Italian Opera [Third Article — ‘Our Italian Friends’]

First published Edinburgh Saturday Post, 29 December 1827, p. 271. Never reprinted. Like the essay on Cornillon three weeks earlier, this piece reads at first like the work of one of the local contributors, with its claim that ‘The musical public’ of the ‘vast Babel’ of London ‘have made advances’ in opera ‘beyond the general conceptions of the “gude folk” here’. But what seems at first to be an expression of local pride turns out to be ironic, at the expense of the ‘gude folk’ of Edinburgh. Other links with the essay on Cornillon include the gentle mockery of ‘the “Athens’” (i.e., Edinburgh), and the extended passage of comic dialogue. The word ‘metropolitan’, referring to London, and the knowledge of London’s operatic venues, certainly suggest De Quincey. Other symptoms include the unnecessary allusion to ‘Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham’, the use of dashes, italics, and ‘&c.’, and the sentence beginning with ‘But’. Phrases like ‘we considered from the very outset’, and ‘Since writing the above’, imply that the author was an established music-critic for the Post, as well as one who took a great interest, as De Quincey did, in opera. (‘Since writing the above’ also echoes the phrase ‘Since the foregoing observations were sent to the press’, in De Quincey’s part of the essay on the Bible Societies (see above, p. 193)). In the passage of dialogue, the phrase ‘it is quite absurd and ridiculous’ has a redundant quality that De Quincey enjoyed; compare ‘sin and danger’ (above, p. 193).