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.
