John Weldon (composer)

John Weldon (born January 19, 1676 in Chichester , † May 7, 1736 in London ) was an English composer and organist .

Life

john Welden began his musical career as a choirboy in Eton before he was personally tutored by Henry Purcell . In 1694 he was hired as an organist in the New College of Oxford University . He was soon known through his talent as an organist and his first compositional work (setting Masquen to music ). In 1701 he went to London to the competition musical setting for William Congreve's libretto The Judgment of Paris (German: The Judgment of Paris ) to participate. Despite the competition committee, which was not impartial, he succeeded in asserting himself against opponents such as Daniel Purcell , the younger brother of Henry Purcell, John Eccles and Gottfried Finger thanks to his more modern compositional style . In the same year he was named gentleman of the Chapel Royal .

After his successful establishment as a composer in London, he settled there in order to write music for the theater from then on. Until the 1960s, it was believed that the music for The Tempest , a work by Shakespeare , could have been written by Henry Purcell. Apparently it was a commissioned work by Weldon for the Drury Lane Theater in 1712. In his personal style you can see clear influences of Henry Purcell, but he is also influenced by Italian and “modern” French forms of composition, which were very popular at the time.

In the last years of his life he devoted himself almost exclusively to church music, including commissions from the Chapel Royal, where he found a job as an organist under the direction of John Blow . In 1715 he was appointed second composer under William Croft . From 1714 he was also organist in the two London churches of Saint Bride's on Fleet Street and Saint Martin in the Fields. He died in London on May 7, 1736 and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral in Covent Garden .

Operas

• The Judgment of Paris (May 6, 1701)
• Orpheus and Euridice (around 1701)
• Britain's Happines (1704)
• The Tempest (1712)

Web links

• Sheet music and audio files by John Weldon (composer) in the International Music Score Library Project

source

• Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicans, J. Fuller Maitland, 1914, Macmillan and Co. Ltd., pp. 491/492