![]() ![]() In early 1757 the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) gave several performances of the musical drama The Masque of Alfred by English composer Thomas Arne (1710–78), as adapted and directed by college provost William Smith (1727–1803) and performed by his students in the College Hall at the southwest corner of Fourth and Arch Streets. While ballad operas were the usual fare in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, there were occasional musical theater productions of a more serious nature, including performances that represented significant milestones in American opera history. Carr and Reinagle were prolific Philadelphia composers whose ballad operas and other compositions were performed frequently in the city in the federal period. Benjamin Carr (1768-1831), an English musician who settled in Philadelphia in 1797 and became a prominent performer, composer, and music publisher, wrote The Archers in 1796, the first musical drama to be written and professionally performed in the United States. Ballad operas still predominated in this period, usually productions written in England and adapted for American tastes. The nation’s most elaborate theater at the time, the Chestnut Street Theatre became a major center for opera. In 1793, two immigrant English impresarios, actor Thomas Wignell (1753–1803) and musician Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809), built the Chestnut Street Theatre on the north side of Chestnut Street west of Sixth Street, although its opening was delayed until the next year after yellow fever struck the city. Chestnut Street Theatre Philadelphia’s first dedicated opera venue was the Chestnut Street Theater, opened in 1794 by actor Thomas Wignall and lyricist Alexander Reinagle. ![]() The Southwark Theatre was the primary venue for theater and ballad opera in Philadelphia until the mid-1790s. Cedar Street was then the southern boundary of the city of Philadelphia and the theater was deliberately built on the south side of the street, just outside the city limits and beyond the jurisdiction of conservative Quakers and city officials opposed to theater on moral grounds. In 1766 the Hallam company built the Southwark Theatre, the first permanent theater building in America, on Cedar Street west of Fourth Street (later the southwest corner of South and Leithgow Streets). In April 1754, another English theater troupe, the Hallam company, began giving plays and ballad operas in the same warehouse and then in 1759 erected a temporary theater on the southwest corner of Cedar (later South) and Hancock Streets, between Front and Second Streets. The Beggar’s Opera, the best-known ballad opera of the eighteenth century, was probably on the bill in the first documented theater performances in Philadelphia, given by a traveling English troupe in January 1749 in a converted warehouse on the Delaware River near Pine Street. An English form of entertainment that was similar to musical comedy, ballad operas were lighthearted plays with satirical songs and dances inserted, usually performed as “after pieces” following a dramatic play. The most popular form of musical theater in early America was ballad opera. An English troupe, the Hallam company, built the venue and performed plays and ballad operas there. The Southwark Theatre, built in 1766, was the first permanent theater in the American colonies. With some notable exceptions, grand opera-the type of large-scale musical theater production that has generally come to define to the term “opera”-was rarely performed in America until the 1820s. ![]() The term “opera” has been used to denote several types of musical theater in America over the centuries: grand or serious opera, ballad opera, operetta, and even Ethiopian opera, the latter another name for blackface minstrelsy. The city has long been a key center for opera and holds several important distinctions in opera history, including being the site of the first serious opera performances in America, birthplace of the first major American opera composer, and home to the nation’s oldest continuously operating opera house. Opera has played an important role in Philadelphia arts and entertainment since the mid-eighteenth century.
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