Event Comment: Pepys, Diary: By and by with
Lord Bruncker by coach to his house, there to hear some
Italian musique: and here we met
Tom Killigrew,
Sir Robert Murray, and the Italian
Signor Baptista, who hath composed a play in Italian for the Opera, which T. Killigrew do intend to have up; and here he did sing one one of the acts. He himself is the poet as well as the musician.... This done, T. Killigrew and I to talk: and he tells me how the audience at his house [
Bridges St.] is not above half so much as it used to be before the late fire. That
Knipp is like to make the best actor that ever come upon the stage, she understanding so well: that they are going to give her #30 a-year more. That the stage is now by his pains a thousand times better and more glorious than ever heretofore. Now, wax candles, and many of them; then, not above 3 l6s. of tallow: now, all things civil, no rudeness anywhere; then, as in a bear-garden: then, two to
three fiddlers; now, nine or ten of the best: then, nothing but rushes upon the ground, and every thing else mean; and now, all otherwise: then, the
Queen seldom and the
King never would come; now, not the King only for state, but all civil people do think they may come as well as any....That he hath gathered our Italians from several Courts in Christendome, to come to make a concert for the King, which he do give #200 a-year a-piece to: but badly paid, and do come in room of keeping four ridiculous gundilows, he having got the King to put them away, and lay out money this way; and indeed I do commend him for it, for I think it is a very noble undertaking. He do intend to have some times of the year these operas to be performed at the two present theatres, since he is defeated in what he intended in
Moorefields on purpose for it; and he tells me plainly that the City audience was as good as the Court, but now they are most gone