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| Why Calliope?
I was researching the celebrated alto castrato Senesino when I found Calliope. As I slowly thumbed it’s decorated eighteenth century pages I realised that I had in my hands a real treasure, something I was meant to find. I was born in the City of London in |
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| Why Calliope?
I was researching the celebrated alto castrato Senesino when I found Calliope. As I slowly thumbed it’s decorated eighteenth century pages I realised that I had in my hands a real treasure, something I was meant to find. I was born in the City of London into a family of mixed Scots, Welsh and English heritage. I grew up knowing the Messiah by heart, singing English and Scots folksongs in school and, like every child of my age, playing the recorder. I studied the recorder to diploma level by age of twelve and at 18 entered the Guildhall School of Music with viola and recorder as a joint principal study. Though I later became a singer my love of baroque music stayed with me as a core part of my professional life. Calliope is full of songs that touch every part who I am, a British singer and musician.
Calliope shows a broad and entertaining picture of London of the 18th century. It is a historical document reflecting the society for which it was collected, allowing us to vividly see and feel the world and the humour in which these songs are born.
The art of artifice
Londoners at the beginning of the 1700s loved fantasy, illusion and artifice. To some this love bordered on desperation and obsession, leading to pain, to drink, to debt and too often to death in a debtors’ prison. Wealth brought great comfort and poverty brought despair. The crash from comfort to the hell of debtors prison took only the blink of an eye.
Well-born ladies and gentlemen needed to be practiced in the arts of good posture and decorous movement, in dancing, music and singing, and in polite and appropriate conversation. Yet, with credit, hansome youthful looks and the skilful use of illusion, one could cross the boundaries of rank, even without patronage. Actors and actresses particularly were difficult to place – they kept up the appearance of success and popularity, even when constantly fleeing creditors. Gentle debtors would pawn their clothes, anything, to stave off creditors. Those aspiring to gentility could buy their clothes second, third or fourth hand, appearing fashionable beyond their means.
It was artifice and illusion that made the Italian opera popular in London, far surpassing the playhouses.The opera had lavish stage effects - singers flying on clouds or in chariots, acrobats, live birds flying freely, fireworks, even a lion that fought the castrato Nicolini onstage, but it was the castrati who were the main draw of the Italian opera, eunuchs “with the voices of angels”. London’s theatres competed hard to attract audiences for English shows with English players. As at the opera, plays were performed with instrumental music before hand and songs during and after the play, but playhouses, lacking royal patronage and the nobility’s subscriptions that funded opera, could not afford extravagant spectacles. So they used social commentary to pull their audiences. Henry Fielding’s work cut particularly close to the bone. His acerbic wit was directed at Sir Robert Walpole in The Historical Register heavily critisising and poking fun at the Prime Minister and his supporters.
Sir Robert Walpole finally lost his temper and passed the 1737 Licensing Act banning all but the two Royal patent theatres from performing in spoken English. Over night London turned from a flourishing theatre scene of at least six playhouses with two Italian opera companies to Italian opera only plus the two embattled Royal theatre companies, with all new productions subject to censorship. Composers of English operas and theatre music and dozens of actors and musicians lost their livelihoods.
“I am sorry it is so much the Vanity of some of our English Gentry to admire that in a Foreigner, which they either slight, or take little notice of, in one of their own Nation” – John Playford 1681 – Preface to 3rd Book of Choice Ayrs and Songs
Many were frustrated by the public love of the foreign, of the Italian or French, and the disregard of anything English. London was then, as now, the world’s melting pot. Musicians came to London from Italy and Germany for many reasons – to escape debts, to follow patrons, to seek their fortunes. They wrote for the opera and playhouses, they were fine musicians and fashionable teachers. The castrati sung only in italian, expressing themselves in a artificial language of shakes, impossibly long, sustained notes and cascades of rapid divisions. Many English rebelled, feeling that entertainment had no meaning unless the text could be understood, whether spoken or in song.
“What is certainly of consequence in Dramatical entertainments, is, that they should be perform’d in a Language understood by the Audience. One wou’d think there should be no need to prove this.” – John Hughes, poet - 1717.
Pamphlets record that people were nervous that the Italians in London were serving the Jacobites and the Pope:
I HATE the Singing in an unknown Tongue,
It does our Reason and our Senses wrong;
Where Words instruct, and Music chears the Mind,
Then is the Art of service to Mankind:
But when a Castrate Wretch, of monstrous size!
Squeaks out a Treble, shrill as Infant cries,
I curse the unintelligible Ass,
Who my, for ought I know, be singing Mass. – Henry Carey 1729
If Gentlemen were suspicious of the castrati, London’s ladies were fascinated and obsessed with their rumoured amourous powers. Anecdotes abounded as to their conquests and many hoped to become one!
How much do those display their Innocence,
Who scoff at Eunuchs and dislike a Thing,
For being but disburthen’d of its Sting.
Safely they give uninterrupted Joys,
Without the genial Curse of Girls and Boys:
The violated Prude her Shape retains,
A Vestal in the Publick Eye remains; - Anonymous Pamphlet - F-----na’s Answer to S------no. 1727
There were also those who would not believe that they were indeed men, satired here by Fielding:
Then we shall see Faribelly, the strange man-woman that they say is with child; and the fine pictures of Merlin's cave at the playhouses; and the rope-dancing and the tumbling. – Miss Mayoress in Pasquin
In a time when society prized illusion and intrigue above all, subverting the accepted sexual system was fair game. Men with high voices ruled the stage, and cross-dressing abounded, overt and covert, detected or undetected, for comic affect or for survival.
Men lived lives as woman (Mollies) and women lived lives as men. It was hard for a woman alone to function in society without a great deal of money. Both the actress Charlotte Charke, and Defoe’s fictional Moll Flanders, donned men’s clothing to do business, travel safely and eventually avoid creditors, though Charlotte simply found it more comfortable to go about town as a man, and made a good reputation in the theatre playing men’s roles. She was one of several woman to play Captain Macheath in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.
By 1737 the British public had heard several fine italian castrati. Some of Handel’s finest singers, including Senesino, had left his company to sing with a rival company, under Porpora, the italian composer and teacher of castrati. Carestini had arrived in London in 173? and quit in 1735, Caffarelli was singing for Handel, Farinelli arrived in 1734 to join Porpora, and Conti in 1735/6 to join Handel. Despite success with his opera Alcina, Handel was ruined by the struggle and had to close the end of the 1737 season with debts of at least £12,000, and suffering from “the double misfortune of insanity and a stroke of the palsy” (Mainwaring quoted by Charles Burney, A General History of Music). Though he returned, restored to health, to London late in 1737 italian opera had already begun to loose popularity.
The rage for operas seems to have been very much diminished in our country, in spite of good composition and exquisite performance. But man tires of dainties sooner than of common food, to which he returns with pleasure after surfeits. It is in vain to ascribe the ruin of operas to factions, opposition, and enmity to Handel; the fact was, that public curiosity being satisfied, the English returned to their homely food, the Beggar’s Opera, and ballad farces on the same plan, with eagerness and comfort. – Charles Burney, A General History of Music.
One of these ballad farces was Lampe and Carey’s spoof The Dragon of Wantley, the hero dressed as Farinelli and the Dragon singing fluently “in the italian manner”. The Dragon of Wantley opened at Covent Garden on 29 October 1737, whilst Handel was still away recovering in France, and ran for 69 performances in it’s first season. Pescetti tried to continue performances at Covent Garden but frim the summer of 1738 there was no Italian opera in London for the next three years.
Songbooks for entertaining at home
From the ashes of the London theatre scene sprung something new – the illustrated engraved Songbook. As the public began to tire of the virtuosic italian opera and deprived of new pieces in the theatre, they looked to entertaining at home. In 1737 George Bickham published a very elaborate and expensive 200 plate folio Songbook, The Musical Entertainer, in 50 fortnightly parts, later issued bound into 2 volumes. Calliope was published in 1739, I believe in response to demand for a more modestly priced popular song edition fuelled by the double loss of theatres and the italian opera from London. With only two theatres remaining open, strolling players banned, and the loss of the italian opera there was a demand for printed music so that a devoted and musical public could continue to hear and perform their favourite music in their own homes. John Simpson’s 2 volume Calliope was printed in the smaller octavo format, 400 plates with small engravings by Henry Roberts on each plate. Calliope has many of the most popular songs from Bickham and lots more besides.
Well bred young women were expected to be able to play or sing any of the most popular tunes of the day, after tea or during long evenings after dinner, though they did not always wish to perform.
The Tea was drank and ta’en away,
No soul had any thing to say;...
But for Blunderella, common Pest
Of the polite, the standing Jest.
...This Creatur thus, with saucy air,
Address’d Belinda, blooming Fair.
Madam, I’m told you sing, I long
To have the honour of a Song:
Much better bred than to refuse,
Belinda pleads the old Excuse;
She’s caught a cold, and feigns a Cough,
But that alsas! won’t bring her off: - Blunderella, Poems of Several Occasions – Henry Carey
The Voice of Calliope
The gender bending actresses of the London theatre strike me as fair contemporary precedent for a woman to sing men’s songs. Handel’s casting of female contraltos in his operas, in both male and female roles, and his imports of Italian singers built a new appreciation of the female contralto voice and encouraged a succession of well-loved singers in opera and theatre: Diana Vico, Anastasia Robinson, the sisters Negri, Thomas Arne’s sister Susannah Cibber, Isabella Young, and Antonia Margareta Merighi, the singer that Handel brought to London as a female tenor (counter-tenor) voice, Burney described her as a low contralto. Never has the female contralto been so in fashion.
Songs in eighteenth century songbooks tended to extremes of vocal range. Setting words to melodies originally intended only for instruments stretches the bounds of the voice, as do the rangy Scottish tunes. People really must have studied and worked to enjoy their singing.
Re-creating Calliope
Calliope contains 200 plates of songs by dozens of composers, many by “Signor Anonimo” (Anon.). Each song is its own microcosm of society and style. The engraver often omitted the composer’s name, perhaps already so famous or already forgotten. We have, as far as possible, identified composers and/or poets and sometimes the plays in which the songs appeared. Where the song is a word setting to a popular instrumental tune we have searched for it. Where a song is traditional we have sought the earliest source. As far as possible we play and sing as informed musicians of the time, observing the conventions and reconstructing missing moments cut to save printing costs.
We play instruments that would then have been used in London. The violin and flute were both popular, heard in the opera, theatres, pleasure gardens and private homes. In the theatre they doubled the voice part, some say because singers were often too busy or too drunk to remember the tune. The theorboe was heard in the continuo of the Italian opera. The baroque guitar was popular in coffee houses and at home. The d-minor baroque lute was played in London in the 1740s, brought over by German players who returned home with lute transcriptions of popular English songs. The triple harp was much played in London, as a gentleman’s instrument and a gentlewoman’s. Finally, the cello as bass continuo and melody instrument – London’s first mention of a solo cello in was in 1718, played by Signor Pipo (Filippo Mattei Amadei), also a composer working at the King’s Theatre. In 1736 Handel used cello in an aria with cello obbligato – so by 1739 a virtuoso cellist would certainly have had license to play a little melody.
The Songs of Calliope
There are works by more than twenty composers on this album. Most knew each other, some very well, some were the pupils of others and many were related by marriage. Actors, actresses, singers, playwrights and composers held curious social status and mostly lived in a world that revolved around the theatre life of Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket.
Opera music (instrumental music and italian arias with new english words) – Handel, Pescetti, Corelli and Geminiani
Theatre songs (including Satirical songs) to be sung as part of the action or as musical interludes between acts or between the play and the afterpiece - Purcell, Galliard, Lampe, Carey, Holcombe, Digard, Greene, Arne, Boyce, Burgess, Monro, Cannington, Martin, Anglosini, Vanbrugh and possibly Handel.
Scottish songs – Traditional and mock traditional, a sentimental fashion for scots song after the Union of 1707.
Emma Curtis |
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