Fleckno [Flecknoe], Richard
(d ?London, c1678). English poet, playwright, lutenist, composer and courtier. He was a Roman Catholic priest. According to his Relation of Ten Years’ Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America (London, 1656), he travelled extensively during the 1640s and 50s. He was unsuccessful as a poet and playwright and is best remembered as the butt of two satires: Andrew Marvell’s Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome and Dryden’s MacFlecknoe.
Fleckno’s importance for the history of music lies in his two operas: Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus (London, 1654) and The Marriage of Oceanus and Brittania (London, 1659). Neither appears to have been performed and the music for both is lost. The libretto for Ariadne, published two years before Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, describes the work as ‘a dramatick piece apted for recitative musick, written and composed by Richard Fleckno’. An important preface (reprinted in Haun) gives Fleckno’s ideas on opera, acquired during visits to Genoa and Venice and three years in Rome. He mentioned Monteverdi as a model, but declined to speak further of the music ‘untill the publishing of it, as shortly I intend to do, with a Treatise of the Air of Musick, and of this particular, to shew, that as no composition seems more easy to the ignorant than it, so none is more hard to those who understand it’. The treatise was never published. The Marriage of Oceanus and Brittania described on the title-page of the libretto as ‘an Alegoricall Fiction really declaring England’s Riches, Glory, and Puissance by Sea, to be Represented in Musick, Dances, and Proper Scenes’ shows the influence of Davenant’s opera. The mixture of Italian recitative, French dance and English masque prefigured a characteristic English approach to opera for decades to come. Both librettos are well-wrought examples of their genre, showing a keen understanding of Italian opera of the 1640s. In his ‘Of a petty French lutenist in England’ (Enigmatical Characters, 1658) Fleckno railed against the music of [Denis?, Ennemond?, Jacques] Gaultier and Dufaut, claiming weak technique and a lack of variety in the playing of visiting French lutenists and denouncing the fashion among the English gentry for admiring and hiring those visitors. A canzonet by Fleckno, Go Phoebus go, was printed in Playford’s The Musical Companion (RISM 16725).
DNB (L. Stephen)
LS
D. Wing: Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed … 1641–1700 (New York, 1945–51, 2/1972–)
R. Flecknoe: ‘Of a petty French lutenist in England’, LSJ, x (1968), 33 only
E. Haun: But Hark! More Harmony: the Libretti of Restoration Opera in English (Ypsilanti, MI, 1971)
NEAL ZASLAW/SARAH ADAMS
Fleetwood Mac.
English rock group. Formed in London in 1967, the group emerged out of the 1960s blues scene. Founding members Mick Fleetwood (b Redruth, 24 June 1942; drums), John McVie (b London, 26 Nov 1942; bass) and Peter Green (b London, 29 Oct 1946; guitar and vocals) had all played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Together with Jeremy Spencer (guitar and vocals) and also later Danny Kirwan (guitar and vocals) the group enjoyed success in the UK, with four singles entering the top ten of the pop charts, including the instrumental Albatross (1968), which reached number one. In 1970 Green left the group suddenly for religious reasons; he was followed in 1971 by Spencer. Christine McVie (keyboards and vocals) joined the group in 1970. A series of personnel changes plagued the group until the McVies and Fleetwood relocated to Los Angeles and joined forces with Lindsey Buckingham (guitar and vocals) and Stevie Nicks (vocals). The reformed band released Fleetwood Mac (Reprise, 1975), which rose to the top of the US album charts, an achievement surpassed only by the group’s next album, Rumours (WB, 1977), which not only rose to number one but stayed in that position for 31 consecutive weeks. Together these two albums contained seven hit singles. Subsequent albums Tusk (WB, 1979) and Mirage (WB, 1982) also did well commercially. In 1987 Buckingham left the group, followed in 1990 by Nicks and Christine McVie. The quintet regrouped briefly in 1993 and again in 1997. While Fleetwood Mac’s music from the late 1960s was strongly influenced by American electric blues, their later music is much more pop- and folk-influenced, relying on strong songwriting, arranging and vocals. The group’s tremendous success in the mid- to late-1970s makes them one of the most important and influential bands of the decade.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Wilson: ‘Getting Back on the Road – Fleetwood Mac’s Aim for the Future’, Melody Maker (25 Oct 1969)
J. Rockwell: ‘Fleetwood Mac: 10 Years of Crisis and Comeback’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xxvii/2 (1977), 131–3
C. Crowe: ‘The True Life Confessions of Fleetwood Mac: the Long Hard Drive from British Blues to California Gold’, Rolling Stone (24 March 1977)
D. McLane: ‘Five Not So Easy Pieces: Fleetwood Mac is More than the Sum of its Parts’, Rolling Stone (7 Feb 1980) [interview]
M. Fleetwood with S. Davis: Fleetwood: My Adventures in Fleetwood Mac (New York, 1990)
JOHN COVACH
Fleischer.
German family of instrument makers. Christoffer Fleischer, lute and theorbo maker [Fleescher, Vleescher] (fl ?1622–?48) was probably of Dutch descent. None of his instruments survive. His son Hans [Johannes] Christoph(er) Fleischer (bap. Hamburg, 28 May 1638; d ?before 1692) is also known as a lute maker, but is said to have made keyboard instruments too. According to the latter’s son Johann Christof(fer) Fleischer (bap. Hamburg, 4 July 1676; d c1730), he also made a replica of a Venetian gut-strung ‘Clavicymbel’ (harpsichord). Hans Christoph’s widow married the organ and clavichord maker Johann Middelburg [Middelborg] (1648–?1710), who then ran the family workshop, in which Johann Christof and his brother Carl Conrad(t) Fleischer (bap. Hamburg, 13 Nov 1680; d 1721/2) were apprentices. From 1707 to 1709 Middelburg was in a dispute with the cabinet makers’ guild; Johann Christof and Carl Conrad joined the dispute around 1708. The plague of 1712–14 was a further setback to the business. Johann Christof and Carl Conrad ran a separate workshop between 1705 and 1708 and another from 1718 until Johann Christof’s death. Their ‘Clavicordis’ were praised by Mattheson (Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, i Hamburg, 1713, 263 and 342) for their accurate though costly workmanship and their bright resonance. In 1718 Johann Christof advertised two instruments of his own invention, the ‘Lauten-Clavessin’ (lute-harpsichord) and the ‘Theorben-Flügel’ (theorbo-harpsichord). Surviving instruments by him include a harpsichord (1710) and five clavichords (1722–9). His clavichords of 1722 and 1723 are the earliest surviving examples of the new, larger type of clavichord that became associated with Hamburg makers in the 18th century (see Clavichord, §4). Two harpsichords by Carl Conrad have been preserved, dated 1710 (see illustration) and 1720. Another may be a harpsichord, converted into a piano, that was auctioned at Sotheby’s in November 1995, which certainly came from the Fleischer workshop.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BoalchM
LutgendorffGL
J.H. van der Meer: ‘Beiträge zum Cembalobau, im deutschen Sprachgebiet bis 1700’, Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, (1966), 103–33
J. Bracker: ‘Die Instrumentenbauerfamilie Fleischer in Hamburg’, Beiträge zur deutschen Volks- und Altertumskunde, xxi (1982), 45–53
ALEXANDER PILIPCZUK
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