Thomas Arne
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Augustine Arne (12 March 1710 – 5 March 1778) was an English composer, violinist, and keyboard player. A prolific composer of music for the stage, he was the most significant figure in 18th-century English theatre music and is considered the catalyst for the revival of English opera in the early 1730s. While he was alive, England's musical scene was for the most part dominated by foreign music and musicians. Arne was the only native English composer of his day that was able to successfully compete with composers like George Friederich Handel who monopolized the British music scene during the eighteenth century.[1]
Between 1733 and 1776, Arne wrote music for about 90 stage works, including plays, masques, pantomimes, and opera. Many of his dramatic scores are now lost, probably destroyed in the disastrous fire at Covent Garden in 1808.[1] He showed little interest in writing concert music. The symphonies and overtures he composed derive mostly from his stage works, and his keyboard concertos were mainly a by-product of his work in the theatre. As a Catholic, Arne's career suffered in a community where writing music for the Church of England was profitable, both financially and politically. As a result he was denied the sort of official patronage given to his most important English contemporaries, William Boyce and John Stanley, a fact that hurt him financially later in his life. Regardless, Arne dominated the various genres of English theatre music for several decades and is considered one of the finest composers of the era. Today he is probably best known for writing the British patriotic song, Rule, Britannia! which is part of his opera Alfred (1740) and for his opera Artaxerxes (1762). Many of his songs and incidental theater music are still performed in concerts and recitals today.[2]
Contents |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life and education
Arne was born in the Covent Garden area of London. He was named after his father and grandfather who were upholsterers and office holders in the London Company of Upholders. As a boy, Arne decided to adopt the middle name of Augustine in order to show support for his mother Anne's Roman Catholic faith. Although his father ran a successful business, the Two Crowns and Cushions, out of a large house in King Street, he allowed both his father (Arne's grandfather) and brother Edward (Arne's Uncle) to die in debtor's prison.[2]
Arne was educated at Eton College and was initially apprenticed for three years to London attorney Arthur Kynaston. However, his true passion was for music and he soon abandoned the law. According to music historian Charles Burney, who became his apprentice in 1744, Arne tormented his fellow pupils ‘night and day’ by playing the recorder, practicing the spinet secretly at night during the holidays, and ‘muffling the strings with a handkerchief’. He initially studied composition on his own before a chance meeting with composer Michael Christian Festing led him to start studying violin and other musical interests more formally. Burney wrote that Arne and Festing were both present on 12 November 1725 to hear Thomas Roseingrave win the competition for the post of organist of St George's, Hanover Square.[1]
Although Arne's father was first opposed to his change of career, he was soon reconciled to it after hearing his son play first violin in a concert in the home of a neighbour. The opposition cannot have been strong, for Arne was soon teaching his younger sister Susannah Maria Arne and his brother Richard to sing. Susannah would grow up to become a famous contralto and actress, and both she and Richard performed in several of their brother's works throughout his career.[3]
[edit] Early career
The genuine support of Arne's father became more apparent when he provided Arne with the financial backing to form a theater company in 1732 for the purpose of staging English operas at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The company's first production was John Frederick Lampe's setting of Henry Carey's Amelia in March of 1732 , which was followed with an unauthorized production of Handel's Acis and Galatea. The company, however, soon split the following Autumn with Lampe remaining at the Haymarket while Arne put on a production of Teraminta by Carey and John Stanley at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 20 November 1732. This was followed by the first staged production of a work composed by Arne, the opera Rosamond, on 7 March 1733. The opera used a setting of Joseph Addison's 1707 libretto. The next season Arne staged his afterpiece setting The Opera of Operas, or Tom Thumb the Great at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The work was a satire of Italian opera and was the brain child of librettist Henry Fielding. Lampe had set the text to music a few years before and a revival of his work was produced at Drury Lane at the same time that Arne's piece premiered, which further encouraged a growing competition between the two. Arne's setting was well received, running for 15 nights which was a significant success for a young composer. Shortly thereafter his masque Dido and Aeneas also did well, running for 17 performances.[1]
In April 1734, Arne's sister married actor and playwright Theophilus Cibber whose company of players was in residence at Drury Lane. The marriage proved beneficial to Arne's position in the London theatre as he became house composer at Drury Lane, and wrote music for a number of plays and pantomimes over the next several years.[3] Also advantageous to his career was his own marriage to one of the finest English sopranos of the century and Lampe's sister-in-law, Cecilia Young, on 15 March 1737. His wife and his sister became indispensable assets to him and contributed greatly to his first enduring successes. They appeared in many of his productions and were by all accounts two of the finest singers and actresses on the London stage. For example, the two women sang in the opening production of Arne's setting of Milton's 1634 masque Comus, as adapted by John Dalton (1738), which continued to run beyond the end of the century.[2]
[edit] Middle career
|
||||||||
By 1738 Arne was one of the leaders of musical life in London. That year he was one of the founding members of the Society of Musicians (later Royal Society), along with Handel, William Boyce, and Johann Christoph Pepusch. Arne was also a Freemason[4] and active in the organisation which has long been centred around his home, the Covent Garden area of London. In 1740 he was commissioned by Frederick, Prince of Wales to set David Mallet and James Thomson's masque Alfred for performance at his country home, Cliveden. The original work contained only seven musical numbers, including Rule, Britannia. He later rewrote it a number of times, turning it into an all-sung oratorio in 1745 and then an opera in 1753. Alfred is one of the few surviving stage works by Arne and is still performed by opera companies today.[1]
In 1740–1741 Arne composed music for the Drury Lane productions of The Tempest, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, including songs such as "Where the bee sucks", "When Daisies Pied", and "Under the greenwood tree" which are still performed in concerts and recitals today. Arne had another major success in spring 1742 with William Congreve's 1700 masque The Judgment of Paris.[2]
In 1741 Arne filed a complaint in Chancery pertaining to a breach of musical copyright and claimed that some of his theatrical songs had been printed and sold by Henry Roberts and John Johnson, the London booksellers and music distributors. The matter was settled out of court. Arne subsequently wrote:
"As Mr. Arne has His Majesty's royal Patent for the sole printing and publishing of his works, he humbly hopes no Gentlemen or Ladies will give any Encouragement to pirated copies, written or printed, such persons who deliver them acting in open contempt of His Majesty's Authority and greatly injuring the Author in his Property. And as Mr. Arne can offend no honest Shopkeeper in maintaining his Right; he gives the Public Notice, that whosoever shall offer to write or print any of his works shall be prosecuted according to law."[5] Arne was certainly one of the very first composers to have appealed to the law over copyright issues.[5]
Up until this time, Arne's career had been confined almost solely to London. However, this changed when his sister moved to Dublin in December 1741 in order to avoid the scandal surrounding her recently failed marriage to Cibber. Susannah began performing in Dublin with Handel in the spring of 1742. She most notably sang the contralto solos in the first performance of Handel's Messiah on April 13. Their success inspired Arne to try his luck in Dublin and he soon arrived with his wife and the tenor Thomas Lowe the following June. He spent two seasons there, during which time he performed mostly already existing compositions, including a number of Handel oratorios in addition to his own works. However, his first oratorio The Death of Abel did have its premiere at Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre on 18 February 1744.[1]
Arne returned to London in August 1744. On his journey home he met Charles Burney in Chester, and agreed to take him to London as his apprentice without the usual fee. He continued his work at Drury Lane over the next several years, and had a smash hit with his version of God bless our noble king, which was sung every night during the crisis of the Young Pretender's rebellion in September 1745. During the summer of that same year, Arne began a long association with concerts in London's pleasure gardens when vocal became one of the regular forms of entertainment. He became the appointed official composer for Vauxhall in 1745 and also presented material at the Mary-le-bone and Ranelagh gardens. In particular, his dialogue Colin and Phoebe established him as one of the leading composers at the gardens. According to Burney, Colin and Phaebe was ‘constantly encored every night for more than three months’, and was published in September in the first collection of Vauxhall songs, Lyric Harmony. Many of the songs that Arne wrote for the pleasure gardens were published in a series of annual song collections, which also contained his theatre music, that were produced over the next 20 years. Although most of the collections contain some new music, many songs were reprinted in several volumes.[2]
[edit] Late career
The 1750s proved to be difficult years both professionally and personally for Arne. His compositions were struggling to grasp the public's admiration and after an argument with David Garrick, Susannah left Drury Lane in 1750 for Covent Garden Theatre. Thomas followed along with several other company members and a battle ensued between the two theatres; beginning with competing productions of Romeo and Juliet put on on the same day, 28 September, with rival settings by Arne and Boyce of processional dirges at the end of the play. Arne's works continued to be out of public favor at Covent Garden and he was ultimately forced to stage his all-sung opera Eliza (1754) at the Little Theatre instead. The opera's subject matter, however, was objected to and was suppressed after one performance "by an Order from a superior Power". To compound these problem's Arne's marriage was having major difficulties. He attributed the situation to Cecilia's frequent illnesses, while she complained of his repeated philandering.[1]
In 1755, he separated from Cecilia, who, he alleged, was mentally ill. He agreed to support her with £40 a year, though in 1758 her friend Mrs Delany wrote that she was "much humbled", teaching singing in Downpatrick: "She has been severely used by a bad husband, and suffered to starve, if she had not met with charitable people". However, other records indicate that she received a reasonable amount of money from the sales of published collections of his music.[2]
After his separation, Arne began a relationship with one of his pupils, Charlotte Brent, a soprano and former child prodigy. Brent was a marvelous singer and actress and helped revive the popularity of Arne and his works. She performed in several of Arne's productions including the role of Sally in his 1760 opera Thomas and Sally and Mandane in his 1762 opera Artaxerxes. Thomas and Sally was the first English comic opera to be sung throughout (it contained no dialogue).[6] Artaxerxes was one of the most successful and influential English operas of the eighteenth century and is the only known attempt to write an Italianate, Metastasian opera seria, in the English language.[7] Brent also sang in Arne's revision of The Beggar's Opera (1759), his comic operas The Jovial Crew (1760) and Love in a Village (1762), and his oratorio Judith (1761) to name just a few. Eventually Brent and Arne went their separate ways and Brent married violinist Thomas Pinto in 1766, the same year that his sister died.[3]
Arne's popularity as a composer began to wain again in the mid 1760s. His last truly successful stage work was the masque The Arcadian Nuptials in January 1764. His comic opera The Guardian Out-Witted only lasted for six performances the following December, while the lost L'olimpiade, an opera seria in Italian, failed after only two nights in April 1765. Major theatres began to lose interest in him and he received fewer and fewer contracts. He found some compensation in his membership of the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club and the Madrigal Society, and in the profitable concerts of catches and glees he gave at Ranelagh House in 1767. However, by 1770 he was experiencing evident financial difficulties, demonstrated by legal threats from Cecilia's lawyers for failing to make payments. In spite of these difficulties, Arne managed to produce some of his finest work during this period, including An Ode upon Dedicating a Building to Shakespeare (7 September 1769), written for David Garrick's Shakespeare festival at Stratford-upon-Avon, the masque The Fairy Prince (1771), the music for William Mason's Elfrida (1772), the afterpiece May-day (1775), and Caractacus (1776).[1]
In October 1777, shortly before his death of a ‘spasmodic complaint’, Arne and his wife were reconciled. They had one son, Michael Arne. Thomas Arne is buried at St Paul's, London.[2]
[edit] Works
- See also: List of compositions by Thomas Arne
Arne was one of the most prolific composers of the eighteenth century, though most of his works are now lost, and his life situation prevented him from composing outside of only a few genres. Many of his dramatic scores were destroyed in the disastrous fire at Covent Garden in 1808. Unlike his most important English contemporaries, William Boyce and John Stanley, Arne did not write anything for the Anglican liturgy or any organ voluntaries, nor did he express interest in writing concert music. His Roman Catholic faith prevented him in the former pursuit and his output in the latter stems almost solely from his stage works. He did not contribute to the concerto grosso repertory and the symphonies, overtures, and keyboard concertos he did write are all related in one way or another to his theatrical works. With the exception of a relatively small amount of sacred music, a number of songs written for the pleasure gardens, a few odes, and some time spent writing glees towards the end of his career, most of his life was spent as a theatre composer.[2] However, his success and output in this area was so prodigous that music historian William Stafford wrote in 1830,
"Arne was neither so vigorous as Purcell, nor had he the magnificent simplicity, and lofty grandeur of Handel: but the ease and elegance of his melodies, and the variety of his harmony, render his compositions attractive in the highest degree: and we may justly be proud of his name, as an honour to English music."[1]
Following Purcell, the popularity of opera in England dwindled for several decades. A revived interest in opera occurred in the 1730s which is largely attributed to Arne, both for his own compositions and for alerting Handel to the commercial possibilities of large-scale works in English. Arne was the first English composer to experiment with Italian-style all-sung comic opera, with his greatest success being Thomas and Sally in 1760. His opera Artaxerxes (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. Although Arne immitated many elements of Italian opera, he was perhaps the only English composer at that time who was able to move beyond the Italian influences and create his own unique and distinctly English voice. His modernized ballad opera, Love in a Village (1762), began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Charles Burney wrote that Arne introduced "a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had either pillaged or imitated."[1]
Of his stage works, only a few of his manuscripts survive, and those works that were printed usually appear without the choruses, dances or recitatives, and often only in vocal score. Some of the best, such as The Judgment of Paris (1742), Artaxerxes (1762) and The Fairy Prince (1771), only survive in the form of these incomplete manuscripts. Most of his works use spoken dialogue as opposed to recitative which was common practice in London theatres of his day.[2]
One of the most arresting features of Arne's music is its diversity of style, which utilized not only the essentials of Italian opera but also rudiments of English folk music and his own galant flair. Even in his earlier works, such as Comus (1738), there is a distinction between his own melodic folklike style and the numbers in a more elevated Handelian expression, such as the exquisite air "Nor on beds of fading flow'rs". His later works are often characterized by galant phrases and motifs which he would employ to aid characterization. For example, in Artaxerxes he set aside the most complex and richly scored airs for the principle characters, mostly using the older idioms for the minor characters. 20th-century criticism, influenced by 19th-century ideas of stylistic unity and progression, has tended to view this practice as a failing, although Arne doubtless thought it made large-scale works pleasantly diverse, and it was taken up by his younger colleagues, such as Thomas Linley and Samuel Wesley.[1]
Sadly, Arne's non-theatrical vocal works have been generally neglected after his death, though the best of them warrant much better attention. The oratorio Judith (1761) is possibly the finest by an Englishman before Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, which was composed almost 150 years later. The work's lyrical airs and surprisingly un-Handelian forward-looking choruses are masterfully constructed. Another masterpiece,An Ode upon Dedicating a Building to Shakespeare (1769), only survives in an incomplete vocal score, without the music that accompanied Garrick's melodramatic declamation of the text, although it does contain "Thou soft flowing Avon", one of Arne's most beautiful songs. Whittington's Feast (1776), his last major work apart from the lost Caractacus, survives complete in orchestral score and contains some exceptional and ornate music. However, as in many of Arne's works, Whittington's Feast suffers from a poor text, largely because it is merely a line-by-line imitation of Alexander's Feast. Arne was undoubtedly an inconsistent composer, decidedly lacking in a proclivity to perfectionism. He was often too hasty in his writing and was too easily satisfied by poor texts. Nevertheless, at his best he was capable of far outshining his more consistent contemporaries.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Peter Holman, Todd Gilman: "Thomas Augustine Arne", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed November 19, 2008), (subscription access)
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Davey, Henry (2007). History Of English Music. Kessinger Publishing Company. ISBN 978-14-2860-670-8.
- ^ a b c d e Molly Donnelly: "Susanna Maria Cibber", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed November 19, 2008), (subscription access)
- ^ Website reference at the United Grand Lodge of England.
- ^ a b Arne, Handel, Walsh, and Music as Intellectual Property: Two Eighteenth-Century Lawsuits: Ronald J. Rabin and Steven Zohn:Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 120, No. 1 (1995), pp. 112-145
- ^ Thomas and Sally, or The Sailor's Return, opera ...: Thomas Arne from Answers.com
- ^ Artaxerxes
[edit] External links
- Family History Page by a descendant of Arne
- Free scores by Thomas Augustine Arne in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
- Thomas Augustine Arne on the Classical Composers Database
- Works by Thomas Arne in the University of North Texas Virtual Rare Book Room
- Profile page for Thomas Arne on the Find A Grave web site
- Free scores by Thomas Arne in the International Music Score Library Project
- The Mutopia project has compositions by Thomas Arne
