One reason why Purcell’s music was neglected in the past was that it was performed in an inappropriate style. Even the best seventeenth-century music can be made to seem unattractive if the instruments are wrong, the voices are too large, the speeds are too slow or the textures too heavy. Things have improved greatly in recent years with the development of specialist Baroque groups, but it is still common to hear recordings using unstylish singers, or those that fail to understand how Purcell indicated tempo and tempo relationships. Another bugbear of mine is the increasing tendency among Baroque specialists to disregard Purcell’s scoring intentions. His violin music is not improved by being arranged for recorders, any more than a Beethoven string quartet would be improved by being arranged for wind instruments. Like other great composers, Purcell knew exactly what he was doing, and so the best results will be obtained by understanding and respecting his intentions.
Another problem, of course, is our lack of awareness of Purcell’s milieu. Without an understanding of how music was used in the Restoration theatre, for instance, his theatrical music can often seem quaint or artificial. Similarly, his odes can seem laughably sycophantic to a modern listener unaware of the literary and musical traditions from which they sprung, or unable to relate to a world that regarded kings as the anointed representatives of God. The aim of this article is to put Purcell and his music into a credible context, so it is possible to understand more easily why his music is as it is.
Purcell was born at a remarkable moment in English musical history. He was still a baby when, in the spring of 1660, the English Commonwealth collapsed and Charles II returned to London in triumph. Musical life had been severely dislocated during the 18 years of the Interregnum. In 1642 the court, England’s leading musical institution, broke up in confusion, and, when Parliament closed the theatres and disbanded the cathedral choirs soon after, many more musicians became unemployed. Attention shifted towards domestic music, and to consort music in particular. As the writer Roger North put it, ‘many chose to fidle at home, than goe out, and be knockt on the head abroad.’ In 1660 the court was revived exactly as it had stood in 1642, including the Chapel Royal, the choir that provided the king with daily choral services in the small chapel of the old palace of Whitehall. Among the singers or ‘gentlemen’ recruited then were Henry and Thomas Purcell, probably the composer’s father and uncle respectively. Within a few years Henry Purcell junior joined the Chapel as a choirboy.
It is important to realise that Purcell was essentially a court musician until William and Mary scaled down the royal music soon after coming to the throne after the Glorious Revolution of 1689. As a choirboy he would have been under the authority of Henry Cooke, the singer and remarkable choir-trainer who more than anyone was responsible for recreating the Chapel Royal choir as a centre of excellence. Among the remarkable group of boys that Cooke recruited and trained were Pelham Humfrey and John Blow, both of whom were to have a profound influence on the young Purcell. Blow was probably Purcell’s main composition teacher, and was a close friend and colleague throughout his life, while Humfrey’s elegant and fashionable anthems were the chief models for his own early essays in the genre.
Church Music
In an age of shorter and more uncertain lives than our own, musical talent was encouraged early. Purcell may have written simple songs as early as 1667, when he was eight or nine, and by the time he ceased to be a Chapel Royal choirboy in 1673 he was evidently capable of writing extended and complex church music. The earliest version of his Funeral Sentences in C minor probably dates from around then, and may have been written either for the funeral of Henry Cooke in 1672 or that of Pelham Humfrey in 1674. If so, it is a remarkable achievement, for Purcell’s handling of chromatic harmony, wild dissonance and expressive declamation is already remarkably assured; two later revisions offer fascinating glimpses of the young composer at work.
The Funeral Sentences are effectively verse anthems, with passages for solo voices alternating with sections for the choir, all with organ accompaniment. All of Purcell’s earliest anthems are of this type, though in 1676 or 1677 he began to write ‘symphony’ anthems that use a string group as well, drawn from the members of the court violin band, the Twenty-Four Violins. The introduction of strings into the Chapel Royal was an innovation that came from Charles II himself, who would have heard modern concerted church music with violins during his years of exile on the Continent.
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