Friend Dana: What would it cost to burn the Opera House? If the price is reasonable have it done and send me the bill. . . . I wrote my two letters under the presumption (there being no paper on Wednesday) that the solid work of exposing their (Pierce and Gushing) perversion of history had of course been done by Hildreth. I should have dwelt with it even more gravely but for that. And now I see (the Saturday paper only got through last night) that you crowded out what little I did say to make room for Fry's eleven columns of arguments as to the feasibility of sustaining the opera in N. Y. if they would only play his compositions. I don't believe three hundred people who take the Tribune care one chew of Tobacco for the matter.
The "eleven columns" was an amiable exaggeration quite in consonance with the remainder of the letter; but I can testify from a consultation of the files of the newspaper which I have served as one of Mr. Fry's successors for more than a quarter of a century that on the date in question The Tribune's critic did occupy three and a half columns with a discussion of the Lagrange season just ended at the Academy of Music and a most strenuous plea for the permanent substitution of English for Italian opera! Also, that most of what Mr. Fry said would sound just as apposite to-day as it did then, and be backed by just as much reason. But a taste for the elegant exotic and reason do not seem to go hand in hand, and managers are still strangely averse to placing themselves for guidance into the hands of The Tribune's critics. How different might not musical history in New York have shaped itself had William Henry Fry, George William Curtis, John R. G. Hassard, and H. E. K. had their way during the last sixty years! The thought is quite overpowering.
The opposition which the Astor Place Opera House met was indeed formidable. It came from the company organized by Don Francesco Marty y Torrens for performances in Havana. This enterprising gentleman did not come to New York to make money, but mischief--as Messrs. Sanquirico, Patti, Fry, and Maretzek must have thought--and incidentally to keep his singers employed during the hot and unhealthy season in Havana. His aiders and abettors were James H. Hackett and William Niblo. The former, in his day an actor, was particularly famous for his impersonation of Falstaff. His interest in opera may have been excited more or less by the fact that his wife had been Catherine Leesugg, an English opera singer, who had sung the part of Rosina in an English version of Rossini's "Barber of Seville" as early as 1819. At Niblo's history I have already taken a glance. In the present chapter he is chiefly interesting, according to a story which has long had currency, as the manager who succeeded in putting an end to the Astor Place Opera House by a trick which took the bloom of caste off that aristocratic institution. I shall let Maretzek tell the story presently, pausing now to interject an anecdote which fell under my notice some years ago while I was turning over the records of the Grand Ducal Theater at Weimar. This always comes to my mind when the downfall of the Astor Place Opera House is mentioned, and also when, as has frequently been the case within the last sixteen years, I met a grandson of one of the principal actors in the incident in the streets of New York.