Also in August 1778
2nd: Louis Philippe II d’orléans arrives in Paris to tell King Louis XVI of the French fleet’s ‘victory’ over the British at the Battle of Ushant – the first naval engagement of the Anglo-french (‘Bourbon’) War, it was in fact fairly inconclusive. Chartres receives a 20-minute standing ovation when he later takes his seat at the Paris Opera, and an effigy of Britain’s Admiral Keppel is burnt in the grounds of Chartres’s family residence. 3rd Two-and-a-half years after Milan’s Royal Ducal Theatre burnt to the ground, the city’s new Teatro alla Scala opens with a performance of Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta. Designed by Milan architect Giuseppe Piermarini, and built on the site of the recently demolished church of Santa Maria alla Scala, it seats around 3,000 and is one of Italy’s largest and most opulent opera houses.
5th Phillipp Seidel, an assistant to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, sends the poet’s Harzreise im Winter in a letter to the author and critic Johann Heinrich Merck. The last work of Goethe’s Sturm und Drang period, the 88-line poem explores his impressions and thoughts during a stay in the Harz Mountains in northern Germany late the previous year. 7th, Writing from Paris to the theologian Joseph Bullinger, Mozart scathingly describes his home city of Salzburg as ‘no place for my talent! Those employed in the music receive no respect, and secondly there is nothing to hear: there is no theatre there, no opera! Salzburg music has always been richly supplied with the useless – the unnecessary – but very impoverished in what is necessary, and entirely deprived of the indispensable.’ 11th The Anglican cleric and hymn-writer Augustus Montague Toplady dies in London of tuberculosis at the age of 37. Best known as the author of the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’, Toplady’s Calvinist views led to him becoming a bitter opponent of John Wesley, attacking the older theologian in a series of articles.