Speranza
-- D. B. Scott.
The multifaceted edifice of Victorian bourgeois (or wealthy upper middle class) popular song (or ballad) was built upon foundations
laid in the eighteenth century.
The most important of these were three:
-- the Italian and English
"opera": opera, qua Italian genre of theatrical music, had been impoted by the Aristocracy and first flourished in the "Italian Opera House" as the Haymarket Theatre was informally called, and later at the more pretentious "Royal Italian Opera" at Covent Garden.
-- the collections of arrangements of'traditional airs' and
-- the table
entertainments pioneered by Charles Dibdin, of "Poor Tom" (or the Sailor's Epitaph) fame.
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The not insignificant part played by
non-conformist hymns will give birth to the 'sacred balld'. elsewhere.
The
influence in mid-century of Afro-American music was also important.
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Bourgeois upper middle class ballad is obviously
indebted to non-bourgeois ARISTOCRATIC musical practice and ballad repertoire, and to the cosmopolitan musical
character of eighteenth-century London: Queen Anne founded the Haymarket Theatre.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the London rich
merchants aped the manners of the upper class -- landed gentry and the Italian-opera loving aristocracy.
An interest in the Italian opera patronized
by the Aristocracy (and Landed Gentry) is a proof of social distinction for the upwardly mobile.
Hogarth satirizes this behaviour and depicted in his "Marriage a la Mode" (1745).
A merchant's daughter aspires to upper-class values by listening to an Italian castrato opera
singer as she collects 'decadent' art objects.
The royal "court" (as in the Camerata di Bardi in 1600s Florence, around the Medicis) remains the focal point
of musical activity during the reign of George II.
However, the first regular
series of PUBLIC subscription concerts started in 1729, at Hickford's Room, in
James Street.
The aristocracy and the nobility inherites a music tradition almost completely bound
to either the court ceremonial or the church liturgy.
The court ceremonial is important when we remember that the first examples of Italian opera back in 1600s Florence were commissions for weddings: Orfeo, Dafne, and the rest of them.
It was only in Venice that opera became 'commercial' (via Mantova).
In the early 1700s, the aristocracy (familiar with the Grand Tour to Italy) supplement it all by importing ITALIAN OPERA -- of the "seria" variety, as it were.
In general, 'opera buffa' was held to be inferior and for the mobs.
It was the flowering of ITALIAN OPERA in
Naples, which occurred slightly later than in Venice, which provides the model for
imitation in London (as well as Hanover and Vienna, to name a few)
IL TRIONFO DI CAMILLA, REGINA DI VOLSCI
The most popular of all Italian operas
in London, "Il Trionfo di Camilla, Regina di Volsci", was originally written for
Naples in 1696 by Giovanni Bononcini (of "Tweedledee" fame).
This was before Henry Purcell's experiments, which never attracted much of the snobbish aristocratic taste, like the sublime "Dido and Aeneas".
"Il trionfo di Camilla, regina di Volsci" received 111 performances
from 1706-28.
But it was always either completely in English -- or in a mixture of English
and Italian.
Addison has elaborated on this.
It was felt more natural to allow the Italian singers (illiterate as some of this Neapolitan castrati were) to air their airs in their vernacular rather than murder a subtle English lyric (the castrati cannot pronounce English vowels or consonants).
"Il trionfo di Camilla, regina di Volsci", therefore, in spite of its Italianate title, comes to be considered an "English" opera.
"Il trionfo di Camilla" had hast concluded a successful run in the "English" Opera Season at Lincoln's Inn Fields
Theatre before "The Beggar's Opera" opened there in 1728.
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The enormous success of
Gay/Pepusch's The Beggar's Opera" (1728) a work pointedly intended to appeal to the middle (rather than the upper) class,
demonstrates the potential size of the new middle-class (rather than aristocratic) audience for a composer who, like
Handel, would be willing to make appropriate concessions.
The Italian Bononcini (better known as "Tweedledee") abstains
from pursuing this opportunity.
Bononcini, as many other Italians settled in London, are more inclined towards the private concerts
of the aristocracy in Britain and Europe.
The work which established ITALIAN OPERA in its native tongue in London was Handel's "Rinaldo" (1711) -- cfr. Gay, "Let Us Take The Road" -- drawn from Torquato Tasso.
London is now a
cosmopolitan town, the home of many ITALIAN musicians.
Handel himself, as a
German who acquires fame (and money) writing ITALIAN operas for the English,
personally testifies to this cosmopolitan character of the city of London.
Aaron Hill, the director of
the theatre in the "Italian Opera House", Haymarket, concocts a libretto from bits of Tasso and
Ariosto.
Hill suggests that Handel set it to music when he met him in London on his
first visit to England.
Handel agrees so it was speedily translated into
Italian by one Giacomo Rossi.
Handel is successful in providing ARISTOCRATIC
entertainment, for the royalty, nobility and landed gentry.
Handel's real sympathies, however, lies with the English bourgeoisie
Although Handel
received royal patronage, he never holds an official court position.
Handel is often
out of favour with certain members of the aristocracy whose resentment becomes
overt when they organize a rival 'Opera of the Nobility' in 1734 -- led by Porpora, and wholly performed in ITALIAN.
During the
1700s, Handel is increasingly aware of the possibility that a large commercial
public might be catered for by a "new" art-form.
The public reactions to Gay's "Beggar's Opera" and Carey and Lampe's burlesque "The Dragon of Wantley" (1737)
-- a parody on Handel's "Giustino" and Farinelli -- show widespread SCORN for Italian "opera seria" which was damaging Handel's box-office
receipts. Add to that the competition from the Opera of the Nobility.
Handel's solution is to blend
(a) the *music* of ITALIAN OPERA
(b) he German
Passion, and
(c) the English choral tradition
-- to create an original and eventually
highly successful hybrid, the English "oratorio".
In Italy, the term "oratorio" means, more or
less, a concert performance of a sacred opera during Lent, when the Pope decrees that opera houses are to be closed (the original 'oratorio' in Rome, where "Anima e Corpo" was performed in 1600).
Handel pleases the middle (rather than the upper) class by
using ENGLISH (and not Italian) as the language of his oratorios.
Also, the old biblical subject matter
is more to the middle-class taste than that of the Italian opera seria -- which rather appeals to the classicists and Grand Tourists
In a period of expanding empire,
it was easy to identify with God's chosen people and their heaven-sent
victories.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the major European
countries are engaged in commercial wars for the control of over-seas markets.
Britain's sea-power was crucial,.
It is thus no surprise to learn that the
patriotic song 'Rule, Britannia!' dates from this time (1740) -- from Arne's masque, "King Alfred" -- and to be parodied by the Tommies during the Great War. "Marmalade and Jam".
By the end of the
Seven Years War (1763) Britain outstrips her rivals in the building of a
colonial empire and securs both North America -- "The American Colonies", or "The Colonies in the New World" -- and India.
The traditional
court composer's commemoration of a victory is a work like Handel's
"Dettingen Te Deum", written to celebrate the fortunate outcome of the last
great charge in British history led by the King himself, at the battle of
Dettingen in 1743 -- the king's horse having accidentally bolted in the direction of the
enemy.
Now, Handel also has an alternative means of response to national
conflict and choses to celebrate the victory over the forces of feudalism at
Culloden, in an oratorio, "Judas Maccabeus" (1746) -- from where the familiar hymn tune, "JUDAS MACCABAEUS" (originally "Joshua") comes -- "See the conqu'ring hero comes".
Prince Charlie is the
grandson of the dethroned monarch James II, and the focal point of pro-Stuart
sympathy among the aristocracy.
The true patriot is called upon to reject
feudalism in the cause of establishing a middle-class democracy.
It is ironic
that an old song revitalized for the cause in the 1740s, "God Save our Gracious King',
originally refers to 'the king over the water' -- still suggested by
the odd phrasing,
"send him victorious"
-- and in an early version the epithet 'true-born'.
Handel
identifies with the aims of middle-class (rather than upper class) liberals, having for ever turned his
back on feudal Germany and become naturalized as English in 1726.
The oratorio of "Judas
Maccabeus" (and first "Joshua") catches the bourgeois mood and is to be one of his most regularly
performed pieces ("See the conqu'ring hero comes")
The English are represented by the Israelites who are fighting
a Roman aristocracy, and the Duke of Cumberland (alias 'the butcher') is
undoubtedly intended for comparison with the divinely favoured eponymous hero: Maccabeus. (Oddly, Handel borrowed his famous march from an earlier oratorio, on the ancient prophet "Joshua").
It is worth while pondering the kind of freedom for which English
soldiers are being asked to sacrifice their lives, if need be.
The agrarian
revolution destroys the ancient village communities, and the system of
co-operative husbandry is eplaced by individual farming.
Furthermore, the
effect of the Enclosure Movement is to dispossess small tenants and cottagers
in the interests of capitalist farmers.
The result of political reformation
means that people are more and more bound together by self-interest rather than
gaining freedom.
The liberty being fought for was the freedom to sell one's own
labour-power or hire that of others, depending on whether one owns or has been
stripped of property.
After the suppression of the '45 rebellion, the Highland
chiefs are, in Dr Johnson's description, changed from patriarchal rulers to
rapacious land-lords.
In the later eighteenth century,
enforced clearances took place in the Highlands to make room for profitable
sheep-farming.
The rightness of the Protestant religion is strongly hinted
at in the Rev. Morell's libretto (despite the obvious anomaly that the
Israelites worship a tribal deity), with the anti-papist slant of the cries of
'down with the polluted altars' and the recommendation to hurl 'priests and
pageants' to 'the remotest corner of the world' in order to avoid deception by
'pious lies'
The enemy Rome also suggests Catholicism and its association with
the Jacobite cause.
Performers in oratorio, of course, were not under the same
suspicion of popery as those in Italian OPERA.
The religious revival which
take place in the later eighteenth century was important to the emerging
industrial bourgeoisie.
Methodism begins to acquire respectability, and the
middle class in industrial areas take advantage of the organizing experience to
be gained from Methodist meetings which relies upon lay leadership and
devolution of responsibility.
Success in industry is also more likely to result
from the sort of skills that are emphasized in dissenting schools.
The subject
of non-conformism and its influence on bourgeois ballad is a big one.
Before the industrial revolution, middle-class town-dwellers are:
(a) merchants
(b)
artisans, or
(c) shopkeepers.
Social change is set in motion by the cotton
industry, and the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton which, together with
Watt's steam-engine, created the factory system.
Because of steam power, the
British coal deposits are of immense significance, and scores of mines are opened.
The mining of copper and iron is needed, too, for the production of the
machinery itself.
Arkwright was a typical example of the new industrial hero.
Arkwright
is a Preston barber in 1768, a mill owner in 1771, and thereafter he is
continually adding to his accumulation of capital the royalties he receives from
machinery built to his patents -- whether or not the invention he had patented is
actually one of his own.
When British industrial production figures begin to
climb, war is once more to prove a decisive factor in crushing foreign
competition and securing captive markets (1793-1815).
A transformation in
political and intellectual life is indicated by the birth of classical
economics.
Adam Smith attacks mercantilism and advocates free trade in "The Wealth of Nations" (1776) and, reduces politics,
parties, religion, in short everything to economic categories.
--------
In
music, the effects of bourgeois democratic ideas are seen in a
(a) deliberate popularization and
(b) simplification of style.
Even a composer like Haydn, who spends most of his life in employment at the Esterhazy court, working within the
traditions of aristocratic musical entertainment, reveals his republican
sympathies by deliberately accommodating himself to this democratic tendency
in his London Symphonies of 1791-5 (e.g. the slow movement of the Surprise
Symphony, No. 94).
Haydn also writes twelve canzonets to English words, one of
which,
"My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair"
became a firm favourite in the
drawing-room repertoire. (The words are rather trite).
Haydn is much influenced by the music of Handel which
he heard, and the kind of simple descriptive effects that can be traced from a
work like Handel's "Israel in Egypt" to Haydn's "The Creation" were again a beloved
feature of bourgeois ballad
The middle class does not reach a position of
political dominance over-night, but significant milestones are
(a) 1832, when the
Reform Bill was passed
(b) the boom in railway investment (essential for the
development of capital-goods industries like iron and coal) which helped to
shake off the 1842 depression, and
(c) the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
The
importance of the Reform agitation is the new polarize in of class antagonism
between labourers and capitalists (rather than labour ind aristocracy) which
follows.
Chartism as the inevitable result of this.
In
treating the house of the third estate as the house of the people, and not as
the house of a privileged class, the ministry and parliament of 1831 virtually
concedes the principal of universal suffrage its immediate and inevitable
result was Chartism.
The importance of riding out the
1842 depression is that afterwards Britain is no longer dependent on one main
industrialized sector, and the ensuing boom years are a contributing factor in
setting English unrest apart from that on the continent in 1848.
The importance
of the repeal of the corn laws is that it gives a victory to the industrial
bourgeoisie over the landed aristocracy, leaving the latter economically and
politically weaker.
The line from 1832 to Chartism is not a haphazard pendulum
alteration of "political" and "economic" agitations but a direct progression.
Birnie, A. An Economic
History of the British Isles, London: Methuen: 1935.
Buck, P. C. The Oxford
Song Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1931.
Burney, C. A General
History of Music (1776), reprint of 1789 edn. New York: Dover, 1957.
Durfey,
T., Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy. final edn of 6 vols. London,
1719-20.
Kalischer, A. C. Beethoven's Letters. Trans. J. S. Shedlock. New
York: Dover, 1972.
Thomson, W. Orpheus Caledonius. London, 1725—26.
Monday, December 24, 2012
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