Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era

This edition makes available one of the few large dramatic works by John Weldon, who may have been the actual composer of The Tempest, formerly attributed to his teacher Henry Purcell. While Weldon's Judgment of Paris was the winner of a 1701 competition to determine who could "compose the best" English masque or opera, his is the only one of the three extant entries that has not yet been published. The edition is based on the only known copy of the score, an eighteenth-centruy manuscript in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. The publication of The Judgment of Paris makes available an important resource for the study of English theater music between the death of Purcell and the arrival of Handel.

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