9 - The Whig Campaign for English Opera; Handel Celebrates the Peace

Summary

Opera all-sung in Italian became the norm for serious opera on the London stage with the production of Almahide (10 January 1710). Many of the Whig-aligned poets and musicians involved in introducing opera in the Italian manner found themselves no longer employed at the Haymarket. They took up Addison’s challenge to plant something in the place of Italian opera and turned their energies to promoting their own operatic works in English. Their campaign for an English dramatic music was actively promoted by Richard Steele, the early opponent of Italian-style opera. The resulting campaign for musical works sung in English can be seen as part of a Whig cultural politics: a way of shaping English national culture through vernacular dramatic works with music.

After Thomas Clayton returned from Ireland (accompanying Wharton’s mission as Lieutenant Governor) in September 1709, he produced a pastoral masque, announced for the Great Room in York Buildings on 3 May 1710, for which Steele’s Tatler carried announcements. The libretto was likely written by John Hughes. Also at liberty were Clayton’s colleagues the composer and cellist Charles Dieupart, who lost his position at the Haymarket at the end of the 1709–10 season, and the cellist, composer, and compiler of pasticcios Nicola Haym, who lost his place at the end of the 1710–11 season. Both had assisted Clayton in producing Arsinoe. In spring 1711 the three now undertook to produce concerts of English vocal music at Clayton’s house in York Buildings on 24 and 29 May and 16 July 1711. With operas now being based on pre-existing librettos in Italian, Peter Motteux’s skills as translator and adaptor were no longer needed; but in any case, by about 1708 his interests had turned to dealing in paintings and importing luxury good and fineries from India, China, and Japan.

Steele actively promoted these concerts and used his literary contacts to obtain librettos for Clayton to set to music. In February or March of 1711, he asked Hughes, a violinist himself and the poet most active in providing texts for vocal music in English, ‘to alter this poem for musick preserving as many of Dryden’s works and verses as you can.