THE TUNES
The Harlot's Progress and The Rake's Progress are alike interesting for the parodic ballad opera pattern of setting new words to familiar tunes. Though neither work includes the music, some songs indicate familiar melodies such as "Let us take the road" from The Beggar's Opera. In The Harlot's Progress, the six "Airs" come from varied sources, with new lyrics by Theophilus Cibber. Of the approximately 24 unnumbered tunes and catches in The Rake's Progress, the most outstanding in connection with the print sequence is "Black Joke," Richard Leveridge's bawdy tune shown by Hogarth in the Rose Tavern print being sung by a pregnant woman (Pl. 5). In the stage piece, this song is part of a medley sung to Rakewell by the various professionals who compete for his money. The most important tunes are those from Poor Vulcan! the burletta by Charles Dibdin (February 1778), supporting my 1778-1780 date for The Rake's Progress manuscript.
The sources used to trace the musical airs include Claude Simpson's The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966); Minnie Sears' Song Index (and Supplement) (New York: Wilson Company, 1926 and 1934); Edythe N. Backus: Catalogue of Music Printed Before 1801 (San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1949), and William Barclay Squire, "An Index of Tunes in the Ballad-Operas," The Musical Antiquary, II (October 1910), 1-17. [18] E. V. Roberts points out that "the lack of a ballad designation for a ballad-opera air usually means that the tune in question was composed specially for that ballad opera" and that, because most "unnamed tunes were unknown outside their ballad operas," they were "neither copied nor printed, and simply do not turn up in the collections." [19] The catches in The Rake's Progress are not traceable. The numbering for songs in The Rake's Progress is my own. Airs from both plays give us some idea of the rich musical treasure English stagewriters could draw upon for theatrical offerings in the eighteenth century. [20]