Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell: A Genius on a Short Clock

The memorial tablet in the north choir aisle at Westminster Abbey says he "left this life and is gone to that blessed place" — and that he died "in the 37th year of his age." In roughly two decades of professional work he wrote incidental music for forty-two plays, more than a hundred songs, coronation anthems for a king, the first English Te Deum with orchestra, and one small opera still regarded as the finest ever set to English words. After him, England produced no composer of comparable stature for two hundred years.

Born Into the Trade

He was born around 10 September 1659 in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, Westminster, a few minutes' walk from the Abbey he would spend his life inside. The family was already in the business. His father, also Henry, was Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey; his uncle Thomas was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal who had sung at the coronation of Charles II. When his father died in 1664, the five-year-old passed into Thomas's guardianship, which meant he passed into the profession.

He had two brothers. Edward left little mark. Daniel became a prolific composer in his own right and, after Henry's death, completed portions of *The Indian Queen*.

The Boy in the Chapel Royal

Admitted as a chorister, Purcell was taught successively by three men who between them constituted the entire English musical establishment: Captain Henry Cooke, Master of the Children; Pelham Humfrey, who had studied with Lully and brought French court style back to London; and John Blow, the most accomplished English composer of the preceding generation.

When his voice broke in 1673 he did not leave music but moved sideways into its plumbing, becoming assistant to the organ-builder John Hingston, keeper of the King's wind instruments. He attended Westminster School and was appointed copyist at the Abbey in 1676 — a job that meant writing out, by hand, everything the choir sang. Few composers have received a more thorough education in what actually works in a large stone building.

Abbey and Chapel

In 1679, when Purcell was nineteen or twenty, John Blow gave up the post of organist of Westminster Abbey in his favour. Teachers do not usually resign their jobs for their pupils, and the gesture is the clearest surviving evidence of what the profession thought it had on its hands.

In 1682 he added the organistship of the Chapel Royal, following the death of Edward Lowe, and married Frances the same year. In 1683 he published his first printed work, the *Twelve Sonatas*. He served three monarchs — Charles II, James II and Mary II — writing the coronation anthems *I was glad* and *My heart is inditing* for James in 1685, and continuing under the very different regime that replaced him.

Dido

*Dido and Aeneas* was composed by July 1688 to a libretto by Nahum Tate and given at Josias Priest's girls' school in Chelsea by the end of 1689, though some scholars argue for a date as early as 1683. It is a three-act opera with prologue, and it is Purcell's only true opera — his only all-sung dramatic work — written for schoolgirls and drawing on Blow's *Venus and Adonis* and Cavalli's *Didone*.

Its reputation rests largely on one number. Dido's Lament, "When I am laid in earth," is built on a lamento ground bass: a short figure that repeats without pity beneath a vocal line that refuses to align with it. The device was standard currency in the period. Nothing else made from it sounds like this, and the aria has since travelled from military remembrance ceremonies to the soundtrack of *Band of Brothers*.

The opera then all but vanished. It was not revived until 1895, when the Royal College of Music staged it for Purcell's bicentenary; the American premiere waited until 1923.

The Theatre Years

The last six years of his life were spent largely in the playhouse, and the pace was industrial: music for forty-two plays. *Dioclesian* (1690), after Fletcher and Massinger; *Amphitryon* (1690), for a Dryden play; *King Arthur, or The British Worthy* (1691), sometimes called his dramatic masterpiece; *The Fairy-Queen* (1692), an elaboration of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* whose score was lost and not recovered until 1901; *The Indian Queen* (1695) and the *Tempest* songs, possibly including "Full fathom five."

These are not operas in the Italian sense but semi-operas — spoken plays with large musical scenes attached — and the form died with him. The incidental music to *Abdelazer* has had the strangest afterlife of all: Benjamin Britten took its rondeau as the theme of *The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra*, which is how millions of children have first heard Purcell without knowing it.

Queen Mary

For Mary II he wrote a sequence of birthday odes — *Arise, my muse* in 1690, the exuberant *Come Ye Sons of Art* in 1694 — and then, in 1695, the *Funeral Sentences and Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary*: an anthem and two elegies for a queen who had been his patron. Within a year he was dead himself.

His 1694 *Te Deum* and *Jubilate Deo* were the first English settings of the Te Deum with orchestral accompaniment, and were performed annually at St Paul's until 1712. *Hail! Bright Cecilia*, his 1692 ode for the patron saint of music, belongs to the same run of ceremonial commissions.

Why Henry Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is compression: Purcell could get more emotional information into a short span than any English composer before or since, and he did it by setting rigid schemes against free vocal lines. Dido's Lament is the demonstration piece — a repeating ground bass used as a pressure vessel rather than as decoration — and the same instinct runs through the funeral music for Queen Mary.

The second element is range, and it is genuinely unusual. He wrote court odes, Anglican anthems, chamber sonatas in the Italian manner, more than a hundred songs and forty-two theatre scores, and he was first-rate across all of it. He absorbed the French court style through Humfrey, a pupil of Lully, and the Italian through the sonatas he published in 1683, and made something recognisably neither.

The counter-case deserves airing. Much of his output was functional, written to order and to deadline, and a good deal of the theatre music is competent rather than transfiguring. He invented no form and founded no school — the semi-opera died with him, and English music's two-century flatness afterward suggests he left no method that could be passed on. His fame also rests disproportionately on a handful of pieces from a very large catalogue. What is not in doubt is that John Blow, the best judge available, thought him worth surrendering the Abbey organ for.

Legacy

He died on 21 November 1695 at his house in Marsham Street, at the height of his career; a chill and tuberculosis have both been proposed. He was buried on 26 November in the north choir aisle, beneath where the organ then stood, with no expense spared — the *Flying Post* reported that all the lovers of that noble science attended. Blow and Jeremiah Clarke wrote memorial odes. His widow Frances published *Orpheus Britannicus* in 1698 and 1702, which is why a great deal of his vocal music survives at all.

His music never quite went away. William Croft folded Purcell's setting of "Thou knowest Lord" into his own 1724 Burial Service, and it has been sung at every British state funeral since. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote him a sonnet. Britten spent a career arranging and rebuilding him. The Purcell Society, founded in 1876, is still issuing revised editions, and a bronze by Glynn Williams was unveiled in Victoria Street in 1995 for the tercentenary of his death.

Achievements

• Notable work: Dido and Aeneas
• Notable work: Who can from joy refrain?
• Notable work: The Fairy-Queen
• Notable work: Hail, bright Cecilia
• Educated at Westminster School
• Worked as composer, organist and musicologist