• Acknowledgments • Act One: Georgian Patterns • Overture: Fashionable Acts • Opera as an “Event”: The Aesthetics of Audience Behavior • A Subscription Culture: Gender and the Sociopolitical Foundations of Opera-going • To See and to Be Seen: Opera and the “Theater of the Great” • Act Two: Victorian Adaptations • Overture to Act Two • The Commercialization of the Opera: Entrepreneurs and the Expansion of the Public • The Refashioning of Fashionable Society: Gender and the Transformation of Operatic Culture • Listening in New Ways: Audience Behavior and the Cultural Politics of Opera Reviewing • Finale: Opera and the Reform of Elite Culture • Appendixes - Prices at the King’s/Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1780s–1880 • Prices at Covent Garden, 1847–1879 • London’s Italian Opera Managers, 1705–1878 • Additional Tables • Abbreviations and Works Frequently Cited • Notes • Index