ABSTRACT
At the outset of my 2017 study Masque and Opera in England, 1656–1688, I invoked the name of the pioneering early-twentieth-century scholar of English opera, Edward J. Dent. 1 It was Dent, I observed, who originally conceived and articulated the notion of an “operatic principle” upon which the study of seventeenth-century musical drama could be founded. According to Dent, this principle “is neither the normal musical principle nor the normal dramatic principle”, but rather acknowledges that “[e]ssential musical principles may sometimes be modified under the influence of the stage, and the normal dramatic values are often entirely altered by the concomitance of music”. 2 Such a state of affairs, Dent averred, left the historian of opera and related forms in a bind: given that our modern understanding of opera is predicated on an accretion of historical precedents, many of them determined not by rigorous artistic logic but rather by commercial expediency, how do we describe, categorize, and evaluate the operatic endeavors of the past, particularly during an era when the form was still in its infancy? The aim of my first book was to go some way towards understanding how musical drama took root in England during the years leading up to and during the reigns of Charles II (1660–85) and his brother James II (1685–88). In the process, I sought to sketch out a means of sorting through the generic jumble that constituted what contemporaries regarded as “operatic”, focusing attention on two distinct phenomena: the revival of musical-theatrical “recreational” entertainments, most of which featured youthful courtly performers, and the development of interest in through-composed opera, which revolved principally around the recruitment and deployment of foreign-born “occupational” musicians and dancers. Both of these strands were centered predominantly on the activities of the royal court, which served as their primary sponsor and ideological inspiration. Such a task, while complicated in its own right, allowed me to skirt some of the most thorny conceptual challenges associated with the history of musical drama in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century. The two generic categories treated in Masque and Opera can each be justified on readily discernible logical grounds: the story of the introduction of through-composed opera, however fragmentary its documentation and however desultory its results, traces the fortunes of a recognizable dramatic genre, already formulated elsewhere and hence available for adoption in England, while my account of court balls and masques, by contrast, functions as a kind of categorical portmanteau—encompassing a range of entertainments that included instances of pure dancing, straight plays, spoken-and-sung masques, and through-sung operatic-style works, some mostly private, some quite flagrantly public, all having as their common denominator the notion of lavish courtly display—that can be expanded to accommodate whatever relevant data one is able to unearth.
