The First "Abduction" Opera: Lewis Theobald's and John Ernest Galliard's The Happy Captive (1741)

Abstract

In 1996 I came across a reference in the Bibliotheque nationale's card catalog to a manuscript titled The Happy Captive. A quick perusal of the manuscript's contents served to pique my interest, and with a little effort, I was soon able to attach to the work the name of a composer, John Ernest Galliard (d. 1747). Galliard came to England in 1706, according to most sources, and quickly established himself as an important figure in London's musical life. He is remembered today chiefly for his translation of Tosi's famous treatise on singing,' but he was rather more than a translator. A skilled performer on the oboe and organ, Galliard composed chamber and orchestral music, songs, cantatas, anthems, masques, pantomimes, and operas. He often collaborated with Lewis Theobald (1688-1744), man of letters, editor of Shakespeare, and object of Alexander Pope's scorn in the Dunciad. Among their best-known works are the masque Pan and Syrinx (1718) and the pantomime The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus (1723), one of a series of remarkably successful entertainments written in the 1720s for John Rich.2 Galliard's final collaboration with Theobald, and one of the last works to come from the pens of both artists, was an opera titled The Happy Captive, which has long been thought lost. Unlike the pantomimes, the opera had little success: The Happy Captive was performed just twice in its first run in 1741, and it was revived only once, in 1742. But that is, of course, no measure of its merits, nor of its historical significance, both of which are considerable. The Happy Captive is not only a thoroughly entertaining comic opera; it is also the earliest example of an abduction or Turkish opera,3 a popular eighteenth-century genre whose most famous representative is Mozart's Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail.