PROGRAM NOTES

The early history of English opera is not very well understood by scholars even today. Most of them approach it from the wrong angle—as musicians, chiefly interested in music.

They compare English scores with French and (especially) Italian ones of the same vintage, ask why full-length all sung operas were so seldom attempted by native English composers when mainland Europeans were knocking them out all the time, and usually end up apologizing for an embarrassing deficiency in national lyric-dramatic talent … English is an “unmusical” language, over-emotional opera offends against the English sense of decorum, and silly operatic plots are not worth a level headed Englishman’s attention.

Various aesthetic and psychological explanations have been tried, none of which seem convincing. Much more plausible is the economic argument. As long as London theatres were owned and run by companies of actors or by actor managers to whom the star roles belonged as of right (and who couldn’t sing a note), plays with lots of incidental music were as close as we could get to the “real” continental operatic thing.

Music was performed by a separate, in theory subsidiary, musical cast—the classic English compromise. It accounts for Purcell, it accounts for Gilbert and Sullivan, and even for twentieth century British and American musical theatre.

This program explores the origins of a musico dramatic form still alive and well (and making millions for Andrew Lloyd Webber!), which isn’t “opera” at all according to the orthodox definition—and never really pretended to be.

Locke’s Psyche
The performance begins with Psyche (words by Thomas Shadwell, music by Matthew Locke with some instrumental selections by his keyboardist Giovanni Battista Draghi) a half play, half opera (hence  “semi opera”), and the first of its kind to be staged in London, in 1675. Locke’s music was published in short score the same year, so although the show was rarely revived (the production was far too expensive for that), younger composers were able to study and learn from it. “The book containing the whole music of that entertainment is not unworthy of a place in a virtuoso’s cabinet,” wrote the music historian Roger North, 50 years later—a tribute to Locke’s enduring appeal and continuing influence.

Blow’s Venus and Adonis
Purcell’s Timon of Athens
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas
Next comes an excerpt from John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (1682 or 1683). It is a short court masque, and not a public entertainment, but Psyche-inspired nonetheless. Following Venus and Adonis comes the trumpet overture preceding Purcell’s masque in Timon of Athens—an adapted Shakespeare play familiar to late seventeenth century audiences, not the original version but Thomas Shadwell’s rewrite. Shadwell had written the libretto for Locke’s Psyche; Purcell was a pupil of John Blow; and theirs was a small creative world within which musical, theatrical, and literary ideas were freely exchanged. To think in terms of individual achievement is rather misleading: a corporate style with individual mannerisms would be closer to the mark. Purcell wasn’t an isolated genius by any means; he stood not head and shoulders, but a separative half-inch above his contemporaries. Dido and Aeneas is Purcell’s main claim to fame: possibly meant for performance at court, like Venus and Adonis, in 1683 or 1684. Few scholars now believe that the 1689 girls’ school production was its first outing. Dido’s lament marks the climax of the opera an opera which for  “concentration of energy ... stands alone among operas of all time” (E. J. Dent).

The Tempest
After Dido and Aeneas, the program continues with a semi-opera score attributed to Purcell until quite recently, but now more cautiously labeled “anonymous.” The Tempest, or The EnchantedIsland, hugely popular with London audiences throughout the late 17th century, is based on Shakespeare’s play, rewritten by Sir William Davenant and John Dryden, and further revised by Thomas Shadwell. The original music for “Arise ye subterranean winds” had been written for performances of the play in 1674 by Shadwell’s lute teacher Pietro Reggio, but a revival in the early 18th century gave it the full bravura treatment, and this later version is the one performed here.

Purcell’s King Arthur
The forceful winds at the end of Part I are now quelled by Aeolus. King Arthur was the second of Purcell’s semi-operas, first seen in the Dorset Garden Theatre in May 1691, the year after Dioclesian; The Fairy Queen followed in 1692. The genre had been created by Shadwell with his operatic versions of The Tempest (1674), with music by Locke, Draghi and Pelham Humfrey; and Psyche (1675), with music by Locke and Draghi. The unashamedly patriotic and heroic text of King Arthur has attracted much criticism in our cynical and decidedly unheroic age, but it was obviously taken at face value as a stirring tale of the struggle between good and evil, and was by far the most successful of Purcell’s semi-operas. It’s easy to see why. The music is wonderfully varied, and for this, Dryden should take some of the credit. He understood, as the adapters of Dioclesian and The Fairy Queen failed to do, that Purcell needed a series of varied situations to produce the necessary contrasts of mood and idiom in the music without distorting the relationship with the parent play. Thus, each of the major musical scenes in King Arthur arises out of a different type of situation and calls for different types of music.

Purcell’s The Indian Queen
The Indian Queen, Purcell’s last full-scale theatrical commission (1695), showed him at the peak of his powers before his tragically early death at the age of 36. This trumpet overture heralds the appearance of  “aerial spirits” trying in their unworldly way to boost Queen Zempoalla’s morale. It doesn’t work.

Handel’s Acis and Galatea
Next, two excerpts from Handel’s Acis and Galatea—a masque in the Venus and Adonis/Dido and Aeneas tradition, set to an English libretto. In the best of Baroque operatic tradition, Galatea sings of her longing for the absent Acis in a (ubiquitous) “dove” aria , and the giant Polyphemus comically sings "O ruddier than the cherry" to the accompaniment of a tiny recorder obligato, distantly reminiscent of the ones Blow and Purcell had written (though for rather more mellow instruments) in high seriousness some two decades before.

Linley’s A Shakespeare Ode
Now a gear-change, to Thomas Linley Jr’s 1776 Ode on the Spirits of Shakespeare. Strictly speaking this is not a theatrical piece (though first performed in a theatre), but a musical celebration of Shakespeare’s genius written to honor the 160th anniversary of his death.

Purcell’s Timon of Athens
Shakespeare and Purcell unite for the conclusion of our performance, in a chorus from Timon of Athens (again, part of Thomas Shadwell’s rewrite). Here, Cupid and Bacchus bury their differences, “There are pleasures divine/In love and in wine” ... or vice versa. Start where you like when you get home.

–Andrew Pinnock / Philip Pickett