Joncus, Berta. 2016. 'Scoring for Celebrity: The Authority of the Vocalist in Love in a Village (1762)'. In: Music and Theater in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Jan Popper Theater, Schoenberg Music Building, University of California, Los Angeles, United States 4 – 5 November 2016. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

In pastiche opera, the art of the star trumped that of the author, as Love in a Village, the eighteenth-century London stage’s most popular comic opera, richly evidences. My research as lead editor for the critical edition (Bärenreiter, 2016) reveals the defining contributions of its principal tenor, John Beard. As a star, and the new manager of Covent Garden, Beard used this opera to advance his reputation for both performance and directorship.

Love in a Village was designed around Beard’s “line,” a metacharacter constructed on stage and off; it created new lines for the sopranos Charlotte Brent and Isabella Hallam. Beard chose to adapt The Village Opera (1729), likely because it featured two sentimental heroines. Beard hired the arranger Edward Toms (not Thomas Arne as earlier believed), known for tailoring music to singers. As in its ballad opera original, the wordbook accommodated atomized, liminal musical numbers for singers to represent their fictional characters and themselves. The character of Hawthorn, newly invented for Beard, led the musical finales. It gave Beard the chance to enact, with his dog Phillis, his reputation as a clubbable, honest, virile English gentleman. Hawthorn’s music is a deft cross-section of Beard’s repertory, with one air from his rival Thomas Lowe. For Brent and Hallam, Toms arranged Italian music performed by London’s reigning prima donnas, giving the young English first ladies a chance to eclipse their Italian counterparts. Framed by a plot in which they were intimatefriends, Brent and Hallam also enacted concord, countering the “rival queens” topos habitually ascribed to twinned sirens. Love in a Village heralded the elevated taste by which Beard, as manager, sought to distinguish Covent Garden. The wordbook’s humble origins were hidden. The music was polite, taken from Handel, and from theatre and pleasure garden repertory. Only low characters sang common tunes, although even these melodies, because seemingly Scottish, carried a whiff of fashion. In repertoire, Love in a Village became a staple for launching debutante sopranos, proving the effectiveness of its design for the production of stars and of musical taste.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Music
Dates:	Date Event 4 November 2016 Completed
Event Location:	Jan Popper Theater, Schoenberg Music Building, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Date range:	4 – 5 November 2016
Item ID:	35480
Date Deposited:	25 Mar 2024 15:58
Last Modified:	25 Mar 2024 18:25
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35480

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