Twenty years ago I
bought, for a handful of dollars, a bound book of music from an antique shop in
Nelson, New Zealand. I catalogued the 123 separate songs and dances that it
contained on my computer and shoved the volume on to a shelf. Why? Because it
was too old. My era was the Victorian age, and this volume was from a time notably
earlier than that. The theatrical pieces were all from the 1780s. Some of the
others seemed to sneak into the 19th century, but just. The most modern few seemed
to be from the 1820s.
Fast forward two
hundred years or so. I don’t buy music any more. I’m past the acquisitive stage
of my life. Into the distributive. The days when I lumped 20 kilos of Hungarian
sheet music on my back to Budapest station in a cab strike and was literally
thrown on board the train by a hunky porter … all
gone.
But when my main
collection made its way, some years back, to join the imposing Harvard Theatre
Collection, this old book stayed on its dusty shelf. And yesterday I stumbled
on my catalogue. So I thought I’d investigate it and see if maybe there was
something interesting therein. And there was. Among the show tunes of the day –
most of which turn up in more or less library collections, even if in later American
editions – the favourite ballads and the oratorio songs, some frightening
‘arrangements’ of Mozart, the Handel and the Purcell, and the quadrilles, waltzes
and country dances, I came upon several pieces by Dr Henry Harrington
(1726-1813) of Bath, Edward Harwood’s musicalised ‘The Dying Christian to his
Soul’ and … no 91. ‘The Fishing Duett sung in the opera of Don Juan composed by Mozart’.
So I looked and I
found.
Don Juan or the Libertine Destroyed, produced at the Royalty Theatre 1787 … the
WHAT theatre?
Enough of the
foreplay. Here’s the real story. The Royalty Theatre only lived about a year.
It was in Well-street, Goodman’s Fields, near Aldgate. Outside London’s walls.
But the licensees of London’s patent theatres squealed like stuck boars at the
thought of competition, even in the East End, so… Anyway, while it lived, the
Royalty and its begetter, Mr Palmer, did pretty well. Under difficulties. And
the principal difficulty was … no spoken dialogue was allowed. Dancing,
singing, pantomime, recitation, but no dramatic dialogue.
So Mr Palmer hired
London’s star pantomimist, the great Carlo Antonio Delpini, plus one or two
well-known actor-singers, some youngsters (including a singing boy named
Braham), a heap of dancers, a young muso named William Reeve … and he went to
work within the permitted boundaries. He produced a sung-and-pantomimed piece
called Hobson’s Choice or, Thespis in
Distress which took the puss out of the patent theatres (and made them even
more pussed off with him than they already were), he gave a sung version of Thomas and Susan, a musical version of
Grey’s Elegy ‘with songs and choruses’, and then he mounted ‘a new grand
tragi-comical pantomimic entertainment under the direction of Mr Delpini’ Don Juan, or the Libertine Destroyed with
the star in the role of Scaramouch, soon to be more familiar as Leporello.
Palmer played the Don. There was no Elvira, no Zerlina, just Anna. And a sailor
‘with a song’ plus two fishermen’s wives (Miss Burnett, Mrs Fox) who gave the
Don his philandering opportunities and who shared ‘the Fishing Duett’.
Mrs Fox
THUS for men the
women fair
Lay the cunning
cunning snare
Whilst like fish
the men will rove
And with beauty
fall in love what is beauty but the bait
Oft repented when
too late
Miss Burnet
If too rash to
seize the prize
Now display’d
before my eyes
How you’ll rue
when all is past
Hymen's hook which
holds you fast
Ere you marry then
beware
Tis a blessing or
a snare
But the music used
wasn’t from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It
couldn’t have been. Because Don Giovanni was
only produced for the first time, at Prague, later in that year. The pantomime
dance music was said to be borrowed from Gluck’s 1761 ballet. And ‘fishing’? I
might have guessed. It’s a couple of girls, with rod and line, singing about
laying a bait for a male… And the tune is by house muso William Reeve
(1757-1815). The words are not credited.
The pantomime had a life – in varying
versions – for something like a century. But I mostly see ‘fisherwomen’ in the
cast, so I gather the Duett was still there.
Well, it mightn’t
have been a ‘Mi tradi’ or a ‘Non mi dir’. But the Fishing Duett did pretty well
for a show song. And now I know. Not Mozart. Reeve.
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