Charles Dibdin is probably best remembered for his patriotic sea-songs – especially ‘Tom Bowling’, which is traditionally performed on the Last Night of the Proms. Although he was a copious and gifted composer of theatre music, few of his compositions are available in published form. Indeed, this volume is the first significant modern edition of Dibdin's theatre music. Born in Southampton in 1745, Dibdin became a chorister at Winchester Cathedral at age nine. By the time he was fifteen he had decided on a career in the theatre, which began with his joining the chorus at Covent Garden in the 1760–1761 season. In 1763 he published A Collection of English Songs and Cantatas; apparently having received lessons only in the rudiments of music as a chorister at Winchester, Dibdin later took great pride in being a largely self-taught composer. The following year his all-sung pastoral The Shepherd's Artifice was performed at Covent Garden. His first major success as a singer came as the farmer's son in Samuel Arnold's opera The Maid of the Mill (1765). In 1768 Dibdin left Covent Garden for a position at Drury Lane, which he held until 1775. Later in 1768 he achieved his greatest success with his performance as the black servant Mungo in his opera The Padlock. By 1776, however, his debts (and an aversion to the debtors' prison) were enough to prompt him to flee to France. He spent the next two years in Nancy composing prolifically before returning to work at Covent Garden in 1778. In 1787 he decided to emigrate to India. To raise money he undertook a tour with his one-man show (‘Table Entertainments’), which provided material for his highly entertaining publication The Musical Tour of Mr. Dibdin (Sheffield: printed for the author by J. Gales, 1788). However, soon after leaving his native shores, Dibdin discovered that seafaring was not in his blood and disembarked from the voyage to India at Torbay. He then gave his ‘Table Entertainments’ in his own custom-built theatre off the Strand (and later in Leicester Square); the shows were popular and afforded him some financial security in the 1790s. Dibdin died in poverty and obscurity in 1814, by which time he had also written three novels and A Complete History of the English Stage in five volumes (London: printed for the author, 1797–1800).

The edition under review contains the music written by Dibdin in the 1770s for the then obscure summer resort theatre at Sadler's Wells near Islington. Admission prices were lower at Sadler's Wells than at the London theatres, which made for quite diverse audiences that were made up largely of tradesmen and their families. When Thomas King took over the theatre in 1772, he placed more emphasis on music and opera in the hope of appealing to the educated classes; Dibdin was one of the composers recruited. Dibdin's Sadler's Wells period is closely tied to King, the only theatre manager with whom he did not fall out. Dibdin does not appear to have composed for Sadler's Wells after King relinquished control of it in 1782; however, between 1772 and 1778 he wrote an average of about two works a year for Sadler's Wells, even sending material there while he was residing in France. At Sadler's Wells Dibdin composed music for several pantomimes, but his main contribution was the dialogues that largely make up this edition. First brought to scholarly attention by the late Roger Fiske (in English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century, second edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 390–395), the ‘dialogues’ are essentially short operatic works with their origins in Italian comic intermezzos (known in England as burlettas). Although several were considered lost, Holman has succeeded in recovering music, librettos and newspaper descriptions of plots, primarily through his recognition of the importance of Dibdin's printed song collections and through extensive research in newspaper archives.

The edition in fact consists of two closely related genres: ‘musical dialogues’ and ‘introductions’. The ‘musical dialogues’ were comedies for two or three singers, and had recitative rather than spoken dialogue, the latter being prohibited at Sadler's Wells. The dialogues last fifteen minutes or so and consequently avoid complex plots; most of the librettos are by Dibdin. They were ideal for the varied entertainments on the bill at Sadler's Wells, which also featured popular variety acts such as acrobatics, dancing and magic shows. Eighteen of Dibdin's Sadler's Wells dialogues have been identified by Holman. Of these, complete printed short scores have survived for only four (The Brickdust Man, The Ladle, The Grenadier and The Mischance), with only extracts and fragments of music for several others, all taken from printed sources; none of this music seems to survive in autograph. (As an aside, I should point out that four major collections of Dibdin autographs, mostly from around the mid-1780s onwards, are held by the Southampton Record Office, the British Library, Harvard University Library and the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. However, a significant portion of the collections is disorganized, and this has proven to be a significant barrier to research; a project of digitizing the autographs was begun by the Leeds University Centre for English Music in 2003 under Holman's direction. The autographs would provide plenty of research material for an industrious graduate student.) Dibdin's ‘introductions’ were used to open variety programmes; they are similar to the dialogues, but more serious in tone, and require four singers. Of the three identified by Holman, a complete short score is known for only one, The Palace of Mirth (an enjoyable piece, though lacking the charm of some of the dialogues).

Fiske recognized that ‘Dibdin's music often reveals a quality in performance that is hard to discover on paper. His best songs are an expression of character or situation, and they show much more sense of the theatre than the better-written songs of Arne and Boyce’ (Fiske, English Theatre Music, 338). Holman echoes this sentiment but also identifies Dibdin as the first English composer to grasp fully the implications of the galant style apparent in many of the vocal numbers in this volume. Dibdin does not, however, seem to have been much interested in composing for instruments. The two overtures in the edition (The Palace of Mirth and The Brickdust Man) are not very good either on the page or off; Holman succinctly describes them in his Introduction as ‘embarrassingly jejune and short-winded’ (25). It's difficult to disagree. However, in the vocal music we hear a different Dibdin. The opening chorus of The Palace of Mirth is a good example of his use of clear directional harmonies, the simplicity of which combines well with the bustling triplet violin line that plays over the chorus (arranged for two voices in the printed short score). Probably the best work in the volume is The Brickdust Man (1772, libretto by Isaac Bickerstaff). John (a street trader who sells powdered brick) and Molly (a milkmaid) each believes the other to have been unfaithful. The climax of the dialogue is Molly's parody of an opera seria rage aria, ‘Get you gone, you nasty fellow’.

Perhaps the greatest editorial problem is that much of the orchestral music is preserved in a printed two-part format; in this respect – and in their ephemerality – the dialogues are reminiscent of much seventeenth-century masque music. The decision in these circumstances is whether to present these pieces as they survive or to attempt editorial reconstructions. Holman opts for the former, noting that the degree of speculation involved in reconstructions has little place in a ‘scholarly edition’ (5). He has adopted a ‘quasi-diplomatic’ approach throughout, largely retaining the original notation and layout but removing redundant accidentals and slurs and modernizing beaming, stem direction and alignment of continuo figures; editorial interventions are clearly indicated in the music and text. Holman obviously has scholars primarily in mind, but also suggests that it will be possible ‘to make performing versions … to suit individual circumstances’ (5). Amateurs may have to look elsewhere for guidance on editorially reconstructing the orchestration (or tackling the continuo). Two of the pieces in the edition – The Brickdust Man and The Grenadier – can be heard, however, with stylistically appropriate orchestral reconstructions by Fiske and Holman on the excellent 1992 recording Three Operas by Charles Dibdin, performed by Opera Restor'd under Holman's direction (Hyperion CDA66608).

The standard of this edition is exemplary. Holman's detailed and meticulously researched Introduction presents much new research as well as offering an excellent contextual account of the composer and his works. The most detailed account of Dibdin is in the late Robert Fahrner's The Theatre Career of Charles Dibdin the Elder (1745–1814) (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). However, Fahrner, a theatre historian, rarely discusses the music. While Fahrner's account remains essential reading, Holman's edition greatly adds to our understanding of Dibdin as a theatre composer, supplementing Fiske. Composed during the peak of Dibdin's stage career in the 1770s, this music helped establish Sadler's Wells as a prominent theatre house in the late eighteenth century and represents one of Dibdin's major contributions to the stage. Holman expertly addresses issues including genre, plots, characters and themes, the music, surviving materials and performers. The edition also includes an extensive ‘Appendix of Incomplete Works’ (including librettos, plots and so forth) and an especially useful ‘Catalogue of Surviving Material’. The music and texts are accurate, attractively presented and easy to read. The edition as a whole is remarkably free from serious errors. The unitalicized title in footnote 110 on page 29 is one of the few trivial rogues to have escaped the proofreader's eye. There are also several minor formatting problems: for example, editorial brackets are sometimes misaligned, grace notes are sometimes not sufficiently distanced from the main notes, and the top stave continues where it should not in several places. The editorial method is well explained. The commentary itself is clear, accurate, detailed and easy to follow; significant variants in the librettos are also recorded, though minutiae are appropriately avoided.

Holman states the two main aims of the edition in his Foreword: first, to make available Dibdin's ‘musical dialogues’; and second, ‘to draw attention to the wealth of material that survives for English theatre music at this period’ (5). Both objectives have been admirably achieved. This excellent edition represents a significant contribution to English music studies in general and to Dibdin studies in particular; it is warmly welcomed. Now that it is publicly available, one hopes that this theatre music, which is often charming and at times enthralling, will be heard by modern audiences. It richly deserves to be.