Old Scores and New Readings | Page 8

as
Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth. He
was one of their school; he went on in the direction they had led; but
the distance he travelled was enormous. Humphries, possibly Captain
Cook, even Christopher Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in

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 naïveté, 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