The maid of the mill was premièred at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden on 31 January 1765. As with so many operas of the period it was a ‘pasticcio’, and the libretto was written by Isaac Bickerstaffe, who had previously written the texts for Arne’s Judith and Love in a village. The music was assembled and prepared by Samuel Arnold, who at the start of the 1764-65 season had replaced Jonathan Battishill as the theatre’s music director.

Arnold had been born in London on 10 August 1740, and received his early musical education as a chorister of the Chapel Royal. On leaving he soon established a reputation as a prolific composer, as well as an excellent organist and teacher, and following his appointment to Covent Garden he assembled and contributed his own music to dozens of English-language ‘pasticcio’ operas. Later in life he was to combine his theatrical commitments with prestigious positions as an organist, firstly at the Chapel Royal (from 1783) and then at Westminster Abbey (from 1793), and he led plans for a complete edition of Handel’s works, 180 parts of which were published between 1787 and 1797. In autumn 1798 he fell from his library steps, sustaining injuries which eventually led to his death, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey on 29 October 1802.

The maid of the mill was based on Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular 1740 novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which had already been turned into a very successful Italian opera—Piccinni’s La buona figliuola—in 1760 (it had also been bitingly parodied, as Shamela, by Henry Fielding). Arnold drew on music attributed to a variety of composers, including Philidor, Galuppi, Pergolesi, Vinci, Scarlatti and Hasse.

'To speak my mind', which appeared in Act 3, scene 1 of the opera, is an effective patter song borrowed from a 1758 opera, La fille mal gardée, by Egidio Duni (1708-1775). Duni was an Italian who had settled in Paris in the late 1750s, and during the third quarter of the eighteenth century he became one of the most important composers of opéra comique, writing over twenty works in the genre. The Mozarts met him in Paris in early 1764 (his name is listed in Leopold Mozart’s travel notes).

from notes by Ian Page © 2018