Purcell

by John F. Runciman

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:

—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 In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out of date to remain there; so Mr.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.