Instantly twenty voices shouted from the pit, “No mistress, no master! liberty!” A few counter voices cried, “Vive le Roi! Vive le Reine!” but the pit drowned them, “No master, no Queen!” A quarrel ensued, but the Queen as composed as before was loudly cheered as she quitted the theatre--never to be seen again at a dramatic performance.
In Maria Theresa, who became Empress of Germany in 1745, the drama had a strong supporter, a taste which had always been wisely encouraged. The story goes that her father composed an opera at a time when war was raging, his country falling into ruins, and his Court receiving the bribes of his enemies.
At the Court of Vienna the drama, at one time or another, has been in popular request. Leopold I. made music and the theatre his great hobby, next to his passion for hunting. According to Vehse,[148] he had a theatre, and he caused at Vienna and Schönbrunn brilliant operas and pastorals to be performed, in which “the scenery and the costumes were most magnificent.” It is reported that the getting up of one of these operas, “Il Pomo d’Oro,” cost as much as 100,000 florins--grand battle scenes, rehearsed under the superintendence of the Court fencing-master, being introduced. The whole of Vienna, we read, became imbued with the Emperor’s fondness for music and the drama, which was equally shared by his second wife, Claudia of Tyrol, who, it is said, sometimes made use of these operatic representations to “tell her lord and husband things which he was not likely to hear elsewhere.” Thus on one occasion she had a piece performed entitled, “La Lanterne de Diogene,” in which the speeches addressed to Alexander the Great were intended to set forth before Leopold the abuses rife at the Court. But the Emperor’s third wife, the saintly Eleanora of Mantua, had no sympathy for the stage, and it is said accompanied her husband to the opera only with inward groans; and, instead of reading the libretto, she studied the Psalms.
Joseph II., again, was fond of the theatre, and he did much for it. One of his favourite comedies was Grossman’s “Not more than Six Dishes,” which appears to have been an amusing satire on the prodigality and the general manners of the nobility, who consequently, we are told, did their utmost to have the piece suppressed. An opera which never failed to amuse the Emperor was one by Paisiello, called “Il Re Teodoro,” the libretto of which was another satire, pointed at King Gustavus III. of Sweden, who, during his stay at Venice in the year 1783, had “displayed a most ridiculous profusion, which even extended to his dressing-gown.”
