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By Estelle Murphy
My interest in John Eccles (ca. 1668–1735) began with my MPhil research on his court odes. Eccles began his career in London’s theaters 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. He 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; in this position he continued to compose for the theater. 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.
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October 10, 2019Read More
By Bella Brover-Lubovsky
Catherine the Great (1729–96), Empress of All the Russias, was neither a devoted music lover nor a musical connoisseur. However, she assigned exceptional importance to dramatic performances that extolled her reign and policies, with a particular passion for spectacles based on her own literary production. Among these, Catherine especially favored the grandiose pageant Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega (The Early Reign of Oleg), based on one of her three historical plays elaborating on events from the history of ancient Rus. The music for Oleg, furnished collaboratively by composers from Catherine’s court, features choruses, instrumental entr’actes, and a melodrama based on a scene from Euripides’s Alceste. Staged during the Second Russo-Turkish War (1787–91) at both the Hermitage court theater and the public Kamenny Theater, the play praised Catherine as a worthy successor to one of the greatest early sovereigns of Rus. Its performance involved 800 persons in total: a variety of native and foreign actors and musicians, the court chapel singers, and extras from three military regiments.
