Court Odes
Court Odes

Author: John Eccles

Publisher: A-R Editions, Inc.

Published:

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 198720896X

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John Eccles is today mainly remembered for his theater works, but, as Master of the King’s/Queen’s Music, he was also the principal composer of ceremonial courts odes for William III and Anne, producing some twenty New Year odes and fourteen birthday odes during his thirty-five years in the post—twice as many as Henry Purcell’s output in the same genre. The fact that his odes are so little known today is partly due to how few survive: music is extant for only five odes, three of them incomplete. This volume presents the first complete modern edition of Eccles’s surviving court odes. There is much superb music awaiting discovery here: by the time he wrote his first odes, Eccles was already a seasoned theater composer, and his odes can be equally dramatic and virtuosic; at the same time, they demonstrate confident control both of the choral and orchestral forces at his disposal, and of the works’ large-scale architecture.

Queen Anne
Queen Anne

Author: James Anderson Winn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 815

ISBN-13: 0199372209

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As the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne (1665-1714) received the education thought proper for a princess, reading plays and poetry in English and French while learning dancing, singing, acting, drawing, and instrumental music. As an adult, she played the guitar and the harpsichord, danced regularly, and took a connoisseur's interest in all the arts. In this comprehensive interdisciplinary biography, James Winn tells the story of Anne's life in new breadth and detail, and in unprecedented cultural context. Winn shows how poets, painters, and musicians used the works they made for Anne to send overt and covert political messages to the queen, the court, the church, and Parliament. Their works also illustrate the pathos of Anne's personal life: the loss of her mother when she was six, her troubled relations with her father and her sister (James II and Mary II), and her own doomed efforts to produce an heir. Her eighteen pregnancies produced only one child who lived past infancy; his death at the age of eleven, mourned by poets, was a blow from which Anne never fully recovered. Her close friendship with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, a topic of scabrous ballads and fictions, ended in bitter discord; the death of her husband in 1708 left her emotionally isolated; and the wrangling among her chief ministers hastened her death. Richly illustrated with visual and musical examples, Queen Anne draws on works by a wide array of artists-among them the composer George Frideric Handel, the poet Alexander Pope, the painter Godfrey Kneller, and the architect Christopher Wren-to shed new light on Anne's life and reign. This is the definitive biography of Queen Anne.