Charles Dibdin
Beard exercised a benign and encouraging influence over Dibdin's early career, choosing him, in his first important appearance, for the part of Ralph, in the 1765 premiere of Samuel Arnold's opera The Maid of the Mill at Covent Garden.
For Dibdin the next turning-point was in the 1767 premiere and short run of Bickerstaffe's Love in the City, in which he played Watty Cockney, and for which he produced a good deal of the music and airs.
The Padlock was produced at Drury Lane under Garrick's management in 1768, Dibdin taking the part of Mungo (a blackface role[9]) so as to cause "that degree of sensation in the public which is called a rage.
Dibdin was obliged to appear on stage and claim authorship of both words and music, while salacious tittle-tattle (and worse) sought to embroil both him and Garrick in Bickerstaffe's offence.
[16] He followed that in 1773 with the interlude The Mischance, and the dialogues The Grenadier (text by Garrick), The Ladle, England against Italy, and None so blind as those who won't see:[17] and furthermore in the same year he wrote songs for The Trip to Portsmouth (words by G. A. Stevens), performed by Charles Bannister at the Haymarket, for which the overture and dances were written by Thomas Arne.
After being connected with Drury Lane both as composer and as actor for several years, a series of disagreements with Garrick,[22] partly over Dibdin's desertion of his second partner Mrs Davenet and his children by her,[23] led to the termination of his engagement.
The dialogue The Imposter, or, All's not gold that glitters, was written for Sadler's Wells in 1776, and his comic opera The Metamorphosis modelled on Molière's Sicilian, but with songs and music his own, was performed at the Haymarket in the same year.
His comic opera The Seraglio, incorporating the famous rondeau song 'Blow High, Blow Low' (written during a gale returning from Calais) was first acted at Covent Garden in November 1776.
[24] The productive season of 1777 included songs for The vineyard revels (a pantomime), She is mad for a husband, Yo, Yea, or, The friendly tars, The old woman of eighty and The razor grinder, all at Sadler's Wells.
[25] On his return from France in 1778 Thomas Harris, the Theatre Manager, appointed him Musical Director at Covent Garden (to write exclusively for him) at the then huge salary of £10 (equivalent to £1,610 in 2023)[26] a week.
[34] Between 1782 and 1783 he engaged some sixty children to act as dancers and singers for his various lively productions at the Circus, for which he supplied many airs, pantomimes, intermezzi and ballets, under such titles as Clump and Cudden, The benevolent tar, The saloon, The talisman, The graces, Long odds, Tom Thumb, The Passions, The Lancashire witches, The Barrier of Parnassus, The Milkmaid, The Refusal of Harlequin, The Land of Simplicity, The Statue, The regions of Accomplishment, and Cestus (a kind of mythological burlesque in which the Homeric gods discoursed in a low vernacular).
[35] His opera Liberty Hall, containing the successful songs "Jock Ratlin", "The Highmettled Racer" and "The Bells of Aberdovey", was produced at the Drury Lane theatre on 8 February 1784.
He then came to an arrangement to supply the manager of the Dublin theatre with music at a cost of £600, of which he received only £140; at the same time he began publishing a weekly magazine, called The Devil, which failed after 21 issues.
Therefore, he made a tour of England to raise money by giving entertainments of songs and recitations, and he sold the musical compositions he had available at very unfavourable rates to the greedy publishers.
Instead, building on what he had done in his tour, he commenced a new kind of one-man-show, musical variety entertainments, in which he appeared in his own person on the stage seated at a harpsichord and played the accompaniments to his own songs, without attempting any theatrical personification of his characters.
Dibdin introduced very many songs which gained wide popularity, including "Poor Jack," "'Twas in the good ship 'Rover'," "Saturday Night at Sea," and "I sailed from the Downs in the 'Nancy.'"
He continued this form of entertainment for nearly twenty years, usually between October and April, in which time he produced eighteen entirely original three-act or three-part productions, as well as several one-act pieces on contemporary themes, or in which to re-introduce some of his popular songs.
His sea-songs form a class by themselves: they are calculated alike to cheer solitude and to animate social assemblages, to raise the laugh and the tear, and to engrave on the heart benevolence, courage, and a trust in Providence.
"[44] The author of his memoir, who witnessed one of Dibdin's Entertainments Sans Souci when a lad, offers the following picture: 'Dibdin was then a handsome man, of middle size, with an open pleasing countenance, and a very gentlemanlike appearance and address.
His costume was a blue coat, white waistcoat, and black silk breeches and stockings; and he wore his hair, in the fashion of the day, fully dressed and profusely powdered.
He sang with simplicity, without any attempt at ambitious ornament, but with a great deal of taste and expression; and, being a poet as well as a musician, he was particularly attentive to a clear and emphatic utterance of the words...
To this instrument were attached a set of bells, a side drum, a tambourine, and a gong, which he could bring into play by various mechanical contrivances, so as to give a pleasing variety to his accompaniments.
'[46] Dibdin's patriotic sea songs and their melodious refrains[47] powerfully influenced the national spirit[48] and were officially appropriated to the use of the British navy during the war with France.
They were not shanties or working songs, but a form of distinctively English ballad combining the tonality of the hornpipe with vivid if sentimentalized depictions of the comradeship, the separations from love, the simple patriotism, loyalty and manly courage of Tom, England's Jack Tar.
In 1803 he was induced by Pitt's government, with a pension of £200 a year (equivalent to £23,100 in 2023),[26] to abandon provincial engagements to compose and sing 'War Songs' to keep up the ferment of popular feeling against France.
Dibdin still provided texts for operas, including The Cabinet, which was presented at Covent Garden in February 1803 with John Braham, Nancy Storace and Charles Incledon, and in December The British Fleet in 1342.
[49] At least two further operas appeared: Broken Gold was a farce in two acts on the occasion of Lord Nelson's victory and death, produced at Drury Lane with John Bannister in 1806, which was 'damned on the first night, and never published'.
The tune of "Tom Bowling" forms part of Sir Henry Wood's 1905 Fantasia on British Sea Songs customarily played on the Last Night of the Proms.
Verdant Green, eponymous hero of the novel by Cuthbert Bede, learns to row and 'feathers his oars with skill and dexterity' (Part II Chapter VI), borrowing a line from Dibdin's song "The Jolly Young Waterman."
The great Victorian baritone Sir Charles Santley made his farewell performance at Covent Garden in 1911 in the role of Tom Tug in Dibdin's opera The Waterman.
