JOHANN PEPUSCH: VENUS AND ADONIS

Libretto: Colley Cibber
Music: Johann Christoph Pepusch

In a new edition by Robert Rawson

Musical Director: Rudyard Cook
Producer: Michael Burden

New College Chapel
7 & 8 February 2025
8.30pm

Tickets available from Ticketsource 

Cast
Venus – Matilda Bates
Adonis – Sam Chichester-Clark
Mars – Rhys Williams

The Berlin-born Johann Christoph Pepusch spent much of his working life in in England arriving in 1704. He was an active musician, and is recorded as a violist, a theatre director, music theoretician, teacher, and organist. In 1726, he founded The Academy of Vocal Music with others; in around 1730–1, it was renamed The Academy of Ancient Music. He also founded the Madrigal Society, and in 1713 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music by the University of Oxford. He is best known today for his arrangement of the music for the 1728 Beggar’s Opera.

In his second decade in London, Pepusch wrote for Drury Lane a number of masques, small entertainments which included a setting of Barton Booth’s Death of Dido, staged by New Chamber in 2023. In 1715, he set Colley Cibber’s libretto Venus and Adonis, a take on the myth in which Venus, with whom Mars is already captivated, falls for Adonis (he is only interested in hunting). In a jealous rage, Mars arranges for Adonis’s death by boar during the hunt. In setting the text, Pepusch set the role of Adonis for his wife, Margarita de L’Epine en travesty.