Baroque music of the British Isles
The Baroque era in British music can be seen as one of an interaction of national and international trends, sometimes absorbing continental fashions and practices and sometimes attempting, as in the creation of ballad opera, to produce an indigenous tradition.
[2] The king's time on the continent, his (hidden) preference for Catholicism and explicit desire for entertainment led to the embracing of the Baroque and continental forms of music.
[8] Purcell produced Dido and Aeneas (1689), often described as the finest in the genre, in which the action is furthered by the use of Italian-style recitative, but much of Purcell's best work was not involved in the composing of typical opera, but instead he usually worked within the constraints of the semi-opera format, where isolated scenes and masques are contained within the structure of a spoken play, such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream in his The Fairy-Queen (1692) or Beaumont and Fletcher dramas in The Prophetess (1690) and Bonduca (1696).
[12] As a princess she was a patron of Purcell, Turner and Blow and from the early years of her reign she sponsored compositions for Royal processions and occasions including her coronation and the Acts of Union in 1707, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain.
His opera, including Rinaldo (1711, 1731), Orlando (1733), Ariodante (1735), Alcina (1735) and Serse (1738, also known as Xerxes), helped make Britain second only to Italy as a centre of operatic production.
[15] Ballad operas developed as a form of English stage entertainment, partly in opposition to the Italian domination of the London operatic scene.
[16] It consisted of racy and often satirical spoken (English) dialogue, interspersed with songs that were deliberately kept very short to minimize disruptions to the flow of the story.
Subject matter involved the lower, often criminal, orders, and typically showed a suspension (or inversion) of the high moral values of the Italian opera of the period.
In the eighteenth century the increasing availability of instruments such as the harpsichord, spinet and later the piano, and cheap print meant that works created for opera and the theatre were often published for private performance, with Thomas Arne's (1710–78) song "Rule Britannia" (1740) probably the best-known.
[21] From the 1730s elegant concert halls began to be built across the country and attendance rivalled that of the theatre, facilitating visits by figures such as Haydn, J. C. Bach and the young Mozart.
[22] Outside of court patronage there were also a number of major figures, including the Scottish composer Thomas Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie (1732–81) well known in his era, but whose work was quickly forgotten after his death and has only just begun to be reappraised.
