Download PROGRAM NOTES Henry Purcell - Suite from King Arthur

PROGRAM NOTES
by Phillip Huscher
Henry Purcell - Suite from King Arthur
Born sometime in 1659, place unknown.
Died November 21, 1695, London, England.
Suite from King Arthur
Purcell composed his semi-opera King Arthur, with texts by John Dryden, in 1691. The first performance
was given at the Dorset Garden Theatre in London in May of that year. The orchestra for this suite of
instrumental excerpts consists of two oboes and english horn, two trumpets, timpani, and strings, with
continuo provided by bassoon and harpsichord. Performance time is approximately twenty minutes.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has performed music from Purcell's King Arthur (Trumpet Tune, "Ye
blust'ring brethren of the skies," with Charles W. Clark as soloist, and Grand Dance: Chaconne) only once
previously, on subscription concerts at the Auditorium Theatre on December 13 and 14, 1901, with
Theodore Thomas conducting.
Henry Purcell is the one composer who lived and worked before J. S. Bach who has found a place in the
symphonic repertory. The Chicago Symphony played Purcell's music as early as 1901, when it
programmed three selections from King Arthur on the first of its new "historical" programs designed to
"illustrate the development of the orchestra and its literature, from the earliest times down to the present
day." Purcell still stands at the very beginning of the modern orchestra's repertory, although he is best
known to today's audiences for the cameo appearance his music makes in Benjamin Britten's twentiethcentury classic, the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
Purcell is regularly described as the finest English composer before Edward Elgar, if not as the greatest
English composer of all. Purcell's early death, at the age of thirty-six, not only cut short one of the most
promising of careers, but also sidetracked the development of a specifically English musical style until
Elgar and then Britten emerged some two centuries later. Britten particularly admired the beauty and
clarity of Purcell's music, and to honor the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death in 1945, he chose a theme
from Abdelazer as the subject of a new score he was writing for an instructional film called The
Instruments of the Orchestra, which became his classic young person's guide.
Purcell probably began his career by writing songs; he also composed instrumental music early on, partly
as a way of teaching himself the rules of counterpoint. On September 10, 1677 (the date we now believe
to have been his eighteenth birthday), he took his first adult job, that of composer for the court violin band
known as the Twenty-Four Violins. Over the next several years, Purcell composed in a wide variety of
forms, including string fantasies, odes, anthems, and welcome songs (to greet the king's return to London
at the end of the summer), as well as the work for which he is still best known today, the opera Dido and
Aeneas.
In the last five years of his short life, Purcell turned his attention almost exclusively to writing music for the
theater. From 1690 until his death in 1695, he wrote music for more than forty theatrical works--everything
from single numbers and entire dance suites that served as incidental music in plays to four large-scale
operatic works: Dioclesian, King Arthur, and The Fairy Queen (one each year from 1690 to 1692), and
then The Indian Queen in his final year. Each of these major scores is what we now call a "semi-opera,"
that is, a spoken play filled out with extensive musical interludes that are, in essence, full-scale,
spectacularly staged operatic scenes. (Dido and Aeneas, unique in Purcell's career, is entirely sung.) In a
semi-opera, there is more music than text; it is really the reverse of a play with incidental music--and in
the recent controversial staging by American choreographer Mark Morris, there was no text at all: "I chose
to discard the spoken text (which I don't like) and keep all the music (which I do)," he said.
King Arthur was by far the most popular of Purcell's semi-operas; it was revived throughout the eighteenth
century and well into the next--it was staged until the 1840s. (Obviously it was still highly regarded, if less
well-know, in the early twentieth century: the three selections from King Arthur were the only pieces by
Purcell the Chicago Symphony played in its first fifty years.) The text is by John Dryden, who intended it
to be "adorn'd with Scenes, Machines, Songs and Dances" when he wrote it in 1684, calling it a
"dramatick opera." After hearing Purcell's music for Dioclesian in 1690, Dryden revised his script for a
staging the next year that would incorporate music by Purcell. Dryden's text, a rather imaginative
reworking of medieval legend, concentrates largely on Arthur's attempts to free his beloved Emmeline, set
against the battle of the Britons and the Saxons.
Purcell's score for King Arthur has not survived intact, and several pieces called for by Dryden no longer
exist. The suite of nineteen short instrumental numbers performed this week draws music from throughout
the five acts, beginning with the opening "First Music" and ending with the Grand Dance, a stirring
chaconne, with which the evening's entertainment concluded. (This is one of the selections the Chicago
Symphony played in 1901.) In between comes a wonderfully diverse array of pieces--simple song tunes
and airs, traditional dances, two hornpipes (jiglike country dances named for a reed instrument that
accompanied them), a brilliant trumpet tune, more elaborate orchestral numbers. The extraordinary
variety of Purcell's score for King Arthur has long been credited to Dryden's text, which sets up strongly
differentiated scenes that call for dramatically different kinds of music. But the sheer imagination and
endlessly inventive qualities of King Arthur can only be explained by the kind of compositional genius that
comes along rarely in any country, at any time.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
© Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their
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