Thomas Clayton’s Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus, premiered at Drury Lane theatre on 16 January 1705, is possibly the most reviled and misunderstood opera of the era, yet it is otherwise rightly credited as the first opera in the Italian manner produced in England. The commonly accepted verdict on the composer and opera has its origins in ‘A Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England’, published on 27 August 1709.Footnote 1 The anonymous author, certainly a partisan for the latest in Italian music, set the tone of most later opinion. ‘Critical’ is certainly the author’s byword, for throughout the tract one can hear him vigorously grinding an axe as he savages the music of Arsinoe, Li amori di Ergasto (1705),Footnote 2 The Temple of Love (1706), Rosamond (1707), and the pasticcio Clotilda (1709). The author reserves some praise for the Italianate arias of Camilla (1706), and the bilingual Thomyris (1707) and Pyrrhus and Demetrius (1708) – operas with music by Giovanni Bononcini, Alessandro Scarlatti and Nicola Haym (although he does condemn the last for the adaptation’s mangled plot).
‘A Critical Discourse’ infamously condemns Arsinoe, seeming to delight in asserting it ‘little deserv’d the Name of an Opera. […] There is nothing in it but a few Sketches of antiquated Italian Airs, so mangled and sophisticated, that instead of Arsinoe, it ought to be called the Hospital of the old Decrepid Italian Opera’s […] a filthy Fardle of old Italian Airs’.Footnote 3 Of this slur on Clayton, one contemporary reader noted in the margin of his copy, ‘Poor Clayton what hadst thou done to vex him’.Footnote 4 The anonymous author’s opinion was echoed (if not repeated verbatim) by early music historians. Sir John Hawkins in his A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) stated with certainty that Clayton borrowed the music of the opera:
Clayton had brought with him [from Italy] a collection of Italian airs, which he set a high value on; these he mangled and sophisticated, and adapted them to the words of an English drama, and entitled Arsinoe Queen of Cypress, called it an opera, composed by himself.Footnote 5
In the final volume of his A General History of Music published in 1789, Charles Burney parrots most of Hawkins’s account; he accepts Clayton’s authorship of the music but turns it to an occasion to damn him and plump for Italian music, since ‘nothing so mean in melody and incorrect in counterpoint’ was likely to have been composed by an Italian composer of the time. Furthermore, Burney takes the opportunity to disparage English taste of the time:
Indeed, the English must have hungered and thirsted extremely after dramatic Music at this time, to be attracted and amused by such trash. It is scarce credible, that in the course of the first year this miserable performance, which neither deserved the name of a drama by its poetry, nor an opera by its Music, should sustain twenty-four [sic] representations, and the second year eleven [sic]!Footnote 6
Burney justly notes the disparity between his judgement and Arsinoe’s appeal to its contemporary audience. But his judgements in his History and elsewhere are notoriously distorted by his advocacy of the superiority of Italian music and opera: he could not be expected to give a sympathetic, contextual, historical evaluation of Clayton’s opera. These judgements on Clayton and the opera have been repeated and varied in one way or another by most modern writers; so ingrained has been the conventional wisdom that few scholars have been willing to grant Arsinoe the benefit of looking at the full manuscript score in the British Library.Footnote 7
A full reception history of Arsinoe is not necessary here, but a few citations will suffice. Stoddard Lincoln, commending John Eccles’s Semele, dismissed the music and translation of Arsinoe as ‘inept’Footnote 8 and argued that Arsinoe, like other early English operas of the decade, was a ‘sort of pastiche’ and that the ‘recitative is so awkward that one finds it difficult to believe an Englishman could have written it – even Clayton’.Footnote 9
The judgement of ‘A Critical Discourse’ and subsequent writers applies a standard of musical taste and expectations for opera reflecting Italian opera of later in the century; this style is most familiar to modern listeners from the London operas of Handel, and especially his Rinaldo (1711). Perhaps no surer evidence of this point is Lowell Lindgren’s validating the anonymous writer’s opinion by pointing out that ‘no more than one-third of its antiquated arias resemble a da capo aria’, adding for good measure that many arias ‘end and begin in different keys’ and have ‘two sections which end on the same chord’ as obvious deficiencies.Footnote 10
One theatre historian called it a ‘right bastardization of opera’,Footnote 11 while another says the ‘music verges on the incompetent’.Footnote 12 Others called it ‘pathetic’Footnote 13 and a ‘disgrace [to] the stage’.Footnote 14 The literary scholar James Winn, one of the few who did examine the manuscript score of Arsinoe, faintly damns the opera with his half-hearted compliment: ‘Arsinoe succeeded in spite of its music’ but ‘gave audiences some idea of what an opera might be like’.Footnote 15
Roger Fiske, parti pris for English opera, who seems to have contracted an antipathy to the ‘virulent germs’ of the ‘disease’ of Italian opera, savages the opera’s ‘cardboard characters, the involved relationships, the silly misunderstandings, and the final reconciliation’ as ‘nonsense’ and indicts the ‘silliness of both words and music’.Footnote 16 But in this regard, one must credit the libretto’s plot as more streamlined and less complicated by extended subplots than its Bologna source libretto or than most Italian operas of the day – a point easily confirmed by glancing through <Online Supplement 1>, which gives parallel texts of the London and Bologna librettos (in translation).
This is not the place to debate or argue the aesthetic quality of Clayton’s opera – such a judgement should await a staged performance with sympathetic and sensitive singers, staging and historic-style continuo realization. But, in the meantime, drawing upon the full range of primary sources now available and placing Arsinoe and its libretto against late-seventeenth-century English theatre music can lead to a sympathetic appreciation and understanding of Arsinoe’s operatic dramaturgy and the goals and achievement of Clayton and his unnamed librettist (see below). Clayton’s Arsinoe must be seen as an innovative, native attempt to create an all-sung, dramatic entertainment suitable for English taste, a taste that had not yet been formed by sustained exposure to Italian-style opera and singing – and especially imported castratos – that came to dominate London opera by 1710.
The London production of Arsinoe
The modern verdicts regarding Clayton and Arsinoe are quite at odds with the opera’s contemporary popularity and reception, with performance data suggesting that it was commercially successful and competitive. The opera was first produced in a subscription for three performances; it was so successful that thirteen more performances were called for that season. In its three seasons, Arsinoe had thirty performances compared to thirty-three performances for Giovanni Bononcini’s Camilla during the same period.
Early published mentions of Arsinoe treat it on a par with Camilla. By August 1705 Arsinoe was well-enough known to be cited as an example of the ‘Exotic Follies’ that are come to charm the Town.Footnote 17 The arias were familiar enough they could be parodied or burlesqued in plays.Footnote 18 The poem The Power of Musick (1707) notes that while the great lords are transported to hear the two ‘tuneful Rival Sisters’ (Tofts and Margarita), the ‘Ladies’ crowd to see ‘sweet Camilla, or Arsinoe’.Footnote 19 The Muses Mercury, in general a promoter of the new Italian-style operas, in 1707 commended ‘the late Success of Arsinoe, Set by Mr. Clayton after the Italian manner’.Footnote 20
Although ‘Dorimant’ is satirized as an ignorant critic, John Oldmixon, editor of the Muses Mercury, has him rank Arsinoe with Nicholas Rowe’s celebrated play Tamerlane (1701; published 1702) as works he misapprehends.Footnote 21 In March 1707, Sir John Percival’s brother could report from London that Joseph Addison and Clayton’s opera Rosamond ‘has not taken So well as Camilla or Arsinoe’.Footnote 22 The Long Vacation (1708) observes that as a result of the operas, London is devoid of customers:
Nugæ Canoræ (1709) notes how ‘Arsinoe, the Great and Fair admir’d’, until Camilla supplanted it.Footnote 24 The anonymous author of ‘A Critical Discourse’ aside, Clayton had a sufficient reputation to be called upon to set additional English texts to music,Footnote 25 including another opera libretto, Joseph Addison’s Rosamond (1707).
Premiere
Several mistaken assumptions and errors of fact about Arsinoe can be corrected. Given Christopher Rich’s long history of alleged disreputable management and cheating his actors at his Drury Lane theatre, it has been incorrectly assumed he somehow stole Arsinoe from John Vanbrugh, manager of the rival Haymarket (Queen’s) theatre, or that he bribed Clayton.Footnote 26
The chain of events leading to Arsinoe can be traced back to 1703. At the time, there were two competing theatre companies in London: the Patent Company at Drury Lane (with Dorset Garden used occasionally) managed by Rich, and the newer ‘rebel’ company at the smaller Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, managed by the veteran actor Thomas Betterton, who led a company of many of London’s experienced actors.
Sometime in the spring or summer of 1703, the playwright and budding architect John Vanbrugh set in motion plans to establish a united theatrical company and build by subscription a new theatre to house it.Footnote 27 He planned to produce both plays and operas.Footnote 28 The proposed company included a full musical establishment overseen by John Eccles (then house composer at Lincoln’s Inn Fields).
By late 1703, Vanbrugh and his partner the playwright William Congreve realized that a repertoire of plays and operas was needed for his new theatre. Whether Vanbrugh contacted Clayton or it was the opportunity of a new theatre in need of new operas, either circumstance could have given Clayton, recently returned from Italy, the incentive and motive to embark on an opera, modelled on those he had seen in Italy. By 1704–05, in addition to Arsinoe Vanbrugh had five other potential operas lined up: Orlando Furioso (music by Daniel Purcell, with a libretto based on that of Philippe Quinault for Lully); The Temple of Love (Joseph Saggione [Giuseppe Fedeli]/Peter Anthony Motteux); The British Enchanters (John Eccles/George Granville); Rosamond (Clayton/Addison), and Semele (Eccles/Congreve).Footnote 29
Vanbrugh had begun acquiring property for his theatre by early June 1703.Footnote 30 On 31 August 1704, a newsletter writer reported that an opening by Christmas 1704 was expected.Footnote 31 The Diverting Post for 28 October 1704 reported:
The Play-House in the Hay-Market […] is almost finish’d, in the mean time two Opera’s translated from the Italian by good Hands, are setting to Musick, one by Mr. Daniel Purcel, which is called Orlando Furioso, and the other by Mr. Clayton, both Opera’s are to be perform’d by the best Artists eminent both for Vocal and Instrumental Musick at the Opening of the House.Footnote 32
Judging from the extant drawings for the sets by Sir James Thornhill,Footnote 33 Clayton and his librettist conceived Arsinoe as requiring a fully-rigged theatre with moveable side-wings and back-shutters, both with upper borders.
The theatre was not open as expected for Christmas. As Clayton later explained, his friend the cellist and harpsichordist Charles Dieupart arranged (in exchange for half the profits) to have the opera produced at Rich’s Drury Lane – no doubt because Vanbrugh’s theatre was far from completion.Footnote 34 On 16 December the Diverting Post announced that Clayton’s opera, ‘Set after the Italian manner’, would be performed at Drury Lane;Footnote 35 Arsinoe was indeed premiered there on 16 January 1705. This theatre was in fact at the time a better choice, for it had the capability for moveable scenery and had the singers, dancers, and instrumentalists needed for a full-scale opera.
An advertisement for the evening’s entertainment suggests Arsinoe fit well (perhaps unobtrusively, despite its novelty) within the customary pattern of an evening at the theatre, with a main piece preceded and followed by songs, dances, and instrumental music:
A New Opera never perform’d before, call’d Arsino′e Queen of Cyprus, After the Italian manner, All Sung, being set to Musick by Master Clayton. With several Entertainments of Danceing by Monsieur l’Abbee, Monsieur du Ruel, Monsieur Cherrier, Mrs. Elford, Mrs. du Ruel, Mrs. Moss, and others. And the famous Signiora Francisca Margaretta de l’Epine will, before the Beginning and after the Ending of the Opera, perform several Entertainments of Singing in Italian and English.Footnote 36
The phrase ‘after the Italian manner’ would have indicated to the attentive reader not to expect an English semi- or dramatic opera. London’s star soprano Margarita de l’Epine, it should be noted, did not sing in the opera, but only as an added attraction, whereas Catherine Tofts was given the title role of Queen Arsinoe.
An argument that Arsinoe was first presented in the midst of a play, as in the manner of an inserted masque, while the actors sat by and watched the masque, has not gained acceptance.Footnote 37
Clayton as composer
Beginning with the insinuation of the author of ‘A Critical Discourse’ that Arsinoe was a ‘hospital’ of ‘old Italian airs’, it has often been inferred that Clayton did not compose Arsinoe. Assertions that Clayton was not the sole composer of Arsinoe have been repeated in various ways by modern writers: that it was a pasticcio of Italian arias or that Clayton adapted the music,Footnote 38 or that he had the assistance of Charless Dieupart and Nicola Haym in its composition.Footnote 39 That Clayton had their collaboration in the composition may be an extrapolation from Spectator, no. 258 (26 December 1711), which reported that Dieupart and Haym assisted in the introduction of Arsinoe and collaborated with Clayton in concerts at York Buildings in 1712. Their importance to Clayton’s enterprise was their role as harpsichordist and cellist; they formed the core of the basso continuo group that was essential to the performance of the Italian-style secco recitative, the operatic novelty that Clayton was introducing.Footnote 40
Contrariwise, every contemporary document or witness credits Clayton as sole composer of the opera. The initial newspaper advertisements cited above announce ‘a New Opera never perform’d before […] being set to Musick by Master Clayton’,Footnote 41 and the Muses Mercury refers to ‘the late Success of Arsinoé‚ Set by Mr. Clayton’.Footnote 42 The printed collection of arias from the opera, Songs in the New Opera, Call’d Arsinoé Queen of Cyprus Compos’d by Mr. Tho: Clayton (1706; hereafter Songs) and single printed song sheets are unanimous in crediting him as the composer.Footnote 43 Both extant manuscript full scores of the opera give Clayton as composer.Footnote 44
In December 1705, William Cleland wrote to a friend in Scotland, ‘Operas are extremlie alamode in the Italian manner[.] besides Arsinoe[,] Clayton[,] who composed it[,] has composed another the words by Mr Addison’.Footnote 45 In 1708, Clayton was sent to the Fleet prison as an insolvent debtor;Footnote 46 when a group of Whigs contributed to a subscription for his relief, the subscription list was headed ‘A charitable Collection for Mr Clayton the composer of Arsinoe’.Footnote 47 The writer of marginalia in the copy reproduced in the facsimile edition of the ‘Critical Discourse’ also accepted Clayton as the composer, noting how unjust the printed remarks were. Richard Steele, likewise, repeatedly called Clayton ‘the Author of Arsinoe’.Footnote 48
Nevertheless, even in 1711 one of Clayton’s main purposes in the Preface to the wordbook for his Passion of Sappho is to defend his authorship of Arsinoe from the insinuation made in the ‘Critical Discourse’. In his defence, Clayton argues that if he had adapted the verbal text to pre-existing Italian arias, there would not be (what he takes to be) the good fit between the words and music in Arsinoe – what he calls ‘the Mechanick part in Setting’ – nor would the rests and cadences in the music match commas and periods in the poetry. Moreover, for two major portions of the opera, the Epithalamium Song and the final Chorus, Clayton would have been on his own without any ready-made Italian sources to adapt. These set pieces have solo verses alternating with orchestral symphonies and concluding with a chorus. Such a large-scale musical entertainment, characteristic of the masques and musical entertainments often found in native English semi- or dramatic operas, could not have been taken from an Italian opera of the period.
Librettist
It is commonly stated that Peter Anthony Motteux, the Huguenot refugee, author, translator, and recently editor of the Gentleman’s Journal (1692–94), was responsible for Arsinoe’s English text.Footnote 49 This attribution was first made in print by, and rests solely on, John Mottley, who in 1747 listed (with no authority or documentation) Arsinoe among the poetic works of Motteux along with the other opera librettos that bear his name.Footnote 50 This attribution was accepted by Motteux’s bibliographer,Footnote 51 who justified his acceptance on the grounds of its similarity to Motteux’s other works.
Resting solely on this posthumous attribution, Motteux’s authorship must be strongly questioned, if not rejected. Primarily, there seems no reason why Motteux would want to keep his authorship secret. Elsewhere, Motteux claimed authorship of his many texts for masques, occasional odes and afterpieces, not all of the highest literary quality. It was, in fact, customary in England to identify librettists of operas, and Motteux’s authorship was acknowledged on the title pages of the wordbooks for The Temple of Love (1706), Thomyris (1707) and Love’s Triumph (1708). Surely he would want to claim responsibility of the even more successful and important Arsinoe. In the Preface to the wordbook of Arsinoe, Clayton was coy about his librettist. He evasively stated ‘I was oblig’d to have an Italian opera translated’. Either the libretto was a work for hire and the real author was required to accept anonymity or, perhaps, Clayton devised the libretto himself (since presumably it was he who brought it back from Italy).
The work of the librettist has been variously characterized. Clayton states he had an Italian libretto translated, and many writers have stated the work was a translation, whereas other writers state the librettist adapted the Italian source libretto. An examination of <Online Supplement 1>, which presents the London libretto opposite a translation of the Bologna source libretto, readily shows that the librettist made a thorough-going rifaccimento: a free and complete reworking of the source libretto, in addition to freely translating the portions of the Italian text that were retained and adapted. In the process, the librettist shortened scenes of recitative,Footnote 52 deleted entire groups of scenes dealing with minor characters, disregarded some arias, transformed verses from recitative into aria text, and eliminated one minor character (Ermillo), transferring some of his lines to another character (Delbo). Clayton’s librettist streamlined the plot down to its essential conflicts, events, and motivation; retained scenes of exciting stage action; accelerated the plot denouement; and avoided many of the original obscure classical mythological allusions. For the plot, he changed a suicide by poison to one by a dagger.
The librettist must share credit for a significant original addition, the Epithalamium Song and the concluding Chorus, intended, no doubt, to meet the expectations of a London audience for an opera (discussed below).
Source libretto
There are two versions of the text of the opera by Tomaso Stanzani: one for a Bologna production for Carnival 1676–77Footnote 53 and one for a production in Venice the following autumn season,Footnote 54 both with music by Petronio Franceschini. There are full scores for both productions.Footnote 55 Neither was the source of music for Clayton’s setting.Footnote 56
A substitution in the cast, the inclusion of a chorus of ambassadors, courtiers and soldiers, and additional scenes with machinery in the Venetian libretto (to appeal to local taste), leave no doubt that the Bologna libretto was the basis for Clayton’s opera.Footnote 57
Removing impediments to the study of Arsinoe
Several impediments no doubt have prevented scholars from readily grasping an overall sense of the operatic-dramatic nature of Arsinoe. First has been lack of awareness of the complete manuscript scores, not consulted by most scholars until recently: one at the British Library and one at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.Footnote 58 The scores include longer versions of several arias (see Table 1), the recitatives, symphonies, instrumental accompaniments, and the Epithalamium Song and Chorus.
Table 1. Aria Forms in Thomas Clayton’s Arsinoe (1705)
Note: Role of Delbo is variously assigned to Mr Cook, Mr Good, or Raimondon.
The only readily available musical representation of the opera has been the collection Songs in the New Opera, Call’d Arsinoé Compos’d by Mr. Tho: Clayton (1706).Footnote 59 As customary at the time for such collections of songs from operas, recitatives are omitted and the arias are given with only the basso continuo line, perhaps giving the impression that there was no more musical substance to the opera. There is no indication in the Songs that six arias had instrumental accompaniments and that there were additional symphonies and music for the dance and chorus of the Epithalamium.Footnote 60
Another impediment is the graphic layout of the printed English wordbook, which makes it difficult to distinguish at a glance the arias from the surrounding recitative as well as their form – the elements that are most important for determining the genre of an opera. We are accustomed to the printed layout conventions of opera seria wordbooks where the strophes intended for, or set as, arias are set off typographically from the lines set as recitative by block indentation or centering, spacing, use of italics, and clear indication of da capos by the words ‘da capo’. This familiar manner of typographically setting out wordbooks for Italian operas was first adopted in London with those for Li amori di Ergasto (1705) and The Temple of Love (1706).
These customary conventions were not used in the printed London wordbook for Arsinoe. This wordbook appears to have been based on the London librettist’s fair manuscript copy, which follows the general typographic layout of the Bologna libretto’s wordbook. In the Bologna wordbook, it is not readily apparent just by visually scanning the text which lines were set as (or intended as) arias: lines for arias are not distinguished by italics (which are reserved for stage directions) and are not regularly indented and spaced before and after.Footnote 61 In viewing other long passages of lines set along the left margin, it is only apparent that previous lines were intended as part of the aria when there is a repetition of the first words of an earlier line followed by ‘&c’. (That these preceding lines were intended as part of the aria is confirmed when upon inspection they have the characteristic rhyme and metric patterns for arias.) The London wordbook follows no consistent manner of indicating which lines of verse were set as an aria. Some lines of verse that seem to reflect the librettist’s intended lines suitable for arias (for example, by concluding a strophe with a repetition of a previous line or adding ‘da capo’) were instead set by Clayton as recitative. In other cases, Clayton chose to set as an aria lines (or often just a single line) that the librettist left by default for recitative. Nor is it clear from the wordbook layout what form the arias took. Throughout, Clayton exercised his own judgment about which lines of verse were suitable for lyric expression (and were not always reflected as such in the wordbook). To show which lines of the libretto Clayton chose to set as aria, duet, or chorus, <Online Supplement 2> presents the second issue of the London wordbook showing the lines set by Clayton in outlines, with numbers as given in the printed Songs.
To further aid overall comprehension of the operatic dramaturgy of Arsinoe, <Online Supplement 3> is a reformatted version of the London wordbook following modern conventions. Recitative is given flush left in roman (normal) type; lines or strophes set as aria, duet, or chorus are indented as block text in italics (with corresponding numbers from the printed Songs). Indications of da capo are added editorially (based on actual musical realization), even though an initial line was repeated in the wordbook. Lines of text in the wordbook that were not set are struck through.
Arsinoe as English opera
Clayton’s dates of travel to Italy and what motivated his trip are not certain.Footnote 62 He received a bequest from his father’s will in 1697, which may have given him the financial resources for travel.Footnote 63 Writing in 1711, Clayton reported that he had been ‘bred’ in the art of music since his childhood, but having found the ‘usual Methods taken in England to attain a general knowledge in this art [ … ] very little satisfactory’, he was ‘at the Trouble and Charge to go into Italy to consult the greatest Masters in it, and by the study of Dead Authors, and Instruction of the greatest living’, felt qualified ‘to introduce the Italian method of composing Musick upon our English Stage’.Footnote 64 Certainly in Italy he became familiar with the prevailing conventions of Italian opera of the turn of the century and collected librettos and probably scores.
Since sources in late 1704 mention his opera, Clayton must have returned at least by 1703, about the time Vanbrugh was projecting his new theatre company. When he returned, he ventured to prepare an all-sung opera for England, which he announced ‘in the Italian manner’. This was perhaps an unfortunate announcement, for it seems to have disposed modern writers to evaluate Arsinoe against the stylistic features of a later eighteenth-century Italian dramma per musica or opera seria.
In many significant ways, Arsinoe is an opera ‘in the Italian manner’: it has a heroic plot and small number of characters, the dramatic narrative is presented in dialogue carried out in secco recitative (recitativo semplice) interspersed with numerous moments of expressive arias. However, it does lack features of the later reform operas of Zeno and Metastasio, such as the highly structured scenes leading up to a da capo exit aria, high moral seriousness, and the elimination of comic characters. Nevertheless, the category does serve to highlight the salient features of recitative, aria form, and vocal style that characterize Italian opera. Against this background, we turn to a fresh consideration of Arsinoe.
Recitative
In the Preface to the wordbook for Arsinoe, Clayton claims to be introducing ‘the Italian manner of Musick on the English Stage’, but this may be a bit of promotional overstatement, for he is not the first to introduce recitative itself. English musicians, musical amateurs, and audiences were, of course, familiar with recitative, going back to Henry Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, William Davenant, John Blow, Henry Purcell, and more recently in Italian songs and cantatas lately introduced in London theatres and music meetings (or concerts).Footnote 65 Older audience members could have heard French-style recitative in the Grabu-Dryden Albion and Albanius (1685) and the Lully-Quinault Cadmus et Hermione (1686). Elaborated declamatory-style recitative was used in English verse anthems. Additionally, the multi-sectional Restoration theatre song (see below) often opened with a section of declamatory-style recitative over a long, sustained bass note before moving on to more ‘songish’ settings of subsequent lines.
The real novelty of Arsinoe and what did need ‘general Acceptation’ was the thorough-going use of secco recitative to carry the dialogue and action of a full-length, all-sung drama. In the conventional English semi- or dramatic opera, the narrative is conveyed in the spoken dialogue of the speaking cast of the main play (what John Dryden called the ‘just Drama’ and Motteux called the ‘correct play’).Footnote 66 The music is assigned to a separate cast of singers for inserted songs, incidental music, or multi-media musical entertainments.Footnote 67 It is presumably the style of conversational, sung, repartee-like dialogue, quickly alternating between characters, that Clayton said he had ‘not been wanting, to the utmost of my Diligence, in the instructing’ of the singers,Footnote 68 and which needed the collaboration of Dieupart and Haym as continuo players.
Clayton took a flexible approach to recitative. For the conversational dialogue, as the manuscript scores reveal, Clayton used the prevailing Italian style of secco recitative. Addison would observe that each nation’s speech has a different intonation pattern, which should be reflected in its musical recitative.Footnote 69 Here Clayton’s choice of secco recitative for English verse, with its patter-like, regular short note values on mostly repeated pitches, could be faulted.
But at other moments of heightened emotional intensity, Clayton used what the English were familiar with: a form of declamatory recitative, such as used by Henry and Daniel Purcell, John Eccles, John Weldon, and others, where the vocal line has a wider range, a greater variety of note values, and more angular contours to reflect the shape of English dramatic speech.
What James Winn dismisses as an example of Clayton’s ‘incompetent’ recitative is in fact an example of his flexible approach to recitative: Arsinoe’s outburst, ‘Help me ye Gods / Assist my Flight’, is set in a heightened declamatory style, while the other characters in the scene use the secco style.Footnote 70
Arias
For the arias, Clayton faced the task of setting text in a manner that would be congenial to his English audience. He chose not to make extensive use of of the Italian melodic style or da capo arias with numerous ritornellos that English audiences were becoming familiar with. Instead, he drew on the style and forms long familiar to English singers and audiences: the Restoration multi-sectional theatre song, best exemplified by the Purcells, Eccles, Weldon, and others.Footnote 71
England’s own native theatre practice was to insert songs (as well as dances and other incidental music) into plays – usually sung not by the principal actors themselves but by professional singers who had minor roles in the play. The texts were usually placed in the printed play book at the point where they were sung, and usually set off as numbered strophes; the musical setting might be given at the end of the play book or printed and sold as individual song sheets. Collections of such popular theatre songs provided the bulk of the content of music publications of the day,Footnote 72 such as the series Choice Songs and Ayres, The Theatre of Music, The Banquet of Musick, Thesaurus Musicus, and Deliciae Musicae – not to overlook the two books of Purcell’s Orpheus Britannicus.
Most such theatre songs are strophic, in short binary forms, pleasantly tuneful, often using dance rhythms, and make no great demands on the singers. More ambitious are larger-scale, multi-sectional songs.Footnote 73 Their texts may appear deceptively in the play books as stanzas for strophic songs or a single Pindaric stanza, but as set they are through-composed songs, some approaching the scale of miniature scenas or cantatas.
Set continuously without ritornellos to demark the music–text units, their closed musical sections may disregard (or be independent of) the units suggested by the lines of verse (for example, couplets or quatrains). The resulting sections are differentiated by metre, tempo, melodic character and key, and provide new musical material as the tone, character, or expression of the text changes. Although several words or short phrases might be repeated within a phrase, the setting did not return to repeat the initial lines of the strophe or music–text unit (as in da capo practice) and cause the song setting to pause the drama’s narrative progress.
Composing in such short music–text units seems to have been Clayton’s default way of approaching text setting. What Clayton drew from the practice of the multi-sectional theatre song was that the musical sections of arias did not need to coincide precisely with the text units of the verses or strophes. Clayton also internalized that it was not necessary to demark the internal sections of arias by opening or concluding ritornellos that may function as transitions. As a result, arias in Arsinoe are built up from various arrangements of music–text units. Table 1 shows the formal structures of the arias in Arsinoe. Footnote 74
While the libretto seems to instruct that twenty-one of the thirty-six arias or duets should be da capo, in fact, Clayton set only twelve (one third) with full da capo reprises, choosing not to set the others as indicated in the wordbook. As a result, in two-thirds of the arias, the music progresses through the strophe without going back to the beginning for a da capo. The first aria, ‘Guide me, lead me’, begins with a brief passage of declamatory-style recitative, ‘Queen of darkness, sable night’. Hearing these opening moments at the very beginning of the opera, an English theatre-goer might have the impression of hearing a common multi-sectional theatre song, which often begin with such a declamatory section over a sustained bass note.
Melodic style
What seems to have aroused most negative comment by the anonymous author, Hawkins, Burney, and others is that Clayton’s arias in Arsinoe are not tuneful and melodically Italian enough. Clayton’s father William was a versatile instrumentalist, composer, and singer at court from 1660 to 1697. His son was a member of the Private Musick from 1689 and, as we have seen, had travelled in Italy.Footnote 75 It is inconceivable that Thomas was not familiar with the Italian style of vocal writing and could not imitate it, if he chose. We must credit him that he was intentionally drawing upon the long-familiar native English style of vocal writing used for the theatre – a style the English themselves recognized as contrasted to the Italian style.Footnote 76
Melodically, these native settings were primarily syllabic but could abound with two-note slurs; virtuosic embellishment was limited more to word-painting or madrigalisms and at cadences; their vocal lines are more angular and rhythmically varied than the Italian style with its smooth, flowing, spun-out lyrical lines with long, sequence-driven melismas on single syllables and repetition of words and short text phrases. The shape, accent, inflection and emphasis of the English melody are influenced by those of the spoken text. In the Italian song, as Ian Spink observed, syllables could verge on being a medium for vocalizing.Footnote 77
It was Clayton’s style of text setting that his critics, predisposed to Italian melody, apparently did not apprehend or appreciate. Rather than considering it an indictment, as Henry Raynor opined, that ‘Clayton’s models were not those which would help him to write for English audiences’,Footnote 78 we can see that he was writing in a style familiar to his English audience (though one soon to be superseded).
English song aesthetic
Clayton’s approach to recitative, aria form, and melody can be seen not as a clumsy, inept attempt at the Italian style, but as hewing to a fundamental aesthetic tenet of vocal English music: primacy of the text.Footnote 79 Throughout early eighteenth-century English critical essays, prologues and epilogues, satires, and essays dealing with dramatic music is found a fundamental desideratum: clear, intelligible presentation of text is paramount; the song must be rational (‘masculine’) and understood by the audience.Footnote 80 The text must be prominent; music must be a handmaid to the text; the music’s role is to add an expressive dimension to the words – not to be an occasion for virtuosic, sensuous (‘feminine’) vocalization on the part of the singer.
But most obviously, the text must be sung in English. This desideratum for non-academic public events, entertainments, and liturgy taps into English insistence that essential to a Protestant nation – and a point of great contrast to the church of Rome – was, as stated in the twenty-fourth Article of Religion of the Book of Common Prayer, that ‘It is a Thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the Custom of the Primitive Church, to have Publick Prayer in the Church, or to Minister the Sacraments in a Tongue not understanded [sic] of the People’. The point could not be put better for our purpose than by Bishop Gilbert Burnet in his gloss on this Article:
if the Worship of God [is] […] nothing but noise and shew to amuse them, which how much soever they may strike upon and entertain the Senses, yet they cannot affect the Heart, nor excite the Mind: So that the natural effect of such a way of Worship is to make Religion a Pageantry, and the Publick Service of God an Opera. Footnote 81
What was essential to English Protestantism must be central as well to British theatrical entertainment. English composers met this goal by careful and sensitive presentation of the text in song settings.
Of course, vocal music must instruct and carry meaning as well as provide pleasure, and singers (and audiences as well) desired vehicles for displays of their skill. English music could still be a handmaid to the text by applying ‘word painting’ or melodic patterns (such as rising and falling melodic shapes) to mimic or illustrate the meaning of the text. In Pope’s words, ‘the Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense’.Footnote 82 Hence characterizable words (rise, flee, etc.) were adorned with suitable melodic shapes and vocal embellishments. In addition to word painting, English protocol allowed virtuosic melismas on syllables at the close of phrases or at ends of musical sections, where they also serve as a semiotic indication of ends of sections. In general, though, Clayton’s settings tend to eschew longer melismas. It was the Italian da capo aria that most violated the principle of keeping the text paramount by interrupting the forward logical presentation of the text and instead creating an abstract, sensuous musical form dominated by music.
To keep attention focused on the sung text without the distraction or interference of accompanying instruments, Clayton set most arias or duets as basso continuo arias where the voice is accompanied by the bass line (played by cello or double bass), with harmonies supplied by harpsichord or theorbo-lutes.Footnote 83 To only seven numbers did Clayton add orchestral accompaniment. Such preference for basso continuo arias was prevalent in late seventeenth-century Italian operas.
Epithalamium Song
Another means of tying Arsinoe to an English audience’s expectations for an operatic work, and a departure from the Bologna source libretto, was the wholesale invention of a musical entertainment, or the Epithalamium Song, toward the end of the last act. Toward the end of Act III, Ormondo (whom Arsinoe secretly loves, and who has fallen in love with her, but who has been falsely accused of attempting her murder) is revealed not as her assassin but as her rescuer and as Pelops, prince of Athens. In the Bologna version, here begins a further series of dramatic discoveries, reconciliations and pardons. At this point (Act III, scene 8) the London version advances to the denoument and reveals Arsinoe and Pelops on a throne, having been, or about to be, married. There is then presented for the entertainment of Arsinoe and Pelops (and the theatre audience, too) the Epithalamium Song, with symphonies, songs, dances and chorus (see Tables 1 and 2).
Table 2. Epithalamium Song in Act 3 of Arsinoe
| British Library MS pages | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Act 3, scene VIII The Scene Opens and discovers Arsinoe and Pelops on a Throne. A Dance. After which an Epithalamium Song, as follows. |
||
| [Symphony] | 173–76 | 2 tpts, 2 vlns, b.c |
| First voice: Hail, happy, happy, happy Pair! Great Pelops and Arsinoe! For love prepare, |
176–78 | Alto solo + b.c. |
| [Symphony] | 178–81 | 2 tpts, 2 vlns, b.c |
| [First voice:] Hail, happy, happy, happy Pair! Great Pelops and Arsinoe! For love prepare, No Moments spare. One happy Moment equals long Despair. They dance again |
181–87 | Alto solo + b.c. |
| [Symphony] | 187–91 | 2 tpts, 2 vlns, b.c |
| Second voice: Bright Queen of Love ordain This Night no Lovers sigh in vain! Nymphs complying, Panting, dying, Mutual Pleasure bless each happy Swain. |
191–96 | Alto solo |
| Chorus: Hail, happy, happy, happy Pair! Great Pelops and Arsinoe! For love prepare, No Moments spare. One happy Moment equals long Despair. |
196–208 | Bass, alto, soprano 2 tpts, 2 vlns, b.c. |
This addition – no doubt with an eye toward playing to Thomas Betterton’s experience in mounting such stage spectacles – is modelled on such royal entertainments in recent English operatic works such as The Prophetess: or the History of Dioclesian (Henry Purcell/Thomas Betterton, 1690), The Fairy Queen (Purcell’s setting of an anonymous libretto, 1693), The Indian Queen (Purcell/Betterton, 1695), and The Virgin Prophetess, or the Fate of Troy (Gottfried Finger/Elkanah Settle, 1701), as well as plays that do not rise to the level of operatic.Footnote 84
Dramatic effectiveness
As noted, Arsinoe had what for the time was a successful run on the stage and must have provided good dramatic entertainment. Clayton and his librettist must be given credit for a sense of the theatre. While in Italy, Clayton must have observed what one would expect from a musical-dramatic work: music is used to heighten moments of drama, assist lyric expression and characterize the persons of the drama.
The librettist provided many effective moments of theatre: a dramatic opening with the hero (Ormondo) discoving a sleeping woman (Arsinoe) whose beauty enchants him; interruption by a masked man rushing onstage to assassinate her (Act I, scene 1); a character’s threatened self-stabbing that is thwarted (Act II, scene 4); an aborted stabbing of the sleeping heroine (Act II, scene 8); a prison scene and sudden revelation of hero’s innocence and royal status (Act III, scene 5); another thwarted self-stabbing (Act III, scene 7); an occasion for a masque-like entertainment with instruments, singing, and dancing (Act III, scene 8); interruption of the entertainment by Dorisbe who stabs (not mortally) herself (Act III, scene 9); and a scene of reconciliation followed by a joyful chorus celebrating those ‘Who live in the Realm of Love’ (Act III, scene 9).
The six arias accompanied by two violins help create set pieces (‘show stoppers’) for the singers Catherine Tofts, Francis Hughes and Letitia Cross and to characterize the persons portrayed at important moments of the plot. Two characters are provided rage arias. Dorisbe (Cross) is given a classic rage aria with accompagnato violins, ‘Assist ye Furies from the Deep’ (no. 20), with introductory and concluding ritornellos and two six-measure measured trills asking for assistance against Arsinoe and Ormondo. Arsinoe (Tofts) sings ‘To War, my Thoughts! to War!’ (no. 27), as she rouses herself against Dorisbe and Ormondo.
In ‘And you Dorisbe, Now forgive me’ (no. 6), an aria of three sections with introductory and closing symphonies, Ormondo (Hughes) pleads Dorisbe’s forgiveness for falling in love with Arsinoe. Dorisbe forsees the fall of Arsinoe in ‘Arise Alecto, and see with me’ (no. 10) with introductory, internal, and concluding ritornellos and ‘motto’ opening. In a strophic aria marked ‘very slow’ with a long introductory violin solo, ‘Wounded I, and Sighing lie’ (no. 12), Arsinoe is torn between hope and despair over choosing between two lovers. Ormondo and Feraspe (sung by Richard Leveridge) each contemplate their following duel in the duet ‘A hated strife/And rebel’s Life’ (no. 16), with two violins, beginning ‘very soft’ and with a ‘loud’ conclusion of agitato semiquavers. An aria that is greatly truncated in the Songs is ‘Ye Gods, I only wish to die’ (no. 17), in which Feraspe, defeated in a duel with Ormondo would rather die than live a life of dishonour.
At the opening of the third act, Arsinoe, alone weeping, sings ‘Greatness, leave me, undeceive me’ (no. 29), marked ‘very slow’, at the thought that Ormondo has betrayed her. For ‘Wanton Zephyrs, Softly blowing’ (no. 31), the flowing, conjunct melody of quavers and semiquavers for Arsinoe matches the imagery of the opening text. The introductory repeated bass quavers of ‘Conscious dungeon, walls of Stone’ (no. 32), marked ‘very slow’, create the sombre mood of Ormondo in his prison cell. The two comic characters Nerina (sung by Mary Lindsey) and Delbo (sung by Mr Cook) are given what is characteristic of English theatre songs, a lively dialogue song for a lovers’s quarrel (no. 26).
Verisimilitude
An important innovation of Arsinoe that should be highlighted in terms of the English operatic tradition is the application of the principle of verisimilitude.Footnote 85 Clayton’s opera, with its origins in an Italian libretto, departed from common English and French operatic practice in terms of the question ‘Who may sing on the operatic stage?’Footnote 86 John Dryden in the preface to Albion and Albanius articulated what was appropriate for operatic treatment, a principle that was observed in English dramatic operas, masques, and many early operas in England:
An Opera is a poetical Tale of Fiction, represented by Vocal and Instrumental Musick, adorn’d with Scenes, Machinery and Dancing. The suppos’d Persons of this musical Drama, are generally supernatural, as Gods and Goddesses, and Heroes, which at least are descended from them, and are in due time, to be adopted into their Number. The Subject therefore being extended beyond the Limits of Humane Nature, admits of that sort of marvellous and surprising conduct, which is rejected in other Plays.Footnote 87
Dryden especially admits shepherds, the inhabitants of the Golden Age, as most suitable for those who may sing in musical entertainments.Footnote 88 Choruses of priests, soldiers, the populace (not the main characters) could also sing.
This principle that singing is only appropriate for mythological, allegorical, or fabulous characters is observed in the operatic works produced in England in the seventeenth century: Venus and Adonis (music by Blow, libretto possibly by Anne Fince, née Kingsmill, c.1683/4); Dido and Aeneas (Purcell/Tate, ?1684/88); Albion and Albanius (Grabu/Dryden; 1685); the imported productions of Ariane, ou le mariage de Bacchus (Grabu/ Perrin, 1674) and Cadmus et Hermione (Lully/Quinault, 1686); the afterpieces and masques of 1695–1704; Congreve’s librettos for Eccles’s The Judgment of Paris (1701) and Semele (unproduced, though begun as early as 1704); and other early operas on pastoral subjects following Arsinoe, including Li amori di Ergasto (1705), The Temple of Love (1706) and Love’s Triumph (1708).Footnote 89
Arsinoe abandoned the expectation that singing on the stage was reserved for pastoral, allegorical, fabulous, mythic, or minor figures. With a cast of singing real-life characters, Arsinoe was typical of the later opera seria plots with their quasi-historical plots that soon dominated opera in England.
Conclusion
Thomas Clayton’s Arsinoe has been almost universally execrated as an Italian opera. This judgment is, as suggested, due to writers’ uncritically following the biased opinions of the author of ‘A Critical Discourse’, Hawkins, and Burney and also applying inappropriate, anachronistic aesthetic criteria drawn from expectations habituated by later Italian arias of Scarlatti, Bononcini, and Handel. This article argues that Arsinoe should not be evaluated as an Italian-style opera, but as an innovative, sui generis musical-dramatic work composed probably in 1703–04, that aimed to create an opera suitable for the English audience who had not yet become enchanted with Italian opera, singers, and vocal style. Clayton and his librettist accepted the model of an all-sung dramatic work such as Clayton would have encountered in Italy, but modified the Italian source libretto to meet English expectations for a musical-dramatic work. As a result, it thus falls outside the trajectory of continental opera.
David Kimbell has observed that manifestations of Italian opera in non-Italian centres were ‘to some extent conditioned by the local “national traditions”’.Footnote 90 For Clayton as opera composer in England, there was no pertinent ‘national tradition’. Venus and Adonis and Dido and Aeneas of the 1680s, based largely on French practice with large numbers of choruses and dances, and the native all-sung odes and theatre masques, which had no long-range dramatic narrative, provided no tradition to draw upon. Nor did the English dramatic opera, which segregated the spoken narrative drama from the musical elements. What Clayton did draw on, I suggest, was the national approach to song as exemplified in the sectional theatre song – a style of text-setting quite at odds with that of the increasingly dominant Italian melodic style.
Keeping arias short, using a majority of basso continuo arias to keep the voice and text prominent, using a native English vocal style, and limiting the use of da capo forms, Arsinoe avoids being a concert on the stage (or a ‘number opera’) and achieves the desideratum for an all-sung musical-dramatic work: presenting the plot by recited dialogue, using music to characterize persons and dramatic action, and pausing at moments to allow singers to give lyrical expression to emotions or reactions.
Arsinoe almost rivaled Bononcini’s Camilla of the following year in terms of contemporary popularity, so it must have satisfied an English audience’s desire for dramatic entertainment, its novelty aside. That Clayton’s approach to English opera did not become the model for English all-sung opera should not be seen (pace Burney) as an indictment of English taste in music or Clayton’s skills as a composer, but rather as the consequence of historical contingency – that is, as the result of the English rapture over the imported castratos Valentini and Nicolini, and the need by managers for the newest style of Italian operas to provide vehicles for these highly-paid singers. The need to provide multilingual librettos (to allow the Italians to sing in their native language) was the first step – abetted by decrees by the Lord Chamberlain – down the slippery slope that in 1710 resulted in the hegemony of opera sung all in Italian, with music composed by Italians to Italian librettos, and sung by casts dominated by imported Italian singers.Footnote 91
Joseph Addison would lament in the Spectator in March 1711, just weeks after the première of Handel’s Rinaldo, that ‘our English Musick is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead’.Footnote 92 Clayton’s Arsinoe must have been in Addison’s mind as an example of native growth that was rooted out by the cultivators of the new Italian-style opera.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/rrc.2023.4.
