operas, either with original music or music adapted from the ballad
tunes of England, were heard in London without being speedily brought to
New York and performed here. In the John Street Theater, too, they were
listened to by George Washington, and the leader of the orchestra, a
German named Pfeil, whose name was variously spelled Fyle, File, Files,
and so on, produced that "President's March," the tune of which was
destined to become associated with "Hail Columbia," to the words of
which it was adapted by Joseph Hopkinson, of Philadelphia. On January
29, 1798, a new playhouse was opened. This was the Park Theater. A
musical piece entitled "The Purse, or American Tar," was on the program
of the opening performance, and for more than a score of years the Park
Theater played an important rôle in local operatic history. For a long
term English operas of both types held the stage, along with the drama
in all its forms, but in 1819 an English adaptation of Rossini's "Barber
of Seville"--the opera which opened the Italian régime six years
later--was heard on its stage, and two years after that Henry Rowley
Bishop's arrangement of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro." At the close of
the season of 1820 the Park Theater was destroyed by fire, to the great
loss of its owners, one of whom was John Jacob Astor. On its site was
erected the new Park Theater, which was the original home of Italian
opera, performed in its original tongue, and in the Italian manner,
though only a small minority of the performers were Italians by birth.

Garcia was a Spaniard, born in Seville. Richard Grant White, writing in
The Century Magazine for March, 1882, calls him a "Spanish Hebrew," on
what authority I am unable to guess. Not only was Manuel Garcia, the
elder, a chorister in the Cathedral of Seville at the age of six, but
it seems as likely as not that he came of a family of Spanish church
musicians who had made their mark for more than fifty years before the
father of Malibran was born. But it is a habit with some writers to find