Cockney Mozart: The Hunt Circle, the King's Theatre, and "Don Giovanni"

The week that Mozart's Don Giovanni made its famous, and famously belated, debut on the London stage, Leigh Hunt, editor and opera critic of the Examiner, found himself marooned in Buckinghamshire, England. Wood examines the struggle between the Mozartians of the Hunt circle and the aristocratic, anti-Mozart "cabal" at the King's Theatre. He argues that the Hunt circle's sense of mission as tastemakers in English music culture took shape during the Regency period with their campaign for professional production of Mozart's operas at the King's Theatre.