Having started the process of restoring Charles Dibdin to his proper place in British musical and theatrical history with our Christmas Gambols album – a project now strongly supported by a new Oxford University Press volume – Retrospect Opera has recorded a second Dibdin disc with Simon Butteriss, this time bringing together three works linked by Shakespearean themes. Queen Mab is a cantata composed for David Garrick’s great ‘Jubilee’, a three-day celebration of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. The Jubilee, our main work, is Garrick’s musical comedy derived from the same occasion: it was his greatest theatrical triumph, and one of the most successful works of eighteenth-century theatre. These two works are being released to mark their 250th anniversary in 2019, and they will be accompanied by Dibdin’s serenata Datchet Mead, or The Fairy Court (1797), again featuring Queen Mab, written to celebrate the marriage of Princess Charlotte, George III’s eldest daughter.

The Jubilee was one of the major triumphs of the first phase of Dibdin’s career, when he was working closely with the celebrated actor-manager, David Garrick (1717–79). Garrick organised a great Shakespeare festival, or “jubilee”, in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1769: a landmark event in Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation and deification as Britain’s national Bard which has inspired several books. The three-day festival started auspiciously, and Dibdin’s cantata Queen Mab was a notable highlight of the first day, but unfortunately heavy rain on the second and third days forced the cancellation of many of the events and caused several comic mishaps. Not too upset, Garrick quickly adapted part of his planned celebration, with Dibdin’s music, for performance back in London at his own Drury Lane theatre. The Jubilee, or Shakespear’s Garland premiered there on 14 October, and proved immensely successful – the greatest triumph of Garrick’s careers as writer and manager. William Hopkins, the Drury Lane prompter, recorded “There never was an Entertainment produc’d that gave so much pleasure to all Degrees, Boxes, Pit and Gallery.”

The Jubilee is a celebration of Shakespeare’s greatness, but that greatness is rooted firmly in his broad popular appeal. The Shakespeare Garrick and Dibdin celebrate is a folk hero as much as a great poet, as highlighted in such lyrics as “For the lad of all lads was a Warwickshire lad” and “The pride of all nature was sweet Willy O.” Such a subject brought out Dibdin’s happiest melodic vein, and his delightful songs are fitted into a number of loosely-connected comic scenes, examining the impact on Stratford of a host of Shakespearean pilgrims. We’ll record all the main songs, with enough of the linking dialogue to make a coherent dramatic work.

Nearly three decades later, Dibdin returned to Shakespeare to celebrate the 1797 marriage of Princess Charlotte, George III’s eldest daughter, with Frederick I of Württemberg. By this time, Dibdin, renowned for his one-man shows, had his own London theatre, and he used this to present the serenata, Datchet Mead, or The Fairy Court. Datchet is a village near Windsor, and Dibdin drew on Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merry Wives of Windsor as he imagined the fairies gathering outside Datchet to hymn the princess’s wedding. With its strong Windsor context and many references to royal nuptials combined with Dibdin’s natural lyricism and sense of fun, this seems to us the perfect way to commemorate the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and the CD will be dedicated to them.

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) is a gigantic figure in the history of English song, probably the most important composer of English comic operas in the late 1700s, and, in addition, he was the most versatile entertainer of his age.

Dibdin sprang to fame at the age of nineteen, playing the part of Ralph in Samuel Arnold’s opera, The Maid of the Mill (1765). Three years later he established his reputation as a composer with The Padlock (1768), an opera in which he stole the show himself, playing the black servant, Mungo. James Boaden recalled: ‘Dibdin, by his music, and still more by his acting in a comic opera, called the Padlock, produced that degree of sensation in the public which is called a rage.’ His fame secured, in the 1770s Dibdin began writing his own librettos, producing both words and music for the two most enduringly successful operas of the decade, The Waterman (1774) and The Quaker (1775), both of them still being revived a century later. Despite all his success in the London theatres, though, Dibdin was touchy and quarrelsome, finding it increasingly hard to work in co-operative environments. Recognising this, in 1787 he staged the first of his one-man musical shows, or ‘Table Entertainments’ as he called them, Readings and Music. Back in 1767, Dibdin had been the first musician in Britain to perform on a piano in public. His interest in the instrument had continued, and in his Table Entertainments he stood, or sat, at a piano, telling dramatized stories and playing and singing songs. This format allowed him to display all his talents and became Dibdin’s principal means of engaging with his public. He opened his own little London theatre, called Sans Souci, in 1791, and continued to perform until 1809. During these decades, Dibdin wrote hundreds of songs, most of them introduced in his Table Entertainments, including the most famous of all, ‘Tom Bowling,’ originally part of The Oddities (1789). Dozens of these songs were still regularly sung decades later: no other eighteenth-century composer contributed more to the nineteenth-century English song repertoire.