Lucia Elizabeth Vestris
Lucia Elizabeth Vestris | |
---|---|
Born | Elizabetta Lucia Bartolozzi 3 March 1797[1] London |
Died | 8 August 1856 London | (aged 59)
Years active | 1815–1854 |
Spouses |
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Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (née Elizabetta Lucia Bartolozzi; 3 March 1797 – 8 August 1856) was an English actress and a
Early life and education
She was born in London in 1797, the first of two daughters of German pianist
Lucia studied music and was noted for her voice and dancing ability. She was married at age 16 to the French ballet dancer,
Career
In 1815, at age 18, her
Her first hits in English were in 1820 at age 23 at the
Despite her celebrity status and popularity, Madame Vestries was not met with total social acceptance for her breeches roles. Her revolutionary action as an actress spurred vicious attacks on her character by her more conservative contemporaries. Vestries' risqué activities onstage were taken to be representative of her own lack of morality and social purity. Disregarding public backlash, Madame Vestries found great financial achievement with her breeches roles and gained the ability to take a position of power within the theatre industry.[citation needed]
Women did not have as much influence over theatrical production as men, including the roles of management, ownership and administration. Though women had the experience and qualifications from past family ventures they were often not able to secure funding enough to finance their ventures in the capital-intensive industry. When Covent Garden management sought to reduce the acting payroll in 1830,[22] however Vestris had accumulated a fortune from performing and was able to lease the Olympic Theatre from John Scott.[23] There she began presenting a series of burlesques and extravaganzas—for which she made this house famous. She produced numerous works by the contemporary playwright James Planché, with whom she had a successful partnership, which included him contributing ideas for staging and costumes.[4]
Second marriage and subsequent career
She married in 1838 for the second time, to the British actor and former associate
Mme Vestris and Mathews inaugurated their management of Covent Garden with the first-known production of
In 1841 Vestris produced the highly successful Victorian farce London Assurance by Dion Boucicault, with possibly the first use of a "box set".[24] The play has been popular ever since, receiving its most recent revival at the National Theatre in 2010.
She also introduced the soprano Adelaide Kemble to the theatre in English versions of Bellini's Norma and Mercadante's Elena da Feltre (renamed Elena Uberti). A daughter of John Kemble, actor-manager, and one of the theatre's owners, and niece of Sarah Siddons, Adelaide had a sensational but short career before retiring into marriage.
About her time in charge at Covent Garden, a note by the actor James Robertson Anderson[25] reported in C.J. Mathews's autobiography, says:[26]
Madame was an admirable manager, and Charles an amiable assistant. The arrangements behind the scenes were perfect, the dressing rooms good, the attendants well-chosen, the wings kept clear of all intruders, no strangers or crutch and toothpick loafers allowed behind to flirt with the ballet-girls, only a very few private friends were allowed the privilege of visiting the green-room, which was as handsomely furnished as any nobleman's drawing-room, and those friends appeared always in evening dress....There was great propriety and decorum observed in every part of the establishment, great harmony, general content prevailed in every department of the theatre, and universal regret was felt when the admirable managers were compelled to resign their government.
Another contemporary actor George Vandenhoff in Dramatic Reminiscences also bears testimony to the fact that: ‘To Vestris's honour, she was not only scrupulously careful not to offend propriety by word or action, but she knew very well how to repress any attempt at double-entendre, or doubtful insinuation, in others. The green-room in Covent Garden was a most agreeable lounging place, from which was banished every word or allusion that would not be tolerated in a drawing-room.’[27]
In the late 1840s Vestris began to appear less and less on the stage because of the debts she and her husband owed and also because she began to raise her late sister's children.[citation needed] Her last performance (1854) was for Mathews' benefit, in an adaptation of Madame de Girardin's La Joie fait peur, called Sunshine through Clouds. She died on 8 August 1856 at her home in Fulham, Grove Lodge.[28][29]
Her musical accomplishments and education were not sufficient to distinguish her in grand opera, and in high
About the same time it was that Madame Vestris made her last appearance on our Italian stage. There, if she had possessed musical patience and energy, she might have queened it; because she possessed (half Italian by birth) one of the most luscious of low voices—found, since Lear's time, excellent in woman—great personal beauty, and almost faultless figure, which she knew to adorn with consummate art—and no common stage address. – But a less arduous theatrical career pleased her better; and so she, too, could not—one might perhaps say, because she would not—remain on the Italian stage.
— Henry F. Chorley, Thirty Years' Musical Recollections, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1862[31]
In an age where women were denied autonomy, and brought up to believe they could not manage their own lives and their own money, let alone run a business employing hundreds of people including both men and women, Vestris was a business-woman par excellence. She managed theatres; took plays on tour with a motley crew of actors, actresses and all the support staff; and only remarried, after her disastrous early experience with Vestris, when forced to by American authorities in order to allow her to bring her tour across their borders.[dubious ] Lucia Elizabeth Vestris was a prominent figure in the history of British theatre and customs in the nineteenth century.[32]
She is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.[33]
References
Notes
- ^ Hewsen, Robert H. (2002). "Vestris, Lucia (1797–1856)". Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia.
- ^ Bryan, Michael (1886). Robert Edmund Graves (ed.). Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical. Vol. I: A–K). York St., Covent Garden, London: George Bell and Sons. p. 90. Original from Fogg Library, Digitized 18 May 2007.
- ^ Pearce, pp. 27–28 and 29–31 (accessed 10 June 2011)
- ^ a b Paul J. Buczkowski, "Associates of James Planche", Buczkowski Personal Website, University of Michigan, accessed 16 November 2010.
- ^ Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, online edition, Oxford University Press, 2010.
- ^ Oliver Strunk, "Notes on a Haydn autograph", Musical Quarterly 20, 1934: p. 197
- ^ Dorothy de Val, "Jansen, Therese," in David Wyn Jones, Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- ^ "Memoir of Madame Vestris". The Era (Sunday 17 August 1856): 9. 17 August 1856.
- ^ a b Raoul Meloncelli, (in Italian) Bartolozzi, Lucia Elisabeth, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, volume 6, 1964 (accessible for free online in Treccani.it)
- ^ Talma, François-Joseph (1849). Mémoires de J.-F.-Talma écrits par lui mème, et recueillis et mis en ordre sur les papiers de sa famille par Alexandre Dumas (in French). Vol. II. Paris: Hippolyte Souverain. pp. 237–239. It was, in fact, the rehearsal of Voltaire's Brutus, and not of Corneille's Horace.
- ^ Marshall, p. 41.
- ^ Marston, II, pp. 148–149.
- ^ New York, Macmillan, 1894, Volume 32, article Mathews, Lucia Elizabeth or Elizabetta (accessible for free on line at Wikisource).
- ^ Such as, for instance: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.; the authoritative Enciclopedia dello spettacolo; The New Grove Dictionary of Opera; and the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
- ^ Appleton, pp. 11–12; Williams, p. 34.
- ^ Bratton.
- ^ a b Grove, p. 979
- ^ Pearce, p. 271.
- ^ "Greatest Hits 1820–60", Library of Congress, accessed 16 November 2010
- ^ Casaglia, Gherardo (2005). "Lucia Elizabeth". L'Almanacco di Gherardo Casaglia (in Italian).
- ^ See V&A's website.
- ISBN 9780521453752. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
- ^ Pearce, pp. 161–163
- Britannica.com (article: box set (theatre)), however, the occurrence ought to be traced back to 1832, when Madame Vestris staged The Conquering Game by William Bayle Bernardat the Olympic Theatre.
- ^ Anderson was by then the sole survivor of the brilliant company by whom "London Assurance" was first played (Henry Saxe Wyndham, The annals of Covent Garden theatre from 1732 to 1897, Volume 2, London, Chatto & Windus, 1906, p. 161)
- ^ Mathews, II, pp. 105–106
- ^ George Vandenhoff, Dramatic Reminiscences; or, actors and actresses in England and America, London, Thomas W. Cooper, 1860, p. 47 (accessible for free online in openlibrary.org)
- ^ "West London Observer", 16 August 1856.
- ^ a b Chisholm 1911.
- ^ Grove, p. 980
- ^ Volume I, p. 242 (accessible for free online in books.google)
- ^ Pearce, passim
- ^ Paths of Glory. Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery. 1997. p. 102.
Bibliography
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 1063. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
- William H. Appleton, Madame Vestris and the London Stage, New York: Columbia University Press, 1974
- Jacky Bratton, Vestris [née Bartolozzi; other married name Mathews], Lucia Elizabeth (1797–1856) in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed online in Oxford DNBon 21 December 2013)
- F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
- Thomas Marshall Lives of the most celebrated actors and actresses, London, Appleyard, s.d., but 1847 (accessible for free online at Internet Archive)
- John Westland Marston, Our recent actors: being recollections critical, and, in many cases, personal, of late distinguished performers of both sexes. With some incidental notices of living actors, London, Samson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1888, II, pp. 148–149 (accessible for free online at Hathy Trust Digital Library)
- Charles James Mathews, The life of Charles James Mathews: chiefly autobiographical, with selections from his correspondence and speeches, edited by Charles Dickens Jr., London: Macmillan & Co., 1879 (accessible for free online at Internet Archive: Volume I e Volume II)
- Charles E. Pearce, Madame Vestris and her times, New York, Brentano's, s.d. (accessible for free online at Internet Archive)
- ISBN 978-0-19-522186-2
- Clifford John Williams, Madame Vestris: A Theatrical Biography, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973
Further reading
- The Daughters of Thespis: or, a Peep Behind the Curtain. 1841. Memphis: General Books, 2012. Print.
- Kathy Fletcher, "Planche, Vestris, and the Transvestite Role: Sexuality and Gender in Victorian Popular Theatre", in Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Vol 15, no. 1, 1987: pp. 9–33
- Charles Molloy W.M.E. (ed.), Memoirs of the life, public and private adventures, of Madame Vestris: of the Theatres Royal Drury Lane, Covent Garden, Olympic and Haymarket, with interesting and amusing anecdotes of celebrated characters in the fashionable world, detailing an interesting variety of singularly curious and amusing scenes, as perferformed before and behind the curtain (etc.), London, Printed for the bookseller, 1839 (accessible for free online at Internet Archive)
- J. Norwood, "Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Theatre Managers: the Iconology of Eliza Vestries and Sara Lane." New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, 2017, pp. 3–21.
- J. Norwood, Lives of Shakespearean Actors, Part IV: Helen Faucit, Lucia Elizabeth Vestris and Fanny Kemble by their Contemporaries., Pickering & Chatto, 2011.
- Elliott Vanskike, "Consistent Inconsistencies: The Transvestite Actress Madame Vestris and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley.", in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol 50, no. 4, 1996: pp. 464–488