Biography
Shield excelled on the violin, an instrument at which he attained considerable mastery. Joining the orchestra at the King's Haymarket Theatre as a violinist at twenty-five, he soon advanced to principal viola. Only at thirty did he begin to issue his compositions in print. Roughly thirty operas flowed from his pen, the earliest being the 1778 pastiche The Flitch of Bacon. Two-thirds of the music in each of these stage works was freshly composed, while at least one-third drew upon traditional airs, above all Scottish and Irish melodies. His inventive scoring earned him a fifteen-year tenure as house composer at Covent Garden. Several melodies now widely recognized gained currency through Shield's operas. In Rosina he brought “Auld lang syne” to public attention, although the tune was not of his making. The air later known as “All those endearing young charms” likewise appears in The Flitch of Bacon. Despite John O'Keefe's silence about him in the latter's autobiography, the two men worked together on The Poor Soldier and on songs later gathered in Moore's Irish Melodies. After resigning from Covent Garden, Shield journeyed across the Channel to Paris and Rome, gathering folk tunes that later appeared in an anthology; that same collection also contained the first published printing of any prelude from Book 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, specifically the Prelude in D minor.