In his 1966 Venice for Pleasure, J G Links wrote that he had solely ever recognized one individual to be upset by Venice, and that was his aunt. The drawback was that, in December 1891, she had been to “Venice at Olympia” at the west London exhibition corridor: “Here was Venice because it ought to have been – ‘fantastically illuminated and completely warmed’,” wrote Links, quoting The Times.
“There had been 1000’s of lights and dazzling splendour, battalions of sleek and refined danseurs, and beautiful Italian music written particularly. On the canal in entrance of the stage you could possibly float down the silent waters in a Venetian gondola steered by a Venetian gondolier, accompanied by the music of mandolins and songs of serenaders with their unending Funiculì, Funiculà. And The Times fails to level out – though my aunt remembered – the gondolas had been WHITE.
“In February, she went to Venice for her honeymoon. There had been no lights, no heat, no ‘dancers attired in attractive costumes’, as there had been in London. The canals smelt and, worst of all, the gondolas had been black. She returned to Olympia however by no means to Venice.”
What was this heat mirage that left Venice a disappointment? Little hint stays. Yet the man who created it – the impresario Imre Kiralfy – was well-known in his day. This Kubla Khan of Kensington planted pop-up jungles and moved miniature mountains in his quest to carry the world to London’s retro suburbs. He distilled the spirit of the nineteenth century in all its wildest desires and punctured hubris: a Hungarian-Jewish little one dancer from Pest, an engineer, composer, businessman and architect, his rise was so fairytale that, by the finish of his life, he was receiving royalty in his shimmering stucco fantasy of White City – the Disneyland of its day – however his posthumous obliteration has been all however whole.
Kiralfy made his stage debut at the tender age of 4, high-kicking people dances in calf-length boots and navy jacket throughout Europe. In 1869, aged 24, he emigrated to New York, the place, together with his brother Bolossy, he wowed crowds with ephemeral, casts-of-thousands spectaculars, reminiscent of Around the World in Eighty Days, catering to an urge for food for “bombastic pseudo-educative historicism”, as Brendan Gregory put it in his 1988 research. Kiralfy styled himself “Master of the Revels for the sovereign individuals of the United States”: “It has been the dream of my life to provide a mix of all the mimetic arts on a scale directly so stupendous and so excellent as to be worthy…”
In 1887, the brothers fell out and Imre went it alone with The Fall of Babylon – “pantomimic illustration in colossal proportions”, as one spectator wrote – with 600 dancing women, and Babylon painted on an enormous drop curtain, 428ft lengthy, in an enormous out of doors area on Staten Island. “No theatre would serve to take advantage of the huge footage which I started to conceive in my thoughts,” stated Kiralfy. The present ended with “the leaping of flames from the huge partitions and excessive towers… screams, groans, cries and dropping collectively of partitions, towers and bridges in tragic confusion,” as one critic put it.
