Thomas Arne
1710 - 1778
Thomas Arne is an English composer born in Covent Garden. He studied at Eton College with the intention to pursue a career in law. A passionate musician, he would secretly practice the spinet and the violin. Once when attending an Italian opera, he met the violinist and composer Michael Festing, who became a major influence on him. Soon after Arne decided to pursue music as a career. He was engaged to write short musicals for Drury Lane Theatre. He became established as the leading English lyric composer after he wrote the music for John Dalton’s adaptation of Milton’s Masque of Comus in 1738. He continued to develop his musical ideas in the masque Alfred, and The Judgment of Paris, both produced at the Prince of Wales’s residence at Cliveden in 1740. Arne’s settings of Shakespeare’s songs, written for revivals of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice in 1740–41, established his early style.
In 1744, after spending two years in Dublin, Arne was a resident composer at Drury Lane Theatre and Vauxhall Gardens. During the next decade Arne published a number of song collections. In 1759 he became a Doctor of Music at Oxford University, and two years later his oratorio Judith was premiered, followed by his opera Artaxerxes.
In the final decade of his life, Arne contributed a song to the great Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 (organised by famous actor David Garrick) and composed music for stage works The Fairy Prince, Elfrida and Caractacus. His well known compositions of including Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind and Where the Bee Sucks added to the English heritage of songs, which made him one of the most important English composers of the 18th century. His most well known work, Rule Britannia! is still performed every year at the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
