Henry Rowley Bishop (1786-1855) - Lo, here the gentle lark

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Composer: Henry Rowley Bishop (1786-1855)
Work: Lo, here the gentle lark
Performers: Susan Gritton (soprano); Musicians of the Globe; Philip Pickett

Drawing: Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) - Vauxhall Gardens (c.1784)
Image in high resolution: https://flic.kr/p/2k6umyp

Further info: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical...
Listen free:    • Bishop: The Comedy of Errors - Incidental ...  

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Sir Henry Rowley Bishop
(London, 18 November 1786 - London, 30 April 1855)

English composer. His father, Samuel Bishop, came from a Shropshire family and was a London watchmaker and later haberdasher. Such education as Henry Bishop received was gained at Dr Barrow's Academy at 8 Soho Square. By the age of 13 he was already in business as a music seller with his cousin Charles Wigley, at 6 Spring Gardens, Charing Cross, and his first songs and piano pieces were published by this firm (c1801-4). Bishop then went to Newmarket to train as a jockey, but his patron, the racehorse owner Thomas Panton, finding the boy physically unsuited to this occupation, agreed instead to pay for his musical education. He returned to London and studied harmony under Francesco Bianchi. Meanwhile his earliest dramatic compositions had appeared, with some success. He wrote the music for several ballets at the King's Theatre and Drury Lane Theatre. His first fully fledged opera, The Circassian Bride, was performed at Drury Lane on 23 February 1809; the score was destroyed when the theatre burnt down the following day, but the music had made an impact. Several notably successful works followed, including The Maniac (26 performances). As a result Bishop was offered the post of musical director at Covent Garden in 1810. There, in the next 14 years, he supervised the composition and performance of dramatic musical works of all kinds, from original operas to collections of songs interpolated in mangled versions of Shakespeare's plays. Despite the immense amount of musical hack-work that Bishop was compelled to perform in this job, he found time for several excursions to the Continent, for a season at the Dublin Theatre (1820), and for direction of many of the Lenten Oratorio concerts from 1819. In 1813 Bishop was one of the founder-members of the Philharmonic Society, and he took his turn as conductor of its concerts. He was also one of the original professors of harmony at the RAM, though he did little teaching there.

In 1824 Bishop left Covent Garden because of a dispute over his salary, and became musical director at Drury Lane. His most ambitious opera, Aladdin, was put on there in a futile attempt to steal the thunder of Weber's Oberon at the rival house. Shortly after this he was engaged to succeed Tom Cooke as ‘director and composer’ to Vauxhall Gardens, in an effort to revive the fading popularity of the resort; he continued to write theatre music on a regular basis until 1840. Meanwhile in 1833 he was awarded a prize by the Manchester Gentlemen's Glee Club for his glee Where shall we make her a grave? and in the following year the Philharmonic Society commissioned and performed his cantata The Seventh Day. He applied for, but failed to secure, the post of organist of St George's, Windsor (1835), and the Gresham Professorship of Music (1837). In 1839 he took the BMus degree at Oxford. In 1841 he was elected to the Reid Professorship at Edinburgh University, but he resigned in 1843, having given a total of two lectures. From 1840 to 1848 he was the principal conductor of the Ancient Concerts. He was knighted on 1 June 1842 on the instigation of Prince Albert. In 1848 he was appointed to the chair of music at Oxford in succession to Crotch, and in 1853 he was awarded the DMus for his ode on the installation of the Earl of Derby as chancellor. Bishop was twice married, first, on 30 April 1809, to the singer Elizabeth Sarah Lyon (1787-1831), by whom he had two sons and a daughter, and second, on 9 July 1831, to Anna Riviere (1810-84), another singer, who bore him two daughters and a son, but left him for Bochsa in 1839. During his later years Bishop almost ceased to compose, but he edited a number of works, including Handel's chamber duets and cantatas (for the Handel Society) and Lord Mornington's glees. He died after an operation to cure the cancer from which he had long suffered.