During the last portion of his life (1690-5) Purcell composed a large amount of music, and that is nearly all we know Of course, he went on playing the organ-that is indubitable Of course, also, he gave lessons; but it is a remarkable fact that few musicians after his death claimed to have been his favourite pupils or his pupils at all That he became, as we should say nowadays, conductor at Drury Lane or any other theatre cannot be asserted with certitude, though it is probable He wrote incidental music for about forty-two dramas, some of the sets of pieces being gorgeously planned on a large scale He had composed complimentary odes for three Kings; in the last year of his life he was to write the funeral music for a Queen, and the music was to serve at his own funeral During this last period he wrote his greatest ode, “Hail, Bright Cecilia”; his greatest pieces of Church music, the Te Deum and Jubilate; and in all likelihood his greatest sonatas, those in four parts He also rewrote a part of Playford’s Brief Introduction to the Skill of Music.

It is not my intention to analyse the dramas No more can be done in the narrow space than give the reader a notion of Purcell’s general procedure of filling his space, and the salient characteristics of the filling Although Dido differs from the other plays in containing no spoken dialogue, and may not strictly fall into this period, I shall for convenience’ sake treat it with them After dealing with the dramatic work there will remain the odes, the anthems and services, and the instrumental music.

THE THEATRE MUSIC

We can scarcely hope to hear the bulk of the music for the theatre, as has been remarked, because of the worthlessness of the plays to which it is attached Even King Arthur, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen and Dioclesian pieces are too fragmentary, disconnected, to be performed with any effect without scenery, costume, and some explanation in the way of dialogue In King Arthur there are instrumental numbers to accompany action on the stage:  without that action these numbers are meaningless. King Arthur was given at Birmingham some years ago, but it proved to be even more incoherent than the festival cantatas which our composers write to order:  if the masque from Timon or Dioclesian had been inserted, few would have noticed the interpolation.

Dido and Aeneas is a different matter It was very well performed by students some years since, and there is no reason why such an opera company as the Moody-Manners should not devote half an evening to it now and then It is not long; excepting the solo parts, it is not difficult; it is entrancingly beautiful; properly staged, the dances of witches, etc., are fantastic and full of interest. For two hundred years every musician has admired Didos lament, When I am laid in Earth; and indeed it is one of the most poignantly sorrowful and exquisitely beautiful songs ever composed. There are plenty of rollicking tunes, too, and the dance-pieces-with the dancers-are exhilarating and admirable for their purpose The musicianship is as masterly as Purcell ever displayed If Purcell composed the work before he was twenty-two he worked a miracle; and even if the date is ten years later it stands as a wonderful achievement If we ask why he did not produce more real operas, there can be only one answer:  the town did not care for them The town went crazy over spectacular shows; even Dryden yielded to the town’s taste; and there is no sign that Purcell cherished any particular private passion for opera as opera He did his best for his paymaster If there is no evidence hinting at his despising posterity, like Charles Lamb, or at any determination, also like Lamb, to write for antiquity, there is in his anthems and odes very considerable evidence that he was ready to write what his paymaster wanted written We must bear in mind that downright bad taste, such as our present-day taste for such artistic infamies as the “Girls of This” and the “Belles of That,” had not come into existence in Purcell’s time Purcell’s contemporaries preferred his music to all other for the same reason that we prefer it to all other of his time-it was the best.

Dido, in pianoforte score, is generally accessible; only a few of the spoken play sets are as yet published, and they are ridiculously expensive Let us not repine and give up hope Some day that unheard-of thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works of England’s greatest musician Meantime, the reader must do as the writer did for some years-he must grub and laboriously copy in the British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of Dioclesian and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as The Tempest and The Indian Queen, and also the Orpheus Britannicus To penetrate to Purcell’s intention, to understand with what skill and force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone hardly suffices I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour to read the whole of the plays, but at least Boadicca, The Indian Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian and King Arthur must be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all the details of the masques For themselves, few of the plays are worth reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant music The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell’s aid was required were the worst of all-what little sense there was in the bad plays was destroyed when they were made into “operas” or “entertainments”-spectacular shows Dryden was the best of the playwrights he was doomed to work with, and in King Arthur Dryden forgot about the aim and purpose of high drama, and concocted a hobgoblin pantomime interlarded with bravado concerning the greatness of Britain and Britons. Dioclesian, the first of Purcell’s great theatre achievements, is even more stupid The original play was The Prophetess of Beaumont and Fletcher, straightforward Elizabethan stodge and fustian:  and if Betterton, who chose to maltreat it, was bent on making the very worst play ever written, it must be conceded that his success was nearly complete It gets down to the plane of pure and sparkling idiocy that the world admires in, say, “The Merry Widow.”  Yet the masque afforded him opportunities of which he made splendid use The overture is a noble piece of workmanship There is a Handelian dignity without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a kind that Handel never attained to Of course, it has no connection with the drama:  it would serve for many another play just as well What the theatre manager demanded of Purcell was a piece of music to occupy the audience before the curtain went up; and Purcell wrote it There are songs and dances of a rare quality, and the biggest thing of all is the chorus, “Let all rehearse,” which rivals Handel’s “Fixed in his everlasting seat,” a plain copy of it, down to many small points Those who say Purcell had no influence upon his successors evidently know little either of Purcell’s music or Handel’s Handel owed much to Purcell, and not least was the massive, direct way of dealing with the chorus, the very characteristic which has kept his oratorios so popular here and so unpopular abroad Handel’s mighty choral effects are English:  he learnt from Purcell how to make them It is true enough that Purcell learnt something from Carissimi; but Carissimi’s effects are very often of that kind that look better on paper than they sound in performance The variations over ground-basses are marvellously ingenious, but more marvellous than the ingenuity are the charming delicacy and expressiveness of the melodies woven in the upper parts They are music which appeals direct to listeners who care nothing for technical problems Some of the discords may sound a little odd to those who have been trained to regard the harmonic usages of the Viennese school as the standard of perfection Dr. Burney thought them blunders resulting from an imperfect technique Later a few words must be said on the subject, but let me for the present point out that Purcell was a master of the theory as well as of the practice of composition He loved these discords, and deliberately wrote them; he could have justified them, and there is hardly one that we cannot justify Purcell could write intricate fugues and canons without any “harsh progressions”; that he liked these for their own sake is obvious in numberless pieces where no laws of counterpoint compelled him to write this note rather than that And though in the eyes of the theorists they are harsh, in the ears of all men they are sweet The works of Purcell and of Mozart are the sweetest music ever composed, yet both composers filled their music with discords-“that give delight and hurt not.”

In 1691 Purcell and Dryden did King Arthur together The poet had by this time forsaken Monsieur Grabut, who had in his eyes at one time stood for all that was commendable in music Grabut was more ingenious as a business man than as a musician, but not all his ingenuity served to prevent the English discovering that he could not write pleasing tunes and that Purcell could. Whether Dryden felt any difference whatever between good and bad music I cannot say:  he may have been like many of the poets, music-deaf (analogous to colour-blind) They are said to have been good friends, which I can well believe; and Dryden, when pursued by duns and men with writs and such implements of torture, is said to have stowed himself secretly in Purcell’s room in the clock-tower of St. James’s Palace, which one may believe or not, according to the mood of the moment Anyhow, he seems to have been happy to work with Purcell, and for the spectacles in King Arthur they laid their two heads together and arranged some dazzling things which no one would care to see nowadays. King Arthur is almost as brilliant as Dioclesian, and contains some exceedingly patriotic songs The stage in England always threatens most bloodshed to England’s foes when those foes might seem to an impartial observer to be having the better of it Only a few years ago the heroes of the music-hall menaced the Boers with unspeakable castigations when only they could be persuaded to leave off unaccountably thrashing our generals; and when Purcell wrote “Come if you Dare,” and many another martial ditty, the time had not long passed when Van Tromp sailed up the Thames with a broom at his mast-head All the same, “Come if you Dare” is a fine song; “Fairest Isles, all Isles excelling,” is one of Purcell’s loveliest thoughts, and the words are more boastful than ferocious; “Saint George, the Patron of our Isle,” is brilliant and the words are innocuous The masque element is not dumped into King Arthur altogether so shamelessly as in other cases; the whole play is a masque Although there is a plot, the supernatural is largely employed, and nymphs, sirens, magicians, and what not, gave the composer notable chances In the first act, the scene where the Saxons sacrifice to Woden and other of their gods, is the occasion for a chain of choruses, each short but charged with the true energy divine; then comes a “battle symphony,” noisy but mild-a sham fight with blank cartridge; and after the battle the Britons sing a “song of victory,” our acquaintance “Come if you Dare, the Trumpets Sound.”  The rest of the work is mainly enchantments and the like More fairy-like music has never entered a musician’s dreams than Philidel’s “Hither this way,” and the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin, will-o’-th’-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn Mendelssohn is Purcell’s only rival in such pictures At the beginning of the celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up “thou genius of the clime” (the clime being Arctic), we get a specimen of Purcell’s “word-painting”: 

This “word-painting,” it must be noted, is of the very essence of Purcell’s art, at any rate in vocal music Suggestions came to him from the lines he was setting and determined the contours of his melody He always does it, and never with ridiculous effect Either the effect is dramatically right, as here; or impressive, as in “They that go down to the sea in ships”; or sublime as in “Full fathom five”; and whatever else it may be, it is always picturesque The shivering chorus was an old idea in Purcell’s time, but the sheer power of Purcell’s music sets his use of it far above any other It should be observed that none of the principals sing in these “operas”:  they couldn’t It is true that many singers, thorough musicians-Matthew Locke, for instance, and Purcell’s own father-were also actors, or at least spoken of as actors But it is evident they must have been engaged only for the singing parts, which were insignificant as far as the plots of the plays were concerned, though prominent enough in the spectacle or show, and therefore in the public gaze When all the enchanters and genies, good and bad, have done their best or worst in King Arthur, the speaking characters finish up their share and the real play in spoken lines; then the singers and band wind up the whole entertainment in a style that was probably thought highly effective in the seventeenth century After the last chorus-which begins as though the gathering were a Scotch one and we were going to have “Auld Lang Syne”-there is a final “grand dance,” one of the composer’s vigorous and elaborately worked displays on a ground-bass.

Before making some general observations on the stage music, I wish to give a few instances of Purcell’s power of drawing pictures and creating the very atmosphere of nature as he felt her Let me begin with The Tempest The music is of Purcell’s very richest Not even Handel in Israel in Egypt has given us the feeling of the sea with finer fidelity Unluckily, to make this show Shakespeare’s play was ruthlessly mangled, else Shakespeare’s Tempest would never be given without Purcell’s music Many of the most delicate and exquisite songs are for personages who are not in the original at all, and no place can be found for their songs.

Two of Ariel’s songs are of course known to everybody-“Full fathom five” and “Come unto these yellow sands,” both great immortal melodies (in the second Shakespeare’s words are doctored and improved) The first I have mentioned as a specimen of Purcell’s “word-painting”:  there, at one stroke of immense imaginative power, we have the depths of the sea as vividly painted as in Handel’s “And with the blast,” or “The depths have covered them.”  Another exquisite bit of painting-mentioned in my first chapter-is repeated several times: the rippling sea on a calm day. It occurs first in Neptunes song, While these pass oer the deep-

Next in Amphitrite’s song, “Halcyon Days,” a serenely lovely melody, we have

which is a variant Then follows “See, the heavens smile,” the opening of the vocal part of which I will quote for its elastic energy: 

In the instrumental introduction to the song this (and more) is first played by the viols a couple of octaves above, and after it we get our phrase: 

The atmosphere of The Fairy Queen is not, to my mind, so richly odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that of The Tempest; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody The score was lost for a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock edited it, and it has been published. The Indian Queen and Bonduca stand badly in need of careful editing-not in the spirit of one editor of King Arthur who, while declaring that he had altered nothing, stated that he had altered some passages to make them sound better. The Indian Queen contains the recitative “Ye twice ten hundred deities” and the song “By the croaking of the toad.”

Purcell’s forms are not highly organised There are fugues, canons, exercises on a ground-bass, and many numbers are dances planned in much the same way as other people’s dances, and songs differing only in their quality from folk-songs Of form, as we use the word-meaning the clean-cut form perfected by Haydn-I have already asserted that there is none This absence of form is held to be a defect by those who regard the Haydn form as an ideal-an ideal which had to be realised before there could be any music at all, properly speaking But those of us who are not antediluvian academics know that form (in that sense) is not an end, but a means of managing and holding together one’s material In Purcell’s music it is not needed The torrent of music flowing from his brain made its own bed and banks as it went Without modern form he wrote beautiful, perfectly satisfying music, which remains everlastingly modern Neither did he feel the want of the mode of thematic development which we find at its ripest in Beethoven As I have described in discussing the three-part sonatas, in movements that are not dances his invention is its own guide, though we may note that he employed imitation pretty constantly to knit the texture of the music close and tight Many of the slow openings of the overture are antiphonal, passages sometimes being echoed, and sometimes a passage is continued by being repeated with the ups and downs of the melody inverted Dozens of devices may be observed, but all are servants of an endless invention.

The variety of the songs and recitatives is wondrous Purcell was one of the very greatest masters of declamation In his recitative we are leagues removed from the “just accent” of Harry Lawes It is passionate, or pathetic, or powerfully dramatic, or simply descriptive (in a way), or dignified, as the situation requires “Let the dreadful engines” and “Ye twice ten hundred deities” have, strange to say, long been famous, in spite of their real splendour; and another great specimen is the command of Aeolus to the winds (in King Arthur)-“Ye blustering breezes ... retire, and let Britannia rise.”  The occasion is a pantomime, but Purcell used it for a master-stroke He wrote every kind of recitative as it had never been written before in any language, and as it has not been written in English since In the songs the words often suggest the melodic outline, as well as dictate the informing spirit Many are rollicking, jolly; some touchingly expressive; most are purely English; a few rather Italian (old school) in manner One can see what Purcell had gained by his study of Italian part-writing for strings, but he could not help penning picturesque phrases.

The dances are, of course, simple in structure When they are in the form of passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses The overtures are often very noble, but without pomposity or grandiloquence; indeed, they move as if unconscious of their own tremendous strength One may hear half a dozen bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic purpose with which the parts are moving, and the enormous heat and energy that move them When strength and sinew are wanted in the themes, they are there, and contrapuntal adaptability is there; but they are real living themes, not ossified or petrified formulas Themes, part-writing and harmony are closely bound up in one another, and harmony is not the least important Purcell liked daring harmonies, and they arise organically out of the firm march of individual parts Excepting sometimes for a special purpose, he does not dump them down as accompaniment to an upper part The “false relations” and “harsh progressions” of which the theorists prate do not exist for an unprejudiced ear In writing the flattened leading note in one part against the sharpened in another he was merely following the polyphonists, and it sounds as well-nay, as beautiful-as any other discord, or the same discord on another degree of the scale. This discord and his other favourites are beautiful in Purcell, and his determination to let them arise in an apparently unavoidable way from the collisions of parts, each going its defined road to its goal, must have determined the character of his part-writing In spite of his remarks in Playford’s book, it is plain that he looked at music horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is good no matter which way it is considered His counterpoint has a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill Handel frequently adopted his free contrapuntal style Handel (and Bach, too) raised stupendous structures of ossified formulas, building architectural splendours of the materials that came to hand; but when Handel was picture-painting (as in Israel) and had a brush loaded with colour, he cared less for phrases that would “work” smoothly at the octave or twelfth than for subjects of the Purcell type.

THE ODES AND CHURCH MUSIC

Some of the later odes are notable works Perhaps the St. Cecilia ode of 1692 is, on the whole, the finest Like the earlier works of the same class, in scheme the odes resemble the theatre sets, though, of course, there are neither dances nor curtain tunes All that has been said about the stage music applies to them The choruses are often very exhilarating in their go and sparkle and force, but I doubt whether Purcell had a larger number of singers for what we might call his concert-room works than in the theatre The day of overgrown, or even fairly large, choruses and choral societies was not yet; many years afterwards Handel was content with a choir of from twenty to thirty Had Purcell enjoyed another ten years of life, there is no saying how far he might have developed the power of devising massive choral designs, for we see him steadily growing, and there was no reason why the St. Cecilia ode of 1692 and the Te Deum and Jubilate should have remained as the culminating points The overture to the 1692 ode is unusually fragmentary I see no indication of any superior artistic aspiration in the fact that it consists of six short movements; rather, it seems to me that Purcell was, as ever, bent on pleasing his patrons-in this case with plenty of variety Still, one movement leads naturally into the next, and scrappiness is avoided, and the music is of a high quality and full of vitality Purcell frequently set a double bar at the end of a section, and makes two or more numbers where a modern composer would simply change the tempo and key-signature and go straight on, so that the scrappiness is only apparent In this ode an instance occurs There are fourteen numbers, but the last three are in reality one-a chorus, a quartet and a chorus repeating the opening bars of the first chorus In a modern composition all would have run on with never a double bar Purcell seems to have had no opportunity of designing another ode on the same broad scale as this At any rate, he never did so, and the ode which did more than any other of his achievements, save, perhaps, the Yorkshire Feast-Song of 1689, to convince his contemporaries of his greatness, abides as his noblest monument in this department of music.

Just as by writing music for plays which will never be acted again Purcell cut off his appeal to after generations of play-goers, so by writing anthems on a model sadly out of place in a sacred service he hid himself from future church-goers King Charles liked his Church music as good as you like, but lively at all costs, and the royal mind speedily wearying of all things in turn, he wished the numbers that made up an anthem to be short So Purcell wasted his time and magnificent thematic material on mere strings of scrappy, jerky sections The true Purcell touch is on them all, but no sooner has one entered fairly into the spirit of a passage than it is finished Instrumental interludes-if, indeed, they can be called interludes, for they are as important as the vocal sections-abound, and might almost be curtain-tunes from the plays Nothing can be done to make these anthems of any use in church Eighteenth and nineteenth century editors have laid clumsy fingers on them, curtailing the instrumental bits; but nothing is gained by this rough-and-ready process, as no Purcell has ever appeared to lengthen the vocal portions As Purcell left the anthems, so we must leave them-exquisite fragments that we may delight in, but that are of no use in the service for which they were composed Still, this does not apply to them all; at least twenty of the finest are splendidly schemed, largely designed, and will come into our service lists more frequently when English Church musicians climb out of the bog in which they are now floundering They are full, if I may use the phrase, of pagan-religious feeling Purcell’s age was not a devotional age, and Purcell himself, though he wrote Church music in a serious, reverential spirit, could not detach himself from his age and get back to the sublime religious ecstasy of Byrde He seizes upon the texts to paint vivid descriptive pieces; he thrills you with lovely passages or splendours of choral writing; but he did not try to express devotional moods that he never felt A mood very close to that of religious ecstasy finds a voice in “Thou knowest, Lord, the Secrets of our Hearts”-the mood of a man clean rapt away from all earthly affairs, and standing face to face, alone, with the awful mystery of “the infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed.”  It is plain, direct four-part choral writing, but the accent is terrible in its distinctness At Queen Mary’s funeral (we can judge from Tudway’s written reflections) the audience was overwhelmed, and we may believe it A more elaborately wrought and longer piece of work is the setting of the Latin Psalm, “Jehová, quam multi sunt.”  It is the high-water mark of all Church music after the polyphonists By Church music I mean music written for the Church, not necessarily religious music The passage at “Ego cubui et dormivi” is sublime, Purcell’s discords creating an atmosphere of strange beauty, almost unearthly, and that yields to the unspeakable tenderness of the naïve phrase at the words, “Quia Jéhovah sustentat me.”  The Te Deum was until recently known only by Dr. Boyce’s perversion Dr. Boyce is reputed to have been an estimable moral character, and it is to be hoped he was, for that is the best we can say of him He was a dunderheaded worshipper and imitator of Handel Thinking that Purcell had tried to write in the Handelian bow-wow, and for want of learning had not succeeded; thinking also that he, Dr. Boyce, being a musical doctor, had that learning, he took Purcell’s music in hand, and soon put it all right-turned it, that is, into a clumsy, forcible-feeble copy of Handel One could scarcely recognise Purcell so blunderingly disguised However, we now know better, and the Te Deum stands before us, pure Purcell, in all its beauty, freshness, sheer strength, and, above all, naïve direct mode of utterance It looks broken, but does not sound broken Purcell simply went steadily through the canticle, setting each verse as he came to it to the finest music possible The song “Vouchsafe, O Lord,” is an unmatched setting of the words for the solo alto, full of very human pathos; and some of the choral parts are even more brilliant than the odes The Jubilate is almost as fine; but we must take both, not as premature endeavours to work Handelian wonders, but as the full realisations of a very different ideal THE FOUR-PART SONATAS.

In the last sonatas (of four parts, published 1697) the Italian influence is even more marked than in the earlier ones The general plan is the same, but more effect is got out of the strings without the management of the parts ceasing to be Purcellian We get slow and quick movements in alternation, or if two slow ones are placed together they differ in character Variety was the main conscious aim The notion of getting a unity of the different movements of a sonata occurred to no one until long after We learn nothing by comparing the various sequences of the movements in the different sonatas, for the simple reason that there is nothing to learn, and it may be remarked that for the same reason elaborate analysis of the arrangement of the sections which make up the overtures is wasted labour The essential unity of Purcell’s different sets of pieces is due to something that lies deep below the surface of things-he was guided only by his unfailing intuition.

In these ten sonatas we have Purcell, the composer of pure music, independent of words and stage-scenes, at his ripest and fullest The subjects are full of sinew, energy, colour; the technique of the fugues is impeccable; the intensity of feeling in some of these slow movements of his is sometimes almost startling when one of his strokes suddenly proclaims it There are sunny, joyous numbers, too, robust, jolly tunes, as healthy and fresh as anything in the theatre pieces The “Golden” sonata is, after all, a fair representative If the last movement seems-as most of the finales of all the composers until Beethoven do seem-a trifle light and insignificant after the almost tragic seriousness of the largo, we must bear in mind that it was very frequently part of Purcell’s design to have a cheerful ending Unfortunately, there is no good edition of the sonatas They are chamber music, and never were intended to be played in a large room They should be played in a small room, and the pianist-for harpsichords are woefully scarce to-day-should fill in his part from the figured bars simply with moving figurations, neither plumping down thunderous chords nor (as one editor lately proposed) indulging in dazzling show passages modelled on Moscheles and Thalberg Properly played, no music is more delightful.