page_title: Richard Leveridge
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Leveridge / Life
caption_attribution_description: Print; Prints
context_page_description: Richard Leveridge was an English bass singer of the London stage and a composer of baroque music, including many popular songs.
context_section_description: Richard Leveridge was born in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in 1670, and in 1695 became the leading bass singer in the United Company managed by Christopher Rich at Drury Lane, after the defection of several leading singers from Rich's company. His first important role of which anything is known was as the magician Ismeron in Henry Purcell's opera The Indian Queen, which included the aria "Ye twice ten hundred deities". Purcell himself remained loyal to the company, and for several months Leveridge worked closely with him. It is likely that "Arise, ye subterranean winds" in the music (attributed to Purcell) for The Tempest was written for him. After Purcell's death he continued to work with composers Daniel Purcell and Jeremiah Clarke, and took a leading part in Clarke's Ode upon the death of Mr Purcell at Drury Lane. Leveridge also composed, and in February 1699 all three provided music for Motteux's adaptation of Fletcher's The Island Princess, in which Leveridge's performance, particularly his 'Enthusiastick Song', engendered great enthusiasm among its hearers.
  At various times between 1697 and 1728 Leveridge published volumes of his own songs, and numerous single items including his popular theatre songs appeared as separate printed sheets throughout his career. After a spell in Dublin he returned to London in 1702 for a revival of The Island Princess and a new production of Macbeth billed as "with music Vocal and Instrumental, all new Composed by Mr Leveridge". He sang the role of Hecate in this work for nearly 50 years, and the music remained popular for more than a century after his death.
  Leveridge continued to sing Purcell's operas and masques in the revivals, at Drury Lane in 1703–08, of The Fairy-Queen, Timon of Athens, Amphitrion, Libertine Destroyed, Tempest, King Arthur, Indian Queen, and Œdipus. He also participated in the introduction of opera in the Italian style from 1705, appearing in Arsinoë (1705), Camilla (1706), Rosamond (1707), Thomyris (1707), and Love's Triumph (1708). Some of these productions had mixed English and Italian singers (bilingual performances), but when the fashion became entirely Italian Leveridge was replaced in the bass roles by the Italian basso Giuseppe Maria Boschi. He then began a short association with Handel, in 1713 to 1714, and acted in the first performances of Il pastor fido and Teseo and played Argantes in a revival of Rinaldo. In this period he sang with Nicolini, who was in London from 1708 to 1712 and in the seasons of 1714–17. Later in his career, in 1731, he is known to have taken the role of Polypheme (who has the aria O ruddier than the cherry) in a performance of Acis and Galatea.
  In 1714, he moved to work at the new theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields, managed by entrepreneur John Rich. Remaining there for most of his career, he returned to his English repertoire and a new form, the musical Afterpiece. These lightweight works were often comic, and in 1716 Leveridge produced his own afterpiece, Pyramus and Thisbe. For this comic parody of Italian opera, he wrote the music, adapting the words from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and sang the role of Pyramus. He was apparently absent from the stage around 1720–24, during which time he was occupied with the coffee house in Tavistock Street near Covent Garden, at the sign of 'The Harlequin and Pierot', which he held by lease from 1714 to 1736. However Rich drew him back, and Leveridge scored a success in 1726 in Apollo and Daphne with Silenus's song Tho' envious old age seems in part to impair me, composed by Johann Ernst Galliard. From that time forth he became the leading bass at Lincoln's Inn Fields and later transferred to Covent Garden.
  His repertoire exploited his firm and powerful voice, and several of his songs became popular favourites. Although most renowned for his comic-patriotic ballad The Roast Beef of Old England, and above all for his setting of John Gay's lyric of Black Eyed Susan, others are lover's complaints or addresses, anacreontics, hunting songs (notably The sweet rosy 
caption: Leveridge in old age, by Frans van der Mijn
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