JOHN WELDON, born at Chichester, received his first musical instructions from John Walter, organist of Eton College, and afterwards became a disciple of Purcell. He was at an early age chosen organist of New College, Oxford. In 1701, he was appointed gentleman-extraordinary of the Royal Chapel; in 1708 he succeeded Dr. Blow, as organist thereof; and seven years after, upon a second composer being added to the establishment, he was named to that situation. He was a great pluralist; for while he held all these offices, he was also organist of St. Bride’s; and George I. having presented the parish of St Martin in the Fields with an organ, Mr. Weldon, perhaps in compliment to the king, Hawkins adds, was elected organist.[54]
Weldon’s compositions were chiefly confined to the service of the church; but he assisted in setting Congreve’s masque, The Judgment of Paris, to music, in which is the air ‘Let ambition fire thy mind,’ a lovely melody, and still as fresh as if the production of the present century. This was introduced by Arne in Love in a Village, and is known to all as ‘Hope, thou nurse of young Desire.’ Some of his songs are to be found in the Mercurius Musicus, and other collections. Among these are ‘From grave lessons and restraint,’ a very popular air, and as such remembered in Sir John Hawkins’s time, who has reprinted it in his fifth volume; and it would even now be occasionally sung by lovers of natural melody, but that the words partake of that pruriency which does not tell well for ‘the wisdom of our ancestors.’
The great and deserved fame of this composer is built on his anthems, ‘In thee, O Lord,’ and ‘Hear my crying,’ of which Hawkins very justly observes, ‘it is difficult to say whether the melody or the harmony of each be its greatest excellence.’ Dr. Burney speaks very slightingly of Weldon’s powers; and it seems to us that on this subject he was either prejudiced, or imperfectly acquainted with the works he criticised.
Weldon died in 1736, and was succeeded in the Chapel Royal by Dr. Boyce.
THOMAS TUDWAY, Doctor in Music, was educated under Dr. Blow, with Turner and Purcell. Soon after quitting the Chapel Royal he was admitted into the choir at Windsor, as a tenor singer. Like his fellow-disciples, he endeavoured to distinguish himself early as a composer, and inserted in the collection of church music, which he selected and transcribed for Lord Harley, an anthem composed by himself in 1675, when he was only nineteen, with six more of his early productions for the church, of which, Dr. Burney tells us, the counterpoint is but ordinary and clumsy.
In 1681 he was admitted to the degree of Bachelor in Music, at Cambridge; and in 1705, when Queen Anne visited that place, he produced an anthem, ‘Thou, O God, hast heard my vows,’ which was performed as an exercise for a doctor’s degree. He then was appointed public professor of music in that university. As an acknowledgment for other anthems composed for the use of Queen Anne, he was appointed her organist and composer-extraordinary.
In the latter part of Dr. Tudway’s life he resided chiefly in London, and was much patronized by the Oxford family. The valuable scores of English church music, in six thick quarto volumes, now in the British Museum, and forming part of the Harleian Collection, (No. 7337,) were collected and transcribed by himself at this time. During the same period he was in the habit of meeting Prior, Sir James Thornhill, Christian the engraver, and other eminent characters, at Lord Oxford’s, once a week; and Sir James drew all their portraits, among which is Tudway playing on the harpsichord. Prior wrote humorous verses under these drawings, which were in the possession of Mr. West, formerly President of the Royal Society. There is also a picture of Dr. Tudway in the Music-school at Oxford, a present from Dr. Rawlinson. ‘At Cambridge,’ Burney rather sarcastically remarks, ‘he was longer remembered as an inveterate punster than as a great musician.’[55] His intimacy with Purcell furnished him with the means of forming an accurate judgment both of the character and talents of that great composer, of which he thus speaks in a letter addressed to his son:—‘I knew him perfectly well: he had a most commendable ambition of exceeding every one of his time, and succeeded without contradiction, there being none in England, nor anywhere else I know of, that could come in competition with him for compositions of all kinds,’ &c.
Dr. Tudway died in 1726.