Purcell

Purcell

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Title: Purcell
Author: John F. Runciman
Release Date: December 23, 2004 [EBook #14430]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PURCELL
BY JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
Bell's Miniature Series of Musicians

LONDON GEORGE BELL & SONS 1909

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V
LIST OF WORKS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HENRY PURCELL _(From the portrait by Kneller, in the possession
of Henry Littleton, Esq.)_
PURCELL _(From a portrait by Clostermann, in the National Portrait
Gallery.)_
PURCELL SEATED AT THE HARPSICHORD _(From a portrait by

Clostermann, in the National Portrait Gallery.)_
PURCELL _(From an engraving after a portrait by Clostermann in the
possession of the Royal Society of Musicians.)_
PART OF THE AUTOGRAPH SCORE OF PURCELL'S ANTHEM
"BEHOLD, NOW PRAISE THE LORD" _(In the British Museum.)_
CHAPTER I
We once had a glorious school of composers. It departed, with no
sunset splendour on it, nor even the comfortable ripe tints of autumn.
The sun of the young morning shone on its close; the dews of dawn
gleam for ever on the last music; the freshness and purity of the air of
early morning linger about it. It closed with Purcell, and it is no
hyperbole to say the note that distinguishes Purcell's music from all
other music in the world is the note of spring freshness. The dewy
sweetness of the morning air is in it, and the fragrance of spring flowers.
The brown sheets on which the notes are printed have lain amongst the
dust for a couple of centuries; they are musty and mildewed. Set the
sheets on a piano and play: the music starts to life in full youthful
vigour, as music from the soul of a young god should. It cannot and
never will grow old; the everlasting life is in it that makes the green
buds shoot. To realise the immortal youth of Purcell's music, let us
make a comparison. Consider Mozart, divine Mozart. Mixed with the
ineffable beauty of his music there is sadness, apart and different from
the sadness that was of the man's own soul. It is the sadness that clings
to forlorn things of an order that is dead and past: it tinkles in the
harpsichord figurations and cadences; it makes one think of lavender
scent and of the days when our great-grandmothers danced minuets.
Purcell's music, too, is sad at times, but the human note reaches us
blended with the gaiety of robust health and the clean young life that is
renewed each year with the lengthening days.
The beauty of sanity, strength, and joyousness--this pervades all he
wrote. It was modern when he wrote; it is modern to-day; it will be
modern to-morrow and a hundred years hence. In it the old modes of

his mighty predecessors Byrde and Tallis are left an eternity behind;
they belong to a forgotten order. Of the crabbedness of Harry Lawes
there is scarcely a trace: that belonged to an era of experiments. The
strongest and most original of his immediate predecessors, Pelham
Humphries, influenced him chiefly by showing him the possibility of
throwing off the shackles of the dead and done with. The contrapuntal
formulas and prosaic melodic contours, to be used so magnificently by
Handel, were never allowed to harden and fossilise in Purcell's music.
Even where a phrase threatens us with the dry and commonplace, he
gives it a miraculous twist, or adds a touch of harmony that transforms
it from a dead into a living thing, from something prosaic into
something poetic, rare and enchanting. Let me instance at once how he
could do this in the smallest things. This is ordinary enough; it might be
a bit of eighteenth-century counterpoint:
[Illustration]
But play it with the second part:
[Illustration]
The magic of the simple thirds, marked with asterisks, is pure Purcell.
And it is pure magic: there is no explaining the effect. He got into his
music the inner essence that makes the external beauty of the
picturesque England he knew. That essence was in him; he made it his
own and gave it to us. He did not use much of the folk-songs born of
our fields and waters, woods and mountains, and the hearts of our
forefathers who lived free and did not dream of smoky cities and
stinking slums; though