Some of his anthems were written while still a chorister boy, and his earliest essays in dramatic music at the age of fourteen.
That in some of his later works in which voices were combined with organ and orchestra, he anticipated Handelian effects is undoubted, and
that the great German master was influenced by them, I think, equally so.
If an account of the orchestra with which he had to deal would read strangely at the present time, it is at least not without interest to think that, even so tremendous a genius as Handel made little advance on it. It has been shewn elsewhere that the genesis of the modern orchestra is of a later date.
Handel was only ten years of age when Purcell died.
It is an irrepressible conjecture of what might have been, if the latter had lived thirty years longer. He then would have failed to reach the age at which the former died. The acting and re-acting of the genius of each one on the other might have produced results of profound importance to English music—might, indeed, have saved it.
Fate, however, on this occasion, probably displayed more kindness than is usually attributed to her. The contest would have proved unequal.
The great German genius, giant in body, overwhelming in energy and ever thirsting for new worlds to conquer (and succeeding), would have been no fitting opponent to the other, frail in physique and already a prey to the terrible disease that has cut off, prematurely, the lives of such countless thousands of men whose possibilities of attainment were barely given time to indicate.[18]
Purcell entered the choir of the Chapel Royal
at the age of six, and while there became acquainted, in the best of all possible ways, with such of the masterpieces of the ancient English school as had escaped destruction, by taking part in their performance. At the age of eighteen[19] he became organist of Westminster Abbey, by the voluntary act of Dr. John Blow, who relinquished the post in favour of his illustrious pupil. This fact is immensely suggestive. It shews that not only was his genius universally recognised, but that his personality was already sufficiently developed to justify his appointment to the most important position to which any musician could attain.