Download HENRY PURCELL (1659 - 1695) Henry Purcell was the greatest

HENRY PURCELL (1659 - 1695)
Henry Purcell was the greatest English composer of the 17th---and, many feel, any---century. In the course of
his lifelong work as a theatre composer and as a royal musician to the courts of Charles II, James II, and
William & Mary, he composed a half-dozen operas, incidental music to 50 plays, 35 odes or cantatas, 75
sacred anthems, 100 instrumental pieces, and countless sacred and secular songs---all this in a tragically
short life of 36 years. The moods he created in music range from luminous grandeur to exquisite melancholy to
raunchy glee.
As if in compensation for a too-brief life, Purcell's music reaches far into the past and at times must have
sounded like the music of the future. The In nomine that opens our concert is one of the latest known
examples of a classic English instrumental genre that stretches back to the early 1500s when composers first
were inspired by the section of John Taverner's Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas that sets the words "Benedictus qui
venit in nomine Domini . " On the other hand, the closing bars of the triple chaconne with which we close the
first section of the concert form chords that were not conceived of again until the blues were invented some
250 years later.
Chaconnes feature short, descending bass lines which repeat themselves every few measures; by Purcell's time
this was already a hackneyed form, but he manages something fresh with each one. The single chacomme
modulates from major to minor and back again; in the double chaconne, two recorders mournfully shadow
each other in strict canon (a technical feat all too familiar from That Piece by Pachelbel); and the triple
chaconne is a playful, virtuosic masterpiece.
One of Purcell's many royal duties under William and Mary was to write an annual musical birthday tribute
to the Queen. Love's goddess sure was blind was Mary's 30th birthday present from Purcell. The text is full
of the usual vaguely classical obsequiousness of the time, far surpassed by Purcell's music. One of the
movements of the ode, "May her blest example" comes with a great story (from John Hawkins' 1875 book A
General History of the Science and Practice of Music ):
[over]
The queen having a mind one afternoon to be entertained with music sent to Mr.
Gostling,...Henry Purcell and Mrs. Arabella Hunt, who had a very fine voice, and
an admirable hand on the lute, with a request to attend her; they obeyed her
commands; Mr. Gostling and Mrs. Hunt sang several compositions of Purcell,
who accompanied them on the harpsichord; at length the queen beginning to
grow tired, asked Mrs. Hunt if she could not sing the old Scots ballad 'Cold and
Raw,' Mrs. Hunt answered yes, and sang it to her lute. Purcell was all the while
sitting at the harpsichord unemployed, and not a little nettled at the queen's
preference of a vulgar ballad to his music; but seeing her majesty delighted with
this tune, he determined that she should hear it upon another occasion; and
accordingly in the next birthday song, viz. that for the year 1692, he composed an
air to the words "May her bright example," the bass whereof is the tune to Cold
and Raw...and is note for note the same with the Scots tune.
The birthday ode tradition was not to last long. Mary died on 28 December 1694 in a raging smallpox
epidemic. The details of the state funeral were assigned to a committee, which may explain why the event did
not take place until March 5th. Perhaps the budget grew in proportion to the delay, for the solemnities were
estimated to have cost more than a hundred thousand pounds. The procession marched to Purcell's music
(recreated here tonight using replicas of the very instruments---slide trumpet and sackbuts---used that day).
The service included elegies and anthems by Purcell including his haunting setting of the Funeral Sentences,
with its terrifying beautiful evocation of the fleetingness of life and the bitter pangs of death (it was to be used
again not nine months later at Purcell's own funeral). The funeral route from Whitehall to Westminster
Abbey was draped in black cloth in a design by Christopher Wren. What better place in America to recreate
the music used at this event than in the Wren Building of the College of William & Mary in the spring of 1995?
---RVBG