By Estelle Murphy
My interest in John Eccles began with my MPhil research on his court odes, works that he wrote in his role as Master of the King’s (and Queen’s) Musick. This blossomed into a PhD that investigated the use of the court ode as a means of public self-fashioning by the monarchical establishment. Naturally, Eccles’s odes featured heavily in this, too, alongside those composed by Henry Purcell, John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, and George Frideric Handel (among others). Indeed, while Handel’s court ode for Queen Anne—Eternal Source of Light Divine (ca. 1714)—is frequently described as having Purcellian influences, Handel had a more immediate influence in Eccles’s odes. This influence should not be overlooked, as Eccles was a hugely popular and prominent composer during his lifetime.
Eccles did not receive his compositional education through the Chapel Royal, as Purcell did. Instead he cut his teeth externally, being taught violin by his uncle, Solomon Eccles, who was a string player at court and member of the Private Musick. As a result, John Eccles’s compositional style differed from that of Purcell and Blow, and unlike them he did not compose sacred music. Eccles began his career in the theater around 1690, composing for the United Company at Drury Lane Theater, and then, when the company broke up in 1695, moved with Thomas Betterton to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The songs he composed were enormously popular, and he quickly became one of London’s best-known theater composers. Eccles was appointed to a position as a violinist in the king’s band in 1696 and was made Master of the King’s Musick in 1700 following the death of Nicholas Staggins (also a violinist). It was surely Eccles’s popularity as a theater composer that secured him his position as Master of the Musick (perhaps a move to keep the music composed for the court fashionable and relevant).
In this position, Eccles continued to compose for the theater while fulfilling his duty to compose the court odes to celebrate New Year’s Day and the monarch’s birthday each year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eccles’s approach to the songs in his court odes echoed the style he used for his theater songs, and both types appeared in print as single sheets and alongside one another in collections. The publication of the songs as single sheets—usually with the vocal melody and continuo line, followed by an arrangement “For the Flute” (i.e., the recorder)—is a strong indicator of their popularity and of the demand for them as versatile music in private use: in that form, they could be sung by women or men with keyboard accompaniment, or played by men on the more typically male-associated recorder.
In 1704 Eccles published A Collection of Songs—a bumper compilation of ninety-six of his songs—with the firm of John Walsh. Many of its contents had already been published by Walsh as single sheets in earlier publications such as A Collection of the Choicest Songs and Dialogues (1703) and The Monthly Mask of Vocal Musick (a periodical begun in 1702). The Collection of Songs was used as the primary source for the A-R Editions volumes dedicated to Eccles’s incidental music (B190, B220, and B237 [forthcoming]). These songs typically name the plays from which they hail, and most also name the singers who performed them. Unsurprisingly, Anne Bracegirdle (bap. 1671–1748)—the singing actress who sang Eccles’s music exclusively for her entire career—features heavily among the actors and professional singers named. She was particularly lauded for her performances of mad songs. The most famous of these, “I burn, I burn,” was edited by Amanda Eubanks Winkler for Incidental Music, Part 1: Plays A–F (B190, pp. 164–67). Eubanks Winkler has written about Bracegirdle’s performance of “I burn, I burn” in an earlier UnderScore post, Hit Tunes from Restoration London, Part 1.
While my edition of Eccles’s incidental music contains no standalone mad songs, one play—John Crowne’s rather poorly received The Justice Busy; or, The Gentleman Quack (ca. 1699)—features what may be a multi-sectional “mad scene” performed by Bracegirdle. Of the five songs in the play sung by Bracegirdle, four seem to make up this mad scene, portraying her character’s emotional journey from lovesick melancholy to madness. Indeed, although The Justice Busy was not a popular work, Bracegirdle’s performance was praised by historian John Downes in 1708, who wrote that “Mrs. Bracegirdle, by a Potent and Magnetick Charm in Performing a Song . . . caus’d the Stones of the Streets to fly in the Men’s Faces,” a reference to the lyrics of her performance of Eccles’s song “I’ll hurry thee hence” (B220, pp. 128–29): “If any Man stops my furious Race, / The Stones in the Street, shall fly in his Face.” Downes’s comment illustrates how Eccles’s songs—especially when performed to great acclaim by Bracegirdle—could achieve success independently of the play from which they hailed (even when that play was a failure).
The most popular song by Eccles in my edition is undoubtedly “A soldier and a sailor” from William Congreve’s play Love for Love (B220, pp. 230–31). It premiered in the spring of 1695 and was the first play staged at the new playhouse at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, established by the actors dissatisfied with the situation with the United Company under the management of Christopher Rich. Love for Love was enormously successful and ran for thirteen nights. While all the songs from Love for Love achieved great popularity, “A soldier and a sailor” is particularly noteworthy. It was sung by Thomas Doggett (ca. 1670–1721) in the role of Ben. The song describes a sailor’s successful wooing of the refined lady Mrs. Frail, who was played by Elizabeth Barry (1656/8–1713). The rough characters in the song—the sailor, tinker, and tailor—made for a comical contrast with the sophisticated lady in the play, which certainly enhanced the comedic effect of the song and inevitably contributed to its popularity. One particularly interesting aspect of “A soldier and a sailor” is that it is composed in the style of a popular broadside ballad and, somewhat ironically, achieved popularity as a ballad song after the play’s run. It even featured in John Gay’s infamous The Beggar’s Opera (1727) alongside songs by Purcell, ballad songs, folk tunes, and other popular melodies. The song appears in the second edition of The Beggar’s Opera playbook, with the melody line only, and sets different words, beginning “A fox shall steal your hens, sir.” Its inclusion in Gay’s new genre of musical play shows how familiar this song was to the London audience of this time, which is particularly remarkable considering that it was composed some twenty years earlier. Its popularity continued well into the nineteenth century (and probably beyond); in fact, the sheer number of surviving sources for “A soldier and a sailor,” both printed and manuscript—as ballad sheets with new words, arrangements for different voice types and instruments, and so forth—meant that many had to be omitted from my edited volume: there were simply too many to include. Nonetheless, nine sources were collated for the edition, with an additional seven listed but not collated—the largest number of sources found for any song in the collection.
The instrumental music for Love for Love was composed by Gottfried Finger (ca. 1660–1730), not Eccles. It was common practice for one composer to write a play’s instrumental music and another (or more than one other) its songs. These editions of Eccles’s music therefore provide an unprecedented window onto a very interesting assembly of little-known works by composers such as Francis Forcer, William Corbett, John Lenton, and Thomas Tollett. We are lucky that any of the instrumental music for the plays survives, for unlike the related vocal music it was not usually given the chance of posterity through print.
Eccles composed comparatively little instrumental music for plays; the songs were clearly his main contribution. However, he provided the instrumental music for Measure for Measure (1700), a play written by Charles Gildon (modelled on Shakespeare), which contained within it a staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (with some reordering and additions) as an “entertainment.” The tunes are typically brief, apart from the one titled “A New Scotch Ground” (B220, pp. 358–63), which is an extended piece probably intended for the first or second music. Eccles’s music is in G major, showing that he was likely attempting to relate his overture and act tunes to the tonal centers of Dido and Aeneas, which begins in C minor and ends in G minor.
The other play in my edition for which Eccles composed instrumental music is Edward Ravenscroft’s The Italian Husband (1697). Unusually for theatrical music of this period, this instrumental music (B220, pp. 104–19) is mostly Italianate in style—surely Eccles’s acknowledgment of the Italian subject matter of the play! The overture, for example, opens with a flamboyant and arresting fanfare section, with striking thirty-second-note scalar runs. The second section is in an imitative fuga style in triple meter, with dotted rhythms throughout. In addition, the fourth instrumental movement that Eccles wrote for the play became a popular piece of music, appearing in various eighteenth-century publications with different titles, including “The Zar of Moscow” and “Baloons Jig”—perhaps an indication that it gained its popularity through oral transmission.
In 1707 Eccles set William Congreve’s opera libretto Semele, the first through-sung opera in the English language, with Bracegirdle intended to take the title role. It was planned to be performed in the Queen’s Theater in the Haymarket, and The Muses Mercury for December 1707 informs us that it was “ready to be practic’d”. However, multiple factors outside of Eccles’s control prevented it from being staged. These included the rise in popularity of Italian opera at this time, as well as the Lord Chamberlain’s reorganization of the theaters, which gave the opera monopoly to Rich’s company, leaving Betterton permitted only to produce plays. It has long been thought that Eccles retired from the theater in 1707 (following this failure to have Semele staged) and moved to Kingston to pursue his favorite pastime—angling—while fulfilling his obligations as Master of the Queen’s Musick by composing the biannual court odes. However, recent research by Peter Holman has revealed that Eccles had been living in Kingston since at least 1700, while also maintaining a central London residence. Moreover, Eccles was writing instrumental theater music long after 1707 as well as other works besides the odes for the court, and he was active as a performer (presumably as a violinist) as late as 1725–26. Numerous newspaper reports show that he was active and present at the performances of his odes right up to New Year’s Day 1735 (he died on 12 January). There is also evidence to suggest that the odes were rehearsed in semi-public performances before the main event.
While none of Eccles’s theater music composed after 1707 survives, what does survive from the earlier period is testament to his command of what the public wanted: good tunes. As I continually tell my students, these were the pop songs of their time, and their composers and performers were akin to the celebrities with whom we are familiar today via our televisions, Spotify subscriptions, and TikTok scrolling. Eccles was certainly not a one-hit wonder, and some of his songs—like “A soldier and a sailor”—went viral. One can only hope that new editions of Eccles’s music will encourage rediscovery and popularity among new generations of music lovers.
Estelle Murphy is a musicologist whose primary areas of specialization are Baroque music in Britain and Ireland and contemporary popular music. Since 2014 she has been Assistant Professor of Music at Maynooth University, Ireland. She was editor and chief copy editor for the past five years for Journal for the Society of Musicology in Ireland and is an editor for the Irish Musical Studies series (Boydell & Brewer). Estelle’s most recent publications include her critical edition of John Eccles’s theater music, which was published in 2021 by A-R Editions. Her chapter on ceremonial song in eighteenth-century Dublin was published in The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song online in November 2021 and in hard copy in 2023. Estelle’s discovery of the incorrect attribution of Francesco Geminiani’s concerto to Matthew Dubourg was published in two short articles in 2023, with Eighteenth-Century Music and in The Handel Institute Newsletter. She spent 2022 on sabbatical, researching and writing for several projects, including a monograph on the history of court ode from the Restoration for Boydell & Brewer press. For this research, she was the recipient of a Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant in 2019 and in July 2022 was hosted as a Bodleian Fellow at the Weston Music Library, Oxford, in conjunction with the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. As part of this project, she recently launched the interactive research resource Musical Court Odes, 1660–1779: A Database of Ode Sources, Poetry, and Analysis (odes.estellemurphy.com).
