What we know of Purcell’s life is nothing, or next to nothing; what is written as his life is conjecture, more or less ingenious inference, or pure fiction In that we know so little of him he is blessed, but the blessedness has not as yet extended to his biographers At one time a biographer’s task was easy:  he simply took the hearsay and inventions of Hawkins, and accepted them as gospel truth whenever they could not be tested The fact that whenever they could by any means be tested they were found to be false-even this did not dismay the biographer Hawkins’s favourite pastime was libelling the dead He libelled Dr. Johnson, and Boswell promptly and most vigorously dealt with him; he libelled Purcell grossly-he deliberately devised slanderous tales of him The biographers, with simple, childlike credulity, went on whenever possible repeating his statements, for the obvious reason that this course was the easiest Hawkins knew nothing of Purcell He can be proved to be wrong, not merely about this or that detail, but about everything He is said to have known one Henry Needler, a pupil of Purcell, and also Gostling, the son of the singer of the same name for whom Purcell wrote; but neither acquaintance seems to have profited him aught His anecdotes are the product of inborn wickedness and an uncouth, boorish imagination When we have cleared away his garbage, there remains only a skeleton life, but at any rate we have the satisfaction of knowing that is pure fact.

Henry Purcell was born (probably) about the end of 1658, and (probably also) in Westminster Some of his family were musicians before him His father, Henry Purcell the elder, was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (that is, a singer in the choir, and in many cases organist as well), and was master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey for three years He held various posts in the “King’s Musick,” sharing the duties of “lute and voyce” for a time with one Angelo Notari The latter appears to have died in 1663; but strangely enough after his death he asked for arrears of salary for 1661 and 1664 However, in 1663 Henry Purcell the elder seemed to have taken over the whole duties of their joint post; and he, Purcell, died in 1664 If Henry the younger was six years old at the time of his father’s death, then he must have been born in 1658 or, at latest, the early part of 1659; if he was born in 1658 or the early part of 1659, then he must have been six years old at the time of his father’s death So much we know positively; anything more is supposition-that is, the whole affair is supposition; but this supposition has one merit:  it cannot be very widely wrong Pepys knew Henry the elder, and refers to him in his Diary; and it may be remarked in passing that those who wish to grow familiar with the atmosphere in which Purcell was brought up, and lived and worked, must go to Pepys, who knew all the musicians of the period, and the life of Church, Court, and theatre Thomas Purcell, brother of Henry the elder, was also a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal He succeeded Henry Lawes as Court lutanist, and held other positions, and evidently stood high in favour This Thomas certainly adopted Henry the younger at the death of Henry the elder, and afterwards he wrote of him as “my sonne.”  Young Henry seems to have become a choir-boy as a mere matter of family custom He joined as one of “the children” of the Chapel Royal, with Captain Cooke as his master Cooke must have been a clever musician in spite of the military title he had gained while fighting on the Royalist side in the Civil War He had an extraordinarily gifted set of boys under him, and he seems to have trained them well When some of them tried their infantile hands at composition he encouraged them Pepys heard at least one of their achievements, and records his pleasure And it must be remembered that Pepys was a composer and connoisseur-he would go many miles to hear a piece of music Cooke died in 1672, and Pelham Humphries became master of “the children.”  He was born in 1647, and therefore was eleven years older than Purcell; he, too, had been a child of the Chapel Royal In 1664 Charles sent him abroad to study foreign methods In the accounts of the secret-service money for 1664, 1665, and 1666 stand sums of money paid him to defray his expenses; yet in 1665 the accounts of the “King’s Musick” show that Cooke received L40 “for the maintenance of Pelham Humphryes.”  In less than a year’s time he was appointed musician for the lute-in the “King’s Musick”-in the place of Nicholas Lanier, deceased Two months after this entry the appointment is confirmed by warrant He undoubtedly did go abroad He got, at any rate, as far as Paris, and came back, says Pepys, “an absolute monsieur”-very vain, loquacious, and “mighty great” with the King Most of the musicians of the time were vain Cooke must have been intolerable Perhaps they learnt it from the actors with whom they associated-many of them, in fact, were actors as well as musicians Humphries had worked under Lulli It is not known that he had any other master in Paris or in Italy, or whether he ever got as far as Italy Up to that date no opera of Lulli’s seems to have been produced, but he was none the less a master of music, and he could hand on what he had learnt of Carissimi’s technique Humphries, highly gifted, swift, returned to England knowing all Lulli could teach him He had not Purcell’s rich imagination, nor his passion, nor that torrential flow of ever-fresh melody; but it cannot be doubted that he was of immense service in indicating new paths and new ways of doing things He had-at second hand we must admit-Carissimi’s methods and new impulse; and, at the very least, he saved Purcell the trouble of a journey to Paris It was a misfortune for English music that he died so early These Restoration geniuses had a way of dying early He distinctly had genius, a very different thing from the plodding industry of Dr. John Blow, who succeeded him in 1674 Dr. Blow afterwards claimed to have been Purcell’s master, and, as Purcell was certainly his pupil, there seems no reason for doubting him Purcell was, of course, sixteen years of age when Humphries died, and no longer a mere choir-boy; but he remained attached to Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal According to the records of the “King’s Musick,” on June 10, 1673, there is a “warrant to admit Henry Purcell in the place of keeper, maker, mender, repayrer and tuner of the regalls, organs, virginalls, flutes and recorders and all other kind of wind instruments whatsoever, in ordinary, without fee, to his Majesty, and assistant to John Hingston, and upon the death or other avoydance of the latter, to come in ordinary with fee.”  So late as 1683, when Purcell had been organist of Westminster Abbey for about three years, he was appointed to be “organ-maker and keeper in the place of Mr. Hingston, deceased.”  The conjecture of Rev. Henry Cart de Lafontaine, editor of these records (published by Novello) seems to be correct:  Purcell must have been apprenticed to Hingston and afterwards succeeded him In later warrants he is authorised to buy wood, metal and Heaven knows what else-he can buy what he likes as long as he keeps the instruments in order and in tune Charles II. had a good ear In 1676 Purcell was appointed “copyist” of Westminster Abbey, whatever post that may have been In 1677 “Henry Purcell” is “appointed composer in ordinary with fee for the violin to his Majesty, in the place of Matthew Lock, deceased.”  I fancy that his tuition from Dr. Blow must have been mainly in organ-playing, in which art Dr. Blow was an esteemed master At the same time, we must not forget that we have Purcell’s own word for it that Blow was one of the greatest masters of composition in the world Purcell spoke of Dr. Blow’s technical mastery of the tricks of canon-writing, which Purcell himself was much addicted to, and greatly enjoyed Dr. Blow may have taught Purcell something of the older technique; that of Lulli and the Italians he must have learnt from Humphries, for Dr. Blow knew next to nothing about it Dr. Blow was born in 1648, and was one year younger than Humphries, and ten older than Purcell In 1669 he became organist of Westminster Abbey He, like Humphries, and, indeed, all the foremost musicians of the period, was a bloated pluralist, and held other positions It is said that he resigned Westminster Abbey in 1680 in Purcell’s favour Whether the resignation was voluntary or not, Purcell assuredly took his place at that date After Purcell’s death in 1695 Dr. Blow took the position again, and retained it until his own death, in 1708 It is also said that he resigned another place to make way for another pupil, Jeremiah Clarke This apparent passion or mania for resigning posts in favour of gifted pupils might easily have led to a pernicious custom amongst organists However, since Dr. Blow’s time the organist of Westminster Abbey has always been a more business-like person, though rarely, if ever, a fine artist Dr. Blow, living amongst men of such genius, caught a little-a very little-of Humphries’ and Purcell’s lordly manner in the writing of music; but no sweet breath of inspiration ever blew his way Burney, unfortunate creature, found fault with his harmonies, and these have been defended as “spots on the sun.”  As a matter of fact, the harmonies are good enough There are no spots-only there is no sun His claim to have taught Purcell is a claim for such immortality as books give Purcell’s teacher will be remembered long after the composer of anthems has been crowded out of biographical dictionaries.

I have said that our knowledge of Purcell consists very largely of speculations, hypotheses and inferences These have led the biographers into wasting some highly moral reflections on Purcell’s early doings We are told, for example, that he composed music for the theatre until he became organist of Westminster Abbey, after which date he applied his energies wholly to the service of the Church Had the biographers not kindly followed the blind Hawkins and Burney, and hearsay generally, those reflections might have been saved for a more fitting occasion It was long held that Purcell wrote the incidental music for Aureng-Zebe, Epsom Wells, and The Libertine about 1676, when he was eighteen, because those plays were performed or published at that time It used to be said that the music, though immature, showed promise, and was indeed marvellous for so young a man But unless one possesses the touchstone of a true critical faculty and an intimate acquaintance with Purcell’s music and all the music of the time, one should be cautious-one cannot be too cautious The music for these plays was not composed till at least fifteen years later The biographers had also a craze for proving Purcell’s precocity They would have it that Dido and Aeneas dated from his twenty-second year If they had boldly stuck to their plan of attributing the music to the year of the first performance of the play to which it is attached, they might easily have shown him to have been a prolific composer before he was born The prosaic truth is that Purcell came before the world as a composer for the theatre in the very year of his appointment to Westminster Abbey, and during the last five years of his life he turned out huge quantities of music for the theatre It is easy to believe that his first experiments were for the Church He was brought up in the Church, and sang there; when his voice broke he went on as organist Some of his relatives and most of his friends were Church musicians But Church and stage were not far apart at the Court of Charles, and, moreover, the more nearly the music of the Church resembled that of the stage, the better the royal ears were pleased Pepys’ soul was filled with delighted approval when he noticed the royal hand beating the time during the anthem, and, in fact, Charles insisted on anthems he could beat time to Whilst “on his travels” he had doubtless observed how much better, from his point of view, they did these things in France There was nothing vague or undecided in that curious mind He knew perfectly well what he liked, and insisted on having it He disliked the old Catholic music; he disliked quite as much Puritan psalm-singing-that abominable cacophony which to-day is called “hearty congregational singing.”  He wanted jolly Church music, sung in time and in tune; he wanted secular, not sacred, music in church But his taste, though secular, was not corrupt-the music-hall Church music and Salvation Army tunes of to-day would probably have outraged his feelings His taste coincided with Purcell’s own Along with some of the old-fashioned genuine devotional music, Purcell must have heard from childhood a good deal of the stamp he was destined to write; he must often have taken his part in Church music that might, with perfect propriety, have been given in a theatre All things were ripe for a secular composer; the mood that found utterance in the old devotional music was a dead thing, and in England Humphries had pointed the new way Purcell was that secular composer.

One spirit, the secular, pagan spirit, breathes in every bar of Purcell’s music Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred style of the anthems and services Not resemblance, but identity, is the word to use There is no distinguishing between the two styles There are not two styles:  there is one style-the secular style, Purcell’s style Let us pause a moment, and ask ourselves if any great composer has ever had more than one style Put aside the fifth-rate imitators who now copied Mozart, and now Palestrina, and could therefore write in as many styles as there were styles to copy, and not one of them their own There is no difference between the sacred motets and the secular madrigals of the early polyphonists Bach did not use dance-measures in his Church music, but in the absence of these lies the entire distinction between his Church and his secular compositions; the structure, manner and outlines of his songs are precisely alike-indeed, he dished up secular airs for sacred cantatas The style of Handel’s “Semele” and that of his “Samson” are the same; there is no dissimilarity between Haydn’s symphonies and the “Creation”; Mozart’s symphonies and his masses (though the masses are a little breezier, on the whole); Schubert’s symphonies or songs and his masses or “The Song of Miriam”; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the great Mass in D.

Purcell’s style is largely a sort of fusion of all the styles in vogue in his lifetime The old polyphonic music he knew, and he was a master of polyphonic writing; but with him it was only a means to the carrying out of a scheme very unlike any the old writers ever thought of-the interest of each separate part is not greater than the general harmonic interest Then, as he admitted, he learnt a great deal from the Italians From Lulli, through Humphries, he got declamatory freedom in the bonds of definite forms, not letting the poet’s or the Bible words warp his music out of all reasonable shape The outlines of his tunes show unmistakably the influence of English folk-song and folk-dance There was an immense amount of household music in those days-catches, ballads, songs and dances The folk-songs, even if they were invented before the birth of the modern key-sense, were soon modified by it:  very few indications can be found of their having originated in the epoch when the modes had the domination; and the same is true of the dances The sum of these influences, plus Purcell’s innate tendencies, was a style “apt” (in the phraseology of the day) either for Church, Court, theatre, or tavern-a style whose combined loftiness, directness, and simplicity passed unobserved for generations while the big “bow-wow” manner of Handel was held to be the only manner tolerable in great music.

By 1680 Purcell’s apprenticeship was at end Early compositions by him had been published in Playford’s “Choice Ayres” in 1676 and 1679; in 1677 he had been appointed “composer (to the King) in ordinary for the violin, in the place of Matthew Lock, deceased”; but none of the highest official posts were his And we must remember that official position was a very different thing in Restoration times from what it is to-day Nowadays the world is bigger and more thickly populated, and men of intellect and genius scorn Court appointments and official appointments generally These are picked up by Court toadies, business-headed persons, men belonging to well-connected families-the Tite Barnacles of the generation The men of power appeal to the vast public direct In Purcell’s day there was no vast public to appeal to Concerts had scarcely been devised; no composer could live by publishing his works The Court, the theatre, the Church-he had to win a position in one or other or all of these if he wished to live at all So in 1680 Purcell the master passed over the head of his teacher, Dr. John Blow, to the organistship of Westminster Abbey-that is, he was recognised as the first organist living In the same year he composed the first theatre pieces he is known to have composed-those for Lee’s Theodosius. (I disregard as fatuous the supposition that in his boyhood he wrote the Macbeth music attributed, perhaps wrongly, to Locke.) It was not for some time that he gained the supremacy at the theatre which he now held in the Church That very trustworthy weathercock John Dryden, Poet Laureate, continued to flatter others for many long days to come In this same year he composed the first of a long series of odes of welcome, congratulation or condolence for royal or great personages, and about this year he married.