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In hindsight it is easy to see that the Great Fire had positive results, not least the magnificent new St Paul’s and superb new City churches designed by the young Deputy Surveyor of His Majesties Works, Christopher Wren. But to those living in London at the end of 1666 the outlook was bleak. Financial pressures, never far from the surface, increased still further. The musicians employed by Charles found their pay constantly in arrears; in the same year that Purcell entered the Chapel Royal Cooke refused to let the boys attend the chapel on the grounds that their clothes were in such a bad state of repair that he had to keep them inside.
The education received by the boys of the Chapel Royal encompassed not only singing but also instrumental tuition and theory. It is probable that Purcell received not only keyboard tuition on the organ and harpsichord, but also as a string player, gaining a proficiency and awareness of instruments and instrumental techniques further enhanced by his appointment in 1773 as unpaid assistant to John Hingeston, the keeper, repairer and tuner of royal instruments, a post assumed by Purcell on Hingeston’s death in 1683.
Of no less importance were the opportunities the position provided for the boy to associate with his seniors, whose ranks now started to include a number of foreign musicians attracted to London by the increasingly cosmopolitan city. Amongst those who had gained influential posts was the Catalan born (but French trained) Louis Grabu, who arrived in England in 1665 and the following year was given the prestigious appointment of Master of Music, thus giving him effective control of the “Twenty-Four Violins”. London now also had its Italian opera company, the King having granted a license to a group of Italian musicians who arrived in England in 1663. It is possible their number included another composer who was to have a significant influence on Purcell, Giovanni Battista Draghi. The latter’s 1687 setting of John Dryden’s splendid St Cecilia’s Day Ode From harmony, from heav’nly harmony introduced a new grandeur and breadth into Purcell’s own choral writing that leads directly to Handel. In the early 1670s the arrival of the brilliant Italian violinist Nicola Matteis presaged a new appreciation of the Italian style, a fashion reflected in Purcell’s increasing assimilation of “the seriousness and gravity of that sort of Musique”, as he put it in the preface to his Sonnata’s of III Parts.
But of Purcell’s musical contemporaries it was his teacher and friend John Blow with whom he is most associated. Born in Newark, Nottinghamshire in 1749, Blow must by all accounts have been an estimable man, even the stern 18th-century English historian Sir John Hawkins conceding that “Dr Blow was a very handsome man in his person, and remarkable for a gravity and decency... though he seems by some of his compositions to have been not altogether insensible to the delights of a convivial hour”. Restoration bawdiness was not at all to Hawkins’s taste! Blow’s decency and esteem for Purcell reputedly led to him voluntarily giving up his position as organist of Westminster Abbey to his younger colleague in 1679, a gesture that may not have been quite as altruistic as it appears, since Blow himself was heavily committed at the Chapel Royal, being not only one of the three organists attached to the Chapel but also Master of the Children.
One of the peculiarly English forms employed by Blow, Purcell and their contemporaries was the court ode, composed to mark a variety of occasions throughout the royal calendar. These works, generally consisting of an opening orchestral symphony followed by an alternation of air and chorus, ranged from the honoring of birthdays to odes celebrating a safe royal return to London after an absence, not to be taken for granted in a country seething with real or imagined Jacobite plot and counter-plot. The bad verse, propagandist purport and, at times, excruciating sycophancy of these odes has little appeal to modern listeners, who have in the main ignored them. Yet to do so is to miss two important points. The first is quite simply that in the instance of Purcell in particular they contain some of his finest music, and to neglect the series he composed in 1680 and 1695, the year of his death, is to deprive ourselves of a central and major part of his output. Additionally, those who would understand more of Restoration England will find buried amongst the slurry of the texts fascinating nuggets of social history. A line like “To the plague of rebellion the mischief was growing” may pass more or less unnoticed until we recognize that the ode it comes from, The summer’s absence unconcerned we bear, was a celebration of the King’s safe return from his usual autumn visit to Newmarket in 1682, a journey he survived only because an assassination plot was aborted when the royal party traveled earlier than expected. Interested readers will find a fascinating amplification of the textural significance of the odes by Ian Spink in Purcell Studies (Cambridge, 1995).
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