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76 CHAPTER 4 : RESUMPTION OF WORK AT THE THEATRE 1. DRURY LANE: SEPTEMBER 1741 – MAY 1743 After his break from the theatre in 1740 Beard was desperate for work. But he didn’t sing in the Oratorio season which ran from January 10th until April 8th 1741 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre. It is a mystery why he didn’t go cap in hand to Handel. Perhaps he felt that he had ‘queered his pitch’ with him; or learned that Handel had made definite arrangements to manage without him. Perhaps he approached him too late. Some works (such as Deidamia) no longer required a tenor; and for others (such as L’Allegro and Acis) a certain ‘Mr Corfe’1 had been engaged. This season was a significant one for Handel as it finally marked his move away from opera to oratorio. Imeneo and Deidamia were given their final performances. Handel would perform no more operas after this. He was not even certain of his next career move. London was not a place where his music was appreciated anymore. It was with delight that he took up the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland’s invitation to visit Dublin. For Beard there was nothing for it but to eat humble pie and beg for a job at one of the main theatres. He must have been desperate to regain his position at Drury Lane. In effect he had lost it utterly, since Fleetwood had replaced him with Thomas Lowe. Lowe had inherited all his roles, from ‘Macheath’ in the main-piece Beggar’s Opera down to ‘Sir John Loverule’ in The Devil to Pay, and including the important operatic parts in Arne’s Comus and Rosamond. Charles Jennens, writing to James Harris on December 5th is the best authority for what was happening at this moment in time: “Beard is come home again, and should have gone with Handel into Ireland, but Fleetwood said he should want him to sing in an English opera. Handel took only Miss Edwards and one Mrs Maclean with him…”2 Henrietta would no doubt have preferred to stay in London, and sort out her financial problems. She cannot, at this time, have realised how long and impossible a task it would be. Beard, one suspects, stayed in London and turned down Handel’s offer of joining him in Dublin in order to be at her side and support her. Had he gone with Handel he would have sung in the world-premiere of Messiah, and would have had the title role in Imeneo, besides repeating his roles in Acis, L’Allegro, Esther and Alexander’s Feast. Handel must have sorely missed him. Donald Burrows explains in the Preface to his edition of the opera how the loss of Beard forced Handel to completely rethink the composition of Imeneo: “There is no other opera in which revisions were made on such a comprehensive scale. Handel had to take into account some important differences between the cast of voices that he now had available and the voice-types for which he had prepared the score in 1738 & 1739… In the previous drafts of the score (and possibly at the time of his original plans in 1740) Imeneo had been written for the tenor voice, probably with the expectation that John Beard would take the part…”3 When Beard’s luck turned in September 1741, and he was invited by Fleetwood to come back to Drury Lane for two years, it must have been a very different contract that he signed. Fleetwood had taken him back despite having Thomas Lowe on his roster. Thus he was over- 1 The BDA and Winton Dean give no first name for this singer, but he was probably James, who was born c.1718. From about 1735 he had sung small parts in Handel’s oratorios, (Israelite in Esther and Abner in Saul, both in 1740) but was given bigger roles in 1741 during Beard’s absence. 2 Burrows & Dunhill Music and Theatre in Handel’s World, p. 129 3 ‘Preface’ Imeneo ed. D. Burrows, Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, Bärenreiter 2002 77 provided with tenors. As a result the work-load was divided between them. Beard found himself with less stage performances than normal4, but with more singing to do between the Acts. What the ‘English Opera’ might have been, for which Fleetwood was said to have wanted him, is not at all clear. Beard and Lowe alternated in the role of Macheath, which was played about four times a month. But otherwise there was no remarkable new role for him. It appears that Fleetwood simply took pity on the unfortunate singer (and his sadly disinherited wife) and gave him his old job back, without any real thought for how he could sensibly employ him. With Handel in Dublin there was not even a London oratorio season in which Beard could show off his vocal prowess. He persuaded Fleetwood to let him resume his roles in Comus, The Provok’d Wife and The Lottery; and also returned to the singing witches in Macbeth. When Shakespeare’s As You Like It was revived in May 1742 with music by Arne, he took the role of ‘Amiens’ and sang ‘Under the greenwood tree’, ‘When Daisies pied’ and ‘Blow, blow thou winter wind’ in settings which quickly became firm national favourites. As they were both on Fleetwood’s books for this short period of their careers it is not surprising to learn of Beard and Thomas Lowe teaming up as a double act. The ‘Biographical Dictionary of Actors’ refers to Beard’s “...’speciality acts’, whether solus or with Vernon or Lowe or others in comic or pathetic dialogue” which “were the delight of the audiences” – and describes one of these as a “knock-down duo rendition of “Bumper Squire Jones”.5 As the playbills reveal, Beard and Lowe alternated each night in their favourite songs, but finally came together for their duo rendition of “Bumper Squire Jones”, and a ‘Battle Song’ by Arne which was advertised as: ‘the Representation of a Battle of the two Operatical Generals Per gli Signori Giovanni and Tomasino detti Beard and Lowe’. Towards the end of the season Beard must have been delighted to be given a couple of choice roles. In the farce Miss Lucy in Town he was given the opportunity to make fun of the current stock of Italian singers employed at the King’s Theatre. Kitty Clive acted opposite him as the female lead in this sequel to The Virgin Unmask’d by Henry Fielding. From Horace Walpole we learn that: “…there is a simple farce at Drury Lane, called Miss Lucy in Town in which Mrs Clive mimics the Muscovita [Signora Panichi] admirably, and Beard, Amorevoli6 tolerably. But the run [i.e. ‘vogue’] is now after Garrick, a wine-merchant, who is turned player, at Goodman Fields”.7 The other offering was a role in Buckingham’s The Rehearsal. This was a popular burletta dating from 1671 which still received an average of eight performances a season. Kitty Clive decided to try out some cross-dressing and play the male lead ‘Bayes’. The public was not convinced, and James Winston reported that “she did it most wretchedly”. However, it set her thinking; and in time she came up with a farce of her own, The Rehearsal or Bayes in Petticoats, in which she would appear on stage in a double role, as the Authoress ‘Mrs Hazard’ and as herself. (See Chapter 7 ‘The Garrick Years’.) In this Beard would appear as himself and as ‘Corydon’, the hero of William Boyce’s inserted Masque. 4 At this time – apart from The Beggar’s Opera - he averaged 2 performances a month. All his other performances were of interval songs. In 1742-3 he added The Conscious Lovers to his repertoire. 5 BDA, ‘John Beard’, p. 402-3 6 Angelo Amorevoli (tenor) was in the opera company at the King’s Theatre from the autumn of 1741: see Deutsch Handel a Documentary Biography pp. 520-528 7 Horace Walpole to H. Mann, May 26th 1742, quoted in Deutsch Handel a Documentary Biography p. 549 78 2. HANDEL: 1742-1747 Handel was back in London by September 1742, having left Dublin on August 13th. He kept his cards close to his chest regarding his next plans for an oratorio season, only telling Charles Jennens “...Whether I shall do something in the Oratorio way (as several of my friends desire) I can not determine as yet”.8 But he spent October finishing the oratorio Samson, which he had left incomplete before setting off for his visit to Ireland. The title role was written for a tenor. John Beard’s was the voice that he had in mind for the hero. The twenty-seven-year-old singer was soon going to be back in Handel’s company. His long absence in 1740-2, which had forced Handel to make some unsatisfactory alternative arrangements, was to be forgotten. Beard was about to get some of the best musical roles of his career. His theatrical career had now resumed as though there had been no interruption, and he never missed a further season until his retirement in 1767. He remained as busy as ever. After two years back at Drury Lane, sharing roles with Thomas Lowe, the two singers decided to split up and divide the work between them. When a position for a lead singer became available at Covent Garden it was Beard who opted to move, leaving each one free to have the first choice of identical roles at the rival houses.
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