Page - 370 - in Musiktheater im höfischen Raum des frühneuzeitlichen Europa - Hof – Oper – Architektur

Juan José Carreras 370 Luneta de los Reyes (a royal box extended over the second and third floors), the Damas section (the cazuela on the first floor) and a higher cazuela on the top floor. This distri- bution can easily be seen in an hitherto unknown source, which shows the distribution of the boxes at the Coliseo for an opera performed on Friday 11 of April 1755 (Fig 4).33 Although the document merely mentions an arrangement of boxes ‘for the opera to be sung’ (‘para la ópera que se ha de cantar’), the distribution can be clearly identified from the Mercurio histórico y político, a sort of official court gazette. In the issue from April 1755, the Mercurio reported the theatrical activities at the Buen Retiro in the fol- lowing terms: “El Domingo de Quasimodo oyeron Sus Magestades desde la Tribuna la Missa Mayor, que se celebró en la Iglesia de San Geronymo, cantada por la Música de la Real Capilla, y este día por la noche asistieron en su Real Coliseo a la representación de la Ópera intitulada, Dido abandonada, y el martes y viernes antecedentes a la del Héroe de la China; cuya di- versión tuvieron también las noches de los días 7, 11 y 13 de este mes.”34 (“On Quasimodo Sunday  [6  April] Their Majesties heard from the tribune the Main Mass, celebrated at the Jeronymite Church  [of the Buen Retiro] and sung by the royal chapel and the same day in the evening they attended the performance of an opera titled Dido abandonada in the royal theatre and the previous Tuesday and Friday they were present at the Héroe de la China  [1 and 4  April]; they repeated this entertainment on the evenings of the 7, 11 and 13 of this month.”) Although the quoted text is somewhat ambiguous, it may be argued that the perfor- mance of 11  April can be identified with L’eroe cinese, a libreto by Metastasio already produced for Madrid for the king’s birthday in 1754, with music by Nicolò Conforto. But independently of the issue of the exact opera involved, it is clear that this extraor- dinary document sheds a crucial new light on a subject of which we still know very little, since it is the only located list to give information about the audience of an opera performance at the time of Farinelli’s direction. Its intriguing presence between the documents collected privately by Francisco Barbieri in the late 19th century and donated later to the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid points to a possible origin from an official archive such as the Archivo General de Palacio, from which the document may have been loaned for study or copying and not returned.35 As one would expect, the spatial 33 See the transcription in Appendix 1. 34 Mercurio histórico y político, vol. 123 (April 1755), p.  75. 35 The poor condition of the document may at least partially explain its neglect until now by historians. The question of the precise provenence and the much more important issue of the existence or not of a lost series of opera distribution lists of theatre boxes cannot be fully addressed here. The 1755 seat- ing-plan appears listed in the source inventory published in Casares 1986, p.  1146, among various documents and notes concerning the Buen Retiro. A similar document, albeit pertaining to a perfor- mance at the Coliseo of the Spanish spoken comedy El triunfo mayor de Alcides mounted to welcome