MUSIC AND MUSICIANS IN THE EQUITY AND COMMON-LAW COURTS OF ENGLAND, 1690–1760 CHERYLL DUNCAN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Awarded for a Collaborative Programme of Research at the Royal Northern College of Music by the Manchester Metropolitan University April 2015 Abstract The six journal articles and one book chapter that make up this submission demonstrate the rich potential of legal documents preserved in The National Archives of the UK as sources of new information about music and musicians. Key literature in relation to eighteenth-century legal studies, theatre research, historical musicology and the broader social context is first reviewed in order to appraise the current state of knowledge. Each of the publications takes as its starting point the author’s discovery of one or more lawsuits as a means of exploring professional music culture in England between 1690 and 1760. These encompass a wide diversity of human interactions, including financial agreements, patronage, benefit arrangements, consumption and debt. The litigation also yields details about the professional and personal lives of individuals ranging from iconic figures such as Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel to minor players like Giuseppe Manfredini and Elizabeth Frederica, whose names have been omitted from previous historical accounts. The publications make an original contribution to existing knowledge and scholarship, thereby demonstrating the value of legal documents as a field of musicological endeavour; while building on previous work on eighteenth-century equity lawsuits, they also include the first detailed studies of common- law documents undertaken by a musicologist. Legal records are notoriously challenging to use, and some of the issues involved in locating, reading and interpreting these abstruse documents are elucidated. The process of contextualization provides opportunities to deploy the material in ways that feed into a variety of historiographical perspectives, including cultural, social and women’s history. Legal documents open up a field of study that is ripe for further investigation; the outcomes will offer new perspectives on music and musicians viewed through the lens of the law, and make a compelling case for the continuing relevance of archival research. CONTENTS 1. Introduction and overview of the literature 1 2. The publications (individually paginated): 2.1 ‘An Innocent Abroad? Caterina Galli’s Finances in New Handel Documents’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64/3 (2011), 495-526. 2.2 ‘Geminiani v. Mrs Frederica: Legal Battles with an Opera Singer’, in Christopher Hogwood (ed.), Geminiani Studies (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2013), 399-411. 2.3 ‘Castrati and impresarios in London: two mid-eighteenth-century lawsuits’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 24/1 (2012), 43-65. 2.4 ‘‘A Debt contracted in Italy’: Ferdinando Tenducci in a London court and prison’, Early Music, 42/2 (2014), 219–229. 2.5 ‘‘Young, Wild, and Idle’: New Light on Gaetano Guadagni’s Early London Career’, The Opera Journal, 46/1 (2013), 3-28. 2.6 ‘New Purcell documents from the Court of King’s Bench’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 49 (2016), 1–38 (in the press). 2.7 ‘New light on ‘Father’ Smith and the Organ of Christ Church, Dublin’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 10 (2014–15), 23–45. 3. Contribution to knowledge and scholarship 23 4. Methodological issues and future directions 38 1. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ‘Civil litigation (legal disputes between two parties) makes up a very large - and under-used - part of the National Archives’ holdings. The records cover disputes about land, property rights, debts, inheritance, trusts, frauds, etc., and they can provide unparalleled levels of information about people in the past.’1 For the musicologist investigating professional music culture in England during the long eighteenth century, legal documents constitute a rich and yet largely untapped repository of primary source material. The names of many individuals associated with the burgeoning entertainment industry are to be found amongst the records of the various courts that comprise the English legal system. An unprecedented expansion in trade, commerce and consumerism during this period, particularly in London, resulted in a sharp escalation in disputes pertaining to business transactions and personal debt; at the same time, commercial music-making was developing in ways that left its practitioners highly susceptible to litigation. With the rise of public entertainments such as opera and concerts, numerous musicians - including many from abroad - were attracted to London by the performance opportunities and lucrative salaries on offer. However, the leisure industry operated within a viciously competitive commercial market; opera, in particular, was enormously expensive to produce, and the notorious fickleness of the tiny minority who could afford tickets made investing in it a very risky financial proposition. At this elite end of the music profession, aristocratic patronage continued to play a pivotal role in the fortunes of performers, who were often obliged to ingratiate themselves with the upper classes in order to further their careers. The lifestyle that many musicians adopted as a consequence usually proved to be beyond their means, and several were brought to the brink of ruin. Both men and women succumbed, though in the case of female singers their misfortune was often attributed to sheer 1 Amanda Bevan, Tracing your Ancestors in the National Archives: the website and beyond (Kew, Surrey: The National Archives, 7/2006), 495. 1 extravagance and/or improvidence.2 Making a living from music in eighteenth-century England, even at the higher levels of the profession, was a demanding and precarious business. Legal documents can supplement our knowledge of a wide range of social and economic issues pertinent to professional music culture; even more importantly, they can play into a variety of historiographical perspectives that are widely represented in the general historical literature of the long eighteenth century, but have yet to be thoroughly assimilated into the standard musicological discourse about this period. The historical background The eighteenth century was a time of exceptionally rapid and far-reaching change, and the historiography of the period has been subject to numerous shifts of emphasis.3 Before the second half of the twentieth century, Georgian Britain was typically portrayed as ‘an age of stability in politics, in religion, in literature, and in social observances ... the period has a rare unity of its own and seems to concentrate in itself all the faults and merits that we are apt to think of as specially characteristic of the whole eighteenth century’.4 As interest in kingship and politics declined after the 1960s, the focus of research realigned to embrace a bewildering array of historiographical approaches - economic history, social history, urban history, gender history, fashion history and, from the 1990s, cultural history - each with its own substantive literature and key resources. Scholars of this period are in the vanguard of digitizing primary sources and making them available online; to give just one example, the London Lives database includes a huge number of digital and searchable primary sources 2 See, for example, Burney’s disparaging comments on Cuzzoni and Frasi in Abraham Rees, The Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, 39 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819) 15: [no pagination], s.v. ‘Frasi, Giulia’. 3 For a succinct overview of this subject, see Penelope Corfield, ‘The Lure of the Georgian Age’, History Today, 64/1 (January 2014), 57–8. 4 Basil Williams, rev. C. H. Stuart, The Oxford History of England: The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760, vol. 11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, rev. 1960), 1. 2 related to the lives of plebeian Londoners.5 The continuing output of significant new studies on eighteenth-century British history is so great that even a brief overview lies well beyond the scope of the present study; the following is merely a small selection of literature that contributes to a broad understanding of the social and cultural context of the period. Pleasures of the Imagination is an important study that charts the broader historical processes through which the arts were commercialized in Georgian England.6 Situating the performing arts, visual arts and print culture at the very heart of eighteenth-century experience, John Brewer argues that the consumption of high culture by the urban middle classes brought about profound transformations in ideas, attitudes, markets and institutions. Studies of the middling classes - their economic activities and their cultural lives - have constituted a major research area since the late 1980s, and the economic history of the era has been reconfigured to reflect social and cultural historical approaches. Among the earliest of these was Peter Earle’s The Making of the English Middle Class, which concentrated on the wealthier end of the social stratum. Earle’s focus on London was unfashionable at a time when many contemporary historians were playing down its significance and decentering attention to the provinces, but he defends its legitimacy on the grounds that the capital ‘totally dominated English urban culture and indeed invented it’.7 The author draws