Music for the Ballets of John Weaver

Abstract

FOR STUDYING THE DANCE-DRAMAS of John Weaver, we have the three libretti he published 1 and his comments elsewhere on his work, but one missing element has been the music to which they were danced. Weaver tells us that the music for The Loves of Mars and Venus was by Henry Symonds, who composed the Symphonies, and Mr. Firbank (Charles Fairbank), who wrote the airs for the dancing part.2 But the score wasn't published, and-like most of the theatre music of the time, including the scores for all of Weaver's other ballets-it has vanished, presumably either thrown out or burned. Music was easily come by in the eighteenth-century theatre and as easily discarded, although some tunes were re-used several times in different contexts and some popular songs and dances were eventually published, while other music has survived in manuscript.3 But even when a large-scale score was successful enough to be published, ordinarily only the vocal parts were included. Later collections of dance music, especially the Comic Tunes from the pantomimes, do exist, but as far as one can tell they include nothing from Weaver's ballets. One source for recovering some of the dance music from the theatres, including what may well be some music from Weaver ballets, does exist in the collections of tunes gathered for social dancing. The most famous of these collections is John Playford's The English Dancing Master, first published in 1651, which was so popular that revised editions were put out regularly by Playford and his successors under the title The Dancing Master until the eighteenth edition, c. 1728.4 In about 1713 a second collection was published as The Dancing Master: Vol. the Second, which went through four editions by 1728, while by about 1727 a third volume had been