Musical Families

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 11

Musical Families

NE August day, over two hundred years ago, a masque was presented in a temporary theatre in the garden of the country home of Frederick, Prince of Wales, at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire. The~music accompanying the performance was written by the most eminent’ English composer of that century, Thomas Arne, and the masque ended with a good rousing song that was soon to become famous-Rule, Britannia. Arne wrote many operas and

stage pieces that are forgotten now, and his fame _ rests mainly on the beautiful settings he composed for Shakespeare’s songs when As You Like It in 1740, and The Tempest six years later, were revived at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. Eighteen

years afterwards, Judith, the second of his two oratorios, introduced women singers in the choruses for the first time, in England at any rate, where until then oratorios were sung entirely by. male voices. The Arne household was full of music -the composer married a singer, Cecilia Young, whom he met at Drury Lane and their son Michael is dager eid today for his delightful song The Lass with a Delicate Air-often ascribed to his father. For Thomas Arne’s sister Susanna Maria (later the famous actress Mrs. Cibber) Handel wrote some of his loveliest arias, and Arne himself achieved one of his greatest successes with the opera Rosamunde, written specially. for her. Music in the Life of the Arnes, from 3YA at 8.30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 25, is the first of four programmes in the series, Happy Families, arranged and presented by Myra Thomson (soprano), assisted by Reta Wootton (contralto), John Scott (tenor), Grahaeme Johnson (bass), Natalie Taylor (pianist) and Trevor Hutton (flautist), In the following three weeks, listeners will be given glimpses of music-making in the home life of other musicians-the Bachs, the Mozarts, and the Schumanns,