Thomas Shaw (composer)

Thomas Shaw (c.1752 Bath-c.1830 Paris) was an English violinist and composer. His father, also Thomas Shaw, was a leading string player and early 18th-century concert director in Bath, England. Shaw's earliest known performance was in Bath in April 1769, but he was clearly an accomplished player by then, for during the following autumn and spring of 1770 he led the orchestra in Thomas Linley's subscription concerts. He was a member of the theatre band in 1771 and his first known composition, an overture, was performed in a concert at the end of December. By 1772 he was playing his own compositions in Bath and Bristol but difficulties with Thomas Linley made London a more attractive centre for him and his last known performance in Bath was in November 1774. That same year Six Favourite Minuets by Shaw were published by Thomas Whitehead in Bath.

In 1776 Shaw was admitted to the Royal Society of Musicians and was a member of the Drury Lane band by 1778. From 1786 until the early 19th century he led the band, and Charles Dibdin thought him a much better leader than Covent Garden's Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. By 1790 Shaw had published some promising instrumental works and compiled an afterpiece opera, The Island of St Marguerite which premiered at Drury Lane on 13 November 1789). In 1791, he wrote an overture for the revival of Michael Arne's Cymon; both these overtures were published in parts, probably in the early 1790s to judge from their title pages. Thereafter Shaw composed only the occasional song for Drury Lane, even though he later became one of the theatre's proprietors. Sheridan's failure to pay him led to severe financial difficulties, and his debts eventually drove him abroad. He seems to have been in Paris when he composed the funeral anthem for Princess Charlotte of Wales in 1817, which was published soon after.

Shaw may have entertained Haydn to lunch on 14 September 1791; Haydn confided in his second London notebook that Mrs Shaw was ‘the most beautiful woman I ever saw’.

Sources

• Roger Fiske/Kenneth E. James. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie (1992), ISBN 0-333-73432-7 and ISBN 1-56159-228-5