Theatre of Magic Programme Notes

Theatre of Magic

PROGRAMME NOTES

The English flocked to the theatres when they were reopened after the Restoration. Old plays by Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher were reworked and eventually supplemented by works by new playwrights. Music, dance, and spectacle were gradually added to complement the drama. The English had not yet embraced opera as it was understood on the Continent, but the amount of music added to the plays became too significant to ignore, and the English writer Roger North invented the term “semi-opera” to describe these entertainments of “half Musick and half Drama.” The leading parts continued to be spoken by actors, while vocal music was allotted to minor characters, whose contributions were essentially diversions, rarely essential to the action. To this was added instrumental music to accompany dance, set the mood, or accompany scene changes. Our concerts this week open with excerpts from two of these semi-operas, both adaptations of Shakespeare’s magical plays, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Matthew Locke was arguably England’s leading composer at the time of the Restoration in 1660. He became very active in London’s commercial theatres, contributing music for countless plays. He is best known today for the instrumental music he wrote for The Tempest, produced by Thomas Shadwell in 1674. The text of the semi-opera was adapted by Shadwell from an earlier adaptation (1667) of Shakespeare’s original by John Dryden and William Davenant. Shadwell’s version of the play remained popular for some 75 years. Locke’s opening Curtain Tune is particularly striking: it is a musical depiction of the storm that precedes the play, complete with detailed instructions to the performers (including the instruction to play “Violently” at the height of the storm). Locke was but one of a team of composers hired by Shadwell to provide music for The Tempest; indeed, Locke provided none of the vocal music. In our short suite of excerpts we have included one of the contributions of violinist John Banister (Dance of Fantastick Spirits), written originally for the Dryden/Davenant version of the play.

Locke’s influence on the younger Henry Purcell in the realm of theatre music is clear, but Purcell did not in fact turn to the theatre until some ten years after Locke’s death. The theatre occupied much of the last five years of Purcell’s life: with William and Mary on the throne and less musical activity at court, and he provided music for numerous plays and at least four semi-operas in the 1690s, among them The Fairy Queen, an anonymous adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Purcell provided a wealth of instrumental and vocal music for the opera, and amongst the most enchanting numbers are those associated with the magical sleep scenes with Titania and Oberon.

With the arrival of G.F. Handel in London in 1710 came also the arrival of Italian opera. Experiments in the first decade of the eighteenth century had included a few arrangements of Italian opera, and some experiments with all-sung operas in English, but audience response was lukewarm. Handel was fresh from a three-year-sojourn in Italy where he’d enjoyed great success in the theatres of Florence and Venice. A new opera house, the Queen’s Theatre, had opened in the Haymarket, and its manager, the young dramatist Aaron Hill, drew up the scenario of an opera based loosely on episodes from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and gave it to the theatre poet, Giacomo Rossi, to set in verse for Handel. Handel composed the music for Rinaldo in just two weeks, and hence the first Italian opera composed specifically for London was premiered on Feb. 24, 1711, Handel’s 26th birthday. It caused a sensation: remarkable music sung by celebrity Italian singers, spectacular stage effects (including the release of hundreds of live sparrows on stage during a garden scene!), and splendid costumes. The success of Rinaldo had a decisive influence on Handel’s career. Handel chose to settle permanently in London, and devoted the next 25 years to producing Italian opera in that city. Rinaldo was remounted several times during Handel’s lifetime in both London and abroad, the single most popular of all of his operas in the eighteenth century.

The story is set in the first century, with Christian forces led by Goffredo laying siege to the city of Jerusalem, defended by its king, Argante. Goffredo promises his daughter, Almirena, to his knight Rinaldo if they are victorious. Argante, fearful of defeat, calls upon his lover Armida, Queen of Damascus and a powerful sorceress. Armida captures Rinaldo, but finds herself unexpectedly drawn to him: her struggle between love and hatred is familiar to Opera Atelier audiences from Lully’s masterful setting of the story. Our excerpts feature Armida’s arias from the end of Act II. Armida disguises herself as Rinaldo’s beloved Almirena and beguiles him, but when he discovers the ruse he vehemently rejects her. She responds with the tormented “Dunque i lacci” and “Ah! Crudel!”. Armida resumes the disguise in the hopes that she can yet win him over, but it is her lover Argante who appears. It is thus she discovers that he has since fallen in love with Almirena. Furious, Armida closes the act with the vengeance aria “Vo’, far guerra.” The original score of this aria has numerous indications for improvised harpsichord solos. The London publisher later printed the aria with the harpsichord solos written out, advertising that they represented the improvisations as played by Handel himself. You will hear those notated improvisations this week.

Handel’s set of twelve Concerti grossi, Opus 6, was published in 1739, at a time when he was turning his attention from the production of opera to that of English oratorio. These oratorios were performed in the theatres, and no performance was considered complete without the addition of a few concertos between the acts. Among those performed were organ concertos, with Handel at the keyboard, and the concerti grossi from Opus 6. The publication of the latter was modelled on that of Corelli, whose Opus 6 concertos had remained extremely popular in England. Like the Corelli model, the Handel concertos are scored for strings only, but manuscript copies of wind parts for several have survived. Certainly the wind players were on stage for the oratorios, and are included in many of the organ concertos. No wind parts survive for Concerto no. 11, but Pavlo Beznosiuk has reconstructed parts based on the surviving models. Ten of the twelve concertos were newly composed for the publication, and all ten were performed at oratorio performances in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the 1739-40 season. Two of the concertos, including no. 11, were arrangements of popular organ concertos performed the previous season. The original organ model of the Eleventh Concerto survives only in a transcription for solo organ, without orchestra. The genre of the solo concerto, with virtuoso soloist, which dominated the concert stages of Italy, and to some extent of Germany and France, failed to take hold with the native British composers or performers. The leading instrumentalists in eighteenth-century London were almost all foreigners. The German expatriate Handel championed (even created) the organ concerto. Italian violinists wowed audiences with Italian concertos. Giuseppe Tartini did not travel beyond his native Italy, but his influence and reputation was widespread. Many of his concertos were published in Amsterdam (the Concerto in G Major D.71 was published there in 1730), and still others circulated in manuscript copies. It is quite likely that some of his concertos made it to the London stage. Tartini had an unusual upbringing — destined at first for the priesthood, then enrolling in law at Padua University, but devoting his time to becoming a master fencer. He came to music relatively late, taking up positions as an orchestral violinist ostensibly to pay the rent. In 1716 he heard Veracini play in Venice, and was so impressed he decided to take up the instrument more seriously. He went on to become one of Italy’s finest violinists and established a violin school that attracted students from all over Europe. A stroke at age 50 affected his playing, and he devoted much of his energy from that point to theoretical works, including the famous Trattato di musica. His compositions comprise almost exclusively solo sonatas and concertos for the violin.

We end the concert where we began, in the theatres of London. William Boyce is best known today as a composer of music for the church, in part because of the three-volume collection of Cathedral Music published 1760–63, a canon of some 200 years English church music. Increasing deafness had led Boyce to shift his attention to the collecting and editing of English music, but in his day Boyce was very active as a composer of countless oratorios and theatrical works: performances of his works were greeted with success at theatres throughout London. In 1760, just prior to the publication of Cathedral Music, he published a collection of Eight Symphonies. This was a retrospective collection of orchestral overtures written for theatre works from the previous two decades. The Seventh Symphony was originally composed in 1740 as the overture to the Pythian Ode “Gentle Lyre, begin the strain.”