The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702–1711: A Facsimile Edition ed. by Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson (review)

87 his hands. The Hanoverian response? Sir Thomas Robinson was ‘‘hesitant’’ to get involved, lest the Irish situation be used ‘‘as a counter-pawn,’’ and George II approved of this caution. Yet in British churches, fiery preaching on Thorn and Salzburg continued up to 1746. Mr. Thompson connects the decline of the ‘‘protestant interest’’ to the accession of Frederick the Great, a ‘‘protestant prince’’ who was, in Horace Walpole ’s phrase, a ‘‘trampler of all treaties, religions, justice and interest but his own personal.’’ With him the appreciation of the value ‘‘of confessional considerations for the conduct of international relations’’ vanished, and the ‘‘protestant interest’’ morphed into the ‘‘common interest of Europe.’’ What is missing in this informative work is a definition of protestant interest . It is never made clear what the religious content of protestant was in the thinking of George I and II and their Whig ministers. Was it the watereddown civil religion envisioned by Hoadly and Toland, but execrated by Swift? This is never discussed. Anne Barbeau Gardiner John Jay College, CUNY The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702–1711: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson. Aldershot , UK: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. viii ⫹ 57 ⫹ facsimiles of 360 songs. $225. In studying the culture of early eighteenth-century England, where might one look to find songs? The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, put out by London’s premier music publisher John Walsh, in association with John Hare, is a periodical publication that made available both words and music of ‘‘the newest Songs, made for the Theatres and other occasions.’’ Electronic databases have not yet been as kind to eighteenth-century music as to books; no complete set of the Monthly Mask is known to exist, and bits are scattered among at least 22 libraries in the western world. Hence this splendid compilation , which offers 360 pieces of music, with dates, careful attributions, and editorial apparatus, is especially welcome. As Ms. Baldwin and Ms. Wilson recognize , Walsh was a businessman, not a music historian or ethnomusicologist, and his selection was inevitably limited to composers to whose music he had fairly immediate access. Nonetheless, his contacts were such that the Monthly Mask comprises work by some 65 people , and only three of the names are soubriquets . John Weldon is represented most often, followed by Daniel Purcell and John Eccles. (Henry Purcell was already dead, and Walsh was promoting current work.) Twenty-four singletons help to spread the reach of the collection . No doubt the 54 unattributable pieces repeat many of the known contributors , but also include others. Hoping for a national market, Walsh went to the trouble of collecting songs from people based in Dublin, Hereford, King’s Lynn, Norwich, Salisbury, Wimborne , Winchester, and Worcester. One measure of its popularity is the fact that the Monthly Mask had ‘‘an unbroken run of nearly nine years,’’ making it a cultural marker of sorts. The range of material is wide. Some of the drinking songs became better known than the more ethereal art songs, as their republication attests. Cultural history vies for place with political history: many pieces concern Marlborough’s wars, while the changes being wrought in English music can be traced across 88 these pages. Staying current even toward the end, in May 1711 Walsh offered the first English publication of work from the recently arrived Georg Frideric Handel, ‘‘The Famous mock Song . . . Sung by Signra Boscchi’’ in Pyrrhus, which makes fun of the performance given by the great castrato Nicolini in an opera the previous season (no. 352). Much theater history can be mined from these pages. For whom was The Monthly Mask intended ? The original sheets assumed an audience who wished to read and play contemporary music, of which this was the first published form for many pieces. Consumers must have appeared, or Walsh would have discontinued the periodical much earlier. Single issues of four songsheets cost 6d., half the price of a seat in the upper gallery at the theater ; but sets could also be bound with a decorative title page. Pictures of several such title pages are included. Collectors , as opposed to casual purchasers, were predictably assumed to be upperclass , as the vocabulary of...