Murphy, Estelle
(2015)
“Sing Great Anna’s Matchless Name”
Images of Queen Anne in the Court Ode.
In:
Queen Anne and the Arts.
Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850
.
Bucknell University Press, pp. 205-226.
ISBN 9781611486315
Abstract
The tradition of performing musical odes at the English
court dates back to the early seventeenth century. These large-scale works for orchestra,
solo vocalists, and chorus were presented before the monarch and nobility
for special occasions, including martial victories, New Year’s Day, births, peace
treaties, the monarch’s birthday, the monarch’s safe return from abroad, and so on.
It was not until the late seventeenth century that the tradition of performing an
ode at court began to solidify and become a biannual one, when typically the master
of the music and poet laureate would provide a work in honor of New Year’s
Day and the king’s or queen’s birthday. It is surely not by chance that the heyday
of the court ode in England — ca. 1689–1714 — coincided with both the period of
the monarchy’s greatest instability and the reign of Queen Anne. In the context of
a monarchy that was weakened and thereafter ruled by Parliament, following the
volatility of the Civil Wars, the regicide, and the Cromwellian Interregnum, the
court ode emerges as an important element in attempts to reassert the status of
the sovereign and mold public opinion, all the more so in the wake of the further
crisis of the monarchy in 1688–1689. Though some have argued that ceremony
and culture declined during, or even because of, Queen Anne’s reign, the ode, by
contrast, experienced a period of growth and was essentially stabilized as a tradition
that would continue into the reign of George I and beyond.
| Item Type: |
Book Section
|
| Additional Information: |
This is the postprint version of the published chapter. Dr. Murphy edited the following song which was then performed and recorded - it is hosted on the website at this address: http://www.bucknell.edu/UPressAudio . Nahum Tate and John Eccles, “Her Pow’rful foes she thus
alarms,” from Awake Harmonious Pow’rs (1704). GB-Lbl. G. 300, 141.
Source: British Library Board. |
| Keywords: |
Queen Anne; musical ode; English court; art patronage; music; history; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > Music |
| Item ID: |
7783 |
| Depositing User: |
Estelle Murphy
|
| Date Deposited: |
19 Jan 2017 12:06 |
| Publisher: |
Bucknell University Press |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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