The Song of Moses - Thomas Linley Junior (1756 - 1778)

Thomas Linley (Tom, to distinguish him from his homonymous father) was born in Bath in May 1756. By the age of 7, he was performing violin concerti in public (in Bristol), and he was to become one of the best violinists of his age, hugely popular with the British public during the last ten years of his life. Like Mozart, he was born into a very musical family, making long tours of the British Isles with his father (a composer and singer) and sisters (the celebrated sopranos Elizabeth, Mary and Maria). After being apprenticed to Dr. William Boyce, he journeyed to Italy to study composition and the violin with Nardini between 1768 and 1771. It was during this time, when he had followed his teacher from Livorno to Florence, that he met and befriended his exact contemporary, Mozart. Although their meeting – and collaboration, for they played duets together – was brief, their shared background and prodigious talents ensured that they never forgot each other.

Linley kept a letter he received from Mozart for the rest of his short life, while according to the singer Michael Kelly: “[Mozart] conversed with me a good deal about Thomas Linley... with whom he was intimate at Florence, and spoke of him with great affection. He said that Linley was a true genius, and he felt that, had he lived, he would have been one of the greatest ornaments of the musical world.” (Kelly Reminiscences, 1826; p.112 in R. Fiske edn.) Linley set about composing in earnest in the 1770s, writing cantatas, songs, more than twenty violin concerti (only one appears to survive), two operas, glees, madrigals and three large-scale choral works.

The Duenna, an opera for which he was responsible for most of the music (libretto by Sheridan), received more performances between 1775 (its year of composition) and 1800 than any other mainpiece opera, even including The Beggar’s Opera; it was last performed at Covent Garden in the 1840s. The Cady of Bagdad, his last major work, was a comparative failure by comparison, owing to the poor quality of its libretto rather than its music, which frustratingly shows Linley becoming more experimental, particularly in his writing for brass and winds. It is tempting to speculate about the directions he would have taken his musical imagination had he lived even to the age of his two peers.

In 1773, Linley had become the leader of the Drury Lane Theatre orchestra, a post he was to hold until his death. When his father became a patentee of that theatre in 1775 with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Tom set about composing violin concerti for his own use, as well as an impressive Ode on the Witches, Fairies and Aerial Beings of Shakespeare in 1776, and a one-act oratorio, The Song of Moses (1777), which was revived in a slightly revised form the following year.

The libretto for The Song of Moses, based on biblical passsages from Exodus 15, was written by John Hoadly (1711- 76), a poet, playwright and Anglican priest who had been chaplain to Frederick, Prince of Wales and rector of Wield, Hampshire. Hoadly’s texts had been used by other prominent composers such as Maurice Greene and John Stanley. Copies of the printed edition were thought to have been lost but one was recently idenitifed in the library of the University of Wales, Lampeter (Tract 559) thanks to the enquires of Mike Lewers and Peter Leech.

Whereas the superb virtuoso arias for The Song of Moses are in a highly modern, galante style, for the majority of the the choruses Linley utilises fugal structures (typified by the oratorios of Handel) which supports his melodic material. He demonstrates a mastery of counterpoint in Praise be to God, weaving the opening theme (reminiscent perhaps of a Lutheran chorale tune) into the vocal textures where it is passed around the different voices with the warrior horse motif thundering around it. The wave hath closed begins in imitative fashion only for this to be abruptly terminated at Sunk like a lifeless stone. Here Linley returns to a homophonic (block chord) statement depicting in a vivid and arresting way the sinking stone, vanished and dead. The Sea is before them, with barking horns and unison orchestral lines, is altogether new and defies the view that the galant style was not necessarily an effective choral idiom, as C.P.E.Bach and other North-German composers proved only too well. All Canaan’s heathen race seems to draw upon a baroque aesthetic, and at cadence-points especially seems to echo not only the choral works of Boyce, Linley’s teacher, but also the semi-operas of Purcell from two generations earlier. For the final rowsing To Ages shalt thou stretch thy sway Linley returns again to a fugal construct, building successive entries into a whirlwind of choral and orchestral energy towards the final Hallelujah, Amen.

Linley died in a boating accident at Grimsthorpe Castle in August 1778, causing deep shock to his hosts and probable patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Ancaster, his faithful public and the Royal Family. George III commissioned four copied volumes of Tom’s major (vocal) works. The late Roger Fiske (1986: 413) thought Tom “our most promising composer between Purcell and Elgar, [whose] accidental death when only twenty-two changed for the worse the whole history of [British] music.” Listening to many of his surviving works, it is a shock to realise that he not only showed promise, but actually was a major composer. We are only today beginning to ascertain the scale of his achievements, and it will be salutary to set these in the context of his great contemporaries during this anniversary festival of music commemorating his birth.

William Davies and Peter Leech


[Note to other societies: you are welcome to use the whole or parts of this text in your own programmes, but if you do please (i) let us know, and (ii) include an acknowledgement to the Aylesbury Choral Society and this website in your programme.]

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