GOING to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it, and that a very severe one,’ noted the evangelical moralist Hannah More in 1775. Many Britons before and after her would have agreed. The first English-language opera could not have had worse conditions under which to be performed, yet, bizarrely, under less restrictive circumstances it may never have existed at all.
In the grip of Puritan rule, when almost anything that was fun was banned, the impresario Sir William Davenant, who had been imprisoned for treason, staged a performance of at his private theatre at Rutland House, the home he leased in the City of London, in 1656. In order to do so, he had to get special permission from the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell himself. He was only granted this through exploiting a loophole in the law banning theatre: a recitative, that is words combined with music, was permissible. This—and the fact that more than half a dozen people were involved in writing and scoring the piece—could have meant that it was a bit of a flop, but the diarist Samuel Pepys
