Download АКУЛИЧ Л.Д. Лекция по дисциплине «Культура страны

АКУЛИЧ Л.Д.
Лекция по дисциплине «Культура страны изучаемого языка»
Тема «Театральная и музыкальная жизнь Великобритании»
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1.Periods in the history of the British theatre, genres associated with each period:
1. 600-1500medieval period: liturgical drama developed four principal forms of
drama: mystery plays, miracle plays, morality plays and mummer’s plays.
2. 1500-1650 renaissance: revenge tragedy, Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy,
commedia dell’arte.
3. 1650-1700 restoration: comedy of manners.
4. 1700-1800 baroque: burlesque and ballad opera.
5. 1800-1850 romanticism: melodrama, romanticism.
6. 20thcentury and beyond: realism and naturalism, symbolism, expressionism,
surrealism, epic, theatre of the absurd, political theatre.
Medieval period – mummer’s plays, mystery and morality plays:
This period is closely related to the church, which influenced the theatre as well. There
are distinguished three main types of drama:
The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment.
Morality plays are an allegory; they typically contain a protagonist who represents
either humanity as a whole or a smaller social structure. Supporting characters are
personifications of good and evil. The plays were most popular in Europe during the
15th and 16th centuries. Morality plays are the result of the dominant belief of the time
period. In Everyman, perhaps the best morality play, the characters take on the
common pattern, representing broader ideas. Some of the characters in Everyman are
God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and
Strength. The premise of Everyman is that God, believing that the people on earth are
too focused on wealth and worldly possessions, sends Death to Everyman to remind
him of God's power and the importance of upholding values.
Miracle plays, or Saint's plays, are based on the lives of saints and martyrs, particularly
St. Nicholas or St. Mary, as well they showed miracle interventions of saints into the
lives of ordinary people. Miracle plays were written in the Cornish language. To
capture the attention of the audience, "the plays were often noisy, bawdy and
entertaining". Typical of these is a play called St. John the Hairy.
Mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches with
accompanying antiphonal song. The plays originated as simple verbal reading of
liturgical texts. These primitive forms were later elaborated with dialogue and
dramatic action. Eventually the dramas moved from church to the exterior - the
churchyard and the public marketplace. Then they were forbidden by the Pope, that
gave the possibility to add comic scenes in the play. Plays were performed in Latin.
The plays were performed by a combination of professionals and amateurs and were
written in highly elaborate forms. Mystery plays moved out of the church into guilds
hands. Sometimes, each play was performed on a decorated cart called a pageant that
moved about the city to allow different crowds to watch each play. Mystery plays were
often collected into cycles (York cycle, Towneley plays ).
The mummer’s play is a seasonal folk play performed by troupes of actors known as
mummers. They are sometimes performed in the street but more usually as house-tohouse visits and in public houses. Although the main season for mumming throughout
Britain was around Christmas, some parts of England had plays performed around All
Souls' Day or Easter. Usually the actors were disguised and occasionally were wearing
head-hiding hats as masks. The plays seem to be based on underlying themes of
duality and resurrection and generally involve a battle between two or more characters,
perhaps representing good against evil. Usually they feature a doctor who has a magic
potion as in mummers’ plays, the central incident is the killing and restoring to life of
one of the characters. The principal characters, presented in a wide variety of manner
and style, are a Hero the Fool, and a Doctor.
Elizabethan period – tragedy and comedy of Ben Jonson.
English Renaissance Theatre is sometimes called ''Elizabethan Theatre. During that
period, there were two distinct types of theatre in England. One was represented by
small groups of professional actors who performed in halls, inns, or marketplaces. The
second type of theatre, found in the London area, was made up of amateurs, usually
university students, performing for the royal court. The audience and the actors were
educated, acquainted with the classics, The significant achievement of the Elizabethan
stage was connected with the theatres of professional acting groups, not the court
theatre.
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A
contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays,
particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his
best. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after
William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I. His major comedies express a
strong distaste for the world in which he lived. Jonson is renowned for his method of
concentrating on a selected side, or on selected sides, of a character, showing how they
dominate the personality.
A gifted lyric poet, he wrote two of his most successful plays entirely in prose, an
unusual mode of composition in his time. Though often an angry and stubborn man, no
one had more disciples than he. He was also a master of theatrical plot, language, and
characterization. His plays held their place on the stage until the period of the
Restoration.
Jonson’s chief plays are still very good theatre. His insistence on putting classical
theory into practice in them has reinforced rather than weakened the effect of his gift
of lively dialogue, robust characterization, and intricate, controlled plotting. In each of
them he maneuvers a large cast of vital personages, all consistently differentiated from
one another. Jonson’s plots are skillfully put together; incident develops out of
incident in a consistent chain of cause and effect, taking into account the respective
natures of the personages involved and proceeding confidently through a twisting,
turning action that is full of surprises without relying on coincidence or chance.
Sometimes Jonson’s comedy derives from the dialogue, especially when it is based on
his observation of contemporary tricks of speech. But there are also superbly ludicrous
situations, often hardly removed from practical joke.
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe (26.01.1564-30.05. 1593) was an English dramatist, poet
and translator of the Elizabethan era. As with other writers of the period, little is
known about Christopher Marlowe. He has been described as a spy, a brawler, a
heretic as well as magician, duelist, tobacco-user, counterfeiter and rakehell.
He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year and
rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe’s mysterious
early death. Christopher Marlowe’s plays are known for the use of blank verse and
their overreaching protagonists. His plays were enormously successful, thanks in part
to the imposing stage presence of Edward Alleyn.
Marlowe’s first play performed on the regular stage in London was Tamburlaine
the Great, about the conqueror Timur, who rises from shepherd to warrior. It is among
the first English playsin blank verse and is generally considered the beginning of the
mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre.
Of the dramas attributed to Marlowe Dido, Queen of Carthage is believed to
have been his first, and performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy
actors, between 1587 and 1593. The play was first published in 1594; the title page
attributes the play to Marlowe and Thomas Nashe.
Marlowe's first play performed on the regular stage in London, in 1587, was
Tamburlaine the Great, about the conqueror Timur, who rises from shepherd to
warrior. It is among the first English plays in blank verse, and, with Thomas Kyd's The
Spanish Tragedy, generally is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the
Elizabethan theatre. Tamburlaine was a success, and was followed with Tamburlaine
the Great, Part II.
The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe's other
works were published posthumously. The sequence of the writing of his other four
plays is unknown; all deal with controversial themes.
The Jew of Malta, about a Maltese Jew's barbarous revenge against the city
authorities, has a prologue delivered by a character representing Machiavelli. It was
probably written in 1589 or 1590, and was first performed in 1592. It was a success,
and remained popular for the next fifty years. The play was entered in the Stationers'
Register on 17 May 1594, but the earliest surviving printed edition is from 1633.
Edward the Second is an English history play about the deposition of King
Edward II by his barons and the Queen, who resent the undue influence the king's
favourites have in court and state affairs. The play was entered into the Stationers'
Register on 6 July 1593, five weeks after Marlowe's death. The full title of the earliest
extant edition, of 1594, is "The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward
the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer."
The Massacre at Paris is a short and luridly written work, the only surviving text
of which was probably a reconstruction from memory of the original performance text,
portraying the events of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, which
English Protestants invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery. It features
the silent "English Agent", whom subsequent tradition has identified with Marlowe
himself and his connections to the secret service. The Massacre at Paris is considered
his most dangerous play, as agitators in London seized on its theme to advocate the
murders of refugees from the low countries and, indeed, it warns Elizabeth I of this
possibility in its last scene.
The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, based on the
German Faustbuch, was the first dramatised version of the Faust legend of a scholar's
dealing with the devil. While versions of "The Devil's Pact" can be traced back to the
4th century, Marlowe deviates significantly by having his hero unable to "burn his
books" or repent to a merciful God in order to have his contract annulled at the end of
the play. Marlowe's protagonist is instead torn apart by demons and dragged off
screaming to hell. Dr Faustus is a textual problem for scholars as it was highly edited
(and possibly censored) and rewritten after Marlowe's death. Two versions of the play
exist: the 1604 quarto, also known as the A text, and the 1616 quarto or B text.
Scholars have disagreed which text is more representative of Marlowe's original, and
some editions are based on a combination of the two. The latest scholarly consensus
(as of the late 20th century) holds the A text is more representative because it contains
irregular character names and idiosyncratic spelling, which are believed to reflect a
text based on the author's handwritten manuscript, or "foul papers".
Marlowe's plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the
imposing stage presence of Edward Alleyn. Alleyn was unusually tall for the time, and
the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were probably written
especially for him. Marlowe's plays were the foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn's
company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s.
Marlowe also wrote the poem Hero and Leander (published with a continuation
by George Chapman in 1598), the popular lyric "The Passionate Shepherd to His
Love", and translations of Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia. In
1599, his translation of Ovid was banned and copies publicly burned as part of
Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on offensive material.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (26.04.1564-23.04.1616) was an English poet and
playwright widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the
world permanent dramatist. He is often call England’s national poet and “Bard of
Avon”. His extant works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 2 long narrative poems and
3 epitaphs. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are
performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point,
and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career.
Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain
controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well-attested
contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of
the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of
Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's
plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts suggest that Titus
Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen
of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. His first histories, which
draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and
have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early
plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas
Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays
of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source
for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of
the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like The Two Gentlemen of
Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the Shrew's story of the
taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics
and directors.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double
plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic
atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture
of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the
equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish
moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to
modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming
rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete
Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost
entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late
1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex
and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry,
and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends
with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually
charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas
North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of
drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the
various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even
Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays"
Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a
number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest
tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most
famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other
Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or
not to be; that is the question". Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is
hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone
by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such
fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In
Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders
the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error
of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of
the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According
to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its
audience any relief from its cruelty". In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of
Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady
Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt
destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the
tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus,
contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful
tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and
completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as
well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these
four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with
reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators
have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on
Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.
Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two
Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title
page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by
three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were
performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of
the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges
recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a
room". When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they
pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first
playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.
The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged.
Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including
Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they
entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance
records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court
between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The
Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre
during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with
the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce
more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder
and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their
knees."
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage,
William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role
in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III,
Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the
servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among
other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert
Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King
Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many
extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon
set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which
pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.
In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from
the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It
contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time. Many of the plays had
already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded
twice to make four leaves. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these
editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies". Alfred
Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or
garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory. Where
several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may
stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or
from Shakespeare's own papers. In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and
Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto
and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern additions do
conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the
Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without
confusion.
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare
published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and
Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of
Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by
Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from
uncontrolled lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's
lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman
laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the
Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's
Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. The
Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the
deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two
early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published
under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic
works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was
composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career
for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The
Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's
"sugred Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published
collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two
contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark
complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the
"fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the
authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth
believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".
The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter"
of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by
the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page;
nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether
Shakespeare even authorised the publication. Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound
meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.
Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He
wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs
of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate
metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to
declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of
some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two
Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.
Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own
purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of
Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks
forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. No single play marks a
change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two
throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing
of the styles. By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's
Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He
increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic
pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted
of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank
verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often
beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the
risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to
interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the
poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to
convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind.
Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre. Like
all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and
Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as
many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures
that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without
loss to its core drama. As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer
and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects
of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he
deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of
theatre.
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature.
In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language,
and genre. Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a
worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information
about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.
His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive
Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described
all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on
Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and
Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to
Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King
Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works.
These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical
standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many
painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist
Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of
Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less
standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English.
Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of
the English Language, the first serious work of its type. Expressions such as "with
bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found
their way into everyday English speech.
Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of
praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of
English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy. And the authors
of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer,
Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the
age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked
elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art".
Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th
century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated
Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Rymer, for example,
condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and
critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I
love Shakespeare". For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th
century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what
they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those
of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing
reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the 18th and 19th
centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were
the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.
During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary
philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel
translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the 19th century, critical
admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation. "That King
Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in
crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying
signs; indestructible". The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a
grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of
Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's
plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.
The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from
discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde.
The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of
his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under
the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that
Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern. Eliot, along with G.
Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer
reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches
replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare. By
the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism,
feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies. Speculation
about Shakespeare
Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about
the authorship of the works attributed to him. Proposed alternative candidates include
Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Several "group theories" have also been proposed. Only a small minority of academics
believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution, but interest in the subject,
particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st
century.
Restoration drama and comedy
Period between 1660 and Glorious Revolution 1688/89.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Earlier in the century, Stuart Kings James I & Charles I try to govern without
Parliament (which holds important taxation rights), in keeping with growth of
absolutism in France. This leads to first modern revolutionary process, struggle
between Charles I & Parliament: 1st civil war 1642 to 1646, royalist Cavaliers against
Oliver Cromwell's parliamentary army, which consists mainly of Puritan-Calvinist
Independentists known as Roundheads (military hairstyle). Puritans ("dissenters,"
especially two groups, Calvinist Independentists & Presbyterians) insist on individual
believer's direct access to God, against episcopal church & monarchic authority.
In 1st civil war Charles I defeated, but then reaches agreement with
Presbyterians against Cromwell's party; in retaliation Cromwell's party launch new
war in 1648 (2nd civil war), seize and execute Charles I in 1649.
Cromwell dismisses Presbyterians from Parliament: "rump parliament," republic
or commonwealth with Cromwell as Lord Protector. Puritan Interregnum 1649 to
1660: during this period theatres are closed (from 1642 on), because associated with
royal court.
Economic grounds of civil war: urban mercantile class & gentry with business
investments are interested in free trade, against state/royal interference.
After its victory, in 1650s Parliament opposes Cromwell's policies, many
factions come into being, finally Parliament dissolved in 1658; shortly after this
Cromwell dies.
Since his son is rather weak, general agreement to restore Stuart dynasty:
Charles II ascends throne in 1660 (Restoration).
However, the question of royal succession soon becomes contentious: Charles's
legal successor is his brother, James II (who succeeds to the throne in 1685, as a
Roman Catholic under strong French influence), supported by Tories (who later
become the Conservative Party) against Whigs. The opposition against James invite
Charles II's Protestant nephew William of Orange to take the crown (1688).
William is supported by the Pope, James flees to France, no bloodshed:
"Glorious Revolution." End of absolutist tendencies in Britain, Parliament steadily
growing stronger. Dissenters & Roman Catholics are excluded from Parliament, but
become capable of influencing public opinion by writing (Habermas, Strukturwandel
der Öffentlichkeit).
CULTURE & DRAMA
Cultural climate of Restoration: classicist influence from French court,
fashionable society with "man about town" (beau, rake): such a person lives from
produce of his land, leaving ample time to visit other fashionable people, generally
low moral standards. Theatres reopened, in small well-furnished rooms, for social
elites, entrance 1-2 shillings, first female actors. Drama develops stimuli from early
17th-century drama, e.g., Ben Jonson's comedy of humours depicting character types.
Love & sexuality represented as being close to money/business, a kind of public
activity associated with gambling/hunting, & with exercise of power over others, much
use of intrigue—disguise—pretence, zest for staging oneself.
Comedy of manners, as domestic & drawing room comedy, holding up mirror
to fashionable society. Older generation of dramatists: George Etherege (1635-91),
William Wycherley (1640-1716); younger generation William Congreve (1670-1729),
Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726, best known as architect), George Farquhar (16781707).
Etherege's best-known drama The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676).
Enclosed society of well-to-do upper class people visiting each other, public sphere
governed by social rules of correct behaviour. Hero is Dorimant (a "wit" and man
about town, with a past) who is drawn to heroine Harriet, his intellectual equal, but
they distrust each other; battle of wits, raillery, puns, aphorisms; misunderstandings
and intrigues until final marriage. Character types: beau, witwould, cuckold, country
bumpkin.
Goldsmith and Georgian Comedy
Though She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith, is often dubbed a
“Restoration comedy” by publicists and reviewers, in fact, it opened in 1773—over a
hundred years after restoration of the monarchy in England, which occurred in 1660.
The similarity between She Stoops to Conquer and Restoration comedies is no
accident. With She Stoops to Conquer (and his essay on sentimental and laughing
comedies), Goldsmith was, in fact, attempting to bring back Restoration-type
“laughing comedies,” which had fallen out of favor as “sentimental comedies” had
taken over the stage. Along with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the author of two later
comedies, The School for Scandal (1776) and The Rivals (1775), Goldsmith led a
reaction against sentimentalism on the stage. The sentimental plays had arisen partly
in response to the seeming immorality of Restoration comedies, which typically
depicted a rakish, decidedly unvirtuous hero whose vices go unpunished. In contrast,
sentimental comedies generally portrayed resistance to temptation and virtue’s final
triumph.
In reacting against the trend of didactic and moralistic sentimental comedies,
Goldsmith drew inspiration from his past. Goldsmith would have been very well
steeped in the English drama that preceded him—during Goldsmith’s time, the
repertory at the theater companies consisted of approximately 1/3 English Renaissance
plays (such as Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe), 1/3 Restoration plays (by writers
such as Dryden, Wycherley, and Congreve), and 1/3 new plays by writers such as
Goldsmith, Sheridan, and their contemporaries. Goldsmith and Sheridan drew upon
their antecedents (particularly the Restoration comedies), writing comedies which
mocked the social mores and behavior of the upper class. Their comedies emphasized
wit, often took a somewhat critical view of romantic love, and generally prized nimble
social skills and adept self-promotion over virtue and honest dealing. With She Stoops
to Conquer, it is clear that Goldsmith cannot entirely leave the sentimental comedy
behind (indeed, there are traces of it throughout the play). Nevertheless, his play marks
a significant departure from the form, an innovation which was not emulated by the
playwrights who followed him—the plays written after Goldsmith’s time became even
more sentimental, eventually developing into the form “melodrama.”
Domestic tragedy
domestic tragedy, drama in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middleclass or lower-class individuals, in contrast to classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in
which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair
of state as well as a personal matter.
The earliest known examples of domestic tragedy are three anonymous late
Elizabethan dramas: Arden of Feversham (c. 1591), the story of the murder of Mr.
Arden by his wife and her lover and their subsequent execution; A Warning for Faire
Women (1599), which deals with the murder of a merchant by his wife; and A
Yorkshire Tragedy (c. 1606), in which a father destroys his family. To these may be
added Thomas Heywood’s less sensational but no less tragic A Woman Kilde with
Kindnesse (1607). Domestic tragedy did not take hold, however, until reintroduced in
the 18th century by George Lillo with The London Merchant, or the History of George
Barnwell (1731). The popularity of this sordid drama of an apprentice who murders his
uncle-guardian influenced domestic tragedy in France and Germany, where the
dramatist and critic G.E. Lessing, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–69), paved
the way for its critical acceptance.
Domestic tragedy found its mature expression in the plays of Henrik Ibsen
toward the end of the 19th century. In earlier domestic dramas by other playwrights
the protagonists were sometimes villains and at other times merely pathetic, but the
bourgeois heroes of Ibsen’s Brand (1866), Rosmersholm (1886), The Master Builder
(1892), and When We Dead Awaken (1899) are endowed with some of the isolated
grandeur of the heroes of classical tragedy.
A tragedy on a humbler social level than that of the middle class, Woyzeck, was
written as early as 1836 by the German dramatist Georg Büchner. Its hero, a poor
soldier and former serf, is so reduced in status he finds employment as a doctor’s
guinea pig. Yet the work has a shattering tragic impact and bears out the precept stated
by another German tragic dramatist of the 19th century, Friedrich Hebbel: “One need
only be a man, after all, to have a destiny.” Woyzeck was well in advance of its time;
lower class tragedy did not come to the fore until the turn of the 20th century with
such works as Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber (1892; The Weavers) and Rose Bernd
(1903). Other outstanding examples are Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into
Night (1956), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), and Lillian Hellman’s The
Children’s Hour (1934).
Burlesque
Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by
caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their
subjects. The word derives from the Italian burlesco, which itself derives from the
Italian burla – a joke, ridicule or mockery.
Burlesque overlaps in meaning with caricature, parody and travesty, and, in its
theatrical sense, with extravaganza, as presented during the Victorian era. "Burlesque"
has been used in English in this literary and theatrical sense since the late 17th century.
It has been applied retrospectively to works of Chaucer and Shakespeare and to the
Graeco-Roman classics. Contrasting examples of literary burlesque are Alexander
Pope's sly The Rape of the Lock and Samuel Butler's irreverent Hudibras. An example
of musical burlesque is Richard Strauss's 1890 Burleske for piano and orchestra.
Examples of theatrical burlesques include W. S. Gilbert's Robert the Devil and the A.
C. Torr – Meyer Lutz shows, including Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué.
A later use of the term, particularly in the United States, refers to performances
in a variety show format. These were popular from the 1860s to the 1940s, often in
cabarets and clubs, as well as theatres, and featured bawdy comedy and female
striptease. Some Hollywood films attempted to recreate the spirit of these
performances from the 1930s to the 1960s, or included burlesque-style scenes within
dramatic films, such as 1972's Cabaret and 1979's All That Jazz, among others. There
has been a resurgence of interest in this format since the 1990s.
he word first appears in a title in Francesco Berni's Opere burlesche of the early
16th century, works that had circulated widely in manuscript before they were printed.
For a time burlesque verses were known as poesie bernesca in his honour. 'Burlesque'
as a literary term became widespread in 17th century Italy and France, and
subsequently England, where it referred to a grotesque imitation of the dignified or
pathetic. Shakespeare's Pyramus and Thisbe scene in Midsummer Night's Dream and
the general mocking of romance in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning
Pestle were early examples of such imitation.
In 17th century Spain, playwright and poet Miguel de Cervantes ridiculed
medieval romance in his many satirical works. Among Cervantes' works are
Exemplary Novels and the Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes published in
1615. The term burlesque has been applied retrospectively to works of Chaucer and
Shakespeare and to the Graeco-Roman classics.
Burlesque was intentionally ridiculous in that it imitated several styles and
combined imitations of certain authors and artists with absurd descriptions. In this, the
term was often used interchangeably with "pastiche", "parody", and the 17th and 18th
century genre of the "mock-heroic". Burlesque depended on the reader's (or listener's)
knowledge of the subject to make its intended effect, and a high degree of literacy was
taken for granted.
17th and 18th century burlesque was divided into two types: High burlesque
refers to a burlesque imitation where a literary, elevated manner was applied to a
commonplace or comically inappropriate subject matter as, for example, in the literary
parody and the mock-heroic. One of the most commonly cited examples of high
burlesque is Alexander Pope's "sly, knowing and courtly" The Rape of the Lock. Low
burlesque applied an irreverent, mocking style to a serious subject; an example is
Samuel Butler's poem Hudibras, which described the misadventures of a Puritan
knight in satiric doggerel verse, using a colloquial idiom. Butler's addition to his comic
poem of an ethical subtext made his caricatures into satire.
In more recent times, burlesque true to its literary origins is still performed in
revues and sketches. Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties is an example of a fulllength play drawing on the burlesque tradition.
Victorian burlesque, sometimes known as "travesty" or "extravaganza", was
popular in London theatres between the 1830s and the 1890s. It took the form of
musical theatre parody in which a well-known opera, play or ballet was adapted into a
broad comic play, usually a musical play, often risqué in style, mocking the theatrical
and musical conventions and styles of the original work, and quoting or pastiching text
or music from the original work. The comedy often stemmed from the incongruity and
absurdity of the classical subjects, with realistic historical dress and settings, being
juxtaposed with the modern activities portrayed by the actors. Madame Vestris
produced burlesques at the Olympic Theatre beginning in 1831 with Olympic Revels
by J. R. Planché. Other authors of burlesques included H. J. Byron, G. R. Sims, F. C.
Burnand, W. S. Gilbert and Fred Leslie.
Victorian burlesque related to and in part derived from traditional English
pantomime "with the addition of gags and 'turns'." In the early burlesques, following
the example of ballad opera, the words of the songs were written to popular music;
later burlesques mixed the music of opera, operetta, music hall and revue, and some of
the more ambitious shows had original music composed for them. This English style
of burlesque was successfully introduced to New York in the 1840s.
Some of the most frequent subjects for burlesque were the plays of Shakespeare
and grand opera. The dialogue was generally written in rhyming couplets, liberally
peppered with bad puns. A typical example from a burlesque of Macbeth: Macbeth
and Banquo enter under an umbrella, and the witches greet them with "Hail! hail!
hail!" Macbeth asks Banquo, "What mean these salutations, noble thane?" and is told,
"These showers of 'Hail' anticipate your 'reign'". A staple of burlesque was the display
of attractive women in travesty roles, dressed in tights to show off their legs, but the
plays themselves were seldom more than modestly risqué.
Burlesque became the speciality of certain London theatres, including the Gaiety
and Royal Strand Theatre from the 1860s to the early 1890s. Until the 1870s,
burlesques were often one-act pieces running less than an hour and using pastiches and
parodies of popular songs, opera arias and other music that the audience would readily
recognize. The house stars included Nellie Farren, John D'Auban, Edward Terry and
Fred Leslie. From about 1880, Victorian burlesques grew longer, until they were a
whole evening's entertainment rather than part of a double- or triple-bill. In the early
1890s, these burlesques went out of fashion in London, and the focus of the Gaiety and
other burlesque theatres changed to the new more wholesome but less literary genre of
Edwardian musical comedy.
19th century revival with the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde;
British Theatre in the 20th century – comedies of Noel Coward, naturalistic
school of drama with J. Galsworthy, Alan Ayckburn, Tom Stoppard, the
absurd school of Samuel Becket, the social drama of J. Osborne, the blend of
realism and the absurd in the plays of Harold Pinter;
Two exiled Irish writers influenced British culture in important ways as the 19th
century turned.
The most celebrated dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar
Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who, in a sense, pioneered the modern drama,
though they did not make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist
poets or novelists.
Wilde expressed a satirical and bitter attitude towards the upper-class people by
revealing their corruption, their snobbery, and their hypocrisy in his plays, especially
in his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which premiered at St.
James's Theatre in London on the 14th of February, 1895.
A Woman of No Importance (first performed in 1893) can be considered Oscar Wilde’s
‘follow-up’ to the theatrical success of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892).The play
premiеred on 19 April 1893 at London's Haymarket Theatre. It is a testimony of
Wilde's wit and his brand of dark comedy.
Taken together, Wilde’s comedies echo the plays of his time, but increasingly lampoon
conventional moral dilemmas with a unique combination of puns, paradoxes, and
playful anticlimax. The Importance of Being Earnest marked the boldest stride in this
direction, a departure from even his own prior ventures. It might well have launched
him yet further into experimentation, for Wilde’s commercial success and public
acclaim gave him unprecedented influence as a playwright.
Shaw is is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare
whose works are examples of the plays inspired by social criticism.
 Widowers' House (1885) ---his first play
 Mrs. Warren's Profession (1892)
 Arms and the Man (1894)
 You Never Can Tell (written 1895)
 Candida (1897)
Although Shaw's plays focus on ideas and issues, they are vital and absorbing,
enlivened by memorable characterizations, a brilliant command of language, and
dazzling wit.
His early plays were published as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (2 vol., 1898).
In 1897 The Devil's Disciple, a play on the American Revolution, was produced with
great success in New York City.
His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the
criticism of the contemporary social, economic, moral and religious evils.
 Widowers' House is a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism
 Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play about the economic oppression of
women
Shaw wrote quite a few history plays, in which he kept an eye on the contemporary
society.
 Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
The main characteristics of Bernard Shaw's plays:
 Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism.
 As a realistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim
of directing social reforms.
 Most of his plays, termed as problem plays, are concerned with political, economic,
moral, or religious problems.
 And his plays have only one passion, i.e. indignation against oppression and
exploitation, against hypocrisy and lying, against prostitution and slavery, against
poverty, dirt and disorder.
 One feature of Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one
character vividly at the expense of another.
- Noel Coward was an early 20th century British playwright known for his witty
dialogue and farcical situational comedies. Though best remembered for his early
plays, Coward had a long career as a composer and actor.
Though critics differ in their opinions of Coward’s greatest work, three of his
comedies are almost always mentioned as masterpieces. Private Lives, written in 1930,
details the comic disasters of a pair of newly-remarried ex-spouses who accidentally
rent adjoining honeymoon suites. Believed to be partially autobiographical, the 1939
comedy Present Laughter concerns a middle-aged actor terrified of his fortieth
birthday and desperately trying to avoid complications as he prepares for a world tour.
In Blithe Spirit, the deceased first wife of a man haunts him, determined to get rid of
his new spouse. Blithe Spirit had an enormously successful initial run of 1,997
performances, a recorded not beaten until the 1970s.
John Galsworthy (14 August 1867 – 31 January 1933)
Galsworthy was a thorough social idealist and a thorough artist. He possesses a
remarkable faculty to discover dramatic elements in natural and unforced situations.
He never introduces false themes, he always maintain a classic balance which can be
seen in his work. His work reveal that he is essentially English in his humor he wrote
plays first to instruct and then to delight. He was completely dissatisfied
with the French pattern plays of his days and wished to present real life. He says - “My
dramatic invasion, and the form of it, was dictated rather by revolt at the artificial
nature of the English play of the period, and by a resolute intention to present real life
on the stage “. Galsworthy believes the writer should make its audience think.
His plays are well made plays. The plays of Galsworthy are full of thought and
substance. He uses where
necessary the usual tricks of the melodrama, but he display a thorough artistic restraint
Galsworthy wrote his first play “The silver Box” in1906, in naturalistic manner. The
play had been praised by all class of audience. In his very first play he showed his
craftsmanship . This play is one of the first example of naturalistic school of England .
Sir Alan Ayckbourn, (born April 12, 1939, London, Eng.), successful and prolific
British playwright, whose works—mostly farces and comedies—deal with marital and
class conflicts and point up the fears and weaknesses of the English lower-middle
class. He wrote more than 70 plays and other entertainments, most of which were first
staged at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, Yorkshire, Eng.
His plays—many of which were performed years before they were published—
include Relatively Speaking (1968), Mixed Doubles: An Entertainment on
Marriage (1970), How the Other Half Loves(1971), the trilogy The Norman
Conquests (1973), Absurd Person Singular (1974), Intimate Exchanges (1985), Mr.
A’s Amazing Maze Plays (1989), Body Language (1990), Invisible
Friends(1991), Communicating Doors (1995), Comic Potential (1999). Ayckbourn
produced his earliest plays in 1959–61 under the pseudonym Roland Allen.
Tom Stoppard, original name Tomas Straussler, in full Sir Tom Stoppard (born
July 3, 1937, Zlín, Czech Republic), Czech-born British playwright whose work is
marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and structural dexterity.
His play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1964–65) was performed at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1966. That same year his only novel, Lord Malquist & Mr.
Moon, was published. His play was the greater success: it entered the repertory of
Britain’s National Theatre in 1967 and rapidly became internationally renowned. The
irony and brilliance of this work derive from Stoppard’s placing two minor
characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the centre of the dramatic action.
Among the most-notable stage plays were The Real Inspector
Hound (1968), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Every Good Boy Deserves
Favour (1978), Night and Day (1978), Undiscovered Country (1980, adapted from a
play by Arthur Schnitzler), and On the Razzle (1981, adapted from a play by Johann
Nestroy). The Real Thing (1982), Stoppard’s first romantic comedy, deals with art and
reality and features a playwright as a protagonist.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avantgarde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his
adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a
bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black
comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th
century.[2] Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the
last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes
considered one of the firstpostmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin
Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in
his later career.
John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an
English playwright, screenwriter, actor and critic of the Establishment. The success of
his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. Osborne was one of
the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first
to question the point of themonarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak
(1956–1966), he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage
emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and
combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.
Osborne did change the world of theatre, influencing playwrights such as Edward
Albee and Mike Leigh. However, work of his kind of authenticity and originality
would remain the exception rather than the rule. This did not surprise Osborne; nobody
understood the tackiness of the theatre better than the man who had played Hamlet on
Hayling Island.
Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning
English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential
modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His bestknown plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964),
and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay
adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The
French Lieutenant's Woman (1981),The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also
directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others'
works.
Pinter was the author of 29 plays and 15 dramatic sketches and the co-author of two
works for stage and radio. He was considered to have been one of the most influential
modern British dramatists, Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The
Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his
plays received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His style
has entered the English language as an adjective, "Pinteresque", although Pinter
himself disliked the term and found it meaningless.
2. Musical life in Britain.
Musical styles, leading composers.
The music of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of music associated
with the United Kingdom since its creation.
Throughout its history, the United Kingdom has been a major exporter
and source of musical innovation in the modern and contemporary eras,
drawing its cultural basis from the history of the United Kingdom, from
church music, from Western culture and from the ancient and traditional folk
music and instrumentation of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
In the 20th century, influences from the music of the United States became
most dominant in popular music. This led to the explosion of the British
Invasion, while subsequent notable movements in British music include the
New Wave of British Heavy Metal and Britpop. The United Kingdom has one
of the world's largest music industries today, with many British musicians
having had an impact on modern music.
Early music
Music in the British Isles, from the earliest recorded times until the
Baroque and the rise of recognisably modern classical music, was a diverse
and rich culture, including sacred and secular music and ranging from the
popular to the elite. Each of the major nations of England, Ireland, Scotland
and Wales retained unique forms of music and of instrumentation, but British
music was highly influenced by continental developments, while British
composers made an important contribution to many of the major movements
in early music in Europe, including the polyphony of the Ars Nova and laid
some of the foundations of later national and international classical music.
Musicians from the British Isles also developed some distinctive forms of
music, including Celtic chant, the ContenanceAngloise, the rota, polyphonic
votive antiphons and the carol in the medieval era.
Church music and religious music was profoundly affected by the
Protestant Reformation which affected Britain from the 16th century, which
curtailed events associated with British music and forced the development of
distinctive national music, worship and belief. English madrigals, lute ayres
and masques in the Renaissance era led particularly to English language opera
developed in the early Baroque period of the later seventeenth century. In
contrast, court music of the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland,
although having unique elements remained much more integrated into wider
European culture.
Baroque music
The Baroque era in music, between the early music of the Medieval and
Renaissance periods and the development of fully fledged and formalised
orchestral classical music in the second half of the eighteenth century, was
characterised by more elaborate musical ornamentation, changes in musical
notation, new instrumental playing techniques and the rise of new genres such
as opera. Although the term Baroque is conventionally used for European
music from about 1600, its full effects were not felt in Britain until after 1660,
delayed by native trends and developments in music, religious and cultural
differences from many European countries and the disruption to court music
caused by the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and Interregnum.[4] Under the
restored Stuart monarchy the court became once again a centre of musical
patronage, but royal interest in music tended to be less significant as the
seventeenth century progressed, to be revived again under the House of
Hanover.
British chamber and orchestral music drew inspiration from continental
Europe as it developed into modern classical music. The Baroque era in
British music can be seen as one of an interaction of national and international
trends, sometimes absorbing continental fashions and practices and sometimes
attempting, as in the creation of ballad opera, to produce an indigenous
tradition. However, arguably the most significant British composer of the era,
George Frideric Handel, was a naturalised German, who helped integrate
British and continental music and define the future of the classical music of
the United Kingdom that would be officially formed in 1801.
Classical
Music
Musical composition, performance and training in the United Kingdom
inherited the European classical traditions of the eighteenth century (above all,
in Britain, from the example of Handel) and saw a great expansion during the
nineteenth century. Romantic nationalism encouraged clear national identities
and sensibilities within the countries of the United Kingdom towards the end
of the nineteenth century, producing many composers and musicians of note
and drawing on the folk tradition. These traditions, including the cultural
strands drawn from the United Kingdom's constituent nations and provinces,
have continued to evolve in distinctive ways through the work of such
composers as Arthur Sullivan, Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Hubert Parry,
Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten
Folk music
Each of the four countries of the United Kingdom has its own diverse
and distinctive folk music forms. In addition, there are numerous distinct and
semi-distinct folk traditions brought by immigrants from Jamaica, India, the
Commonwealth and other parts of the world. Folk music flourished until the
era of industrialisation when it began to be replaced by new forms of popular
music, including music hall and brass bands. Realisation of this led to two folk
revivals, one in the late-19th century and the other in the mid-20th century,
which kept folk music as an important sub-culture within society.
England has a long and diverse history of folk music dating back at least
to the medieval period and including many forms of music, song and dance.
Through two periods of revival from the late nineteenth century much of the
tradition has been preserved and continues to be practiced. It led to the
creation of a number of fusions with other forms of music that produced subgenres such as electric folk, folk punk and folk metal and continues to thrive
nationally and in regional scenes, particularly in areas such as Northumbria
and Cornwall.
Northern Irish music
Ireland, including Northern Ireland, has vibrant folk traditions. The
popularity of traditional instruments such as fiddles has remained throughout
the centuries even as analogues in Great Britain died out. Perhaps the most
famous modern musician from Northern Ireland influenced by folk tradition is
Van Morrison.
Scottish folk music
Scottish folk music includes many kinds of songs, including ballads and
laments, sung by a single singer with accompaniment by bagpipes, fiddles or
harps. Traditional dances include waltzes, reels, strathspeys and jigs.
Alongside the other areas of the United Kingdom, Scotland underwent a roots
revival in the 1960s. Cathy-Ann McPhee and Jeannie Robertson were the
heroes of this revival, which inspired some revolutions in band formats by
groups like The Clutha, The Whistlebinkies, The Boys of the Lough and the
Incredible String Band.
Welsh folk music
Wales is a Celtic country that features folk music played at twmpathau
(communal dances) and gwylwerin (music festivals). Welsh music also
includes male voice choirs and songs accompanied by a harp. Having long
been subordinate to English culture, Welsh musicians in the late 20th century
had to reconstruct traditional music when a roots revival began. This revival
began in the late 1970s and achieved some mainstream success in the UK in
the 80s with performers like Robin Huw Bowen, Moniars and Gwerinos.
Early British popular music
In the sense of commercial music enjoyed by the people, British popular
music can be seen to originate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with
the arrival of the broadside ballad, which were sold cheaply and in great
numbers until the nineteenth century. Further technological, economic and
social changes led to new forms of music in the nineteenth century, including
the brass band, which produced a popular and communal form of classical
music. Similarly, the music hall sprang up to cater for the entertainment of
new urban societies, adapting existing forms of music to produce popular
songs and acts. In the 1930s the influence of American Jazz led to the creation
of British dance bands, who provided a social and popular music that began to
dominate social occasions and the radio airwaves.
British popular music
Forms of popular music, including folk music, jazz, pop and rock music,
have particularly flourished in Britain since the twentieth century. Britain has
had an impact on popular music disproportionate to its size, due to its
linguistic and cultural links with many countries, particularly the United States
and many of its former colonies like Australia, South Africa, and Canada, and
its capacity for invention, innovation and fusion, which has led to the
development of, or participation in, many of the major trends in popular
music. In the early-20th century, influences from the United States became
most dominant in popular music, with young performers producing their own
versions of American music, including rock n' roll from the late 1950s and
developing a parallel music scene. This is particularly true since the early
1960s when the British Invasion, led by The Beatles, helped to secure British
performers a major place in development of pop and rock music. Since then,
rock music and popular music contributed to a British-American collaboration,
with trans-Atlantic genres being exchanged and exported to one another,
where they tended to be adapted and turned into new movements, only to be
exported back again. Genres originating in or radically developed by British
musicians include blues rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, hard rock, punk
rock, electric folk, folk punk, acid jazz, trip hop, shoegaze, drum and bass,
grime, Britpop and dubstep.
William Byrd was born in London in 1540. Two of his brothers became
choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral and, around 1550, he himself may have joined
the boys of the Chapel Royal. His early musical training was overseen by adult
members of the chapel, among them Thomas Tallis, who taught him keyboard
playing. By March 1563 he was appointed organist of Lincoln Cathedral, a
post secured on favourable financial terms and supported by the grant of a
rectory.
Even in an era so richly stocked with great names, William Byrd
demands particular attention as the most prodigiously talented, prolific, and
versatile composer of his contemporaries. Byrd was born in about 1543, and it
is assumed that he was a chorister in the Chapel Royal (his brothers were
choristers at St. Paul's Cathedral) and a student of Thomas Tallis. He was
named organist and master of choristers of Lincoln Cathedral at the age of 20,
where he wrote most of his works in English and music for Anglican services.
This music and his anthems provided the young English church with some of
its finest music. In 1570 he was appointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal,
where he shared the post of organist with Thomas Tallis. Queen Elizabeth I,
despite Byrd's intense commitment to Catholicism, was one of his benefactors,
and granted him and Tallis a patent to print music in 1575. Their first
publication was a collection of five- to eight-part, Latin motets, but they
published little else. Around the same time, Byrd began composing for the
virginal. His contribution to the solo keyboard repertoire comprises some 125
pieces, mostly stylized dances or exceptionally inventive sets of variations
which inaugurated a golden age of English keyboard composition.
During the 1580s and 1590s, Byrd's Catholicism was the driving motive
for his music. As the persecutions of Catholics increased during this period,
and occasionally touched on Byrd and his family, he wrote and openly
published motets and three masses (one each in three, four, and five parts),
which are his finest achievement in sacred music, almost certainly composed
for small chapel gatherings of Catholics. Byrd had taken up the publishing
business again, printing the first English songbook, Psalmes, Sonets and Songs
in 1588. This and his other songbooks include Byrd's compositions in the
leading secular genres of the day: the ayre or lute song, the madrigal, and the
consort song for solo voice and viols. The consort song's finest hour came at
the hands of Byrd, who preferred texts of a high moral (frequently religious) or
metaphysical tone. They are notable for the way the viol parts lead an
existence independent of the vocal line. He openly published two Gradualia in
1605 and 1607, with music for the Propers of all the major feast days. His last
collection, Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets from 1611, consisted mostly of
previously published works, but did include two of his viol consort works.
Byrd is at his most distinguished in the free fantasias for consort, particularly
the later pieces in five and six parts, works of exceptionally luxurious texture.
Byrd's last songs were published in 1614, and he lived out his life comfortably
at Stondon Massey, where he died in 1623.
Thomas TallisThe career of Thomas Tallis, Gentleman of the Chapel
Royal, spanned a period of spectacular change in the English liturgical
climate. Born early in the sixteenth century, his first musical appointment was
as organist to a Benedictine (Catholic) Priory in Dover, two years before
Henry VIII's definitive break with Rome in 1534. By 1537, Tallis was serving
a London parish church as organist; in 1538 he was performing the same task
for the Abbey of Holy Cross, Waltham, though this position evaporated when
King Henry dissolved the monasteries in 1540. After a brief clerkship at
Canterbury Cathedral, Tallis joined the Chapel Royal, where he played, sang,
and composed for the remainder of his life, serving in turn Henry VIII,
Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I. Among the lavish rewards he
eventually reaped was a famous bequest of 1575, giving him and his young
pupil, William Byrd, a complete monopoly on the printing of music and ruled
music paper in England.
The liturgical music in England during this time underwent great
changes, not the least of which was the shift between Latin and vernacular
texts. At the outset of Tallis' career, the prevailing English style of Latin music
followed the soaring treble-dominated textures of the previous century, as
exemplified in the Eton Choirbook; his early Latin motets reflect this. But by
the late 1540s, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was working toward a standard
liturgical practice, built around his Book of Common Prayer, that would
finally replace the Sarum (English Latin) rite in 1559 with exclusively
vernacular worship music. The reign of the Catholic "Bloody" Mary Tudor
briefly interrupted this trajectory towards the vernacular with a militant
resurgence of Catholic music in an older style; Tallis' MissaPuernatus and the
motet Gaudegloriosa apparently date from this time. Stylistically, the church
music of England over the second half of the century was yielding to the
influence of the Continental imitative style, through the music of the
transplanted Italian, Ferrabosco.
Through all these changes, Tallis appears to have retained a professional
steadiness and respectability, making music and composing with grace and
equanimity as his situation changed. His English-language settings range from
simple treatments of the psalms to anthems (such as Hear the Voice and
Prayer) to three complete settings of the Anglican Service; this music is
commonly imbued with a somber and penitential mood. His Latin-texted
pieces, whether following the stylish "modern" mode of pervasive imitation or
not, demonstrate restraint and even tenderness. (One of the few exceptions,
though, is his best-known work today, an over-the-top and still rather
mysterious experiment in polychoral writing, the 40-voiced Spem in alium).
Surprisingly little of Tallis' instrumental music survives, despite his over 50
years of professional organ playing.
As England's greatest composer of the Baroque, Henry Purcell was
dubbed the "Orpheus Britannicus" for his ability to combine pungent English
counterpoint with expressive, flexible, and dramatic word settings. While he
did write instrumental music, including the important viol fantasias, the vast
majority of his output was in the vocal/choral realm. His only opera, Dido and
Aeneas, divulged his sheer mastery in the handling of the work's vast
expressive canvas, which included lively dance numbers, passionate arias and
rollicking choruses. Purcell also wrote much incidental music for stage
productions, including that for Dryden's King Arthur. His church music
includes many anthems, devotional songs, and other sacred works, but few
items for Anglican services.
Purcell was born in 1659 to Henry Purcell, master of choristers at
Westminster Abbey, and his wife Elizabeth. When he was five, his father died,
forcing his mother to resettle the family of six children into a more modest
house and lifestyle. In about 1668, Purcell became a chorister in the Chapel
Royal, studying under chorus master Henry Cooke. He also took keyboard
lessons from Christopher Gibbons, son of the composer Orlando Gibbons, and
it is likely that he studied with John Blow and Matthew Locke. In 1673,
Purcell was appointed assistant to John Hingeston, the royal instrument
keeper.
On September 10, 1677, Purcell was given the Court position of
composer-in-ordinary for the violins. It is believed that many of his church
works date from this time. Purcell, a great keyboard virtuoso by his late teens,
received a second important post in 1679, this one succeeding Blow as
organist at Westminster Abbey, a position he would retain all his life. That
same year saw the publication of five of the young composer's songs in John
Playford's Choice Ayres and Songs to Sing to the Theorbo-lute or Bass-viol.
Around the same time, he began writing anthems with string accompaniment,
completing over a dozen before 1685, and welcome songs. Purcell was
appointed one of three organists at the Chapel Royal in the summer of 1682,
his most prestigious post yet.
Purcell composed his first ode for St. Cecilia's Day in 1683. The
following month, upon Hingeston's death, he was named royal instrument
keeper while retaining his other posts. The composer remained quite prolific in
the middle part of the decade, primarily producing music for royal occasions.
In 1685 the new King, James II, introduced many changes at Court, one of
which was to make Purcell the Court harpsichordist and Blow the Court
composer. Near the end of 1687, Queen Mary's pregnancy was announced and
Purcell was commissioned to compose an anthem for Psalm 128, Blessed are
they that fear the Lord. Many other of his anthems appeared in 1688, as did
one of his more famous ones for church use, O sing unto the Lord.
With the ascension of William and Mary to the throne on April 11, 1689,
Purcell retained his post as royal instrument keeper, and he, along with Blow
and Alexander Damazene, shared the duties of Court composers. With his
royal duties reduced, he was able to pursue other opportunities, including
teaching and writing for other organizations. One of Purcell's greatest
successes came in 1689 with the production of Dido and Aeneas. He then
collaborated with John Dryden on King Arthur in 1691, and also composed the
music for The Fairy-Queen (1692), based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream both productions also scoring triumphs. In the final year of his
life Purcell remained exceedingly busy, writing much for the stage, including
The Indian Queen, left incomplete at his death on November 21, 1695.
John Gay
John Gay was born in Barnstaple, Devon, England on June 30, 1685. At
the age of 10, Gay was orphaned and his uncle, the Reverend John Hammer,
agreed to take care of him. After finishing his education at the Barnstable
Grammar School, Gay went to London to be an apprentice to a silk merchant.
1 Disliking the work, Gay left the merchant to work briefly for Arthur Hill,
who became manager of a theater company. In 1712, in his late twenties, Gay
was a secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth. He also worked as a secretary to
Lord Clarendon. 2 During his time in London, Gay established relationships
with Londoners and became a part of the city society.
In 1713, Gay published the poem "Rural Sports," a comic description of
hunting and fishing, and inscribed it to Alexander Pope, a prominent writer of
the time. Pope appreciated the honor and soon became acquainted with Gay. 3
Pope and Gay became lifelong friends and colleagues. Gay also became close
with the writer Jonathon Swift; Pope and Swift both encouraged Gay to
continue writing and publishing his work. Gay studied with Georg Frideric
Handel, the greatest opera composer at the time in London. Gay's love for
music transferred into much of his writings for the stage; he included some
type of music in many of his plays. 4
Gay published poems, fables, plays, and ballad operas. His most notable
works include: 5
The Shepherd's Weeks, a series of mock-classical pastoral poems (1714)
What D'Ye Call It, a satirical play (1715)
"Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London," a poem (1716)
Three Hours after Marriage, a comedy written with Alexander Pope and
John Arbuthnot (1717)
Acis and Galatea, the libretto to Handel's opera and Gay's final attempt
at ballad opera (1719)
Poems on Several Occasions, a set of poems (1720)
Fables, a set of beast fables (1727-38)
Fifty-One Fables in Verse (1727)
The Beggar's Opera, his famous ballad opera (1728)
Polly, the sequel to The Beggar's Opera which was published but not
performed (1729)
Achilles (1733)
Although Gay wrote numerous poems and plays, his ballad opera The
Beggar's Opera was certainly his greatest success and his most important
contribution. John Gay is credited with the first success of the ballad opera
genre. Although many scholars believe his ballad opera was the only notable
one of its kind, many scholars also believe that his opera led to the popular and
successful operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. The success of the ballad opera
was immediate and Gay made a significant amount of money from the opera.
Even though Gay was successful as a writer, he was not a rich man.
Luckily, he made friends with some of the high society who helped support
him. Most notable were the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury. Gay met them
when he was working for the Duchess of Monmouth. The Duchess of
Queensbury became Gay's most important patron until his death.
John Gay died at the age of 47 on December 4, 1732 in London. He was
buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb
is taken from The Beggar's Opera and spoken by the Beggar, showing Gay's
humor until the end of his life: "Life is a Jest, and all Things show it: I thought
so once and now I know it".
Gilbert and Sullivanrefers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of
the librettist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan
(1842–1900). The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between
1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The
Mikado are among the best known.
Gilbert, who wrote the words, created fanciful "topsy-turvy" worlds for
these operas where each absurdity is taken to its logical conclusion—fairies
rub elbows with British lords, flirting is a capital offence, gondoliers ascend to
the monarchy, and pirates turn out to be noblemen who have gone wrong.
Sullivan, six years Gilbert's junior, composed the music, contributing
memorable melodies that could convey both humour and pathos.
Their operas have enjoyed broad and enduring international success and
are still performed frequently throughout the English-speaking world. Gilbert
and Sullivan introduced innovations in content and form that directly
influenced the development of musical theatre through the 20th century. The
operas have also influenced political discourse, literature, film and television
and have been widely parodied and pastiched by humorists. Producer Richard
D'Oyly Carte brought Gilbert and Sullivan together and nurtured their
collaboration. He built the Savoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works
(which came to be known as the Savoy Operas) and founded the D'Oyly Carte
Opera Company, which performed and promoted Gilbert and Sullivan's works
for over a century.
Their first major hit was HMS Pinafore (1878), satirizing the Royal
Navy and the British obsession with social status. The Pirates of Penzance
(1879), written in a fit of pique at American copyright pirates, also poked fun
at romantic melodrama, sense of duty, family obligation, and the relevance of
a liberal education. Patience (1881) satirized the aesthetic movement in
general and the poet and aesthete Oscar Wilde in particular. Iolanthe (1882)
pokes fun at English law and at the House of Lords. Ruddigore (1887) is a
topsy-turvy take on the Victorian Melodrama, and viciously satirizes that
entire genre. The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), their only joint work with a
tragic ending, concerns a strolling jester who finds himself embroiled in a
risky intrigue at the Tower of London. The Gondoliers (1889) pokes fun at the
plot devices of opera in the setting of a kingdom ruled by a pair of gondoliers
who try to run it in a spirit of 'republican equality'. Trial By Jury is rather selfevident, but is unique because it was the only operetta with no spoken
dialogue. Their most popular work was The Mikado (1885), where English
bureaucracy was made fun of in a Japanese setting.
Gilbert's plots remain perfect examples of 'topsy-turvydom,' in which
primeval fairies rub elbows with English lords, gondoliers ascend to the
monarchy and pirates reconcile with majors general. Gilbert's lyrics employ
double (and triple) rhyming and punning, and served as the very model for
such 20th century Broadway lyricists as Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz
Hart. Sullivan, a classically trained musician who devoted much of his career
to religious hymns and grand opera, contributed catchy melodies which were
also emotionally moving. As seamless as their onstage collaboration was,
Gilbert and Sullivan were temperamentally incompatible, and their partnership
was frequently ruptured. Their last joint work, The Grand Duke, opened in
1896, and the sickly Sullivan died four years later.
Their works were originally produced by British impresario Richard
D'Oyly Carte, considered by some to be the third member of this partnership,
who built the Savoy Theatre in London to present their operettas, and formed
the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which would perform the Savoy Operettas
with exacting detail until 1982. The Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were even
more popular abroad, and many American cities saw amateur and professional
Gilbert and Sullivan performing groups. This trend has continued to the
present day, and it can be argued that these operettas and The Mikado in
particular were instrumental in giving the particular shape to American
musical of the 20th century.
Moreover, many cultural movements saw the influence of Gilbert and
Sullvan. For instance, aestheticism, the cultural movement characterized by
Oscar Wilde and satirized in Patience, was actually brought to the United
States by Richard D'Oyly Carte so that Americans could understand the
operetta. In terms of humor, the idea of extending a joke throughout a piece of
literature and/or comedy work is prevalent in the Savoy Operas.
The 1999 Mike Leigh film Topsy-Turvy presents the most recent
acclaimed film depiction of the team and their creation of their most popular
operetta, The Mikado .
The works of Gilbert and Sullivan are frequently parodied or pastiched;
a notable example of this is Tom Lehrer's performance of the 'Major General's
Song' (from the operetta The Pirates of Penzance), with the chemical periodic
table of elements set to Sullivan's original music. (see Elements song) The
popular TV series Family Guy drew from Gilbert and Sullivan with a parody
of the 'Captain's Song' from H.M.S. Pinafore. Larry David's show Curb Your
Enthusiasm uses 'Three Little Maids' from The Mikado as background music.
One of the pre-eminent musical figures of his time, Edward William
Elgar (1857-1934) bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the finest
English composer since the days of Handel and Purcell. Elgar's father owned a
music shop and was a church organist who taught his son piano, organ, and
violin; apart from this instruction, Elgar was basically self-taught as a
musician. At the age of 16, the composer became a freelance musician and for
the remainder of his life never took a permanent job. He conducted locally,
performed, taught, and composed, scraping by until his marriage to Caroline
Alice Roberts, a published novelist of some wealth, in 1889.
Elgar had by this time achieved only limited recognition. He and his
wife moved to London, where he scarcely fared better in advancing his career.
They couple eventually retreated to Worcester, Elgar suffering from bitter selfdoubt and depression. Alice stood by him the entire time, her unfailing
confidence restoring his spirits. He was further buoyed by the success of his
Imperial March, Op. 32, which earned him a publisher and a vital friendship
with August Jaeger, his editor and confidant. In 1899, Elgar composed one of
his best-known works, the "Enigma" Variations, Op. 36, which catapulted him
to fame. The work is a cryptic tribute to Alice and to the many friends who
stood behind the composer in the shaky early days of his career. German
conductor Hans Richter proclaimed it a masterpiece, and his performances of
the work in Britain and Germany established the composer's lasting success.
Elgar's most fruitful period was the first decade of the twentieth century,
during which he wrote some of his noblest, most expressive music, including
the Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op. 55 (1907-1908), and the Violin
Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 (1909-1910). His best-known works from this
period, however, are the first four of his Pomp and Circumstance Marches
(1901-1907); the first of these, subtitled "Land of Hope and Glory," became an
unofficial second national anthem for the British Empire.
Elgar suffered a blow when Jaeger (the "Nimrod" of the "Enigma"
Variations) died in 1909. The composer's productivity dropped, and the
horrors of World War I deepened his melancholy outlook. His music became
more intimate, even anguished; still, he wrote some of his best chamber music
during this period, as well as the masterly Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
(1919), whose deep feeling of sadness and impending loss surely relates to the
final illness of his faithful Alice, who died in 1920.
For some time after that, he wrote little of significance but made a
historic foray into the recording studios when new electrical recording
processes were developed; the fortunate result was a number of masterly
interpretations of his own orchestral music that have survived for posterity. In
the early '30s, Elgar set to work on a third symphony, left unfinished at his
death in 1934. The work was brought to a generally well-received realization
by Anthony Payne in the late '90s and was subsequently recorded.
John Taverner is considered the most important figure in English music
of his time. His compositions exist in about 30 manuscripts that were copied
over about a 100-year period, beginning around the late 1520s. It is believed
that many of his works were lost; a good many others survive but in partial
form, such as the Masses Mater Christi and Small Devotion, and the smallerscale antiphons Ave Maria and Sub tuumpraesidium. It is generally accepted
that Taverner's three (six-part) Festal Masses (Corona spinea, Gloria
tibiTrinitas, and O Michael) rank with the greatest works of their kind up to
that time. Taverner's contribution to the genre of the votive antiphon was also
considerable, with Ave Dei patrisfilia, Gaudeplurimum, and O splendorgloriae
being among the most important.
Taverner was born most likely in south Lincolnshire, perhaps in the
vicinity of Boston or Tattershall, around 1490. Nothing is known of his parents
or early years. Some of his compositions -- Ave Dei patrisfilia and
Gaudeplurimum -- were discovered among manuscripts of Henry VIII, and
there is evidence to suggest that they were written for the Chapel Royal. There
is also ample reason to believe these compositions date from 1515-1525, the
period during which some therefore believe he lived in London. It may thus be
speculated with some good reason that the composer spent some time in
London in the early part of the sixteenth century.
In 1524, Taverner became a clerk-fellow of the collegiate church choir
of Tattershall. In November 1526, he took on the post of Master of Choristers
at Cardinal College, Oxford. The composer wrote a number of works during
his Oxford years, including his three Festal Masses, the Mass Sancti Wilhelmi,
and JesuChriste pastor, a votive antiphon. In fact, during this period and the
Tattershall years that immediately preceded it -- that is, the period from 15201530 -- it is believed that Taverner composed the bulk of his music.
In 1527, Taverner became entangled in a scandal involving the dissident
religionist John Clark, who was proselytizing for Lutheran theological ideas. It
is believed that Taverner was ultimately exonerated of all charges, but he left
the College in April 1530 anyway, owing to its decline following the English
Reformation.
Taverner's whereabouts and activities over the next six years are
unknown. He is mentioned among the new members of 1537 for the Corpus
Christi Gild in Boston, Lincolnshire. The Gild listed the composer as having a
wife when he was admitted to membership. Her name was Rose Parrowe, a
widow from Boston, with two daughters.
In 1538, Taverner took on the position as agent for the Crown when he
began working for Thomas Cromwell. Many music historians have depicted
the composer's role during this period as that of a fanatic bent on the demise of
various religious congregations and orders, owing to their loyalty to Rome. It
appears, however, that Taverner was a compassionate advocate on behalf of
those targeted by Cromwell to surrender possessions to the Monarchy. In
January 1539, he wrote Cromwell a letter beseeching him to forego further
efforts at forcing divestiture of the holdings of many of the religious houses in
Boston. In 1540, he resigned from his duties as a Crown agent. The following
year, Taverner became treasurer of the Corpus Christi Gild, remaining in that
role for at least three years, after which Gild records ceased. In 1545, Boston
became a borough, and Taverner served as an alderman there.
Ralph Vaughan Williams left a varied oeuvre that includes orchestral
works, songs, operas, and various choral compositions. While primarily
drawing on the rich tradition of English folksong and hymnody, Vaughan
Williams produced well-loved works that fit into larger European traditions
and gained worldwide popularity.
Vaughan Williams, who lost his father early in life, was cared for by his
mother. Related, through his mother, to both Charles Darwin and the
Wedgwoods of pottery fame, he grew up without financial worries. He studied
history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge, and finished up at the Royal
College of Music, where he worked with Parry, Wood, and Stanford. In 1897,
the year he married Adeline Fisher, Vaughan Williams traveled to Berlin to
study with Max Bruch, also seeking Maurice Ravel as a teacher several years
later, despite the fact that the French composer was three years his junior. In
1903, he started collecting English folksongs; certain characteristics of English
folk music, particularly its modal tonalities, in many ways informed his
approach to composition. Vaughan Williams further developed his style while
working as editor of the English Hymnal, which was completed in 1906. His
work on the English Hymnal went beyond editing, for he contributed several
new hymn tunes, most notably the Sine nomine, the tune for the hymn For All
the Saints. The composer's interest in and knowledge of traditional English
music is reflected in his song cycle On Wenlock Edge (1909), based on
selections from A.E. Housman's immensely popular volume of poetry A
Shropshire Lad. In his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, composed in
1910, Vaughan Williams introduced antiphonal effects within the context of
modal tonality, juxtaposing consonant, but unrelated, triads. Composed in
1914, his Symphony No. 2, "A London Symphony" brings to life, with great
charm, the sounds of London from dawn to dusk. That year, Vaughan
Williams also wrote his pastoral The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra.
When World War I broke out, the 41-year-old composer enlisted as an orderly
in the medical corps, becoming famous for organizing choral singing and other
entertainment in the trenches. He was commissioned from the ranks, ending
his war service as an artillery officer. The war interrupted the composer's work
but did not, it seems, disrupt the inner continuity of his creative development.
The Symphony No. 3 ("Pastoral"), composed in 1922, conjures up a familiar
world, effectively incorporating folksong motives into sonorities created by
sequential chords. While critics detected pessimistic moods and themes in the
later symphonies, ascribing a shift to a darker vision to the composer's alleged
general pessimism about the world, Vaughan Williams refused to attach any
programmatic content to these works. However, the composer created a
convincing musical description of a desolate world in his Symphony No. 7
"Sinfonia Antarctica" (1952), which was inspired by the request to write the
music for the film Scott of the Antarctic. In addition to his symphonies,
Vaughan Williams composed highly acclaimed religious music, as well as
works inspired by English spiritual literature, culminating in his 1951 opera
The Pilgrim's Progress, based on the spiritual classic by John Bunyan. An
artist of extraordinary creative energy, Vaughan Williams continued
composing with undiminished powers until his death at 87.
Known to his friends simply as Max, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is one
of the most prolific and frequently performed of British composers. His
several hundred compositions draw from an eclectic array of influences, from
Indian music to serialism to Renaissance polyphony. Davies has also worked
tirelessly in the area of music education and as an environmental activist.
The precocious Davies made his musical debut in a BBC broadcast at
age eight. His education continued at Leigh Grammar School and from 1952 at
Manchester University, where he received an M.A. in 1957. He also attended
the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1952 to 1956, where he and
fellow musicians Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John Ogdon, Alexander Goehr, and
Elgar Howarth formed New Music Manchester -- a group devoted to the
performance of twentieth century works. The Italian government provided
Davies with a scholarship in 1957, allowing him to study in Italy for a year
with GoffredoPetrassi.
From 1959 to 1962, Davies was director of music at the Cirencester
Grammar School, where he developed a teaching method based on musical
performance. Since then he has written often for children, and continues to
devote significant time to education. He spent the next two years in the United
States, studying at Princeton University's graduate school with Roger Sessions
and Earl Kim on a Harkness Fellowship. He wrote The Shepherd's Calendar
(1965) for young singers and instrumentalists for the 1965 UNESCO
Conference on Music in Education in Sydney, Australia, and was a visiting
composer at Adelaide University in 1966.
Back in England in 1967, Davies formed the Pierrot Players with
Birtwistle. The Players specialized in performances of contemporary music,
and Davies wrote many works for them, including his infamous Eight Songs
for a Mad King (1969). He took over sole directorship of the Players in 1970,
reforming them as the Fires of London (which he continued to lead and
compose for until he disbanded the group in 1987). During the 1960s, Davies
became interested in John Taverner, the sixteenth century English composer.
In 1962, he wrote the award-winning First Fantasia on an In Nomine of John
Taverner, and started work on his first opera, Taverner, which was premiered
in 1972.
In 1970, Davies relocated to the Orkney Islands; Orcadian subject
matter, in particular, the writings of George Mackey Brown and the Orcadian
St. Magnus became a significant part of his music. Brown's writings have
inspired works like Black Pentecost (1979) and the massive Orkney Saga
project (the first two of its proposed fourteen parts appeared in 1997). In 1977,
Davies organized the St. Magnus Festival, which he directed until 1986. The
Yellow Cake Revue for singers and piano (1980) features a text by Davies
criticizing proposed uranium mining in the Orkneys and is just one of his
compositions reflecting his environmental concerns.
Davies received his knighthood in 1987. Two years earlier, he became
the Associate Composer-Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, an
association which led to the Strathclyde Concerto Project, a set of ten
concertos for various instruments written over the years 1987 to 1996. His
interest in children's music continued with the frequently performed The Turn
of the Tide (1992), in which Davies' music is combined with compositions by
school children. Among his numerous commissioned works are An Orkney
Wedding, with Sunrise (1984), written for the centennial of the Boston Pops;
The Doctor of Myddfai (1995), his second full-scale opera, written for the
fiftieth anniversary of the Welsh National Opera; and the Symphony No. 8,
"Antarctic" (2000), commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra.
With the arrival of Benjamin Britten on the international music scene,
many felt that English music gained its greatest genius since Purcell. A
composer of wide-ranging talents, Britten found in the human voice an
especial source of inspiration, an affinity that resulted in a remarkable body of
work, ranging from operas like Peter Grimes (1944-1945) and Death in Venice
(1973) to song cycles like the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943) to
the massive choral work War Requiem (1961). He also produced much music
for orchestra and chamber ensembles, including symphonies, concerti, and
chamber and solo works. Britten's father was a prosperous oral surgeon in the
town of Lowestoft, Suffolk; his mother was a leader in the local choral society.
When Benjamin's musical aptitude became evident, the family engaged
composer Frank Bridge to supervise his musical education. Bridge's tutelage
was one of the formative and lasting influences on Britten's compositional
development; Britten eventually paid tribute to his teacher in his Op. 10, the
Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937). Britten's formal training also
included studies at the Royal College of Music (1930-1933).
Upon graduation from the RCM, Britten obtained a position scoring
documentaries (on prosaic themes like "Sorting Office") for the Royal Post
Office film unit. Working on a tight budget, he learned how to extract the
maximum variety of color and musical effectiveness from the smallest
combinations of instruments, producing dozens of such scores from 1935 to
1938. He rapidly emerged as the most promising British composer of his
generation and entered into collaborative relationships that exerted a profound
influence upon his creative life. Among the most important of his professional
associates were literary figures like W.H. Auden, and later, E.M. Forster.
None, however, played as central a role in Britten's life as the tenor Peter
Pears, who was Britten's closest intimate, both personally and professionally,
from the late '30s to the composer's death. Pears' voice inspired a number of
Britten's vocal cycles and opera roles, and the two often joined forces in song
recitals and, from 1948, in the organization and administration of the
Aldeburgh Festival.
A steadfast pacifist, Britten left England in 1939 as war loomed over
Europe. He spent four years in the United States and Canada, his
compositional pace barely slackening, as evidenced by the production of
works like the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), the song cycle Seven Sonnets of
Michelangelo (1940), and his first effort for the stage, Paul Bunyan (19401941). Eventually, the poetry of George Crabbe drew Britten back to England.
With a Koussevitzky Commission backing him, the composer wrote the
enormously successful opera Peter Grimes (1944-45), which marked the
greatest turning point in his career. His fame secure, Britten over the next
several decades wrote a dozen more operas, several of which -- Albert Herring
(1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer
Night's Dream (1960), Death in Venice (1973) -- became instant and
permanent fixtures of the repertoire. He also continued to produce much vocal,
orchestral, and chamber music, including Songs and Proverbs of William
Blake (1965), the three Cello Suites (1961-1964) and the Cello Symphony
(1963), written for Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Third String Quartet
(1975).
Britten suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1971, which resulted in
something of a slowdown in his creative activities. Nonetheless, he continued
to compose until his death in 1976, by which time he was recognized as one of
the principal musical figures of the twentieth century.
A multi-talented Renaissance man of the 20th century, Noël Coward
worked primarily as a playwright, actor, songwriter, and singer, but his
creative activities also included the writing of fiction and poetry; producing
and directing for the stage, film, and television; and nightclub entertaining and
recording. Across a career spanning six decades, he was remarkably successful
at these various pursuits, moving from one to the other with seeming ease,
even when he was wearing several different hats at the same time, e.g.,
writing, directing, and starring in the same show. As a writer and as a
performer, he maintained a consistent persona, that of a witty, sophisticated
British subject, always ready to deliver a devastating and hilarious
observation, often at the expense of his own kind, as he did, for instance, in his
most famous song, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." He was also, however,
intensely patriotic, as he demonstrated in his World War II-era song "London
Pride" and the film In Which We Serve (which, characteristically, he wrote,
co-directed, starred in, and composed the background score for). And his
sophistication could be used in the service of plaintive sentiment, as it was in
such ballads as "If Love Were All." Especially later in his career, Coward put
his persona on display in nightclubs and film appearances, but his reputation
rests more on his writing; he was one of the major British playwrights of the
century and, arguably, also the greatest creator of musical theater works
among his countrymen in the same period, with 13 stage musicals to his credit
between 1923 and 1963.
Noel Coward was born in Teddington, Middlesex, England on December
16, 1899 into what he referred to as “genteel poverty”. Principally a
playwright, Coward also wrote a whole catalog of hit popular songs with an
elegant, sophisticated style. As a young child, Coward would give little
performances in front of his family and was encouraged onto the stage by his
mother. His career started with an advertisement in the Daily Mirror his
mother saw and answered and auditioned by Lilla Field for whom he sang the
song "Liza".
By age 11, Noel was already on the stage acting in minor roles. He
worked with actor Claude Hawtrey who Noel would later say had an enormous
effect upon his grasp of acting. In 1913, he met and worked with Gertrude
Lawrence and in 1915, he appeared in his first adult role in Charley's Aunt.
This same year, Coward also composed his first song "Forbidden Fruit".
In 1916, he had his first cabaret appearance and in 1917, in collaboration
with Esme Wynne, he wrote his first play entitled Ida Collaborates. In 1918,
Coward produced Women and Whiskey, joined the British Army, wrote
another play The Rat Trap, and made his first film appearance (as an extra). In
1919, "The Baseball Rag", with music by Doris Joel became Noel's first
published tune and in 1921, he his play I'll Leave It To You starring the
playwright himself, premiered in London's West End.
In 1921, Coward traveled to America and in 1922, his novel The
Withered Nosegay was published. 1923 saw Noel's first musical Revue
London Calling in which he appeared with Gertrude Lawrence. Throughout
the 1920’s he continued writing plays and produced, among others, The
Vortex, Hay Fever, Bitter Sweet, Design For Living and Private Lives.
Through the 1930’s, Coward produced several other plays for the West
End and Broadway. He split his time between London, New York and Paris,
France. By 1940, he had written 32 plays and perhaps 140 tunes, yet he never
learned to read or write music. Among the songs he had composed included
the hits "Mad Dogs And Englishmen”, “Go Out In The Midday Sun",
"Zigeuna", "Bittersweet", "Don't Lets Be Beastly To The Germans”, "I Travel
Alone", "You've Got That Thing", "What Is This Thing Called Love", and
many more. Among his films were Cavalcade, In Which We Serve and Brief
Encounter.
In the mid-1940’s Coward settled in Jamaica, BWI. A reporter once
asked him why he chose to live in Jamaica rather than in Britain, and Noel is
reported to have replied "I can answer that in just two words - Income Tax."
He built a home in Jamaica, which he called 'Firefly', and entertained lavishly.
During the 1950's, he wrote seven new plays, none of which were successful.
After the London opening of his play Sirocco, he went on stage and was
greeted by boos from the audience. When his plays could no longer find a
public, he turned more and more to writing songs, all of which were well
received in America. In 1965, he opened as an act in a Las Vegas casino where
he was a huge hit. Also in 1965, he had an appeared with Mary Martin on a
television show. In the late 1960’s, Coward’s play Hay Fever was revived and
opened to critical acclaim and success.
Coward was knighted in 1970, which was soon followed by a secession
of illnesses. Noel Coward died on March 29, 1973, at his home “Firefly” in
Jamaica. In 1984, a stone commemorating his life was placed in the Poet’s
Corner of Westminster Abbey.
As Coward's own recordings of his songs entered the public domain in
Europe (where the copyright limit lasts only 50 years), CD reissues became
confusingly repetitious in their content, but a number of them demonstrated
the continuing appeal of his music, as did the many albums devoted to his
music recorded by others, which include: Dominic Alldis' If Love Were All:
The Songs of Noël Coward; The Noël Coward Songbook, by Ian Bostridge,
Sophie Daneman, and Jeffrey Tate; Richard Conrad's Noël Coward Songs: A
Room with a View; Craig Jessup Sings Noël Coward; Barbara Lea and Keith
Ingham Are Mad About the Boy: The Songs of Noel Coward; Mad About the
Man, by Carmen McRae; Bobby Short Is Mad About Noel Coward; The
Dance Bands Play Noel Coward; The Great British Dance Bands Play the
Music of Noel Coward; Noel Coward Revisited (featuring Laurence Harvey,
Hermione Gingold, and Dorothy Loudon, among others); Twentieth-Century
Blues: The Songs of Noël Coward (featuring Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry,
Elton John, and Sting, among others); and The Words and Music of Noël
Coward.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has been the most successful composer of
musicals of his generation and also a breaker of molds in the genre. The
composers who inspired him were for the most part American, but he was born
in London, the son of William Lloyd Webber, director of the London College
of Music, and was trained at the Royal Academy of Music.
Though the school wasn't a musical-theater stronghold, Lloyd Webber
and lyricist Tim Rice met and began work on a musical based on the biblical
story of Joseph and his coat of many colors; Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat showed strong rock influences. Soon the two hit on
another unusual idea: a musical based on the life of Christ from Judas' point of
view. Unable to finance a stage version, Lloyd Webber and Rice did manage
to record their show, and Jesus Christ Superstar went on to sell millions of
copies. The hit musical version followed belatedly.
Lloyd Webber and Rice parted ways temporarily, but Rice returned with
another audacious idea: a musical retelling the life of Argentine icon Eva
Perón. Evita (1976) repeated the Jesus Christ Superstar pattern, with its hit
album followed by a successful theatrical run.
The Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership now was severed (Rice went on to
write Chess), and Lloyd Webber next wrote a musical revue based on T.S.
Eliot's whimsical poems about Cats (1981). This time the show came before
the album, and its two-decade run became legendary. By this time, Lloyd
Webber had largely abandoned rock elements in favor of a pastiche style that
borrowed from classical and opera sources.
Lloyd Webber created several moderately successful shows (Song and
Dance, Starlight Express) before scoring another long-running hit in 1987 with
a musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Aspects of Love (19891990) was less successful, however. A musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder
film Sunset Boulevard proved one of his rare disappointments. In 1996, Lloyd
Webber and Rice contributed a new song, "You Must Love Me," to a film
version of Evita starring Madonna; "You Must Love Me" was named Best
Original Song at the 1997 Academy Awards, and in January of that year,
Andrew Lloyd Webber became Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton.
Lloyd Webber continued to compose new musicals approximately every
other year. Whistle Down the Wind opened in July 1998 in London, and The
Beautiful Game, a political musical about Northern Ireland, opened in
September 2000.
The music of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of music associated
with the United Kingdom since its creation.
Throughout its history, the United Kingdom has been a major exporter
and source of musical innovation in the modern and contemporary eras,
drawing its cultural basis from the history of the United Kingdom, from
church music, from Western culture and from the ancient and traditional folk
music and instrumentation of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
In the 20th century, influences from the music of the United States became
most dominant in popular music. This led to the explosion of the British
Invasion, while subsequent notable movements in British music include the
New Wave of British Heavy Metal and Britpop. The United Kingdom has one
of the world's largest music industries today, with many British musicians
having had an impact on modern music.
Early music
Music in the British Isles, from the earliest recorded times until the
Baroque and the rise of recognisably modern classical music, was a diverse
and rich culture, including sacred and secular music and ranging from the
popular to the elite. Each of the major nations of England, Ireland, Scotland
and Wales retained unique forms of music and of instrumentation, but British
music was highly influenced by continental developments, while British
composers made an important contribution to many of the major movements
in early music in Europe, including the polyphony of the Ars Nova and laid
some of the foundations of later national and international classical music.
Musicians from the British Isles also developed some distinctive forms of
music, including Celtic chant, the ContenanceAngloise, the rota, polyphonic
votive antiphons and the carol in the medieval era.
Church music and religious music was profoundly affected by the
Protestant Reformation which affected Britain from the 16th century, which
curtailed events associated with British music and forced the development of
distinctive national music, worship and belief. English madrigals, lute ayres
and masques in the Renaissance era led particularly to English language opera
developed in the early Baroque period of the later seventeenth century. In
contrast, court music of the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland,
although having unique elements remained much more integrated into wider
European culture.
Baroque music
The Baroque era in music, between the early music of the Medieval and
Renaissance periods and the development of fully fledged and formalised
orchestral classical music in the second half of the eighteenth century, was
characterised by more elaborate musical ornamentation, changes in musical
notation, new instrumental playing techniques and the rise of new genres such
as opera. Although the term Baroque is conventionally used for European
music from about 1600, its full effects were not felt in Britain until after 1660,
delayed by native trends and developments in music, religious and cultural
differences from many European countries and the disruption to court music
caused by the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and Interregnum.[4] Under the
restored Stuart monarchy the court became once again a centre of musical
patronage, but royal interest in music tended to be less significant as the
seventeenth century progressed, to be revived again under the House of
Hanover.
British chamber and orchestral music drew inspiration from continental
Europe as it developed into modern classical music. The Baroque era in
British music can be seen as one of an interaction of national and international
trends, sometimes absorbing continental fashions and practices and sometimes
attempting, as in the creation of ballad opera, to produce an indigenous
tradition. However, arguably the most significant British composer of the era,
George Frideric Handel, was a naturalised German, who helped integrate
British and continental music and define the future of the classical music of
the United Kingdom that would be officially formed in 1801.
Classical
Music
Musical composition, performance and training in the United Kingdom
inherited the European classical traditions of the eighteenth century (above all,
in Britain, from the example of Handel) and saw a great expansion during the
nineteenth century. Romantic nationalism encouraged clear national identities
and sensibilities within the countries of the United Kingdom towards the end
of the nineteenth century, producing many composers and musicians of note
and drawing on the folk tradition. These traditions, including the cultural
strands drawn from the United Kingdom's constituent nations and provinces,
have continued to evolve in distinctive ways through the work of such
composers as Arthur Sullivan, Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Hubert Parry,
Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten
Folk music
Each of the four countries of the United Kingdom has its own diverse
and distinctive folk music forms. In addition, there are numerous distinct and
semi-distinct folk traditions brought by immigrants from Jamaica, India, the
Commonwealth and other parts of the world. Folk music flourished until the
era of industrialisation when it began to be replaced by new forms of popular
music, including music hall and brass bands. Realisation of this led to two folk
revivals, one in the late-19th century and the other in the mid-20th century,
which kept folk music as an important sub-culture within society.
England has a long and diverse history of folk music dating back at least
to the medieval period and including many forms of music, song and dance.
Through two periods of revival from the late nineteenth century much of the
tradition has been preserved and continues to be practiced. It led to the
creation of a number of fusions with other forms of music that produced subgenres such as electric folk, folk punk and folk metal and continues to thrive
nationally and in regional scenes, particularly in areas such as Northumbria
and Cornwall.
Northern Irish music
Ireland, including Northern Ireland, has vibrant folk traditions. The
popularity of traditional instruments such as fiddles has remained throughout
the centuries even as analogues in Great Britain died out. Perhaps the most
famous modern musician from Northern Ireland influenced by folk tradition is
Van Morrison.
Scottish folk music
Scottish folk music includes many kinds of songs, including ballads and
laments, sung by a single singer with accompaniment by bagpipes, fiddles or
harps. Traditional dances include waltzes, reels, strathspeys and jigs.
Alongside the other areas of the United Kingdom, Scotland underwent a roots
revival in the 1960s. Cathy-Ann McPhee and Jeannie Robertson were the
heroes of this revival, which inspired some revolutions in band formats by
groups like The Clutha, The Whistlebinkies, The Boys of the Lough and the
Incredible String Band.
Welsh folk music
Wales is a Celtic country that features folk music played at twmpathau
(communal dances) and gwylwerin (music festivals). Welsh music also
includes male voice choirs and songs accompanied by a harp. Having long
been subordinate to English culture, Welsh musicians in the late 20th century
had to reconstruct traditional music when a roots revival began. This revival
began in the late 1970s and achieved some mainstream success in the UK in
the 80s with performers like Robin Huw Bowen, Moniars and Gwerinos.
Early British popular music
In the sense of commercial music enjoyed by the people, British popular
music can be seen to originate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with
the arrival of the broadside ballad, which were sold cheaply and in great
numbers until the nineteenth century. Further technological, economic and
social changes led to new forms of music in the nineteenth century, including
the brass band, which produced a popular and communal form of classical
music. Similarly, the music hall sprang up to cater for the entertainment of
new urban societies, adapting existing forms of music to produce popular
songs and acts. In the 1930s the influence of American Jazz led to the creation
of British dance bands, who provided a social and popular music that began to
dominate social occasions and the radio airwaves.
British popular music
Forms of popular music, including folk music, jazz, pop and rock music,
have particularly flourished in Britain since the twentieth century. Britain has
had an impact on popular music disproportionate to its size, due to its
linguistic and cultural links with many countries, particularly the United States
and many of its former colonies like Australia, South Africa, and Canada, and
its capacity for invention, innovation and fusion, which has led to the
development of, or participation in, many of the major trends in popular
music. In the early-20th century, influences from the United States became
most dominant in popular music, with young performers producing their own
versions of American music, including rock n' roll from the late 1950s and
developing a parallel music scene. This is particularly true since the early
1960s when the British Invasion, led by The Beatles, helped to secure British
performers a major place in development of pop and rock music. Since then,
rock music and popular music contributed to a British-American collaboration,
with trans-Atlantic genres being exchanged and exported to one another,
where they tended to be adapted and turned into new movements, only to be
exported back again. Genres originating in or radically developed by British
musicians include blues rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, hard rock, punk
rock, electric folk, folk punk, acid jazz, trip hop, shoegaze, drum and bass,
grime, Britpop and dubstep.
William Byrd was born in London in 1540. Two of his brothers became
choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral and, around 1550, he himself may have joined
the boys of the Chapel Royal. His early musical training was overseen by adult
members of the chapel, among them Thomas Tallis, who taught him keyboard
playing. By March 1563 he was appointed organist of Lincoln Cathedral, a
post secured on favourable financial terms and supported by the grant of a
rectory.
Even in an era so richly stocked with great names, William Byrd
demands particular attention as the most prodigiously talented, prolific, and
versatile composer of his contemporaries. Byrd was born in about 1543, and it
is assumed that he was a chorister in the Chapel Royal (his brothers were
choristers at St. Paul's Cathedral) and a student of Thomas Tallis. He was
named organist and master of choristers of Lincoln Cathedral at the age of 20,
where he wrote most of his works in English and music for Anglican services.
This music and his anthems provided the young English church with some of
its finest music. In 1570 he was appointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal,
where he shared the post of organist with Thomas Tallis. Queen Elizabeth I,
despite Byrd's intense commitment to Catholicism, was one of his benefactors,
and granted him and Tallis a patent to print music in 1575. Their first
publication was a collection of five- to eight-part, Latin motets, but they
published little else. Around the same time, Byrd began composing for the
virginal. His contribution to the solo keyboard repertoire comprises some 125
pieces, mostly stylized dances or exceptionally inventive sets of variations
which inaugurated a golden age of English keyboard composition.
During the 1580s and 1590s, Byrd's Catholicism was the driving motive
for his music. As the persecutions of Catholics increased during this period,
and occasionally touched on Byrd and his family, he wrote and openly
published motets and three masses (one each in three, four, and five parts),
which are his finest achievement in sacred music, almost certainly composed
for small chapel gatherings of Catholics. Byrd had taken up the publishing
business again, printing the first English songbook, Psalmes, Sonets and Songs
in 1588. This and his other songbooks include Byrd's compositions in the
leading secular genres of the day: the ayre or lute song, the madrigal, and the
consort song for solo voice and viols. The consort song's finest hour came at
the hands of Byrd, who preferred texts of a high moral (frequently religious) or
metaphysical tone. They are notable for the way the viol parts lead an
existence independent of the vocal line. He openly published two Gradualia in
1605 and 1607, with music for the Propers of all the major feast days. His last
collection, Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets from 1611, consisted mostly of
previously published works, but did include two of his viol consort works.
Byrd is at his most distinguished in the free fantasias for consort, particularly
the later pieces in five and six parts, works of exceptionally luxurious texture.
Byrd's last songs were published in 1614, and he lived out his life comfortably
at Stondon Massey, where he died in 1623.
Thomas TallisThe career of Thomas Tallis, Gentleman of the Chapel
Royal, spanned a period of spectacular change in the English liturgical
climate. Born early in the sixteenth century, his first musical appointment was
as organist to a Benedictine (Catholic) Priory in Dover, two years before
Henry VIII's definitive break with Rome in 1534. By 1537, Tallis was serving
a London parish church as organist; in 1538 he was performing the same task
for the Abbey of Holy Cross, Waltham, though this position evaporated when
King Henry dissolved the monasteries in 1540. After a brief clerkship at
Canterbury Cathedral, Tallis joined the Chapel Royal, where he played, sang,
and composed for the remainder of his life, serving in turn Henry VIII,
Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I. Among the lavish rewards he
eventually reaped was a famous bequest of 1575, giving him and his young
pupil, William Byrd, a complete monopoly on the printing of music and ruled
music paper in England.
The liturgical music in England during this time underwent great
changes, not the least of which was the shift between Latin and vernacular
texts. At the outset of Tallis' career, the prevailing English style of Latin music
followed the soaring treble-dominated textures of the previous century, as
exemplified in the Eton Choirbook; his early Latin motets reflect this. But by
the late 1540s, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was working toward a standard
liturgical practice, built around his Book of Common Prayer, that would
finally replace the Sarum (English Latin) rite in 1559 with exclusively
vernacular worship music. The reign of the Catholic "Bloody" Mary Tudor
briefly interrupted this trajectory towards the vernacular with a militant
resurgence of Catholic music in an older style; Tallis' MissaPuernatus and the
motet Gaudegloriosa apparently date from this time. Stylistically, the church
music of England over the second half of the century was yielding to the
influence of the Continental imitative style, through the music of the
transplanted Italian, Ferrabosco.
Through all these changes, Tallis appears to have retained a professional
steadiness and respectability, making music and composing with grace and
equanimity as his situation changed. His English-language settings range from
simple treatments of the psalms to anthems (such as Hear the Voice and
Prayer) to three complete settings of the Anglican Service; this music is
commonly imbued with a somber and penitential mood. His Latin-texted
pieces, whether following the stylish "modern" mode of pervasive imitation or
not, demonstrate restraint and even tenderness. (One of the few exceptions,
though, is his best-known work today, an over-the-top and still rather
mysterious experiment in polychoral writing, the 40-voiced Spem in alium).
Surprisingly little of Tallis' instrumental music survives, despite his over 50
years of professional organ playing.
As England's greatest composer of the Baroque, Henry Purcell was
dubbed the "Orpheus Britannicus" for his ability to combine pungent English
counterpoint with expressive, flexible, and dramatic word settings. While he
did write instrumental music, including the important viol fantasias, the vast
majority of his output was in the vocal/choral realm. His only opera, Dido and
Aeneas, divulged his sheer mastery in the handling of the work's vast
expressive canvas, which included lively dance numbers, passionate arias and
rollicking choruses. Purcell also wrote much incidental music for stage
productions, including that for Dryden's King Arthur. His church music
includes many anthems, devotional songs, and other sacred works, but few
items for Anglican services.
Purcell was born in 1659 to Henry Purcell, master of choristers at
Westminster Abbey, and his wife Elizabeth. When he was five, his father died,
forcing his mother to resettle the family of six children into a more modest
house and lifestyle. In about 1668, Purcell became a chorister in the Chapel
Royal, studying under chorus master Henry Cooke. He also took keyboard
lessons from Christopher Gibbons, son of the composer Orlando Gibbons, and
it is likely that he studied with John Blow and Matthew Locke. In 1673,
Purcell was appointed assistant to John Hingeston, the royal instrument
keeper.
On September 10, 1677, Purcell was given the Court position of
composer-in-ordinary for the violins. It is believed that many of his church
works date from this time. Purcell, a great keyboard virtuoso by his late teens,
received a second important post in 1679, this one succeeding Blow as
organist at Westminster Abbey, a position he would retain all his life. That
same year saw the publication of five of the young composer's songs in John
Playford's Choice Ayres and Songs to Sing to the Theorbo-lute or Bass-viol.
Around the same time, he began writing anthems with string accompaniment,
completing over a dozen before 1685, and welcome songs. Purcell was
appointed one of three organists at the Chapel Royal in the summer of 1682,
his most prestigious post yet.
Purcell composed his first ode for St. Cecilia's Day in 1683. The
following month, upon Hingeston's death, he was named royal instrument
keeper while retaining his other posts. The composer remained quite prolific in
the middle part of the decade, primarily producing music for royal occasions.
In 1685 the new King, James II, introduced many changes at Court, one of
which was to make Purcell the Court harpsichordist and Blow the Court
composer. Near the end of 1687, Queen Mary's pregnancy was announced and
Purcell was commissioned to compose an anthem for Psalm 128, Blessed are
they that fear the Lord. Many other of his anthems appeared in 1688, as did
one of his more famous ones for church use, O sing unto the Lord.
With the ascension of William and Mary to the throne on April 11, 1689,
Purcell retained his post as royal instrument keeper, and he, along with Blow
and Alexander Damazene, shared the duties of Court composers. With his
royal duties reduced, he was able to pursue other opportunities, including
teaching and writing for other organizations. One of Purcell's greatest
successes came in 1689 with the production of Dido and Aeneas. He then
collaborated with John Dryden on King Arthur in 1691, and also composed the
music for The Fairy-Queen (1692), based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream both productions also scoring triumphs. In the final year of his
life Purcell remained exceedingly busy, writing much for the stage, including
The Indian Queen, left incomplete at his death on November 21, 1695.
John Gay
John Gay was born in Barnstaple, Devon, England on June 30, 1685. At
the age of 10, Gay was orphaned and his uncle, the Reverend John Hammer,
agreed to take care of him. After finishing his education at the Barnstable
Grammar School, Gay went to London to be an apprentice to a silk merchant.
1 Disliking the work, Gay left the merchant to work briefly for Arthur Hill,
who became manager of a theater company. In 1712, in his late twenties, Gay
was a secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth. He also worked as a secretary to
Lord Clarendon. 2 During his time in London, Gay established relationships
with Londoners and became a part of the city society.
In 1713, Gay published the poem "Rural Sports," a comic description of
hunting and fishing, and inscribed it to Alexander Pope, a prominent writer of
the time. Pope appreciated the honor and soon became acquainted with Gay. 3
Pope and Gay became lifelong friends and colleagues. Gay also became close
with the writer Jonathon Swift; Pope and Swift both encouraged Gay to
continue writing and publishing his work. Gay studied with Georg Frideric
Handel, the greatest opera composer at the time in London. Gay's love for
music transferred into much of his writings for the stage; he included some
type of music in many of his plays. 4
Gay published poems, fables, plays, and ballad operas. His most notable
works include: 5
The Shepherd's Weeks, a series of mock-classical pastoral poems (1714)
What D'Ye Call It, a satirical play (1715)
"Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London," a poem (1716)
Three Hours after Marriage, a comedy written with Alexander Pope and
John Arbuthnot (1717)
Acis and Galatea, the libretto to Handel's opera and Gay's final attempt
at ballad opera (1719)
Poems on Several Occasions, a set of poems (1720)
Fables, a set of beast fables (1727-38)
Fifty-One Fables in Verse (1727)
The Beggar's Opera, his famous ballad opera (1728)
Polly, the sequel to The Beggar's Opera which was published but not
performed (1729)
Achilles (1733)
Although Gay wrote numerous poems and plays, his ballad opera The
Beggar's Opera was certainly his greatest success and his most important
contribution. John Gay is credited with the first success of the ballad opera
genre. Although many scholars believe his ballad opera was the only notable
one of its kind, many scholars also believe that his opera led to the popular and
successful operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. The success of the ballad opera
was immediate and Gay made a significant amount of money from the opera.
Even though Gay was successful as a writer, he was not a rich man.
Luckily, he made friends with some of the high society who helped support
him. Most notable were the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury. Gay met them
when he was working for the Duchess of Monmouth. The Duchess of
Queensbury became Gay's most important patron until his death.
John Gay died at the age of 47 on December 4, 1732 in London. He was
buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb
is taken from The Beggar's Opera and spoken by the Beggar, showing Gay's
humor until the end of his life: "Life is a Jest, and all Things show it: I thought
so once and now I know it".
Gilbert and Sullivanrefers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of
the librettist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and the composer Arthur Sullivan
(1842–1900). The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between
1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The
Mikado are among the best known.
Gilbert, who wrote the words, created fanciful "topsy-turvy" worlds for
these operas where each absurdity is taken to its logical conclusion—fairies
rub elbows with British lords, flirting is a capital offence, gondoliers ascend to
the monarchy, and pirates turn out to be noblemen who have gone wrong.
Sullivan, six years Gilbert's junior, composed the music, contributing
memorable melodies that could convey both humour and pathos.
Their operas have enjoyed broad and enduring international success and
are still performed frequently throughout the English-speaking world. Gilbert
and Sullivan introduced innovations in content and form that directly
influenced the development of musical theatre through the 20th century. The
operas have also influenced political discourse, literature, film and television
and have been widely parodied and pastiched by humorists. Producer Richard
D'Oyly Carte brought Gilbert and Sullivan together and nurtured their
collaboration. He built the Savoy Theatre in 1881 to present their joint works
(which came to be known as the Savoy Operas) and founded the D'Oyly Carte
Opera Company, which performed and promoted Gilbert and Sullivan's works
for over a century.
Their first major hit was HMS Pinafore (1878), satirizing the Royal
Navy and the British obsession with social status. The Pirates of Penzance
(1879), written in a fit of pique at American copyright pirates, also poked fun
at romantic melodrama, sense of duty, family obligation, and the relevance of
a liberal education. Patience (1881) satirized the aesthetic movement in
general and the poet and aesthete Oscar Wilde in particular. Iolanthe (1882)
pokes fun at English law and at the House of Lords. Ruddigore (1887) is a
topsy-turvy take on the Victorian Melodrama, and viciously satirizes that
entire genre. The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), their only joint work with a
tragic ending, concerns a strolling jester who finds himself embroiled in a
risky intrigue at the Tower of London. The Gondoliers (1889) pokes fun at the
plot devices of opera in the setting of a kingdom ruled by a pair of gondoliers
who try to run it in a spirit of 'republican equality'. Trial By Jury is rather selfevident, but is unique because it was the only operetta with no spoken
dialogue. Their most popular work was The Mikado (1885), where English
bureaucracy was made fun of in a Japanese setting.
Gilbert's plots remain perfect examples of 'topsy-turvydom,' in which
primeval fairies rub elbows with English lords, gondoliers ascend to the
monarchy and pirates reconcile with majors general. Gilbert's lyrics employ
double (and triple) rhyming and punning, and served as the very model for
such 20th century Broadway lyricists as Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Lorenz
Hart. Sullivan, a classically trained musician who devoted much of his career
to religious hymns and grand opera, contributed catchy melodies which were
also emotionally moving. As seamless as their onstage collaboration was,
Gilbert and Sullivan were temperamentally incompatible, and their partnership
was frequently ruptured. Their last joint work, The Grand Duke, opened in
1896, and the sickly Sullivan died four years later.
Their works were originally produced by British impresario Richard
D'Oyly Carte, considered by some to be the third member of this partnership,
who built the Savoy Theatre in London to present their operettas, and formed
the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which would perform the Savoy Operettas
with exacting detail until 1982. The Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were even
more popular abroad, and many American cities saw amateur and professional
Gilbert and Sullivan performing groups. This trend has continued to the
present day, and it can be argued that these operettas and The Mikado in
particular were instrumental in giving the particular shape to American
musical of the 20th century.
Moreover, many cultural movements saw the influence of Gilbert and
Sullvan. For instance, aestheticism, the cultural movement characterized by
Oscar Wilde and satirized in Patience, was actually brought to the United
States by Richard D'Oyly Carte so that Americans could understand the
operetta. In terms of humor, the idea of extending a joke throughout a piece of
literature and/or comedy work is prevalent in the Savoy Operas.
The 1999 Mike Leigh film Topsy-Turvy presents the most recent
acclaimed film depiction of the team and their creation of their most popular
operetta, The Mikado .
The works of Gilbert and Sullivan are frequently parodied or pastiched;
a notable example of this is Tom Lehrer's performance of the 'Major General's
Song' (from the operetta The Pirates of Penzance), with the chemical periodic
table of elements set to Sullivan's original music. (see Elements song) The
popular TV series Family Guy drew from Gilbert and Sullivan with a parody
of the 'Captain's Song' from H.M.S. Pinafore. Larry David's show Curb Your
Enthusiasm uses 'Three Little Maids' from The Mikado as background music.
One of the pre-eminent musical figures of his time, Edward William
Elgar (1857-1934) bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the finest
English composer since the days of Handel and Purcell. Elgar's father owned a
music shop and was a church organist who taught his son piano, organ, and
violin; apart from this instruction, Elgar was basically self-taught as a
musician. At the age of 16, the composer became a freelance musician and for
the remainder of his life never took a permanent job. He conducted locally,
performed, taught, and composed, scraping by until his marriage to Caroline
Alice Roberts, a published novelist of some wealth, in 1889.
Elgar had by this time achieved only limited recognition. He and his
wife moved to London, where he scarcely fared better in advancing his career.
They couple eventually retreated to Worcester, Elgar suffering from bitter selfdoubt and depression. Alice stood by him the entire time, her unfailing
confidence restoring his spirits. He was further buoyed by the success of his
Imperial March, Op. 32, which earned him a publisher and a vital friendship
with August Jaeger, his editor and confidant. In 1899, Elgar composed one of
his best-known works, the "Enigma" Variations, Op. 36, which catapulted him
to fame. The work is a cryptic tribute to Alice and to the many friends who
stood behind the composer in the shaky early days of his career. German
conductor Hans Richter proclaimed it a masterpiece, and his performances of
the work in Britain and Germany established the composer's lasting success.
Elgar's most fruitful period was the first decade of the twentieth century,
during which he wrote some of his noblest, most expressive music, including
the Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op. 55 (1907-1908), and the Violin
Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 (1909-1910). His best-known works from this
period, however, are the first four of his Pomp and Circumstance Marches
(1901-1907); the first of these, subtitled "Land of Hope and Glory," became an
unofficial second national anthem for the British Empire.
Elgar suffered a blow when Jaeger (the "Nimrod" of the "Enigma"
Variations) died in 1909. The composer's productivity dropped, and the
horrors of World War I deepened his melancholy outlook. His music became
more intimate, even anguished; still, he wrote some of his best chamber music
during this period, as well as the masterly Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
(1919), whose deep feeling of sadness and impending loss surely relates to the
final illness of his faithful Alice, who died in 1920.
For some time after that, he wrote little of significance but made a
historic foray into the recording studios when new electrical recording
processes were developed; the fortunate result was a number of masterly
interpretations of his own orchestral music that have survived for posterity. In
the early '30s, Elgar set to work on a third symphony, left unfinished at his
death in 1934. The work was brought to a generally well-received realization
by Anthony Payne in the late '90s and was subsequently recorded.
John Taverner is considered the most important figure in English music
of his time. His compositions exist in about 30 manuscripts that were copied
over about a 100-year period, beginning around the late 1520s. It is believed
that many of his works were lost; a good many others survive but in partial
form, such as the Masses Mater Christi and Small Devotion, and the smallerscale antiphons Ave Maria and Sub tuumpraesidium. It is generally accepted
that Taverner's three (six-part) Festal Masses (Corona spinea, Gloria
tibiTrinitas, and O Michael) rank with the greatest works of their kind up to
that time. Taverner's contribution to the genre of the votive antiphon was also
considerable, with Ave Dei patrisfilia, Gaudeplurimum, and O splendorgloriae
being among the most important.
Taverner was born most likely in south Lincolnshire, perhaps in the
vicinity of Boston or Tattershall, around 1490. Nothing is known of his parents
or early years. Some of his compositions -- Ave Dei patrisfilia and
Gaudeplurimum -- were discovered among manuscripts of Henry VIII, and
there is evidence to suggest that they were written for the Chapel Royal. There
is also ample reason to believe these compositions date from 1515-1525, the
period during which some therefore believe he lived in London. It may thus be
speculated with some good reason that the composer spent some time in
London in the early part of the sixteenth century.
In 1524, Taverner became a clerk-fellow of the collegiate church choir
of Tattershall. In November 1526, he took on the post of Master of Choristers
at Cardinal College, Oxford. The composer wrote a number of works during
his Oxford years, including his three Festal Masses, the Mass Sancti Wilhelmi,
and JesuChriste pastor, a votive antiphon. In fact, during this period and the
Tattershall years that immediately preceded it -- that is, the period from 15201530 -- it is believed that Taverner composed the bulk of his music.
In 1527, Taverner became entangled in a scandal involving the dissident
religionist John Clark, who was proselytizing for Lutheran theological ideas. It
is believed that Taverner was ultimately exonerated of all charges, but he left
the College in April 1530 anyway, owing to its decline following the English
Reformation.
Taverner's whereabouts and activities over the next six years are
unknown. He is mentioned among the new members of 1537 for the Corpus
Christi Gild in Boston, Lincolnshire. The Gild listed the composer as having a
wife when he was admitted to membership. Her name was Rose Parrowe, a
widow from Boston, with two daughters.
In 1538, Taverner took on the position as agent for the Crown when he
began working for Thomas Cromwell. Many music historians have depicted
the composer's role during this period as that of a fanatic bent on the demise of
various religious congregations and orders, owing to their loyalty to Rome. It
appears, however, that Taverner was a compassionate advocate on behalf of
those targeted by Cromwell to surrender possessions to the Monarchy. In
January 1539, he wrote Cromwell a letter beseeching him to forego further
efforts at forcing divestiture of the holdings of many of the religious houses in
Boston. In 1540, he resigned from his duties as a Crown agent. The following
year, Taverner became treasurer of the Corpus Christi Gild, remaining in that
role for at least three years, after which Gild records ceased. In 1545, Boston
became a borough, and Taverner served as an alderman there.
Ralph Vaughan Williams left a varied oeuvre that includes orchestral
works, songs, operas, and various choral compositions. While primarily
drawing on the rich tradition of English folksong and hymnody, Vaughan
Williams produced well-loved works that fit into larger European traditions
and gained worldwide popularity.
Vaughan Williams, who lost his father early in life, was cared for by his
mother. Related, through his mother, to both Charles Darwin and the
Wedgwoods of pottery fame, he grew up without financial worries. He studied
history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge, and finished up at the Royal
College of Music, where he worked with Parry, Wood, and Stanford. In 1897,
the year he married Adeline Fisher, Vaughan Williams traveled to Berlin to
study with Max Bruch, also seeking Maurice Ravel as a teacher several years
later, despite the fact that the French composer was three years his junior. In
1903, he started collecting English folksongs; certain characteristics of English
folk music, particularly its modal tonalities, in many ways informed his
approach to composition. Vaughan Williams further developed his style while
working as editor of the English Hymnal, which was completed in 1906. His
work on the English Hymnal went beyond editing, for he contributed several
new hymn tunes, most notably the Sine nomine, the tune for the hymn For All
the Saints. The composer's interest in and knowledge of traditional English
music is reflected in his song cycle On Wenlock Edge (1909), based on
selections from A.E. Housman's immensely popular volume of poetry A
Shropshire Lad. In his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, composed in
1910, Vaughan Williams introduced antiphonal effects within the context of
modal tonality, juxtaposing consonant, but unrelated, triads. Composed in
1914, his Symphony No. 2, "A London Symphony" brings to life, with great
charm, the sounds of London from dawn to dusk. That year, Vaughan
Williams also wrote his pastoral The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra.
When World War I broke out, the 41-year-old composer enlisted as an orderly
in the medical corps, becoming famous for organizing choral singing and other
entertainment in the trenches. He was commissioned from the ranks, ending
his war service as an artillery officer. The war interrupted the composer's work
but did not, it seems, disrupt the inner continuity of his creative development.
The Symphony No. 3 ("Pastoral"), composed in 1922, conjures up a familiar
world, effectively incorporating folksong motives into sonorities created by
sequential chords. While critics detected pessimistic moods and themes in the
later symphonies, ascribing a shift to a darker vision to the composer's alleged
general pessimism about the world, Vaughan Williams refused to attach any
programmatic content to these works. However, the composer created a
convincing musical description of a desolate world in his Symphony No. 7
"Sinfonia Antarctica" (1952), which was inspired by the request to write the
music for the film Scott of the Antarctic. In addition to his symphonies,
Vaughan Williams composed highly acclaimed religious music, as well as
works inspired by English spiritual literature, culminating in his 1951 opera
The Pilgrim's Progress, based on the spiritual classic by John Bunyan. An
artist of extraordinary creative energy, Vaughan Williams continued
composing with undiminished powers until his death at 87.
Known to his friends simply as Max, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is one
of the most prolific and frequently performed of British composers. His
several hundred compositions draw from an eclectic array of influences, from
Indian music to serialism to Renaissance polyphony. Davies has also worked
tirelessly in the area of music education and as an environmental activist.
The precocious Davies made his musical debut in a BBC broadcast at
age eight. His education continued at Leigh Grammar School and from 1952 at
Manchester University, where he received an M.A. in 1957. He also attended
the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1952 to 1956, where he and
fellow musicians Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John Ogdon, Alexander Goehr, and
Elgar Howarth formed New Music Manchester -- a group devoted to the
performance of twentieth century works. The Italian government provided
Davies with a scholarship in 1957, allowing him to study in Italy for a year
with GoffredoPetrassi.
From 1959 to 1962, Davies was director of music at the Cirencester
Grammar School, where he developed a teaching method based on musical
performance. Since then he has written often for children, and continues to
devote significant time to education. He spent the next two years in the United
States, studying at Princeton University's graduate school with Roger Sessions
and Earl Kim on a Harkness Fellowship. He wrote The Shepherd's Calendar
(1965) for young singers and instrumentalists for the 1965 UNESCO
Conference on Music in Education in Sydney, Australia, and was a visiting
composer at Adelaide University in 1966.
Back in England in 1967, Davies formed the Pierrot Players with
Birtwistle. The Players specialized in performances of contemporary music,
and Davies wrote many works for them, including his infamous Eight Songs
for a Mad King (1969). He took over sole directorship of the Players in 1970,
reforming them as the Fires of London (which he continued to lead and
compose for until he disbanded the group in 1987). During the 1960s, Davies
became interested in John Taverner, the sixteenth century English composer.
In 1962, he wrote the award-winning First Fantasia on an In Nomine of John
Taverner, and started work on his first opera, Taverner, which was premiered
in 1972.
In 1970, Davies relocated to the Orkney Islands; Orcadian subject
matter, in particular, the writings of George Mackey Brown and the Orcadian
St. Magnus became a significant part of his music. Brown's writings have
inspired works like Black Pentecost (1979) and the massive Orkney Saga
project (the first two of its proposed fourteen parts appeared in 1997). In 1977,
Davies organized the St. Magnus Festival, which he directed until 1986. The
Yellow Cake Revue for singers and piano (1980) features a text by Davies
criticizing proposed uranium mining in the Orkneys and is just one of his
compositions reflecting his environmental concerns.
Davies received his knighthood in 1987. Two years earlier, he became
the Associate Composer-Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, an
association which led to the Strathclyde Concerto Project, a set of ten
concertos for various instruments written over the years 1987 to 1996. His
interest in children's music continued with the frequently performed The Turn
of the Tide (1992), in which Davies' music is combined with compositions by
school children. Among his numerous commissioned works are An Orkney
Wedding, with Sunrise (1984), written for the centennial of the Boston Pops;
The Doctor of Myddfai (1995), his second full-scale opera, written for the
fiftieth anniversary of the Welsh National Opera; and the Symphony No. 8,
"Antarctic" (2000), commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra.
With the arrival of Benjamin Britten on the international music scene,
many felt that English music gained its greatest genius since Purcell. A
composer of wide-ranging talents, Britten found in the human voice an
especial source of inspiration, an affinity that resulted in a remarkable body of
work, ranging from operas like Peter Grimes (1944-1945) and Death in Venice
(1973) to song cycles like the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943) to
the massive choral work War Requiem (1961). He also produced much music
for orchestra and chamber ensembles, including symphonies, concerti, and
chamber and solo works. Britten's father was a prosperous oral surgeon in the
town of Lowestoft, Suffolk; his mother was a leader in the local choral society.
When Benjamin's musical aptitude became evident, the family engaged
composer Frank Bridge to supervise his musical education. Bridge's tutelage
was one of the formative and lasting influences on Britten's compositional
development; Britten eventually paid tribute to his teacher in his Op. 10, the
Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937). Britten's formal training also
included studies at the Royal College of Music (1930-1933).
Upon graduation from the RCM, Britten obtained a position scoring
documentaries (on prosaic themes like "Sorting Office") for the Royal Post
Office film unit. Working on a tight budget, he learned how to extract the
maximum variety of color and musical effectiveness from the smallest
combinations of instruments, producing dozens of such scores from 1935 to
1938. He rapidly emerged as the most promising British composer of his
generation and entered into collaborative relationships that exerted a profound
influence upon his creative life. Among the most important of his professional
associates were literary figures like W.H. Auden, and later, E.M. Forster.
None, however, played as central a role in Britten's life as the tenor Peter
Pears, who was Britten's closest intimate, both personally and professionally,
from the late '30s to the composer's death. Pears' voice inspired a number of
Britten's vocal cycles and opera roles, and the two often joined forces in song
recitals and, from 1948, in the organization and administration of the
Aldeburgh Festival.
A steadfast pacifist, Britten left England in 1939 as war loomed over
Europe. He spent four years in the United States and Canada, his
compositional pace barely slackening, as evidenced by the production of
works like the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), the song cycle Seven Sonnets of
Michelangelo (1940), and his first effort for the stage, Paul Bunyan (19401941). Eventually, the poetry of George Crabbe drew Britten back to England.
With a Koussevitzky Commission backing him, the composer wrote the
enormously successful opera Peter Grimes (1944-45), which marked the
greatest turning point in his career. His fame secure, Britten over the next
several decades wrote a dozen more operas, several of which -- Albert Herring
(1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer
Night's Dream (1960), Death in Venice (1973) -- became instant and
permanent fixtures of the repertoire. He also continued to produce much vocal,
orchestral, and chamber music, including Songs and Proverbs of William
Blake (1965), the three Cello Suites (1961-1964) and the Cello Symphony
(1963), written for Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Third String Quartet
(1975).
Britten suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1971, which resulted in
something of a slowdown in his creative activities. Nonetheless, he continued
to compose until his death in 1976, by which time he was recognized as one of
the principal musical figures of the twentieth century.
A multi-talented Renaissance man of the 20th century, Noël Coward
worked primarily as a playwright, actor, songwriter, and singer, but his
creative activities also included the writing of fiction and poetry; producing
and directing for the stage, film, and television; and nightclub entertaining and
recording. Across a career spanning six decades, he was remarkably successful
at these various pursuits, moving from one to the other with seeming ease,
even when he was wearing several different hats at the same time, e.g.,
writing, directing, and starring in the same show. As a writer and as a
performer, he maintained a consistent persona, that of a witty, sophisticated
British subject, always ready to deliver a devastating and hilarious
observation, often at the expense of his own kind, as he did, for instance, in his
most famous song, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." He was also, however,
intensely patriotic, as he demonstrated in his World War II-era song "London
Pride" and the film In Which We Serve (which, characteristically, he wrote,
co-directed, starred in, and composed the background score for). And his
sophistication could be used in the service of plaintive sentiment, as it was in
such ballads as "If Love Were All." Especially later in his career, Coward put
his persona on display in nightclubs and film appearances, but his reputation
rests more on his writing; he was one of the major British playwrights of the
century and, arguably, also the greatest creator of musical theater works
among his countrymen in the same period, with 13 stage musicals to his credit
between 1923 and 1963.
Noel Coward was born in Teddington, Middlesex, England on December
16, 1899 into what he referred to as “genteel poverty”. Principally a
playwright, Coward also wrote a whole catalog of hit popular songs with an
elegant, sophisticated style. As a young child, Coward would give little
performances in front of his family and was encouraged onto the stage by his
mother. His career started with an advertisement in the Daily Mirror his
mother saw and answered and auditioned by Lilla Field for whom he sang the
song "Liza".
By age 11, Noel was already on the stage acting in minor roles. He
worked with actor Claude Hawtrey who Noel would later say had an enormous
effect upon his grasp of acting. In 1913, he met and worked with Gertrude
Lawrence and in 1915, he appeared in his first adult role in Charley's Aunt.
This same year, Coward also composed his first song "Forbidden Fruit".
In 1916, he had his first cabaret appearance and in 1917, in collaboration
with Esme Wynne, he wrote his first play entitled Ida Collaborates. In 1918,
Coward produced Women and Whiskey, joined the British Army, wrote
another play The Rat Trap, and made his first film appearance (as an extra). In
1919, "The Baseball Rag", with music by Doris Joel became Noel's first
published tune and in 1921, he his play I'll Leave It To You starring the
playwright himself, premiered in London's West End.
In 1921, Coward traveled to America and in 1922, his novel The
Withered Nosegay was published. 1923 saw Noel's first musical Revue
London Calling in which he appeared with Gertrude Lawrence. Throughout
the 1920’s he continued writing plays and produced, among others, The
Vortex, Hay Fever, Bitter Sweet, Design For Living and Private Lives.
Through the 1930’s, Coward produced several other plays for the West
End and Broadway. He split his time between London, New York and Paris,
France. By 1940, he had written 32 plays and perhaps 140 tunes, yet he never
learned to read or write music. Among the songs he had composed included
the hits "Mad Dogs And Englishmen”, “Go Out In The Midday Sun",
"Zigeuna", "Bittersweet", "Don't Lets Be Beastly To The Germans”, "I Travel
Alone", "You've Got That Thing", "What Is This Thing Called Love", and
many more. Among his films were Cavalcade, In Which We Serve and Brief
Encounter.
In the mid-1940’s Coward settled in Jamaica, BWI. A reporter once
asked him why he chose to live in Jamaica rather than in Britain, and Noel is
reported to have replied "I can answer that in just two words - Income Tax."
He built a home in Jamaica, which he called 'Firefly', and entertained lavishly.
During the 1950's, he wrote seven new plays, none of which were successful.
After the London opening of his play Sirocco, he went on stage and was
greeted by boos from the audience. When his plays could no longer find a
public, he turned more and more to writing songs, all of which were well
received in America. In 1965, he opened as an act in a Las Vegas casino where
he was a huge hit. Also in 1965, he had an appeared with Mary Martin on a
television show. In the late 1960’s, Coward’s play Hay Fever was revived and
opened to critical acclaim and success.
Coward was knighted in 1970, which was soon followed by a secession
of illnesses. Noel Coward died on March 29, 1973, at his home “Firefly” in
Jamaica. In 1984, a stone commemorating his life was placed in the Poet’s
Corner of Westminster Abbey.
As Coward's own recordings of his songs entered the public domain in
Europe (where the copyright limit lasts only 50 years), CD reissues became
confusingly repetitious in their content, but a number of them demonstrated
the continuing appeal of his music, as did the many albums devoted to his
music recorded by others, which include: Dominic Alldis' If Love Were All:
The Songs of Noël Coward; The Noël Coward Songbook, by Ian Bostridge,
Sophie Daneman, and Jeffrey Tate; Richard Conrad's Noël Coward Songs: A
Room with a View; Craig Jessup Sings Noël Coward; Barbara Lea and Keith
Ingham Are Mad About the Boy: The Songs of Noel Coward; Mad About the
Man, by Carmen McRae; Bobby Short Is Mad About Noel Coward; The
Dance Bands Play Noel Coward; The Great British Dance Bands Play the
Music of Noel Coward; Noel Coward Revisited (featuring Laurence Harvey,
Hermione Gingold, and Dorothy Loudon, among others); Twentieth-Century
Blues: The Songs of Noël Coward (featuring Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry,
Elton John, and Sting, among others); and The Words and Music of Noël
Coward.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has been the most successful composer of
musicals of his generation and also a breaker of molds in the genre. The
composers who inspired him were for the most part American, but he was born
in London, the son of William Lloyd Webber, director of the London College
of Music, and was trained at the Royal Academy of Music.
Though the school wasn't a musical-theater stronghold, Lloyd Webber
and lyricist Tim Rice met and began work on a musical based on the biblical
story of Joseph and his coat of many colors; Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat showed strong rock influences. Soon the two hit on
another unusual idea: a musical based on the life of Christ from Judas' point of
view. Unable to finance a stage version, Lloyd Webber and Rice did manage
to record their show, and Jesus Christ Superstar went on to sell millions of
copies. The hit musical version followed belatedly.
Lloyd Webber and Rice parted ways temporarily, but Rice returned with
another audacious idea: a musical retelling the life of Argentine icon Eva
Perón. Evita (1976) repeated the Jesus Christ Superstar pattern, with its hit
album followed by a successful theatrical run.
The Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership now was severed (Rice went on to
write Chess), and Lloyd Webber next wrote a musical revue based on T.S.
Eliot's whimsical poems about Cats (1981). This time the show came before
the album, and its two-decade run became legendary. By this time, Lloyd
Webber had largely abandoned rock elements in favor of a pastiche style that
borrowed from classical and opera sources.
Lloyd Webber created several moderately successful shows (Song and
Dance, Starlight Express) before scoring another long-running hit in 1987 with
a musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Aspects of Love (19891990) was less successful, however. A musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder
film Sunset Boulevard proved one of his rare disappointments. In 1996, Lloyd
Webber and Rice contributed a new song, "You Must Love Me," to a film
version of Evita starring Madonna; "You Must Love Me" was named Best
Original Song at the 1997 Academy Awards, and in January of that year,
Andrew Lloyd Webber became Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton.
Lloyd Webber continued to compose new musicals approximately every
other year. Whistle Down the Wind opened in July 1998 in London, and The
Beautiful Game, a political musical about Northern Ireland, opened in
September 2000.