This book concerns the life and theatrical career of the great
native-born English composer and musician of the eighteenth century,
Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778). Its purpose is three-fold. First, it
provides a comprehensive biography and account of the performance and
publication of Arne's works during his lifetime. Although Arne's
childhood years get some attention, the book focuses on the period from
1732 to 1778, a time of great innovation for English opera and related
genres. Second, it considers Arne's social context: his relationships
with the many dramatists, actors, singers, and fellow composers and
instrumentalists-including many members of his own family-with whom he
collaborated on the London and Dublin stages as well as at the London
pleasure gardens. Third, it offers analysis of eighty musical
illustrations drawn from vocal works for the theatre spanning Arne's
career, and readers can simultaneously study and listen to the musical
examples on a companion web page that hosts media files produced using
music notation software. The audio component constitutes a crucial
supplement to a study of Arne because so much of his extant theatre
music cannot otherwise readily be heard. Arne was the leading figure in
English theatrical music of his day. Dr. Charles Burney, the great
eighteenth-century historian of music, had a high opinion of the
composer, especially of Arne's setting of Milton's Comus (1738): "In
this masque he introduced a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody,
wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English
composers had hitherto either pillaged or imitated. Indeed, the melody
of Arne at this time . . . forms an era in English Music; it was so
easy, natural and agreeable to the whole kingdom, that it [became] the
standard of all perfection at our theatres and public gardens." Yet
Burney's greatest compliment concerns Arne as a composer of secular
vocal music: "He must be allowed to have surpassed [Purcell] in ease,
grace, and variety." During his forty-six-year career Arne composed
music for over 100 stage works-to say nothing of his myriad single
songs, cantatas, and instrumental compositions. Yet despite a relative
wealth of source material, scholars of theatre, drama, and music in our
own time have almost completely ignored him. As a consequence,
musicologists, theatre historians, and laypeople alike tend to evince a
detrimentally limited sense of the magnitude of Arne's contribution to
English music and especially to the history of English opera. To listen
to musical examples that accompany The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne,
please visit http: //www2.lib.udel.edu/udpress/thomasarne.htm
