Before Purcell's position in musical history can be ascertained and
fixed, it is absolutely necessary to make some survey of the rise of
the school of which he was the close.
In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in an
England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the people as
it is to understand how this should have been forgotten in a more
musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's arrival in this
country there was no book printed which did not show unmistakably that
its writer loved music. It is a fact (as the learned can vouch) that
Erasmus considered the English the most given up to music of all the
peoples of Europe; and how far these were surpassed by the English is
further shown by the fact that English musicians were as common in
continental towns in those days as foreign musicians are in England
nowadays. I refrain from quoting Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys,
and the rest of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on the
fact that here music was widespread and highly cultivated, just as it
was in Germany in the eighteenth century. Moreover, an essential
factor in the development of the German school was not wanting in
England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister; and English nobles
and gentlemen, wealthier than German princes, differing from them only
in not being permitted to assume a pretentious title, had each his
Musick-master. I believe I could get together a long list of musicians
who were thus kept. It will be remembered that when Handel came to
England he quickly entered the service of the Duke of Chandos. The
royal court always had a number of musicians employed in the making or
the performing of music. Oliver Cromwell retained them and paid them;
Charles the Second added to them, and in many cases did not pay them
at all, so that at least one is known to have died of starvation, and
the others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears of salary. It was
the business of these men (in the intervals of asking for their
salaries) to produce music for use in the church and in the house or
palace; that for church use being of course nearly entirely
vocal--masses or anthems; that for house use, vocal and
instrumental--madrigals and fancies (_i.e._ fantasias). As generation
succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was built up and a
mode of expression found; and at length the first great wave of music
culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode
of expression I shall say something about presently; and all the
criticism I have to pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater
than Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and
Sweelinck. Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of the
music of this period should obtain (if he can) copies of the D minor
five-part mass, and the Cantiones Sacræ, and carefully study such
numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the profound "Tristitia
et anxietas" in the latter.
The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime
another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic
perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast
growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely
mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him,
engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called
the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of
Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as
this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating
beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and
sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the
incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might
be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties
which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one
important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very
slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face
washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
original. Another important point is this: whereas the church
composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon
the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to
weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he
succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had
first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the
sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before
Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his
songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music
shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at
the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed
the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal
technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went
on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each
successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the
beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude
and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up
again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music
which was not called by that name; but the description will serve.
This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we
have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to
show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the
single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the
method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may
be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make
the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into
conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this
method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When
Milton said,
"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent,"
he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for music
had been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did not use the
poem as an excuse for a melody, but the melody as a means of
effectively declaiming the poet's verse. The poet (naturally) liked
this--hence Milton's compliments. It should be noted that many of the
musicians of this time were poets--of a sort--themselves, and wished
to make the most of their verses; so that it would be a mistake to
regard declamation as something forced by the poet, backed by popular
opinion, upon the musician. With Lawes, then, what we may call the
declamatory branch of the English school culminated. Except in his
avowedly declamatory passages, Purcell did not spin his web precisely
thus; but we shall presently see that his method was derived from the
declamatory method. Much remained to be done first. Lawes got rid of
the old scholasticism, now effete. But he never seemed quite sure that
his expression would come off. It is hard at this day to listen to his
music as Milton must have listened to it; but having done my best, I
am compelled to own that I find some of his songs without meaning or
comeliness, and must assume either that our ancestors of this period
had a sense which has been lost, or that the music played a less
important part compared with the poem than has been generally
supposed. Lawes lost rhythm, both as an element in beauty and a factor
in expression. Moreover, his harmonic resources were sadly limited,
for the old device of letting crossing parts clash in sweet discords
that resolved into as sweet or sweeter concords was denied him. What
would be called nowadays the new harmony, the new rhythm and the new
forms were developed during the Civil War and the Puritan reign. The
Puritans, loving music but detesting it in their churches, forced it
into purely secular channels; and we cannot say the result was bad,
for the result was Purcell. John Jenkins and a host of smaller men
developed instrumental music, and, though the forms they used were
thrown aside when Charles II. arrived, the power of handling the
instruments remained as a legacy to Charles's men. Charles drove the
secular movement faster ahead by banning the old ecclesiastical music
(which, it appears, gave him "the blues"), and by compelling his young
composers to write livelier strains for the church, that is, church
music which was in reality nothing but secular music. He sent Pelham
Humphries to Paris, and when Humphries came back "an absolute
Monsieur" (who does not remember that ever-green entry in the Diary?)
he brought with him all that could possibly have been learnt from
Lulli. He died at twenty-seven, having been Purcell's master; and
though Purcell's imagination was richer, deeper, more strenuous in the
ebb and flow of its tides, one might fancy that the two men had but
one spirit, which went on growing and fetching forth the fruits of the
spirit, while young Humphries' body decayed by the side of his younger
wife's in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.