Here’s a talk I gave a few years ago,:
The Linley sisters and 18th century vocal culture.
Thomas Linley was the eldest son of William, a carpenter, who came with his family to Bath when Thomas was 11 years old. Here he was apprenticed to the organist of Bath Abbey, and as early as the age of 20 he had established himself as a musician and music teacher. By this time, the 1750s, Bath had become the most fashionable place in the country after London, largely as a result of Beau Nash’s efforts early in the century. Society arrived, and Society needed entertaining. Music was at the core of this entertainment, both in the Pump Room and in the Assembly Rooms, and by becoming Director of Public Concerts in the Assembly Rooms Linley was at the core of Bath’s musical life.
Over a period of 18 years Mary Linley, Thomas’s wife, had twelve children, of whom eight survived childhood. Elizabeth was the eldest, born in 1754. Next came Thomas junior, then Mary junior, Sam, Maria, Ozias, Jane and William. The older children were all taught music by their father. Elizabeth was singing in concerts by the age of 12; Thomas played a violin concerto in Bristol aged only 7; Mary was singing by the age of 9; Sam appeared on stage in Bristol dancing a hornpipe at the age of 6; but Maria was a late starter, making her singing debut aged 15. When the family moved to London in 1776, the three youngest children aged 11, 8 and 5 were left with their grandparents in Bath, and they missed out on the intensive musical training which Thomas had given their older siblings.
Today there are musically gifted children at the Purcell or Menuhin Schools, or Chethams, who give their first concerto performances at 10 or so, or who win the BBC Young Musician of the Year at 15, say. Thomas Linley junior was a true child prodigy, like his exact contemporary and friend Mozart. But singers don’t get that kind of exposure so early: the occasional boy treble like Aled Jones, or the young Charlotte Church, maybe – and pop singers, of course. Today a classical singing career doesn’t usually start until after several years at music college – aged 25, perhaps. If the Linley girls’ experience was normal for the time, what has changed since then?
We have a description from the late eighteenth century of how a young singer was taught: Catherine Stephens, one of the most famous English singers of the early nineteenth century, studied with Gesualdo Lanza from the age of 13, and at 18 she had already performed to ‘great applause’ in Bath, Bristol and Southampton, the kind of places where Linley was exhibiting his children forty years before. Lanza wrote:
‘Miss Stephens went through, with me, all the principles of vocal music: not only all the gradations of Solfeggio, but through a whole course of vocal exercises, designed to give facility of execution in modulations, cadenzas, and every style of ornament. Under my direction, she also studied nearly 200 pieces of music, English and Italian, selected from the best English and Italian operas, and from oratorios.’
This, remember, when a modern child would be at school: 200 songs and arias is an enormous number, and unthinkable today. The early singing debuts of Elizabeth, Mary and Maria, were therefore not so unusual for the time.
Elizabeth Linley, known as Eliza, was the eldest and the most celebrated of the singing sisters. Her father’s teaching underlined the importance of simplicity and sincerity, and the composer and singer Charles Dibdin wrote that he ‘taught nothing more than correct expression and unaffected pronunciation of words, stressed as in speech’, and described Eliza as one of the ‘finest singers of her day because she was taught on this principle.’ It must also be said that she was very good looking, and her father, recognising her ability to attract audiences for a variety of reasons, organised concerts for her throughout the West Country. She usually sang arias from Handel oratorios and some other things like Arne’s Shakespeare settings, but never anything unbecomingly frivolous. William Jackson, the organist of Exeter Cathedral described her thus:
‘Her voice was remarkably sweet and her scale just and perfect; from the lowest to the highest note the tone was the same quality. She had a great flexibility of throat, and whether the passage was slow or rapid the intervals were always precisely in tune. Her genius and sense gave a consequence to her performance which no fool with the voice of an angel could attain; and to those extraordinary qualifications was added a most beautiful person, expressive of the soul within.’
And all this when she was not yet seventeen.
I’m struck by the remark about the tone being of the same quality from bottom to top. This was by no means the case with all singers then, many of whom had quite clear changes of timbre between the different registers, even if they did make those changes as seamless as possible. They also didn’t lower the larynx and modify the vowel sounds at the top as modern opera singers do, and we must assume that Eliza didn’t do that either. But they were all encouraged to sing without forcing the tone. Mancini wrote in 1774: ‘be absolutely clear, that forcing the voice is always one of the greatest errors’ even when trying to be heard above the audience.
There’s a famous incident concerning Eliza at this time which could have been lifted straight out of a Hollywood movie. On an evening in 1770 in Salisbury Cathedral, an audience came to hear a recital of sacred music, including arias from The Messiah sung by an up-and-coming young singer. On came Eliza, waif-like and beautiful, to sing ‘Rejoice greatly’. The voice wasn’t especially powerful, but such was its clarity that it could be heard throughout the building. Its sweet tone was matched by the radiant expression of her face. Then something special happened, which was reported in the local paper:
‘While Miss Linley was singing ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, a bullfinch which had found its way into the cathedral was struck by the inimitable sweetness and harmonious simplicity of her manner of singing, and mistaking it for a feathered chorister of the woods, it perched on the gallery over her head, and accompanied her with the musical warblings of its little throat through a great part of the song.’
This description of Eliza’s voice as having inimitable sweetness and harmonious simplicity, coupled with Jackson’s comments about the sweetness and purity of her singing, prompted me to talk to the ex-headmaster of the Yehudi Menuhin School, Nicolas Chisholm, about the training of young musicians and young singers especially. He has observed that the age of puberty is earlier than it used to be, and many cathedral choir schools are unable to keep their boy choristers singing in the choir up to the traditional age of thirteen. But it’s perhaps not generally realised that girls’ voices change at puberty as well, and maybe the ethereally pure quality of Eliza’s voice could be partly explained by her being less physically developed. Set against this, it must be said that there are many young professional sopranos working today who have come through University and College choirs, and who specialise in performing in ensembles such as The Sixteen, where pure and mostly vibrato-free singing is the norm. My feeling is that it was the father’s training of these girls which led to their particular style of singing, not their physical development.
Thomas Linley senior had been apprenticed to the organist of Bath Abbey, Thomas Chilcot: likewise his own children became his apprentices. As a result, all Eliza’s income came to him. So when she and her twelve-year-old sister Mary were billed to appear at the Three Choirs Festival in 1770 the fee of £100 was his. Incidentally, that’s more than £10,000 today. But out of these fees came some pretty hefty expenses. With his fairly lowly beginnings as a carpenter’s son, Thomas would have known the importance of looking like a gentleman, and of his daughters looking like ladies. Multiply the following examples by at least 100 for today’s cost: silk, £4 a yard; shoes, £15 without the buckles; lace collars £40.
Mary Linley’s professional career had begun in 1769, a year before her Three Choirs debut, when she was 11 years old. This was as a comic actress in Man and Wife in Covent Garden. George Colman, playwright and manager, wanted to sign her for a season, but her father refused – he didn’t want theatrical careers for his children, but musical ones. He thought that actresses were no better than whores. Besides, he could make more money this way. So Mary became a singer specialising in oratorios, and her voice was much praised, as second only to Eliza. Gainsborough painted members of the Linley family several times, amongst them being his famous portrait of Eliza and Mary begun in 1771.
The Three Choirs Festival had been founded in about 1715, as a week of liturgical music in one of the cathedrals of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford. At first only church music was allowed in the cathedrals themselves, and even Handel’s Messiah (a regular feature from 1757) had to be performed in secular venues. Otherwise the music of Purcell and Handel dominated the programmes, with occasional works by other contemporary composers, including Thomas Linley junior, whose cantata ‘Let God Arise’ was performed in 1773 (when he was 17 years old).
This world of concerts inhabited by Eliza, Mary and Maria was in many ways quite separate from the world of theatre music, though there were singers who performed in both, and Catherine Stephens whom I mentioned earlier, was one of those. This separation remains largely true today: my own career was mostly in concerts and recordings, with only perhaps one opera a year. And within the theatre world of the time there were those on the one hand who performed Italian opera, and on the other, those who performed English opera.
Pier Francesco Tosi, who wrote an important treatise on singing in 1723, was a famous castrato singer who arrived in London in 1693, bringing Italian music to a new audience. The music of Purcell, who had died only the previous year, would dominate in England for a long time yet, but little by little the Italians gained ground. One of the essential differences between English taste in drama or opera and Italian taste was that the dialogue in English was spoken, with music used as an interlude or as an accompaniment to a dance. In the Italian stile recitativo the text was sung throughout, with measured airs when required. John Blow’s Venus & Adonis and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, both fully sung English operas, were a new departure. The first Italianate opera staged in London was Arsinoe, in 1705, and it was a translation of an Italian text into English with music by an Englishman, Thomas Clayton, who had been to Italy for a while to study the Italian style. Here’s a comment by Colley Cibber, the poet laureate, written in 1740:
‘The Italian Opera began first to steal into England; but in as rude a disguise, and unlike itself, as possible, in a lame, hobbling translation, into our own language, with false quantities, or metre out of measure, to its original notes, sung by our own unskilful voices, with graces misapplied to almost every sentiment, and with action, lifeless and unmeaning, through every character.’
Incidentally, Clayton himself frankly apologised that he could only get English singers. This shows that as early as 1705, there was a general understanding that Italian singers were better than English ones.
If Arsinoe was judged to be artistically dreadful (though quite successful commercially – not the last time that’s happened), in 1706 Giovanni Bononcini’s opera Camilla had an entirely different reception. It was put on in Drury Lane translated into English, with one curious exception. John Hawkins wrote that ‘to accommodate the singers of our own country, many of the recitatives and airs were translated into English,’ but since the role of Turnus was performed by an Italian singer Valentino Urbani, his lines were kept in Italian, thus resulting in a production in two languages. Hawkins added, ‘notwithstanding the glaring absurdity of so motley a performance, it is said that the opera never met with so good a reception abroad as it did here.’ This kind of hybrid performance became more common as more Italians came to London and shared the stage with English-speakers.
In Hamburg in the 1720s Telemann’s dual-language operas became standard fare, but for another reason. Opera generally was regarded as an Italian phenomenon there, and the cantabile line of the aria was considered to be best served by being in that language. But the story, carried by the recitative, was delivered in German so that the audience could understand what was going on. This seems to me rather a sensible idea. And remember that the Germans were used to sung recitative in the many cantatas that Kappelmeisters like J S Bach had composed.
In Vienna, German-language opera was the Singspiel – spoken plays with sung arias. In 1778 the Emperor Joseph II took steps to promote all-sung German opera by re-founding the Burgtheater. The result was rather like the English model, with pieces usually translated and bodged together from French and Italian originals; but there were exceptions. When the young Mozart arrived from Salzburg in 1781 he made himself known by writing Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a proper and entirely original opera. But the Burgtheater experiment didn’t last much longer, and Mozart returned to Italian opera, at least until his last stage work, The Magic Flute, which is in fact a Singspiel with spoken text.
After Camilla came another fully-English opera Rosamond, again by Thomas Clayton, and this one was savaged even more harshly than Arsinoe had been. One critic claimed that it was ‘no better than a confused Chaos of Musick, where there is ev’rything, and nothing…’ and that its only merit was that it was short.
Joseph Addison was the librettist for Rosamond, and was largely spared the opprobrium which the opera received. He became eventually an outspoken critic of the whole genre of Italian opera in English:
‘Our authors would often make words of their own, which were entirely foreign to the meaning of the passages they pretended to translate… thus the famous song in Camilla, ‘Barbara si t’intendo,’ ‘Barbarous woman, yes, I know your meaning,’ which expresses the resentments of an angry lover, was translated into the English lamentation, ‘Frail are a lover’s hopes,’ etc. And it was pleasant enough to see the most refined persons of the British nation dying away and languishing to notes that were filled with a spirit of rage and indignation.’
‘I have known the word and pursued through the whole gamut, have been entertained with many a melodious the, and have heard the most beautiful graces, quavers, and divisions bestowed upon then, for, and from, to the eternal honour of our English particles.’
It obviously became clear that the best solution was to have the entire opera in Italian. Besides, Italian operatic heroes, lovers and emperors were usually sung by castrati, and there were no English singers of that kind. The public seemed happy enough to listen to something they didn’t understand, and moreover they felt that the Italian language sounded best for singing anyway.
Gradually Italian opera took over, and English was relegated to a second-class singing language, with English singers also being regarded as second-class. This is an attitude which persisted and even exists to a certain extent today. Students at our conservatoires often prefer to sing in Italian rather than their native language because they claim to find it more grateful vocally. I entirely repudiate this idea, and ask how anyone can truly communicate from the heart in anything but their own language. But it is certainly true that the great operatic repertoire until well into the twentieth century was all foreign.
The problem wasn’t only found in England. In Germany and Austria too opera was thought of as an Italian art-form for much the same reasons. In the eighteenth century the majority of Mozart’s operas and all of Haydn’s were in Italian. As late as the 1850s Wagner was complaining that his German singers couldn’t sing their own language because they had all been trained in the Italian manner.
One of the most significant events of early eighteenth century London was the arrival in 1710 of Handel, whose Rinaldo was an immediate and massive success. The great castrato Nicolo Grimaldi had arrived in 1707, and all seemed to be well. But Grimaldi left in 1712, and because of a dearth of good Italian singers no new Italian operas were written between then and 1720. To counter this, the Royal Academy of Music was founded in 1719 specifically to promote Italian opera, and its first success was Handel’s Radamisto at the King’s Theatre. The even greater castrato Senesino settled in London, as did the soprano Margherita Durastani. The part of Radamisto, the hero, was written for her, and it seems that Handel took the eminently practical line that if he didn’t have a castrato available he would give the male lead to a woman.
There was a notorious rivalry during the 1720s between two sopranos; Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni. John Hawkins wrote this about them:
‘The town no sooner became sensible of the perfections which each possessed, than they began to compare them in their own minds, and endeavour to determine to whom of the two the greatest tribute of theatrical applause was due. Some ladies of the first quality entered very deeply into the merits of this competition; a numerous party engaged to support Cuzzoni, and another not less formidable associated on the side of Faustina. Thus encouraged, the behaviour of the rivals to each other was attended with all the circumstances of malevolence that jealousy, hatred, and malice could suggest; private slander and public abuse were deemed weapons too innoxious in this warfare – blows were made use of in the prosecution of it, and, shame to tell, the two Signoras fought.’
Shenanigans like this were a gift to satirists and parodists, and in 1728 The Beggar’s Opera had its first performance. English ballad operas were already popular, consisting of new words to well-known tunes interspersed with spoken dialogue. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera skewered the Italians in no uncertain terms, and he has The Beggar deliver these lines at the beginning:
‘I have introduced the similes that are in your celebrated Operas: the Swallow, the Moth, the Bee, the Ship, the Flower, etc. Besides, I have a prison-scene which the ladies always reckon charmingly pathetic. As to the parts, I have observed such a nice impartiality to our ladies, that it is impossible for either of them to take offence. I hope I may be forgiven, that I have not made my Opera throughout unnatural, like those in vogue; for I have no recitative.’
The replacement of Italian heroes and kings by whores, pickpockets and other low-lifes, the deliberate shoe-horning of the traditional Italian happy ending in spite of the horrors that have gone before, all served to drive home the satire. Here was a kind of opera which ordinary people could relate to, rather than the mostly upper-class clientele of the Italians.
Historians have often cited The Beggar’s Opera as the reason why the Royal Academy failed, and why Italian opera lost its treasured status, but it appears that the main factor was a disagreement between Handel and the castrato Senesino. Handel asked the Academy to sack the singer, but when they refused because he was so popular, Handel resigned and the whole thing collapsed.
What of English singers of the period? Cecilia Young, born 1712, was described by Burney as having ‘a good natural voice and a fine shake, and had been so well taught that her singing was infinitely superior to that of any other English woman of her time.’ She met Handel in 1734 and worked with him for ten years. She also married Thomas Arne, an extremely important figure in the music of London, who was official composer at Vauxhall Gardens. You probably know how significant the Pleasure Gardens were in providing musical entertainment in the capital throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. It’s rather satisfying to realise that the Chelsea Flower Show is held on the site of one of the other grand Pleasure Gardens, Ranelagh.
Another celebrated singer was John Beard, born in 1716, who also sang for Handel and Arne. Handel’s tenor roles of Samson, Judas Maccabeus and Jephtha were written for him, at a time when castrati would normally have taken the leading heroic parts. Susannah Maria Cibber, born 1714, sister of Thomas Arne, was a contralto who apparently had a sweet, expressive and agile voice, but led a scandalous life for a time, living in a ménage a trois. Again, Handel wrote roles for her, including The Messiah, but eventually she changed career to become a dramatic actress, one of the highest-paid in London. James Bartleman, born 1769, was a bass who specialised in concert singing, and had what a critic described as a cello-like voice, whose richness and equality of tone resulted in part from his peculiarities of pronunciation – I’d love to know what that sounded like! Sarah Harrop, born 1758, later Mrs Bates, had great success as a singer of sacred music and of Purcell’s songs. And there is a famous portrait of her by Angelica Kauffman.
I must mention Anna Storace (known as Nancy), born in London in 1765, taught first by her father, then by Sacchini and Rauzzini. She made her Three Choirs debut at the age of 11, but soon afterwards went with the family to Italy and subsequently to Vienna in 1783. She sang Rosina in Paisiello’s The Barber of Seville, and became a great favourite of the public and of the Emperor, who apparently wanted her for his mistress. Perhaps in order to facilitate this, he banished her husband, a much older man whom she married disastrously at 18. She was short and plump, so not suited to serious roles but specialised in comic ones. Mozart wrote the part of Susanna for her in his Marriage of Figaro, while she was still only 20. She returned to London in 1787, sang for a time in the Italian operas at the King’s Theatre before joining Drury Lane where her brother Stephen composed many of the stage works alongside Thomas Linley senior. Here she carried on specialising in comic and lower-class roles opposite John Bannister, a bass who was first and foremost an actor, but was ‘quite capable of holding a tune if it wasn’t too demanding’! The upper-class roles would be taken by two other well-known singers: Mrs Crouch, who had been a pupil of Linley, and Michael Kelly, a tenor of international fame.
And what of the Linley sisters?
Mary at the age of 22 married Richard Tickell, at which point she gave up her singing career. She died of TB in 1787 at the age of 29.
Maria’s promising career also ended early, with her death in 1784 aged 21.
Eliza, the most extravagantly gifted of the girls, married the playwright and politician Robert Brinsley Sheridan when she was 19. He forbade her, as his wife, from singing professionally, and she only subsequently appeared in special subscription concerts for friends and grand patrons. Her story is altogether fascinating, and I heartily recommend Alan Chedzoy’s biography of her, Sheridan’s Nightingale.
There are so many threads to the story of singing in England in the eighteenth century, and I’ve only been able to give a brief sketch of some of the issues of the time. But although there are many parallels with what we experience today, there’s one thing I don’t think we’d put up with any more: husbands ordering their young wives not to sing.
Sources:
Black, Clementina. The Linleys of Bath, London: Martin Secker, 1911
Bor, Margot & Clelland, Lamond. Still the Lark: A biography of Elizabeth Linley, London: Merlin Press, 1962
Burney, Charles. A general history of music, London: 1776-89
Chedzoy, Alan. Sheridan’s Nightingale, the story of Elizabeth Linley, London: Allison & Busby, 1997
Cibber, Colley. An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, London: 1740
Girdham, Jane. English opera in late eighteenth-century London, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997
Hawkins, John. A general history of the science and practice of music, London: 1776
Ivey, Donald. Song: Anatomy, Imagery and Styles, New York: MacMillan, 1970
Kinder, Kaylyn. Eighteenth-century reception of Italian opera in London. University of Louisville, 2013
Mancini, Giambattista. Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato, Vienna: 1774
Potter, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Singing, Cambridge: CUP, 2000
Toft, Robert. Heart to heart: Expressive Singing in England 1780-1830, Oxford: OUP, 2000
Tosi, Pier Francesco. Observations on the Florid song, trans. Mr Galliard, ed. Michael Pilkington. London: Stainer & Bell, 1987