The Enraged Musician

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The Enraged Musician from 1741 is entirely dedicated to noise, and the victim of all the noise is a professional musician who can be identified as Pietro Castrucci, who is none other than Handel's first violin in the orchestra of the Italian Opera. He was throwing up the window and swearing at everybody outside. The engraving shows the right of those on the streets, true Londoners, to make the noise they will. The street is alive, it’s chaotic and graceful. There is somebody hammering pewter, there is somebody grinding knives, there is somebody beating a drum, there is somebody singing, the church bells are ringing in the background, and he cannot hear himself think. There is a ballad singer next to his window, and a playbill on the wall announces The Beggar's Opera, and there's a parrot as well. This engraving is signaling the end of the Italian opera era and the fashion for imported culture, the noise of London and its Londoners silencing the old fashioned Italian violinist and all that he represents.

The Beggar's Opera was playing at Drury Lane on the night of November 24, 1741; the play ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time [stagebeauty, 2007]. The Beggar’s opera with its lower-class criminal characters offered plain English and familiar folk tunes and it was a brilliant idea, the ballad opera, it was guaranteed to appeal to the working class and to alienate those in power in the 18th century England [Olsen, 1999, p.151].

It’s clear that Culture in the 18th century London was being imposed by nobility, the uprising middle class and its fashions, a period where English traditions were set aside to give way to imported composers, imported singers and why not, an imported King. Hogarth was a critic of all this scene.

- Hogarth, William (1833). Anecdotes of William Hogarth. London: J. R. Nichols and Son.

- Eck, Caroline van, James McAllister, and Renée van de Vall (1995). The Question Of Style In Philosophy And The Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

- Black, Jeremy (2005). Culture in 18th- Century England: A subject of taste, p.32. London: Hambledon and London

- “Stage Beauty”. Stagebeauty.net. N.p., 2007. Web. 16 Dec. 2016

- Finberg, Melinda C. (2015). The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660 - 1789. P.1216. Edited by Day, Gary and Lynch, Jack. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

- Conlin, Jonathan (2013). The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, p.12. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

- McCleave, Sarah Yuill (2013). Dance in Handel’s London Operas, p.70. University of Rochester.

- Burrows, Donald (2010). Handel, 2nd ed. p.1388, 1392. New York: Oxford University Press.

- Coke, David and Alan Borg (2011). Vauxhall Gardens. New Haven: Yale University Press.

-"Vauxhall Gardens". Vauxhallgardens.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 26 Dec. 2016.

- Olsen, Kirstin (1999). Daily Life In 18Th-Century England. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

- Uglow, Jenny (2011). William Hogarth: A life and a World. Faber & Faber.