Thomas Arne

Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778) was an English composer.

Most of his work was incidental music for the theatre. He introduced Italian-style opera to the London stage with works such as Artaxerxes (1762, revised 1777). Among his best-known songs are "Where the bee sucks" from The Tempest (1746), "Blow, blow thou winter wind" from As You Like It (1740) and "Rule, Britannia!" from the masque Alfred (1740).

Biography

Arne was educated at Eton College and intended for the law, but practised secretly on a muffled harpsichord and learnt the violin from Michael Festing, until his father allowed him to make music his career. He also taught his sister Susanna singing, and she appeared in his first opera, a setting of Joseph Addison's Rosamond, in 1733. He wrote music for Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb (1733), John Milton's Comus (1738), and William Congreve's The Judgement of Paris (1740).

He had married the singer Cecilia Young in 1736, and he and his wife worked successfully in 1742-44 in Dublin, which they twice revisited in the 1750s. Alfred was produced in 1740, at the residence of Frederick, Prince of Wales, at Cliveden. In 1744 he was appointed composer to the Drury Lane Theatre, and in 1745 composer to the Vauxhall Gardens. In 1746 he supplied music for the masque Neptune and Amphitrite and the songs in The Tempest. He composed two oratorios, The Death of Abel (1744) and Judith (1761).

In 1760, after a quarrel with David Garrick, he gave up his post as composer to Drury Lane Theatre and became composer to the Covent Garden Theatre, where his popular dramatic pastoral Thomas and Sally was produced in 1760. In 1762 he produced his opera Artaxerxes, with a libretto he himself translated from a work by Pietro Metastasio and composed in the Italian manner.

He was buried at St Paul's, Covent Garden. His son Michael Arne was also a composer.