During the last portion of his life (1690-5) Purcell composed a large
amount of music, and that is nearly all we know. Of course, he went on
playing the organ--that is indubitable. Of course, also, he gave
lessons; but it is a remarkable fact that few musicians after his death
claimed to have been his favourite pupils or his pupils at all. That he
became, as we should say nowadays, conductor at Drury Lane or any other
theatre cannot be asserted with certitude, though it is probable. He
wrote incidental music for about forty-two dramas, some of the sets of
pieces being gorgeously planned on a large scale. He had composed
complimentary odes for three Kings; in the last year of his life he was
to write the funeral music for a Queen, and the music was to serve at
his own funeral. During this last period he wrote his greatest ode,
"Hail, Bright Cecilia"; his greatest pieces of Church music, the _Te
Deum_ and _Jubilate_; and in all likelihood his greatest sonatas, those
in four parts. He also rewrote a part of Playford's _Brief Introduction
to the Skill of Music_.
It is not my intention to analyse the dramas. No more can be done in the
narrow space than give the reader a notion of Purcell's general
procedure of filling his space, and the salient characteristics of the
filling. Although _Dido_ differs from the other plays in containing no
spoken dialogue, and may not strictly fall into this period, I shall for
convenience' sake treat it with them. After dealing with the dramatic
work there will remain the odes, the anthems and services, and the
instrumental music.
THE THEATRE MUSIC.
We can scarcely hope to hear the bulk of the music for the theatre, as
has been remarked, because of the worthlessness of the plays to which it
is attached. Even _King Arthur, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen_ and
_Dioclesian_ pieces are too fragmentary, disconnected, to be performed
with any effect without scenery, costume, and some explanation in the
way of dialogue. In _King Arthur_ there are instrumental numbers to
accompany action on the stage: without that action these numbers are
meaningless. _King Arthur_ was given at Birmingham some years ago, but
it proved to be even more incoherent than the festival cantatas which
our composers write to order: if the masque from _Timon_ or _Dioclesian_
had been inserted, few would have noticed the interpolation.
_Dido and Aeneas_ is a different matter. It was very well performed by
students some years since, and there is no reason why such an opera
company as the Moody-Manners should not devote half an evening to it
now and then. It is not long; excepting the solo parts, it is not
difficult; it is entrancingly beautiful; properly staged, the dances of
witches, etc., are fantastic and full of interest. For two hundred years
every musician has admired Dido's lament, "When I am laid in Earth"; and
indeed it is one of the most poignantly sorrowful and exquisitely
beautiful songs ever composed. There are plenty of rollicking tunes,
too, and the dance-pieces--_with the dancers_--are exhilarating and
admirable for their purpose. The musicianship is as masterly as Purcell
ever displayed. If Purcell composed the work before he was twenty-two he
worked a miracle; and even if the date is ten years later it stands as a
wonderful achievement. If we ask why he did not produce more real
operas, there can be only one answer: the town did not care for them.
The town went crazy over spectacular shows; even Dryden yielded to the
town's taste; and there is no sign that Purcell cherished any particular
private passion for opera as opera. He did his best for his paymaster.
If there is no evidence hinting at his despising posterity, like Charles
Lamb, or at any determination, also like Lamb, to write for antiquity,
there is in his anthems and odes very considerable evidence that he was
ready to write what his paymaster wanted written. We must bear in mind
that downright bad taste, such as our present-day taste for such
artistic infamies as the "Girls of This" and the "Belles of That," had
not come into existence in Purcell's time. Purcell's contemporaries
preferred his music to all other for the same reason that we prefer it
to all other of his time--it was the best.
_Dido_, in pianoforte score, is generally accessible; only a few of the
spoken play sets are as yet published, and they are ridiculously
expensive. Let us not repine and give up hope. Some day that unheard-of
thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he
may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works
of England's greatest musician. Meantime, the reader must do as the
writer did for some years--he must grub and laboriously copy in the
British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of
_Dioclesian_ and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as _The
Tempest_ and _The Indian Queen_, and also the _Orpheus Britannicus_. To
penetrate to Purcell's intention, to understand with what skill and
force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone
hardly suffices. I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour
to read the whole of the plays, but at least _Boadicca, The Indian
Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian_ and _King Arthur_ must
be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all
the details of the masques. For themselves, few of the plays are worth
reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant
music. The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and
a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell's aid
was required were the worst of all--what little sense there was in the
bad plays was destroyed when they were made into "operas" or
"entertainments"--spectacular shows. Dryden was the best of the
playwrights he was doomed to work with, and in _King Arthur_ Dryden
forgot about the aim and purpose of high drama, and concocted a
hobgoblin pantomime interlarded with bravado concerning the greatness of
Britain and Britons. _Dioclesian_, the first of Purcell's great theatre
achievements, is even more stupid. The original play was _The
Prophetess_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, straightforward Elizabethan stodge
and fustian: and if Betterton, who chose to maltreat it, was bent on
making the very worst play ever written, it must be conceded that his
success was nearly complete. It gets down to the plane of pure and
sparkling idiocy that the world admires in, say, "The Merry Widow." Yet
the masque afforded him opportunities of which he made splendid use. The
overture is a noble piece of workmanship. There is a Handelian dignity
without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a
kind that Handel never attained to. Of course, it has no connection with
the drama: it would serve for many another play just as well. What the
theatre manager demanded of Purcell was a piece of music to occupy the
audience before the curtain went up; and Purcell wrote it. There are
songs and dances of a rare quality, and the biggest thing of all is the
chorus, "Let all rehearse," which rivals Handel's "Fixed in his
everlasting seat," a plain copy of it, down to many small points. Those
who say Purcell had no influence upon his successors evidently know
little either of Purcell's music or Handel's. Handel owed much to
Purcell, and not least was the massive, direct way of dealing with the
chorus, the very characteristic which has kept his oratorios so popular
here and so unpopular abroad. Handel's mighty choral effects are
English: he learnt from Purcell how to make them. It is true enough that
Purcell learnt something from Carissimi; but Carissimi's effects are
very often of that kind that look better on paper than they sound in
performance. The variations over ground-basses are marvellously
ingenious, but more marvellous than the ingenuity are the charming
delicacy and expressiveness of the melodies woven in the upper parts.
They are music which appeals direct to listeners who care nothing for
technical problems. Some of the discords may sound a little odd to those
who have been trained to regard the harmonic usages of the Viennese
school as the standard of perfection. Dr. Burney thought them blunders
resulting from an imperfect technique. Later a few words must be said on
the subject, but let me for the present point out that Purcell was a
master of the theory as well as of the practice of composition. He loved
these discords, and deliberately wrote them; he could have justified
them, and there is hardly one that we cannot justify. Purcell could
write intricate fugues and canons without any "harsh progressions"; that
he liked these for their own sake is obvious in numberless pieces where
no laws of counterpoint compelled him to write this note rather than
that. And though in the eyes of the theorists they are harsh, in the
ears of all men they are sweet. The works of Purcell and of Mozart are
the sweetest music ever composed, yet both composers filled their music
with discords--"that give delight and hurt not."
In 1691 Purcell and Dryden did _King Arthur_ together. The poet had by
this time forsaken Monsieur Grabut, who had in his eyes at one time
stood for all that was commendable in music. Grabut was more ingenious
as a business man than as a musician, but not all his ingenuity served
to prevent the English discovering that he could not write pleasing
tunes and that Purcell could.[1] Whether Dryden felt any difference
whatever between good and bad music I cannot say: he may have been like
many of the poets, music-deaf (analogous to colour-blind). They are said
to have been good friends, which I can well believe; and Dryden, when
pursued by duns and men with writs and such implements of torture, is
said to have stowed himself secretly in Purcell's room in the
clock-tower of St. James's Palace, which one may believe or not,
according to the mood of the moment. Anyhow, he seems to have been happy
to work with Purcell, and for the spectacles in _King Arthur_ they laid
their two heads together and arranged some dazzling things which no one
would care to see nowadays. _King Arthur_ is almost as brilliant as
_Dioclesian_, and contains some exceedingly patriotic songs. The stage
in England always threatens most bloodshed to England's foes when those
foes might seem to an impartial observer to be having the better of it.
Only a few years ago the heroes of the music-hall menaced the Boers with
unspeakable castigations when only they could be persuaded to leave off
unaccountably thrashing our generals; and when Purcell wrote "Come if
you Dare," and many another martial ditty, the time had not long passed
when Van Tromp sailed up the Thames with a broom at his mast-head. All
the same, "Come if you Dare" is a fine song; "Fairest Isles, all Isles
excelling," is one of Purcell's loveliest thoughts, and the words are
more boastful than ferocious; "Saint George, the Patron of our Isle," is
brilliant and the words are innocuous. The masque element is not dumped
into _King Arthur_ altogether so shamelessly as in other cases; the
whole play is a masque. Although there is a plot, the supernatural is
largely employed, and nymphs, sirens, magicians, and what not, gave the
composer notable chances. In the first act, the scene where the Saxons
sacrifice to Woden and other of their gods, is the occasion for a chain
of choruses, each short but charged with the true energy divine; then
comes a "battle symphony," noisy but mild--a sham fight with blank
cartridge; and after the battle the Britons sing a "song of victory,"
our acquaintance "Come if you Dare, the Trumpets Sound." The rest of the
work is mainly enchantments and the like. More fairy-like music has
never entered a musician's dreams than Philidel's "Hither this way," and
the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin,
will-o'-th'-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn is
Purcell's only rival in such pictures. At the beginning of the
celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up "thou genius of the clime"
(the clime being Arctic), we get a specimen of Purcell's
"word-painting":
[Illustration]
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 principals 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-bass.
[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 circumstances; 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 pass o'er the
deep"--
[Illustration]
Next in Amphitrite's song, "Halcyon Days," a serenely lovely melody, we
have
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
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:
[Illustration]
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:
[Illustration]
--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 passages 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-bass, 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 asserted 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,
passages sometimes being echoed, and sometimes a passage 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
passionate, 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
blustering 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 passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest
pieces are the overtures and choruses. The overtures are often very
noble, 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
class, 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 massive 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 scrappiness 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 scrappiness 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 noblest 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 scrappy, jerky sections. The true Purcell
touch is on them all, but no sooner has one entered fairly into the
spirit of a passage 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 passages 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 passage 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
naïve 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,
naïve 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 analysis 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 passages
modelled on Moscheles and Thalberg. Properly played, no music is more
delightful.