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Few of these eager attendees probably realized -or cared -how much this performance diverged from the original. They experienced the opera translated into English, with Caspar played by an actor, his music appropriated by a new confidant, Rollo, most ensembles significantly curtailed and a string of new solos and duets added. 1 Untangling these authorial strands, however, could hardly have interested or even occurred to most patrons. Regularly cut, altered or splintered into excerpts and pastiches, operas appeared less fixed entities than loose collections of the most popular moments, infinitely transformable for new contexts. As long as the English Opera House adapters retained the portions that embodied Der Freischütz in the public mind, they could rework more obscure passages. Accordingly, they dutifully preserved numbers dinned into Londoners' ears in sheet music and concert excerpts -the Overture, the Huntsmen's and Bridesmaids' Choruses, the Drinking Song. Most importantly, they retained virtually verbatim the most eagerly awaited scene, the scene that plunged the house into unusual darkness, that obliged the theatre to close for atypical night rehearsals, that resonated with the popular genre of melodrama Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Third Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, London, the anonymous readers for this journal for comments on previous versions.

Foreign opera at the London playhouses: from Mozart to Bellini / Christina Fuhrmann, Ashland University. pages cm.-(Cambridge studies in opera) Includes bibliographical references and index.

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