Music in Eighteenth-Century Britain

David Wyn Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field looks at various aspects of musical life in eighteenth-century Britain. The significant roles played by institutions such as the Freemasons and foreign embassy chapels in promoting music making and introducing foreign styles to English music are examined, as well as the influence exerted by individuals, both foreign and British. The book covers the spectrum of British music, both sacred and secular, and both cosmopolitan and provincial. In doing so it helps to redress the picture of eighteenth-century British music which has previously portrayed Handel and London as its primary constituents.

CHAPTER ONE
Eighteenth-Century English Music: Past, Present, Future

Peter Holman

There are four German words that everyone concerned with English music has to live with: das Land ohne Musik - the land without music. You have all come willingly to this conference, so I presume we can agree that eighteenth-century England was not a land without music, and that the products of its musical culture are worth studying and performing. This has been argued eloquently in print a number of times in recent years, notably in the eighteenth-century volume of the Blackwell History of Music in Britain.¹ But it is worth looking in more detail at how the Land ohne Musik judgment came to be made and accepted for so long, and what can be done to change it. Revisionist histories of English music - and of European eighteenth-century music in general - are badly needed and I hope what I have to say will suggest some directions that they might take.

The phrase das Land ohne Musik often appears in books on English music, though its origin is a mystery. It was used by Oscar Schmitz for the title of a book published in Munich in 1914, a significant date.² Previously Heinrich Heine had expressed similar sentiments, in an article written in French in July 1840 for the Gazzette d'Augsbourg.³

Ces hommes n'ont d'oreille ni pour la mesure ni pour la musique en général, et leur engoûment contre nature pour le piano et le chant, n'en est que doublement insupportable. Il n'y a véritablement rien d'aussi horrible sur terre que la musique anglaise, si ce n'est la peinture anglaise.

These people [the English] have no ear, either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for piano playing and singing is thus all the more repulsive. Nothing on earth is more terrible than English music, save English painting.

Heine had to admit that the English were fond of music, but managed to turn even that fact into criticism: their passion for piano playing and singing was 'unnatural' and thus 'all the more repulsive'.

Nineteenth-century Germany was the place where musicology was invented: Guido Adler mapped out the main areas of the discipline in an article published in 1885.⁴ It is no accident that 'Mediaeval', 'Renaissance', 'Baroque' and 'Classical', the labels we still use for the main periods of music history, were borrowed by late nineteenth-century German musicologists from art history. In 1888 Heinrich Wölfflin suggested that Jacob Burckhardt's concept of the Baroque in the visual arts could also be applied to literature and music, and in 1919 Curt Sachs applied the concept systematically to music.⁵ It is also no accident that our received historical outline of Baroque music traces a central line of development from the Italy of Monteverdi's time to the Germany of J.S. Bach. To some extent, composers are still thought important in so far as they exemplify this historical thread. It helps to explain why, for instance, Albinoni (1671-1751), Vivaldi (1678-1741) and G.B. Sammartini (1700/1-75) receive more attention than a number of equally important Italian contemporaries, for they are the ones thought to have influenced German composers.

Of course, this agenda is part of a larger one that had more to do with nineteenth-century cultural politics than with a proper, balanced evaluation of the total corpus of eighteenth-century music. It privileged what was perceived as the centre - Italy, Germany and Austria - over the supposed periphery Scandinavia, eastern and central Europe, France, the Iberian peninsula and England. It privileged instrumental music, especially those genres that used Viennese sonata form, over vocal music. And it privileged the work of the professional secular male in concert music over all others, such as church musicians, amateurs and women.

This agenda came to dominate musicological writing in English because many of the founding fathers of American musicology were German, and they were joined in American universities by successive waves of immigration, culminating in the exodus of Jewish musicologists from Nazi Germany before the Second World War. English eighteenth-century music has suffered more than most other areas of musicology from the German-American hegemony of musicological thought, in which Handel, a German, was thought to have dominated English musical life. Even today, most American research into English eighteenth-century music is devoted to Handel. To be fair, it is not difficult to find the same agenda at work in English musicology. The idea that Parry, Stanford and Elgar were part of an English 'Musical Renaissance' presupposes that there had been an earlier period of decline. As recently as 1983 Cambridge University Press entitled a volume Music in Eighteenth-Century England even though it consisted of six essays on Handel and his circle, one on Purcell, one on Purcell and Handel, one on Haydn, and only three concerned with all the other composers in eighteenth-century England, or its musical life in general.⁶ The irony is that the volume was a memorial to Charles Cudworth, who had done so much to awaken interest in Handel's English contemporaries.

The most persistent observation on musical life in eighteenth-century England is that it was dominated by Handel and other immigrant composers, the implication being that native composers were too feeble, parochial or conservative to offer them much competition. This is such a persuasive idea that it is worth looking at in some detail. It was not a new situation. Immigrants had played an important role in bringing new ideas from the continent ever since the reign of Henry VII. One thinks of the immigrant families that brought new instruments and new types of instrumental music to Henry VIII's court, or Alfonso Ferrabosco I (1543-88) and his crucial role in introducing the madrigal to England, or Angelo Notari (1566-1663), who introduced continuo playing and new types of song in the reign of James I, or Giovanni Battista Draghi (c. 1640-1708), whose 1687 ode on St Cecilia's day introduced Purcell (1659-95) and Blow (1649-1708) to new ways of writing for voices and instruments.

It is true that the scale of immigration steadily increased from the reign of Charles II onwards, but this was because England was rapidly becoming one of the leading mercantile powers of the world, with a large middle class willing and able to patronize music. That is why regular commercial concerts began in London earlier than anywhere else, why it became an important music publishing centre in the 1690s, and why it had become the main European centre for harpsichord making by 1750. These developments were not symptoms of weakness or decline, but evidence of a vibrant and complex musical life. Musicians were not attracted to London from all over Europe by the prospect of becoming large fishes in a small, stagnant pond, but because London was the largest and most exciting pond of all, where you did not need to be a big fish to make a fortune.

Indeed, it could be argued that England was the most musical country in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, judged by the amount of musical activity of all types. Assuming sufficent wealth and social standing, a music lover in London could choose between a number of rival concert series, the Italian opera, elaborate music in the spoken theatres in plays, masques or pantomimes, and, in the summer, ambitious musical programmes in the various pleasure gardens. Nor was all the musical activity confined to the professional sphere, or to London. We tend to think of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the golden age of amateur music-making, but there must have been an enormous amount of musical activity in Georgian homes, to judge from the vast amount of vocal and instrumental music of all sorts published mainly or wholly with amateurs in mind. We must not forget, too, that the average Georgian gentleman regularly participated in a form of music-making, however humble, when he sang with his friends in the tavern. The craze for catches and glees reached such a pitch in the late eighteenth century that prizes were instituted for new compositions, and pubs even ran competitions for the best performances.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of English musical life at the time is that it was not confined to the capital, as it tended to be in autocratic and centralized France or Spain. England did not have numerous small courts, each with its own musical establishment, as in Germany, or many churches with good choirs and orchestras, as in Italy. However, in the second half of the century most English provincial towns had an amateur musical society that regularly put on orchestral concerts, there were a number of provincial theatre circuits that featured operas and musical plays, and many of the local militias had wind bands that contributed a good deal to the musical life of the towns in which they were stationed. While the provincial cathedral choirs were mostly at a low ebb, there was a vigorous and increasingly complex tradition of music in parish churches, which often involved the performance of elaborate music for choir and instruments by local composers, the subject of Sally Drage's essay in this volume.

A problem with this vigorous musical life was that it was unstructured and decentralized, which meant that there was no central archive to preserve the repertory as in German courts or Italian churches. For this reason, English music tends not to survive unless it was published; there are dozens of composers of the period whose surviving output is more or less confined to their printed collections. Furthermore, the need to keep printed music commercially viable meant that much of the music that did get into print appeared only in an incomplete form. Orchestral songs and cantatas were often printed in compressed score, as were operas, which also suffered from being published without recitatives, dances and choruses; in fact, only a handful of late eighteenth-century English operas survive complete in orchestral form.

My second objection to the 'foreign domination' theory is that there is little sign that immigrants replaced native musicians in lucrative employment, or prevented them from obtaining it. Foreigners were repeatedly encouraged to come to England because they were the purveyors of new musical ideas or new musical technology, but it is striking how often they added a new thread to the tapestry of musical life, enriching the pattern and leaving the existing threads intact. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Lupo and Bassano families were added to the establishment of Henry VIII's court without displacing existing instrumentalists, and the same is true of the musicians who came to England with the various foreign brides of the Stuarts, or those who were attracted to England's dynamic concert life around 1700. It could be argued that Handel and the other immigrants who staffed the Italian opera company at the Haymarket around 1710 ruined the theatrical ambitions of Englishmen such as John Eccles (c. 1668-1735), John Weldon (1676-1736) and William Corbett (c. 1675-1748), but the English musical theatre soon bounced back, and in the long term Italian opera became just an extra strand enriching the musical life of London.

My most serious objection to the 'foreign domination' theory is that it is based on an anachronistic conception of national and racial identity. Nationalism was developing during the eighteenth century, but it was much less pronounced than in the nineteenth century or in modern times, even though there was a persistent thread of anti-Catholicism in England that must have affected musicians from Catholic countries. But national identity still meant relatively little, particularly to the educated elite that went on the Grand Tour, corresponded with intellectuals with similar interests in other countries, and patronized talented musicians wherever they found them. Charles Burney (1726-1814) typifies this cosmopolitan outlook. He travelled throughout Europe collecting material for his history of music, he corresponded with prominent musicians in a number of countries, and was a strong advocate of modern Italian and German composers such as Galuppi (1706-85), C.P.E. Bach (1714-88) and Haydn (1732-1809), whose progressive styles came closest to his ideal of natural, elegant melody.

There is certainly a logical problem with the received view of English musical history when it asserts that English musical life in the eighteenth century was dominated by immigrants, while at the same time it ignores their contribution to that musical life. Handel, of course, is the exception that proves the rule. It has been common in the past to think of English music only in terms of its native-born composers. But immigrants such as Paisible (d. 1721), Dieupart (d. c. 1740), Geminiani (1687-1762), Barsanti (1690-1772), De Fesch (1687-1761), Giuseppe Sammartini (1695-1750), Herschel (1738-1822), Hellendaal (1721-99) and Giordani (c. 1733-1806) spent most of their working lives in these islands, and contributed a good deal to musical life. Yet they have suffered from a Catch-22 situation in modern times: English musicologists and performers tend to ignore them because they were foreigners, while they are of little interest in their countries of origin because they left home at an early age, never to return. It is certainly difficult to make sense of some English genres without including the contribution of immigrants. A history of the English concerto grosso (or grand concerto), for instance, needs to take account of Barsanti's op. 3 (1742), De Fesch's op. 10 (1741), Geminiani's op. 2 (1732), op. 3 (1732) and op. 7 (1746), Hellendaal's op. 3 (c. 1758), and Sammartini's op. 2 (1728), op. 5 (1747), op. 8 (1752) and op. 11 (c. 1756), as well as Handel's op. 3 (1734) and op. 6 (1740). England has always been a nation of immigrants, and it makes no sense to restrict an account of its culture to the work of natives or, more accurately, to the work of the descendants of less recent immigrants.

What is often forgotten is that immigrant composers, anxious to be accepted in England, adapted their own idioms to conform to English taste. Although the basic language of English eighteenth-century music came mostly from abroad, it has a highly distinctive accent, which can often be found as strongly in the work of immigrants as that of native composers. The theatre suites written around 1700 by the Frenchman Jacques or James Paisible and the Moravian Gottfried or Godfrey Finger (c. 1660-1730) are as English as those by William Croft (1678-1727) or John Eccles, and the same is true of many of the grand concertos by immigrants just mentioned, to say nothing of John Frederick Lampe's English comic operas or John Christian Bach's Vauxhall songs. Even Handel adopted the English style on occasion. He wrote a Purcellian court ode soon after coming to London, and his Milton oratorio L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato of 1740 clearly shows the influence of Thomas Arne's Comus written two years earlier, in its vivid nature depiction and in the tuneful ballad style used in some of the arias. Of course, the nature of traditional musical criticism is such that biographers often prefer to see such connections as the influence of the immigrant on the native Englishman, rather than the reverse.

Mention of Handel brings me to the central problem of English eighteenth-century music. We are coming to realize that Handel's domination of English musical life was not so complete as was once thought, at least in his lifetime. He came to London to put on an Italian opera, and Italian opera largely concerned him for the first twenty years of his life in England. In the 1730s he gradually transferred his attention to the new genre of English oratorio, which he effectively invented and which occupied him for the rest of his life. He was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of tables
• Library sigla
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Eighteenth-Century English Music: Past, Present, Future
• Part 1 Institutions and Networks
• Part 2 Genre and Repertoire
• Part 3 Sources and Resources
• Part 4 Individuals and Style
• Index