An age that could witness without protest the appointment of Jonathan Swift, the author of "The Tale of a Tub," to the position of a dignitary of the Church, must surely have been one in which, at least among the ruling classes, the moral sense must have sunk low. At any rate, it may be said that the extreme liberty of thought, encouraged by the then prevalent doctrines, and the utter disregard of ceremonial in the services of the Church, are far removed from the thought and customs of to-day.
After a Scottish a Dutch, after a Dutch, with an interval, a German reigning house. It is impossible, when the consideration of English music is under discussion, to shut one's eyes to the extreme significance of such facts. Opera, even in its most primitive state, had not been known in England before the Stuart times, and, though the genius of Purcell was
fascinated by it, yet even he was unable to imbue his countrymen with any taste for it. The masque they could understand, since it was a natural outcome of the kind of play that had been popular in the country for centuries, but this was a foreign institution for which they had no predilection.
So far as England is concerned, it was a hothouse plant fostered principally by a foreign Court and an aristocracy who had acquired their taste for it abroad. Such operatic work, as Purcell was responsible for, was given in English, but it was not long before an Italian company was invited to London for the purpose of presenting Italian opera, which by that time had arrived at a point of much greater advancement, and a permanent home made for it.
With the company came Buononcini, the most celebrated composer of this form of art that his country possessed.
The arrival in this country of Handel, who had not only made a complete study of it, but whose genius had enabled him to carry it to a state of development hitherto undreamt of, was the signal of war between the rival composers, and led to the establishment of another theatre for its exploitation, at the head of which was the great German master. It may be mentioned that at this period of its expansion and introduction to the various countries of Europe, the liberty was granted to the individual exponent of the different parts to sing in his native language, a diplomatic concession that will be readily
appreciated; hence two or three, or even more, languages might be heard in the course of a single representation.
To Handel, however, who was always most exacting as to the rendering of his music, such an anomaly would be, naturally, intolerable. And so it proved. His operas were written in Italian, and in that language they had to be sung. That was what he required, and no less would he accept. In this connection, it is strange to observe that, notwithstanding his long residence in England, he not only never mastered the intricacies of the pronunciation of English, but never learnt to appreciate the relative importance of the words of a sentence. Of this, the early editions of his works afford ample proof. In fact, it is known that his struggles with his librettist were frequent and stormy, ending, however, as one would naturally imagine, in the complete collapse of the latter. Fancy Wagner with a librettist. It is unthinkable.
The continued importation of foreign singers who were alone qualified to meet the demands of fashionable society, which was then the only source from which money was to be earned, naturally relegated the English singer to a position of comparative neglect. His energies were confined either to the modest demands made upon him by the then Church services, or devoted to occupations upon which it is unnecessary to dwell.
Similarly, native composers, such as were left, who were, neither by training nor instinct,