1710–1778 · United Kingdom · Classical
Thomas Arne (1710–1778) was an English composer from London who wrote music for the theatre, masques, operas and songs. His song "Rule, Britannia" is regarded as an unofficial anthem of Great Britain. The site catalogue holds five of his pieces for voice and piano, from Beginner+ to Intermediate+ level.
Thomas Augustine Arne was born in London on 12 March 1710, in the Covent Garden district, and was baptised a Catholic. His family came from an old Catholic background. Both his father and his grandfather worked as upholsterers; the grandfather ended up in want and died in Marshalsea, a debtors' prison.
The father earned enough to rent a spacious house on King Street (No. 31), in Covent Garden, and to send his son to Eton College, expecting him to become a lawyer. Later the father too lost nearly all his money and took extra work at London's Drury Lane Theatre as a box-counter and ticket-checker.
Music so gripped the young Thomas that he sneaked a spinet into his bedroom. At night, while the household slept, he practised, muffling the sound with a handkerchief.
To reach the upper gallery at the Italian Opera he dressed up as a liveried servant. At the opera he got to know the musician and composer Michael Festing, who became a strong influence on him. Festing taught Thomas the violin and took him along to musical events; in 1733 they travelled to Oxford, where Handel's oratorio Athalia was being performed.
After school Thomas spent three years in training with a lawyer. One day, however, his father found him leading a group of musicians, probably at one of Festing's musical evenings. Seeing how much his son loved music and how gifted he was, the father agreed that he should give up the law and earn his living from music. It was most likely Festing again who talked him round.
So Thomas became a musician. In 1733 the Lincoln's Inn theatre staged Rosamund, an opera with music by Arne and his first. The composer's sister took part in it. Together with their brother Richard she often performed his works. She married Theophilus Cibber, an actor at Drury Lane, and performed under the name Mrs Cibber.
Arne's marriage to the singer Cecilia Young took place on 15 March 1737. His operas and masques were gaining in popularity, and he gained Frederick, Prince of Wales, as his patron. At the prince's country house, Cliveden, the masque Alfred was first heard in 1740. Its closing number was the song "Rule, Britannia", which went on to become an unofficial anthem of Great Britain. Cecilia's sister Isabella was married to John Frederick Lampe. Arne was a Freemason and took an active part in the brotherhood, long centred in Covent Garden, where he lived for many years. Cecilia herself was a soprano and the daughter of the composer Charles Young.
In 1741 Arne lodged a complaint with the Court of Chancery: he said that two London booksellers who also distributed music, Henry Roberts and John Johnson had printed and sold some of his theatre songs. The matter ended in a settlement out of court. Arne was among the first composers to turn to the law over copyright.
In 1742 he went to Dublin with his wife and stayed for two years. There he mounted a number of stage works, presented the oratorio The Death of Abel (only its melody known as the Hymn of Eve has come down to us) and gave several successful concerts. Audiences of that era were demanding, and composers had to find ever more inventive ways to hold their attention: Arne announced in a local newspaper that he would slip comic interludes between the acts, giving listeners a rest from serious music. Returning to London in 1744, he became leader of the orchestra at Drury Lane, and the following year composer at Vauxhall Gardens.
In 1750, after a quarrel with David Garrick, Arne's sister moved from Drury Lane to the Covent Garden Theatre, and the composer followed her. In the 1760s he worked repeatedly with Isaac Bickerstaffe, a writer from Ireland.
In 1755, during another stay in Dublin, Arne separated from Cecilia. He grew close to his pupil, the soprano Charlotte Brent. She sang in several of his works, among them the part of Sally in Thomas and Sally and that of Mandane in Artaxerxes. Later they parted ways, and in 1766 Charlotte married the violinist Thomas Pinto.
The opera buffa Thomas and Sally (1760) was the first comic opera in English with music from beginning to end and no spoken dialogue. The opera seria Artaxerxes (1762) brought Italian-style drama to the English language, using recitative where spoken scenes would normally stand. Covent Garden hosted the first performances of both. Few English operas of the eighteenth century did better or had more influence than Artaxerxes, which Londoners staged often, right up to the 1830s.
Mozart almost certainly saw Artaxerxes during his visit to London in 1764 and said that it had influenced his own operas. Joseph Haydn, in London in 1791, was impressed by a performance and admitted he had not known such an opera existed in English.
For the Shakespeare Jubilee that Garrick organised at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, Arne supplied the song Soft Flowing Avon, set to Garrick's own words. During a 1773 staging of Judith he for the first time gave the choruses female voices. And in 1777 he and his wife made peace with each other.
Thomas and Cecilia had a son, Michael Arne, also a composer, who wrote for the theatre and followed his father's path in nearly everything. His works were staged at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Like his father, Michael was a capable actor. Thomas Arne died in London on 5 March 1778 and was laid to rest in the church of St Paul in Covent Garden. In 1988 a blue commemorative plaque was unveiled at 31 King Street. He is counted among the finest theatre composers Britain produced in the eighteenth century.
Arne is known above all as a theatre composer. He wrote music for stagings of plays by Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, Arthur Murphy and others, as well as for masques and several operas; between 1733 and 1776 he wrote for the stage, and a large part of his theatre scores has been lost. He also composed oratorios, trio sonatas, an organ concerto, sonatas for harpsichord and violin, and light catches and glees, genres typical of England in particular.
Arne worked at the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres, wrote for London's theatres and pleasure gardens, and also composed concertos, sinfonias and sonatas. His light music in the catch and glee genres was printed in various collections of his day. The Brockhaus and Efron encyclopaedic dictionary (1890) noted that his works are rich in melody but lack skilful counterpoint, and that he wrote mostly under the influence of Handel and the Italians.
Arne's first opera was Rosamund (1733). By the 1740s his operas and masques were winning ever more success, and in the 1760s Thomas and Sally and Artaxerxes appeared for Covent Garden. Artaxerxes is the sole known attempt at Italian-style opera seria in English. Of the oratorio The Death of Abel only the melody called the Hymn of Eve survives; Arne also set Garrick's own words in the song Soft Flowing Avon.
Arne's best-known piece is the song "Rule, Britannia", written for the finale of the masque Alfred (1740). Another of his songs, "A-Hunting We Will Go", was written for The Beggar's Opera when it was staged in 1777; today people know it as a folk song and a children's rhyme. Among his operas the best known are Thomas and Sally (1760) and Artaxerxes (1762); he also wrote the oratorios Abel (1744) and Judith (1761).
The site catalogue currently holds five pieces by Arne, all for voice and piano. The best place to begin is "The Weeders" (Beginner+ level). Next come "Celia’s Complaint", "Love Relaps’d" and "Hush to Peace", all at Intermediate level. The most demanding of the five is "A Favorite Glee (To Soften Care)" (Intermediate+ level). All five pieces are meant for a pair of performers, a singer and a pianist, so they are best learned together with a vocalist.