HENRY PURCELL
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the dominant figure in English music was Henry Purcell. Composer in Ordinary to the Chapel Royal, and its organist, he wrote extensively for the church and the court, for the theatre, for chamber ensembles, and for solo voice with keyboard accompaniment; he also wrote a number of bawdy catches, exhibiting a fondness for dirty jokes by no means rare among church musicians.
Stylistically, his music was always responsive to its context. The church anthems, and other liturgical compositions, have a gravity and nobility, even in their livelier passages, that mark them out as true heirs of the tradition established a century earlier by Tallis and Byrd. The court odes have all the grandeur proper to such occasional pieces, and are not unlike similar musical offerings then composed for royal or ducal patrons in France, Germany, and Italy. The incidental music for the theatre shows a keens sense of how music, within the conventions of the period, could enhance dramatic effect. His one opera, “Dido and Aeneas”, while very modestly conceived and executed as a performance-piece for a girls’ boarding-school, has a succinct power and beauty which rise far above its humble origins, and which give it an assured place in the operatic repertoire — Dido’s Lament, in Act Two, is in fact one of the greatest soprano arias ever composed. Purcell’s chamber music, while small in quantity, is as graceful and appealing as any being written anywhere at that time; and it shows a keen appreciation of the essential character of chamber music as primarily a conversation between the players, rather than as entertainment for anyone who happens to be listening.
Apart from his chamber music and some instrumental passages in his odes and his theatre music, Purcell’s work was almost entirely vocal. The quality of the texts varied greatly. In the courtly odes, the wording oscillates between the stilted and the sycophantic — the price paid everywhere by composers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who had to depend on the high-born for a livelihood. In the liturgical compositions, by contrast, the wording was universally superb: its sources were the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, those masterpieces of English prose. What the two genres had in common was Purcell’s brilliance as a word-setter: whether he was dealing with good writing or bad, he consistently fused note and word into a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts; with doggerel he elevated the words to a higher plane than they deserved, while with fine literature he rose to its challenge and matched it. In every measure, he contrived a melody and a rhythm that showed a supreme sensitivity to language, a command of what music could offer to language and, in turn, of what language could offer to music.
Purcell’s great forerunner, Byrd, was equally gifted in the setting of words — doubly so, for he worked with equal success in English and in Latin. A similar double gift is found, later, in Handel, who set both Italian and Latin texts with equal flair. The same cannot be said, though, of Handel’s setting of English. Fans of his “Messiah” will not wish to be told that his setting of its text is frequently flawed. But the fact is that the musical line, here and there, inflicts on the words an inflection that distorts their true nature: it is as though the musical idea (often a very beautiful one) was so strong that the composer forced the words, willy-nilly, into its mould. With Handel, these errors can certainly be excused, for English was not his mother tongue; foreigners cannot be expected to master the nuances involved in handling the neutral vowel, the schwa. Composers whose first language is English cannot be so readily forgiven, if they commit the same blunder.
As with Byrd, Purcell’s craftsmanship and artistry as a word-setter were always evident in his choral works. They were even more strikingly apparent, by reason of their open exposure, in his compositions for the solo voice: throughout “Dido and Aeneas”, for instance, he never puts a foot wrong, in that respect, whether in recitatives or arias; and the same is true of the many airs he wrote in his incidental music for the stage. But there is one small area of his vocal output, little known and seldom performed, which plumbs the ultimate depths of his genius as a composer: the half-dozen or so sacred songs for solo voice and keyboard.
These pieces are settings of devotional poems by Purcell’s contemporaries, that eloquently capture the spiritual intensity of late seventeenth century faith. They are highly personal, almost private, in their approach to God; and they clearly appealed to something profoundly felt by Purcell. He set them with passion: they are declamatory when that is called for; when sorrowing, they are poignant in the extreme, plangent with chromatic dissonance; and in their gentler passages, they move with a touching lyricism that is at once tender and resolute. Elsewhere in his oeuvre, we encounter Purcell, the consummate professional, at work. In these songs, we encounter the inner man, naked and devout: they are his finest gift to the future.
When Purcell died, in 1695, at the age of thirty-six, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His funeral service was conducted by the entire Chapter of the Abbey, and the music was sung by the combined choirs of the Abbey and the Chapel Royal. The music was, of course, by Purcell himself: it was the same music as he had written for the funeral of the late Queen Mary. There was, in that, a proper justice: Death, the great leveller, had put on the same level of dignity and honour a mighty monarch and her humble servant. Which of the two is, in the end, more memorable, posterity has long since decided.
