Libretti and Source Texts

(b Perth Amboy, NJ, Feb 19, 1766; d New York, NY, Sep 28, 1839). American playwright, librettist, theater manager, historian, and painter. Despite losing his sight in one eye due to an accident, Dunlap became a professional portrait painter in his youth, and he was noted for his paintings of George Washington. In 1784 he traveled to London and studied painting with Benjamin West. Upon his return to the United States in 1787, he began writing plays and became America’s first professional playwright. Over a period of 40 years he translated, adapted, or wrote more than 70 plays, many of which used music by composers such as Benjamin Carr, Alexander Reinagle, Victor Pelissier, and James Hewitt. He was influenced by the plays of German dramatist August von Kotzebue, whose works he translated and made popular in the United States.

Dunlap’s The Archers, or Mountaineers of Switzerland (1796...

(b Northampton, MA, May 14, 1752; d New Haven, CT, Jan 11, 1817). American poet and author of hymn texts. He graduated from Yale College in 1769, becoming a tutor there two years later. He served as a chaplain in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and wrote the texts of several patriotic songs, one of which (“Columbia, Columbia, to Glory Arise,” 1787) became widely popular. From 1783 to 1795 he was pastor of the Congregational Church in Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, where he rose to eminence as a preacher, educator, and poet. He was elected president of Yale College in 1795. In 1798, at the request of both Congregational and Presbyterian governing bodies in Connecticut, he undertook a revised edition of Isaac Watts’s Psalms and Hymns to replace one by Joel Barlow (1785) that had previously been compiled for the Congregationalists. Issued at Hartford in ...

(Dorothea )

(b Liverpool, England, Sept 25, 1793; d Dublin, Ireland, May 16, 1835). English poet. She spent most of her life in Wales and became well known in literary circles, being much admired by Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Her works were extremely popular at home and abroad, notably in the United States before the Civil War. She rivaled Thomas Moore in the extent to which her works were included in literary anthologies and equaled Tennyson in the degree to which her poems became part of the conventional education of American youth. “Cassabianca” (The boy stood on the burning deck) and “Pilgrim Fathers” (The breaking waves dash high) were standard school recitations until the early 20th century. Four collected editions of Hemans’s verse appeared in the United States between 1825 and 1850. Her importance to American musical life lies in the settings made of her poetry by her sister, Harriet Mary Browne (later Mrs. Hughes, ...