Italian-style opera was a late-comer to Britain. Created at the courts of Northern Italy in the first decade of the seventeenth century as a humanist effort to recapture what were thought the powers of ancient Greek music, by mid-century opera had spread throughout Italy and across the Alps to most of the major princely courts. While some English musicians and travellers would have encountered opera during their continental travels, the Jacobean-Caroline court’s thirst for musical drama was satisfied by its own multimedia court masques.

The idea of all-sung opera on continental models seemed not attractive to England’s Restoration theatre managers. It required subsidy from or partnership with the court of Charles II to produce forms of all-sung opera on French models, but no long-lasting local tradition was established.

The Restoration theatre did develop its own way of incorporating music with drama, one suited to the English ‘genius’, one that reflected an English disposition towards rational drama: a characteristic operatic tradition that is distinguished other than merely being sung in English. But after all-sung opera was introduced to London in 1705, interventions by the Lord Chamberlain – shuffling the musicians, singers, and managers between the two theatres – eliminated the conditions needed for the English form of opera (helped along in no small way by an audience enamoured by the Italian castrato singer).

By 1710 opera in the Italian style had come to dominate the London stage, and in March 1711 Joseph Addison could lament ‘our English Musick is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead’. This chapter traces the English experience with dramatic works with music to recover what was this rooted-out ‘English Musick’ and to understand the basis for the response to all-sung, Italian-style opera.

Music in the Theatre

To revive the London stage, shortly after his return in 1660, Charles II granted patents for two royal theatres. One was granted to Sir William Davenant under the patronage of the Duke of York, another to Sir Thomas Killigrew, which operated under the direct patronage of the King. At first the companies played at temporary locations. In November 1671, after playing at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Duke’s Company (where the actor Thomas Betterton was a co-manager) moved to a new building at Dorset Garden; it was the most magnificent of London’s theatres, built for scenery and spectacle.