Home | Archive | Summer 2001 | Book review

Restored to life

Ann Bond on Music in eighteenth-century Britain, Edited by David Wyn-Jones
Ashgate (Aldershot, 2000 [recte 2001]); xiv, 318pp; £49.50. ISBN 1 84014 688 5.

‘The land without music’: this accusation has stuck in our gullet for generations. Peter Holman, who writes the introductory essay to this symposium, is at pains to remove the obstruction. He points out that eighteenth-century Britain was alive with music, even if we tended to fetch our musicians from abroad (or, more accurately, foreign musicians were attracted to the seething cauldron of London’s musical life); and his thesis is, that the immigrants by no means obliterated native musical trends, and often actually assimilated to our ways. How far this tallies with the overall impression left by the eleven other essays, which originated in specialist papers presented to a conference at Cardiff University in 1996, is something that readers must judge for themselves.

Let us consider the immigrants first, as they certainly predominate. At least three essays deal directly with the Italian influx. Robin Stowell writes interestingly about Viotti’s violin concertos, the last ten of which were written for London. The numerous Italian cellists who came to London in the eighteenth century – and against whom Robert Lindley uniquely held his own – are discussed by Lowell Lindgren. This essay has of course to disentangle the transition from viol to violoncello which was catalysed by the Italians, and Lindgren manages to throw light on the grey areas surrounding bass violins, gambas and cellos. Finally, Saskia Willaert writes in some details about the buffo opera singer and the repertory of Italian opera in London. Her detailed tables of singers’ engagements may not make for rivetting reading but – like much other information in this book – they furnish valuable research tools for other enquirers.

Donald Burrows’s essay deals with the sources of the 1735 version of Handel’s Athaliah. Handel was of course our most celebrated musical immigrant, but his status in Georgian times was complex. Many of the essays in this book throw indirect light on the fascinating process by which a German composer of Italian opera came to be regarded as an icon of Englishness, identified with the monarchy, the established church, and even morality itself. How far did Handel’s music exert a stranglehold, and was it ever seen as supporting the conservative Antient Music phalanx, which was uniquely strong in Britain? Of course, like Beethoven at a later date, his monolithic stature could not be ignored. Rachel Cowgill’s highly interesting study of Latrobe, the Moravian minister who was a friend and helper of Burney and a vigorous champion of Haydn, shows Latrobe campaigning against a perceived monopoly. ‘I published these specimens of foreign Music [the Selection of sacred music],’ he wrote, ‘to drag my Countrymen out of the ruts of Handel. Not that I despise Handel; I love him dearly & consider him a most gigantic Genius, but others deserve also some attention.’

It was not only Latrobe who was instrumental in introducing the sacred music of Mozart and Haydn; other continental church music was to be heard at the fashionable embassy chapels – the Portuguese, Sardinian and Bavarian – in London, which were the only legal places of Roman Catholic worship in Britain. The Portuguese chapel finally closed in 1829 (the last work heard there was Mozart’s Requiem, sung in memory of his sister Nannerl) but it had ushered into existence the enterprising publishing work of Vincent Novello, who was to exert such an influence on the English choral scene. One might object that this hardly falls within the framework of eighteenth-century musical activity. The same could be said for the Viotti violin concertos mentioned above, which show pre-Romantic stylistic traits and which Stowell places somewhere between the Mozart and Beethoven examples of the genre; and the six volumes of Latrobe’s Selection, which only began to appear in 1805. However, England’s cultural chronology is rarely tidy.

To return to the core of the period, a really valuable overview of the currency of British and foreign composers can be found in Sarah McCleave’s study of the Mackworth Collection – a vast collection of music, both printed and manuscript, acquired by the Mackworth family over four generations between 1680 and 1790. The family seat was in Glamorganshire, but Mackworths were Members of Parliament, and thus kept in touch with the music of the capital. The range of composers represented is very wide, including French and English as well as Italian, and by no means displaying a Handelian bias. McCleave also explores the sociological aspect of the collection, which was clearly used for performance. Italian operas (in short score, and minus the recitatives) were probably acquired so that the arias might be played on that gentlemanly instrument, the flute; and sets of parts of concerti grossi point to the existence of local ensembles, where amateur string players could form the concertino and hired professionals took the solo parts. This essay conveyed to me a very clear flavour of the period. Also interesting from the sociological angle is Simon McVeigh’s well-written account of ‘Freemasonry and musical life in London in the late eighteenth century’.

English composers are featured in Eva Zöllner’s study of the Judith oratorios, where Arne and Christopher Smith rivalled Handel’s setting; and in Diack Johnstone’s well-researched study of Greene’s attractive harpsichord work. For real penetration to the grass-roots of English musical life, however, Sally Drage’s account of provincial church music is the winner. She is noted for her involvement with Peter Holman’s Psalmody project, which is opening up many sources of home-grown church music. The well-known polarity of choir versus congregation (and sometimes clergy) is seen to be nothing new; however, it could well be that in the period under discussion there was a healthier balance between the factions than at any time before or since. So as far as the church was concerned, England was certainly not without its own music. In the wider context, something about the symphonies of John Marsh would have been a welcome complement to this symposium.

Ann Bond’s A guide to the harpsichord was published in 1997 by Amadeus Press.