Reminiscences of the Opera

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From 1842 to 1853 and again from 1856 to 1858, Benjamin Lumley (1811-1875) was manager of Her Majesty's Theatre in London, the great nineteenth-century English home of romantic ballet and Italian opera. Lumley was studying for the bar when, in the 1835 to 1836 season, Pierre- François Laporte, the then manager of the theatre, employed him first on legal and then on financial business. For five years he worked as Laporte's assistant, and after the latter's death in 1841 he took over as manager. Lumley brought some of the greatest international stars of the time to London, but his prodigious expenditure could not keep pace with his income, and both his reigns ended in financial disaster. Under his aegis, however, appeared such dancers as Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, Lucille Grahn, Jules Perrot and Arthur St.-Léon, and the singers Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, Johanna Wagner, Luigi Lablache, Fanny Tacchinardi-Persiani and Jenny Lind, and their stories, intermingled with Lumley's own triumphs and disasters, are brought vividly to life in this fascinating and long out-of-print autobiography.