The Mapleson Memoirs, 1848-1888, Vol I

Few memoirs capture the machinery behind the magic quite like this one. James Henry Mapleson was the man who brought opera to Anglo-American audiences for four decades, and he tells his story with the combative confidence of someone who survived every conceivable disaster: star temperaments, financial collapses, rival impresarios, and the endless chess game of keeping a company solvent while satisfying a public hungry for spectacle. Volume One follows his unlikely ascent from young student with musical ambitions to the manager of Her Majesty's Theatre and later the Academy of Music, where he booked and bribed the greatest singers of the age. The memoir crackles with personal anecdotes: the egomaniacal conductors, the divine but impossible divas, the peculiar customs of the Victorian stage. Mapleson writes without detachment, which is precisely what makes him valuable. He takes sides, settles scores, and argues for his own importance with irresistible partiality. This is how opera worked in its golden age of chaos: part art, part circus, and entirely dependent on men like Mapleson who could juggle all three at once.