The inevitable pairing of the names of Britten and Purcell, a pairing promoted by Britten himself, was one in which he was linked to Britain’s ‘only’ composer. In response, Britten willingly took on the mantle of hope for English composition. At the same time, there is no doubt that the Britten felt an affinity with the earlier composer, and drew considerable strength and inspiration from his works. However, although Britten’s response is often presented as a personal one, this article suggests that his engagement with Purcell’s music was part of an earlier and broader picture of the use and reuse of earlier English music in the first decades of the twentieth century. His engagement with Purcell’s music, which included realisations of his songs and the use of forms and techniques associated with the composer, was at its most intense in 1945, and was focused on the period round 21 and 22 November, the dates of the Wigmore Hall concerts which saw the premieres of Britten’s Quartet No. 2 and The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. The reception of Britten’s ‘Purcell’ works was sometimes mixed, but this article concludes that for Britten, it was a matter of supreme enjoyment.

One of the works of the 1764 season at Covent Garden was a new burletta called Midas. Midas was, though, not ‘new’; it was only new to London: an early version of the work had its first staging privately in 1760 in Lurgan near Belfast, and the first professional version was at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre in 1762. The professional version was prepared in response to the appearance in Dublin of an Italian burletta company, a company that had previously performed in London and would do so again after its Dublin engagement. This interplay of repertory between the two cities - of which Midas was the most obvious product - resulted both in a new genre and a tangling with Italian opera troupes. Midas was the product of a group of Irishmen, of whom Kane O’Hara, the librettist, was the most important and the most enigmatic; this chapter explores his role in the cross-currents of drama between the two cities. In so doing, Burden’s chapter re-contextualises the history of the burletta and offers a powerful demonstration that theatre historians cannot and should not write about London’s theatre in isolation: regional influences were important tributaries to the Georgian capital’s culture.

In 1789, Charles Burney described the operas of Henry Purcell – Dioclesian, King Arthur and The Fairy-Queen – as ‘differing from real operas, where there is no speaking’. Burney’s remark reflected his expressed preference for Italian music and (sub-consciously) his own failure as a composer to do anything other than produce a few insignificant ditties while apprenticed to the theatre composer Thomas Arne. But it is also a remark that has contributed to a skewed historical picture of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera in England that persists to this day – skewed, because for the majority of English theatre-goers, ‘real opera’ had spoken dialogue, and was a genre they preferred to the ‘foreign’ all-sung version. Yet despite this self-evident fact, it is Burney’s view that has come to dominate both English and non-English writings about opera in England. This situation has been compounded by the country’s inability to nurture to an internationally recognized level the musical talent that it clearly possessed, making it easy for those viewing England both from without and within the Austro-German tradition to dismiss the country as ‘the land without music’, and English opera as ‘a mass of insincerity’ lacking ‘the pure ideal which had been the guiding spirit of Peri and Monteverdi’, or (at best) as ‘light opera’ relying on ‘dramatic principles’.

The central truth of English opera in the eighteenth century – as opposed to opera in England during the same period – is that the genre is not recognizable to those contemporary scholars and aficionados who believe that only all-sung dramatic works can be thus described. “Operas” in London could be long or short, high or low, have as few or as many characters as the playwright or librettist chose, could contain (or not, as fashion dictated) dancing, transformations, and pageants. However, unless an audience was told otherwise – by a particular work being described as “an English opera after the Italian manner,” for example – they would expect spoken dialogue between numbers, not sung recitative, an expectation which would continue well into the nineteenth century. This situation is distressing to those scholars who believe that all operas should aspire to the condition of Figaro or Tristan. It is a delight, however, to others, in particular to those who revel in the flexible nature of the genres that were present on the eighteenth-century London stage, and who do not object to dirtying their hands with this mass of related, often ephemeral, forms which such a scene produced. The dirtying of hands is of course the result of handling the genres; by definition, they are messy round the edges, with their origins not above suspicion, and their substance most frequently established as the result of the commercial concerns of the management.

To say that the greater part of the English audience was suspicious of continental opera is an understatement. They found an entirely sung 'play' difficult to accept, disliked recitative, thought the plots ludicrous and treated opera with suspicion because it was 'foreign'. To such an audience, a genre with spoken dialogue called 'English Opera' (as opposed to opera in English) was decidedly preferable. Nevertheless, the arrival of Italian opera early in the eighteenth century was welcomed by that part of the public keen for something exotic and prepared to be charmed by the music, captivated by the stagings and scandalised by the singers. That these types of opera were used for different types of critical discourse emphasises the fact that Italian opera remained a separate and distinct force and indeed came to delineate a binary opposition in eighteenth-century culture.

This binary opposition manifested itself most obviously in the division of the repertoire between the London theatres. On the one hand, Drury Lane and Covent Garden put on mainly spoken plays; the all-sung operas staged there were usually afterpieces in English, though operas with spoken dialogue also appeared among the mainpieces in various guises, including ballad opera and burletta. There were three other venues for opera in English. The oldest of these was the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Opened in 1720, it was an occasional venue for opera performances, including those in the summer under Samuel Foote from 1747 and George Colman the Elder's seasons from 1777. The English Opera House, later the Lyceum, which opened in 1772 and was first able to function as a proper theatre in 1809, was restricted to performing opera; not until the Licensing Act of 1843 was it allowed to present spoken drama. There was, lastly, the Olympic Theatre, which, for a short period in the 1830s under Eliza Vestris, was licensed to produce 'entertainments of music, dancing, burlettas, spectacle, pantomime, and horsemanship': the meaning of the term 'burletta' came to encompass almost any musical entertainment other than all-sung opera.