Johann Christoph Pepusch

Johann Christoph Pepusch (Berlin, 1667 – London, 20 July 1752) was a German-born composer and theorist who spent most of his career in London. The son of a Protestant pastor, he studied theory with a certain Klingenberg, possibly a relative of the Stettin organist of the same surname, and instrumental practice with Grosse, a Saxon organist. From the age of fourteen he was in the service of the Prussian court. He apparently left that post at the end of the seventeenth century after witnessing, according to Hawkins, the summary execution of an officer accused of insubordination, which led him to seek refuge under a more just government.

After travelling through Holland, he settled in London around September 1697 or shortly afterwards, and remained there until his death. From 1707 he lived near Lincoln's Inn Fields. He frequented the concerts of Thomas Britton in Clerkenwell, where he probably met the poet John Hughes, with whom he later collaborated. His first regular position was as violist and later harpsichordist at Drury Lane in 1704. Little remains from those years apart from one stage work, the pasticcio Thomyris, Queen of Scythia, but he was esteemed for his instrumental music, published in Amsterdam and London, and for his work as a performer and organiser of concerts.

In 1708 he joined the opera company at the Haymarket as violinist, harpsichordist and music agent for the soprano Margherita de l'Epine, whom he married between 1718 and 1723; the exact date is not known with certainty. In 1713 he received the degree of Doctor of Music at Oxford alongside William Croft. Between 1714 and 1716 he directed the music at Drury Lane and wrote several English masques, such as Venus and Adonis, which is almost operatic in style. From 1716 he worked at Lincoln's Inn Fields for fifteen years. Around 1717 he entered the service of James Brydges, future Duke of Chandos, at Cannons, where he was musical director and in charge of the chapel until 1721.

In 1728 he was almost certainly at the head of the premiere of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and may have composed its overture. Around 1732 he largely withdrew from the theatre to devote himself to early music. In 1735 he reorganised the Academy of Ancient Music as a school for children, was organist at the Charterhouse from 1737, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1745. Among his pupils were Boyce and James Nares.

His legacy is twofold. For a long time he was portrayed as a pedantic scholar, an image that partly derives from Burney, yet his stage music, his English cantatas such as Alexis, and his violin sonatas, with their arrangement in sixteen keys that anticipates Bach's Inventions, reveal a lively composer with no proven enmity towards Handel. His Treatise on Harmony of 1730 defended solmisation as the basis of harmonic theory.