Tag

Riots

Astor Opera House Riot

June 23, 2025

I’ve just written about massacres that are depicted in opera. Here’s a real massacre that happened in front of a New York City opera house. The date was May 10, 1849, the theater was the Astor Place Opera House. I briefly mentioned it in an earlier post. The riot resulted in as many as 32 […]

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A Few Opera Riots

November 16, 2022

The most fully realized riot in all opera is the one that ends the second act of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. It’s a gigantic free for all involving everyone in the neighborhood including nine of the meistersingers. Beckmesser starts a serenade full of errors that are marked by Hans Sachs striking his cobbler’s hammer. “David wakes […]

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The Gordon Riots – 1780

March 22, 2022

Andrew Roberts in his biography of George III, (The Last King of America) which I’ll get to in a subsequent post, describes the Gordon Riots of 1780 as the worst catastrophe to befall London during the interval between the Great Fire in 1666 and the Blitz which began in 1940. Those who saw the disorder […]

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