A Short History of Opera, fourth edition

IN FRANCE, OPERA GREW OUT of the ballet; in England, it was rooted in the masque. English opera, like its counterpart in France, developed late in the seventeenth century into a distinct national type retaining many traces of the parent form. Unlike French opera, however, English national opera succumbed to Italian taste soon after 1700.¹ The untimely death of its master, Henry Purcell, is symbolic of its own fate—“a spring never followed by summer.”

The English masque was an entertainment something like the French court ballet, allegorical in character, with the main interest in costumes and spectacle, but including spoken dialogue, songs, and instrumental music.² The principal author of masques in the early seventeenth-century period was Ben Jonson; one of his colleagues was Inigo Jones, who designed costumes and scenery. None of the great Elizabethan composers wrote masque music, but the form became a proving ground for experiments in solo singing soon after the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was also the age of the “solo ayre,” beginning with the publication of John Dowland’s first collection in 1597.

The masque flourished especially during the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49). Among the earliest composers of masques were Alfonso Ferrabosco (c. 1575–1628), Thomas Campion (1567–1620), and Henry Lawes (1596–1662),³ but the first recitative in England was probably written in 1617 by Nicolas Lanier (1588–1666) and included in his music (now lost) for Ben Jonson’s Lovers Made Men.⁴ This and similar efforts to adapt the new Italian stile recitativo to English words were of little immediate importance for English music, which in the course of the seventeenth century developed its own style in the airs and songs, preferring to leave most of the rest of the masque (that is, those portions that in an Italian opera would have made up the recitative) in spoken dialogue. The songs, being simply inserted pieces and not organically connected with recitatives as were the early Italian arias, retained a simple and even popular flavor, which gave a distinctive national stamp to English masque music and, by inheritance, to later English opera.⁵ Among the exceptions to this description is William Davenant’s The Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour (1636), which (apart from the introductory speech) was entirely set to music by William and Henry Lawes.

Under the Commonwealth (1649–60) there were few public masques, though some were still given privately—for example, James Shirley’s Cupid and Death (1643) with music by Matthew Locke (c. 1630–77) and Christopher Gibbons (1615–76). Masques were also performed in schools during this period. The professional theater flourished briefly under the management of William Davenant, who in about 1656 prepared The Siege of Rhodes—a five-act work, entirely in music, that probably was not performed until 1659.⁶ The music no longer survives, but it included recitatives and arias written by a number of different composers, among whom were Locke and Henry Lawes. The production introduced elements that had not heretofore been experienced in a public theater in London, namely, movable scenes, a front curtain drawn up rather than parted in the middle, and an orchestra placed in front of the stage.⁷ Apparently in order to avoid trouble with the Puritan authorities, the acts were called “entries,” and the whole spectacle was known not as an opera (which word, in any case, was still new in England at the time) but as “A Representation by the Art of Prospective in Scenes and the Story sung in Recitative Musick.” Nevertheless, The Siege of Rhodes probably should be regarded as the first English opera as well as the first true opera seen in England. Though successful, this type of entertainment was not followed up, for the Restoration soon brought influences to bear that gave a different direction to English dramatic music.

The Puritans had not sought to suppress secular music, but they did oppose the theater, and this resulted in an attempt to evade their prohibition by disguising a theatrical spectacle as a musical concert.⁸ Paradoxically, the result of staging The Siege of Rhodes was to remove the prohibition against stage plays. English audiences preferred spoken drama, and once this was permitted they no longer had any interest in maintaining a form that to them represented only a makeshift, called forth by special circumstances.⁹ Theater music, to be sure, was composed after the Restoration, but not in the form of opera; it was confined for the most part to masques and incidental music for plays, and the style in both these fields was affected by foreign influences. A primary example of the type of entertainment that was popular during the Restoration was Robert Stapylton’s The Slighted Maid (1663), a play that incorporated three separate masques with music by John Banister.

The tendency of the English to underrate their own music in comparison with that of continental composers has been a bane of their musical history ever since Elizabethan times. That a true English style in dramatic music survived as long as it did—that is, until the end of the seventeenth century—was due partly to the strength of the old tradition, partly to the Commonwealth (which had decidedly not welcomed continental artists), and partly to the genius of a very small number of English composers who were either conservative enough or of sufficiently original genius to resist foreign domination. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the predominant foreign influence had been Italian and it continued for the remainder of the century. A number of Italian musicians appeared in the first years of the Restoration: there were Italian operas at the court in 1660; Giovanni Battista Draghi arrived in 1667; Nicola Matteis in about 1672 introduced the works of the Italian school of violin composers; a celebrated castrato, Giovanni Francesco Grossi (known as “Siface”), tarried briefly in London in 1687 and probably introduced there some of the music of Alessandro Scarlatti.¹⁰ But Charles II, who had learned to admire French music at the court of Versailles during his exile, and who soon after his restoration organized a band of twenty-four violins (that is, a string orchestra) in emulation of the vingt-quatre violons of Louis XIV, showed himself disposed to encourage French composers rather than Italian. Thus in 1666 a Frenchman, one Louis Grabu (fl. 1665–94), was appointed master of the king’s music, the highest official musical post in England. Grabu was undoubtedly a better courtier than a composer, if we may judge by his chief work, a setting of Dryden’s Albion and Albanius (1685) in three acts, along the lines of a French opera prologue. The music, a feeble imitation of Lully, dealt the death blow to that “monument of stupidity” as far as public success was concerned.¹¹

King Charles tried to lure Lully from Paris but failing in the attempt was obliged to be content with Cambert (see chapter nine), who found himself out of employment when Lully took over the Académie Royale de Musique in 1672. It was then that Cambert decided to make his livelihood in London, and from 1673 until his death in 1677 he served as maître de la musique and harpsichordist for the Duchess of Portsmouth. He, together with singers and woodwind players from Paris, provided court entertainment drawn primarily from Lully’s music. Cambert also had two of his operas performed at the King’s Theater in Drury Lane in 1674: Ballet et musique pour le divertissement du roy de la Grande-Bretagne, a pastorale that was entirely sung, and Ariane, probably with revisions by Louis Grabu.¹² In addition to these and other importations, Charles II sent a number of young English musicians, among them Pelham Humfrey (1647–74), to acquire a French polish under Lully at Paris.¹³ In spite of foreign influences, however, the vitality of English music was preserved in the latter part of the seventeenth century by three composers: Matthew Locke, John Blow, and Henry Purcell.

Locke, the eldest of the three, had received his training during the Commonwealth and was at the height of his powers during the early years of the Restoration. He composed portions of the music for revivals of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1672 and The Tempest in 1674.¹⁴ These and similar Shakespearean performances were decked out with machines and added songs, ballets, and instrumental pieces; the language was altered, the order of scenes changed, and prologues and even new episodes and characters were added to make an operatic entertainment of a sort frequently burlesqued in the popular theaters. Nevertheless, this tradition of plays with music is important, since it was for such productions that Purcell later wrote most of his dramatic compositions. Another work for which Locke furnished some of the music was Psyche, an adaptation by Thomas Shadwell of Lully’s “tragi-comedy-ballet” of the same name, presented at the Dorset Garden Theater in 1675. The music of Psyche was published in 1675 under the title The English Opera. It is of interest as showing the strong French influence in English theater music at this time and for the skillful setting of English recitative, but on the whole, it lacks distinction and is generally regarded as inferior to Locke’s earlier dramatic pieces or his instrumental works.

Although he produced only one complete work for the stage, John Blow (1649–1708) is the most important English dramatic composer before Purcell.¹⁵ His Venus and Adonis was first performed at court in 1682 and later revived at Josias Priest’s school at Chelsea in 1684.¹⁶ Although subtitled “a masque,” Venus and Adonis is really a little pastoral opera, with the simplest possible plot and continuous music. The first act, after a long dialogue between Venus and Adonis, ends with a chorus of huntsmen and a dance. The entire second act is an interlude: first a scene in which Cupid instructs (in the form of a spelling lesson) all the little Cupids in the art of causing the wrong people to fall in love with each other, then a half-serious conversation between Venus and Cupid, ending with a dance of Cupid and the three Graces. The farewell of Venus and Adonis, and the latter’s death, are set to pathetic strains in the third act; Venus bids Cupid bear Adonis to heaven, and the chorus calls on Echo and the nymphs to mourn his death.

In its musical style and proportions, Venus and Adonis shows the influence of the Italian cantata rather than the opera; certain details, however, suggest that Blow was well acquainted with Cambert’s works and with at least the instrumental portions of Lully’s. The overture is on the French pattern, though with a rather more contrapuntal style and an individual harmonic idiom. The prologue, like many of Lully’s, introduces allegorical figures discoursing on love in general terms, and it ends with an “entry,” that is, a ballet. Little coloratura phrases on descriptive words in the recitatives and songs are reminiscent of the French practice, as is also the common device of echoing the final phrase of a chorus or solo. An important part is given to ballets and choruses, and there is a relatively large amount of instrumental music, including particularly a “ground” (that is, a passacaglia) in the finale of Act II and a lovely saraband in the same scene, beginning with a descending chromatic bass (example 10.1).¹⁷

Typically English are the forthright melodies, such as the duet “O let him not from hence remove” in Act I (example 10.2). Above all, Blow’s music has a quality of sincerity, directness, and independence, an “air of owing nothing to anyone,” which lifts it out of the realm of mere courtly show and gives to his characters a living human likeness beside which the conventional figures of French opera seem like puppets.¹⁸ The lamenting cry of Venus on hearing of Adonis’s death (example 10.3) and the nobly elegiac final chorus exemplify this quality, which has marked so much of English music—whether in the national folksongs, the motets of Thomas Tallis, or the madrigals of John Wilbye—and which at the end of the seventeenth century is incarnated in Blow and his great pupil Henry Purcell.

The music of Henry Purcell (1659–95) represents a fusion of different national style qualities.¹⁹ His early training under Captain Henry Cooke, master of the boys of the Royal Chapel, made him familiar with the English musical tradition; from Pelham Humfrey he undoubtedly learned something of the French manner of composition, and from Blow, the Italian, but these elements were always dominated by a genius essentially individual and imbued with national feeling. The dramatic work of Purcell includes only one opera in the strict sense—that is, sung throughout—namely, Dido and Aeneas.²⁰ Although the dates of composition and first performance of this opera are unknown, it was long believed that Dido was designed for a 1689 performance at a girls’ boarding school in Chelsea. That theory, however, was challenged in the 1990s when two other theories were put forth. One suggests that Dido and Aeneas was performed at court in 1684 before it was staged at the boarding school, similar to the performances of Venus and Adonis. The other argues that the opera represents an allegory of events related to the reign of James II (1678–87) and therefore was first performed at the end of 1687 or the early part of 1688.²¹ What does seem to be agreed upon is that Dido was probably never presented in a public theater until after the composer’s death. The opera, exquisite in detail and effective in performance, is on the scale of a chamber opera rather than a full stage work.

Between 1690 and 1695 Purcell composed music for more than forty theater works. His contributions consist of overtures, interludes, masques (Timon of Athens, 1694), songs, dances, choruses, and other music for plays.²² In some cases the extent and importance of the musical numbers are so great that the works may rightly be considered operas or semioperas (Dioclesian, 1690; King Arthur, 1691; The Fairy Queen, 1692), and indeed were commonly so called in England at the time.²³

It will readily be seen that such productions are similar to the Renaissance Italian plays with intermedi and to the French dramatic ballets, though of course their immediate forebears are the masque and the comedy-ballets of Molière and Lully. It is remarkable how long it took before poets and composers worked out fully the implications of the ideal of dramma per musica, drama carried on wholly by means of music. To be sure, in Italian opera all the dialogue was sung and, at least with composers like Monteverdi and Cavalli, often sung in appropriately flexible and expressive recitative. Nevertheless, the Italian tendency was constantly toward sharpening the contrast in musical style between action dialogue on the one hand and verses expressing emotion on the other. Even the arias and duets, in regular closed musical forms with periodic melody, were at first treated almost like interpolations and given only to subordinate characters, while larger musical units involving choruses and dances were kept quite distinct from the development of the action itself. By and large, this was the state of affairs in Lully’s tragédies lyriques also. But often in early German opera, always in the French comedy-ballet, and in early English opera with only two or three exceptions, the distinction was absolute: spoken dialogue for the action, music only for “set numbers.”

When we examine Purcell’s music, we are impressed first of all by the fresh, engaging quality of his melodies, so like in feeling to English folksongs. The air “Pursue thy conquest, love” from Act I of Dido and Aeneas, with its horn-call figures and constant lively echoing between melody and bass, suggests the sounds and bustle of the chase. In King Arthur, the martial “Come if you dare” shows an English adaptation of the popular trumpet aria of Italian opera, with two of these instruments concertizing in the introduction and interlude, and with the characteristic

rhythmic motif common in French music and so appropriate to the declamation of English words (see measure 3 in example 10.4).

The duet “Fear no danger” in Act I of Dido and Aeneas is similar in rhythm and style to the duets of Lully. No less characteristic, though in a different mood, is an aria such as “Charon the peaceful shade invites” from Dioclesian, with the two concertizing flutes, the three- and six-measure phrases, the delicate cross-relations, and the word-painting on “hastes” (example 10.5). There are also many fine comic airs and duets, particularly in the lesser theater pieces.²⁴ Da capo arias are not frequent in Purcell, but he uses most effectively the older form of the passacaglia or ground, the best example of which is Dido’s “When I am laid in earth” in the last act of Dido and Aeneas, one of the most affecting expressions of tragic grief in all opera. Another air of this kind is “O let me weep,” the “plaint” in Act V of The Fairy Queen.

Purcell’s recitative is found at its best in Dido and Aeneas, the only one of his operas that gives opportunity for genuine dramatic dialogue. The treatment, as Dent points out, has nothing in common with the Italian recitativo semplice; rather, the style is that of free arioso, admitting expressive florid passages and always maintaining a clear rhythmic, formal, and harmonic organization, yet without sacrificing correctness of declamation or expressive power.²⁵ The dialogue in the parting scene between Dido and Aeneas (Act III) and the beautiful arioso phrase that introduces Dido’s last aria show what can be done by way of dramatic musical setting of the English language, that despised tongue that has been so often condemned as “unsuitable for opera.” In Purcell’s other works there are isolated examples of recitative phrases, including one from The Indian Queen (example 10.6) that Charles Burney called “the best piece of recitative in our language.”²⁶

The overtures to Purcell’s operas are in the same general form as the French overtures of Lully; one of the finest examples is found in Dioclesian.²⁷ Other instrumental music includes “act tunes” (that is, interludes or introductions), and there are some interesting examples of the canzona and other forms.²⁸ There are dance pieces of all kinds, including the hornpipe, paspe (French passepied), canaries, and special descriptive dances as in Lully; a favorite type (also common in French opera) is the chaconne or ground, which is often placed for climax toward the end of a scene and in which dancing is combined with solo and choral singing as well as with instrumental accompaniment.²⁹ Descriptive symphonies occur, such as the introduction to the song “Ye blustering bretheren” in Act V of King Arthur or the famous “Cold” symphony and chorus “See, see, we assemble” in Act III—a scene perhaps suggested by the chorus of trembleurs in Lully’s Isis.

The choruses in Purcell’s operas contain some of his best music. Such numbers as “Sing Io’s” in Act II of Dioclesian, with stately vigorous rhythms, brilliant voice groupings, orchestral interludes, and passages of harmony contrasting with contrapuntal sections, foreshadow the broad, sonorous choral movements in Handel’s oratorios. Other choruses in Purcell are more like those of Lully, in strict chordal style with piquant rhythms; still others show the influences of the English madrigal tradition.³⁰ Finally, there are the choruses of lamentation, such as “With drooping wings” in Dido and Aeneas, which (like many other features of this opera) has a worthy predecessor in the closing number of Blow’s Venus and Adonis. Except for Dido and Aeneas, where the chorus has a part in the action, Purcell’s choral numbers usually occur in scenes devoted to spectacle or entertainment, corresponding to the ceremonies, ballets, and the like in French opera. There are scenes of this kind in Bonduca (Act III), King Arthur (Acts I and III), and The Indian Queen (Act V). The masques, of which examples may be found particularly in Timon of Athens and The Fairy Queen, also contain many choruses and dances; for parallels to these masques, with their fantastic settings and characters, we must look not only to the French operas but also to the contemporary popular plays of the Théâtre Italien at Paris, which contain many scenes of a similar nature.³¹

On the whole, it is difficult to accept Romain Rolland’s estimate of Purcell’s genius as “frail” or “incomplete.”³² The composer of the closing scenes of Dido and Aeneas could surely have created a true national opera in England if he had not been frustrated by the lack of an adequate librettist and by his apparently inescapable servitude to an undeveloped public taste.³³ As it was, however, Purcell’s death in 1695 put an end to any hope for the development of English musical drama in the foreseeable future. London was even then full of Italian musicians; audiences became fascinated with Italian opera, and, with few exceptions, English composers did little to counter this trend. For example, Thomas Clayton’s (1673–1725) Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus, which was staged by Christopher Rich at Drury Lane in 1705, was sung in English but composed in an Italian manner. What is unique about Arsinoe, however, is that it was sung throughout, with recitatives used in place of spoken dialogue—the first such opera to come to the London stage. Arsinoe was exceptionally successful, enjoying numerous performances for two consecutive seasons.³⁴

A year after the premiere of Arsinoe, George Granville’s The British Enchanters³⁵ enjoyed a dozen or more performances at the Haymarket Theater beginning in February 1706, but not even works such as this could prevent Italian opera from dominating English opera.³⁶ The successful production, in English, of II trionfo di Camilla, regina de’Volsci by Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747) at the Drury Lane Theater in March 1706 marked the capitulation, and the fashion was completely established by the time of Handel’s arrival and the performance of his Rinaldo in 1711.³⁷

There was at least one Englishman who viewed this state of operatic affairs with regret. Joseph Addison in The Spectator frequently alluded to the absurdities of Italian opera in England, and in one issue he wrote a long essay in criticism of Italian recitative, with acute observations on the relation of language to national style in music and an exhortation to English composers to emulate Lully by inventing a recitative proper to their own language: “I would allow the Italian Opera to lend our English Musick as much as may grace and soften it, but never entirely to annihilate and destroy it.”³⁸ That this was a faint hope, Addison had virtually admitted in an earlier letter, which so well and so wittily sums up the situation of opera in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century that it deserves to be quoted at length:

It is my Design in this Paper to deliver down to Posterity a faithful Account of the Italian Opera, and of the gradual Progress which it has made upon the English Stage: For there is no Question but our great Grand-children will be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to sit together like an Audience of Foreigners in their own Country, and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand.

Arsinoe was the first Opera that gave us a Taste of Italian Musick. The great Success which this Opera met with, produced some Attempts of forming Pieces upon Italian Plans, that should give a more natural and reasonable Entertainment than what can be met with in the elaborate Trifles of that Nation. This alarm’d the Poetasters and Fiddlers of the Town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary Kind of Ware; and therefore laid down as an established Rule, which is receiv’d as such to this very day, That nothing is capable of being well set to Musick, that is not Nonsense.

This Maxim was no sooner receiv’d, but we immediately fell to translating the Italian Operas; and as there was no great Danger of hurting the Sense of those extraordinary Pieces, our Authors would often make Words of their own, that were entirely foreign to the Meaning of the Passages which they pretended to translate. [Here Addison gives some instances of inept translations, and then he continues.] By this Means the soft Notes that were adapted to Pity in the Italian, fell upon the Word Rage in the English; and the angry Sounds that were turn’d to Rage in the Original, were made to express Pity in the Translation. It oftentimes happen’d likewise, that the finest Notes in the Air fell upon the most insignificant Words in the Sentence. I have known the word And pursu’d through the whole Gamut, have been entertain’d with many a melodious The, and have heard the most beautiful Graces, Quavers and Divisions bestow’d upon Then, For, and From; to the eternal Honour of our English Particles.

The next Step to our Refinement, was the introducing of Italian Actors into our Opera; who sung their Parts in their own Language, at the same Time that our Countrymen perform’d theirs in our native Tongue. The King or Hero of the Play generally spoke in Italian, and his Slaves answer’d him in English: The Lover frequently made his Court, and gain’d the Heart of his Princess in a Language which she did not understand. One would have thought it very difficult to have carry’d on Dialogues after this Manner, without an Interpreter between the Persons that convers’d together; but this was the State of the English Stage for about three Years.

At length the Audience grew tir’d of understanding Half the Opera, and therefore to ease themselves entirely of the Fatigue of Thinking, have so order’d it at Present that the whole Opera is perform’d in an unknown Tongue. We no longer understand the Language of our own Stage….

It does not want any great Measure of Sense to see the Ridicule of this monstrous Practice; but what makes it the more astonishing, it is not the Taste of the Rabble, but of Persons of the greatest Politeness, which has establish’d it….

At present, our Notions of Musick are so very uncertain, that we do not know what it is we like, only, in general, we are transported with anything that is not English: so if it be of a foreign Growth, let it be Italian, French, or High-Dutch, it is the same thing. In short, our English Musick is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead.³⁹

1. Dent, Foundations of English Opera; White, The Rise of English Opera; Forsyth, Music and Nationalism; Nalbach, The King’s Theatre,1704–1867; Luckett, “Exotick but Rational Entertainments.”

2. See Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640 (includes an extensive bibliography); Chan, Music in the Theatre of Ben Jonson (includes many musical examples); H. Evans, ed., English Masques; W. Evans, Ben Jonson and Elizabethan Music. See also Finney, “Comus, Dramma per Musica”; Bevington, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque.

3. Among his many contributions to theatrical productions in London are the songs he wrote for the three-act masque Comus (1630).

5. The song “Back, shepherd, back” in Henry Lawes’s setting of Milton’s Comus (perf. 1634) is typical of this style.

6. Cf. Zimmerman, Henry Purcell, and White, The History of English Opera, concerning the premiere. See also Emslie, “Nicholas Lanier’s Innovations.”

8. Arundell, in The Critic at the Opera, 51–52, argues that Davenant’s operatic productions “came into being because the loophole in the law forbidding stage plays allowed music to be used in a costumed entertainment.” Cf. Scholes, The Puritans and Music, chap. 13 and passim.

9. For example, after the Restoration Davenant was able to stage The Siege of Rhodes as a spoken play.

10. On Draghi, see Pepys, Diary, February 12, 1667; on Matteis, see Evelyn, Diary, 2:97; on Scarlatti, see Evelyn, Diary, 2:268.

12. Ariane ou le mariage de Bacchus was originally composed for the French court but was not staged until the London production. See Bashford, “Perrin and Cambert’s Ariane Re-examined”; and Buttrey, “New Light on Robert Cambert in London and His Ballet et Musique.”

16. See Luckett’s “A New Source for Venus and Adonis” concerning the printed text that relates to the 1684 production.

17. For a discussion of the “ground,” see Lewis, “Purcell and Blow’s Venus and Adonis.”

19. See relevant sections in the histories of Hawkins (4:495–539) and Burney; Moore, Henry Purcell and the Restoration Theatre: Westrup, Purcell; Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage; Zimmerman, Henry Purcell; White, The History of English Opera; Holman, Henry Purcell.

21. Cf. Pinnock and Wood, “‘Unscarred by Turning Times’?: The Dating of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.”; idem, “‘Singin’ in the Rain’: More on Dating Dido”; Price, “Dido and Aeneas: Questions of Style and Evidence”; and Walkling, “Political Allegory in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.”

22. The principal ones are The Indian Queen, 1695; The Tempest, 1695; and Bonduca, 1695.

24. Examples are: “Dear pretty youth” (The Tempest); “Celia has a thousand charms” (The Rival Sisters); “I’ll sail upon the dogstar” (A Fool’s Preferment); “Celimene, pray tell me” (Oroonoko); and the song of the drunken poet, “Fi-fi-fi-fill up the bowl” (The Fairy Queen, Act I).

26. Burney, A General History of Music, 2:392. It should be noted that Henry Purcell’s younger brother, Daniel, was called upon to compose the final masque of The Indian Queen.

27. Dioclesian is a semi-opera in five acts, based on a Thomas Betterton play. Of particular interest is the finale of the opera, which is a self-contained masque.

28. Indian Queen. Acts II and III; Fairy Queen. Act IV; King Arthur, Act V.

29. Examples in King Arthur, Act III, and Dioclesian, Act III (in canon form).

30. For an example in the chordal style, see “’Tis love that hath warmed us” in King Arthur, Act III, and for one in the madrigal tradition, see “In these delightful pleasant groves,” in The Libertine.

34. The text of Arsinoe was a translation from the Italian. See Burney, History, 2:655.

36. With the enactment of the Order of Separation (1707), which decreed that Drury Lane was limited to productions of plays without music whereas the Haymarket could stage any kind of opera, the government further added to the ease with which Italian opera could dominate the English stage. The order was relaxed a few years later, thereby allowing English semi-operas to once again entertain Londoners.

37. II trionfo di Camilla, composed for Naples in 1696, received no less than sixty-four performances in London between 1706 and 1709. For more on the attribution of this opera to Giovanni Bononcini, see Lindgren, “The Three Great Noises.” See also chapter thirteen.

39. The Spectator, no. 18, March 21, 1711. See also two essays from The Spectator in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 511–17, and the accounts quoted in Lowens, “The Touch-Stone (1728): A Neglected View of London Opera.” For a study of the influence Italian opera had upon the productions staged at the Drury Lane and Haymarket theaters from 1704 to 1710, see Price, Music in the Restoration Theatre.