During the first ten years of his mastership Purcell composed much-precisely how much we can only guess It was not until 1690 that he began the huge string of incidental theatre sets which were for so long spoken of as his operas Mr. Barclay Squire, to whom all who are interested in Purcell are deeply indebted, has clearly established that by 1690, though not more than two years earlier, his one opera, Dido and Aeneas, was written If we take this as belonging to the period which began in 1690, we have for these first ten years only ten plays to which he provided music, and of these several are very doubtful, and the rest not very important During the remaining six years of his life he wrote music for forty-two plays Several sets are of the greatest importance, amongst them Dioclesian, King Arthur, The Fairy Queen and The Tempest.

We cannot tell how many of the anthems belong to this period One might surmise that most of them do, as his activity at the theatre later on must have occupied most of his time But if we had no dates for Mozart’s three greater symphonies, we might readily fall into the mistake of attributing them to another year than that of their composition, and the mistake would be natural, if not inevitable, when we consider the enormous amount of music we know Mozart to have written in 1788 In Purcell we find the same terrific, superhuman energy manifested as the day of his death drew near, and perhaps we may be wrong in imagining that the theatre wholly absorbed him A few of the anthems may with great probability be ascribed to certain dates because of the royal events with which they are connected For example, two ("I was Glad,” and “My Heart is Inditing”) must have been written for the coronation of James II. in 1685 For “the Queen’s pregnancy” in 1688 another ("Blessed are They that Fear the Lord”) was certainly composed The anthems for the Queen’s funeral-and, as it turned out, for Purcell’s own-can also be dated in the same way, but they fall into a later period.

During these ten years fifteen odes were set, including the notable Yorkshire Feast Song, also the music for “the Lord Mayor’s show of 1682,” and the Quickstep, which afterwards became famous when the words “Lillibulero” were adapted to it It was sung as a sort of war-song against James II In 1687 Purcell wrote an elegy on John Playford, the son of the publisher of the same name.

It would be utterly impossible to determine the dates of upwards of 200 songs, duets, trios, and catches, nor does it greatly matter In a little book such as this we have little enough space without going into these questions The first sonatas in three parts are more important They were published in 1683, with a portrait of the composer at the age of twenty-four Some pieces for strings in from three to eight parts may be attributed to 1680 Some of the many harpsichord things may also belong to this period.

We cannot follow Purcell’s development step by step, year by year, as we can, for instance, Beethoven’s When we come to survey his work as a whole, we shall be able to compare the three-part sonatas issued in 1683 with the sonatas in four parts published in the year after his death We shall learn that towards the end of his life he was a more magnificent master, than he was when twenty-four years old That is the most we can see We may observe ode after ode, it is true, but with regard to them we ought to be able to take into account conditions and limitations of which nothing is recorded nor can be known This holds, also, with regard to the theatre music We can merely guess at what his employers asked him to provide We can never know the means they placed at his disposal One significant thing must be noted here:  the music itself-its style, spirit, even mannerism-affords us no trustworthy clue as to when any particular piece may have been written For ages the biographical copyists have not ceased to marvel at a boy of fourteen writing the Macbeth music It is silly rubbish, with which I believe Purcell had nothing whatever to do They marvelled at the immature power latent in the music to The Libertine, which they supposed he wrote in 1676 Alas! the date is 1692 They marvelled still more over Dido and Aeneas, attributed to 1680 Alas! again its date is much later-1688 to 1690 The evidence of style counts for little The truth is that in Purcell’s music there are no marked stages of development, no great changes in style Undoubtedly he gradually grew in power, richness of invention, fecundity of resource; but the change was one of degree, not of kind He never, as Beethoven did, went out to “take a new road.”  He struck what he knew to be his right road at the very beginning, and he never left it His nature and the point in history at which he appeared forbade that the content of his music should burst the form The forms he began with served him to the end.

I shall first deal with such of Purcells compositions as may fairly be considered as having been written before 1690. The music for the dramas is not of an ambitious character. It consists mainly of songs, dances, and curtain tunes. In many cases half a dozen items are all that are attached to one play, and many of the pieces are brief. Therefore that formidable-looking list of what used to be called Purcells operas does not represent anything like the quantity of music we might suppose. Purcell wrote only one opera-Dido The word “opera” had not in his day acquired a special meaning Spectacular plays, with songs, duets, choruses, dances, etc., were called entertainments or operas indiscriminately Until a few daring inquirers investigated, the world supposed Purcell to have collaborated with the playwrights In a few later shows it is true that he did, but some of the plays were written before he was born, some while he was a boy, and others-later ones-are known to have been first given without the aid of his music. The Indian Emperour was first played in 1665; Purcell added music in 1692. Tyrannic Love was produced in 1668 or 1669; the music was added in 1694. The Indian Queen was produced before The Emperour; the music was done in the last year of Purcell’s life If the Circe music is indeed Purcell’s, it cannot have been written until the author, Davenant, had been in his grave seventeen years If only the estimable ladies and gentlemen whose passion for writing about Purcell has wrapped the real man in a haze of fairy tales had taken the preliminary trouble of learning a little of the literature and drama of Purcell’s day!  Nay, had they only looked at the scores of Purcell’s “operas”!  Most of these plays undoubtedly had some music from the beginning It will be remembered that during the Puritan, joyless reign of dunderheadedness the playhouses were closed; but Cromwell, who loved music and gave State concerts, licensed Davenant to give “entertainments”-plays in which plot, acting, and everything else were neglected in favour of songs, dances, and such spectacles as the genius and machinery of the stage managers enabled them to devise When the Puritan rule faded, the taste for these shows still persisted Dryden took full advantage of this taste, and after 1668 threw songs wholesale into his plays Further, it would seem to have been the custom of theatre managers, when “reviving” forgotten or half-forgotten plays, to put in new songs and dances and gorgeous scenes, in the very spirit of Mr. Vincent Crummles, as the extra attractions As Purcell’s fame spread, his help would be more and more sought At first Mr. Crummles would be content with a few simple things, but later, finding these “a draw,” he would rely more on Purcell’s aid This is pure speculation, but it is fact that the earlier plays embellished by Purcell have nothing like the quantity of music we find in the later ones One venturesome biographer, by the way, not only insists on Purcell’s authorship of the Macbeth music, but suggests that “probably the recognition of the excellence and effectiveness” of such dull stuff “induced the managers of theatres to give him further employment.”  They were certainly a long time about it, for Lee’s Theodosius, the first play for which Purcell is known to have composed incidental music, was not produced till 1680, eight years after the latest possible date of the Macbeth music; and, apart from Dido, which is not a play, but an opera, it was eighteen years till these same astute managers were “induced” by “the excellence and effectiveness” of the Macbeth or any other music to give Purcell something serious to do in the theatre It was in 1690 that Dioclesian appeared, the first and one of the most important of a long string of works for the stage The hypotheses, the “wild surmises” and the daring defiance of mere facts indulged in by biographers are indeed wonderful, as they strive and strain to read and to fill in the nearly obliterated, dim and distant record of Purcell’s life Yet it is risky for a biographer to laugh; perhaps it is utterly wrong to conjecture that towards the end of his life Purcell had become indispensable, and was engaged to supply the music for all the plays as they were given, big or little, as they came along Nor do we know how much more music may have been written for the first plays, nor how much of what has been preserved is genuine Purcell.

On one point we may be quite certain It is the greatest pity that Purcell wasted so much time on these Restoration shows When the English people revolted against Puritanism, and gave the incorrigible Stuarts another chance, Charles the Wanderer returned to find them in a May-Day humour They thrust away from them for a little while the ghastly spiritual hypochondria of which Puritanism was a manifestation, and determined to make merry But, heigh-ho! the day of Maypoles was over and gone From the beginning the jollity and laughter were forced, and the new era of perpetual spring festival soon became an era of brainless indecency Even the wit of the Restoration was bitter, acid, sardonic (as Charles’s own death-bed apology for being an unconscionable time a-dying) Generally it was ill-tempered, and employed to inflict pain And there was not even wit in most of the plays It is hard to see what even the worst age could discover to laugh at in Shadwell’s Libertine, the story of Don Juan told in English, and, in a sense, made the most of.

Because of their nastiness, often combined with stupidity, the Restoration dramas will never be resurrected There is another reason The glorious Elizabethan era and spirit were gone; the eighteenth century was coming on fast Dryden and his fellows had noble rules for the construction of plays, and nobler ones for the language that might or might not be used They derived all their rules, if you please, from “the ancients.”  Like Voltaire, they reckoned Shakespeare a barbarian with native wood-notes wild They took his plays and “made them into plays.”  They improved The Tempest, Timon of Athens, The Midsummer Night’s Dream, and goodness knows how many more Davenant, in search of material for entertainments, began it; Dryden continued it; even Shadwell had his dirty fingers in it And this matters to us, for some of Purcell’s most glorious songs, choruses and instrumental pieces were composed for these desecrations, and can never again be listened to under the conditions he had in his mind.

According to some authorities ("The Dictionary of National Biography” amongst them), the first play handled by Purcell was Lee’s Sophonisba; or, The Overthrow of Hannibal; according to others, the first was Theodosius; or, The Force of Love Both, however, date not later than 1685, which is near enough for either when there is nothing like conclusive evidence as to which had the priority The music for the first plays is in no way bound up with the plays It consists of instrumental pieces and songs literally interpolated It is likely enough that tunes written for one play were often enough used for another The pieces were brief, but the unmistakable Purcellian mingling of strength and sweetness is to be found even in such trifles In 1690 and later Purcell took full advantage of masques which were inserted, the interpolations being sometimes as long as the rest of the play, and artistically of infinitely greater value For the present he confined himself to less imposing forms, which was certainly what he was engaged to do.

The finest example of the odes of the period is the so-called Yorkshire Feast Song (1689) Many of the others are not, for Purcell, extraordinary They were written for such special occasions, for instance, as the King’s return all the way to London from Windsor, or even Newmarket, or the birthday of a Queen, and in one case the birthday of a six-year-old Duke They consist of overtures, songs, choruses, etc. With one or two exceptions, the structure is Purcells ordinary. What that structure was we shall see (once for all) in examining some of the later compositions, the only difference observable in the later works being, on the whole, an increased richness and greater breadth of scheme. They are nearly always brilliant, often incisive; there are most lovely melodies; and there are numerous specimens of Purcells power of writing music, endless in its variety of outline and colour and changing sentiment, on a ground-bass-i.e., a bass passage repeated over and over again until the piece is finished The instrumentation must have been largely dictated by the instruments placed at his disposal, though we must remember that in days when it was an everyday occurrence for, say, an oboist to play from the violin part save in certain passages, even an apparently complete score is no secure guide as to what the composer meant, and as to how the piece was given under his direction This remark applies to the scoring of much of the theatre music The Theatre Ayres contain only string parts, and it is nonsense to suppose that in the theatre of that time Purcell had only strings to write for Purcell wrote in all twenty-two sonatas-twelve in three parts, ten in four So far as the number of parts is concerned, there is little real difference In the three-part works one stave serves for both the string bass-player and the harpsichordist; in the four-part ones there are two separate staves, with trifling variations in the two parts The twelve three-part sonatas were issued, as has been said, in 1683 They are pure, self-sustaining music, detached from words and scenic arrangements; nothing approaching them had been written by an Englishman, nor anything so fine by an Italian Indeed, in their own particular way they are matched only by the composer’s own four-part sonatas published after his death We must not look for anything like form in the sense that word conveys nowadays; there is no unalterable scheme of movements such as there is in the Haydn symphony, and within each movement there is no first subject, second subject, development and recapitulation All that had to be worked out nearly a century later The set forms of Purcell’s day were the dances The principle of Purcell’s sonata form is alternate fast and slow movements Nothing more can be perceived; there is nothing more to perceive Sometimes he commences with a quick piece; then we have an adagio or some slow dance; then another quick piece In other cases the order is reversed:  a slow movement may be followed by a slower movement He makes great use of fugue, more or less free, and of imitation, and, of course, he employs ground-basses The masculine strength and energy, the harsh clashing discords, are not less remarkable than the constant sweetness; and if there is rollicking spring jollity, there are also moments of deepest pathos There is scarcely such a thing as a dry page It is true that Purcell avowed that he copied the best Italian masters, but the most the copying amounts to is taking suggestions for the external scheme of his sonatas and for the manner of writing for strings He poured copiously his streams of fresh and strong melody into forms which, in the hands of those he professed to imitate, were barren, lifeless things Many of these sonatas might almost be called rhapsodies; certainly a great many movements are rhapsodical In set forms one has learnt from experience what to expect In the dance measures and fugues, after a few bars, one has a premonition (begotten of oft-repeated and sometimes wearisome experience) of what is coming, of the kind of thing that is coming; just as in a Haydn or Mozart sonata one knows so well what to expect that one often expects a surprise, and may be surprised if there is nothing to surprise one But in many of Purcell’s largos, for example, the music flows out from him shaped and directed by no precedent, no rule; it flows and wanders on, but is never aimlessly errant; there is a quality in it that holds passage to passage, gives the whole coherence and a satisfying order Emerson speaks of Swedenborg’s faculties working with astronomic punctuality, and this would apply to Purcell’s musical faculties Take a scrappy composer, a short-breathed one such as Grieg:  he wrote within concise and very definite forms; yet the order of many passages might be reversed, and no one-not knowing the original-would be a penny the wiser or the worse There is no development With Purcell there is always development, though the laws of it lie too deep for us Hence his rhapsodies, whether choral or instrumental, are satisfying, knit together by some inner force of cohesion.

During these ten years several children were born to Purcell He had six children altogether Four died while still babies; two, Edward and Frances, survived him Edward lived till 1740, leaving a son; Frances married one Welsted, or Welstead, and died in 1724 Her daughter died two years later Before the end of the eighteenth century the line of Purcell’s descendants seems to have terminated In 1682 Purcell became an organist of the Chapel Royal, whilst remaining organist of Westminster Abbey As has already been said, the musicians of this age were pluralists-they had to be in order to earn a decent living, for the salaries were anything but large, and punctuality in payment was not a feature. In 1684 there was a competition at the Temple Church, not between organists, but between organ-builders. The authorities got two builders to set up each an organ, and decided which was the better by the simple plan of hearing them played by different organists and deciding which sounded the better. To any but a legal mind the affair would seem to have resolved itself mainly into a competition between organ-players; but we know how absolutely lost to all sense of justice, fairness, reason and common sense the legal mind is. So Purcell played for Father Smith, and inevitably the organ built by Father Smith was thought the finer. This easy way of solving a difficult problem, though it has so much to recommend it to the legal mind, has fallen into desuetude, and is abandoned nowadays, even in that home of absurdities, the Temple. For the coronation of James II., Purcell superintended the setting-up of an extra or special organ in the Abbey; and for this he was granted L34 12s. out of the secret-service money. In 1689, at the coronation of the lucky gentleman who superseded James, no such allowance appears to have been made; and Purcell admitted the curious to the organ-loft, making a charge and putting it in his pocket. This was too much for the clergy. They regarded the money as theirs, and as Mr. Gladstone, that stout Churchman, said, the Church will give up rather its faith than its money. The Abbey authorities never thought of giving up either, but they threatened Purcell with terrible penalties unless he gave up the money. Almost with a pistol at his head they asked him to give up his money or his post. How the squabble ended no man knows; the conjecture that he refunded the money-i.e., gave it to those it did not belong to-is unsupported.

These are the only scraps of veracious history that come down to us; the other choice bits I take to be exercises in prosaic romance.