Dibdin would have known what he was
talking about: in his long career as actor, vocalist, playwright and
impresario he worked on the Continent and even in the Orient as well
as in England, and wrote about nine hundred songs, of which as many
as two hundred were known all over the English-speaking world. (The
most successful were about the hard lot of the sailor, such as ?Poor
Jack?.) Since there were no composer?s royalties, if it had not been
for a benefit dinner in 1810 and later a government pension, Dibdin
might have starved to death. Yet thousands of popular songs were published
in the second half of the eighteenth century, and sheet music sales
supported several publishers. (Bookseller George Walker opened a music
shop in London in the 1790s, advertising ?half-price? sheet music: he
used tinted paper, claimed higher production costs and printed a price
on the music which was twice the half-price.)
Also important were songs from ballad
and comic operas, which bore little resemblance to opera of the Italian
kind. The earliest and best example is
The Beggar?s Opera
, with
libretto by John Gay and music by Johann Christoph Pepusch (born in
Berlin), first performed in 1728. This dispensed with recitative and
used spoken dialogue, for which the beggar apologizes at the outset:
?I hope I may be forgiven, that I have not made my Opera throughout
unnatural, like those in vogue.? Pepusch?s music borrowed some of the
tunes from already familiar street ballads, and also included Purcell?s
?What Shall I Do?, quoted above. The characters were not the usual operatic
noblemen and pretty peasant girls, but pickpockets, prostitutes and
lawyers, no doubt resembling some members of the audiences in the pleasure
gardens.
The Beggar?s Opera
spawned many imitations and was a
spectacular success in all the principal towns in England. Dibdin quotes
Jonathan Swift?s praise: it had ?not wit, nor humour, but something
better than either?.
At Vauxhall, along with the promenading
and the enjoyment of the fresh air, there were daily concerts which
started in the afternoon and continued until nine o?clock. Another important
venue was Marylebone Gardens, which offered music from 1732; the garden
began with the bowling green of the Rose Tavern, then a popular gambling
spot. (Macheath, the thug in The Beggar?s Opera, said of the Rose: ?There
will be deep play to-night and consequently money may be picked up on
the road. Meet me there and I?ll give you the hint who?s worth setting.?)
James Hook, a young organist, began playing at Marylebone in 1769.
Like Playford, Hook was born in Norwich;
a child prodigy, he earned his living as a musician from the age of
eleven. He was lured away from Marylebone to become music director at
Vauxhall in 1774. Hook?s songs were similar to Arne?s, but assimilated
even more successfully all the elements that made up the London style:
influences from the Italian through Purcell and Handel to the various
ballad styles of the day resulted in graceful and technically admirable
melodies; furthermore, the characters in the songs often resembled real
people, as opposed to the stock shepherds. ?The Tear?, one of Hook?s
biggest hits, was about a woman whose loved one had gone away to war.
Hook played an organ concerto every
evening, and a strolling wind band perambulated after the main concert.
At a celebration of the birthday of the Prince of Wales in 1799, 20,000
lanterns were lit and 1,200 chickens and 1,680 bottles of port were
consumed. But soon times were changing: the entertainment at Vauxhall
in 1816 included a tightrope act, and Hook retired in 1820, having written
perhaps 2,000 songs, as well as much other music. Complete comic operas
were presented at Vauxhall from 1830 to 1832, but the management lowered
the admission price in 1833, and attracted 27,000 people on the first
night.
Vauxhall remained the most important
of the pleasure gardens as long as they lasted, but finally closed in
1859. It has long since disappeared into the sprawl of Greater London,
and is now only a name on a railway station. (When the first station
was built there, it became one of the most famous in the world, so that
a word for railway station in Russian is a cognate of ?vauxhall?.) Lesser
gardens survived into the 1880s, by which time the music was moving
indoors, to the music halls. The pleasure gardens presented music for
nearly 200 years altogether, and without a single amplifier.
In the American colonies the trial of
John Peter Zenger in New York in 1735 was concerned with ballads. Zenger,
who printed one of the city?s two newspapers, published ballads about
the election of opposition candidates, which were enjoyed in the local
taverns, and the city government had him thrown into jail for libel.
The court
contended that it should decide on the
libel, restricting the jury to the fact of publication, but Zenger?s
lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, successfully argued that the jury should determine
whether or not the ballads were libellous. It decided they were not,
and the principle of freedom of the press was established in America.
Of the forty most popular songs printed
in the USA in the 1790s (the list, compiled by Charles Hamm, appears
in his
Yesterdays: Popular Song in America
), no fewer than ten
were written by Hook.
The infant United States of America
was a frontier in more senses than one. America?s taste in music, drama
and literature initially reflected the divisive War of Independence
the new nation had gone through, the hardships endured and the homesickness
of a people who were nearly all immigrants. Of that early top forty,
only five songs were written by composers living in the USA. A difference
was apparent between the most successful imports and the rest of an
English composer?s output: English songs covered the gamut of styles
- humorous, sentimental, salacious and so on - but those most popular
in America were the tear-jerkers. At the top was ?The Galley Slave?
by William Reeve; the one anonymous song on the list was ?Since Then
I?m Doomed?; Hook?s ?The Tear? made the list (as did ?A Prey to Tender
Anguish? by Haydn, whose chamber music was popular in colonial America).
A popular subject of early American
musical entertainment on the stage was the Swiss patriot William Tell.
The Patriot, or Liberty Asserted
(1794) and its successor,
The
Archers
(1796), were written by William Dunlap, who was born in
New Jersey. The music for
The Archers
was by Benjamin Carr, an
English immigrant; his ?The Little Sailor Boy? (another song about loss)
was a success in the 1790s. Carr also played ?Yankee Doodle? in a concert
in New York in 1794, the year it was first printed in America. This
was a traditional tune with different verses in several languages; among
the contributors to the American words was a British Army surgeon stationed
near Albany, New York, in 1751.
American music was inevitably dominated
for some time by composers and musicians who had emigrated from England.
They were all necessarily versatile, playing several instruments and
being able to turn a hand to any type of entertainment; they were also
mostly second-rate, otherwise they would not have left the musical capital
of the English-speaking world to try their luck on a frontier. But Francis
Hopkinson was born in Philadelphia. A lawyer and a judge, a signer of
the Declaration of Independence and the first Secretary of the Navy,
he was the first American to write secular songs for voice and harpsichord.
His ?My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free?, often cited as the first American
secular song, was one of his earliest but was discovered only after
his death; he had not included it in his first printed book of songs,
published in 1788. He also wrote what is described as the first American
grand opera,
America Independent, or The Temple of Minerva
(1781),
a pastiche of tunes from the London stage, with his own words.
The importance of the colonial music
master cannot be overestimated. One famous full-time professional, William
Billings, had only one eye, a short leg and was deformed by a broken
shoulder, but he had a fine voice and thought everyone should sing for
the joy of it. His
The New England Psalm-singer
(1770) was the
first book of songs by a native-born American. Billings wrote in a joyous
style, believing his work to be ?twenty times more powerful than the
old slow tunes?. One of his best known was ?Chester (Let Tyrants Shake
Their Iron Rod)? (1788), a marching song. He never made much money,
however, for his songs were pirated, and he spent much of his time convincing
people that he was the author of his own work. Oliver Shaw, who went
blind after a series of accidents, was born in Massachusetts. He wrote
?Mary?s Tears? (1812) and ?There?s Nothing True But Heaven? (1829),
both of which were enormously popular. Shaw was more typical than Billings
of early American composers, being convinced that good music could be
written only in emulation of the great European composers of the period.
John Hill Hewitt, the son of James Hewitt,
wrote one of the first songs to be generally regarded as truly American,
?The Minstrel?s Return?d from the War? (1825). It resembled his father?s
?The Wounded Hussar? (on the top forty in 1800), and was the biggest
American hit until the songs of Stephen Foster. The song is about a
soldier who returns from battle, pledging to his sweetheart that the
bugle will not part them again; but it does, and he dies on the battlefield.
The piano accompaniment suggests a march and trumpet fanfares in its
introduction; there were still five editions in print in 1870.
Many of Hewitt?s other songs were successful;
he was among the earliest professional American songwriters in the modern
sense, in that he wrote skilfully simple songs which followed trends,
specifically for the American market. In the early 1830s his songs reflected
the contemporary popularity of Italian opera (Rossini?s
Barber of
Seville
was first performed in New York in 1825). Later in the decade,
singing families from Austria and Switzerland toured the USA, and Hewitt
wrote mountain songs; ?The Alpine Horn? (1843) included a yodel. ?Mary,
Now the Sea Divides Us? (1840), written to words by J. T. S. Sullivan,
was described as a ?Southern refrain?; according to Hamm, ?its pentatonic
character? suggests ?that it may have been adapted from a tune in the
Scotch-Irish-English oral tradition?, already well established in the
USA and the most important strain in what would become country music
in the next century. Hewitt wrote ?answer? songs: ?The Fallen Oak? (1841)
was inspired by Henry Russell?s ?Woodman, Spare That Tree?, and ?I Would
Not Die at All? parodied Foster?s ?I Would Not Die in Spring Time?.
Henry Russell was born and died in England,
but had much of his success as a songwriter and performer in America.
He had a pleasant voice, and Hewitt admired the way he made the most
of a limited range; most of his songs used only five notes or so. They
were a great influence on parlour singing, often appealing to nostalgia
and using the word ?old?, as in ?The Old Arm Chair? (1840). Like Dibdin
at the height of his fame, Russell was a solo recital artist; ?Woodman,
Spare That Tree? (1837) was his first and biggest hit. A setting of
a poem by George Pope Morris, it was inspired by a true story: Morris
and Russell were visiting in upstate New York and saw a giant oak being
saved by a present to the woodcutter of a $10 gold piece. In later years
Russell?s favourite anecdote told of a ?snowy-bearded gentleman? who,
after a performance of the song, leapt up from his seat to demand, ?Mr
Russell, in the name of Heaven, tell me, was the tree spared?? Receiving
an answer in the affirmative, the old fellow sat down in relief, saying,
?Thank God! Thank God! I breathe again!?
Irish emigration to the USA had an important
impact long before the potato famine. Of around thirty thousand settlers
in 1817, two-thirds were from the British Isles, and most of these were
Irish. Their songs were already popular, and had been sung in America
before 1790. Ten volumes of
Irish Melodies
published in Dublin
between 1808 and 1834 included some of the most popular songs of the
entire century, adapted with new texts by Thomas Moore (1779-1852);
they owed much to an earlier collection of wordless tunes from the same
publisher. Some of Moore?s poems and his adaptations, which he sang
himself in public, are still sung today: two of the best known are ?(?Tis)
the Last Rose of Summer? (using a tune called ?The Groves of Blarney?,
also heard in Friedrich von Flotow?s opera
Martha
, and set for
piano by Beethoven and Mendelssohn), and ?Believe Me, If All These Endearing
Young Charms? (sung to the tune of ?My Lodging is on the Cold Ground?).
They appeared in a more modern hit parade: they were hits on Victor
records, by Elizabeth Wheeler in 1909 and John McCormack in 1911.
?Yankee Doodle? had been meant by the
British at the time of the War of Independence and earlier to satirize
the supposedly rough and credulous colonials, who cheerfully turned
the tables and adopted it as their own first patriotic song. During
the War of 1812 theatre managers and song publishers were quick to capitalize
on a new surge of nationalism. ?To Anacreon in Heaven? was an old drinking
song, the tune of which had been used dozens of times, for example for
?Adams and Liberty? in 1798, one of the earliest native American hits.
A Baltimore lawyer and poet, Francis Scott Key, adopted the tune in
1805 for verses about the struggle against the Barbary pirates, in which
he first used the phrase ?star-spangled banner?. He made use of the
tune and the phrase again in 1814, during the British bombardment of
Baltimore?s defences, creating what became the American national anthem.
The Anacreontic Society of London was
a drinking club, and the original lyrics of the song urged the members
to ?entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus?s vine?. Perhaps the tune
had long been a popular drinking song because of the comic effect created
by drunks trying to sing the unsingable. Key?s setting is a poor piece
of lyric writing, for the stresses of the music fall on the wrong syllables,
making it even harder to sing; all the same, it was chosen as America?s
national anthem in 1931 over ?America the Beautiful?. This is a poem
by Katherine Lee Bates written at Pike?s Peak in Colorado in 1893, set
to a hymn tune by Samuel Augustus Ward: it is singable, it celebrates
beauty and it proposes love of country without hatred of somebody else?s.
When the Americans chose a British drinking song with words that don?t
fit, the British got the last laugh after all.
The War of 1812, as Americans called
it, was only a sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and its last
battle was fought in New Orleans on 8 January 1815: the news of the
Treaty of Ghent of 24 December 1814 could not reach the USA in only
two weeks. Two thousand Kentucky riflemen, in response to a call from
Andrew Jackson, arrived in New Orleans a few days before the battle
and soundly defeated some fifteen thousand of the best-trained troops
in the world. A fiddle tune, ?Eighth of January?, celebrated the victory;
with words collected by folklorist Jimmie Driftwood, this became ?The
Battle of New Orleans?, a huge hit in 1959. ?My Country, ?tis of Thee?
was written by Samuel Francis Smith, a Harvard-trained clergyman, in
1831; he used the tune of the British anthem ?God Save the Queen?, though
he is said to have been unaware of that.
A rude patriotism continued to play
a large part in the nature of American entertainment and in the treatment
of visiting performers: theatre audiences would often demand to hear
?Yankee Doodle?, especially if the visitors were British. This combination
of chauvinism and anti-elitism led to the Astor Place Riot in 1849 in
New York, in which twenty-two people were killed. The conflict was between
the supporters of an American and a British Shakespearian actor (the
British thespian was seen to represent an aristocratic élitism),
but the riot was a turning point in more ways than one. Public entertainment
began to separate into several genres, each with its own audience, moving
away from the pastiches of songs and melodrama which had been common
until then; and art in America began to develop into highbrow and lowbrow,
absurd terms from nineteenth-century anthropology. This anti-élitism
has had a more ominous cultural effect in more recent times.
Yet there still was not the gulf between
classical and popular music that there is today. The French-born conductor
Louis Jullien was promoted by P. T. Barnum in America; a showman, he
used a baton six feet long, wore white gloves and kept a plush chair
on the podium, into which he sank, exhausted, at the end of his labours.
But he was a thoughtful musician, who wrote an opera as well as dance
music, and conducted both music by contemporary American composers and
movements from Beethoven?s symphonies.
Americans have often held contradictory
attitudes. While foreigners were despised for patronizing America, foreign
music was seen as somehow superior, a result of the attitude towards
class inherited from Britain. Americans learned their music from their
own singing masters, and American hymnals began to take on a native
flavour in the late seventeenth century. But neither churches nor publishers
would have admitted it, and publishers continued to look down on popular
songs as the ?trash? of the ?common people?. This high regard for foreign
material, however, did not extend to paying royalties on it. During
the nineteenth century performing rights societies were formed in Europe,
but American publishers refused to entertain such notions. They helped
themselves to European music, which was therefore cheaper, and for much
of the nineteenth century got away with charging twice as much for it
because it was perceived to be better. This did nothing to inspire American
composers of formal music. More to the point, it was an early indication
of the myopia of which the musical establishment has always been capable:
today?s record companies and broadcasters, stumbling over themselves
to milk last year?s fashions, are merely an echo of their ancestors.
The operas of Rossini, Bellini and other
Italian composers were immensely popular all over the world. Lorenzo
Da Ponte, who had written the librettos for several of Mozart?s operas,
was a celebrated resident of New York City in his old age. It was thanks
partly to his influence that Rossini?s
Barber of Seville
was
mounted there in 1825, only seven years after its Italian premiere,
at a time when most of Beethoven?s music had not been heard in America.
The orchestra of twenty-four musicians was said to be the largest yet
to have appeared in an American theatre. But English-speaking people
still resisted opera in a foreign language, turning to English-language
versions and substituting dialogue for recitative. The tunes were pirated
for completely new songs, such as ?I?ll Pray for Thee? (from Donizetti?s
Lucia di Lammermoor
) and ?Over the Summer Sea? (?La donna è
mobile? from Verdi?s
Rigoletto
). Not all the Italian operas were
written by Italians:
The Bohemian Girl
, by the Irishman Michael
William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn, was premiered in t843
in London, and in New York the next year, and became the most successful
production on the English-speaking musical stage until the operettas
of Gilbert and Sullivan. It included ?I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble
Halls? and ?Then You?ll Remember Me?, two huge hits. Opera became an
upper-class preserve, but not before it had had its influence: the Italian
trick of holding back the accompaniment on a climactic vocal note is
still heard in pop today.
The biggest success of the century was
?Home, Sweet Home?, written by the Englishman Henry Bishop, with words
by the American John Howard Payne, which was first performed in the
opera
Clari, or The Maid of Milan
in London in 1823. It was the
favourite song of both sides during the American Civil War, and there
were six hit records of it between 1891 and 1915. Critics never liked
it, but of its type it was a perfect marriage of words and music, so
that many people have thought it was written by Stephen Foster, the
first great American songwriter, and an important contributor to the
first fully American genre: minstrelsy.