Old Scores and New Readings | Page 9

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 ancestors, and how in writing as he did he was merely carrying
on and developing their technique.
For we must not forget that the whole problem for the seventeenth
century was one of technique. The difficulty was to spin a tone-web
which should be at once beautiful, expressive, and modern--modern
above all things, in some sort of touch with the common feeling of the
time. I have told how the earlier composers spun their web, and how
Lawes attained to loveliness of a special kind by pure declamation. In
later times there was an immense common fund of common phrases,
any one of which only needed modification by a composer to enable

him to express anything he pleased. But Purcell came betwixt the old
time and the new, and had to build up a technique which was not
wholly his own, by following with swift steps and indefatigable energy
on lines indicated even while Lawes was alive. Those lines were, of
course, in the direction of word-painting, and I must admit that the first
word-painting seems very silly to nineteenth century ears and
eyes--eyes not less than ears. To the work of the early men Purcell's
stands in just the same relation as Bach's declamation stands to Lawes'.
Lawes declaims with a single eye on making clear the points of the
poem: the voice rises or falls, lingers on a note or hastens away, to that
one end. Bach also declaims--indeed his music is entirely based on
declamation,--but as one who wishes to communicate an emotion and
regards the attainment of beauty as being quite as important as
expression. With him the voice rises or falls as a man's voice does
when he experiences keen sensation; but the wavy line of the melody as
it goes along and up and down the stave is treated conventionally and
changed into a lovely pattern for the ear's delight; and as there can be
no regular pattern without regular rhythm, rhythm is a vital element in
Bach's music. So with Purcell, with a difference. The early "imitative"
men had sought chiefly for dainty conceits. Pepys was the noted
composer of "Beauty, Retire" and his joy when he went to church,
"where fine music on the word trumpet" will be remembered. He
doubtless liked the clatter of it, and liked the clatter the more for
occurring on that word, and probably he was not very curious as to
whether it was really beautiful or not. But Purcell could not write an
unlovely thing. His music on the word trumpet would be beautiful (it is
in "Bonduca"); and if (as he did) he sent the bass plunging headlong
from the top to the bottom of a scale to illustrate "they that go down to
the sea in ships," that headlong plunge would be beautiful too--so
beautiful as to be heard with as great pleasure by those who know what
the words are about as by those who don't. Like Bach, Purcell depended
much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern; unlike Bach, his patterns
have a strangely picturesque quality; through the ear they suggest the
forms of leaf and blossom, the trailing tendril,--suggest them only, and
dimly, vaguely,--yet, one feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell,
following those who, in sending the voice part along the line, pressed it
up at the word "high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly

wavy line of tone or melody, solved the problem of spinning his
continuous web of sound; and the fact that his web is beautiful and
possesses this peculiar picturesqueness is his justification for solving
the problem in this way. After all, his way was the way of early
designers, who filled their circles, squares, and triangles with the forms
of leaf and flower. And just as those forms were afterwards
conventionalised and used by thousands who probably had no vaguest
notion of their origin, so many of Purcell's phrases became ossified and
fell into the common stock of phrases which form the language of
music. It is interesting to note that abroad Pasquini and Kuhlau went to
work very much in Purcell's fashion, and added to that same stock from
which Handel and Bach and every subsequent composer drew, each
adding something of his own.
It was not by accident that Purcell, with this astonishing fertility of
picturesque phrases, should also have written so much, and such
vividly coloured picturesque pieces--pieces, I mean, descriptive of the
picturesque. Of course, to write an imitative phrase is quite