The Enraged Musician

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The Enraged Musician

William Hogarth came from humble beginnings; his family was far from rich and his life was simple. He was eminently gifted with talent of portraying humour, passion, and feeling, he introduced genuine comedy into painting and a lot of his works tend to have a moral tendency [Hogarth , 1833, p. preface, 119]. With that in mind we can look at The Enraged Musician as it was probably intended, a portrait of the end of an era in an 18th century London that had been invaded by hordes of foreign artists and styles, suffocating the British culture, and to fully understand this engraving we must go back in time.  

In The bad taste of town, a previous work from 1724, Hogarth direct its critic to the fashion related to music and foreign culture and architecture adored by the royalty and the aristocratic when England, with its uprising middle class, became Europe’s centre of culture giving birth to the first concert halls and opera houses in history. The absence of Englishness in this picture is alarming, a German King who doesn’t speak English, a German composer specialized in Italian opera, a Swiss impresario, a play based in German stories and Italian singers. These new public theatres financed by aristocratic patrons used to have a variety of foreign talents, like the Italian soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, who would receive small fortunes to perform in such places, in the centre of the picture you see that a woman wheels a barrow marked as “waste paper” with the works of Shakespeare, Congreve, Dryden and Otway, while the Londoners were making huge queues to watch the fashionable Doctor Faustus in one side of the street and Operas and midnight masquerades organized by the Swiss impresario Heidegger, who leans out of the building on the other side of the street [Eck, Macallister and Vall, 1995]. A guard on the front door suggests that royalty is present as well, George was an assiduous attender at the opera. During the 1714-15 season at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, he attended twenty-two performances out of a possible forty-four, in 1715-16 he attended seventeen times out of a possible twenty-nine; and in 1716-17 fourteen times out of a possible twenty-five. In 1725-26 season, George went to the opera twenty-eight times, and in 1726-27 season, twenty-nine times, including Handel’s opera Admeto on nineteen occasions. [Black, 2005, p.32]

Opera was popular, Italian Opera dominated the first half of the century and It was in this context that, as a child, Mozart toured England with his father and in1712 Handel came to stay as an expert in Italian Opera establishing the popularity of the genre. The King's Theatre at the Haymarket, established in 1705, sounded like a cathedral; it had too much reverb for plays and quickly became an opera house around 1709 [Finberg, 2015. p.1216], and between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 of Handel's operas premièred there. In 1729 Handel became joint manager of the theatre with John James Heidegger receiving a green light to carry on operas without disturbance for five years. [Maccleave, 2013. p. 70]. Handel was also Kapellmeister to German prince George, the Elector of Hanover, who in 1714 would become King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.  With his opera Rinaldo, composed in only two weeks with many borrowings from his older Italian works, Handel enjoyed great success [Burrows, 2010. p. 1388, 1392]. He was utterly dedicated to Italian Opera and kept on writing it even though increasingly nobody wanted to go, and so everybody lost huge sums of money, everyone was getting completely fed up with Italian opera, and so Handel, cashing in, writes 'Messiah' in 1741.

But there was more going on around England at the same time, particularly at places like the Vauxhall pleasure garden. The story, according to Mary Lewis, is that Hogarth had a meeting with Tyers in 1730 and the result was the conceiving of the ridotto al fresco - an outdoor entertainment and the start of the Garden’s success. [Uglow, 2011. p.547].  With a new octagonal bandstand or 'Orchestra' built in the middle of the Grove, it was one of Jonathan Tyers's most revolutionary buildings and possibly the first building in London designed specifically for the performance of music, unveiled in 1735, it not only provided a raised stage for the musicians, or 'Band', so they could be seen and heard by everybody in the Grove, but it also effectively separated the Band from easy contact with their audience so that requests for popular pieces of music, which had been the previous method of programming, became a thing of the past. This allowed for the introduction of newly-written works by contemporary composers, within a complementary pre-organized programme.[Cook and Borg, 2011]. Tyers, always the first to put his own stamp on the public face of Vauxhall, stipulated that his music should be specifically English music, composed and performed by English (or at least English-based) musicians; In promoting English music, Tyers differentiated Vauxhall from the London theatres and concert rooms, where European, especially Italian, music and performers held sway. There were exceptions, Handel draw a crowd of 12,000 for a rehearsal of his Fireworks music at Vauxhall pleasure garden on April 27th of 1749, this was the beginning of a shift from court to a public performance culture [Conlin, 2013. P.12]. Vauxhall was one of the few places where good contemporary English music could be heard on a regular basis, something to do with the fact that Tyers and Hogarth were friends and Hogarth belonged to “The Academy of Ancient Music”, that was dedicated to everything British. Throughout Hogarth's lifetime, this controversy over Italian opera was at the forefront of cultural life in London, it was incredibly expensive to put on and established by aristocratic patrons at the King's Theatre in Haymarket.  Here it was entitled The Royal Academy of Music.  There were three resident composers, an orchestra, a chorus, a secretary and a host of imported stars, especially of course castrati.  Basically, castrati and the female Italian singers were overpaid. [Simon, 2007]