“Love in a Village” has now been released as part of the ambitious “OPERA” publishing project. In the 18th century it was number one in the British Isles, but is now almost forgotten.

“Love in a Village” (1762) was eighteenth-century London’s most popular opera. With forty consecutive nights in its first run, a New York production already in 1768, and an eighty-year-long presence in playhouse repertory, the reach of this opera was unrivalled during the century. Why has there never been a critical edition? Because it’s an English pastiche comic opera, mixing dialogue with airs. Shunned by twentieth-century musicologists, pastiche opera is now, thanks to Module 1 of the series “OPERA – Spectrum of European Music Theatre” in Individual Editions – receiving the editorial attention it deserves. Apart from its period renown, “Love in a Village” merits inclusion in the “OPERA” series because it makes us rethink authorship, and hence editorship.

As this hybrid edition lays bare, the composer Thomas Arne was not the musical mind behind “Love in a Village”, as has until now been assumed. Rather, Love in a Village was the brainchild of tenor and Covent Garden manager John Beard, whose repertory in oratorio, playhouse and pleasure garden airs – many of which are jewels not sung today – constitutes the bulk of the borrowings. Beard almost certainly chose the obscure ballad opera “The Village Opera” for adaptation into the “Love in a Village” wordbook. Having led a one-night revival of “The Village Opera” five years earlier, Beard knew that, unusually, its plot featured two heroines; in these roles he cast the star Charlotte Brent and the promising sixteen-year-old Isabella Hallam. For these two singers alone English numbers were crafted out of then-fashionable Italian operas. To convert “The Village Opera” into “Love in a Village”, Beard turned to the twenty-nine year-old Isaac Bickerstaffe, whom critics later called the ‘dramatic cobbler’. True to his soubriquet, for his “Love in a Village” wordbook Bickerstaff knit together the 1729 “Village Opera” with a 1673 farce, “The Gentleman Dancing-Master” by William Wycherley, thereby providing scenes not just for the singers but for ballad-singing star comedians as well. Bickerstaff’s only original scenes are those for Beard, written to dramatize the tenor according to his reputation for geniality and decency.

Beard hired the trumpeter Edward Toms – like Beard, an occasional court musician – to arrange the borrowed music. The false attribution of “Love in a Village” to Arne is due to his pupil and then-mistress, Brent. She was known for singing Arne’s music – she had shot to fame in his “Artaxerxes” early in 1762 – and consequently Toms arranged for Brent airs by Arne that she had not yet performed; Arne also supplied one new air for Brent. For his composing team Beard further enlisted the virtuoso bass viol player Carl Friedrich Abel, new to London, who provided a stunning overture. Before December 1762 Abel had held only one public concert; “Love in a Village” effectively launched his London career. As digitized source materials show, Abel’s overture, a brilliant three-movement symphony, rightly drew much attention: besides headlining wordbooks, it was engraved in parts and in vocal score, all which can be viewed on the Edirom platform.

Editorially “Love in a Village” would seem straightforward: one fair copy held at the Royal College of Music, MS RCM 342, is the only authoritative music source. But the manuscript contains alterations, and only close comparison with wordbooks allow recognition of the process by which three versions of “Love in a Village” were tried out between opening night 8 December 1762 and 8 February 1763. What determined the final version was playhouse audiences – as opposed to any authorial guiding hand – and what pleased audiences were numbers that allowed cast members to best display their powers. Through the digitization of “Love in a Village's” primary sources for OPERA, users can see first-hand the multiple ways – in changes to MS RCM 342, in prolegomena of wordbooks, and in the titling of engraved numbers – in which the engine for change was star power.

Berta Joncus
(from [t]akte 2/2018)