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5 unusual facts about Opera of the Nobility


Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset

For the 1741–42 season he entered into partnership with seven other noblemen (the second Opera of the Nobility) and they were able to continue for three years at the King's Theatre, Haymarket.

Élisabeth Duparc

After training in Italy she sang in Florence (1731, 1734–35) then London (1736 onwards) - at the latter she initially joined the Opera of the Nobility, where she appeared in operas by Riccardo Broschi, Egidio Duni, Giovanni Battista Pescetti and Francesco Maria Veracini.

Giovanni Battista Pescetti

Having spent some time writing operas in and around Venice, he left for London in 1736, becoming director of the Opera of the Nobility in 1737.

Israel in Egypt

However in 1733 a rival opera company to Handel's, The Opera of the Nobility, had split the audience for Italian opera in London.

Opera of the Nobility

The company went bankrupt and was dissolved in 1737 (shortly after appointing Giovanni Battista Pescetti its musical director), but not before it had poached some of Handel's best singers such as Francesca Cuzzoni and Antonio Montagnana and forced his company into bankruptcy too.


Nicola Porpora

In 1729 the anti-Handel clique invited him to London to set up an opera company as a rival to Handel's, without success, and in the 1733–1734 season, even the presence of his pupil, the great Farinelli, failed to save the dramatic company in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the "Opera of the Nobility") from bankruptcy.


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