Having shown how Purcell sprang from a race of English musicians, and
how he achieved greater things than any man of his time, it remains
only to be said that when, with Handel, the German flood deluged
England, all remembrance of Purcell and his predecessors was swiftly
swept away. His play-music was washed out of the theatres, his odes
were carried away from the concert-room; in a word, all his and the
earlier music was so completely forgotten that when Handel used anew
his old devices connoisseurs wondered why the Italians and Germans
should be able to bring forth such things while the English remained
impotent. So Handel and the Germans were imitated by every composer,
church or other, who came after, and all our "English music" is purely
German. That we shall ever throw off that yoke I do not care to
prophesy; but if ever we do, it will be by imitating Purcell in one
respect only, that is, by writing with absolute simplicity and
directness, leaving complexity, muddy profundity and elaborately
worked-out multiplication sums to the Germans, to whom these things
come naturally. The Germans are now spent: they produce no more great
musicians: they produce only music which is as ugly to the ear as it
is involved to the eye. It is high time for a return to the simplicity
of Mozart, of Handel, of our own Purcell; to dare, as Wagner dared, to
write folk-melody, and to put it on the trombones at the risk of being
called vulgar and rowdy by persons who do not know great art when it
is original, but only when it resembles some great art of the past
which they have learnt to know. It was thus Purcell worked, and his
work stands fast. And when we English awake to the fact that we have a
music which ought to speak more intimately to us than all the music of
the continental composers, his work will be marvelled at as a
new-created thing, and his pieces will appear on English programmes
and displace the masses of noisome shoddy which we revel in just now.
It will then be recognised, as even the chilly Burney recognised a
century ago, failing to recognise much else, that "in the accent of
passion, and expression of English words, the vocal music of Purcell
is ... as superior to Handel's as an original poem to a translation."
Though this is slight praise for one of the very greatest musicians
the world has produced.