Vanessa L. Rogers

_Love in a Village_ (1762), the most popular English comic opera of the eighteenth century, is now the first-ever hybrid critical edition of a British musical work. This edition reveals lead tenor and Covent Garden playhouse manager John Beard to have been the chief agent behind _Love in a Village_, long erroneously attributed to Thomas Arne; in fact, its medley of favourite airs of the period was arranged by trumpeter royal Edward Toms. The edition includes a hard-copy score and an online critical apparatus linked to searchable digitized primary sources. First performed at Covent Garden on 8 December 1762, _Love in a Village_ held the British stage for decades and was a hit as far away as New York, St Petersburg, and Calcutta. Its music derived from London’s pleasure garden concerts, Italian opera arias of the 1750s and 1760s, theatrical and occasional song, and common tunes. Combining within one work both humble music and sophisticated compositions by Arne, Handel, and Francesco Geminiani, among others, _Love in a Village_ built on and refreshed the techniques of ballad opera for attracting audiences and creating playhouse stars. The publication of _Love in a Village_ has been supported by the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, as the fourth volume of OPERA – Spectrum of European Music Theater in Individual Editions. This series, which has received over 25 million euros in research investment, is dedicated to creating critical editions of outstanding works of European musical theatre from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.

John Rich (1692-1761) was a profoundly influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. As producer, manager, and performer, he transformed the urban entertainment market, creating genres and promotional methods still with us today. This volume gives the first comprehensive overview of Rich's multifaceted career, appreciation of which has suffered from his performing identity as Lun, London's most celebrated Harlequin. Far from the lightweight buffoon that this stereotype has suggested, Rich–the first producer of The Beggar's Opera, the founder of Covent Garden, the dauntless backer of Handel, and the promoter of the principal dancers from the Parisian opera–is revealed as an agent of changes much more enduring than those of his younger contemporary, David Garrick. Contributions by leading scholars from a range of disciplines–theatre, dance, music, art, and cultural history–provide detailed analyses of Rich's productions and representations. These findings complement Robert D. Hume's lead article, a study that radically alters our perception of Rich.

Contributors:
Olive Baldwin; Jeremy Barlow; Donald Burrows; Al Coppola; Moira Goff; Robert D. Hume; David Hunter; Terry Jenkins; Berta Joncus; Matthew J. Kinservik; Ana Martínez; Judith Milhous; Felicity Nussbaum; Marcus Risdell; Fiona Ritchie; Vanessa Rogers; Robin Simon; Jennifer Thorp; Linda J. Tomko; Thelma Wilson

Ballad opera, an early form of English musical theatre launched by the appearance of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728, flourished in the 1730s and was one of the most profitable forms of theatrical entertainment in Britain. Significantly, over a quarter of all recorded ballad operas were premiered at benefit performances in London theatres, making a direct link between the benefits and the development of this extremely influential genre.

The benefit performance structure was perfect for trying out new musical entertainments, as the theatre personnel undergoing the benefit would take on the costs related to such an experiment.  If a piece happened to succeed, it would be adopted by the theatre’s managers and performed again. If proving popular enough, it even could make the author some additional money through publication. Some of the biggest successes of the genre were first presented as benefits, the most prominent example being John Hippisley’s Flora (1729), which had nearly 200 performances in London alone within its first decade.

This chapter utilizes advertisements for the benefit performances as well as the texts and music of ballad operas themselves in order to find out more about these important premieres. We shall see that benefit performances drove the development of ballad opera, whether by initiating experimental works by new authors, prompting a musical revision of an older repertory piece (as in the case of Flora), or by encouraging a performer to try out a new character type or singing role (as with the frequent benefit revivals of The Beggar’s Opera). Though the flood of ballad opera benefits was curtailed by the Licensing Act in 1737, this chapter argues that the benefit performances occupied a central role in the development of ballad opera and helped to craft the genre that dominated British stages for the second quarter of the century.

An intriguing 19th-century sketch of a rare Georgian-era orchestra arrangement for London’s Drury Lane Theatre is held in a scrapbook in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The unusual drawing by theatre historian James Winston places the theatre orchestra on an annexe projecting out from the front of the stage and over the pit, seemingly causing some of the benches to be removed. The extension raises the orchestra to the height of the stage in order to showcase a large number of musicians in what was clearly an extraordinary musical event. Despite the scarcity of orchestral seating plans in Britain during this period, the sketch has been ignored by scholars—probably because the event it depicts has remained a mystery. Why would Winston have sketched this orchestral arrangement? And if it was for a special performance, what was the occasion?

Seating plans for English orchestras are exceedingly rare, and so Winston’s drawing is particularly valuable for those who seek iconographical evidence of how an orchestra of this period might have been arranged. We can learn much about orchestral performances in London’s theatres, specifically which instruments were present in the playhouse, prevailing ideas about seating and layout, how the stage might have accommodated the orchestra, and other related matters. Winston’s detailed drawing contains some excellent clues, giving us a substantive start at understanding how orchestral music in the late Georgian era theatre might have worked ‘on the stage’.

Despite the Theatre Royal Drury Lane’s importance as one of the most important theatrical and musical venues in the English-speaking world, few sources survive which illuminate the London theatre’s musical activities during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Because of this scarcity of information, musicologists must be creative in finding and using primary materials that can help reveal more about the place of music at this theatre. One surprising but informative source that has heretofore been overlooked is the large number of English caricatures that contain images of music-making at Drury Lane. Although caricatures can be problematic, they are still worth a closer examination as they give us a more complete picture of what is happening musically in an English playhouse.  This study investigates primary sources relating to theatrical musical practices, including an exploratory analysis of related English caricatures, in order to find out more about Drury Lane’s theatre orchestra from the time of David Garrick’s management beginning in 1747 until the retirement of manager Robert William Elliston in 1826.

An excellent summation of the effect of music in ballad operas can be found in theater manager and author Colley Cibber’s memoirs:
"[W]hen the Movement of the Air, and Tone of the voice, are exquisitely harmonious, tho’ we regard not one Word or what we hear, yet the Power of the Melody is so busy in the Heart, that we naturally annex Ideas to it of our own Creation, and, in some sort, become our selves the Poet to the Composer". Indeed, the ballad opera authors’ repeated use of familiar traditional airs, which were already fixed firmly in the audience’s mind, ensured that various levels of meaning proliferated with the hearing of the music.  Cibber’s words go right to the heart of the ballad opera genre’s formula for success:  spectators would have been very aware of these meanings and histories while listening, and set to clever contemporary texts, the ballad airs could help the opera attain new heights of parody and satire.  Moreover, the audience’s previous knowledge of the music helped to provide a uniquely porous border between spectator and stage unseen in any other operatic genre of this period; through awareness of earlier versions of these music and texts, the audience is brought “in” to the jokes served up by the authors. This unique interrelation of music and text resulted in the brilliant popular success of this highly experimental genre.  This paper examines how the careful selection of pre-existing ballad airs—along with a skillful adaptation of the lyrics—provided the foundation for this singular and highly successful model of musical theater.

Henry Fielding's (1707-1754)ballad operas are fundamental to any comprehensive examination of the genre, and his technical and dramatic contributions are considerable.  His eleven operas span many styles, ranging from full-length pieces similar to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera to short one-act works with newly composed music that resemble later mid-century English burlettas.  Many of his inspired theatrical and musical works briefly eclipsed other London entertainments in popularity and were among the best-loved stage pieces of the century. This chapter is an overview of Fielding's ballad operas and musical selections.