The orchestra, amazingly for anybody used to modern concert halls, isn't in the middle of the space. It's off at the right, under the canopy. and not at all the center of attention. The performance, Small says, might have been

Mr. Handel directing one of his organ concertos or a concerto grosso; or that remarkable phenomenon, the eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, presenting a piano con­certo of his own composition; or the regular music director [at Ranlagh], Dr. Thomas Arne, directing his new symphony--they all performed there. Whatever it is they are playing, we can be sure it will be a piece that modern concert au­diences sit in stillness and silence to listen to.

But that is not what the people in this picture are doing. They are stand­ing or walking about, talking in pairs and in groups, or just coming and going, in much the same way as people do in the foyer of a modern concert hall. It appears that the building has not caused socializing and enjoying music to be divided into two separate activities as does a modern concert hall, and the members of the audience seem to be perfectly capable of doing both things at the same time. We have to assume that they were no whit less sophisticated or discerning in their musical judgment than mod­ern audiences, since this is the period, around 1760, that is generally re­garded as one of the high points in the history of the Western tradition.

Most of those present seem, at least to our eyes, to be treating the per­formance as background to their other social activities--there is even in the foreground a couple of small boys engaged in a bout of fisticuffs--but there is a knot of people gathered around the musicians' platform, as in a later day jazz enthusiasts would gather around the bandstand in a dance hall when one of the great bands was playing for the dancing. If the musi­cians are part of the social scene and do not dominate it, it is to large extent because of the circular shape of the building, which allows no direction to be me dominant one. Even the musicians' platform is unobtrusive; it looks like the afterthought that we are told it was, since the musicians were orig­inally placed at the center of the space. Another detail emphasizes what is to our eyes the informality of the scene: in the niches around the circum­ference can be seen diners seated at tables. In one niche I think I can even see a waiter bending over obsequiously, taking the order. It looks like a very agreeable scene.

But not a scene, of course, like anything we see when we play Handel or Mozart now. In the Louvre earlier this year I found another painting of a musical performance, Giovanni Paolo Pannini's "Fête musicale donné par le cardinal de La Rochefoucauld au théatre Argentina de Rome en 1747 a l'occasion du mariage du Dauphin, fils de LouisXV"(or, in English, "Musical celebration given by the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld at the Theater Argentina in Rome in 1747 on the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, son of Louis XV"):

This was a resplendent occasion. There are more than 70 musicians in the orchestra, plus singers, and in the audience (or so I'd guess) was everyone important at the court of Louis XV, including many churchmen. In the front row of seats sit cardinals or bishops, in red skullcaps; behind them sit priests, whose skullcaps are black. And yet vendors (at the bottom of the painting) are moving through the crowd, selling drinks. In the space behind the seats, aristocrats are chatting. One of them has even wandered forward, and is standing in the middle of the seats, gabbing with the clerics. This was a formal occasion--more formal, in fact, than anything we'd see in concert halls today. Just look at the lavish theater, and the lavish clothes that everyone is wearing. But the music isn't being heard with formal concentration.

And things got crazier than that. When Handel ran opera companies in London in the early 18th century, he ran them as commercial enterprises. Opera, after all, was popular, maybe not with a mass audience (whatever we might imagine a mass audience to be, back then, in an age when most people were too poor to buy tickets for public entertainment), but with aristocrats. And also with their footmen and servants, who were admitted free to the upper gallery of the theater, and shouted comments at the singers: "Damn her! she has got a nest of nightingales in her belly!"

But then nothing about these performances was decorous. On stage there was spectacle, including flying, fire-breathing dragons. The singers seemed exotic--most were Italian (and therefore, to an English audience, exciting and theatrical). Some had scandalous lives. Some of the women wore scandalous, revealing costumes. Many of the stars were castrated men. That was the fashion in Italy, to castrate boys who had musical talent (or whose poverty-stricken parents were willing to sell them -- literally sell them -- to an opportunistic music school [this is a detail I'll have to check before I put it in the final version of the book]. These boys then were trained to be singers, and the best of them sang, by all accounts, with voices that were both shining and powerful, combining the brilliance of a woman's high vocal range with a man's virility. The castrati who made it big, becoming opera stars, were international sensations, wealthy, fawned over, and -- since their sexuality wasn't affected by the operation -- sexually pursued by both men and women.

And so the castrati were perpetual operatic scandals. Opera, at its peak in London, could be tremendously exciting. Here's what one 18th century writer said about the London premiere of a Handel opera called Radamisto:

If persons who are now living, and who were present at that performance may be credited, the applause it received was almost as extravagant as his AGRIPPINA had excited : the crowds and tumults of the house at Venice were hardly equal to those at LONDON. In so splendid and fashionable an assembly of ladies (to the excellence of their taste we must impute it) there was no shadow of form, or ceremony, scarce indeed any appearance of order or regularity, politeness or decency. Many, who had forc'd their way into the house with an impetuosity but ill suited to their rank and sex, actually fainted through the excessive heat and closeness of it. Several gentlemen were turned back, who had offered forty shillings for a seat in the gallery, after having despaired of getting any in the pit or boxes.

And when Handel made the mistake of engaging not just one, but two Italian prima donnas to perform opposite one of his castrato stars, all hell broke loose. One of these women, Francesca Cuzzoni, was "short and squat, with a doughy cross face" (according to Horace Walpole, one of London's leading citizens), but also "an expressive and pathetic singer" (or so said an 18th century writer on music history). The other prima donna, Faustina Bordoni, "had the art [or so the same music historian wrote] of sustaining a note longer, in the opinion of the public, than any other singer." She was also pretty, smart, a fine actress, and temptingly unmarried.

The two women didn't get along. And so one Tuesday night in June, when Handel was leading an opera by the Italian composer Bononcini,

a great Disturbance happened at the Opera, occasioned by the Partisans of the Two Celebrated Rival Ladies, Cuzzoni and Faustina. The Contention at first was only carried on by Hissing on one Side, and Clapping on the other; but proceeded at length to Catcalls, and other great Indecencies: And notwithstanding the Princess Caroline was present, no Regards were of Force to restrain the Rudenesses of the Opponents.

Or so wrote a London newspaper, four days later. But as the conductor Christopher Hogwood adds in his book on Handel,

Nor was the violence limited to the audience: 'who would have thought the Infection should reach the Haymarket, and inspire two Singing Ladies to pull each other's coiffs?' asked John Arbuthnot in his pamphlet, The Devil to Pay at St. James, published that year; '... it is certainly an apparent Shame that two such well bred Ladies should call Bitch and Whore, should scold and fight like any Billingates.'

The town satirists quickly capitalized on the scandal. A hastily published skit, called The Contre Temps; or, Rival Queans, gives a replay of the action set in the Temple of Discord, with Handel standing fatalistically by as the two ladies maul each other:

I think 'tis best - to let 'em fight it out:
Oil to the Flames you add, to stop their Rage;
When tir'd, of Course, their Fury will asswage.

(Faustina lays flat Cuzzoni's nose with a sceptre, Cuzzoni breaks her head with a gilt leather crown: Handel, desirous to see the end of the battle, animates them with a kettledrum : a globe thrown at random hits the High Priest on the temples: he staggers off the stage.)

Another London publication ran a satirical poem, making fun of the two women with explicit (and in fact completely pornographic) comments on their sexual performance. One reason all this is worth recounting is that our ideas of opera in this period -- the Baroque period; Baroque opera -- don't allow for anything like what I'm describing. Until very recently, the conventional classical music wisdom (printed in books, taught in music schools) was that Baroque opera was stylized and restrained. Which can't be true! As we'll see, this notion came from a misunderstanding of the music in Baroque opera. But for the moment, we ought to let that go, and just agree on something very basic, and very human. Nothing performed in the carnival atmosphere of Baroque opera could possibly have been restrained, not musically, socially, theatrically, or sexually. Just look at how Richard Taruskin, in his five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, describes what things were like back home in Italy, where Baroque opera began:

The liberties singers were expected to take with the written music, and had to take or lose all respect, would be thought a virtually inconceivable desecration today. But that was the very least of it: the great Neapolitan castrato Gaetano Majorano, known as Caffarelli (1710-83)...was actually arrested and imprisoned, according to the police report, for "disturbing the other performers, acting in a manner bordering on lasciviousness (on stage) with one of the female singer, conversing with the spectators in the boxes from the stage, ironically echoing whichever member of the company was singing an aria, and finally refusing to sing in the ripieno [the concluding "chorus" of principals] with the others." He was released, however, by royal command and reinstated in the company, for he was the public's darling. They loved his monkeyshines.

Now what sort of public would tolerate such behavior, let alone delight in it? Nowadays only a circus audience, perhaps; surely not any sort of "serious" theatrical public. We, who expect (and are expected!) to sit still and pay attention when attending any theatrical performance, can only regard the behavior of the opera seria audience as something virtually other-planetary. That audience, a mixture of aristocracy and urban middle class (what we would now call "professionals"--doctors, lawyers, clergy, civil servants, and military officers), was famed throughout Europe for its sublime inattention. They "sat (or roamed) in a continuously well-lit auditorium," as one commentator remarked, having come to the theater "to see itself as much as to see the show." As Feldman reports (citing research by Kathleen Hansell), at San Bartolomeo in Naples, a particularly aristocratic house, "noise levels astonished diarists from abroad, nobility arrived with servants who cooked whole meals, talked, played [at cards), and relieved themselves in the antechambers that stood in back of each lavish box."

Next: what they did with the music, including what I promised for this episode, but didn't get to: how part of the final scene of one of Mozart's greatest operas, Don Giovanni, actually was improvised at the first performance. I'll also ask what all this means. I don't claim to be describing paradise. Performances before the dawn of what we now call classical music weren't any kind of ideal. They often were a mess. But that doesn't mean that we should throw out their spirit.

[I wrote the previous episode while listening to U2's first four albums. I wrote this one to the sound of frogs and crickets outside my study windows, joined for a short time by the rumble of a passing train. When I'd finished writing, and did the drudge work of putting what I wrote on the web, I put on headphones, and listened to Haydn's Symphony No. 28, a really sparkling piece in A Major.]

If you'd like to subscribe to this book--which above all means you'll be notified by e-mail when new episodes appear--just click here. Subscribers help me; I feel wonderfully encouraged each time somebody new asks to be put on my subscription list. And feel free to add a note to your e-mail. I'm always curious about who's subscribing, and why you're all interested. That often leads to an e-mail exchange, and often enough to some sharing of ideas (from which I learn a lot). Or let me put it this way: Even if you don't work in the classical music business, you become part of the network of people who've helped me with the book, which means (as I explained in episode six) that the book is partly dedicated to you. I'll also offer special goodies to subscribers--segments I haven't published online, revisions of online episodes, the book proposal I'll eventually send to a publisher, second thoughts on things I've written, special comments, and other things I can't imagine yet..

Please comment on the book, too. Below you'll see where you can post comments, which can either appear with your name attached, or anonymously. Anyone who posts a comment of course also becomes part of the network I'm so happy about. The comments have helped me enormously.

My privacy policy: I'll never share my subscriber list with anyone, for any reason. I send all e-mail to my list myself, without routing it through anyone at ArtsJournal. And I send all e-mail with the names of the recipients hidden. All subscribers have their privacy protected at all times. Further: if you e-mail me about the book, I'll consider your e-mail private. I won't quote it in any public forum without your permission. Comments you post here, though, of course appear in a public forum, and thus can be freely quoted by me or by anyone else who reads them.