The building was a blaze of light in a darkened city. Whole districts had their uncertain supply of low-voltage electricity cut off to illuminate the marble foyers, gilt auditorium and spacious stage of an elaborately over-embellished theatre. The treacherous allure of Venice and of the Midget Theatre was enacted on a gigantic scale as the whole population, it seemed, flocked to marvel once more at painted vistas of grandeur and romance, and to fall under the spell of the arm-flailing passions of love, lust, revenge, hate, treachery, nobility and despair. The tragic fortunes of noble courtesans and jilted queens, of cruel tyrants and traduced princes, seemed more real, and were certainly charged with far deeper significance, than the reminders of the real-life apocalypse visible in the world outside the resplendent theatre. The Central European mania for opera—incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon sensibility—reached its apotheosis in that wanton squandering of scarce resources on a form of entertainment that many would regard as the most mindlessly self-indulgent and bombastic of the arts.
