page_title: Michael Arne
section_title: Mid-life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Arne / Biography / Mid-life and career
caption_attribution_description: Interior of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Circa 1808. Mistakenly ascribed to John Bluck by the website, but actually published as Plate 32 of Microcosm of London (1808) (see File:Microcosm of London Plate 009 - Billingsgate Market.jpg). The play is Coriolanuis, according to p. 43 of Sheridon Studies, Cambridge University Press (1995).
context_page_description: Michael Arne was an English composer, harpsichordist, organist, singer, and actor. He was the son of the composer Thomas Arne and the soprano Cecilia Young, a member of the famous Young family of musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like his father, Arne worked primarily as a composer of stage music and vocal art song, contributing little to other genres of music. He wrote several songs for London's pleasure gardens, the most famous of which is Lass with the Delicate Air. A moderately prolific composer, Arne wrote nine operas and collaborated on at least 15 others. His most successful opera, Cymon, enjoyed several revivals during his lifetime and into the early nineteenth century.
context_section_description: During the 1750s and 1760s, Arne worked as an organist and harpsichordist and composer to the theatres and pleasure gardens of London. He married in the 1750s to a now unknown woman who died only a few years into their marriage. From 1756 onwards he composed a considerable amount of music for the stage, much in the same vein as his father. He wrote several successful operas, a significant amount of incidental music for plays, and published several song collections. Several of his songs were written for performance in London's pleasure gardens. One of his best-known songs is  Lass with the Delicate Air, which premiered in 1762. In 1764 he collaborated with Jonathan Battishill in setting Richard Rolt’s Almena, which was a theatrical flop but praised for its fine music. The previous year he had met soprano Elizabeth Wright after hearing her perform at Ranelagh Gardens. The two became romantically involved and married in 1766. The following year Elizabeth sang the title role in his opera Cymon. The work used a libretto by David Garrick and was the greatest success of his career. Arne's wife sang in several more of his stage works as well as other productions in leading roles at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane throughout the 1760s.
  In 1766 Arne built a laboratory at Chelsea in order to pursue his interest in alchemy. His hobby quickly turned into an obsession, and he was soon suffering financially due to the expenses of this pursuit. These financial problems caused a considerable amount of stress and tension in his marriage, and Arne ended up in debtor's prison in early 1769. Elizabeth died on 1 May 1769 while he was in prison, and Charles Burney blamed Arne for his wife's early death due to the overwork and stress he had subjected her to. Somewhat humbled, Arne abandoned his pursuit of alchemy and by the early 1770s was financially stable again.
caption: The interior of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where Michael Arne primarily worked from 1756 to 1767
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