Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Many years ago, I picked up a review copy of the recording of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. I was studying it as I travelled on the bus, when I became aware that a small girl next to me was showing a lot of interest in the record cover. Her mother leant over to me and said ‘would you mind if my daughter had a closer look at this picture? She’s fascinated by anything to do with fairies!’.
The picture which had caught the little girl’s attention was ‘The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania’, painted in 1849 by Sir Joseph Noel Paton, in which the central characters are indeed surrounded by fairies of many shapes and sizes. Paton is one of the few ‘good’ painters of the 19th century to condescend, as John Ruskin put it, to the very popular fairy genre, and art critics differ over how much Paton caught of the darker dimensions of Titania and Oberon’s quarrel.
The painter is measured against Shakespeare, and so is the great musician who composed the music for The Fairy Queen. For Titania is Purcell’s fairy queen, and the source of his drama is Shakespeare. My young neighbour on the bus felt the enchantment of the picture. Possibly she would have felt that of the music, too, if she had heard it. But that boxed set of LPs may not have made her best introduction to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, the ultimate source for the book of the music.
This is paradoxical in a way, since as Eric Walter White observes, the play A Midsummer Night's Dream ‘trembles on the brink of music’. Around the same time Paton’s 1847 painting was illustrating the Romantic fascination with the fairy world came Mendelssohn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s play. Mendelssohn’s fairy music includes the song with which the fairies sing Titania to sleep: ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue’.
Mendelssohn’s generation thought they had rediscovered the real Shakespeare, and they sought to be faithful to him. A Midsummer Night's Dream was Mendelssohn’s favourite Shakespeare play, no doubt partly because there’s so much music in it – in the words and images, and the songs.
In Purcell’s time, Shakespeare was a theatrical property to be exploited and adapted. In The Fairy Queen, instead of the song Shakespeare provided at the same point in the play, there is a long allegorical scene with singing and dancing, in which Night, Mystery, Secresy, and Sleep appear and sing. Purcell’s Fairy Queen is not an opera in the sense we now understand opera, nor is it like Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play. Purcell did not set a single line of Shakespeare to music, and he gave none of the characters in Shakespeare’s play music to sing. It would be quite possible for someone listening to the musical part of The Fairy Queen to remain unaware it was based on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Wilfrid Mellers compares the relationship of the play and The Fairy Queen to how a filmed version of a 20th century ‘musical’ stands to the ‘book of the movie’, and John Eliot Gardiner instances how West Side Story compares to Romeo and Juliet.
The nearest I have come to experiencing The Fairy Queen as originally presented was many years ago in a collaborative production between University of NSW Opera and actors and dancers from NIDA. I remember, however, and others confirm, that production did not return to the radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play in Purcell’s libretto. Instead, as much of Shakespeare was included as possible, inserting at the appropriate points the scenes set to music by Purcell. From the point of view of the actors, that was probably a happier solution – better some Shakespeare than a travesty of his words. And the musicians, too, probably preferred to rescue the great Purcell from being tarnished by association with a great play corrupted.
This is a logical way to approach the presentation of The Fairy Queen, but Pinchgut Opera is about to mount this work in Sydney and they have chosen, not unreasonably, to perform only the parts of the show which have music by Purcell, and to present them acted, sung, and danced, rather than in concert. Even thus the entertainment will last two and a half hours – with the play (even as adapted) it would run closer to five hours!
The play as adapted for the libretto of The Fairy Queen has been described as a mere string on which is threaded a whole series of episodes musical, spectacular, and choreographic; ‘a sort of revue’, including Shakespeare’s scenes. It is in fact a very superior exemplar of how theatre of the Restoration period rehashed old plays as musicals. Purcell’s contributions are so large-scale and impressive, as music and as theatre, that it is worth exploring the history to find out how and why Purcell made, from a rather poor adaptation of Shakespeare, an English ‘dramatic opera’, and against all expectations captured the spirit of Shakespeare. This history will set Purcell in the theatre of his time, rather than citing him as a culprit for England’s failure to produce a ‘real’ opera until the 20th century.
Music played a large part in the theatre in 17th century England, and theorists were well aware of the experiments of the Florentine Camerata, late in the previous century, reviving what they believed to be the sung performance of ancient tragedy. Such experiments led to opera, first in Italy, then in France.
The court masques of the reigns of James I and Charles I were collaborations of speech and spectacle, with songs and dances. The dancers at first were aristocrats, but later were sometimes joined by professionals, especially in the ‘anti-masques’ which provided comic or grotesque contrast. These dancers were ‘disguised’ in costumes (masks), and the basic form of the entertainment was balletic. Often these entertainments were presented after the performance of a play, and a poet provided words to introduce them. They created a taste for spectacular scenic effects, which continued after the Restoration, migrating from court circles to the public theatre.
The preface to The Fairy Queen (1692), refers to another form of entertainment: ‘That Sir William Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes was the first Opera we ever had in England, no Man can deny; and is indeed a perfect Opera: there being this difference only between an Opera and a Tragedy; that the one is a Story sung with proper Action, the other spoken’. The Siege of Rhodes, in 1656, was the first public stage production in England (as opposed to the court and private masques) to employ scenery. Elements of sung ‘heroic tragedy’ and of the masque were fusing.
But in spite of King Charles II leaning towards the style of wholly-sung French opera developed by Lully, and using royal patronage to promote English imitations, wholly sung opera didn’t catch on in England. Instead, a peculiarly local hybrid form developed to suit the new theatres and the new audience, often in revivals of old plays with added words and music. The plays of Shakespeare, among others, were produced with changes to suit a refined age, removing ‘uncouth’ language, making the morals of the plots clearer, replacing the boys, who played female characters in Shakespeare’s time, with actresses, and introducing elaborate scenic effects. In 1671 the same Davenant who wrote The Siege of Rhodes opened a new theatre, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, in Dorset Garden. Most of the dramatic operas of the last quarter of the century were performed there, including Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.
These were not quite ‘operas’: looking back from the mid-18th century, Roger North wrote that they ‘were called Operas but had more properly been styled Semi-operas, for they consisted of half Musick, and half Drama’. By the mid-1690s some spoken plays were presented with anything up to an additional two hours of singing, dancing, and instrumental music, but they remained plays: the essential action was conveyed not through music but through speech.
Why did English taste prefer entertainments like The Fairy Queen to fully sung opera? By the time North was writing, opera had established itself in England, but composed by foreigners and sung in Italian. For him, the problem with semi-opera was that ‘some that would come to the play hated the musick, and others that were very desirous of the musick, would not bear the interruption that so much rehearsal [ie speech] gave, so that it is best to have either by itself intire’.
Purcell was at the forefront of composing for the English musical stage. After his early death at the age of thirty-six, John Dryden, who had collaborated with Purcell in the semi-opera King Arthur (1691) wrote in his commemorative elegy:
‘So ceas’d the rival Crew, when Purcell came,
They Sung no more, or only Sung his Fame.
Struck dumb, they all admired the godlike man:
The godlike man,
Alas, too soon retir’d,
As He too late began’.
Purcell may or may not have realised that he had already created, in Dido and Aeneas (1689) ‘the first true English opera’. This was performed in semi-private, at a girls’ school in Chelsea, and had no fame and no successors. Rather, Purcell continued his stage career with a series of increasingly elaborate semi-operas: Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691), and The Fairy Queen (1692-3). Probably he sensed that he didn’t have a technique for turning English words into a continuous structure of story-telling and musically developed numbers, adequate to the scale required in the public theatre.
Nevertheless, in the elaborate and expensive masque-like scenes introduced in The Fairy Queen into the spoken drama Purcell’s treatment is dramatic, as we will see. The Fairy Queen contains elements looking back to the masque and the heroic opera; some of it develops aspects of Lully’s comic operas; its ballets are more popular in style than those of the old masque. There are also in The Fairy Queen, as Mellers points out, anticipations of English ballad opera, Victorian pantomime, and music hall. The entertainment is varied, as befits a Restoration variety show, yet it feels consistent as a whole.
The Fairy Queen had no direct influence on subsequent developments, because Purcell’s music disappeared for 200 years; the score, largely in Purcell’s handwriting, was found early in the 20th century in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
The Fairy Queen’s first performances were chronicled by Motteux in the Gentleman’s Journal: ‘The Opera…is call’d The Fairy Queen. The Drama is originally Shakespears, the Music and Decorations are extraordinary. I have heard the Dances commended, and without doubt the whole is very entertaining’. Downes reported in 1708 that The Fairy Queen was superior to Dioclesian and King Arthur ‘especially in Cloaths, for all the Singers and Dancers, Scenes, Machines and Decorations…The Court and Town were wonderfully satisfy’d with it; but the Expences in setting it out have been so great, the Company got very little by it’.
What would the audience have experienced? Before the curtain went up they would have been entertained by dances, with music known as ‘first music’ and ‘second music’. Already the fantasy and changing moods of Purcell’s score would be obvious, the fourth of the dances being a French-style rondeau, fulfilling a promise referred to by Motteux: ‘something very surprising is promised us; Mr. Purcel who joyns to the Delicacy and Beauty of the Italian way, the Graces and Gayety of the French, composes the music…’ . The Overture proper, or ‘curtain tune’ is a grand overture in the French style, with dotted rhythms, trumpets and kettledrums. The spoken play then begins, but with considerable cuts and alterations to Shakespeare. The author or authors of the adaptation of the text are unknown, though the likeliest candidate is Thomas Betterton, the actor-manager who supervised the production.
The wood near Athens, with interactions of humans and fairies, has become the single place of action. A reduced version of the opening scene between Theseus, Egeus and the lovers was removed when the opera was revived in 1693, to make way for a musical addition, to follow the scene of the artisans planning their play (with additional material from the rehearsal of their play in Shakespeare’s Act III). The 1693 addition was the scene of the three drunken poets, one of whom sings (notice that all the singing parts are characters not from Shakespeare’s play, but added to it). Titania enters, attended by fairies, and leading the Indian Boy. She asks the fairy choir to entertain him, which they do first with a song ‘come, come, let us leave the town’. Thus the fairies, doing Titania’s bidding, shift the locale of the drama from town to country. There they meet three drunken poets, and torment the blindfolded one with cruel pinching, until he confesses, stuttering, he’s a very poor, scurvy poet. Possibly this was an allusion to Thomas D’Urfey, known as ‘Poet Stutter’.
This shifting of the tone towards broad comedy from the beginning, in the 1693 revival of The Fairy Queen, shows that vaudeville was intrinsic to this form of theatre. An even broader contrast is made when, instead of Shakespeare’s ‘You spotted snakes’, Titania conjures up the marvellous sequence of sung numbers devoted to the subject of Night – night being the setting of the drama. As well as its mystery and beauty, the music has drama, as Purcell creates a muted, bass-less fabric in which Night herself can appear; then he introduces an erotic note, which will come again and again in The Fairy Queen. Secrecy, accompanied by two recorders, sings ‘One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days’. The way this song is repeated by the chorus is typical of the large-scale song and dance structures in each of the masques The Fairy Queen contains. Purcell and his literary collaborator have contrived their adaptation of Shakespeare so that Titania is brought on at the end of each act, to be entertained by a kind of masque.
My young companion on the bus probably would have been disappointed by the costumes. Edward Dent suggests that either a desire for variety or a realisation that a London opera chorus wouldn’t look very convincing as fairies led to each masque being given in a different set of costumes. But the chorus members acted as well as singing, most remarkably in the air of Sleep, with its long measured silences at ‘Hush, no more’, where one can almost see the stops and starts of the retreating masquers – repeating in a whisper ‘no noise!’, they glide away and leave the stage clear for the mysterious gyrations of the dancers.
In Act III, having fallen in love with Bottom ‘translated’ into an ass, Titania has her fairies prepare a masque for his entertainment: ‘While a Symphony’s playing, the two Swans come Swimming on through the Arches to the bank of the River… they turn themselves into fairies and dance… Four Savages enter, fright the Fairies away, and Dance an Entry’. Into this context, in the 1693 revival, was inserted the comic dialogue between Coridon, a shepherd, and Mopsa, an ugly shepherdess sung by a male alto in drag, a survival of the anti-masque tradition, acted out in a very funny way.
The reconciliation of Titania and Oberon in Act IV is the pretext, after a brilliant symphony with trumpets to cover the noisy scene changing, for a grand masque of the Four Seasons. At the end of the play, in a substantial departure from Shakespeare, Oberon re-enters to cure Duke Theseus’s incredulity about the events: ‘All was true the Lovers told’. He and Titania introduce the longest of the masques, a celebration of married love through the Gods Juno and Hymen. Here, in the 1693 revival was introduced the longest single number in The Fairy Queen, ‘The Plaint’, in which a soprano sings a long chromatic song on a ground bass, expressing (perhaps inappropriately for the context) the despair of a lady who has lost her lover forever, in tones reminiscent of the Queen’s lament from Dido and Aeneas. Then, in the concluding pièce de résistance, the sophistication of Court and Town is contrasted with a scene set in ‘China’, in a garden, ‘the Architecture, the Trees, the Plants, the Fruit, the Birds, the Beasts quite different from what we have in this part of the World’.
Each of these added masques is virtually self-contained, and each is knit together by Purcell’s music so satisfyingly that they could be and were performed in concert in the 1690s. Yet the theatricality of Purcell’s setting is so great that there is every justification for performing these masques with scenery, costumes, acting and dancing, even without the adaptation of Shakespeare’s play which formed their scaffolding. Apart from giving us two and a half hours of Purcell’s greatest music for the theatre, they don’t come across only as parts of a rich Restoration variety show, but reveal, as John Eliot Gardiner says ‘an authentic musical equivalent to the poetic and enchanted world of Titania, Puck and Oberon’. A fairy world to delight little girls and grown-ups alike.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2003