FOREIGN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5337, 15 August 1895, Page 1

FOREIGN.

Max O'Bell is reported to be writing a comedy for an American manager. A quaint little opera has been discovered and performed at Dresden. It is called The Apothecary and was written by Haydn in 1768. Mrs Sims Reeves, who was a famous concert singer half a century .ago, under the name of Lucombe, died on June 9. The deceased married the veteran tenor in 1850. Henry Irving had an immense reception at the Lyceum the evening the Birthday honours were made known. In the scene from Don Quixote, when Maria, the Don's housekeeper, checked the rhapsodies of her master with the words, " But, master, you were never knighted/ there ras a momentary pause, then a laugh or two, and then a great outburst of cheering. Miss Fanny Davenport, the American actress has made more out of M. Sardon, the great French playwright, in the ahapa of hard cash, than anyone else. It is said that she is worth fully £100,000, most of which haa been derived from Fedora, La Tosca, Theodora, Cleopatra and Gismonda, over the mounting of which Miss Davenport spent something like J830,000. In ten years she has paid Sardon over £15,000 in royalties. When Adelina Patfci appeared as Violetta | in La Traviata at Convent Garden on June i 12, she wore her famous tiara and necklet ot^iamonds, valued at £70,000. Amongst I tne " guests " on the stage were two wellknown Bow street detectives, who kept the prima donna in sight wherever she went, | both on the stage and behind the scenes. Mdme. Patti is recommended to follow the custom of the proprietor of Sanger's Circus, ! who. habitually locked up his cashbox in an iron safe fixed in the lion's cage I Frankfort-on-the-Main has some claims to be regarded as the most musical, city in the world. Last season there were given | no less that forty-aix orchestral concerts, twelve of them with a band of over a hundred performers, eight with a band of between eighty and ninety, and ten with one of between seventy and eighty playera ; besides these there were eight oratorio concerts on a large scale, eighteen performances by smaller choirs, fifteen chamber music concerts, twenty - eight recitals, &c; besides the pupils' concerts at the Ccnservatorium and the Stockhausen'sche Gesangschule. A pretty good doße of music for a town of about 200,000 inhabitants. Of the three great British playwrights of the present time — Finero, Sydney Grundy and Hemy Arthur Jones — it seems generally agreed that Jones is the greatest. Mr Jones lives in London, in a house formerly occupied by Alma Tadema, and elaborately decorated. He waß a country boy when he went up to the city, and iB forty-three years old. He wrote his first play, Leah, when eighteen, but it wbb net until twelve years later that he scored a genuine euccesa in The Silver King. Mr Jones says it takes him about nine months to write a play— six months to think it out and three .months to write it. Finero is said to oompoee his playa with great rapidity. Like Sardou, he is blow in accumulating material, but when once the time for using it arrivea he writeß with' remarkable speed, and within three or four weeks the drama is ready for the stage manager. Finero is of Portuguese origin,, and he is about forty years old. The leading singer in an opera (aays J.F.E. in the "Saturday. Beview " when writing of Tamagno, one of the great 'tenors of the day) generally loafs around the stage afc a distance from the- minor people, like the keeper of a village store who is too proud to speak to the common agricultural labourers assembled in front of thu public-house, until the moment arrives for him to come down to the footlights and bawl to the gallery, and then he remembers what be is paid to do. The illimitable vanity of the opera singer is largely the cause of misconduct of this kind, and ib would be merely foolish to visit the sins of the singers upon the management ; but it iB clearly the duty of the critics to help the management by laughing at the sins of the singers. Of course we cannot laugh at all the sins ; they are not comic enough; and probably one would laugh leas heartily at the laughable ones but for the general low level of the acting. What I complain of is not merely that the singers do things which would not be tolerated at the Elephant and Caßtle, but few of them act so well bb the Drury Lane supers. Some of the droll effects produced by overpowdering are described by " G. 8.5.," the dramatic critic of the " Saturday Beview." The piece under notice was Fedora. "Mrs Patrick Campbell ruined Mr Tree's clothes. Wherever her beautiful white arms touched him they left their mark. She knelt at his feet and made a perfect zebra of his left leg with bars across it. Then she flung her arms convulsively right round him, and the next time he turned his back to the footlights there was little to choose between his coatback and bis shirt front. Before, the act was over a gallon of benzine would hardly have set him right again. Mr Tree had his revenge at the end of the play, when, in falling on Fedora's body, he managed to transfer a large blaok patch to her cheek, which waß strikingly in evidence when she bowed her acknowledgment of the frantic applause with which the evening ended; but he was still bo unhinged by the futility of Loris and the ill-treatment of his garments that when the audience called for Mr Bancroft he informed them that Mr Bancroft was prevented from coming forward by modesty, but that Mrs Bancroft— and here Mrs Bancroft came forward smiling, and the audience naturally chuckled hugely."