Fanny Eckerlin has speculated on this last point that Eckerlin may have been chafing at the restrictions of her contract, as by this time she had already appeared with some success at La Scala, where she had debuted in "La gazza ladra" during the 1817–18 season. During Eckerlin's career she spent several seasons at the Teatro Italiano in Barcelona, where a claque in her honor was created, and where she won many favorable notices for her work before accepting a contract with the Salle Favart in Paris. She was a noted interpreter of Rossini, and during his tenure at the helm of
La Scala into a costume. As with most of the theatres at that time, La Scala was also a casino, with gamblers sitting in the foyer. Conditions in the auditorium, too, could be frustrating for the opera lover, as Mary Shelley discovered in September 1840: At the Opera they were giving Otto Nicolai's "Templario". Unfortunately, as is well known, the theatre of La Scala serves, not only as the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan, but every sort of trading transaction, from horse-dealing to stock-jobbing, is carried on in the pit; so that brief and far between are the snatches