The theatre career of Thomas Arne / Todd Gilman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gilman, Todd.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Arne, Thomas Augustine, 1710-1778.

Arne, Thomas Augustine.

Composers--England--Biography.

Composers.

Dramatic music.

England.

Arne, Thomas Augustine, 1710-1778. Dramatic music.

Dramatic music--England--18th century--History and criticism.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xix, 623 pages : music ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press ; Lanham, Maryland : Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Pub. Group, [2013]

Summary:

This book concerns the life and theatrical career of the great native-born English composer and musician of the eighteenth century, Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778). Its purpose is three-fold. First, it provides a comprehensive biography and account of the performance and publication of Arne's works during his lifetime. Although Arne's childhood years get some attention, the book focuses on the period from 1732 to 1778, a time of great innovation for English opera and related genres. Second, it considers Arne's social context: his relationships with the many dramatists, actors, singers, and fellow composers and instrumentalists-including many members of his own family-with whom he collaborated on the London and Dublin stages as well as at the London pleasure gardens. Third, it offers analysis of eighty musical illustrations drawn from vocal works for the theatre spanning Arne's entire career, and readers can simultaneously study and listen to the musical examples on a companion Web page that hosts media files produced using music notation software. The audio component constitutes a crucial supplement to a study of Arne because so much of his extant theatre music cannot otherwise be readily heard.

Arne was the leading figure in English theatrical music of his day. Dr. Charles Burney, the great eighteenth-century historian of music, had a high opinion of the composer, especially regarding Arne's setting of Milton's Comus (1738): "In this masque he introduced a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had hitherto either pillaged or imitated. Indeed, the melody of Arne at this time...forms an era in English Music; it was so easy, natural and agreeable to the whole kingdom, that it [became] the standard of all perfection at our theatres and public gardens." The greatest compliment that Burney could give, however, concerns Arne as a composer of secular vocal music: "He must be allowed to have surpassed [Purcell] in ease, grace, and variety." During the course of his forty-six-year career, Arne composed music for more than one hundred stage works, to say nothing of his myriad single songs, cantatas, and instrumental compositions (including the famous "Rule, Britannia"). Yet despite a relative wealth of source material, modern scholars of theatre, drama, and music have almost completely ignored him. As a result, musicologists, theatre historians, and laypeople alike possess a detrimentally limited sense of the magnitude of Arne's contributions to English music and especially to the history of English opera. Book jacket.

Contents:

I Young Thomas Augustine Arne 31

II Drury Lane, 1735-1740 69

III From Cliveden to Dublin 119

IV Young Charles Burney 209

V Drury Lane and Vauxhall Gardens, 1744-1750 223

VI Divisions and Difficulties 253

VII Dublin Encore 289

VIII The Brent, or English Syren 301

IX Harmony in an Uproar 411

X Arne's Orbit 445

XI Shakespeare's Jubilee 471

XII Arne's Last Operas 493

XIII Poor Devil of a Crotchet Monger 541

XIV Decline and Death 555.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611494365

1611494362

9781611494372

1611494370

OCLC:

809456963