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Berta Joncus, The London stage from Purcell to Pepusch, Early Music, Volume 43, Issue 2, May 2015, Pages 330–333, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cav019
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Extract
This collection of articles gives a kaleidoscopic view of London stage entertainments, from tragedy to bawdy songs. The scholarship is rich, thanks to the expertise of many of the authors, the data they have marshalled in tables and appendices, and the variety of disciplines represented: theatre, dance, music and literature. There are important findings here, though the book’s tripartite organization—The Judgment of Paris, the ‘Mainpiece’ and the ‘Afterpiece’—does little to illuminate them. Three topics in fact dominate this volume: performers, composers and word books. Most of the authors focus on performers, an increasingly important research area.
To open the collection, Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson show that singers probably determined the outcome of the celebrated 1701 Prize Competition for stage composers. Some sporting Kit-Kat Club members organized a competition to see which London composer could best set a commissioned libretto, The Judgement of Paris, by William Congreve. After the works of the finalists—John Eccles, Daniel Purcell, John Weldon and Gottfried Finger—were mounted at Dorset Gardens, the upstart Weldon took first prize. Musicologists consider the award misguided. On Baldwin’s and Wilson’s evidence, the judges’ assessment of the music’s merit depended on singing excellence and proper typecasting. Weldon’s likely singers—we know their names from a performance of the same work a year later—best satisfied these criteria. Weldon capitalized on the ‘extraordinary skill’ (p.23) of tenor Francis Hughes (Mercury); shrewdly, he cast the seasoned Mary Lindsey as the goddess queen Juno and the precocious 14-year-old Mary Ann Campion as Venus. By contrast, Eccles cast the 18-year-old Mary Hodgson as Juno, and the celebrated, but 30-year-old, Anne Bracegirdle as Venus. Daniel Purcell’s sopranos were second ladies, and his Mercury, James Bowen, was at the end of his career. We do not know whom Finger enlisted. Reimagined as a performance, rather than analysed as a score, Weldon’s production is the justified winner.
