Curtis Price

The Rebuilding of the King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1789-1791

The rebuilding of the Kings Theatre, Haymarket, after its destruction by fire in June 1789 has occasioned virtually no surprise or analysis. Built by Sir John Vanbrugh and opened in 1705, the theater had been Londons principal Italian opera house for nearly a century and Michael Novosielskis new theater of 1791 was to remain so until the late 1840s. Hailed at the time as an architectural marvel of a size and

A plan of the Pantheon Opera House (1790–92)

The Pantheon Opera remains among the least known of the major theatrical ventures in eighteenth-century London. It came into being amidst the conspiracies that flourished after the Kings Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Conceived as a kind of English Court Opera, the Pantheon was backed at enormous expense by the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury. It struggled through the 1790–91 season, accumulating ruinous debts, and then on 14 January 1792 it too burned to the ground, just four nights into its second season.

A Royal Opera House in Leicester Square (1790)

The Kings Theatre, Haymarket, was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Shortly thereafter some wealthy and powerful patrons – notably the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury – launched an ambitious scheme to build a fabulously expensive Royal Opera House in Leicester Square. The venture was designed to re-establish London as a major centre for Italian opera and ballet, to reform the wayward financial and artistic management of the Kings Theatre and to give the capital city a grand opera house of modern design that would rival any in Europe. Because the royal patent promised for Leicester Square was blocked, the scheme had to be dropped, and the sponsors wound up establishing the ill-fated and short-lived Pantheon Opera instead – but that is another story. Our concern here is with the Leicester Square project which, though never realised, did set in motion many of the changes desired by its backers and helped to return London to the mainstream of opera.