Rosina: A Comic Opera (1782) (review)

William Shield. Rosina: A Comic Opera (1782). Libretto by Frances Brooke. Edited by John Drummond. (Musica Britannica, 72.) London: Stainer and Bell, 1998. [Dramatis personae, p. xiv; pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. xvii-xix; introd., p. xxi-xxvii; sources, p. xxviii-xxxi; editorial policy, p. xxxii; notes on performance, p. xxxiii-xxxiv; select bibliog., p. xxxv. ISMN M-2202-1901-6; ISBN 0-85249-844-6. £65.]

"Who cares," Eric Walter White once asked, only somewhat facetiously, "if there is English opera?" (The Rise of English Opera [New York: The Philosophical Library, 1951; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1972], 13). Not only was England dismissed by outsiders as the Land ohne Musik, but as early as 1681, John Playford lamented "the Vanity of some of our English Gentry to admire that in a Foreigner, which they either slight, or take little notice of, in one of their own Nation" (book 3 of his Choice Ayres and Songs, 1681; quoted by Roger Fiske in English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century [London: Oxford University Press, 1973; 2d ed. 1986], xv). This long-standing disregard has been challenged over the past half century (as witnessed by the series Musica Britannica, among other efforts), but recognition of the rich and active role of native composers of operas in English has been particularly slow to come. Certainly Henry Purcell's achievements have been long acknowledged, as has the commercial (if not artistic) success of The Beggar's Opera (1728). But from this point until the advent of Benjamin Britten, virtually all mention of English opera vanishes from the standard histories.

Why have English operas been overlooked for so long? There are undoubtedly many reasons beyond the snobbery regarding native efforts. The English class system certainly played a role, at least in the eighteenth century--Italian opera in England was performed exclusively in London, during a somewhat limited season, and was accessible only to the wealthy, while "English" opera was performed throughout the country and heard by a much wider range of society. Yet the resulting popularity of the English productions was a blow to their aesthetic prestige, since even to this day, "more elite" is still frequently equated with "more artistic." Economics also played a role; if Italian singers could command astronomical salaries, they must be better than the native-born singers performing in an English opera. Moreover, the music itself was different; by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, composers of English opera had almost entirely abandoned a sung-through operatic structure in favor of a model based on spoken dialogue with songs, much in the manner of a Singspiel or even like the musical theater of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Additionally, Fiske estimates that borrowed music can be found in seventy-five percent of English opera productions after 1762, including "both fully-composed arias by known composers and simple traditional ballads by 'anon'" (p. 274). Such an amalgamation undermined English opera's reputation still further, since pasticcio productions have never garnered the scholarly attention devoted to works by single composers.

Perhaps one of the largest obstacles to the serious study (and performance) of eighteenth-century English opera has been the paucity of primary source materials--the devastating fires suffered by both the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters in the early nineteenth century destroyed nearly all manuscript full scores and orchestral parts. Since virtually all eighteenth-century operas in England were published only in vocal-score format, the historical loss of this manuscript music was disastrous. The survival, therefore, of a set of parts--albeit nineteenth-century copies--from one of the great English successes of the eighteenth century is an invaluable aid to scholarship. These parts, coupled with a contemporary vocal score, form the basis of John Drummond's new edition of William Shield's Rosina.

Shield had truly come up through the ranks of the English musical world. He was born in 1748 and became an orphan at age nine when his father, a music master, died...