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Rome
September 24, 1907
My dear ones
If I had stayed to the end, it would have been 1 A.M. But this I must explain to you, otherwise you won't understand it.
Because my evenings are so dreary I decided long ago to pay a visit to the theater, but waited for something I knew. This evening
Carmen was being played in the Theater Quirino. It began at 9 P.M., the hour I usually go up to my room. Now you understand the beginning. Although I arrived only ten minutes before the curtain, my checkroom ticket was No. 1; for 2.60 lire I got a seat in the second row of the stalls, right in the middle, in other words very grand; the theater filled up slowly, but it never got very full. In this theater the front orchestra merges into the cheaper section (platea), and above it are three rows of boxes. The center of the third row is left open for a balcony. Not very elegant, nor was the audience; either the distinguished Romans are still out of town or they don't frequent this theater. But the others are probably not much more elegant. The stage curtain showed all kinds of advertisements: sewing machines, underwear, furniture by installments, as well as a Roman Dr. Stern offering his services to stutterers and guaranteeing brilliant success. The rest of the orchestra, on a level with the front orchestra and with nothing between them, was almost deserted when I arrived. Only one conscientious elderly gentleman was trying out his violin and evidently hadn't had the time to tune and clean it at home. One by one others appeared, the younger men hitching up their trousers before sitting down; then they produced instruments which they cleaned, put together, and on which they proceeded to make the most appalling sounds. I suspected some of them to have brought with them little whistles off the street which could be used for the pretext of creating an atmosphere. Gradually some thirty musicians, with varying amounts of hair, arrived; one of them was a girl, at all events young and dark, if not