Lucie Skeaping
Presenter, BBC Radio 3
‘Purcell lived in one of the world’s most exciting cities, in one of the most remarkable periods of English history; and what a variety of music he left us before, all too soon, he was “laid in earth…”’
Think Baroque. Think Restoration drama. Think early English opera and ‘semi-opera’, regal birthday odes and funeral laments, religious hymns and anthems, instrumental pieces and a plethora of songs, snatches and catches both sacred and profane. In a short but extraordinarily versatile and productive life, ★enry Purcell contributed mightily to all the musical forms popular in his time. ★e was regarded as England’s foremost composer, and his reputation as such was unrivalled until the 20th century.
Purcell was, it’s worth noting, lucky with his timing. Born in 1659 on the eve of the restoration of the monarchy, he of the world that I love most’, he captured something of the appetites of the age.
With both his father and his uncle employed as singers in the Chapel Royal, Purcell had an auspicious start in music. Showing talent from an early age, he was eased into the professional world while still a youngster. The Purcells lived in Westminster and ★enry, a pupil at Westminster School, was brought into the Chapel Royal as a chorister, staying until his voice broke and going on to study with some of the leading composers of the day, notably Pelham ★umfrey and John Blow.
Early compositions included work in a variety of genres, but by the time he
actor-manager Thomas Betterton or John Dryden, who became the country’s first poet laureate; or whether it was a Te Deum to mark the birthday of the patron saint of music, St Cecilia, or a celebratory ode – or funeral elegy – for Queen Mary. It was for Queen Mary’s birthday in 1694 that Purcell wrote a work that continues to be among his most frequently performed. Come Ye Sons of Art, setting a text by the poet Nahum Tate, is an ode that contains the brilliant and energising countertenor duet ‘Sound the Trumpet’.
It wasn’t only in court and church that Purcell flourished. ★e wrote musical items for a succession of stage plays: the separate songs and instrumental interludes that, in the style of the time, would be highlighted in the course of a theatrical production.
★is ‘semi-operas’ included Dioclesian (1690) to a libretto adapted by Betterton from an earlier play, King Arthur, to a text by Dryden and The Fairy Queen based on a loose arrangement of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1692). King Arthur contains what is arguably the most famous of all Purcell’s arias, ‘Fairest Isle’, an unparalleled encomium, almost erotic at times, to the composer’s beloved homeland. Britain (‘all isles excelling’ in Dryden’s proud words) is ‘seat of pleasure, and of love’, the place where Venus will choose her dwelling, where every swain shall pay his duty and every nymph prove grateful. Among the last pieces Purcell was to write was the incidental music to Abdelazer, an earlier ‘revenge tragedy’ by Aphra Behn: this is a series of ten short musical items each of which has its own sense of rhythm and theatricality.
Fully-fledged, through-composed ‘opera’ had not yet taken root in England, yet Purcell, ever the adventurous musical pioneer, also composed what was in effect a chamber opera, Dido and Aeneas. A short but supremely rich and moving music drama, it was, so far as is known, first performed at a school for girls in Chelsea. Derived from Virgil and again based on a text by Tate, it homes in on Dido’s heartbreak when her lover, Aeneas, leaves her to return to the Trojan wars. Dido’s deeply poignant lament, ‘When I am laid in earth’ with its recurring, descending ground bass, was destined to become one of the most celebrated airs in the entire repertoire of English vocal music.
Purcell’s productivity and the sheer range of his musical creativity were extraordinary. ★e proved himself capable of composing the most atmospheric music: amorous, heart-searching, chilling
Purcell’s productivity and the sheer range of his musical creativity were extraordinary
or humorous as required. King Arthur contains a supremely witty musical evocation of the frosty winter in which a succession of empty, staccato chords accompany the shivery, separated syllabic steps written into Dryden’s text, while The Fairy Queen includes among its opening features a wonderfully drunken, stuttering p-p-p-p-poet (probably a parody, affectionate enough, of D’urfey).
Imagine what might have been if Purcell had lived longer. Only in his mid-30s when he died in 1695, Purcell was deeply mourned by all who had known him, including his old teacher and benefactor John Blow, who wrote An Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell to words provided by their mutual friend Dryden. Purcell is buried in Westminster Abbey adjacent to the organ. The music he had recently composed for the funeral of Queen
Mary II was played at his own burial: a powerful lament that has been performed at countless interments and memorial services ever since.
More than any other composer, it was Purcell who marked out an essentially English addition to the music of the Baroque, a contribution to musical history that later generations felt placed him on a pedestal equal to that occupied by Vivaldi, Lully and JS Bach. Purcell, and he alone, was ‘Orpheus Britannicus’ – the title given, appropriately enough, to a collection of his songs published in two volumes shortly after his untimely death.
And what of his influence on the history of music and musicianship in Britain? In his lifetime, London was something of a magnet for talented foreigners, who brought with them cosmopolitan musical influences. Purcell proved himself astonishingly open-minded, capable of absorbing and incorporating the finest elements of musical styles from across the continent – particularly from France and Italy (see ‘Purcell’s Style’, p112). ★is contemporaries included such outstanding composers as the Italian Giovanni Battista Draghi and the Catalanborn, French-trained Louis Grabu – who was appointed Master of the King’s Music.
During the centuries that followed, the capital remained one of the great musical centres of the world, countless Continental composers feeling it essential to make their mark across the Channel.
Yet no native-born British composer of a stature comparable to that of Purcell was to emerge until the first half of the 20th century. Was that due to the dominance of the German tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries? Or perhaps we should point to the move away from the court and chapel patronage that set Purcell on his path and spurred on his career.
Yet when a new golden era of British composers emerged – think Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton and Tippett – Purcell was not forgotten. Quite the opposite – their interest sparked the revival and renewal of the reputation of a composer who had fallen out of fashion. ‘I learned an enormous amount about the setting of the English language, about its rhythms, its sonorities [from Purcell],’ Britten once said. ‘That gave me a greater sense of confidence and of not being quite so alone as I might have felt.’
In 1945 Britten composed one of his most popular pieces, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, whose ingenious variations take the ‘Rondeau’ from Purcell’s Abdelazer suite as their theme. And if Purcell was at one point, said Britten, ‘not fully appreciated in this country’, when the new Covent Garden opera company opened in 1946 it was not with the recent hit of Britten’s opera Peter
Grimes, but with Purcell’s Fairy Queen.