Ever since the cultural watershed of the 1960s, predictions of the imminent demise of classical music, especially in America, have been rife. Its audience, undermined by the precipitate decline in public music education and decimated by defections to pop (respectable for aspiring intellectuals from the moment rock became British), was assumed to be aging, indeed dying off. Whether as a symptom of this process or as one of its causes, media coverage for classical music steadily and drastically diminished over the 1970s and 1980s (coinciding with the rise of serious pop coverage), as did the number of radio stations that offered it.

August in the Restoration, like Augusts before and since, was a time for those who could afford it to escape the hot, dirty streets of Paris to head for the country. With this in mind, Ludovic Vitet, music critic of Le Globe, broadcast an appeal in his Bulletin musical on 1 August 1829 (cloudy and unseasonably cool): Have patience, you poor dilettanti who have rushed back from the countryside; and those of you who have put off your departure to be present at the first performance of this marvel, don't think that you have yet reached the end of your suffering.

Byron was determined from the start that Manfred should not be performed on stage. Writing from Venice in spring 1817 he told his publisher, John Murray, that: The thing I have sent you will see at a glimpse - could never be attempted or thought of for the stage . . . I composed it actually with a horror of the stage - with a view to render even the thought of it impracticable, knowing the zeal of my friends, that I should try that for which I have an invincible repugnance - viz. - a representation.

I have a picture by Mondrian in front of me. It is made of up of a wide range of different, discrete rectangular shapes. The paint has been applied precisely. The colors are varied and striking and contribute to the overall impression of exactness in the detail and variety in the general. There are no people in the picture. It reminds me of a Handel opera. More or less any Handel opera.

‘Neapolitan elements and comedy in nineteenth-century opera buffa’, by Sebastian Werr.

Verdian Opera Burlesqued: a glimpse into mid-Victorian theatrical culture by Roberta Montemorra Marvin