The Recruiting Serjeant
Sheet Music

SKU: PE.PREME804S

Composed by Charles Dibdin. Full Scores. Full Score. 96 pages. Edition Peters #PREME804S. Published by Edition Peters (PE.PREME804S).

ISBN 9790674521772.

This short opera, composed for the summer entertainments given in the circular rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens, is spiced with character songs and village dialect. It tells of a recruiting sergeant who contrives to enlist farmer Joe by painting a picture of soldierly heroics. Joe, however, has only feigned interest to vex his wife – preferring all along the home farm and his evening pint. This facsimile edition of one of the very few English operas of the time published in full score, is introduced by Robert Hoskins.

Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was a colourful personality, constantly falling out with theatre managers and perpetually in debt. If he was perverse and unruly, he was also multi-talented – a novelist, playwright and critic; an impresario and painter; a singer who could act; a writer of enduring sea songs; and one of the few English composers of the day who could effectively match music with dramatic action. Dibdin’s mainstream career as a theatre composer blossomed briefly when he joined David Garrick at Drury Lane in 1768, but mostly he was unemployable. His best remembered operas are The Padlock (1768) and The School for Fathers (1770).