Old Scores and New Readings | Page 8

church music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the form and plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other writers of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of weaving many melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of Lulli would help him to attain terseness, and save him from that drifting which is the weak point of the old English instrumental writers; he was acquainted with the music of Carissimi, a master of choral effect. In a word, he owed much to his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as they did--won his greatness by using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by inventing the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.
Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the church, and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one style, which had to serve in one place as in another. I have already shown the growth of the secular spirit in music. In Purcell that spirit reached its height. His music is always secular, always purely pagan. I do not mean that it is inappropriate in the church--for nothing more appropriate was ever written--nor that Purcell was insincere, as our modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to have to define the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s court, but it would seem that Purcell was religious in his way. He accepted the God of the church as the savage accepts the God of his fathers; he wrote his best music with a firm conviction that it would please his God. But his God was an entity placed afar off, unapproachable; and of entering into communion with Him through the medium of music Purcell had no notion. The ecstatic note I take to be the true note of religious art; and in lacking and in having no sense of it Purcell stands close to the early religious painters and monk-writers, the carvers of twelfth century woodwork, and the builders of Gothic cathedrals. He thinks of externals and never dreams of looking for "inward light"; and the proof of this is that he seems never consciously to endeavour to express a mood, but strenuously seeks to depict images called up by the words he sets. With no intention of being flippant, but in all earnestness, I declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious na?vet��, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music. Descriptive music suggests to the ear, word-painting to the eye. But the two merge in one another. What we call a higher note is so called because sounds produced by the mere rapid vibrations make every being, without exception, who has a musical ear, think of height, just as a lower note makes us all think of depth. Hence a series of notes forming an arch on paper may, and does, suggest an arch to one's imagination through the ear. It is perhaps a dodge, but Handel used it extensively--for instance, in such choruses as "All we like sheep," "When his loud voice" ("Jephtha"), nearly every choral number of "Israel in Egypt," and some of the airs. Bach used it too, and we find it--the rainbow theme in "Das Rheingold" is an example--in Wagner. But with these composers "word-painting," as it is called, seems always to be used for a special effect; whereas it is the very essence of Purcell's music. He has been reproved for it by the eminent Hullah, who prettily alludes to it as a "defect" from which other music composed at the time suffers; but the truth is, you might as well call rhyme a "defect" of the couplet or the absence of rhyme a "defect" of blank verse. It is an integral part of the music, as inseparable as sound from tone, as atoms from the element they constitute. But the question, why did Purcell write thus, and not as Mozart and Beethoven, brings me to the point at which I must show the precise relationship in which Purcell stood to his musical