Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain

In the early eighteenth century, the benefit performance became an essential component of commercial music-making in Britain. Benefits, adapted from the spoken theatre, provided a new model from which instrumentalists, singers, and composers could reap financial and professional rewards. Benefits could be given as theatre pieces, concerts, or opera performances for the benefit of individual performers; or in aid of specific organizations. The benefit changed Britain's musico-theatrical landscape during this time and these special performances became a prototype for similar types of events in other European and American cities. Indeed, the charity benefit became a musical phenomenon in its own right, leading, for example, to the lasting success of Handel's Messiah. By examining benefits from a musical perspective - including performers, audiences, and institutions - the twelve chapters in this collection present the first study of the various ways in which music became associated with the benefit system in eighteenth-century Britain.

Introduction Alison DeSimone and Matthew Gardner; Part I. Musical Benefits in the London Theatre: Networks and Repertories: 1. Risks and rewards: benefits and their financial impact on actors, authors, singers, and other musicians in London, c. 1690–1730 Kathryn Lowerre; 2. With several entertainments of singing and dancing: London Theatre benefits, 1700–1725 Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson; 3. Concertos 'upon the stage' in early Hanoverian London: the instrumental counterpart to opera Seria Robert G. Rawson; 4. Cobblers, country fairs, and cross-dressing: benefits and the development of ballad opera Vanessa Rogers; Part II. Beyond London: Mimicry or Originality?: 5. Benefit concerts in the North of England: more than just musical entertainment Roz Southey; 6. Amateur music-making, professional musicians, and benefit concerts in Edinburgh Stefanie Acquavella-Rauch; 7. English music in benefit concerts: Henry Purcell and the next generation Amanda Eubanks Winkler; 8. Strategies of performance: benefits, professional singers, and Italian opera in the early eighteenth century Alison DeSimone; Part IV. Charity Benefits: 9. The Mercer's Hospital Charity Services: music charity in eighteenth-century Dublin Tríona O'Hanlon; 10. English Oratorio and charity benefits in mid-eighteenth-century London Matthew Gardner; Part V. The Role of the Audience: 11. Encountering 'the most extraordinary prodigy': meeting Master Mozart in Georgian London John Irving; 12. Benefits: Cui Bono? David Hunter.

Matthew Gardner holds a Junior Professorship in Musicology at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany in association with the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz. He has published widely on Handel and his English contemporaries, including Handel and Maurice Greene's Circle at the Apollo Academy: The Music and Intellectual Contexts of Oratorios, Odes and Masques (2008). In 2014, his edition of Handel's Wedding Anthems for the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe received the International Handel Research Prize.
Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. A recent publication, 'Equally Charming, Equally Too Great: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London' in the Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal won the 2018 Ruth Solie Prize for an Outstanding Article on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association. DeSimone's work has been supported by grants from the American Musicological Society, the American Handel Society, the Handel Institute, and the University of Missouri Research Board.