Sooner and Later: Compositions in canon form for Flute Ensemble

Composer(s)

Antonio Caldara: (b Venice, ?1671; d Vienna, 28 Dec 1736). Italian composer. He was one of the most prolific among an unusually productive generation of composers and contributed to the rapid evolution of Italian vocal music, carrying its late stage to Vienna and there effecting an amalgam of Italian and German styles.

Franz Schubert: (b Vienna, 31 Jan 1797; d Vienna, 19 Nov 1828). Austrian composer. The only canonic Viennese composer native to Vienna, he made seminal contributions in the areas of orchestral music, chamber music, piano music and, most especially, the German lied. The richness and subtlety of his melodic and harmonic language, the originality of his accompaniments, his elevation of marginal genres and the enigmatic nature of his uneventful life have invited a wide range of readings of both man and music that remain among the most hotly debated in musical circles.

Frédéric Chopin: (b Żelazowa Wola, nr Warsaw, 1 March 1810; d Paris, 17 Oct 1849). Polish composer and pianist. He combined a gift for melody, an adventurous harmonic sense, an intuitive and inventive understanding of formal design and a brilliant piano technique in composing a major corpus of piano music. One of the leading 19th-century composers who began a career as a pianist, he abandoned concert life early; but his music represents the quintessence of the Romantic piano tradition and embodies more fully than any other composer’s the expressive and technical characteristics of the instrument.

Georg Philipp Telemann (b Magdeburg, 14 March 1681; d Hamburg, 25 June 1767). German composer. The most prolific composer of his time, he was widely regarded as Germany’s leading composer during the first half of the 18th century. He remained at the forefront of musical innovation throughout his career, and was an important link between the late Baroque and early Classical styles. He also contributed significantly to Germany’s concert life and the fields of music publishing, music education and theory.

(b Reims or Machault, Champagne, c1300; d Reims, April 1377). French composer and poet.

Guillaume Dufay
(b Beersel, ?5 Aug 1397; d Cambrai, 27 Nov 1474). French composer and theorist. He was acknowledged by his contemporaries as the leading composer of his day. He held positions in many of the musical centres of Europe and his music was copied and performed virtually everywhere that polyphony was practised.

Henry Purcell (ii)
(b ?Westminster, London, ?10 Sept 1659; d Westminster, London, 21 Nov 1695).
Composer and organist, son of (1) Henry Purcell (i). He was one of the most important 17th-century composers and one of the greatest of all English composers.

(b c1510–15; d 1555/6). South Netherlandish composer. One of the most prolific figures of the early 16th century, he is best known for his sacred music, particularly the souterliedekens, polyphonic settings of the psalms in Dutch.

Johann Sebastian Bach: (b Eisenach, 21 March 1685, d Leipzig; 28 July 1750). Composer and organist. The most important member of the family, his genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful and original inventiveness, technical mastery and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. While it was in the former capacity, as a keyboard virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that by the end of the 18th century earned him a unique historical position. His musical language was distinctive and extraordinarily varied, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, the styles and the general achievements of his own and earlier generations and leading on to new perspectives which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.
The first authentic posthumous account of his life, with a summary catalogue of his works, was put together by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil J.F. Agricola soon after his death and certainly before March 1751 (published as Nekrolog, 1754). J.N. Forkel planned a detailed Bach biography in the early 1770s and carefully collected first-hand information on Bach, chiefly from his two eldest sons; the book appeared in 1802, by when the Bach Revival had begun and various projected collected editions of Bach’s works were underway; it continues to serve, together with the 1754 obituary and the other 18th-century documents, as the foundation of Bach biography.

Johannes Brahms: (b Hamburg, 7 May 1833; d Vienna, 3 April 1897). German composer. The successor to Beethoven and Schubert in the larger forms of chamber and orchestral music, to Schubert and Schumann in the miniature forms of piano pieces and songs, and to the Renaissance and Baroque polyphonists in choral music, Brahms creatively synthesized the practices of three centuries with folk and dance idioms and with the language of mid- and late 19th-century art music. His works of controlled passion, deemed reactionary and epigonal by some, progressive by others, became well accepted in his lifetime.

Vierne, Louis(-Victor-Jules)
(b Poitiers, 8 Oct 1870; d Paris, 2 June 1937). French organist and composer.

Born blind with a congenital cataract condition, Vierne's sight was partially restored at the age of six and he was able to recognize people, see objects at a short distance and read large type at close range. At the age of six he began the study of solfège and piano. In 1880 the family moved to Paris from Lille (where they had lived because of his father's work as a journalist) and the following year the young Vierne was enrolled as a boarding student in the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles. There he pursued a plan of general studies that also included solfège, harmony, piano and violin. César Franck, who often served on juries at the school, advised him to study the organ and in the autumn of 1886 Vierne began lessons with Louis Lebel. From 1888 Vierne studied harmony privately with Franck and attended his organ class at the Paris Conservatoire. He entered the organ class as a full-time student either in October 1890 (as Vierne states in his memoirs) or in January 1891 (according to Widor's class notes). Franck died in November of that year and was succeeded by Widor. Within a year Vierne was serving as Widor's assistant at the Conservatoire, teaching the auditors, and from 1892 was Widor's substitute at St Sulpice. After four years in the organ class he won a first prize in July 1894.

Ludwig van Beethoven: (b Bonn, bap. 17 Dec 1770; d Vienna, 26 March 1827). German composer. His early achievements, as composer and performer, show him to be extending the Viennese Classical tradition that he had inherited from Mozart and Haydn. As personal affliction – deafness, and the inability to enter into happy personal relationships – loomed larger, he began to compose in an increasingly individual musical style, and at the end of his life he wrote his most sublime and profound works. From his success at combining tradition and exploration and personal expression, he came to be regarded as the dominant musical figure of the 19th century, and scarcely any significant composer since his time has escaped his influence or failed to acknowledge it. For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music.

Luigi Cherubini: (b Florence, 8/14 Sept 1760; d Paris, 15 March 1842). Italian, composer, conductor, teacher, administrator, theorist, and music publisher, active in France. He took French citizenship, probably in 1794, and was a dominant figure in Parisian musical life for half a century. He was a successful opera composer during the Revolutionary period, and had comparable success with religious music from the beginning of the Restoration. He was made director of the Paris Conservatoire and consolidated its pre-eminent position in music education in Europe.

He began his career as a classical musician, developing a broad activity in chamber music and orchestra, in institutions such as the Orchestral Academy of the Barenboim-Said Foundation, the Youth Orchestra of Andalusia, and the European Union Youth Wind Orchestra. He studied with Antonio Salguero, Piotr Szymyslik, and Israel Sánchez, among others, obtaining his diploma in Classical Music with the highest distinctions.

Michael Praetorius
(b Creuzburg an der Werra, nr Eisenach, ? 15 Feb 1571; d Wolfenbüttel, 15 Feb 1621). German composer, theorist and organist. He was the most versatile and wide-ranging German composer of his generation and one of the most prolific, especially of works based on Protestant hymns. He is also important as a theorist, notably through his Syntagma musicum.

Nino Rota: (b Milan, 3 Dec 1911; d Rome, 10 April 1979). Italian composer. He grew up surrounded by music: his mother Ernesta Rinaldi was a pianist and the daughter of the composer Giovanni Rinaldi (1840–95). At the age of eight he was already composing, and in 1923 a well-received performance of his oratorio L’infanzia di S Giovanni Battista established him as a child prodigy. In the same year he entered the Milan Conservatory, where his teachers included Giacomo Orefice. After a brief period of study with Pizzetti, he moved to Rome (1926), where he studied with Casella, and took his diploma at the Conservatorio di S Cecilia three years later. On the advice of Toscanini he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (1931–2) with Rosario Scalero (composition) and Fritz Reiner (conducting). He formed a friendship with Aaron Copland and discovered American popular song, cinema and the music of Gershwin: all these elements were grafted on to his passion for Italian popular song and operetta.

On his return to Italy, barely into his twenties, Rota attracted the attention of audiences and critics with a large body of music, predominantly chamber and orchestral works. At a time of open warfare between innovators and traditionalists (sustained by the mood established by the Fascist régime favouring warfare), Rota’s style, in part building on the example of Malipiero, displayed original characteristics. Works such as Balli (1932), the Viola Sonata (1934–5), the Quintet (1935), the Violin Sonata (1936–7) and his first two symphonies (1935–9 and 1937–41) show Rota’s trust in an unbroken link with the music of the past. This made Rota’s idiom exceptionally and uninhibitedly responsive to the widest variety of influences, supported, as it was, by a masterly technique, an elegant manner and a capacity for stylistic assimilation. His language at this time is strikingly different from the contemporary predominant directions in Italy. For example, the symphonies draw on a middle-European, Slav symphonic tradition (Tchaikovsky, but possibly Dvořák even more so), probably absorbed during his American period and already infused with cinematic mood. He contributed to the renewal of Italian music with a body of work that has an immediacy of gesture and is rooted in a rare lyricism, built on harmonic languages, formal structures and a rhythmic and melodic idiom which sound distinctive and original. Gianandrea Gavazzeni commented of the Sonata for flute and harp (1937) that he heard ‘the voice of an Italian Ravel, archaic, intimate, the voice of one who has invented a style that did not exist before’.

After World War II, Rota’s critical fortunes altered considerably when, in the wake of the post-Webern movement, his work was increasingly judged to be anachronistic. This opinion was strengthened by his growing establishment as a film composer, held by many to be insignificant and uninvolved in the contemporary music scene. He continued, however, to write music for the concert hall and the opera house, with a constant cross-fertilization between the two areas: for a European composer this was an oblique, pioneering approach. In film music he used his eclectic inclinations and treated the boundaries of the film medium as a challenge, so producing some of the finest music of the genre.

He became a lecturer at Bari Conservatory (1939), and later its director (1950–77). In 1942, Rota began his long collaboration with the Lux Film company, directed by, among others, Guido M. Gatti and Fedele D’Amico. He created the music for around 60 films in ten years by such directors as Renato Castellani (Mio figlio professore, Sotto il sole di Roma), Mario Soldati (Le miserie del signor Travet), Alberto Lattuada (Senza pietà, Anna) and Eduardo De Filippo (Napoli milionaria, Filumena Marturano). In 1952, with Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), he began an association with Fellini which lasted until the composer’s death. Of their 16 films, some achieve an extraordinary marriage of music and image, such as I vitelloni, La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, Amarcord and Il Casanova di Federico Fellini. Although it is generally thought that the director dominated the composer, the situation was more subtle and problematic as the music was required to fulfil a narrative and psychological role, frequently featured at the expense of the text itself. Fellini’s film style owes a great deal to Rota’s virtuosity, adaptability and insight. Examples include the many circus marches inspired by Julius Fučík’s Einzug der Gladiatoren and the engaging parody of Weill’s Moritat von Mackie Messer in the theme of La dolce vita. In addition, Rota’s tendency to quote, sometimes to the point of plagiarism – the theme for Gelsomina in La strada is based on the Larghetto of Dvořák’s Serenade, op.22 – was a genuine inclination which converged with Fellini’s imagery, to the point where it identified with it and lent it dignity. Rota’s film career, amounting to over 150 titles, included collaborations with Luchino Visconti (Rocco e i suoi fratelli and Il gattopardo [The Leopard]) and directors such as René Clément, Franco Zeffirelli, King Vidor, Sergei Bondarchuk, as well as on the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.

Rota composed in a wide variety of genres, writing pieces of an almost provocative simplicity. His Ariodante (1942), audaciously 19th-century in manner, was followed by works reminiscent of operetta and vaudeville, such as I due timidi (1950), La notte di un nevrastenico (1959) and the overwhelming farce Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (1955). These works show an ability to produce instant sketches which the composer himself described as the product of his familiarity with the rhythm of film-making. Another favoured genre was that of the fairy tale as in Aladino e la lampada magica(1968) and La visita meravigliosa (1970), considered perhaps his finest score for the theatre.

The most significant orchestral works are the 3 piano concertos, the Sinfonia sopra una canzone d’amore (1947), the Variazioni sopra un tema gioviale (1953), Symphony No.3 (1956–7) and several concertos for various instruments. His piano and chamber music includes many original compositions, such as the 15 Preludes or the Due Valzer sul nome di Bach for piano (1975; re-used in Casanova), the Violin Sonata (1936–7), the String Quartet (1948–54), two trios (1958 and 1973) and a nonet (1959–77). His vocal music includes the oratorio Mysterium (1962) and the rappresentazione sacra, La vita di Maria (1968–70), in which a style derived in part from the neo-madrigalist manner of such composers as Petrassi and Dallapiccola results in an operatic-sounding eclecticism, with influences filtered through Stravinsky but rooted in other Eastern European styles (Musorgsky, for example).

Rota had frequent recourse to self-borrowing, increasingly apparent in the later film music and stage works. As a whole, Rota’s work is a dense web of continual, multiple references where – in line with the composer’s declared intention – film music and art music are allowed equal dignity. As early as Il cappello di paglia di Firenze he drew together material from preceding works, but it is particularly in a masterpiece like the ballet La strada (1966) and in the opera Napoli milionaria (1977) where self-quotation becomes a point of synthesis and revelation of his essential style. His first film score for Fellini, Lo sceicco bianco, stands out as a source-composition, a model of one of Rota’s specific musical languages; other scores for Fellini as well as Il cappello di paglia, Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca and the incidental music for Much Ado about Nothing draw material from it. La strada makes use of themes from many works, including Lo sceicco bianco, Le notti di Cabiria, Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Concerto soirée and 8½, while Napoli milionaria uses quotations from Filumena Marturano, Plein soleil, La dolce vita, Rocco e i suoi fratelli and Waterloo. Rota’s uninhibited language corresponds in aesthetic terms to this flood of quotation, and the two aspects offer new definitions of such terms as ‘new’ or ‘originality’.

Paolo Agostini (or Agostino) was born around 1583 at Vallerano, near Viterbo. He became a student of Giovanni Bernardino Nanino, whose daughter he later married. He held a series of positions as organist and maestro di cappella in different churches in Rome between 1607 and 1626, when he succeeded Vincenzo Ugolini as maestro of the Cappella Giuliaìs choir in St. Peter’s Basilica. His surviving works are sacred music and he was considered a skilled writer of counterpoint, often using strict canonic techniques. The motet “Preparate corda vestra” was published in “Sacri affetti contesti da diversi eccelentissimi autori Raccolti da Francesco Sammaruco Romano A 2. A 3. A 4. è Aggiuntui (sic) nel fine le letanie della B. V. – Apud Lucam Antonium Soldum. In aedibus sancti Spiritus in Saxia. Anno. Jubbilei. 1625”…

Paul Hindemith
(b Hanau, nr Frankfurt, 16 Nov 1895; d Frankfurt, 28 Dec 1963). German composer, theorist, teacher, viola player and conductor. The foremost German composer of his generation, he was a figure central to both music composition and musical thought during the inter-war years.

Robert Schumann: (b Zwickau, Saxony, 8 June 1810; d Endenich, nr Bonn, 29 July 1856). German composer and music critic. While best remembered for his piano music and songs, and some of his symphonic and chamber works, Schumann made significant contributions to all the musical genres of his day and cultivated a number of new ones as well. His dual interest in music and literature led him to develop a historically informed music criticism and a compositional style deeply indebted to literary models. A leading exponent of musical Romanticism, he had a powerful impact on succeeding generations of European composers.

Théodore-César Salomé (20 January 1834 – 26 July 1896) was a French organist and composer.

Thomas Augustine Arne: (b London, 12 March 1710; d London, 5 March 1778). English composer, violinist and keyboard player. He was the most significant figure in 18th-century English theatre music.

Arne inherited his first name from his grandfather and father, London upholsterers and undertakers and office holders in the London Company of Upholders. As a child he adopted the middle name Augustine, apparently to show his allegiance to the Roman Catholic faith of his mother, Anne. His father rented a large house in King Street, Covent Garden, where he ran a thriving business, the Two Crowns and Cushions, although he apparently allowed his own father and brother Edward to die in debtors’ prisons. According to Charles Burney, who became his apprentice in 1744, Arne was sent to Eton, where a passion for music soon became evident: he tormented his fellow pupils ‘night and day’ by playing the recorder, practised the spinet secretly at night during the holidays, ‘muffling the strings with a handkerchief’, and studied composition on his own before taking violin lessons with Michael Christian Festing; Burney wrote that Arne and Festing were both present on 12 November 1725 to hear Thomas Roseingrave win the competition for the post of organist of St George’s, Hanover Square.

The next year Arne was apprenticed for three years to a London attorney, Arthur Kynaston, but he soon abandoned the law for music. Burney wrote that Arne’s father was reconciled to the change by the chance discovery of his son playing first violin in a concert at the house of a neighbour. The opposition cannot have been strong or prolonged, for Thomas Augustine was soon teaching his younger sister Susanna and his brother Richard to sing, and his father had some hand in the company formed in 1732 to put on English operas at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket; he sold tickets for the performances and probably provided financial backing. The company began in March with John Frederick Lampe’s setting of Henry Carey’s Amelia, and followed that with an unauthorized stage production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea (17 May).

That autumn, however, the company split: Lampe remained at the Haymarket while Arne put on a production of Teraminta by Carey and John Stanley at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (20 November) – the first definite record of his theatrical activities – and his own opera Rosamond (7 March 1733), a setting of Joseph Addison’s 1707 libretto. The next season Arne put on his afterpiece setting of The Opera of Operas, or Tom Thumb the Great at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in competition with a revival at Drury Lane of Lampe’s full-length setting of the same text. Arne’s setting ran for 15 nights and his masque Dido and Aeneas also did well, running for 17 performances.

Arne’s position in the London theatre was strengthened by his sister Susanna’s marriage in April 1734 to the actor and playwright Theophilus Cibber, whose company was in residence at Drury Lane. As a result he became house composer at Drury Lane, and wrote music for a number of plays and pantomimes over the next few years. Another profitable alliance was his own marriage to the soprano Cecilia Young on 15 March 1737, despite her father’s objection to his Catholicism. He now had at his disposal the greatest tragedienne of her time (his sister) and the finest English female singer (his wife), and they contributed to his first enduring success, his setting of Milton’s 1634 masque Comus as adapted by John Dalton (1738); it held the stage beyond the end of the century. Comus exploited the current fashion for old plays, the beginnings of a pre-Romantic interest in the past, though its success also had much to do with Arne’s charming music; it was imitated by Handel in his Milton oratorio L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, written two years later.

By 1738 Arne was one of the leaders of musical life in London. That year he was one of the founder-members of the Society (later Royal Society) of Musicians, along with Handel, Boyce and Pepusch. In 1740 he was commissioned to set David Mallet and James Thomson’s masque Alfred for performance in an entertainment given by the Prince of Wales in the gardens of Cliefden (Cliveden) House, near Maidenhead. The original work seems to have contained only seven musical numbers (including ‘Rule, Britannia’), although Arne rewrote it a number of times, turning it in 1745 into an all-sung oratorio, and in 1753 into an all-sung opera. In the theatrical season 1740–41 he composed music for the Drury Lane productions of The Tempest, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, including songs such as ‘Where the bee sucks’ and ‘Under the greenwood tree’ that have never been surpassed or forgotten since they were written. Arne had another major success in spring 1742 with Congreve’s 1700 masque The Judgment of Paris, presumably inspired by the unidentified setting performed with Alfred at Cliveden in 1740.

Up to this point, Arne had worked mostly in London. But his sister took refuge in Dublin in December 1741 from the scandal surrounding the failure of her marriage to Cibber, and sang there with Handel in spring 1742, notably in the first performance of Messiah on 13 April. Handel’s success in Dublin presumably inspired Arne to try his luck there: he arrived with his wife and the tenor Thomas Lowe on 30 June and worked there for two seasons. He spent most of his time performing existing compositions, including a number of Handel oratorios, though his own oratorio The Death of Abel was first given at the Smock Alley Theatre on 18 February 1744. On his return journey in August he passed through Chester, where he met the young Charles Burney and agreed to take him to London as his apprentice without the usual fee.

Over the next few years Arne continued his work at Drury Lane, and had a hit with his setting of God bless our noble king, which was sung every night during the crisis caused by the Young Pretender’s rebellion in September 1745. His long association with London’s pleasure gardens also seems to have started that summer, when vocal music formed part of the entertainments at Vauxhall for the first time. According to Burney, Arne’s dialogue Colin and Phaebe was ‘constantly encored every night for more than three months’, and was published in September in the first collection of Vauxhall songs, Lyric Harmony; Arne’s later song collections, notably in the series Vocal Melody (1749–64), also contain many songs from the pleasure gardens.

The 1750s were not very fruitful years for Arne. David Garrick, joint patentee at Drury Lane from 1747, began to prefer other composers, and Arne had several flops, including the all-sung afterpieces Henry and Emma (1749) and Don Saverio (1750). Things came to a head when Susanna Cibber defected to Covent Garden with several other actors at the beginning of the 1750–51 season. Arne followed her and a battle ensued between the two theatres, beginning with competing productions of Romeo and Juliet put on on the same day, 28 September, with rival settings by Arne and Boyce of processional dirges at the end of the play. Arne’s dirge continued to be performed long after Boyce’s was forgotten, but in general he was no more successful at Covent Garden than at Drury Lane, and he had to put on his next major work, the all-sung opera Eliza, at the Little Theatre (1754); it was suppressed after one performance ‘by an Order from a superior Power’. He returned to Drury Lane briefly with his setting of David Mallet’s masque Britannia (1755), though in October that year he returned to Dublin with his wife, his pupil Charlotte Brent and his niece Polly Young.

It soon became apparent that Arne’s marriage was in trouble. He attributed the situation to Cecilia’s frequent illnesses, which he claimed resulted from her ‘passions, equal to raving madness’, while she complained of his repeated philandering. At the end of the season he returned to London with Charlotte Brent, now his mistress, while Cecilia remained in Dublin with Polly Young. He agreed to support her with £40 a year, though in 1758 Mrs Delany found her ‘much humbled’, teaching singing in Downpatrick: ‘She has been severely used by a bad husband, and suffered to starve, if she had not met with charitable people’. However, he evidently attempted to raise money at this period by publishing collections of his music with John Walsh, including Six Cantatas for a Voice and Instruments (1755), VIII Sonatas or Lessons for the Harpsichord (1756), VII Sonatas for Two Violins with a Thorough Bass (1757) and the scores of Britannia (1755), Alfred (1757) and Eliza (1757).

With Charlotte Brent at his disposal, Arne’s fortunes rapidly revived. After Garrick refused her services at Drury Lane, she scored major successes at Covent Garden in Arne’s revision of The Beggar’s Opera (1759), his comic operas The Jovial Crew and Thomas and Sally (both 1760), his Metastasio opera Artaxerxes and his comic opera Love in a Village (both 1762), as well as his oratorio Judith, given at Drury Lane on 27 February 1761. He finally achieved a measure of official recognition on 7 July 1759 with an Oxford doctorate. Arne could not sustain this level of success for long: his comic opera The Guardian Out-Witted only lasted for six performances in December 1764, while the lost L’olimpiade, an opera seria in Italian, failed after only two nights in April 1765. Things were not helped in 1766 by the death of his sister and the marriage of Charlotte Brent to the violinist Thomas Pinto, and in the late 1760s he found little employment at either theatre. He found some compensation in his membership of the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club and the Madrigal Society, and in the profitable concerts of catches and glees he gave from 1767, although he was evidently in financial difficulty by 1770, when Cecilia’s lawyer threatened legal action because he was £10 in arrears with his support payments.

Despite this, the last decade of Arne’s life saw the production of some fine works, including An Ode upon Dedicating a Building to Shakespeare (7 September 1769), written for Garrick’s Shakespeare festival at Stratford-upon-Avon, the masque The Fairy Prince (1771), the music for William Mason’s Greek-style tragedy Elfrida (1772) and the lost music for Mason’s tragedy Caractacus (1776), a score that according to Samuel Arnold contained ‘some of the brightest and most vigorous emanations of our English ‘Amphion’’. In October 1777 Arne was reconciled with his wife, though two months later he fell ill and made his will. He died of a ‘spasmodic complaint’, and was buried in the churchyard of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, on 15 March 1778; his effects, including ‘a remarkably fine toned double key’d harpsichord, two guitars, a mandolin, a lute and other valuable effects’, were disposed of on 8 April.

From The New Grove dictionary of Music and Musicians

William Boyce
(b London, bap. 11 Sept 1711; d London, 7 Feb 1779). English composer, organist and editor. Though formerly best known for some of his anthems and his editing of Cathedral Music (1760–73), the significant contribution he made to instrumental music, song, secular choral and theatre music in England is now widely recognized.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: (b Salzburg, 27 Jan 1756; d Vienna, 5 Dec 1791). Austrian composer, son of Leopold Mozart. His style essentially represents a synthesis of many different elements, which coalesced in his Viennese years, from 1781 on, into an idiom now regarded as a peak of Viennese Classicism. The mature music, distinguished by its melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture, is deeply coloured by Italian opera though also rooted in Austrian and south German instrumental traditions. Unlike Haydn, his senior by 24 years, and Beethoven, his junior by 15, he excelled in every medium current in his time. He may thus be regarded as the most universal composer in the history of Western music.