Fool! Fool that I am to fix all my happiness on such a trifler! ’Sdeath! To make herself the pipe and balladmonger of a circle! To soothe her light heart with catches and glees! What can you say to this, sir?
R.B. Sheridan, The Rivals (1775), II.1
When Faulkland, the hero of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), exclaimed dismissively on the singing of Julia, the object of his affections, all audience members would have recognised it as a comment (if comically magnified) on Sheridan’s own relationship with the celebrated singer Elizabeth Linley (1754–1792), whom he had recently married. Like his mouthpiece, Sheridan appears to have had a low opinion of professional musicians, for he had put a stop to Linley’s career when they wed, informing her aggrieved father, musician Thomas Linley, that ‘your daughter’s marriage was an event which must always have been looked to by [concert promoters] as quite as natural a period to your right over her as her death’.Footnote 1 Sheridan’s stance met with the approbation of Samuel Johnson, among others, while later biographers justified it by asserting his wife’s own ‘repugnance to appear in such public exhibitions, exposing her to the gaze of the fopling and fashionable licentious’.Footnote 2 Such representations of Linley were both paradoxical and entirely conventional: this extraordinary singer was made still more so, they suggested, by her dislike for performance. So, for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she acquired greatest virtue and musical reputation by eschewing the public gaze. The real story is, as always, far more complex, and more interesting.
I first made Elizabeth Linley’s acquaintance fourteen years ago, when asked to write her and her family’s entries for the New Dictionary of National Biography. At that time I discovered not only her extraordinary contemporaneous popularity, but also an ongoing fascination which led to the creation of a succession of hagiographic accounts of her life. Several of these accounts arose, it is fair to say, from the ready availability of material because of Linley’s marriage to Sheridan, one of the century’s famous literary sons. Sheridan’s letters and the several posthumous biographies, along with the letters of his sister and memoir of his mother, provided sufficient material on their dramatic relationship – one full enough of incident and intrigue for Sheridan himself to have written a famous play about it – for modern populist writers to see opportunity to cash in. But in the process, and because these biographers have relied almost exclusively on existing published narratives, the story of Elizabeth Linley has become that of the wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Her musical talents, which generated her fame in the first instance, have been treated as a piquant introduction to the story of their relationship, but although biographers have acknowledged the importance of her musical career, they have shown interest neither in investigating it nor in setting it within the context of contemporary musical life.
My aim in this article is, obviously, to address this neglect, but I am doing so not in order to pen another admiring biography of Elizabeth Linley, but to investigate the way in which repertoire, reputation and voice were linked for a singer who, more than most, had cause to be careful of her public image.Footnote 3 This is not an investigation of the construction of dramatic persona in the conventional sense, because Elizabeth Linley was not allowed, by father or husband, to develop a career on the stage, though London theatre managers courted her father on that score. But her private life was so intimately bound up first with her professional singing career and then with the various romantic entanglements that arose from her fame as a celebrated singer and a beauty, that private and public in many ways were one for her; the fact that her own, often highly personal verse frequently found its way into the newspapers attests to her willingness to play out aspects of her domestic life in public.Footnote 4 Her story might, indeed, be seen as marking the increased commercialisation in the later eighteenth century of musical life outside London, and the concomitant scrutiny of that arena within public discourse. In the process, as this article will reveal, that broader musical world came to be seen (as with the theatre) as a proving ground for a burgeoning national musical identity, through the articulation of an ideal of the English voice.
The Maid of Bath
A glance at Linley’s life and career might illustrate the degree to which the culture of celebrity, which we generally associate with twentieth- and twenty-first-century idols of cinematic and popular culture, also surrounded and (tellingly) conditioned the lives of eighteenth-century singers.Footnote 5 When London dramatist Samuel Foote first capitalised on Elizabeth Linley’s fame by writing the play The Maid of Bath in 1771, the only surprises were that he chose as his subject a figure so young – only sixteen – and so provincial. His story of her unfortunate engagement to a wealthy, elderly gentleman and equally unfortunate pursuit by an unscrupulous military man was broadly accurate; its unflattering (and probably unfair) portrayal of her real-life fiancée, Walter Long, as miserly and lecherous may have contributed to Long’s decision to drop his suit. Foote’s enthusiasm for representing a ‘true’ story is manifest in the reference, near the end, to himself and his play, when one of the characters asserts that as she is ‘acquainted with Maister Fout the play-actor – I will get him to bring the filthy loon [the elderly suitor, Flint] on stage’.Footnote 6 The imbrication of life and art was evident in some of the characterisations, too: his depiction of Linley herself as both spirited and dutiful seems to have been accurate, although it was also stereotypical for theatrical heroines. Needing a virile young lover to counterbalance the miser, Foote was kinder in his representation of her military suitor than he should have been, perhaps also because he and that military man, Thomas Matthews, were on friendly terms in real life.Footnote 7
The play’s happy outcome was not to eventuate in real life: the following year, in order to escape ‘Major’ Matthews’s harassment, and the punishing workload imposed by her father, Linley absconded to France, escorted by the young R.B. Sheridan, who then persuaded her that, given appearances, she should marry him. Here, too, a drama of romance-novel stereotypes seems to have coloured their relationship. As Linley later explained to Sheridan, ‘It was not your person that gained my affection.’ (He was not deemed a handsome man by Fanny Burney.Footnote 8) ‘No, S–n’, she continued, ‘it was that delicacy, that tender compassion, that interest which you seemed to take in my welfare, that were the motives which induced me to love you.’Footnote 9
But if Linley was won over by Sheridan’s apparent concern for her well-being, and if Sheridan was happy to play the heroic lover – fighting two duels with Matthews on their return from France – he was also happy to exploit her fame, writing his first play, The Rivals, in 1774–5, as an expansion on the subject of Foote’s Maid of Bath. He also evidently enjoyed playing the gentleman, exerting control over her singing career once they were married in 1773 by initially stopping her public performances altogether, as noted above, and even forbidding her from singing at their first family Christmas gathering.Footnote 10 He then capitalised on demand for her by marketing a series of exclusive private subscription concerts.Footnote 11 On one level, then, he treated her as a commodity.
In this respect, Sheridan differed little from her father, who had nurtured and then exploited Linley’s talents to the full from a very young age.Footnote 12 Indeed, in 1767 (when she was twelve) one concert-goer remarked that she sang in Thomas Linley’s weekly concerts and that he ‘makes her sing too much and too hard songs’; Linley herself apparently sought a lighter workload from her father, perhaps even making it a condition of her return from France.Footnote 13 When Thomas Linley recognised that Elizabeth’s talent and beauty were attracting suitors and a reputation, in her teenage years, he sought to marry her off to someone who would indemnify him against the loss of income that would result from her change of hands from his ownership to that of another man – hence the rich, elderly fiancée, Walter Long, satirised by Foote.
‘Daughter of a musician’
While both father and husband were ready to exploit the young Linley’s talents (as, legally, they had a perfect right to do), both also recognised that her image required careful management. This consideration manifested itself in two forms: first, in the choice of venues in which she performed, and second in the choice of repertoire. The former, to which we turn first, demonstrates the growing importance of a provincial circuit of high-society festivals in establishing the credentials of native performers, which allowed them to develop careers quite separate from the demands (and perils) of the London stage and concert scene. Once Linley married Sheridan, however, we see the countervailing sense that public performance was not appropriate for the wives or daughters of gentlemen.
Thomas Linley had allowed his daughter, aged twelve, to appear on the London stage in 1767, in the Shakespeare-derived masque The Fairy Favour, written by his friend Thomas Hull, and staged at Covent Garden, but he was subsequently chary of his children appearing in London, writing to George Colman in 1770 that he did not ‘relish the giving the prime of my Daughters Performance to support the schemes of others’.Footnote 14 Of course, although Thomas Linley did not, in the end, encourage any of his children in acting careers, he had other means of showcasing their talents in public, through his concerts in Bath and then, as the fame of Linley and her sister Mary spread, through oratorio performances in the Three Choirs’ Festivals of Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, in Salisbury, Oxford, Cambridge, Chester, and in London. These tours were taxing, both in the performances for which they were contracted and in the social events that surrounded them: for instance, on Linley’s appearance at the Salisbury Festival in 1770 (when only just sixteen), Elizabeth Harris noted that, prior to the performance of Hercules, they had a musical party at home that lasted for five hours.Footnote 15
For Sheridan, an aspiring politician, the concern about public performance, and particularly the stage, was much more a social and a moral one. He wrote to Thomas Linley in 1775, two years after he had married Linley, at a time when it seemed her father might consider putting his younger daughters on the stage, to express his concern:
The Daughter of a Musician, having Talents to benefit her Father in the same Profession, treads only in the Path in which she was born. Her apperance [sic] in Public is natural and not unexpected, it argues no Choice, no Passion for becoming a Spectacle, no low Vanity of being the unblushing Object of a Licentious gaping Croud – if she be in herself good, modest, and well bred – there is her Character – and the Part she may always appear in…
In acting, however, he said:
every thing is reversed: it is her evident Inclination and Passion to obtrude herself into a conspicuous Scene of all that’s indelicate, immodest, immoral … What is the modesty of any Women whose trade it is eternally to represent all the different modifications of Love before a mix’d Assembly of Rakes, Whores, Lords and Blackguards in Succession! – to play the Coquet, the Wanton, to retail loose innuendos in Comedy, or glow with warm Descriptions in Tragedy; and in both to be haul’d about, squeez’d and kiss’d by beastly pimping Actors!Footnote 16
His concern here was determined by gender: he was happy, he said, for his father (the celebrated actor-cum-orator, Thomas Sheridan) to appear on the stage, ‘but’, he continued, ‘God forbid his Daughters should be there!’Footnote 17
Sheridan’s initial determination that Elizabeth should not sing in public after their marriage demonstrated that he saw any form of public performance (particularly for money) as compromising the status he aspired to as a gentleman.Footnote 18 Indeed, immediately after their marriage, he used both the withholding and the granting of her participation in concerts as a means of advancing his social position: he spent some time (to his father-in-law’s anguish and annoyance) deciding whether or not she could sing in the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester in 1773, to which her father had committed her prior to their marriage. And when he eventually decided in favour, Daniel Lyons relates that Sheridan, ‘much to his honour, acquiesced in her benevolent intention of singing at the Meeting, and presenting the sum of one hundred guineas, which was to have been the remuneration of her transcendant [sic] talents, to the Charity’.Footnote 19 Lyons also relates a story that Sheridan consented to another request (this time, not a prior commitment) from the University of Oxford, but in a manner clearly designed to assert his status:
Her singing (i.e. Mrs. Sheridan’s) at Oxford, at the installation of Lord North, as Chancellor, in 1773, was, as Dr. Hall told me, put on the footing of obliging his Lordship and the University; and when, on that occasion, several degrees were conferred, in the academic form of ‘honoris causá’ Lord North slightly observed that Sheridan should have a degree ‘uxoris causá’, but he had not.Footnote 20
Sheridan’s subsequent promotion of subscription concerts featuring his wife slotted – not entirely comfortably – between public and domestic worlds, but their exclusivity undoubtedly helped bolster his social status, if not his gentlemanly reputation. He was at pains to advertise the twice-weekly concerts at the family home in Orchard Street as being ‘for the nobility’.Footnote 21 Contemporaries commented both on the difficulty of gaining access and on the social standing of those attending, Fanny Burney noting that
highest, at this season, in the highest circles of society, from the triple bewitchment of talents, beauty, and fashion, stood the fair Linley Sheridan; who now gave concerts at her own house, to which entrance was sought not only by all the votaries of taste, and admirers of musical excellence, but by the leaders of ton, and their numerous followers, or slaves.Footnote 22
As a married woman, Elizabeth evidently sometimes sang in other private settings, for exclusive company, on an unpaid basis.Footnote 23
Elizabeth Linley’s own attitude to public performance seems to have varied, no doubt changing over time, as her voice matured and her circumstances altered. It is likely that the teenage Linley felt her father made her sing too much,Footnote 24 and this had an obvious impact on her health: she joked of fainting during a performance of Samson in Cambridge in June 1772, causing ‘no small bustle among the Cantabs’.Footnote 25 She also disliked the publicity and harassment that ensued from her fame.Footnote 26 A reduction in her engagements was reputed to have been one of the points of negotiation with her father for her return from France. Her letters to Sheridan after her return indicate that by then she resisted public performance, except where it was of direct benefit to her family. Thus she wrote in c.1772/3:
My father and I had a long conversation this morning. He wanted me to go to a private concert at Dr Davenport’s, but I availed myself of his promise and excused myself, as I am resolved not to go so much to those kind of meetings. He says he shall have a concert for my brother’s benefit in a fortnight, and he shall expect my performance without any objections. You know I could not refuse him; but I am resolved never to go into public but on these occasions.Footnote 27
Nonetheless, once she and Sheridan were married, when his play The Rivals initially failed in 1775, she wrote to him: ‘I am delighted. I always knew that it was impossible you could make anything by writing plays; so now there is nothing for it but my beginning to sing publickly again, and we shall have as much money as we like.’Footnote 28
It is possible, then, that Elizabeth Linley’s protestations against public performance in her earlier letters were not a mark of her dislike, but a reflection of his – or, perhaps more likely, that she simply wanted to choose for herself when she sang. Charles Burney’s brief characterisation of her singing in Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1812) includes the observation that when she heard the noted Italian sopranos Lucrezia Aguiari and Franziska Danzi, who sang in London between 1775 and 1777, ‘she astonished all hearers by performing their bravura arias, extending the natural compass of her voice a fourth above the highest note of the harpsichord’.Footnote 29 Given Burney’s and others’ high praise of both the foreign singers – he described Aguiari as a ‘truly wonderful performer’, with an extraordinary three-and-a-half octave range (‘beyond any one who had then [been] heard’) – this was praise indeed.Footnote 30 Linley’s willingness, into the later 1770s, to emulate the Italian opera stars of her day for an audience, suggests that she retained an enthusiasm for performance and a competitive pride in her abilities that reached beyond the limitations of domestic enjoyment and tutelage of her niece and nephews.Footnote 31
‘The best English taste’
The second aspect to Linley’s image as a performer was the choice of repertoire. It is evident that, from the first, Thomas Linley was committed to what we would call musical classics. He himself first made his name singing Polyphemus in Acis and Galatea and often performed in Handel’s oratorios.Footnote 32 One of the Linley’s boarders, the artist Ozias Humphry, who lived with them from 1762 to 1764, also recalled the musical influence of Mrs Linley on her children, and her own vocal talent, which, according to Humphry, was ‘almost equal’ to that of her husband. When requested, Mrs Linley
would sing to [Humphry] the whole of the airs of Thomas and Sally, the Chaplet, the Beggar’s Opera, of Love in a Village &c. &c., for she was never weary. To these she occasionally added the most admired songs of Handel, Giordini [sic], Jackson, Doctor Arne and others. Mrs Linley’s feeling was of the first degree, and she acquired by attention so much stile expression and manner wth a voce di camera that her singing was in the best English taste: wch afterwards shone, with perhaps superiour Lustre in the daughters Elizabeth, Maria, and Mary, at the Oratorios in London, and excited universal wonder.Footnote 33
All the former dramatic pieces were considered classic works of English musical theatre by this point, while the composers named ranked among the most popular of the day. Thomas Linley and his wife may well have treated the simpler songs in the dramatic works as suitable material for training their children, and no doubt other young students; Linley himself performed this kind of repertoire and ballad songs in concerts from time to time.Footnote 34 The inclusion of his children in Thomas Linley’s Bath concerts from at least the mid-1760s onwards suggests that they were well versed in this music, which became increasingly popular as the century wore on.Footnote 35 Indeed, their performance of simple ballads and the like would have been a strategic move, designed to foster audience sympathy for ‘poor Linley’, as he was known.Footnote 36 The suggestion of deliberate manipulation of Elizabeth Linley’s public image, even in her early performing years, is supported by the portraiture of family friend, Thomas Gainsborough, who represented Linley and her brother, Tom, as street urchins at around this time. Few concert programmes or even advertisements survive from this period (concert promoters did not advertise regularly in the newspapers), but those that do are revealing: when the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Linley assisted Thomas Sheridan in his ‘Attic Entertainments’ in Bath in 1770–1, the airs that interleaved his readings were English, Irish and Scottish ballads, with each programme ending with more demanding dramatic pieces by Purcell, ‘Mad Bess’ and ‘From rosy bowers’.Footnote 37 If not all the songs were simple, then certainly all were of impeccable national pedigree.
But, as the observation that Thomas Linley made his young daughter sing ‘too much and too hard songs’ suggests, Elizabeth Linley was also working on more challenging repertoire, at the centre of which was Handel. Ozias Humphry notes that she was required to learn and perform ‘duets and Trios from Handel and other Masters’ when young.Footnote 38 This choice in part reflected current fashion: in this period in particular, surviving notices and reports demonstrate that Handel’s music dominated Bath’s concert repertoire.Footnote 39 Thomas Linley’s tutor, Thomas Chilcott, a leading keyboardist in Bath until the 1750s, is credited with introducing Handel’s music to Bath,Footnote 40 and Thomas Linley himself named his first child (a son who did not survive) George Frederick – presumably after Handel.Footnote 41 Handel’s oratorios were popular in Bath from 1752, when it was noted of Alexander’s Feast ‘nothing of its kind’ had been sung there before;Footnote 42 thereafter, Messiah, Acis and Galatea, Judas Maccabeus, Israel in Egypt and Solomon were performed with some regularity. Acis and Galatea may indeed have been performed so frequently because Thomas Linley achieved particular success in it, in the role of Polyphemus; it was also chosen for Elizabeth Linley’s first (or at least, first known) benefit concert, in May 1768.Footnote 43 The role of Galatea evidently continued to be an important one for Linley, as other concert and oratorio notices show; in January 1773, after Linley’s return from France, one visitor to Bath, a Mrs Powys of Oxfordshire, remarked that she had heard ‘The celebrated Miss Linley … in “Acis and Galatea.”’Footnote 44
It is telling that Mrs Powys’s remark on Linley comes at the end of a list of attractions visited in and around Bath, including a country house, the Bristol Hot Wells and its glass houses: she was thus ‘The celebrated Miss Linley … now a capital singer at Bath’, another tourist attraction. Such celebrity, though unusual for a provincial singer, was perhaps to be expected at this time – and not only because of Foote’s Maid of Bath. The growth in oratorio performances in the latter part of the century, not only in Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford, but also in Salisbury, Oxford and Cambridge, amongst other places, created a circuit which popular performers could exploit – something that, as we have seen, the ambitious Thomas Linley certainly recognised. Indeed, his daughters Elizabeth and Mary were stars of this circuit, inspiring adulation wherever they went. Not surprisingly, while Thomas Linley was unwilling to let his daughters appear on stage in London (for financial reasons if for no otherFootnote 45), he was happy for them to sing in oratorio performances there in 1773, riding the wave of their provincial success (in a telling reversal of the traditional trajectory). At their London performances, even George III, according to Horace Walpole, ‘ogle[d] her [Linley] as much as he dares to do in so holy a place as an oratorio’.Footnote 46
‘Infinitely superiour’
So, although Linley and her sister sang recent operatic arias in general concerts (as a sample programme shows; see Fig. 1), it is clear that Handel’s oratorios dominated their repertoire. And it is surely no accident that contemporary commentators remarked upon Elizabeth Linley’s peculiar suitability for Handel’s music. Susan Burney, daughter of the historian, reported in 1779:
Pacchierotti … sd Mrs Sheridan seemed to him to have the advantage over all our female Singers – He said her Voice was more clear & more touching in its tone than Miss Harrops, & without affectation he believed she had the most feeling, & sung Handel’s Music best.Footnote 47
Concert at the Booth Hall, Gloucester, Friday Evening, 11 September 1772; cited in Daniel Lyons, Origin and Progress of the Meeting of the Three Choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, & Hereford (1864/5?), n.p.
What is particularly interesting in this is that the famous castrato Pacchierotti and other commentators seemed to adopt a uniform rhetoric, characterising Linley’s voice as unaffected, simple, sweet. Thus Daniel Lyons, in his chronicle of the Three Choirs Festival, said of Linley that she had ‘a sweet and powerful voice, with very superior musical talents’.Footnote 48 Fanny Burney, who was charmed by her in 1773, said that her voice was ‘soft, sweet, clear & affecting’, and added that
she sings with good Expression, & has great Fancy & even taste in her Cadences, though perhaps, a finished singer would give less way to the former, & prefer few & select Notes. She has an exceeding good shake, & the best & most critical Judges pronounce her to be infinitely superiour to all other English singers.Footnote 49
One of those who knew Linley best, the composer William Jackson of Exeter, a close friend of the family’s, recalled her singing in his ‘Sketch of my own Life’, in much the same terms:
Her Voice was remarkably sweet, and her Scale just and perfect – from the lowest to the highest Note the Tone was of the same Quality. She had great Flexibility of Throat, and whether the Passage was slow or rapid, the Intervals were always precisely in tune. As she never, willingly, sung any Songs but those of real Melody and Expression, the goodness of her Choice added to her Reputation. Her Genius and Sense gave a Consequence to her Performance which no Fool with the Voice of an Angel could ever attain: and to those extraordinary Qualifications was added a most beautiful Person, expressive of the Soul within.Footnote 50
A rare comment on Linley’s London subscription concerts, the performing Sheridan eventually assented to after their marriage, comes from Mrs Powys in 1776:
When in London this spring (1776) we had the very high entertainment, at a private concert, of hearing the celebrated Mrs. Sheridan sing many songs, accompanied by Giardini on the violin. I had never had that pleasure since she was Miss Linley; was then charmed, but more so now. I think indeed her voice, person, and manner are more than one generally sees combined, and then her being so totally unaffected render each ten times as pleasing as otherwise they would be.Footnote 51
The rhetoric around Linley’s voice, of sweetness, expression, and lack of affectation, was applied also to her behaviour: like William Jackson, Mrs Powys, in the quotation above, recognises the importance of the combination of ‘voice, person [i.e., physical presence], and manner’ in achieving Linley’s (or, now, Mrs Sheridan’s) effect. Such musings were not uncommon, particularly concerning women; indeed, Mrs Powys had concluded her remarks on hearing Linley in Bath that ‘nothing but the elegance of her figure can equal her voice’.Footnote 52 Charles Burney shrewdly proposed: ‘That her voice, without the assistance of her beautiful Person, or her Person, without the sweetness of her voice, wd have been equally ravishing is impossible to believe.’Footnote 53 Later, others, such as Pacchierotti, remarked on their delight at finding that she was unspoiled by her connection with fashionable society. Fanny Burney had sagely observed on first acquaintance that there was great personal ‘merit’ in a young woman so beautiful and talented who managed to preserve her modesty and good sense.Footnote 54 Encountering her again six years later, in 1779, Fanny was agreeably surprised that high society had still not corrupted her, finding herself
absolutely charmed at the sight of her. I think her quite as beautiful as ever, & even more captivating, for she has, now, a look of ease and happiness that animates her whole Face … the elegance of Mrs Sheridan’s beauty is unequalled by any I ever saw … I was pleased with her in all respects, – she is much more lively & agreeable than I had any idea of finding her; she was very gay, & very unaffected, & totally free from airs of any kind.Footnote 55
The Handelian sound?
These epithets – ‘sweet’, ‘unaffected’ – may have related to Linley’s standard repertoire in two ways. First, association with the biblical or pastoral subject matter would have encouraged the connection; thus also the label ‘angelic’ attached itself to her. David Garrick described her as a ‘saint’ (in response to her trials as an adolescent and perhaps also after her marriage), Joshua Reynolds painted her as a mute Saint Cecilia (there were many engraved copies), and in his 1812 article for Rees’s Cyclopaedia, Charles Burney called her a ‘Sancta Cæcilia rediviva’, explaining that ‘The tone of her voice and expressive manner of singing were as enchanting as her countenance and conversation’.Footnote 56 Betsy Sheridan compared the famous Madam Mara to her sister-in-law when hearing the former sing at the Handel commemoration in 1784:
Madame Mara was the only singer of real merit – her voice is uncommonly fine perhaps beyond Mrs Sheridan’s, but that something Angelic which was in the sound of hers is wanting as well as that beauty and expression which necessarily gave such additional charms to our sister’s singing.Footnote 57
And after her death, only Handelian oratorio would do to evoke her effect. The Female Mentor of 1793 associated her with the final aria of sacrificial Iphis in Jephtha, asking: ‘Who that ever heard the late Mrs Sheridan sing … “Brighter scenes I seek above / In the realms of peace and love” … did not feel a rapture blended with devotion, which is more than mortal?’Footnote 58
Linley’s connection with the ethereal (‘angelic’) melded with the supremely natural (‘unaffected’), particularly in Handelian repertoire, which in turn helped reinforce her virtuous reputation. This network of associations was established in 1770 (if not before), when she was reported to have inspired avian emulation while singing ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ in Salisbury Cathedral:
a little bullfinch that had found means … to secrete itself in the cathedral, was so struck by the inimitable sweetness, and harmonious simplicity of her manner of singing, that mistaking it for the voice of a feathered chorister of the woods, and far from being intimidated by the numerous assemblage of spectators, it perched immediately on the gallery over her head, and accompanied her with the musical warblings of its little throat through a great part of the song.Footnote 59
Perhaps prompted by this story, in the following year Foote gave Linley’s character the avian name of ‘Miss Linnet’ in The Maid of Bath. Linley (and her father and husband) encouraged this network of characterisations not only through her demeanour and behaviour, but also, it seems, in selection of her repertoire:Footnote 60 as the concert programme given in Figure 1 shows, ‘Sweet bird that shun’st the noise of folly’ from L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1740) was one of her concert arias. Her final public concert, given in March 1773 for her brother Tom’s benefit, the day before her wedding, included an affective cantata specially written for her by Tom, ‘In yonder grove’, which again emphasised her association with a (melancholic) natural environment and with a bird, this time the nightingale. The cantata also had biographical resonances: she effectively took the role of ‘Emma’, who first mourns her ‘Harrold’s engagement in battle and then rejoices at his return’. The parallel with Linley’s own, recent emotional turmoil over Sheridan’s duels with Thomas Matthews would have been obvious to all present.Footnote 61 Linley herself wrote the text. To similar ends, Sheridan’s The Rivals, whose characterisation of Linley as Julia is at times only thinly veiled, was on stage in 1775 at the same time Reynolds’s Saint Cecelia was on show in the Royal Academy exhibition; as one of Linley’s biographers has suggested with regard to contemporary interest in the singer, ‘each seemed to be a commentary on the other’.Footnote 62
The second way in which the labels ‘sweet’, ‘unaffected’ and so on might have been linked to Linley’s repertoire is through the broader development of a Handelian ‘sound’ in the composer’s latter years, and after. This suggestion might be supported by the association of the same or similar epithets with singers with whom Handel had formed close working relationships. Thus Daniel Lyons summarises Burney’s remarks on Gaetano Guadagni: ‘Handel was so much pleased with his sweet and full voice, that he engaged him to sing the fine airs in Samson and The Messiah, which he had composed for Mrs. Cibber’s sweet and affecting voice.’Footnote 63 Still more significant was Giulia Frasi, who came to England in 1742 and became Handel’s prima donna from 1749 until his death, creating several major roles; she maintained that status under his successors until 1768, also regularly singing in the provincial festivals. Burney, who taught Frasi himself, and so knew her voice well, said that she had ‘a clear and sweet voice, free from defects, and a smooth and chaste style of singing, which, though cold and unimpassioned, pleased natural ears, and escaped the censure of critics’.Footnote 64 Given this faint praise, Daniel Lyons’s explanation of her success is interesting:
though she never ranked as first woman at the Italian opera, yet, by learning English, she became of much importance at our oratorios, theatres, and public concerts, when singers of a higher class, without this qualification, could be of no use. She pronounced our language in singing with a more distinct articulation than native performers; and her style being plain and simple, with a well-toned voice and a good shake, she delighted the ignorant and never displeased. She became, in consequence, an established favourite with the public, and sung at the Meetings of the Three Choirs nine successive years.Footnote 65
Frasi, in particular, must have been hugely influential in establishing a Handelian ‘sound’ – and, indeed, contributing to the sound of English opera, as she also performed for Thomas Arne in some of his major stage works.Footnote 66 It seems highly likely that the young Elizabeth Linley, and her father, would have taken Frasi as something of a vocal role model for Handelian repertoire, even while maintaining an interest in other styles. It is notable that Charles Burney, in an undated posthumous assessment, emphasised Linley’s connection to Handelian repertoire:
she had so long studied the Oratorios of Handel & so frequently sung the best songs in them that she seemed to execute them with more propriety of Expression than any one had ever done before. They were the sounds wch she first lisped in her infancy. There was something so pure, chaste & judicious in her manner of Executing them, that joined to her articulate & correct pronunciation of the Words, seraphic Looks, & truely natural & Pathetic Expression, it was impossible for the most enthusiastic admirers of more modern music [of which Burney was one] & Italian refinemts in singing not to be pleased.Footnote 67
We cannot, of course, know precisely what a ‘sweet’ sound was by the standards of the mid-eighteenth century,Footnote 68 nor what kind of continuity in ‘sweetness’ there might have been, but use of the epithet itself is revealing, perhaps particularly when aligned with other repeated or similar terms: ‘affecting’, ‘clear’, ‘chaste’, ‘natural’, ‘plain and simple’. This was the kind of language that accompanied what William Weber has described as the classicisation of Corelli in eighteenth-century England (and, we might add, Lully in eighteenth-century France), but which we might further see as a kind of purification.
Such terminology was also remarkably similar to the language used by those seeking not just to describe, but also to promote a native musical style, such as the Exeter-based composer William Jackson – a family friend of the Linleys, who wrote works for Elizabeth to sing. In his Observations on the Present State of Music in London (1791), in which he criticised both bravura and (perhaps surprisingly) pathetic Italian arias as lacking ‘melody’, he praised only ‘cavatinas’ and those English opera composers who ‘very wisely adapt some of the Songs to Tunes which were composed when Melody really existed’.Footnote 69 If Jackson’s preference for a simpler, purer form of song sounds somewhat like Rousseau, it nevertheless had a particular national twist: in an earlier Preface to his famous Elegies (c.1760), Jackson defined that era ‘when Melody really existed’, singling out Purcell and Handel as marking the pinnacle of correct taste, since in decline. Handel, he suggested, ‘brought Air to its Perfection, and has been happily imitated by a few, which perhaps may a little while delay a total Degeneracy; for it is but too certain, that we are getting into as frivolous and trifling a Taste as ever existed’.Footnote 70
Jackson, it seems, was expressing a growing consensus on an ideal ‘English’ sound, which applied as much to singers as to composers. In his Dictionary of Musicians from the Earliest Times of 1825, John S. Sainsbury assessed Thomas Linley’s ‘taste and style’ in oppositional terms as ‘modelled on the principles of that pure English school which, however overshadowed at present by the foreign structure that has been opposed to it, can never be totally eclipsed while there are any feelings of nature and good sense remaining among us’.Footnote 71 If we return to Ozias Humphry’s comment on Elizabeth Linley’s mother’s voice, we see that he says her ‘stile, expression and manner’ were ‘in the best English taste’, which he suggests also characterised the singing of her daughters. And R.B. Sheridan himself, on first encountering the Linleys, not only exclaimed on Elizabeth’s singing ‘like an angel’, but also that ‘the Father too sings in a particular natural stile, likewise a little daughter [Mary]’.Footnote 72 Charles Burney, in notes on the singer for Rees’s Cyclopaedia, observed that the effect of Elizabeth’s voice arose ‘not from its great Extension, or from its Force, but from a native Sweetness & true Intonation’.Footnote 73
What did it mean to be ‘natural’ and ‘pure’? We might suspect that these terms, like ‘sweet’, merely mark the currently fashionable (so David Garrick’s acting, widely praised for its naturalism in this period too, would be highly artificial by today’s standards). But vocal tradition and the growing sense of a public discourse around English song and singers – further fostered through the mechanics of celebrity – might also have established some standards. We recall that Elizabeth Linley was repeatedly praised for her ‘feeling’ (Pacchierotti), ‘Expression’ (Fanny Burney) and ‘sense [which] gave a consequence to her performance’ (Jackson). Similarly, her sister Mary was praised in 1776 for her ‘manner of delivering Recitative [which] is particularly distinct and sensible’, in Acis and Galatea.Footnote 74 Somewhat later, Charles Dibdin, who established himself as a significant singing teacher in London in the 1780s, provided a greater sense of definition when he wrote of his technique that he ‘took care they [his pupils] should be taught nothing more than correctness, expression, and an unaffected pronunciation of the words; the infallible and only way to perfect a singer’. He expanded in a footnote:
Those who get at the force and meaning of the words, and pronounce them as they sing with the same sensibility and expression, as it would require in speaking, possess an accomplishment in singing beyond what all the art in the world cannot convey … Mrs. Sheridan and Madam Mara, were, according to my idea, the most accomplished singers I ever heard, because they were taught upon this principle.Footnote 75
An emphasis on ‘sensibility and expression’ in the delivery of text suggests a preference for the kind of (relatively) simple airs Jackson favoured, or for the accompanied recitative that became a particular feature of Handel’s oratorios. When we recall that those earlier Handelian singers praised for their sweetness – Cibber, Guadagni and Frasi – were all associated with excellence either in acting (Cibber and Guadagni) or in articulation of text (Frasi), a range of musical possibilities begins to suggest itself. Thomas Linley himself had reputedly aimed at ‘talking by notes’, presumably another emphasis on the expressive quality of music.Footnote 76
Elizabeth Linley’s apparent status as a standard-bearer for the best English style makes her repertoire particularly interesting, for if the timbre of Linley’s sweetness is lost to us, the style that she helped to define is not entirely beyond grasp. Aside from those works of Handel on which Linley’s voice was formed, we are fortunate that several composers wrote particularly for her, including her father and brother, Tom, and of course William Jackson. Since, as Thomas Linley himself observed in 1775, ‘No musician can set a song properly unless he … knows the performer who is to exhibit it’, it is reasonable to look to the music written for her to gauge the nature of her voice, and what it might tell us about aspirations towards an English vocal style.Footnote 77
The six-year period (or more) when Linley was in the public eye, from at least 1767 to 1773, was one of great compositional activity for her father and Jackson. As noted above, Linley sang in her father’s weekly concerts, which doubtless featured his own songs, from 1767, and quickly became the chief attraction there. Unfortunately, however, most of these pieces are lost; those that survive in the Posthumous Works tend to date from his time in London, and while they undoubtedly show Elizabeth’s influence in other ways (she often provided poetic texts), there is no evidence they were intended for her to sing.Footnote 78 William Jackson seems to have been most productive between the late 1760s and early 1770s, when the works he wrote were often intended for performance in Bath, with the Linleys as his mainstays. Some, at least, of the two collections of Twelve Songs from circa 1765 and 1770, and certainly the Twelve Canzonets (c.1770) must have been tailored for Elizabeth Linley’s voice (or perhaps, given her youth, vice versa). In the semi-biographical play The Rivals, the hero and his acquaintances discuss the heroine’s musical accomplishments and songs, two of which were Jackson’s, ‘When absent from my soul’s delight’ and ‘Go, gentle Gales!’ (with ‘My heart’s my own, my will is free’, from Isaac Bickerstaff’s Love in a Village (1762) and Galatea’s ‘Ye verdant plains and woody mountains’ also referenced).Footnote 79 The Canzonets, which Jackson describes as ‘trifles’, ‘performed almost as soon as composed’, and which he suggests ‘may be found useful to those who teach to sing’, one could imagine in the context of the Linley music lessons described by Ozias Humphry, with which Humphry seemed to suggest Jackson was involved.Footnote 80 The range and demands they place on the soprano soloist in terms of vocal precision and technique call to mind Jackson’s praise of Linley’s exactitude in those regards (e.g., see, for example, the end of Canzonet IV, ‘Now I know what it is to have strove’).
Jackson’s Ode to Fancy (published 1770) is also very likely to have been intended for Linley; she was advertised as the sole soprano soloist for the premiere of Joseph Warton’s Ode to Fancy on 26 November 1767, alongside Jackson’s (now-lost) Lycidas, and while it has been suggested that the setting of Warton’s Ode was by Charles Rousseau Burney (first performed in Worcester at the Three Choirs Festival in 1766), it seems just as plausible that the work was that of the Linley’s long-time friend William Jackson.Footnote 81 Whether performed by Linley in 1767 or (probably) by her at a later date, the work suggests a young singer’s developing powers. Although in technical terms we might find the two-octave range required for the Ode (b flat to b flat′′) most extraordinary for a teenager, with the solo soprano demonstrating comfort at both ends of the spectrum, Jackson may well have been exploiting Linley’s vocal abilities for the purposes of word painting. Lines such as ‘Say in what deep and pathless vale, or on what hoary mountain’s side’ in the recitative ‘O lover of the desart, hail!’ illustrate this function well (Ex. 1). But the emotional impact of the text was of more importance, not only for the singer’s affective power, but also for the idea of a native vocal style, as Jackson made clear in various prefaces. To display the soprano’s ability to animate the text, it seems, Jackson frequently set affective lines for her to a monotone (e.g., on the lines ‘Let us with silent footsteps go, to charnels and the house of Woe’, Ex. 2), thus encouraging the kind of text articulation and expression for which Linley was known, and also allowing unimpeded appreciation of the singer’s tone. Such text setting – and such text – is characteristic of the accompanied recitative which Handel increasingly cultivated, and for which his successors (including Jackson) also showed a preference. It also contributed to the elegiac vein for which Jackson was best known, and which was apparent in the pieces within the Ode that Jackson assigned to the soprano soloist: recitatives and arias expressing pensive solitude and melancholy (whose personifications are, strikingly, both female – a lover and a beggar), and an affinity with the natural world. Given that Linley’s singing was implicitly associated in The Rivals with such a mode, via an overarching characterisation of the female singer’s repertoire as ‘some pretty, melancholy “purling streams” airs’ – that is, airs in the style of Galatea’s longing, pastoral accompagnato in Acis and Galatea – a style seems clearly established. That the soprano was also assigned the characterisation of mirth in Jackson’s Ode again suggests the intended singer was Linley, given Charles Burney’s observation that ‘she was possessed of the double power of delighting an audience equally in pathetic strains, and songs of brilliant execution’.Footnote 82
William Jackson, ‘O lover of the desart, hail!’, bb. 1–6, Ode to Fancy by Warton (London, 1773), 18.
William Jackson, ‘Goddess of the tearful eye’, bb. 3–8, Ode to Fancy by Warton (London, 1773), 36.
If Jackson’s Ode offers an early idea of the potential of Linley’s voice, the young Thomas Linley’s cantata for her final public performance in March 1773, set to a text she herself provided, surely confirmed not only her style but also her sense of self and her willingness to perform that self in public.Footnote 83 It is striking that Jackson’s and Tom Linley’s works mark out similar technical and – more interestingly – aesthetic territory, in which Elizabeth Linley’s dramatic flair is evident. Tom Linley favoured the highly angular lines found in Jackson’s Ode, as for example on the words ‘or in my bosom plunge the dart’ (in the aria, ‘If thy too cruel bow be bent’), suggesting that his sister’s vocal flexibility and range were particularly prized (Ex. 3). Linley’s increasing virtuosity was no doubt indicated by Tom Linley’s writing, as the previous section of this same aria shows (Ex. 4).Footnote 84 But again, technique and virtuosity were largely placed at the service of the text. Aesthetically, it is striking that Linley’s own verse, as set by her brother (and elsewhere) exhibited the same elegiac tone that Jackson favoured, suggesting to the audience a poetic and emotional maturity to match her vocal command: ‘In yonder grove’ opens on a sombre scene, as ‘wretched Emma mourns her Harrold’s absence’ in a grove ‘where Cypress spreads its gloom’. Linley’s prominent invocation of the nightingale, first as sonic manifestation of gloomy retreats (also its role in Jackson’s Ode), then as evocation of romantic love, not only allowed her to demonstrate virtuosity – as was usual for singers invoking its tones. The nightingale (Philomel) also served as a mirror of the singer’s own pensive and solitary connection with nature, and, through that naturalness, seems to guarantee a vulnerability and emotional authenticity that, in this age of sensibility, was a significant part of Linley’s appeal (Ex. 5).
Thomas Linley, ‘If thy too cruel bow be bent’, bb. 21–9, in ‘In yonder grove’ (1773), The Posthumous Vocal Works of Mr Linley and Mr T. Linley (London, 1800), 39.
Thomas Linley, ‘If thy too cruel bow be bent’, bb. 12–17, in ‘In yonder grove’ (1773), The Posthumous Vocal Works of Mr Linley and Mr T. Linley (London, 1800), 37–8.
Thomas Linley, ‘In yonder grove’, bb. 14–30, in ‘In yonder grove’ (1773), The Posthumous Vocal Works of Mr Linley and Mr T. Linley (London, 1800), 34–5.
That the nightingale, like other songbirds, was frequently invoked in lyric verse at this time does not make its appearance in Linley’s poetry any less significant: quite the opposite. Joining a venerable lineage of songs inviting avian emulation – including Handel’s ‘Sweet bird’ (L’Allegro), ‘The morning lark to mine ascends his note’ (Semele) and ‘With plaintive notes’ (Samson) – and singers aspiring to and encouraging such associations through choice of repertoire (including Farinelli himselfFootnote 85), the appearance of this topic in the pieces Linley sang attests to the potency of the avian metaphor. The bird-like ‘naturalness’ of Linley’s song not only assured listeners that her vocal virtuosity was underpinned by a virtuous sincerity; in an age when the politics of national identity also proposed (and fought for) the nation as ‘natural’ (whether in France, the fledgling United States of America, or in Britain), such performances of ideal Nature could be harnessed to reflect a similarly idealised national voice. Though music may seem a rather tangential way in which to assert national identity, its effect on the emotions allowed it a force which, for an ideology also dependent on an intangible sense of fraternity, made it an ideal vehicle of national (and nationalist) sentiment. Visceral and ephemeral as the human voice’s impact may be, it spoke – and speaks – powerfully to the inherent volatility and excitement in the processes of identity formation. Elizabeth Linley’s voice, virtuosic, virtuous, sensible, but stilled so early – first by her husband, then by her untimely death from tuberculosis, and finally by a succession of biographers asserting her aversion to performance – lived only as imagined perfection for most, even before her death; what better representative, then, of the idealised national voice?
