Purcell | Page 9

Purcell are deeply indebted, has clearly established that
by 1690, though not more than two years earlier, his one opera, Dido
and Aeneas, was written. If we take this as belonging to the period
which began in 1690, we have for these first ten years only ten plays to
which he provided music, and of these several are very doubtful, and
the rest not very important. During the remaining six years of his life he
wrote music for forty-two plays. Several sets are of the greatest
importance, amongst them _Dioclesian, King Arthur, The Fairy
Queen_ and The Tempest.
We cannot tell how many of the anthems belong to this period. One

might surmise that most of them do, as his activity at the theatre later
on must have occupied most of his time. But if we had no dates for
Mozart's three greater symphonies, we might readily fall into the
mistake of attributing them to another year than that of their
composition, and the mistake would be natural, if not inevitable, when
we consider the enormous amount of music we know Mozart to have
written in 1788. In Purcell we find the same terrific, superhuman
energy manifested as the day of his death drew near, and perhaps we
may be wrong in imagining that the theatre wholly absorbed him. A
few of the anthems may with great probability be ascribed to certain
dates because of the royal events with which they are connected. For
example, two ("I was Glad," and "My Heart is Inditing") must have
been written for the coronation of James II. in 1685. For "the Queen's
pregnancy" in 1688 another ("Blessed are They that Fear the Lord")
was certainly composed. The anthems for the Queen's funeral--and, as
it turned out, for Purcell's own--can also be dated in the same way, but
they fall into a later period.
During these ten years fifteen odes were set, including the notable
Yorkshire Feast Song, also the music for "the Lord Mayor's show of
1682," and the Quickstep, which afterwards became famous when the
words "Lillibulero" were adapted to it. It was sung as a sort of
war-song against James II. In 1687 Purcell wrote an elegy on John
Playford, the son of the publisher of the same name.
It would be utterly impossible to determine the dates of upwards of 200
songs, duets, trios, and catches, nor does it greatly matter. In a little
book such as this we have little enough space without going into these
questions. The first sonatas in three parts are more important. They
were published in 1683, with a portrait of the composer at the age of
twenty-four. Some pieces for strings in from three to eight parts may be
attributed to 1680. Some of the many harpsichord things may also
belong to this period.
We cannot follow Purcell's development step by step, year by year, as
we can, for instance, Beethoven's. When we come to survey his work
as a whole, we shall be able to compare the three-part sonatas issued in

1683 with the sonatas in four parts published in the year after his death.
We shall learn that towards the end of his life he was a more
magnificent master, than he was when twenty-four years old. That is
the most we can see. We may observe ode after ode, it is true, but with
regard to them we ought to be able to take into account conditions and
limitations of which nothing is recorded nor can be known. This holds,
also, with regard to the theatre music. We can merely guess at what his
employers asked him to provide. We can never know the means they
placed at his disposal. One significant thing must be noted here: the
music itself--its style, spirit, even mannerism--affords us no trustworthy
clue as to when any particular piece may have been written. For ages
the biographical copyists have not ceased to marvel at a boy of fourteen
writing the Macbeth music. It is silly rubbish, with which I believe
Purcell had nothing whatever to do. They marvelled at the immature
power latent in the music to The Libertine, which they supposed he
wrote in 1676. Alas! the date is 1692. They marvelled still more over
Dido and Aeneas, attributed to 1680. Alas! again its date is much
later--1688 to 1690. The evidence of style counts for little. The truth is
that in Purcell's music there are no marked stages of development, no
great changes in style. Undoubtedly he gradually grew in power,
richness of invention, fecundity of resource; but the change was one of
degree, not of kind. He never, as Beethoven did, went out to "take a
new road." He struck what he knew to be his right road at the very
beginning, and he never