Semi­opera (or Dramatic opera) and Masque Entries for ‘semi­opera’ and ‘masque’ from The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music ­ accessed through Oxford Music Online. For more detailed articles, including extensive bibliographies, see Grove Music Online

Semi‐opera. Term denoting type of English Restoration drama in which there were extensive musical episodes, similar to Masques, performed only by subsidiary characters. Form was developed by Betterton with The Tempest, 1674, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play with music by Humfrey, Locke, and others. Another example was King Arthur, text by Dryden (1684) and music by Purcell (1691). Purcell was also involved in Dioclesian (1690), The Fairy Queen (1692, rev. 1693), and The Indian Queen (1695). Only King Arthur was specifically devised as a semi‐opera, the others being Betterton versions of earlier plays. Daniel Purcell, John Eccles, and D'Urfey also wrote semi‐operas, but early in the 18th century the form was superseded by Italian opera. The Oxford Dictionary of Music

Masque (or Mask or Maske).

An aristocratic ceremonial entertainment in the 17th century, consisting of a combination of poetry, vocal and instrumental music, dancing, acting, costume, pageantry, and scenic decoration, applied to the representation of allegorical and mythological subjects. It was much cultivated in Italy, from which country England seems to have learnt it, then carrying it to a very high pitch of artistic elaboration. It developed from the intermedii and from mystery plays. In Elizabethan times, among the authors employed was Ben Jonson, a supreme master of the English masque; he sometimes enjoyed the collaboration of Inigo Jones as designer of the decorations and machinery. Among composers of masque music were Campion, Coprario, Lanier, and the younger Ferrabosco. From a literary point of view the most famous masque is Milton's Comus ( 1634 ); for this the music was

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supplied by Henry Lawes, but the finest masques of this period had music by his brother William. Masques continued under the Puritan régime of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, some being arrangements, by authority, for entertainment of distinguished foreign visitors. After the Restoration, masque episodes were popular in plays, and music for them was composed by John Blow, Pelham Humfrey, Louis Grabu, and Henry Purcell . A late example is Arne's Alfred ( 1740 ), written for performance in the Prince of Wales's garden: from it comes the song Rule, Britannia! In the 20th century Vaughan Williams described his ballet Job as a ‘masque for dancing’, to indicate that 19th‐century type of choreography would not be appropriate. Lambert's Summer's Last Will and Testament is described as a masque. The Oxford Dictionary of Music

Masque

A type of courtly entertainment used to celebrate special events in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. It consisted of dancing, speech, and song brought together in an allegorical ‘device’ in honour of the king or a prominent courtier. Nearly all masques were produced to celebrate a special occasion, for example a dynastic marriage, a state visit, or just the Christmas season. The masque differs from spoken drama or opera in that the action is carried forward by dance rather than by speech or song. The main characters, called ‘masquers’, were aristocratic amateurs who danced their roles, often led by a member of the royal family. The masque had its origin in the ‘disguisings’ of Henry VIII's court, which were little more than evenings of social dancing clothed in flimsy allegory. Although a number of masque­like entertainments are known from the reign of Elizabeth, the masque proper came of age during the reign of James I. Many early Jacobean masques were the product of collaborations between such writers as Ben Jonson and Thomas Campion, the architect and designer Inigo Jones, and composers such as Alfonso Ferrabosco (ii), John Coprario, and Robert Johnson. The best masques of this period, for example Campion's Lord Hayes Masque (1607) and Jonson's Masque of Queens (1609) and Oberon (1611), display a harmonious blend of their diverse elements that was never surpassed.

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During the reign of Charles I the masque increased in length, complexity, magnificence, and cost with a new generation of collaborators, including the writers James Shirley and William Davenant and the composers William and Henry Lawes. During the 1630s such masques as Shirley's The Triumph of Peace (1634) and Davenant's Britannia triumphans (1638) became a visible sign of the court absolutism and extravagance that contributed not a little to the Puritan revolution and to Charles I's downfall. The Banqueting House that still stands in Whitehall—built by Inigo Jones specifically for the performance of masques—was chosen with a fitting sense of irony for Charles's execution in 1649. As a court form, the masque barely survived the Civil War, though intimate masques continued to be performed in country houses and schools well into the Restoration period. The most important works of this type are Milton's Comus with music by Henry Lawes, produced at Ludlow in 1634 in honour of the Earl of Bridgewater, and Shirley's Cupid and Death with music by Christopher Gibbons and Matthew Locke, performed in London in 1653 and 1659. Cupid and Death is the only masque for which the music survives more or less complete. It is often said that the masque is merely an imitation of the Italian ballo or the French ballet de cour. While it is true that the visual aspects of many masques are inspired by Italian Renaissance versions of classical antiquity, the other elements—dance, speech, and above all music—owe little or nothing to foreign models. Musical similarities between English masques and French ballets seem to be the product of similar circumstances rather than of direct contact. Masque music was nearly always a collaboration between several composers and arrangers, partly because masques were frequently put together very quickly and partly because each element of the music—the songs, the dances, and the incidental instrumental music—was performed by a separate ensemble of royal musicians. The ensembles were spatially separated and normally never heard together, though Thomas Campion, notably in Lord Hayes Masque, experimented with polychoral effects in the Italian manner. Thus these three elements are best considered individually. Masques were constructed round a series of formal dances or ‘entries’ performed at intervals during the entertainment. There were normally five of these, corresponding to some extent to the five acts of a spoken play. The central part of the masque consisted of three entries danced by the masquers to specially composed and choreographed music.

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A fourth entry, called the ‘revels’, consisted of social dances between the masquers and members of the audience. A fifth entry, or ‘antimasque’, was danced by professionals taking comic or grotesque characters such ascommedia dell'arte figures, demons, witches, or even birds and animals. Dance music was normally provided by the court violin band, though antimasque dances were sometimes played by wind instruments. The main dances were usually cast in the form of almans, with two repeated sections, though sometimes a third section in quick triple time was added. Their style is brisk and airy, with clear tonal harmonies. Antimasque dances express the grotesque and the comic by the sudden contrast of different tempos. Many of them are, in effect, patchworks made up from fragments of different dances. The songs in Jacobean and Caroline masques were designed largely to introduce and comment on the dances. They were performed by singers of the royal music who appeared in stage in the guise of minor characters such as attendants or priests. Normally they accompanied themselves with lutes—hence the large numbers of lutes sometimes mentioned in descriptions of masques. Masque songs tend to be similar to ordinary songs of the period—many of them are found in contemporary song collections—though large ensembles and large halls tended to encourage a simple, declamatory style. In the 1630s William Lawes experimented with long anthem­like sequences of continuous solo and ensemble vocal music. Cupid and Death develops this process still further, and was probably a prototype for Blow's all­sung masque Venus and Adonis(c. 1682) and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689). Little can be said about the third musical element in English masques: the ‘loud music’ played by wind instruments which was used to cover the noise of stage machinery in scene changes. Unfortunately, none of it seems to have survived. Peter Holman

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