114 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
1822–23 season, opera in the Théâtre d’Orléans was played by a resident company
whose personnel were imported. Davis also sought out fresh repertory, giving
A merican premieres of many works, chiefl y French. To meet expenses, the com-
pany took to touring: fi rst to Havana, Cuba, in 1824 and later to the Northeast.
W hen Davis retired in 1837, his son took over management, and the troupe fl our-
ished into the 1850s. The theater closed after the Civil War.
Davis’s competitor, James Caldwell, an English immigrant and erstwhile
actor, had arrived in New Orleans in 1820 as head of a touring company from
Virginia. In 1824 Caldwell began to play English-language opera at the 1,100-seat
Camp Street Theater, in the city’s new American section. In 1835 Caldwell built
the St. Charles Theater and began to present traveling troupes there.
Local opera, then, fl ourished in New Orleans in both foreign-language and
English forms until after the Civil War. Managers used the population’s love
of social dancing to attract audiences. The Théâtre d’Orléans had its own ball-
room, and a ticket to the opera might also entitle the holder to attend a ball after
the performance. A newspaper notice in 1836 reported: “Spectacles and operas
appear to amuse our citizens more than any other form of public amusement—
except balls.” As well as enticing customers into the theater, social dances gave
members of the opera orchestra more professional work.
Meanwhile, opera also gained a foothold on the continent’s western edge.
Many hundreds of miles separated San Francisco from the cities of the Midwest.
Until the mid-1860s, it could be reached most easily from the East by two seago-
ing routes, both long and expensive: across the isthmus of Panama (in the days
before the canal) or around Cape Horn. Communication by railroad, telegraph,
and overland mail was not even established until after 1859. Thus the region was
still a maritime colony of the East as well as a western frontier settlement.
In San Francisco’s early years, men greatly outnumbered women. In the 1850
census, only 8 percent of California’s population was female, many of those said
to be women of ill repute. This state of affairs is explained by the discovery of
gold in northern California early in 1848, when San Francisco was a village of
fi ve hundred. By 1851 thirty thousand people lived there, most of them men
drawn by the prospect of getting rich quick. Thus San Francisco changed over-
night from backwater to boomtown, a place where an expensive cultural form
like opera could fl ourish.
The city’s fi rst theater opened in October 1850. By the beginning of 1853,
though fi res had already burned three theaters to the ground, four more were
operating. The man most responsible for establishing opera as an enduring local
presence was Thomas Maguire, a New York native who moved to San Francisco
in the late 1840s. He made his fortune not by striking gold but by running a suc-
cessful saloon and gambling parlor and by building and renting out theaters.
In 1856 the elegant new Maguire’s Opera House opened, and four years later an
Italian troupe took up residence there. Interested more in the power of what
could happen onstage than in the fi nancial bottom line, Maguire set his prices
low: fi fty cents or one dollar, at a time when the going local price for opera tickets
ranged from one to three dollars. He later calculated that during the 1860s he
lost $120,000 on opera.
In 1860 Maguire replaced his resident troupe with a new organization: the
Maguire-Lyster Company, fashioned out of the traveling Lyster English Opera
Company, on the one hand, and a complement of Italian and English singersSan FranciscoThomas Maguire172028_05_106-131_r3_ko.indd 114 23/01/13 8:21 PM