William Shield (1748-1829)
The Book of Ruth in the Bible has been described as a kindly idyll. All the characters in the story are nice people, who behave in a manner we feel to be right and decent. What is more, the little story has a happy ending. And so it is with Rosina, an opera whose story was adapted by Mrs. Frances Brooke from the Book of Ruth (‘a fable equally moral, simple and interesting’, she said). This story had already furnished the subject for an episode in James Thomson’s poem The Seasons, and for an opera with libretto by the French playwright Favart: Les Moissoneurs.
Music was set to the book of Rosina by William Shield, who composed some of the numbers and arranged others, and the opera had its premiere at Covent Garden Theatre in 1782. It established Shield’s fame overnight. There were 70 performances in the first two years. Rosina became the most profitable item in the repertoire, and for the next eight years Shield enjoyed a virtual monopoly of composing for the theatre.
This much-loved short ‘afterpiece’, ‘a bonus extra following the main show’, stayed popular and was regularly performed for a century. Historians of music usually say that Rosina was liked for its music rather than for its libretto. A questionable assertion, when it is made about a stage hit. Granted, the vocal items are what make Rosina worth reviving – Shield handled the ballad style deftly and freshly. One contemporary wrote of the beauty of Shield’s melodies; another, George Hogarth, said that the music ‘is not marked by force or energy; but it is perfectly suited to the subject of his pieces, which are sweet and simple pictures of rural life’
Perhaps then the appeal of Rosina’s story should not be dismissed. Its author, knew what she was about. She was a cross-eyed woman of 40 who spent seven years in Quebec as the wife of the governor’s chaplain. She had edited a paper of theatrical gossip – The Old Maid – and her libretto for Rosina was well designed to appeal to the public’s taste for what was called ‘operetta of escape’. Her pastoral sentimentalism was more attractive to the English middle classes, the main audience for such entertainments, than the stylised stories of tragic Italian opera. They enjoyed the portrayal of the peasantry in its rustic setting, the simple sentiments, the all-is-for-the-best-in-the-end stories.
Mrs. Brooke’s libretto is a long way ‘after the Book of Ruth’ – some of that is rather strong stuff. Ruth, a foreign (Moabite) woman, is the widow of a Jew; she and her mother-in-law are seeking a Jewish husband for her. Ruth, in the manner approved by custom, virtually offers herself to Boas, on whose fields she is a gleaner, and he does the right thing by her.
Rosina, on the other hand, is in no way scheming (though it is no accident that her name begins with ‘R’) but winningly shy and virtuous. Mr. Belville, in the opera (‘B’) does not have to marry across ethnic barriers, as does his model in the Bible. By the time he offers Rosina his hand he has confirmed his suspicion
‘from the grace of Rosina’s form, the native dignity of her mind, and the lovely simplicity of her deportment, that she was not born a villager’.
The message that social class and wealth are no real barriers to love and to being thought worthy is watered down by Mrs. Brooke to sentimental optimism: ‘Heaven never forsakes the good man’s children’. Even the dashing and wicked brother, Captain Belville, whose irresponsible lust for Rosina makes him dishonour his social class, makes full moral amends at the end: ‘Allow me to retire, brother, and learn at a distance from you how to correct those errors into which the fire of youth and bad example have hurried me’.
As played in 1782 by the middle-aged Charles Bannister (Mr. Belville) and his daughter-in-law Miss Harper (Rosina) these characters were no doubt simple and straightforward – there is no hint of social satire, only an occasional gentle irony. Even a travesti character (sung by Miss Kennedy), William, the rustic swain of Rosina’s supposed sister Phoebe, is funny but uncomplicated. Artificial and shallow this drama may be, but so was dominant bourgeois taste at the time.
What made Rosina work was its music. Not dramatic in itself, this was pretty music attached to a drama. William Shield, like many a 20th century composer for musicals, composed some numbers himself and arranged the rest. Of the 18 vocal numbers, six have identifiable ballad tunes and another six are composed more-or-less in ballad style. There are no large-scale arias like those in Italian operas. The most famous and influential of ‘ballad operas’ was Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera of earlier in the18th century. That was a satire on (among other things) the pretensions of tragic opera. Gay had originally intended the songs to be unaccompanied – the words were the important thing. The tunes were popular rather than satirical.
Ballad operas helped form a native and authentically English genre of music theatre, of which Rosina is a variant. William Shield, a violinist and viola player, became composer to the Covent Garden Theatre and wrote at least 50 light operas and pasticcios, all inclining to the ballad opera tradition. He included his own songs and those of others.
Shield’s songs are simple, uncluttered, and appealing. They relate to the dramatic situation only in a generalized way. In Rosina some of the songs are obviously illustrative, like Captain Belville’s shooting song, with its imitation of hunting fanfares. On the whole, however, the songs rely on the simplicity and charm of their tunes, and Shield’s deft touch with orchestration. The most famous song in this vein is Rosina’s ‘Light as Thistledown’. One imagines the show stopped for the characters to deliver these songs, so that they would make their full effect.
Attentive listeners may notice one fascinating thing in Rosina’s music. At the very end of the overture, the orchestra imitates a drone bass and the oboe plays a variant of the tune known as Auld Lang Syne. Scholars think this may be Shield’s adaptation of a Northumbrian pipe tune he remembered from his youth.
Its inclusion in the popular Rosina made it known all over Britain, and that is certainly how it came to be associated with its now traditional words.
First published in Opera Australia, 1982