Arnold, Samuel - The Castle of Andalusia

Facsimile: Printed score, John Bland (1782)
MS libretto, The Huntington Library LA605
Introduction by Robert Hoskins

In its day The Castle of Andalusia by Dr Samuel Arnold (1740–1802), with its gothic sentimentality and wild romantic action, was a novelty. The castle, the forest, the cave-in-rock, the bandits, mistaken identities and sudden recognitions were to become the stock-in-trade of the Romantic movement and its poetry. In this facsimile edition, first published by John Bland in 1782, Robert Hoskins introduces us to a composer, who, like his near contemporaries Arne, Boyce, Storace and Hook (to name a small selection) had no interest in the extremes represented by the fire and languor of the Italians, the sophisticated artificialities of the French or the intellectual and emotional complexities of the Germans. The English style was fresh and direct, lyrical and ‘airy’ and its most characteristic manifestation is in entertainment music.