Music for the London stage

The English composer John Eccles (c.1668–1735) obtained his first major composing job as a result of a 17th-century industrial relations dispute. In the early 1690s, the United Company was the only theatre company in London licensed to perform plays. Following a dispute over salaries and conditions, the theatre manager and actor Thomas Betterton broke free of the company in 1695 and—taking many of its most experienced actors and singers with him—formed a breakaway company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For some reason his principal composer, Henry Purcell, stayed with the remnants of the old company. This left the field open for John Eccles, who had composed a few songs for the United Company, to join Betterton as his chief composer. Within a few months, Purcell was dead, and over the next decade Eccles became one of the leading composers for the London stage, supplying music for operas and masques, as well as incidental music for more than 60 plays.

At least 100 of Eccles’s songs were issued in cheap single-sheet editions in the years around 1700, which suggests that the music-buying public found his compositions highly attractive. However, as Anthony Rooley points out in his foreword to the collected edition of Eccles’s works now being published by A-R Editions, the ‘long shadow cast by Henry Purcell’s towering genius’ means that Eccles’s music is little known today. The General Editors of this edition (Michael Burden, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Alan Howard and Kathryn Lowerre) and their associates are now making efforts to bring his music to a wider public. In the present volume, Amanda Eubanks Winkler presents Eccles’s surviving music for plays with titles beginning with the letters A–F. Work on two further volumes, for plays H–P and R–Z, is in progress. (Eubanks Winkler’s edition of Eccles’s music for Macbeth has already been published in RRMBE 133.)

The theatre in late 17th-century England featured generous quantities of music. Most famous are the ‘semi-operas’—dramas with large-scale musical scenes, such as Dioclesian, King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, for which Purcell wrote the music. But ordinary plays included a considerable amount of music too. Instrumental music was performed before the play began and between the acts, while within the drama itself there was often a song or two, and sometimes a longer musical scene. These pieces were frequently performed in the guise of entertainments for the on-stage characters or to reflect the mood of the protagonists at key moments in the drama. A particular feature of many plays was the ‘mad song’, a solo song performed by or for a character who has been driven insane, often by love. All these varying types of music are found in the present volume, and it includes pieces for a wide range of forces.

While the largest number `are solo songs with continuo (variously for soprano, tenor and bass), there are also unaccompanied songs, vocal duets, overtures and suites of instrumental dances for four-part strings, pieces for unaccompanied violin, ensemble music for SATB, and ‘symphony songs’ (songs with introductions and interludes for strings). The music for Don Quixote, Part I includes a vocal duet with three accompanying recorders, while from Cyrus the Great there is music for soprano, two trumpets and drums. Much of Eccles’s vocal music was written for singing actors rather than professional musicians, and so the vocal lines are relatively undemanding.

Here I should highlight one peculiarity of this edition: although described on the title-page as incidental music by John Eccles, almost a third of the 214 pages of music contain pieces by other composers. It is explained in the introduction that, in addition to Eccles’s music, pieces contributed by his immediate predecessors and contemporaries to the same plays is also included. The other composers featured are John Banister, William Corbett, Gottfried Finger, James Hart, John Lenton, Simon Pack and one or more anonymous composers. (Purcell’s incidental music is excluded, presumably because it is readily available in the Purcell Society edition.) This all-encompassing approach has merit in that it enables those studying or performing late 17th-century theatre music to find all of the surviving music for a given play in one place, and it is certainly good to have modern scholarly editions of these pieces. However, the volume is presented and marketed as incidental music by Eccles, and as a volume of the Eccles collected edition, so anyone seeking theatre music by Lenton, Finger and the others is unlikely to seek it here. Several of the ‘extra’ works are substantial suites of instrumental pieces, and their inclusion explains why Eccles’s incidental music will stretch to three volumes of the collected edition.

As is appropriate for a volume in the RRMBE series, this is a scholarly edition with a critical commentary on each work. A short preface by the General Editors provides useful background information on music in the late 17th-century English theatre, on Eccles’s life and career and on the main sources of his music. Following this is an introduction to the incidental music volumes by Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Alan Howard and Estelle Murphy. As well as containing further valuable information about Eccles’s music and the performers involved in the first productions, the introduction provides helpful notes on performance and a clear explanation of the editorial approach taken. For each play, Eubanks Winkler has provided a brief introduction and critical notes in which sources are described and editorial corrections to the principal source are noted, along with variants between it and concordant sources. The introductory matter is particularly valuable. Eubanks Winkler provides brief plot summaries and explains the contexts in which the music was heard. Also very useful is the ‘Biographical Glossary’ at the end of the volume, which provides information on the singers, playwrights and composers mentioned in the edition.

Any editor of Eccles’s incidental music has the difficult task of deciding which sources should be given precedence. There are no autograph manuscripts, and the extant music is scattered among many contemporary printed editions and copyists’ manuscripts. The principal source used in this edition is Eccles’s A Collection of Songs for One, Two, and Three Voices (London: John Walsh, 1704). That volume, which Eccles dedicated to Queen Anne, is a compilation of the songs he had composed over the previous ten years. Eubanks Winkler, Howard and Murphy argue that because Eccles was involved in its production, it ‘seems likely that it contained his preferred versions of his songs’ (p.xvi). From a practical perspective, drawing on A Collection of Songs is sensible, given that it generally contains the most complete bass figuring available. However, we should also bear in mind that A Collection of Songs is theatre music removed from its stage context and repackaged, some years later, for the amateur performer. While Eccles might indeed have preferred these versions, the sources contemporaneous with the stage performances may reflect the composer’s theatrical intentions more closely.

Eccles and Walsh certainly made a number of changes for A Collection of Songs. Their inclusion of versions of the songs for recorder makes it clear that they were targeting a domestic market. All of the songs were published in the treble clef to make them suitable for female singers, even those performed by a bass singer in the theatre. ‘Why should the world mistake’, for example, is in a different key from the version published in 1695, shortly after its performance on the stage in The Ambitious Slave (it is transposed to G minor from the less common F minor). The music was originally performed during a sleep scene, for which the F minor version would seem well suited. Eubanks Winkler opts to use the later G minor version, however. She also chooses A Collection of Songs as the source for the mad song ‘I burn, I burn’ from Part II of Don Quixote, in preference to the edition published in the year of its performance, 1694. She observes that the version in A Collection of Songs is different from all other sources, but writes that ‘one can only assume that Eccles revised the piece to conform to his wishes’ (p.170). His wishes for the song as a non-theatrical piece, perhaps, but it seems likely that the earlier version is closer to the one heard in the theatre. Similarly, the version of the song ‘As Cupid roguishly one day’ in A Collection of Songs, taken as the principal source by the editor, differs from the editions published shortly after its first performance in 1701 in the play Altemira.

Eubanks Winkler also gives preference to A Collection of Songs over the substantial contemporary manuscript of Eccles’s theatre music, now British Library Add. Ms. 29378. Although the manuscript is described in the preface to the present edition as ‘the most significant source of Eccles’s theater music’ (p.xii), Eubanks Winkler treats it as the principal source only when no printed sources survive. Thus the first two songs from Cyrus the Great are edited from the manuscript, while for the third song the readings in A Collection of Songs are preferred. The presence of the stage cue ‘She speaks and then goes on’ in Add. Ms. 29378 and in the earlier printed sources for this song suggests that they have closer links to the theatrical version.

Thanks to Eubanks Winkler’s careful description and collation of the sources, anyone interested in the differences between the various versions of these pieces can easily identify them, and can opt to follow the earliest version of the musical text if preferred. A few minor contemporary sources are not listed, among them a couple of manuscript sources for music from The Fair Penitent and The Fickle Shepherdess. I noted a very small number of misreadings (for example in bar 62 of the continuo part for ‘Why should the world mistake’, where a badly printed F in the original source has been misread as a D). Overall, though, the music has been edited with accuracy and attention to detail.

Where the vocal part in the chosen source is in the treble clef but the original singer was male (as is sometimes the case in A Collection of Songs), Eubanks Winkler has amended the clef from treble to transposing treble clef or bass, to reflect the original singer’s vocal range. An editorial viola part has been added to string music for which parts for two violins and bass only survive, on the basis that the music was probably performed in four parts. When merely a single violin part survives, no reconstruction of the missing parts has been attempted. In cases where only a solo vocal line survives for a song, Eubanks Winkler has not provided an editorial bass part, arguing that the theatrical forces are unknown. Original continuo figuring is included when present in the original source, but editorial figures have not been provided in the works with unfigured basses. The edition is well presented and the music clearly laid out. The large format, soft-bound volume may not be ideal for singers to perform from, but individual numbers are available as digital downloads from A-R Editions, as are performance parts.

All in all, this volume is a valuable addition to the RRMBE series, providing performers and researchers with the opportunity to explore new repertory and discover more about music for the English stage in the decade after Purcell. Eccles—and his contemporaries represented in this volume—may still have difficulty escaping from the ‘long shadow’ cast by Purcell’s genius, but there is nevertheless music worth exploring here.