Performance History
The exact date of the premiere is unknown but the wordbook was advertised in The London Gazette from 4 June to 8 June 1691, suggesting a recent staging. Peter Holman believes it was performed in May. The production was not as spectacular as Dioclesian or the later The Fairy Queen but it proved the most financially successful for the theatre. Betterton himself took the role of King Arthur, despite being in his fifties. The contemporary writer Roger North was most impressed by Charlotte Butler's singing of Cupid, describing it as "beyond anything I ever heard upon the stage", partly ascribing her success to "the liberty she had of concealing her face, which she could not endure should be so contorted as is necessary to sound well, before her gallants, or at least her envious sex."
King Arthur was revived at least twice during Purcell's lifetime and continued to be performed in the later 1690s. The first major revival in the eighteenth century was staged in 1736. This production left the work unaltered, but later revivals involved varying degrees of revision. They included a performance in Dublin in 1763; David Garrick and Thomas Arne's version in 1770; and John Kemble and Thomas Linley's transformation of King Arthur into a two-act after-piece entitled Arthur and Emmeline in 1784.
Read more about this topic: King Arthur (opera)
Famous quotes containing the words performance and/or history:
“They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)