Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 1695-1705 Performance in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in Theatre, Music, Dance Series

From 1695 to 1705, rival London theater companies based at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields each mounted more than a hundred new productions while reviving stock plays by authors such as Shakespeare and Dryden. All included music. Kathryn Lowerre charts the interactions of the two companies from a musical perspective, emphasizing each company's new productions and their respective musical assets, including performers, composers, and musical materials. Lowerre also provides rich analysis of the relationship of music to genres including comedy, dramatick opera, and musical tragedy, and explores the migration of music from theater to theater, performer to performer, and from stage to street and back again. As Lowerre persuasively demonstrates, during this period, all theater was musical theater.

Contents: Prologue: rival crews: music and musicians in the London theaters; Part I The Place and Function of Music in Dramatic Productions: Musical approaches in comedy; Musical tragedies and dramatick operas. Part II Music and Musicians in Theatrical Competition: Initiation, 1695-1697; Competition, 1698-1700; Power shift, 1700-1703; Realignment, 1703-1705; Epilogue; Appendices: Selected bibliography; Indexes.

Kathryn Lowerre is a musicologist and an editor of John Eccles’ collected works (A-R Editions). She has taught at Michigan State University, Colby College, and the University of Michigan, USA