Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667-1752)
- Concerto (I) à 7, Op.VIII (c.1717)
Performers: Barocco Veneziano
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German composer and theorist mainly active in England. He was the son of
a Protestant minister and studied music theory under one Klingenberg
(probably not the son of the Stettin organist Friedrich Gottlieb
Klingenberg as Hawkins stated, but perhaps an elder relation), and
practice under Grosse, a Saxon organist. From the age of 14 he was
employed at the Prussian court, where he remained until about the end of
the 17th century. According to Hawkins he resolved to leave Germany
after witnessing the execution without trial of a Prussian officer
accused of insubordination ‘and put himself under the protection of a
government founded on better principles’. After travelling through
Holland, he settled in London, where he remained for the rest of his
life. His first permanent employment in London was as a viola player,
and later harpsichordist at Drury Lane Theatre in 1704. In January 1708
he joined the opera company operating from Vanburgh’s Queen’s Theatre in
the Haymarket. There he served as violinist, harpsichordist, and agent
for the soprano Margherita de l’Epine. Pepusch and l’Epine were married
some time between 1718 and 1723; their only son, who died in July 1739
after showing considerable talent and promise, was baptized on 9 January
1724. In July 1713 Pepusch, along with William Croft, was awarded the
degree of DMus at Oxford; the music he submitted for this occasion,
including the ode 'Hail, queen of islands! Hail, illustrious fair', has
not survived. In 1714 Pepusch moved to Drury Lane as musical director
and over the next two seasons contributed four essays in the genre of
the English masque: Venus and Adonis, Myrtillo and Laura, Apollo and
Daphne and The Death of Dido. In autumn 1716 he transferred to Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, where he served as musical director for much of the next 15
years. Sometime after this date Pepusch became involved with the
musical establishment of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, and he was
replaced by John Ernest Galliard as musical director at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields for the 1717-18 season. His presence at Cannons, Brydges’s estate
near Edgware in Middlesex, can be documented from as early as December
1717, and he and George Frideric Handel were both there in April 1718.
Although he was again active at Lincoln’s Inn Fields for the 1718-19
season, Pepusch seems to have been appointed musical director at Cannons
in mid-1719. Pepusch was responsible for providing music for the duke’s
chapel and chamber on a regular basis until mid-1721, presumably
dividing his time between Cannons and his London house. After this date
the duke cut back his musical establishment in response to financial
losses, but Pepusch continued to provide occasional musicians from
London until 1725, when organized musical activity at Cannons seems to
have ceased. In 1735, when he moved to Fetter Lane, Pepusch reorganized
the Academy of Ancient Music as a seminary for the musical instruction
of young boys. In December 1737 he was made organist of the
Charterhouse, and in 1745 (the year before his wife died) he was elected
a Fellow of the Royal Society, to whom he delivered a paper ‘Of the
Various Genera and Species of Music Among the Ancients’. Throughout his
career he was much sought after as a teacher, his pupils including
Boyce, Benjamin Cooke, J.H. Roman, John Travers, George Berg, James
Nares and Ephraim Kellner. After his death Travers and Kellner shared
with the Academy of Ancient Music their master’s extensive and important
library of books and music, among which was the collection of virginal
music now known as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Largely as a result of
Burney’s estimate of him, posterity has tended to look upon Pepusch as
an academic pedant who opposed Handel’s cause in England. He was
certainly the most learned musical antiquarian of his day, but to regard
him only in this way is to ignore the lively theatre music and the
elegant English cantatas, which are mostly carefully composed, but by no
means dry. And though the success of The Beggar’s Opera contributed to
Handel’s difficulties in promoting Italian opera for the Royal Academy,
there is no indication of any personal or professional enmity between
the two men.
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