This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Moscow being the way it is — devoted to an alarming degree to providing surprises of the good and frequently less good sort — it was technically no great shock to find myself one day in the early 2000s in the pillared auditorium of a grand old mansion-turned theatre, the stage a croquet lawn stalked apparently by chinless Englishmen in white tie and toppers singing foolish things at each other to a tinkling harpsichord and the jigs of a little baroque orchestra.
Not some cute little meet-the-English cultural outreach gig staged by the British Council (as if ), but a happy resurrection of the “Mock Opera” based on the Pyramus/Thisbe idiocy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written in 1745 by John Frederick Lampe and regularly rolled out by Helikon Opera over the last 20-odd years, with proper tea served in proper teacups, what’s more, to an audience evidently delighted by the somewhat weak-kneed humour.
Lampe’s little lark may not be the greatest thing in history — that would obviously be his marginally better-known The Dragon of Wantley — but it’s by no means rubbish. The wrinkle it adds to the play (with the producer dragging a moneybags along to rehearsal to squeeze him for moolah) is fun, and remarkably close to the current arts world in its acute depiction of stupidity, fawning, entitlement, etc.
Funny, though, that one should need to go to Moscow to see it. Alas, even they don’t seem to be putting it on that much these days, in the new excitingly patriotic atmosphere. An amusing note has been appended to the blurb noting that the characters display attractive levels of self-irony “unlike the actual inhabitants of Albion”; I was about to bridle and cavil, and then I thought of our politicians and arts world and trigger warnings and bloggers and effluencers and decided not to bother.
The middle bit of the English 18th century is familiar territory, with the explosion of London; the sudden military supremacy; a literary revolution that (with Defoe and Richardson) created the novel; Garrick’s revelatory Shakespeare productions; the birth of an English school of art with Hogarth, Hayman and Reynolds; the naturalisation of Palladian architecture by Colen Campbell and William Kent; the boisterous artistic and political circles gathered around Dr Johnson and various ennobled Boyles.
Finally pulling itself together after a century of mayhem and discord, England unearthed its lost mojo as nearly everyone grudgingly reconciled themselves to those krauts in the palace.
And in music — well, there was Handel, wasn’t there? And beyond that, er … English music, so original and fruitful in the 16th and 17th centuries, had peaked in the genius of Henry Purcell and died with him in 1695. Then there was only silence until the arrival of boatloads of Italians — led by Francesco Geminiani and Giovanni Bononcini — and the bumptious tedesco italianizzato GFH himself.
Those Italians have withered and vanished in Handel’s shadow, so all we are left with up to his death in 1756 is the massive output of his 40-odd operas and 29 oratorios, and a load of chamber music and concerti grossi, all fabulous, but all most definitely Handelian. And then, when he’d gone, we twiddled our thumbs a lot until old Joseph Haydn was dragged over to perk the place up in the 1790s.
The interesting thing is how far this is from the truth. London was the most active musical city in Europe (and simply dripping with money, hence those hordes of foreigners descending to gorge themselves). However large Handel loomed over everything, his operas were popular with the tiniest slice of the aristocracy, and rarely racked up a dozen performances. But everyone else thought they might quite like a bit of musical fun too. The last thing they were after was the Italian opera seria — with those characters that Mozart in Amadeus describes as “shitting marble” — that Handel and co were pumping out.
The death knell of that was The Beggar’s Opera in 1728, John Gay’s scattergun satire of rapacious politicians (set to current pop tunes) as a celebration of London’s rackety underworld. This was more like it, and it gave birth to a load of sequels and imitators — itself stemming from the old burlesque tradition of the jig that ended Elizabethan plays. With the obvious targets of overweening politicians, royal soap-operas and the pretentious entertainments of the aristos lining up to be shot down, a great swathe of mocking musical entertainments was born.
The natural venue for these skits and squibs was not the theatre but the new, rather more socially diverse playgrounds of the pleasure gardens popping up around London and elsewhere. Vauxhall in particular (revamped by Jonathan Tyers in 1729) was devoted to music — as well as to canoodling and getting wasted — and it had a pleasantly quasi-democratic air: entrance was a shilling, you had to look reasonably smart, and liveried servants were not permitted (in order to elide obvious differences of rank). It was all too much for some, for whom the more exclusive Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea were opened soon after, with an entrance fee of half a crown.
Correctly viewed, this jovial foolishness from The Dragon of Wantley to G&S to Neil Innes and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band has been England’s most memorable contribution to music. Vauxhall was the stage for a personal favourite, the attractive figure of the travelling showman Charles Dibdin, whose comic opera The Ephesian Matron of 1769 nutshells the genre as well as any: tripping along on the winding folky tunes, cutely adept harmonies, minuets, gavottes and jog-trot rhythms of the English version of the “galant” style of the time (a significant relaxation of the starchy Baroque), it tells of a young widow determined to remain faithful to (and, importantly, also with) her husband’s dead body for ever — until a handsome centurion pops up five seconds later, and the mourning period is cut from seven years to a single day.
In the cheerful epilogue, the singers apologise for this outdated caricature of feminine inconstancy, obvs no longer applicable now the sex is “so much altered from what ladies were two thousand years ago”.
I suppose the neglect of this delightful genre is really down to that musical style. A lovely, breezy thing in itself, developed from the rigours of the baroque by Bach’s sons, Telemann and the young Haydn, it was the perfect playtime idiom for a London where the official music was still that square old grandpa idiom of Handel’s. But this whole period has effectively been reclassified as “waiting for Mozart” and then ignored, with a generation of European composers stuffed into a drawer, only brought out for occasional light relief.
The English music of the period was extensively disinterred in the 1980s and ’90s by Peter Holman and Roy Goodman, recorded on Hyperion under the title “The English Orpheus” — and it was Holman’s company Opera Restor’d which staged Lampe and Dibdin for the first time for nearly two centuries.
Happily, there are glimmers of another resurfacing: with groups like the quartet Saraband, who tour lively potted concerts of songs, dances and semi-horrible history. I caught them in Twickenham playing the music that accompanied the “Twickenham Yahoos” Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay as they gallivanted about those beyond-the-pale areas where beastly Catholics were allowed.
The nicest picture (though no doubt I am conflating several) was the gang of them picnicking on the lawns of the new Marble Hill, helping themselves to bottles from Henrietta Howard’s cellar in the company of those good-time gals, the actress-singers Peg Woffington and Kitty Clive, whilst Henrietta was up in town seeing to George. (Funnily enough, the group Apollo’s Cabinet also has a similar Kitty Clive show currently on tour.)
In another concert, Bojan Čičić and the Academy of Ancient Music played a storming programme of Thomas Arne, William Boyce and others culminating in the great incidental music to The Tempest written by the prodigious young Thomas Linley in 1777 — the group’s string-players really off the leash and playing with maximum respect and style.
They were all first-division composers: Arne had a long, varied and ground-breaking career spanning baroque and galant styles, Boyce’s Solomon (inter alia) is a gorgeous and sexy thing based on the Song of Songs, and Linley was one of the brightest hopes of English music (the others being Stephen Storace and George Pinto) who all died way before their time. As Čičić (Croatian by origin) observes, in any other country these fellows would be objects of pride and celebration rather than complete oblivion.
Certainly, plenty of this is small-scale, songs, sonatas, harpsichord and fortepiano pieces for the home and salons such as the Linley family setup in Bath: beyond the theatres and pleasure gardens there was little call for orchestral pieces, and Boyce’s famous symphonies started life as overtures to his theatre works. True too that you probably don’t need to listen to hour after hour of this jaunty, melodic, elegant, endlessly attractive but somewhat mild-tempered idiom.
Linley’s Tempest and other works began to change that, with an irruption of turbid Sturm und Drang-style emotionalism. They might have developed this very distinctive English idiom at the end of the century instead of sinking again into the shadow of the mighty Beethoven and other fashionable European music.
Well, the urge to favour the foreign has a long history here, but for a brief few shining decades the native product gave those Italians and Germans more than a run for their money. So here’s a challenge for the Academy of Ancient Music and the rest of our matchless baroque-and-classical specialist groups: can we have some more, please? If those dashed Russkies can do it, so can we.
