Willem de Fesch: 'An excellent musician and a worthy man' (review)

Burney thought him a German, but Willem de Fesch (or William Defesch as he was known in England) was actually a Netherlander and much the most important Dutch composer of the eighteenth century. Born in Alkmaar in August 1687, he appears to have been a pupil of the Flemish violinist and composer Carl Rosier, whose daughter he later married. As a virtuoso violinist he gained his first appointment in 1708 as leader of the orchestra at the civic theatre in Amsterdam, and it was there too, ten years later, that his first works were published. In 1725 Defesch left Amsterdam to take up a post as 'kapelmeester' at the cathedral in Antwerp, but by 1731 he had evidently fallen out with the cathedral authorities, seemingly over his harsh treatment of the choristers, and in May of that year he resigned. Not long after, the composer and his family moved to London, and there he remained until his death in January 1761. Exactly when they arrived is not certain, but we may suppose it to have been in time to have heard one of the first public performances of Handel's Esther in the spring of 1732, since within the year Defesch had produced a full-length English oratorio of his own. Of this work, Judith, only a single aria survives, but Hogarth's comic engraving of a chorus of singers rehearsing it is generally well known. The libretto, reproduced as Appendix I of Robert Tusler's book, is by William Huggins, a friend of Hogarth's who had been responsible for organizing the last of the three earlier performances of Esther.

Huggins was also the dedicatee of Defesch's first English publication, a set of ten sonatas for two German flutes or violins and bass engraved and sold by Benjamin Cooke (as Op. 7) in 1733. Its long list of subscribers, a document which Tusler evidently hasn't seen, shows just how quickly and effectively Defesch had made his mark on the London musical scene. Among the composers who took a copy were Bononcini, Greene (and his Apollo Society), Lampe, Pepusch (and his wife), Peter Prelleur, J. C. Smith Jr., and Sammartini; performers include Arigoni, Carbonelli, Richard Collett, Matthew Dubourg, Valentine Snow, the oboist J. C. Kytch, the flautist C. F. Weideman, the bass Gustavus Waltz (said to have been Handel's cook), and the 'Gentlemen of the Philharmonick Society on Wednesday, at the Crown and Anchor' (who signed up for three sets). Also on the list is Count Kinski, the Austrian ambassador in London, and, most interestingly, a 'Mr. John de Fesch', who can only have been the composer's younger brother, Joannes, at whose wedding (in 1726) William had been a witness. Was he too now resident in England perhaps?

It must have been during the Antwerp period that Defesch first made contact with Lady Frances Erskine, the daughter of the exiled Jacobite Earl of Mar, and to her he dedicated a set of twenty Italian canzonettas and arias with words mostly by Paolo Rolli (also 1733, it appears, though only the third edition of 1736 is known). A second set, also containing several Rolli settings, came out about the same time, and was dedicated to Miss Elizabeth Ashe, a young upper-class female who moved in the fast set and was later to find herself bigamously married to the son of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. What the connection with Defesch was in this case is anyone's guess, but it is not uninteresting perhaps that one of the Rolli poems in the Ashe volume ('Solitudine campestre') was also set by Greene, Hasse, and Sammartini. Another colourful character with whom, thanks to Tusler, Defesch is now known to have been associated, this time in a master–pupil relationship, was the political propagandist Thomas Hollis (1720–74). And this is the more extraordinary in that, while Defesch seems to have been sometime organist of the Venetian embassy chapel...