The records of the opera and the theater might, in themselves, make a chapter.  As early as 1791 a French theatrical company played in New Orleans, using halls, and in 1808 a theater was built in St. Philip Street.  It is said that the first play given in the city in English was performed December 24, 1817, the play being “The Honey Moon,” and the manager Noah M. Ludlow; but it was not until some years later that the English drama became a feature of the city’s life, with the establishment of a stock company under the management of James H. Caldwell.  Edwin Forrest appeared, in 1824, with Mr. Caldwell’s company at the Camp Street Theater, which he built on leaving the Orleans Theater.  The former was, when opened, out in the swamp, and people had to walk to it from Canal Street on a narrow path of planks.  It was the first building in the city to be lighted by gas.

The annals of the old St. Charles theater, called “old Drury,” are rich with history.  Practically all our great players from 1835 until long after the Civil War, appeared in this theater, and an old prompter’s book which, I believe, is still in existence, records, among many other things, certain details of the appearance there, in 1852, of Junius Brutus Booth, father of Edwin Booth, and mentions also that Joseph Jefferson (Sr.) then a young man, was reprimanded for being noisy in his dressing-room.

New Orleans was, I believe, the first American city regularly to support grand opera and to give it a home.  For a great many years before 1859 (in which year the present French Opera House on Bourbon Street was built) there was a regular annual season of opera at the Orleans Theater, long since destroyed.

In the days of the city’s operatic grandeur great singers used to visit New Orleans before visiting New York, as witness, for example, the debut at the French Opera House of Adelina Patti.  Since the time of the Civil War, however, the city has suffered a decline in this department of art.  Opera seasons have not been regular, and in spite of occasional attempts to revive the old-time spirit, the ancient Opera House, with its brave columned front, its cracking veneer of stucco, and its surrounding of little vari-colored one story cafes and shops (which are themselves like bits of operatic scenery), does not so much suggest to the imagination a home of modern opera, as a mournful mortuary chapel haunted by the ghosts of old half-forgotten composers:  Herold, Spontini, Mehul, Varney; old conductors, long since gone to dust:  Prevost, John, Calabresi; old arias of Meyerbeer, Auber, and Donizetti; and above all, by the ghosts of pretty pirouetting ballerinas, and of great singers whose voices have, these many years, been still.