The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675-1725

Abstract

Kathryn Lowerre, ed. The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675-1725. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 324 pp. $119.95 USD, £65.00 (hardback). ISBN: 9781409455332.The aim of Kathryn Lowerre's new collection is promising: to focus on a fifty-year period, as Lowerre writes, "neither 'Restoration' nor 'Eighteenth Century,"' a time of "theatrical and musical volatility encompassing the span of a hypothetical audience member's active theatre-going life" (1). That promise, however, is only partially realized in a book whose contributions vary widely in quality.The first three chapters address different aspects of the competition organized by members of the Kit-Cat Club in 1701 (for "the Encouragement of Musick") to write the best setting of William Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris. (Four entries, by John Eccles, Gottfried Finger, Daniel Purcell, and John Weldon, were performed at the Dorset Garden Theatre in successive weeks in March and April; Weldon was unexpectedly judged the winner, with Finger coming in last.) Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson use their impressive grasp of contemporary sources, both manuscript and print, relating to the production and reception of musical theatre in this period to "bring together all the available evidence" about the singers who performed in the competition (6). As Baldwin and Wilson admit, however, the only definite information we have comes from just one letter by Congreve about the performers of Eccles' setting; the bulk of their chapter consists of shrewd speculation, perhaps at its most valuable when, at its close, the chapter opens out to consider possible explanations for the competition's result.Matt Roberson's perceptive re-reading of familiar sources relating to the staging of the competition entries leads to new and persuasive conclusions, unfussily presented; the illustration showing his theories about the nature and positioning of the puzzling tin "acoustical reflectors" described by Congreve in the same letter is particularly useful.Robert Rawson's contribution attempts to identify "Why Finger Failed in 'The Prize Musick'": a difficult task, since Finger's setting does not survive. The chapter is not entirely successful. Rawson concludes that "Finger's music had lost much of its relevance" by the time of the competition "since he continued to rely so heavily on central European conventions" (45). While there is no doubt that, as Robert Pascall writes in his thoughtful article on "Style" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "the differences between and the relative merits of the ["national"] styles of composition [...] were an important part of 18th-century musical consciousness," identifying the features of those styles and what they would have meant to different audiences can be very difficult. Considering the weight they are made to bear in his argument, Rawson's frequent references to aspects of "Austro-Bohemian" style in Fingers London music really need to be supported by examples of contemporary Czech and Austrian works, and discussion of these works' "national" characteristics (probably much less familiar than "French" or "Italian" styles to students of English theatre music of this period) for comparison, if we are to entertain his conclusions.Jennifer Cable's chapter is also concerned with issues of "national" style-this time Italian influence on the English cantatas of Eccles, Daniel Purcell, and Johann Pepusch-but disappointingly, its weaknesses are similar to those of Rawson's chapter: it provides no examples of contemporary Italian music to compare with the English works in question, making Cable's claims difficult to assess. Here, as before, what seems to me the most interesting question-why was the Italian style so attractive to English audiences, performers, and composers at this point?-is never really addressed.In his discussion of the relationship between Pepusch and Richard Leveridge's afterpiece The Union of the Three Sister Arts and contemporary aesthetics, Sean M. …