ABSTRACT
In early nineteenth-century Belfast, the musical bill of fare found in the Theatre Royal, Arthur Street, consisted mainly of very popular balled operas composed in the last forty years of the eighteenth century. In these, the music was original, and differed from The Beggar's Opera of 1728 and its successors, for which the music was culled from different sources. The operatic content of the repertoire reflected the relatively healthy state of English opera, which had been demonstrated in the final season of the old century. In the first decade of the century the theatre audience, accustomed to hearing opera sung by the actors of the stock company, had heard the established English operas sung by the major talents of Incledon, Bellamy and Dickons. There was a lack of new English operas, however. But the theatre in general, far from renewing itself, was to encounter a blight.
