Among the composer anniversaries we’re celebrating in 2009, perhaps none should mean more to us than the 350th anniversary of the birth of Henry Purcell. Why? Because unlike Haydn, Mendelssohn, even Handel, Purcell shares with us the English language. Among many reasons for admiring Purcell, there is none greater than the undisputed claim that no one has ever surpassed him in the felicitous setting of English words to music. Probably, if at all musical, we will have sung some Purcell - perhaps ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’, in a children’s choir emulating the Manchester children who famously recorded this song under Hamilton Harty in 1929. Or we may be like my parents and others of their dwindling generation, who took part in the Sydney University Musical Society’s Dido and Aeneas, under Faunce Allman, in the mid-1940s – and still talk about this revelation of Purcell’s musical genius. Purcell’s only all-sung opera, Dido and Aeneas was composed for performance in a girl’s school. It remains among the most accessible of Purcell’s music, and I heard it described the other day (on another radio station, in connection with its current revival by Opera Australia), as the most perfect of one-hour operas. Singers more specialised than choristers will have attempted Purcell songs, among the most famous being ‘Music for a While’, and ‘I attempt from love’s sickness to fly’, the latter described by Oxford professor and Purcell biographer Sir Jack Westrup as ‘perhaps the most perfectly poised melody Purcell ever wrote’, and by others, more contentiously, as the greatest matching of words to music in English.
The trouble is that a great deal of Purcell’s vocal music long seemed destined to remain filleted in anthologies, and its original context regarded as impossible to revive. There was no doubt of Purcell’s genius – his contemporary Roger North called him ‘the divine Purcell’, and on the tomb in Westminster Abbey of John Blow, a composer of note, is inscribed ‘master of the famous Mr. H. Purcell’. Yet as The Record Guide observed more than half a century ago ‘Though many single compositions of Purcell fill the listener with delight and exhilaration, it is difficult to contemplate his career as a whole without regret’. This was not mainly because Purcell died so young – at 36, about the same age as Mozart. Rather it was because ‘his divine genius was largely frustrated by unfavourable circumstances’. Take those songs: ‘Music for a while’ is from incidental music Purcell composed, probably in 1692, for the play Oedipus. ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’, with its aura of ineffable British purity, comes from the play The Libertine, a version of the Don Juan legend! ‘I attempt from love’s sickness’ comes from The Indian Queen (1695), one of those ‘half-hearted quasi-operas’ - as far as England was prepared to go towards ‘real’ opera, in the transitional years through which Purcell lived. He did not live long enough to share in the establishment in England of Italian forms, such as the concerto grosso and the opera, whose supreme exponent we have already celebrated in Handel.
Revivals of Purcell’s very large amounts of ‘occasional’ music can be, and are attempted. Likewise his ‘semi-operas’, and it is worth it, for the music. The Fairy Queen, a concatenation of theatrical devices distantly based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was presented in toto by Roger Covell’s University of New South Wales Opera, in collaboration with NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art, in the early 1970s. My memories are of the great musical highlights, and wondering how they could have been inspired by such a farrago. David Freeman’s staging of King Arthur, or the British Worthy, with Sydney University Musical Society in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney, similarly induced mirth at points, alongside wonderful moments like the frost scene, or the patriotic uplift of ‘Fairest Isle’. Of course, these depressing reflections on Purcell in staged performance need not affect listening to his music in a series of representative radio programs. But listeners will want to imagine the original context, to understand Purcell, and to deepen their appreciation.
John Closterman's portrait of Purcell, 1695. Public Domain
Biographical information helps only up to a point. We know little of Purcell’s personal life, and even the exact date of his birth is uncertain. What we do know tells us of a family of professional musicians, notably Purcell’s father and Henry’s brother Daniel (also a composer). It was a life spent in the service of the King, the Church, and the theatre. The boy Henry Purcell sang as one of the children of the Chapel Royal, and here came his contact with the music of Matthew Locke, a colleague of our Purcell’s father, and with the persons as well as the music of John Blow and Pelham Humfrey (Locke, and Purcell’s marking of his death, are in these programs. So, in the same program, is Blow). Through the last two composers mentioned Henry Purcell would have been pointed towards features of the Italian style. He went even further than Locke and Blow in anglicising foreign influences, without losing a national accent - in works like the trio sonatas. These are works for a market of domestic music making, and like the Fantasias for strings, have proved, of Purcell’s music, the easiest to accommodate in modern concerts. As with all his music, however, the recent recourse to ‘original’ instruments has proved immensely salutary, not so much for the sound as such as for the articulation, which brings to life Purcell’s subtle rhythmic imagination, a counterpart of his understanding of word-rhythm. But we must follow Purcell not only in these private works for fellow music connoisseurs, but in all the music produced as part of his professional employment.
Purcell was a singer – if it true as reported that he sang the solo ‘`Tis nature’s voice’, from one of his Odes for St Cecilia’s Day (1692) with ‘incredible graces’, then he must have been a countertenor (not inconsistent with his listing as a bass in the choir records). Purcell’s keyboard skill must have been remarkable, since at age 20 he succeeded Blow as organist of Westminster Abbey. Some idea of his playing might be guessed from his harpsichord suites and from his own voluntary for organ, rather than the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ long attributed to him, but actually by his younger fellow-gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Jeremiah Clarke. Some of Purcell’s ceremonial religious music survived the occasion for which it was written – notably the Te Deum and Jubilate, originally for St.Cecilia’s Day 1693, but which became ‘the’ Te Deum for thanksgivings, until supplanted by Handel’s Utrecht Te Deum of 1713.
'...passages of harmonic daring...'
Kings and Queens of different lineage came and went even during Purcell’s brief life. Those who have attempted in choirs the anthem he composed for the coronation of King James II in 1684, ‘My heart is inditing’, will have been astonished at its passages of harmonic daring - under masterly control and so expressive in effect - while also being challenged by how difficult it is to maintain pitch in passing dissonances. From the still infrequently explored chapel music, these are treasures, and others may be known to singers in those Anglican churches maintaining a great tradition – things like the psalm setting ‘Jehovah, quam multi sunt’, in which I recently attempted the solos written for a Chapel Royal bass, the Reverend John Gostling. The death late in 1694 of William I’s co-ruler Queen Mary occasioned from Purcell striking music including the ‘Funeral Sentences’ and the march with muffled drums and ‘flat trumpets’ (this struck Sydney Philharmonia, in the 1980s, as appropriate music for a Good Friday concert in the stark surroundings of the Cell Block Theatre). Its melancholy re-use came almost immediately, at Purcell’s own funeral, just a year later.
The same Philharmonia Motet Choir that sang the Funeral Music had been entranced, a few years earlier, by the bouncy, cheerful tunefulness of music for a happier occasion, Queen Mary’s birthday in 1693, for which Purcell composed the Ode ‘Come ye sons of art’. This age in England, the Restoration and what followed, knew how to enjoy itself, and was not one to deny itself sensual pleasure. Purcell’s music reflects that, in the celebratory odes, and some of the theatre music, where there is comedy, too. His music also shows the results of England’s opening up to foreign cultural influences, which Charles II and his son James II brought from their exile on the Continent. You can hear French influences in such a work as Dido and Aeneas, particularly in its dances, a feature taken from French baroque opera. Many will have acquired from Purcell their first direct involvement with characteristics of baroque music. Such forms as Passacaglia, and what the English wrote ‘Chacony’, emerge from the textbook in living reality – for example in the ‘ground bass’ of Dido’s lament.
If there were more of the programs with which 2MBS will celebrate Purcell’s 350th, we could have included tributes forming part of the 20th century Purcell renaissance. Those who knew their music would have recognised in the theme of the TV series The First Churchills (1969) the same tune on which Benjamin Britten wrote variations which are his ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’. It’s a rondo from Purcell’s music for a 1695 revival of the play Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge. Britten, who produced new editions of Purcell music, performing and recording it, also learnt much from Purcell about setting English words. So did Michael Tippett, whose championing of Purcell included a recording of the ode ‘Hail, bright Cecilia’ in which Alfred Deller sang Purcell’s own part (two others of the St. Cecilia’s Day Odes). Britten and Tippett, creators in their own right, recognised Purcell’s genius, and believed that his musical invention can still excite and exhilarate, even in the original setting, if listened to in the right way.
First published in the 2 MBS magazine, July 2009 to accompany a series of radio programs commemorating Purcell on his 350th anniversary