Purcell Part 2

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 princ.i.p.als 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-ba.s.s.

[1] Poor Grabut's fall was most lamentable. (His name, by the way, is spelt Grabu, or Grabut, or Grebus.) Pepys records that when "little Pelham Humfreys" returned from France he was bent on giving "Grebus" a lift out of his place. He most certainly did; and the case ought to be a warning to humbugs not to set their faith in princes. He had jockeyed competent men out of their places, and by 1674 he was himself ousted. He sank into miserable circ.u.mstances; and by the end of 1687 was dead.

James II.--who was a much more honest paymaster than his brother--apparently paid up all arrears the Court owed him. His impudence must have been boundless; for he dared to measure himself not only against thorough workmen like Banister, but even men of genius like Humphries and Purcell. His audacity carried him in the end no further than a debtor's prison; and had he been paid only the value of his services, he might have died there.

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 Neptune's song, "While these pa.s.s o'er the deep"--

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Next in Amphitrite's song, "Halcyon Days," a serenely lovely melody, we have

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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:

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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:

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--similarly harmonized (but major instead of minor) to the first example, and more fully worked out. In spite of incongruous masque or rather pantomime scenes the pervading atmosphere is sustained. One would say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero's magic island, and never thought of Shadwell's stupid and boorish travesty.

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 pa.s.sages 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-ba.s.s, 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 a.s.serted 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, pa.s.sages sometimes being echoed, and sometimes a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 bl.u.s.tering 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 pa.s.sacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses. The overtures are often very n.o.ble, 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.[2] 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.

[2] Since the above was written and in type I have read Mr. Ernest Walker's most interesting book, "Music in England," which contains a valuable chapter on the discords found in the music of Purcell and of earlier men.

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 cla.s.s, 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 ma.s.sive 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 sc.r.a.ppiness 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 sc.r.a.ppiness 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 n.o.blest 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 sc.r.a.ppy, jerky sections. The true Purcell touch is on them all, but no sooner has one entered fairly into the spirit of a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages 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, "Jehova, 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 pa.s.sage 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 nave phrase at the words, "Quia Jehovah 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, nave 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sages modelled on Moscheles and Thalberg. Properly played, no music is more delightful.

CHAPTER V

It is impossible to touch on more than a few characteristic examples of Purcell's achievement. There are many charming detached songs; the _Harpsichord Lessons_ contain exquisite things. There is also a quant.i.ty of unpublished sacred and secular music of high value.

When Purcell died, on November 21, 1695, he was busy with the music for Tom d'Urfey's _Don Quixote_ (part iii.), being helped by one Eccles, who enjoyed a certain mild fame in his day. The last song, "set in his sicknesse," was a song supposed to be sung by a mad woman, "From rosy bowers." The recitative is magnificent; two of the sections in tempo are fine, especially the second; the last portion is meant to depict raving lunacy, and does so. It is by no means one of Purcell's greatest efforts, and he apparently had no notion of making a dramatic exit from this world. If the doctors knew what disease killed him, they never told. The professional libeller of the dead, Hawkins, speaks of dissipations and late hours: and he would have us believe that he left his family in poverty. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Purcell was left quite well off, and was able to give her son Edward a good education. She had also property to bequeath when she died in 1706. Purcell worked so hard that he cannot have had time for the life of tavern-rioting that Hawkins invented. All we know is that he died, and that his death was a tragic loss to England. A few days later he was buried in Westminster Abbey, to the sound of his own most solemn music. A tablet to his memory was placed near the grave, and the inscription on it is said to have been written by the wife of Sir Robert Howard, author of the _Indian Queen_ and other forgotten master-works. The light of English music had gone out, though few at the moment realised it, for Dr. Blow and Eccles and others went on composing music which was thought very good. But the light had gone, and it was not Handel who extinguished it. Handel did not come to England for fifteen years, and during that fifteen years not a single composition worthy of being placed within measurable distance of Purcell's average work fell from an English pen. Purcell was by no means forgotten all at once. The four-part sonatas were issued in 1697, the _Harpsichord Lessons_ in 1696; the _Choice Ayres for the Theatre_--selections from the stage music--came out in 1697; the first book of the _Orpheus Britannicus_ appeared in 1698, and a second edition of it in 1706; the second book of the same appeared in 1702, and a second edition in 1711; while a third edition of both books was published as late as 1721, when Handel had been settled in England some years. The fame of our last great musician survived him for quite a long time, as things go. That the re-issue of his works was not due alone to the energy of his widow is clear, for she died in 1706.

It is indeed mournful to contemplate the havoc disease and death play with the might-have-beens of men and of causes. Pelham Humphries, an unmistakable genius, was carried away at twenty-seven; Henry Purcell, one of the mightiest of the world's masters of music, died at the age of thirty-seven, only two years older than his peer in genius, Mozart. Yet he left a glorious record, and his days must have been glorious. Men like Purcell do not create music such as theirs by blind instinct, as a cat catches mice. A mighty brain and mightier heart must have worked with pa.s.sionate energy, the fires must have burnt at an unbroken white heat, to produce so much unsurpa.s.sable music in so short a time. The qualities we find in the music were in him before they got into the music; all that we can enjoy he enjoyed first. He had, too, a high destiny to work out, and he knew it. Thomas Tudway said he was ambitious to exceed everyone of his time. To the last he laboured unceasingly, and if he died, as has been suspected, of consumption, there is no trace of the fever of ill-health nor any morbidness in his creations. They are charged with energy--often elemental, volcanic energy that nothing can resist; and at its lowest, the energy is the energy of robust health and a keen appet.i.te. That energy carried him far beyond the modest goal he thought of, exceeding his fellows. He won the topmost heights within the reach of man. The old polyphonists he never tried to rival, but in the style of music he wrote no composer has gone or can go higher than he. A wiseacre has said that he left a sterile monument. It may be that monuments in the British Museum blow and blossom and reproduce their kind: outside they do not. If the wiseacre meant that Purcell did not leave, as Haydn and Mozart undoubtedly did, a form in which dullards may compose until the world is sick, then the wiseacre is right But the inventors and perfecters of forms have not always wrought an unmitigated good. If Haydn left a fruitful monument in the symphony, and Handel in his particular form of oratorio, and if we thankfully praise Haydn and Handel for these their benefits, must we not also blame Haydn for the dull symphonies that nearly drove Schumann and Wagner mad, and Handel for the countless copies of his oratorios that rendered stupid, dull, and insensible to the beauty of music those generations that have attended our great musical festivals? The spirit of Purcell's work and its technique did not die with Purcell: the spirit of much of Handel's music, and certainly of his masterpiece, _Israel in Egypt_, is Purcell's; and eighteenth-century contrapuntist though Handel was, much of his technique came from Purcell. Rightly regarded, Purcell's monument is anything but sterile. Felix Mottl, worried to exasperation by stale laments for Mozart's premature death, once lifted up his voice and thanked G.o.d for Mozart, the Heaven-sent man. In the same spirit we may be thankful for Purcell. In his music we have the full and perfect expression of all that was fair and sweet and healthy in this England of ours; "all thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights," that our English nature is capable of find a voice in his music--if only we will take the trouble to listen to it. He is neglected, it is true, but he is immortal: time is nothing: he can wait. If our age neglects him, his age neglected Shakespeare. Shakespeare's time came; Purcell's cannot be for ever delayed.

LIST OF WORKS.

Music for over fifty dramas, including _Dioclesian_ (1690), _King Arthur_ (1692), _Bonduca_, _The Indian Queen_, and _The Tempest_ (1695).

Over two hundred songs, duets, catches, etc.

Twelve sonatas of three parts (1683), ten of four parts (published 1697). _Harpsichord Lessons_ (published 1696). A number of fantasias for strings.

About one hundred anthems; a quant.i.ty of sacred music apparently not for Church use; _Te Deum_ and _Jubilate in D_; complete service in B flat; evening service in G minor.

BELL'S MINIATURE SERIES OF MUSICIANS

COMPANION SERIES TO Bell's Miniature Series of Painters

EDITED BY G.C. WILLIAMSON. LITT.D.

_NOW READY_.

BACH. By E.H. THORNE.

BEETHOVEN. By J.S. SHEDLOCK, B.A.

BRAHMS. By HERBERT ANTCLIFFE.

CHOPIN. By E.J. OLDMEADOW.

GOUNOD. By HENRY TOLHURST.