Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667-1752) - Concerto (I) à 7, Op.VIII (c.1717)
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Composer: Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667-1752)
Work: Concerto (I) à 7, Op.VIII (c.1717)
Performers: Barocco Vеnеziano
Painting: Gerard Hoet (1648-1733) - Concerto All’Antica
Image in high resolution: https://flic.kr/p/2mbSDZ5
Painting: Benjamin Arlaud (fl. 1707-1719) - John Christopher Pepusch (c.1713)
Image in high resolution: https://flic.kr/p/2mc18Gc
Further info: https://www.amazon.com/Pepusch-Concertos-Flute-Sonatas-Walsh/dp/B00004Y6UG
Listen free: No available
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Johann (John) Christoph (Christopher) Pepusch
(Berlin, 1667 - London, 20 July 1752)
German composer and theorist mainly active in England. He was the son of a Protestant minister and studied music theory under one Klingenberg (probably not the son of the Stettin organist Friedrich Gottlieb Klingenberg as Hawkins stated, but perhaps an elder relation), and practice under Grosse, a Saxon organist. From the age of 14 he was employed at the Prussian court, where he remained until about the end of the 17th century. According to Hawkins he resolved to leave Germany after witnessing the execution without trial of a Prussian officer accused of insubordination ‘and put himself under the protection of a government founded on better principles’. After travelling through Holland, he settled in London, where he remained for the rest of his life. His first permanent employment in London was as a viola player, and later harpsichordist at Drury Lane Theatre in 1704. In January 1708 he joined the opera company operating from Vanburgh’s Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. There he served as violinist, harpsichordist, and agent for the soprano Margherita de l’Epine. Pepusch and l’Epine were married some time between 1718 and 1723; their only son, who died in July 1739 after showing considerable talent and promise, was baptized on 9 January 1724. In July 1713 Pepusch, along with William Croft, was awarded the degree of DMus at Oxford; the music he submitted for this occasion, including the ode 'Hail, queen of islands! Hail, illustrious fair', has not survived. In 1714 Pepusch moved to Drury Lane as musical director and over the next two seasons contributed four essays in the genre of the English masque: Venus and Adonis, Myrtillo and Laura, Apollo and Daphne and The Death of Dido. In autumn 1716 he transferred to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he served as musical director for much of the next 15 years. Sometime after this date Pepusch became involved with the musical establishment of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, and he was replaced by John Ernest Galliard as musical director at Lincoln’s Inn Fields for the 1717-18 season. His presence at Cannons, Brydges’s estate near Edgware in Middlesex, can be documented from as early as December 1717, and he and George Frideric Handel were both there in April 1718.
Although he was again active at Lincoln’s Inn Fields for the 1718-19 season, Pepusch seems to have been appointed musical director at Cannons in mid-1719. Pepusch was responsible for providing music for the duke’s chapel and chamber on a regular basis until mid-1721, presumably dividing his time between Cannons and his London house. After this date the duke cut back his musical establishment in response to financial losses, but Pepusch continued to provide occasional musicians from London until 1725, when organized musical activity at Cannons seems to have ceased. In 1735, when he moved to Fetter Lane, Pepusch reorganized the Academy of Ancient Music as a seminary for the musical instruction of young boys. In December 1737 he was made organist of the Charterhouse, and in 1745 (the year before his wife died) he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to whom he delivered a paper ‘Of the Various Genera and Species of Music Among the Ancients’. Throughout his career he was much sought after as a teacher, his pupils including Boyce, Benjamin Cooke, J.H. Roman, John Travers, George Berg, James Nares and Ephraim Kellner. After his death Travers and Kellner shared with the Academy of Ancient Music their master’s extensive and important library of books and music, among which was the collection of virginal music now known as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Largely as a result of Burney’s estimate of him, posterity has tended to look upon Pepusch as an academic pedant who opposed Handel’s cause in England. He was certainly the most learned musical antiquarian of his day, but to regard him only in this way is to ignore the lively theatre music and the elegant English cantatas, which are mostly carefully composed, but by no means dry. And though the success of The Beggar’s Opera contributed to Handel’s difficulties in promoting Italian opera for the Royal Academy, there is no indication of any personal or professional enmity between the two men.