Waart, Edo de. 56 Wachmann, Eduard 56
Weede [Wiedefeld], Robert
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Weede [Wiedefeld], Robert(b Baltimore, 22 Feb 1903; d Walnut Creek, CA, 9 July 1972). American singer and actor. He began his stage career at the Radio City Music Hall in 1933 before making his Metropolitan Opera début as Tonio in Pagliacci in 1937. He continued to appear on operatic stages, particularly at the Metropolitan and the San Francisco Opera, for four decades. He created the role of the Emperor of Haiti, Jean Jacques Dessalines, in William Grant Still's Troubled Island (1949) for the City Center Opera Company (later New York City Opera). He also appeared in concert and recital, and was a soloist on the ‘Great Moments in Music’ radio programme from 1942 to 1946. It is as Tony, the lead role in Loesser's Broadway musical The Most Happy Fella (1956), that Weede is best remembered; he regarded the vocal technique that it required to be equal to that of any opera. He subsequently appeared on Broadway in Milk and Honey (1961) and Cry for Us All (1970). One of the finest American baritones of the century, Weede had the ability and flexibility to adapt his voice successfully to both operatic and musical theatre roles without surrendering to the potential trappings of either style and the high standards which he established have been recognized as signposts for succeeding generations of American singers. With a large, well-trained voice, his diction, articulation and pitch were virtually unequalled. Even in his later years, his voice possessed a strength and quality which has earned him the respect of singers ever since. WILLIAM A. EVERETT, LEE SNOOK
Weedon, Bert(b London, 10 May 1921). English electric guitarist. A former dance band musician and featured soloist with both Ted Heath and Mantovani, Weedon was the first Briton to incorporate into his style the innovations of American country and western, boogie-woogie and rock and roll guitarists. In 1943 he accompanied Stephane Grappelli. During the 1950s he played on recording sessions for almost all of the aspirant British rock singers and made a series of influential recordings between 1959 and 1961, including Guitar Boogie Shuffle, Big Beat Boogie and Twelfth Street Rag. Weedon's example was acknowledged by such younger guitarists as Hank Marvin (of the Shadows) and he influenced many amateur musicians with his best-selling books Play in a Day Guide to Modern Guitar Playing (London, 1987) and Play Every Day, the Bert Weedon Way, (London, 1963) which were translated into several languages. Although his approach became outmoded by the blues-inflected innovations of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, Weedon continued to make albums of guitar pieces, such as Rockin' at the Roundhouse (1971) and 22 Golden Guitar Greats (1976). He also made more than 5000 radio and television broadcasts during his career. DAVE LAING Weelkes, Thomas(b ?Elsted, Sussex, ? bap. 25 Oct 1576; d London, bur. 1 Dec 1623). English composer. He was one of the most gifted of the madrigalists, and a major composer of English church music. 1. Life. 2. Madrigals. 3. Church music. 4. Assessment. WORKS BIBLIOGRAPHY DAVID BROWN Weelkes, Thomas 1. Life.Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that Weelkes was the son of John Weeke, rector of Elsted. The earliest known fact concerning Weelkes is the publication of his first volume of madrigals in 1597, the preface of which reveals that he was a very young man at the time of their composition; this seems to confirm that he was born in the middle or later 1570s. By 1597 he had enjoyed the ‘undeserved love, and liberall good will’ of George Phillpot, who lived at Compton, near Winchester. He also passed some time in the service of the courtier Edward Darcye before being appointed, towards the end of 1598, organist of Winchester College at a salary of 13s. 4d. a quarter, with board and lodging. He remained at the college for three or four years, and during this period composed his finest madrigals. These appeared in two volumes (1598, 1600), of which the second (works for five and six voices) is one of the most important volumes in the English madrigal tradition. He also contributed a splendid madrigal to the collection The Triumphes of Oriana (RISM 160116). Weelkes freely admitted that he had no gifts other than his musical ones and it seems that he felt unsettled at Winchester. At some time between October 1601 and October 1602 he joined the choir of Chichester Cathedral as organist and informator choristarum, being also appointed to one of the lucrative lay-clerkships of Bishop Sherborne’s foundation. Weelkes’s early years at Chichester were both prosperous and promising. Besides accommodation and other gratuities, he received £15 2s. 4d. per annum. On 13 July 1602 he was awarded the BMus degree from New College, Oxford, and on 20 February 1603 married Elizabeth Sandham, the daughter of a wealthy Chichester merchant, by whom he had at least three children. On the title-page of his fourth and last volume of madrigals (1608) he described himself as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, but his name does not appear in the records of the chapel itself, and he can have been at most a Gentleman Extraordinary. It is possible that by this time Weelkes’s personal conduct was giving cause for concern. Though he does not at first seem to have been guilty of the more blatant acts of unruliness, indiscipline and neglect of duty for which certain of his colleagues were periodically reproved, he was charged in 1609 with unauthorized absence throughout the whole of the bishop’s visitation. Shepherd (1980) has cautioned against assuming too readily that Weelkes’s personal decline had begun as early as 1611, when the cathedral’s chapter acts appear to indicate that he was not giving full satisfaction as a choirmaster. Nevertheless, in 1613 he was charged with being drunk in public, and by 1616 his drunkenness had become habitual and was a public scandal, for he was reported to the bishop as being ‘noted and famed for a comon drunckard and notorious swearer & blasphemer’. The bishop refused to tolerate this behaviour any longer, and on 16 January 1617 Weelkes was dismissed from his post as organist and informator choristarum, though he still retained his Sherborne clerkship. Despite this punishment, there was still no improvement in his conduct, for in 1619 it was reported that he would dyvers tymes & very often come so disguised eyther from the Taverne or Ale house into the quire as is muche to be lamented, for in these humoures he will bothe curse & sweare most dreadfully, & so profane the service of God … and though he hath bene often tymes admonished … to refrayne theis humors and reforme hym selfe, yett he daylye continuse the same, & is rather worse than better therein. In September 1622 Weelkes’s wife died. By this time he was again employed as organist, though the records make it clear that his service to the cathedral was very erratic. It seems that he was spending a good deal of time in London, and it was at the house of a friend, Henry Drinkwater of St Bride’s parish, that he made his will on 30 November 1623. This included a substantial legacy of 50s. to Drinkwater for meat, drink and lodging. The next day he was buried at St Bride’s. Weelkes, Thomas 2. Madrigals.It is known that Weelkes’s musical education began in 1586; thus his style was formed while English music was in transition. From the beginning he would have studied the older polyphonic technique, Flemish in origin, which was still used magnificently by Byrd, but he would also have become increasingly familiar with the Italian madrigal, and have witnessed the subsequent adoption of the form by Morley. Yet, despite the fact that Weelkes was obviously indebted to Morley, he did not in his first collection, Madrigals to 3. 4. 5. & 6. Voyces (1597), slip into the facile elegance which Morley commanded so easily. The three-voice madrigals are the most interesting works in the collection and reveal an inclination to organic counterpoint which contrasts sharply with Morley’s more decorative network of voices. Weelkes often achieved a far greater sense of growth within each paragraph than Morley. He inserted triple-rhythm sections into some duple-time madrigals to clarify the structural divisions; more important still, he was already employing long-range repetitive procedures for musical integration. Besides using literal repetitions in unconventional places, he also employed varied repetitions, relationships between the main thematic points, and the progressive evolution either of thematic points or whole sections. The newness of this volume is displayed most obviously in Cease sorrowes now, whose radical pathos and chromaticism introduced a new expressive experience into English composition. The four-voice works come closer to canzonets, though an admirable work like Three virgin nimphes displays a contrapuntal strength owing as much to the native English tradition as to imported Italian manners. The canzonet structure emerges explicitly in the sometimes clumsy five-voice madrigals. Cohen has revealed that the texts and musical ideas of these were drawn from Salamone Rossi’s Primo libro delle canzonette a tre voci (Venice, 1589). The more controlled and varied counterpoint in some of the six-voice works foreshadows the sonorous vigour of the best of Weelkes’s later madrigals. In his second volume, Balletts and Madrigals to Five Voyces (1598), Weelkes turned to the other closed madrigalian form that Morley had introduced into England. Weelkes lacked Morley’s light touch and capacity for fleet counterpoint; instead he brought to the ballett a more studied brilliance, sharper contrasts, a higher thematic concentration and wider expressive range, shown at its best in Harke all ye lovely saints above, one of the most attractive pieces in the English madrigal repertory. The more expansive balletts are generally less successful, for the form’s epigrammatic wit was undermined by the substitution of amiable canzonet-like counterpoint for the pithiness of the typical homophonic ballett verse. Weelkes confessed that the volume had been ‘not a little hastened’, and this is apparent in the variable quality of the balletts. The madrigals are more consistent works in which Weelkes further developed his contrapuntal style, though employing thematic relationships less than in the earlier volume. Instead, an orderly balancing of sections, each clearly defined in manner, was frequently used to shape structures which are more taut than those of the rather sprawling three-voice works of the 1597 volume. One madrigal, Sweet hart arise, is founded upon the main thematic points of Byrd’s Laudate pueri, further evidence of Weelkes’s association with the native English tradition in his madrigalian compositions. The trends of Weelkes’s first two volumes find splendid fulfilment in his Madrigals of 5. and 6. Parts (1600). Here his counterpoint shows further concentration and enrichment, and is purged of its more facile imitations of Morley. The peak of contrapuntal concentration is reached in the concluding sections of Like two proud armies and When Thoralis delights to walke (and also of the ‘Oriana’ madrigal, As Vesta was, from Latmos hill descending), each of which employs a melodic point so constructed that, if deployed at the unison or octave, it produces a point-saturated texture, requiring little or no free melodic material; in addition, in a gigantic augmentation in the bass, the point determines the harmonic structure. Weelkes’s recognition of the strongly instrumental idiom of his counterpoint is confessed on his title-page: ‘apt for the viols and voices’. His various textural and repetitive devices for structural articulation are now supplemented by embryonic ritornello procedures. Some pieces, notably Lady the birds right fairely and A sparow-hauck proud, seem to recall an earlier English manner, but others, such as Like two proud armies, with its elaborate bass roulades on ‘thund’ring’ and its monolithic harmonic manner, have an almost Baroque extroversion. Yet the finest madrigals are those in which Weelkes’s vivid imagination is fired by a text of contrasting images or feelings. This happens pre-eminently in O care thou wilt dispatch mee and Thule the period of cosmographie. The former is a kind of tragic ballett where the juxtaposition of sharply contrasting musical material matches the daring combination of opposing imagery in the poems of Weelkes’s contemporary, John Donne; the latter madrigal sets a text whose catalogue of wonders reported from the newly discovered parts of the world prompts a kaleidoscopic succession of musical images which are contrasted with the even greater miracle of the poet himself ‘whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry’. Weelkes’s last volume, Ayeres or Phantasticke Spirites for Three Voices (1608), is a disappointment. There is little genuine organic counterpoint in it; often two of the three voices move in 3rds or 6ths, and the melodic interest is, as the title ‘ayre’ suggests, firmly in the top voice. To compensate for the loss of natural growth that counterpoint affords, Weelkes made much use of extended sequences, often on very short melodic fragments. Even so, all these ayres are short, and many are simple binary structures. While the two Italian-texted works and Aye me alas (the best piece in the volume) are completely madrigalian, others, like Strike it up tabor and Come sirrah Jacke hoe, have a strongly English flavour in the sturdy vigour both of their music and their lyrics, which sometimes have clear topical references; indeed, some may have been occasional pieces. Weelkes appended to the volume a fine six-voice elegy on Morley, Death hath deprived me of my dearest friend; two other elegies had appeared in his earlier volumes. Weelkes, Thomas 3. Church music.It is impossible to date any of Weelkes’s church music precisely, though it seems reasonable to assume that most, if not all of it, was composed after he had moved to Chichester. Apart from two pieces included in Leighton’s Teares or Lamentacions (RISM 16147), none of it was published in Weelkes’s lifetime. One of the Leighton pieces is, in fact, a consort song, and two of Weelkes’s full ‘anthems’, O Jonathan and When David heard, are really sacred madrigals, the latter ranking among his finest compositions (see illustration). The range of Weelkes’s full anthems, both in style and quality, is very wide. The outstanding ones among the more overtly polyphonic are O Lord, arise and Weelkes’s only setting of a Latin text, Laboravi in gemitu meo. In their consistent counterpoint, leisurely unfolding, more archaic approach to dissonance, and absence of internal structural relationships, these contrast sharply with the three anthems that combine an English text with a recurring Latin acclamation, set to identical or related music. Brett has reinforced the point that a number of Weelkes’s full ‘anthems’ were almost certainly composed for extra-liturgical, even secular occasions, and this may well be true of these three. In two, Gloria in excelsis Deo. Sing, my soul, to God and Alleluia. I heard a voice, this produces a ternary structure, but in the third, Hosanna to the Son of David, the acclamation also appears in the middle of the piece, thus recalling the developing ritornello techniques of certain of Weelkes’s madrigals of 1600, notably Like two proud armies. In these three works he aimed at a special brilliance and forcefulness which achieves maximum cogency in the concentrated paragraphs of Hosanna, one of the most sonorous and powerful pieces in the English repertory. Alleluia is unique in that it is the only anthem of the time to have survived in both a full and a verse form. Weelkes appears to have devoted more energies to the verse anthem, perhaps because the form permitted extended composition with smaller and less expert vocal forces than were required for his best full anthems; thus the verse anthem would have suited well the limited resources of the Chichester Cathedral choir. In general Weelkes’s choruses are briefer and simpler than those of either Byrd or Gibbons, and rarely incline, except in some verses for tenor or bass soloists, to the more mobile declamation that Gibbons exploited. His real model was Byrd, and his most tangible debt is heard in the measured tread of most of his solo lines, with their tendency to expand a duple-time opening into a triple-rhythm continuation. Despite the normal expressive restraint of Weelkes’s verse anthems, their structural practices are markedly progressive, developing further the integrating techniques already noted in his other music. In addition to using common material in two consecutive sections, and relating the openings of two or more other sections, Weelkes often established particularly strong relationships between his choruses. Sometimes he used variation procedures, as in Give ear, O Lord, which is perhaps the most successful exploration in all his anthems of a personal emotional expression; at other times he exploited literal repetition, as in the identical first and last of the three choruses of Give the king thy judgements, O God, one of his finest verse anthems. The most wide-ranging in expression of all is Christ rising, which owes a material debt to Byrd’s setting of the same text, yet paradoxically is the only one that reflects something of the world of the madrigal. Among the major composers of the time, Weelkes wrote the greatest number of Anglican services. Most are for Evensong, though both of the first two include an offertory, the only services of the time to do so. Six are verse services, the other four are full. Like Weelkes’s verse anthems, they are restrained in expression, yet show marked variety both in character and in the deployment of the forces required for each. Most of Weelkes’s services relate their separate movements by head-motifs and/or tail-motifs, sometimes making an entire Gloria common to two canticles. In the First Service such identities also occur in the main body of each movement in an intricate network of relationships which makes this the most intensively integrated of all Weelkes’s works. The most attractive service is the fourth, ‘for Trebles’, which uses the Latin acclamation from Weelkes’s anthem Alleluia. I heard a voice to set the second half of the Gloria of Nunc dimittis. Other services also have material relationships with anthems, notably the five-voice Service, which has brief sections in common with O how amiable and All people clap your hands, and the seven-voice service which shares two passages with O Lord, grant the king a long life. This last service is the most expansive of all, and owes a clear debt to Byrd’s Great Service, which it emulates in both scale and achievement. The only other service to approach it in size is that ‘in medio chori’, for which Weelkes composed some three-voice sections for a group of singers placed between the choir stalls in addition to the normal soloists and chorus.
4. Assessment.Weelkes’s few instrumental works are of little importance. The consort music is consistently grave in character; the most important pieces are the two In Nomine settings for five viols, one of which is specially notable for its highly dissonant opening imitation. As a vocal composer Weelkes’s main deficiencies were a lack of response to the sound of words themselves, and uneven melodic invention. As a madrigalist he could not match Wilbye’s ability for making his individual lines grow around the verbal phrase, and he lacked that composer’s sensitive ear for the textural variety which may enhance the poetic shadings of the text; nor did he share Gibbons’s mastery of vocal declamation. Weelkes’s great strength lay in the vivid inventiveness of his very calculated musical imagery, and the commanding brilliance of a fully developed contrapuntal technique whose roots are more English than Italian. These features were evolved in his madrigals and were extended in the best of the full anthems, even though the more sensational imagery of the madrigals is absent. Despite the more restrained manner of the services and verse anthems, the structural enterprise of his other music is equally evident in them, and there is constant resourcefulness in the way each work is laid out. For imaginative brilliance, sonorous counterpoint applied to majestic utterance, and capacity for broad musical thinking, Weelkes is unsurpassed by any of his English contemporaries. Weelkes, Thomas WORKSservicesall incomplete
other sacred vocalanthems unless otherwise stated
madrigals
other vocal
instrumental
Weelkes, Thomas BIBLIOGRAPHYKermanEM Le HurayMR ReeseMR H. Chitty: ‘Winchester College: the Organist and the Queristers’ Master, 1541–1607’, The Wykehamist, no.523 (1913), 215–17 E.H. Fellowes: ‘Thomas Weelkes’, PMA, xlii (1915–16), 117–43 F. Bridge: Twelve Good Musicians from Henry Bull to Henry Purcell (London and New York, 1920) E.H. Fellowes: English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632 (Oxford, 1920, enlarged 3/1967 by D. Greer and F.W. Sternfeld) E.H. Fellowes: The English Madrigal Composers (Oxford, 1921, 2/1948/R) G. Holst: ‘The Tercentenary of Byrd and Weelkes’, PMA, xlix (1922–3), 29–37 G. Holst: ‘My Favourite Tudor Composer’, Midland Musician, i (1926), 4–5 W.D. Peckham: ‘The Vicars Choral of Chichester Cathedral’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, lxxviii (1937), 126–59 D.F. Tovey: ‘Weelkes: Four Madrigals’, Essays in Musical Analysis, v (London, 1937/R), 3–12 A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Thomas Weelkes’, The Music Masters, ed. A.L. Bacharach, i (London, 1948, 2/1957), 361–6 D. Arnold: ‘Thomas Weelkes and the Madrigal’, ML, xxxi (1950), 1–12 C.E. Welch: Two Cathedral Organists: Thomas Weelkes (1601–1623) and Thomas Kelway (1720–1744) (Chichester, 1957) W.D. Peckham, ed.: The Acts of the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral Church of Chichester, 1545–1642 (Lewes, 1960) W.S. Collins: The Anthems of Thomas Weelkes (diss., U. of Michigan, 1960) D.J. Morse: Word-painting and Symbolism in the Secular Choral Works by Thomas Weelkes, Tudor Composer (diss., New York U., 1961) W.K. Ford: ‘Chichester Cathedral and Thomas Weelkes’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, c (1962), 156–72 W.S. Collins: ‘Recent Discoveries concerning the Biography of Thomas Weelkes’, ML, xliv (1963), 123–31 D. Brown: ‘The Anthems of Thomas Weelkes’, PRMA, xci (1964–5), 61–72 W. Mellers: Harmonious Meeting: a Study of the Relationship between English Music, Poetry and Theatre, c.1600–1900 (London, 1965) D. Brown: ‘Thomas Weelkes’, Recorder and Music Magazine, ii (1967), 137–8 D. Brown: Thomas Weelkes: a Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1969/R) P. Brett: ‘The Two Musical Personalities of Thomas Weelkes’, ML, liii (1972), 369–76 J.G.C. Milne: ‘On the Identity of Weelkes’ “Fogo”’, RMARC, no.10 (1972), 98–100 C. Monson: ‘Thomas Weelkes: a New Fa-la’, MT, cxiii (1972), 133–5 T.J. McCann: ‘The Death of Thomas Weelkes in 1623’, ML, lv (1974), 45–7 G.A. Philipps: ‘Patronage in the Career of Thomas Weelkes’, MQ, lxii (1976), 46–57 H.F. Gervers: ‘A Manuscript of Dance Music from Seventeenth-Century England: Drexel Collection MS 5612’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, lxxx (1977), 503–52 J. Shepherd: ‘Thomas Weelkes: a Biographical Caution’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 505–21 G. Dodd: ‘Mr Weelkes, his second pavin’, Chelys, ix (1980), 31–2 K.C. Fincham: ‘Contemporary Opinions of Thomas Weelkes’, ML, lxii (1981), 352–3 J. Cohen: ‘Thomas Weelkes's Borrowings from Salamone Rossi’, ML, lxvi (1985), 110–17 R. Charteris: ‘The Huntington Library Part Books, Ellesmere MSS EL 25 A 46–51’, Huntington Library Quarterly, l (1987), 59–84 W.S. Collins: ‘The Reconstruction of the Evening Service for Seven Voices by Thomas Weelkes’, Five Centuries of Choral Music: Essays in Honor of Howard Swan, ed. G. Paine (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988), 93–126 K.S. Teo: ‘Chromaticism in Thomas Weelkes’s 1600 Collection: Possible Models’, Musicology, xiii (1990), 2–14 R.W. Stoll: ‘“With fear doth freeze, with love doth fry”: Welt- und Selbsterfahrung in einem Madrigal des elisabethanischen Zeitalters’, Festschrift Ulrich Siegele zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. R. Faber and others (Kassel, 1991), 67–86 Directory: New%20Grove%20Dictionnary%20Of%20Music Download 14.95 Mb. Share with your friends:
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