The Opera Game

The Duke of Brunswick kept a chessboard in his private box at the Italian Opera — the Théâtre-Italien, then performing at the Salle Ventadour. Frederick Edge, Morphy's secretary and the closest witness we have, records the party as frequent visitors to that box; by Lawson's telling, the American sat with his back to the stage. One evening in the autumn of 1858 — most probably the fourth of November, during Rossini's The Barber of Seville, though tradition insists on Bellini's Norma and the record will not settle it — the twenty-one-year-old Paul Morphy sat down against the Duke and Count Isouard, who consulted together over the pieces while the performance went on below.

The allies argued over every reply. What came out of their deliberations is the most-taught attacking game in the history of chess: every developing move arriving with a threat, a knight given away for two open lines, both heavy pieces flung down the only open file — and at the end the queen herself surrendered, so that a rook and a bishop could deliver mate between them.

Seventeen moves. It has appeared in nearly every primer on attacking play printed since, because no game shows more cleanly what development, initiative, and the open file are for. Frank Marshall thought it the most famous game of all time; John Nunn grumbles that Morphy was only beating "two duffers." Both are right — and that argument is part of why it is still being taught.

The score was first printed only in 1860, two years after the evening, in Max Lange's biography of Morphy. The date and the opera are still argued over. The moves never have been.