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Interest in Purcell's music is greater today
than at any period since his own times. I*,
recent years, a great deal has been disco
vered about the way in which his work ,
were performed, and the conditions r Ltf
which he worked. Thus the tercen* ,aary o r
Purcelfs birth in 1659 offers a f jod op- J i-
tunity to summarize modern kncvvie< 4 ^
and opinion concerning a compo c who
is still not generally rated at his * ^e worth.
Miss Hoist has assembled a uistinguished
group of contributors for this purpose:
Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, Eric
Walter White, Michael Tippett, Jeremy
Noble, Ralph Downes, Robert Doning-
too, F. B. Zimmerman, and Nigel
Fortune.
The whime as a whole will, it is hoped,
contribute to a proper realization of
PurceiFs place as one of the greatest of
English composers.
3 1148 005 12
,
* 5 1978*
, 1980
M A1 WG 2 5 1984
DEC 2 6 1985
HENRY PURCELL
780.92 F9d5ho 61-04556
Hoist
Benry PurceH, 1659-1695
DATE DUE
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR
CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI ACCRA
Oxford University Press,
in Qrwt BrMtt
PREFACE
This collection of essays was planned as a result of trying to
solve some of the practical problems of editing Purcell's
works for performance. Even those of us who have been
brought up on his music are still "woefully ignorant when
it comes to such questions as whether a note should be
doubly-dotted or whether it should be a flat or a natural.
One longs to know what balance of singers and players
Purcell had at his first performances and whether certain
parts were sung by a counter-tenor or by an ordinary tenor
with light, easy top notes. Perhaps our greatest need, when
puzzled by the conflicting guesses of different editors of his
music, is to know where to find the manuscripts, and,
having found them, to know how to recognize if they are
autographs or not.
The following essays answer a great many questions, and
I am very grateful to the singers, players, composers, and
writers who have found time to contribute, from their
practical experience, to this tercentenary volume.
Many others have helped in the writing of this book. I
am particularly grateful to the Tokyo representatives of the
British Council for their kindness in making enquiries about
the Nanki library, to Mr. Anthony Gishfbrd for his en
couragement in the early stages of this book, and to the
Oxford University Press for their patience in die later
stages. I also wish to thank Messrs. Faber & Faber Ltd. for
permission to quote irom Poetry md Drttmt, by T. S. Eliot,
and Messrs. Roudedge & Kegan Paul Ltd. for permission
to quote from Problems ofArt* by Suzanne Longer,
LH.
Aldeburgh* September, 1958
104556
CONTENTS
1. Homage to the British Orpheus. PETER PEARS i
2. On realizing the continue in Purceir* songs. BENJAMIN BRITTEN 7
3. New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9 . ERIC WALTER WHITE 14
4. PurcelVs librettist, Nahum Tote. IMOGEN HOLST 35
5. Our sense of continuity in English drama and music. MICHAEL TTPPBTT 42
6. Purcell and the Chapel Royal. JEREMY NOBLE 52
7. An organist* 's view of the organ works. RALPH DOWNBS 67
8. Performing PurcelTs music today (with a section on the dances by
Imogen Hoist). ROBERT DONINGTON 74
9. PurcelVs Handwriting. FRANKLIN B. ZTMMHBMAN 103
APPENDIX A. PurcelPs autographs. NIGEL FORTUNE and FRANTLIN B.
ZIMMERMAN IO6
APPENDIX B. Further seventeenth- and eigh&enth-cenfynry evidence 122
bearing on the performance ofPurcelFs uwrks. ROBERT DONINGTON
APPENDIX c. A note on the Na&ki collection ofPi&celFs works.
IMOGEN HOLST 127
INDEX 131
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Henry PurcclJ. A drawing attributed to Kneller. (Reproduced by
courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) Frontispiece
Facing page
I. A page from Gildon's adaptation of Measure for Measure (1700),
showing part of the additional scene in Dido and Aeneas.
(Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 24
II. PurcelTs transcription of part of the beginning of Monteverdi's
'Cruda Amarilli', and part of his own 'Benedicite'. Bod
leian Library, Oxford, MS. Mus. a.i, p. 2. (Reproduced by '
courtesy of Bodley's Librarian) 40
HI. PtirceU's musical handwriting. Fitzwilliam MS. 88, 141 (rev.)
(Reproduced by courtesy of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge] gg
IV. PurcelTs handwriting. British Museum, Royal Music MS.
20J1.8, front index. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees
of the British Museum ) IO4
Facsimik I. Rules for Graces from PurceH's A Choice Collection
of Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinet, published by his
widow in 1696. (Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of
the British Museum) me 82
Facsimile 2. Tables of Graces from John Playford's An Intro-
factim to the Skill of Musick, thirteenth edition, printed for
Henry Playford in 1697. (This is the edition for which
Purcefi kd collaborated with Playford) page 83
I
Homage to the British Orpheus
PETER PEARS
The ingredients in tlie magic brew of song are words and
notes. A gift of melody is often enough to give great
pleasure; the correct accentuation of words can inform and
suggest; the revelation of sense through sound and of sound
in sense is given to few to achieve. None would deny
PurcelTs melodic genius; there is plentiful witness to it
throughout his work for the stage, both instrumental and
vocal. 'I attempt from love's sickness to fly', 'If music be
the food of love 5 , 'They tell us that yon mighty powers', 'If
love's a sweet passion' are only the beginning of a long list
of jewels. Purcell was content often, as Dowland was before
him, to use a simple dance-form as a song, and also to turn
a dance into a song or a song.into a dance, e.g. the Hornpipe
from the Fairy Queen which was used for 'There's not a
swain', 1 The four bar phrases o 'If love's a sweet passion'
link it to the dance; no one haj written a more singable
melody to fit into twenty-four bars.
The dance-forms at PurcelTs disposal were less favourable
for the settings of songs of character than the Pavans and
Galliards which, Dowland used. The heavy down beats of
the Pavan easily suggest melancholy moods, and Dowland
x An American musician, Mr. Jonathan Edmunds, has fitted con
temporary words to some of PurcelTs Ayres for the Theatre and In
cidental dances. Some of them go very well, more particularly the
straighter dance-forms.
2 Homage to the British Orpheus
was not a man to miss a chance so much to his fancy.
PurcelTs dances were more extrovert and better suited to
gay songs and sweet sentiments.
When Purcell wishes to elaborate slightly a simple
dance-form for the setting of words, his felicity can be quite
extraordinary. Consider such a popular favourite as 'I
attempt from love's sickness to fly'. Only a consummate
genius could unite such cunning with such delicious fresh
ness. First, the little dove-like flight of notes on the word
'fly' (a straight run and a twist to escape) colours the vocal
line; next, the very lack of symmetry in the rhythm (five
bars plus seven bars in the refrain, five plus six and four plus
six in the verses) gives a wayward movement to the song,
while the fall at the end of each line adds a touch of hopeless
weakness to remind the listener of the vain attempt at
escape from love's sickness. As often happens in PurcelTs
music, the major key sounds sad; compare his use of minor
keys for joy. Many of PurcelTs shorter songs are in dance
form slightly elaborated at cadences, prolonged by repeti
tions of key words. These are often surprisingly difficult
to perform because the phrases need very clever shaping, and
can easily sound strange and dull. 'I take no pleasure',
'Olinda', 'See how the fading glories' are songs of this type.
The relationship between words and music has to be very
carefully examined, and the poise has to be found and held
in those tricky wayward phrases which are continually
going out of the straight.
To find an example of Purcell's direct magic with words
and music, one need go no further than Dido and Aeneas.
Fear no danger to ensue,
The Hero loves as well as you,
sings Belinda in lines of no very special distinction. But
Homage to the British Orpheus 3
Nahum Tate knew what he was about, and he gave Purcell
verses of a neutral, passive quality which were fair game for a
real composer. In the hands of a lesser man, the result might
well have been deadly: Purcell uses the words for his
musical ends and with false verbal accents gives a brilliant
lilt to the passage and offers us a melody of striking and
memorable quality. (This air is surely the father of Handel's
setting of Milton's 'Come and trip it as you go on the light
fantastic toe' in L' Allegro.) Other composers of the period
use all the stock devices also, as Purcell did; but he almost
always transforms them by the magic of genius into sensitive
living creations. His vocal line is more inventive within its
chosen shape; compare, for instance, Blow's Self-Banished
with PurcelTs "How blest are shepherds'. His figured bass
seldom fails to give an inventive player legitimately lively
ideas for realization. It is hardly necessary to remark that a
great danger of the figured-bass style lies in the responsi
bility that is thrown on the keyboard player. If he is dull
and inept, even the best music can sound very tedious. In
particular, the movements over a ground bass can die from
lack of invention. The splendid Divine Hymns, too, need a
feeling for colour from the keyboard to match the wonder
fully expressive vocal line. We have the Air 'Here the
deities approve' oyer a ground, transcribed for the solo
harpsichord by the composer, to show us how ravishingly
Purcell would have accompanied such a piece himself.
It would seem that at no time was he not a master of
dramatic character-painting in recitative. From the earliest
anthems to the last song that he set, Purcell seems to have
had a flair for the creation of character in music quite
without equal (one is tempted to say) at any time. But alas !
he had all too little opportunity for exercising this prodigious
talent, Dido and Aeneas, some of the religious pieces, some
4 Homage to the British Orpheus
of the incidental music, this is all that can be included in the
dramatic category. Most of the stage music, nearly all of
King Arthur, Dioclesian, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen is
masque music, delightful and skilful and inventive and
adorable, but lacking the sustained intensity that fills the
music of character and situation. Nor was this anything but
right; dramatic music of the intensity of Dido or 'Job's
Curse' would have been quite out of place in. King Arthur
or The Fairy Queen. One can see from songs like 'The Fatal
Hour', 'Sweeter than Roses' and 'From rosy bowers' what
Purcell could have done with the operatic situations involv
ing the most pointed characterizations; one can also imagine
what effect his lyrical and expressive airs over a ground
would have had in their proper perspective in a Gluck-ish
or Mozartian opera libretto. No opera seria of Gluck has a
more intense and un-artificial air than Dido's Lament or
*O Solitude', composed though these are in the 'ancient and
learned' form of a Ground. The seventeenth century was in
its musical forms much freer than the eighteenth century;
it was a period which musicologists like to label in a deroga
tory tone 'transitional', nearly always sensitive and lively,
in which a genius such as Purcell could find all he wanted for
the exercise of his talents, even in opera, until the social
conventions of a capital in which a man of letters (Dryden)
was incomparably more important than a musician put
Purcell into a secondary position in the theatre. Lamentations
are no doubt vain, one should not bewail the crackling
fustian of Dryden' s King Arthur; might one not rather
suggest that Mr. W. H. Auden, the Dryden of our time;
should leave tampering with Mozart's untouchable Flute
and consider refashioning the stage framework for PurcelTs
lovely music?
When the background to PurcelTs dramatic songs is
Homage to the British Orpheus 5
implicit in the text (e.g. 'Mad Bess', 'From rosy bowers')
he is at his superb best. Some of the poems which he set
dramatically have so little character that even Purcell can
hardly reveal the personality of the singer. In the Divine
Hymns, however, with the whole Bible as his stage and some
thundering texts by contemporary bishops comparable
with, though superior to, Bach's cantata texts, Purcell
created dramatic scenes of great vividness. *JV S Curse ? ,
'Saul at Endor', and 'The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation*
are full of examples of astonishing invention. The Prologue
and Epilogue to 'Saul' bring the characters on to the stage
and take them off again in music of perfectly-timed myster-
iousness. Samuel's appearance is calculated to present the
new dark colour of the bass voice to the most impressive
effect imaginable. Saul's high distress and the witch's wails
are dramatic strokes of a master-composer for the stage. The
Virgin's ariettas are concise and beautifully contrasted, and
her reiterated cries of 'Gabriel' are amazing each time one
hears them.
What makes, for instance, 'Job's Curse' so impressive a
work? In the long recitative, the declamation is of the most
vivid kind, where each word has its proper dramatic
accent (as against the natural accent) and yet fits into an
impressive musical pattern.
Let the night perish, cursed be the morn
Wherein 'twas said, There is a man-child born !
Slowly the melodic line emerges and climbs over towarck
the hammer-strokes of those last words, and then we are off
to an agony of prophetic denunciations in a music of wild
tortuousness. The voice moves through intervals strange and
unexpected; the harmony continually changes; it is difficult
to imagine that the eighteenth century is only a decade
6 Homage to the British Orpheus
away. After the long recitative with its many picturesque
points and the wonderful section starting
Why did I not when first my mother's womb
Discard'd me drop down into my tomb?
Purcell gives us a beautiful resigned air full of Job's- longing
for the peace of the grave, an air where each word is so
placed that its whole meaning seems to penetrate each
individual note. An extraordinary intensity emerges which
conies from the complete wedding of the sound and sense
of the words with a melody of great musical beauty. It is,
to use Dryden's phrase, 'Musick, the exaltation of Poetry'.
This magic gift of Purcell's with words and music cannot
be explained any more than Schubert's can. It is easy enough
to say that he found in words the sound-picture (line, colour,
and proportion) which was translatable into song. How he
found this, and his method of translating, are his secrets and
his copyright. There is really no need to probe; it is enough
to love, in this his tercentenary year, our incomparable
Orpheus Britannicus.
On Realizing the Continue in PurcelVs
Songs
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
In practically every one of our concerts, given the length
of three continents over the last twenty years, Peter Pears
and I have included a group of PurcelTs songs. Although
they were not included for chauvinistic reasons, it has been
nice to find that foreign audiences accept these English
songs alongside those of their own great classic song-writers.
It is pleasant to get cheers at the end of PurcelTs 'Alleluia*
in the home of Schubert and "Wolf, requests for a repeat of
'Man is for the woman made' in the birthplace of Mozart,
appreciative giggles at the end of 'There's not a swain of
the Plain' in Faure's home town, and an impressive silence
as the last bars of 'Job's Curse' die 'away in Diisseldorf,
where Schumann spent many years. And not only in foreign
places; in England too where, to our shame, the music
of Purcell is still shockingly unknown. It is unknown
because so much of it is unobtainable in print, and so much of
what is available is in realizations which are frankly dull and
out of date. Because all PurcelTs solo songs, secular and
sacred, as well as his many big scenas, have to be realized.
We have these wonderful vocal parts, and fine strong basses,
but nothing in between (even the figures for the harmony
are often missing). If the tradition of improvisation from a
figured bass were not lost, this would not be so serious, but
S On Realizing the Continue in PurcelTs Songs
to most people now, until a worked-out edition is avail
able, these cold, unfilled-in lines mean nothing, and the
incredible beauty and vitality, and infinite variety of these
hundreds of songs go undiscovered. Therefore over these
many years I have myself realized about twenty secular
songs (mostly from Orpheus Britannicus), a few sacred songs,
four of the big Divine Hymns (from the Harmonia Sacra)
and half-a-dozen duets (some taken from the dramatic
works reprinted separately by Purcell's widow in Orpheus
Britannicus) all with piano. I have also realized for other
occasions the Golden Sonata, and continue parts of the fine
Welcome Song of 1687, and Purcell's masterpiece, Dido and
Aeneas, for harpsichord. There is also a sequence of songs,
a Suite from Orpheus Britannicus, where I realized the figured
bass for strings.
Never have I attempted the ultimate realization of any
of these songs. Since the accompaniments were originally
intended to be improvised, they must be personal and
immediate and as we know only too well how ephemeral
fashions are, how quickly tastes change, so each generation
must want its own realizations. (I have myself in several
cases changed my mind about my own efforts and after a
few years rewritten them.) The most I have hoped for is to
have drawn attention to some of these wonderful and useful
songs by a lively enough version, and hope therefore that
eventually other people will like these songs enough to
arrange them themselves.
I have no theories as to how this should be done. But in
the light of my experience here are a few deductions. It
is an important rule of the game that one should stick to the
actual notes of the bass (with allowable changing of the
length of the notes it seems in those days they were not too
particular about this and changing of the octave, such as
On Realizing the Continue in PurcelYs Songs 9
could be done by different registrations on the harpsichord.)
And one must of course complete the harmonies in the way
the figures indicate. If there are gaps in these (and there are
many) a knowledge of the period and the composer's
personal style should help. But just a filling in by these
harmonies above the correct notes is not enough; one
dimension is still lacking, the dimension of one's personal
reaction to the song, which in former days would have been
supplied by improvisation. This dimension comes from the
texture of the accompaniment, the way the harmonies are
filled in. If one is realizing for a piano it is important to be
aware of the difference of sound from harpsichord and
string bass, for which most of the songs would have been
written. There must be compensation for the lack of
sustaining power of the actual bass notes (repeated notes,
octaves, trills, tremolandi for crescendi &c.), as well as an
awareness of the difference between the plucked and ham
mered strings. Actually the sound that Purcell expected,
this harpsichord sound, can give, one ideas dry clear
arpeggios, grace-notes, octave doublings, sudden contrasts
in dynamics or range, and that wonderful short staccato.
However, the principal factors determining the texture
are the form of the songs, the shapes of phrases in the voice
part or the bass, and of course the mood of the words.
If the songs are simple verse songs, or songs not broken
up into many sections, the accompaniment should reflect
this by keeping to a consistent style. In *I attempt from
love's sickness to fly' I have supported the beautiful melody
with simple continuous four-part harmony (with occasional
doublings), with the top line occasionally moving in quavers
suggested by the tune and the mood of the song. In 'Fairest Isle'
I have used PurcelTs own harmonies taken from his choral
version (in King Arthur), with new keyboard spacing. In each
BHP
i o On Realizing the Continue in Purcell' s Songs
successive verse of 'Man is for the woman made' I have
invented new figuration to match the increasing dottiness of
the words. In 'How blest are shepherds' and 'On the brow of
Richmond Hill' the repetitions (I suggest, echoes) of each
section of the tune have newly spaced harmonies to support it.
The solo version of 'Turn then thine eyes' has rapid quaver
triplets to introduce the coloratura of the voice part. The
lively J* J of 'will on thy cheek appear' is echoed on the
piano. The elegant coquetry of 'Pious Celinda' suggested
to me an ironic eighteenth-century phrase with a turn and
grace note, which interrupts the amusing vocal line. 'Hark
the echoing air' suggested imitations of trumpets and oboes
(as did the 'Sound the Trumpet' duet) and the 'clapping of
wings' suggested quick, snappy grace notes. In the songs
with ostinato basses, which are many, I try to establish the
ostinato clearly to begin with, and then colour each new
image with new figuration the 'snakes drop' in staccato
thirds in 'Music for a while' after a clear four-octave start;
in the 'Evening Hymn' the harmonies change very slowly
and figuration is only gradually introduced.
In the form which Purcell perfected the continuous
movement made up of independent, short sections mysteri
ously linked by subtle contrasts of key, mood, and rhythm
the accompaniment must follow and emphasize these
contrasts. Each miniature section of 'Sweeter than Roses'
has its own figuration; the cool arpeggios of the 'roses'
in the short interlude, echoing the singer's first melting
phrase the growing intensity of 'warm' and the firm
cadential 'kiss'; the 'trembling' is in oscillating sixths; high
shivering chords 'freeze'; 'fire' has lively crackling chords;
trumpets accompany the 'victorious love', and dizzy whirl
ing quavers 'all, all, all is love'. This perhaps sounds naive,
but Purcell has himself suggested some such musical pictures
On Realizing the Continue in Pwcelfs Songs 11
in the voice and bass parts, and besides he has provided in
these given parts a firm and secure musical structure which
can safely hold together and make sense of one's wildest
fantasies. This is only one of many similar cases. Perhaps
the most beautiful and certainly one of the wildest, is 'Mad
Bess'. Here to start, to finish, and to introduce many of the
sections, I have used a scurrying semiquaver passage based
on the first vocal phrase. Dramatically it can be said to
suggest the movements of poor demented Bess.
In the Divine Hymns I have used the same kind of tech
nique, but with a less exaggerated fantasy, since the moods
are mostly less extreme. 'Lord, what is man' is in three fully
worked out sections. The austere recitative which starts this
fine Hymn I have accompanied quite barely : a turn for each
of the long pedal notes later a trill at the more animated
'Reveal ye glorious spirits' chords at each change of
harmony; and I echo the vocal run as joy' fades out into
'astonishment'. In the arioso 'Oh, for a quill' the little quaver
passages in the piano part are all suggested by the voice or bass
part, and by the intense though subdued mood of longing.
The final 'Hallelujah' starts quietly in figuration, largely
octave doubling of the bass. I have added semiquaver figures
as the momentum grows, and as the movement fades out
into a soft ecstatic finish (which is the way we always do
it) the right hand crosses and re-crosses the voice in flowing
semiquavers.
The splendid opening tune of 'We sing to Him' suggests
to me the singing of a thousand voices, so the accompani
ment is in full ringing chords.
In 'Job's Curse' I have taken the liberty of repealing the
last four bass bars as a little codetta after the voice has
finished, in order to let the impact of this tremendous scena
die away more gradually. It is however printed in small
12 On Realizing the Continue* in Pur cell's Songs
notes and can be omitted very easily. Similarly in *I attempt
from love's sickness to fly', that perfect opening song for a
recital, I have preluded the song by a few bars; practical
experience has shown us that this is necessary in order to
accustom the audience to the style of the music, the sweet,
subtle mood before the voice starts. The two little ariosi in
'The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation' are more contra
puntalat 'me Judah's daughter', canonical, with the left
hand gently filling in the harmonies.
One of PurcelTs most elaborate dramatic Scenas is
'Saul and the Witch at Endor'. Misty slow-moving quavers
at the start bind together the three voices, united in setting
the gloomy scene. When they separate into their three
individual characters I have used the simple device of differ
ent registers to add to the characterizations the ghost of
Samuel almost disappearing off the bottom of the piano.
'Celemene', the Dialogue for soprano and tenor from
Orconoko ('sung by the boy and the girl') could not be a
greater contrast. The children prattle away about the
puzzles of love, and I have followed the onomatopoeia of
the voice parts : the heart-beats, the trembling, the touching.
A five-finger exercise matches the innocence of 'When you
wash yourself and play . . .' Again in 'I spy Celia' I have
tried to follow every instruction in this young person's guide
to love.
In the Suite from Orpheus Britannicus in which I arranged
the figured basses for strings the problem was really the
same as if realizing for piano, but with the big difference of
thinking in terms of strings. At the start of 'Let sullen
Discord smile' I added a viola part to the other strings
because of the absence of a keyboard instrument. In the
original the upper strings were dropped at the entry of the
voice. I continue them in simple four-part harmony, adding
On Realizing the Continuo in Purcell's Songs 13
martellato scale passages at let war devote this day to
peace'. In 'Why should men quarrel' strings pizzicato fill
out the harmony in between the spiky flute figuration and
the cello solo. 'So when the glittering queen of Night' has
the harmony filled out in the divided muted cellos and
double bass. Against this funeral march-like background the
voice and three solo strings stand out clearly like stars on a
dark night. The introduction of 'Thou tun'st this world' is
originally for two oboes and continuo. I have given the bass
line to a bassoon and not completed the harmony. "When the
voice enters, the strings take over with simple detached chords,
only occasionally flowing into figuration. At the end of this
typically Purcellian song in a gay minor key, we repeat the
second half of the introduction (as before on wind instru
ments alone). The splendid 'Sound Fame' has a rousing, but
not Handelian, trumpet solo against one of Purcell's barest
ostinatos. The latter I have given to a second string orchestra
in octaves (at the end in four octaves). The first orchestra
plays counterpoints and occasionally pizzicato block har
monies; finally joining the trumpet in diatonic semiquavers.
I know there are many other ways of realizing Purcell's
figured basses a highly distinguished series is now being
brought out by my friends Michael Tippett and Walter
Bergmann. I hope there will be many more^ and done with
plenty of boldness of imagination, for what has kept so
many of these wonderful treasures locked up in obscurity
has been creative dullness or too much reverence. Purcell
would have hated these two qualities above all; at least,
that is the feeling one has after getting to know him through
even these few works.
3
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas'
ERIC WALTER WHITE
To those who believe that Dido and Aeneas is a masterpiece
of English opera, authoritative information about its music
and libretto is of considerable importance.
No score was published in PurcelTs lifetime in fact, the
first published version was an incomplete one printed by the
Musical Antiquarian Society in 1841 and today the main
authority for the music resides in certain copyists' manu
scripts. Writing in the preface to the Purcell Society edition
of Dido and Aeneas, 1889, Dr. W. H. Cummings claimed to
have in his possession *a MS. score of the opera written
probably in Purcell's time'. After his death, this score was
sold at Sotheby's in 1917 under the following description:
Purcell (H) Dido and Aeneas, MS., with musical notes, half calf,
uncut, S^EC. XVm
It was acquired by the Marquis Tokugawa and shipped to
Japan in 1920, where for some years it remained in the
Nanki Music Library. It is not clear where it is now, 1 so
Cummings's claim cannot be checked.
This is unfortunate, because Cummings appears to have
been an unreliable guide to the other important manuscript
score the one that formerly belonged to the Rev. Sir
Frederick Ouseley and is now in the Library of St. Michael's
College, Tenbury Wells. He refers to this manuscript also
1 News of this MS. is given in Appendix C. [Editor.]
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9 15
in the preface to the Purcell Society edition of Dido and
Aeneas and calls it 'a fine MS. score written by John Travers,
about 1720.' In fact, the name of John Travers is mentioned
nowhere in this manuscript; and the anonymous scribe's
handwriting differs in a number of marked particulars from
Travers's own authenticated hand. Handwriting tests are
notoriously difficult to apply with complete success; but
in this case the apparently gratuitous attribution to Travers
is probably also faulted by the paper on which the manu
script is written. This being watermarked *j. WHATMAN*
must date from the latter part of the eighteenth century.
J But the fact that Cummings was wrong about the
attribution of the Tenbury MS. and that it belongs to a later
date than hitherto suspected do not necessarily detract
from its value. Whoever the scribe may have been, his copy
was a 'fair' one in the best sense of that word. Not only is it
clean and clear, but internal evidence shows it was based on a
very early score possibly PurcelTs own original manu
script as adapted for use in the theatre. The style of notation
and the restricted use of figuration imply that the original
must date from the end of the seventeenth or beginning of
the eighteenth century. The plentiful stage directions
certainly refer to an actual stage production.
When Nahum Tate came to write the libretto, he was
already familiar with the story of Dido and Aeneas, since
some years previously he had based the action of his first
play on the fourth book of the Aeneid, but on the advice of
certain friends (as he explains in the preface) he had altered
the names of the characters and the scene of the action, the
tragedy in its transformed guise appearing as Brutus of Alba
(1678). His libretto for PurcelTs opera, which made use of
some of the material that had appeared in the earlier play,
was originally brought out as an eight-page folio pamphlet
1 6 New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas'
(perhaps for private circulation as no publisher's name is
given) with the following inscription at the head of p. i
of the text:
AN OPERA
Perform' d at
MR. JOSIAS PRIEST's Boarding-School at
CHELSEY
By Young Gentlewomen.
The Words Made by Mr. NAT. TATE.
The Musick Composed by Mr. Henry Purcell.
Only a single copy of this publication is known, and that is
now in the Library of the Royal College of Music. As the
opera was probably performed for the first time in 1689 or
1690, it is reasonable to suppose that this libretto, though
undated, was published at the same time. This dating is
borne out by the fact that the Epilogue that Thomas D'Urfey
specially wrote for this school production and which has
the following specific reference to the Revolution of 1 68 8-89 :
Rome may allow strange Tricks to please her Sons,
But we are Protestants and English Nuns
was included in a collection entitled New Poems published in
1690. The opera had to wait over ten years for its first
professional performance, which was given in 1700 at the
Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields by Thomas Betterton's
company in the course of a production of Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure. By then Purcell had been dead for over
four years. The opera libretto was included in the quarto
edition of the play published the same year; and this version
differs from the earlier text in certain material ways.
At this point a word should be said about the title of the
opera. As has been pointed out above, the original libretto
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas' 1 7
is untitled, though it is possible that the text of the libretto
may have been preceded, by a title-page now lost. Dido and
Aeneas is definitely mentioned as the title of the opera in
D'Urfey's published Epilogue. In the Measure for Measure
quarto the tide is The Loves of Dido and Aeneas, and the work
is subtitled a masque. When it was revived in 1704 for at
least two performances that were independent of Measure
for Measure, the advertisements referred to it as the Masque
of Aeneas and Dido. The fact that the tide given to the opera
in the Tenbury MS. is The Loves of Aeneas and Dido may mean
that the score from which this MS. was copied was the one
specially prepared for these 1704 performances at Lincoln's
Inn Fields.
Although the 1700 text of the libretto has been public
property for over two and a half centuries, no one interested
in English opera generally and Dido and Aeneas in particular
seems to have paid any special attention to it. Either its
existence has been ignored; or where it has been known,
comment has been inaccurate and misleading. For instance,
Cummings in his preface to the Purcell Society edition of the
score mentioned the fact that some of the pieces in the opera
had at times been 'divorced from the work and introduced
into stage plays, without regard to their appropriateness; for
example, "Fear no danger" was thrust into Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure, as may be seen from a copy of the
music of the duet published in 1700'. This is a misunder
standing. The number in question was published by Walsh
as an extract from the opera as played in this special produc
tion of Measure for Measure. Alfred Loewenberg in his
Annals of Opera (1943) stated that Dido and Aeneas 'was given
as an interlude in C. Gildon's version of Measure for Measure 9 .
This is inaccurate in so far as it implies that the opera was
given between acts of the play. As will be seen, Gildon did
i $ New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas'
his best to integrate it into the action. Harold Child was
nearer the truth when in his note on the stage history of the
play (written for the Cambridge New Shakespeare in 1922)
he said that Gildon's adaptation 'was so successful as to
be given eight times, largely owing, perhaps, to the four
"entertainments of musick" (three of them taken from
PurcelTs Dido and Aeneas) with which it was diversified'.
But even here Child was at fault in that he failed to realize
that the fourth entertainment was an integral part of Tate's
libretto for Dido and Aeneas, though whether or not it was
set by Purcell is a moot point. Edward J. Dent (in Foundations
of English Opera, 1928} realized that Dido and Aeneas was
'inserted as a masque into Gildon's adaptation of Measure for
Measure, but implied that it was given only once in that
form, whereas in fact it was not only performed several
times during the 1700 season, but was revived on its own at
the Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1704 and may have
been played at the newly built Queen's Theatre in the
Haymarket when Measure for Measure was revived there
in 1 706.*
During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the
theatre in Dorset Garden, which Sir Christopher Wren
had built for the Duke's Men in 1673, served as the chief
centre of operatic production in London; and it was there
that Purcell's dramatic operas, The Prophetess, King Arthur,
and The Fairy Queen, were produced in the early 16905.
By 1695, the year of Purcell's death, however, the fortunes
of the Theatre had started to wane; and in that year too
1 This latter performance is rather doubtful, however, since the ad
vertisement specifies 'Measure for Measure written by the famous Beau
mont and Fletcher with the Masque of Acis and Galatea', &c., and this
may mean that Acis and Galatea took the place of The Loves of Dido
and Aeneas, though there would he nothing unusual in adding an extra
masque as an afterpiece.
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9 19
Betterton, who had been acting with the United Companies
at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, since 1682, moved to
Lincoln's Inn Fields with a number of experienced players,
leaving a comparatively young and immature company
behind at Drury Lane. He erected a theatre by subscription
within the walls of Lisle's Tennis Court, and opened with a
new play by William Congreve, Love for Love. The com
petition between the two companies was keen. One of the
first things the Drury Lane players did was to transfer some
of PurcelTs semi-operas from Dorset Garden, adding
The Prophetess to their repertory in 1697 and King Arthur
in 1698. (There is no record of a revival of The Fairy Queen
at Drury Lane until 1703, when only a single act was per
formed, presumably because the score seems to have been
mislaid shortly after PurcelTs death.) Lincoln's Inn Fields
retaliated by mounting opera too. The rivalry between the
two houses is referred to in a Dialogue called A Comparison
between the Two Stages (1702), which has sometimes been
(erroneously) attributed to Gildon:
Sullen The Opera now possesses the Stage [i.e. at Drury Lane]
and after a hard Struggle, at length it prevail' d, and something
more than Charges came in every Night: The Quality, who are
always Lovers of good Musick, flock hither, and by almost a
total revolt from the other House, give this new Life, and set it
in some eminency above the New, this was a sad mortification
to the old Stagers in Lincolns-Inn-Fields, but at length they too
Critic. Nay, there I will prevent you good Mr. Sullen:, I must
have the Honour of this Speech. At last, (as you say) the old
Stagers moulded a piece of Pastry work of their own, and made a
kind of Lenten Feast with their Rinaldo & Armida; this surpriz'd
not only Drury-Lane, but indeed all the Town, no body ever
dreaming of an Opera there.
The piece of pastry-work referred to was Rinaldo andArmida
20 New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9
(with music by John Eccles to a libretto by John Dennis,
1698) ; and this was followed two years later by The Loves of
Dido and Aeneas.
The rivalry between the two houses expressed itself also
in choice of plays. Betterton was particularly successful in
Shakespeare: Drury Lane retaliated with Ben Jonson. To
quote once more from .4 Comparison between the Two Stages:
Sullen. Well, this lucky hit of Battertons put D. Lane to a non
plus: Shakespeare Ghost was rais'd at the New-house, and he
seem'd to inhabit it for ever: What's to be done then? . . . Then
they fell to task on the Fox, the Alchymist, and Silent Woman,
who had kin twenty years in Peace, they drew up these in
Battalia against Harry the 4th and Harry the 8th, and then the
Fight began. Now do you proceed
Critic. The Battd continued a long time doubtful, and Victory
hovering over both Camps, Batterton Sollicits for some Auxiliar
ies from the same Author, and then he flanks his Enemy with
Measure for Measure.
Measure for Measure, or, Beauty the Best Advocate, a Very
much alter'd* version of Shakespeare's play 'with additions
of several Entertainments of Musick' was acted by Better-
ton's company at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre early in
1700. The plot was altered, the scene changed from Vienna
to Turin, and the comic characters and low-life scenes
omitted, their place being taken by the musical entertain
ments. Although the adaptor's name was not given on the
title-page of the quarto that was published that summer, he
is known to have been Charles Gildon from an advertise
ment appended to Gildon's Loves Victim (1701) which ran
as follows :
Measure for Measure a Comedy alter'd from Beaumont & Fletcher
by Mr. Gildon.
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 21
Subsequent Shakespearian adaptations at Lincoln's Inn
Fields included The Merchant of Venice, altered by George
Granville, Lord Lansdowne, and retitled The Jew of Venice
(1701), which contained a masque of Peleus and Thetis,
and a dull and vulgar version of Twelfth Night by William
Burnaby called Love Betray d (1703). This too was intended
to include a masque, though it appears to have been omitted
in actual performance.
The Loves of Dido and Aeneas was inserted into the action of
Measure for Measure as if it were a masque, or succession of
masques. The whole of Tate's libretto that is the three-act
opera together with the classical-pastoral prologue was
worked into the text of Gildon's adaptation in the form of
four separate entertainments, the first, second and third
entertainments (roughly equivalent to Acts I, II, and III of
the opera) being introduced as a series of diversions played
before Angelo in Act I, Scene I, Act II, Scene 2, and Act III,
Scene i, respectively, and the fourth entertainment (viz.
the classical-pastoral prologue of the libretto) coming after
Act V at the end of the play. Although the first three enter
tainments are placed near the end of their particular scenes,
the action is resumed, however briefly, at the end of each
entertainment. 'Begin the Opera, the Deputy attends', says
Lucio; and that is the cue for the first entertainment, at the
end of which Angelo says, 'This Musick is no Cure for my
Distemper' &c. 'Come let 'em begin*, cries Angelo at the
beginning of the second entertainment; and when it is over,
he pursues a striking analogy between Dido and Isabella:
All will not do : All won't devert my Pain,
The Wound enlarges by these Medicines,
'Tis She alone can yield the Healing Balm.
This Scene just hits my case; her Brothers danger,
Is here the storm must furnish Blest occasion;
22 New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9
But when, my Dido, I've possess'd thy Charms,
I then will throw thee from my glutted Arms,
And think no more on all thy soothing Harms.
At the beginning of the third entertainment Angelo again
commands 'Let them begin' and then comments 'No
Isabella yet?' A stage direction follows: 'They all sit, and the
Third Musick. Before 'tis quite done, Isabella enters! The final
chorus 'With drooping wings' is followed immediately by
Angelo's comment,
'I see my Ev'ning Star of Love appear.
This is no place to try my last Effort', &c.
Even the fourth entertainment, which comes right at the
end of the play, is followed by a brief eight-line speech of
the Duke's.
This technique recalls the way Elkanah Settle and
Matthew Locke introduced the masque of Orpheus and
Euridice into The Empress of Morocco (1673) at the climax of
the action; but whereas Orpheus and Euridice was a
complete operatic scene in itself and was played without a
break, there can be no doubt that in the case of Gildon's
adaptation the dramatic scheme of Dido and Aeneas was
adversely affected by the necessity of separating the acts
with substantial chunks of Shakespeare's play. So it is not
surprising that shortly afterwards The Loves of Dido and
Aeneas was divorced from Measure for Measure and presented
on its own at Lincoln's Inn Fields as a masque following The
Anatomist on 29 January 1704 and The Man of Mode on
8 April the same year.
Nor were the exposition and unfolding of the action of
the opera helped by a transposition of two scenes, for which
Gildon was presumably responsible. In Tate's original
libretto the action runs as follows :
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 23
Prologue, Scene i By the Sea
Scene 2 The Grove
Act I, Scene i The Palace
Act n, Scene i -The Cave
Scene 2 The Grove
Act IE, Scene i The Ships
But in Gildon's adaptation, Scenes i and 2 of Act II are
transposed, the two scenes in their reversed order forming
the whole of the second entertainment. This transposition is
such an error from the dramatic point of view that one
naturally wonders why he should have countenanced it.
One possible explanation is that there are certain stage
effects in the Cave scene that may have made it preferable
for that scene to follow the Grove scene in the Lincoln's
Inn Fields production. In the 1700 quarto, the Cave scene
opens with the stage direction, * The Cave rises. The Witches
appear . After the Echo Dance of Furies, there is the direction,
At the end of the Dance Six Furies sinks. The four open the
Cave fly up\^ Specific directions regarding rising, sinking and
flying are not to be found at this point in the 1689 libretto,
presumably because only a limited range of stage effects
was possible in Mr. Priest's School. But it is clear from the
stage directions in Rinaldo andArmida, which was played in
the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre towards the end of 1698,
that after its recent adaptation the stage there was fully
equipped for rising, sinking, and flying effects. In fact,
incidental music was sometimes played under the stage, as
appears from a direction 'The Serpent and Bases softly under
1 This stage direction gives a fascinating glimpse of the choreo
grapher's intentions for the Echo Dance. The misprint 'open', most
probably meant for 'over', suggests that there may Have been four
dancers above the roof of the cave, imitating a bar later the move
ments of the six dancers on the floor of the stage; their gestures, clearly
defined against the sky, conveying a visual *echo'. [Editor.]
24 New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas
the Stage, and this device could also have been used in
The Loves of Dido and Aeneas for the Echo Dance of the
Furies. In any case, it may have been more convenient from
the standpoint of stage management at Lincoln's Inn Fields
for the Cave scene to follow the Grove scene, so that the
sinking and flying and rising and echo effects could come
at the end of this particular entertainment rather than in the
middle.
This contention seems to be supported by the Tenbury
MS., where the layout of the action (the Prologue being
absent) is as follows:
Act I, Scene i The Palace
Scene 2 The Cave
Act n, Scene i The Grove
Act HI, Scene i The Ships
It looks as if the Cave scene had been restored to its rightful
place in the original score, while the stage directions for
flying and sinking remained in the Tenbury MS. the
direction after the Edio Dance of Furies is 'Thunder and
Lightning horrid Musick.*- The Furies sink down in the Cave
the Rest fly up 9 so it still seemed convenient to make the
end of the Cave scene the place for an act division, or (as the
Tenbury MS. specifies) 'The End of the first part'. This is
probably the way the opera was given at the two 1704
performances at Lincoln's Inn Fields mentioned above.
Various persons have drawn attention to the apparently
unset chorus and dance at the end of Act II. In Tate's 1689
libretto the passage runs as follows :
The Sorceress and her Inchanteress.
Cho. Then since our Charmes have Sped,
A Merry Dance be led
1 Rinaldo andArmida also lias the stage direction, 'Thunder and Light-
n\ng Y and Horrid Mustek alternately'.
tfe^^ffeSorc^
mwwt
JwtV
tooi,
t together j
* Tr.
air. to
JED.
Honour but a G&twu Trouble,
t fr,
aFr,
a f r
I. A page from Gildon's adaptation of Measure for Measure (1700), showing part
of the additional scene in Dido and Aeneas. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees
of the British Museum?)
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9 25
By the Nymphs of Carthage to please us.
They shall all Dance to ease us.
A Dance that shall make the Spheres to wonder,
Rending these fair Groves asunder.
The Groves Dance.
Dent (in Foundations of English Opera) gave it as his opinion
that 'the inconclusive tonality' of Aeneas's preceding recita
tive, with which the act at present ends, 'suggests that
Purcell may have originally intended to set the chorus, but
perhaps cut it out, feeling that the despair of Aeneas made a
more dramatic end to the act'. Dent did not see anything
unstylistic in this extraordinarily non-classical procedure,
though he regretted Purcell did not 'contrive his recitative
so as to end the act in the key in which it began'.
Benjamin Britten went further than Dent. After he had
made a special realization of the score for the English Opera
Group revival of the opera during the Festival of Britain,
1951, lie issued a statement (dated 4 April 1951) in which he
said:
Anyone who has taken part in, or indeed heard a concert or stage
performance, must have been struck by the very peculiar and
most unsatisfactory end of this Act n as it stands; Aeneas sings
his very beautiful recitative in A minor and disappears without
any curtain music or chorus (which occurs in all the other acts).
The drama cries out for some strong dramatic music, and the
whole key scheme of the opera (very carefully adhered to in
each of the other scenes) demands a return to the key of the
beginning of the act or its relative major (D minor or F major).
What is more, the contemporary printed libretto . . . has perfectly
clear indications for a scene with the Sorceress and her Enchan
tresses, consisting of six lines of verse, and a dance to end the act.
It is my considered opinion that music was certainly composed
to this scene and has been lost. It is quite possible that it will be
found, but each year makes it less likely.
CHP
2$ New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas
Britten's solution was to turn the first four lines of verse into
a trio for the Sorceress and two witches based on a trio from
The Indian Queen (c. 1690) transposed to D minor; the last
two lines became a chorus to music borrowed from the last
of the nine Welcome Songs (1687) transposed to D major;
and the dance was set to a movement in F major from the
Overture to Sir Anthony Love (1690). (Similarly for the
Mermaid Theatre productions of 1951, 1952, and 1953,
Geraint Jones drew music for the missing chorus and dance
from other Purcell works,)
It is at this point that The Loves of Dido and Aeneas as
printed in the Measure for Measure quarto provides fresh
evidence of what may have been the contemporary solution
of this problem. After the passage of Aeneas's recitative
ending
Yours be the Blame, ye Gods, for I,
Obey your will but with more ease cou'd dye
come four lines, also for Aeneas, each of which is introduced
with double quotation marks, showing they were to be
omitted in performance and, presumably, not to be set to
music.
"Direct me, friends, what Choice to make,
"Since Love and Fame together press me,
"And with equal Force distress me.
"Say what Party I shall take.
Here follows a duet for two friends of Aeneas, which does
not appear in the original libretto. There is an occasional
interjection by Aeneas, which almost raises the status of this
musical number from that of a duet to a trio. Dramatically
it is of considerable importance, as it emphasizes the difficult
nature of the choice with which Aeneas is faced and gives it
appropriate musical form. (Attention is drawn to tie fact
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 27
that, apart from the quatrain for Aeneas given above, no
further lines are marked for omission.)
1 Fr. Resistless Jove Commands
2 Fr. But Love
More Resistless then Jove's.
Aen. But Fame Alcander.
2 Fr. Fame's a Bubble,
Honour but a Glorious Trouble,
A vain Pride of Destroying,
Alarming and Arming,
And Toiling and Moiling,
And never Enjoying.
1 Fr. 'Twas that gave Hector,
2 Fr. What?
1 Fr. Renown and Fame.
2 Fr. An empty Name,
And Lamentable Fate.
1 Fr. 'Twas Noble and Brave.
2 Fr. 'Twas a Death for a Skve.
1 Fr. His Valour and Glory-
Shall flourish in Story.
2 Fr. While he rots in his Grave.
Aen. Ye Sacred Powers instruct me how to choose,
When Love or Empire I must loose.
Aen. & Cho. Love without Empire Trifling is and Vain,
And Empire without Love a Pompous Pain.
Exeunt.
At this point comes the stage direction 'Enter Sorceress and
Witches ', and the chorus "Then since our Charmes have Sped*
follows as in the original 1689 libretto.
It is interesting to find this duet/trio introduced at this
particular spot. As it does not appear in the original libretto
and as the two extra men's voices would have been in
convenient for the original girls* school production, it
2 S New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas
is likely that Tate either suppressed this passage in 1689 or
added it specially for the professional performance in 1700.
It helps to give musical density to Aeneas, who in the school
production was a light-weight character, confined to
recitative; and it is a complete vindication of Britten's
inspired guess that the exigencies of musical form called for
some sort of ensemble at this point.
The only other important textual change in the libretto of
Dido and Aeneas as printed in the 1700 quarto comes in
the fourth entertainment. This is substantially the same as the
classical-pastoral prologue of Tate's original libretto ; but the
material is slightly rearranged, the final duet between a
country shepherd and shepherdess with chorus being moved
to an earlier position immediately following Venus's
couplet
Smiling Hours are now before you,
Hours that may return no more.
After the chorus ending
Prepare those soft returns to Meet,
That makes Loves Torments Sweet.
the Nymphs' Dance is cut, and in place of the removed duet
there is a new episode a duet between Mars and Peace
with antiphonal choruses supplied by their attendants. This
provides a much stronger ending, in the classical as opposed
to the pastoral vein. The new material runs as follows :
Enter Mars and his Attendants, on one side, Peace and her Train
on the other.
Mar. Bid the Warlike Trumpet sound
Conquest waits with Lawrel crown'd,
Conquest is the Hero's due.
Glorious Triumph will ensue.
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 29
Peace. 'Tis time for War's alarms to cease,
And Heroes crown' d with spoils,
Enjoy the Harvest of their toils,
And reap the happy Fruits of Peace. ,
Mar. & his Train Cho. No, no ! the love would have it so
Fame and Honour answer No.
Peace. Wherefore must the Warriour be
To resdess Tasks assign' d,
Give others those delights which he
Must never hope to find,
Shall he, whose valour gain'd
The Prize in rough alarms,
Be still condemn'd to arms,
And from a Victors share detain' d.
Mar. Cho. Yes, yes.
Peace. Cho. No, no.
Mar. Cho. Fame, fame will have it so.
Peace. Cho. Love and Reason answer no.
Peace. Must he with endless toils be prest,
Nor with repose himself be blest,
Who gives the weary Nations rest.
Mar. Cho. Yes, yes.
Peace. Cho. No, no.
All. Love, Reason, Honour, all will have it so.
Cho. Since it is decreed that Wars should cease,
Let's all agree to welcome Peace.
The grand Dance.
In considering the problem of whether or not another
composer was called in to complete the score in 1700, one
should remember that the full description of these entertain
ments as given at the head of the first is 'The Loves of Dido
and Aeneas, a Mask, in Four Musical Entertainments'. There
is no suggestion, that any part of the text of these entertain
ments, with the exception of the four lines in the Grove
jo New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas
scene that were specially marked for omission, was not set
to music. Furthermore, the Prologue to Measure for Measure,
which was written by John Olchnixon and spoken by
Betterton, goes out of its way to mention by name and pay
homage to the composer. At first Betterton chides the
audience for their fickle attendance at the Lincoln's Inn
Fields Theatre:
To please this Winter, we all Meanes have us'd:
Old Playes have been Reviv'd, and New produced.
But you, it seems, by Us, wou'd not be Serv'd;
And others Thrive, while we were almost Starv'd. . . .
After continuing in this vein for some time, he comes to a
close; and a stage direction makes it clear he is about to
make his exit when, suddenly remembering something he'd
forgotten, he comes back and delivers this final triplet:
Hold; I forgot the Business of the Day;
No more than this, We, for our Selves, need Say,
'Tis Purcels Musick, and 'tis Shakespears Play.
Here is as clear an indication as possible that Purcell was
fully accepted as the composer of the music to these par
ticular entertainments.
As against this, however, the Tenbury MS. has no music
for the Prologue at all, and in the Grove scene the music
stops dead after Aeneas's final line of recitative, being
followed by the scribe's subscription "The End of the 2<i
Act'. This comes on a recto sheet; 'and the Prelude to the
third act follows on the verso. Clearly the copyist had no
suspicion that there was any gap in the music at this point.
This might be accounted for by the fact that the extra
music for the trio /duet and chorus, having been written by
another hand, was inserted into Purcell's original score for
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9 31
purposes of theatrical performance, but withdrawn before
the score was handed over to the copyist.
But if Purcell was not the composer of the missing parts of
the score, who in fact was?
There seems to be no need to look outside the Purcell
family for an. answer. Since Henry's death in 1695, Daniel
Purcell had been much preoccupied with composition for
the stage. In the first place, he wrote the music for a masque
of Hymen to complete his brother's score for The Indian
Queen. In 1696 he set the lyrical passages in an extraordinary
dramatic concoction written by George Powell and John
Verbruggen and produced at Dorset Garden. This was
called Brutus of Alba. Part of the action was based on Tate's
earlier tragedy of the same name; but it also had passages of
dynastic pageantry recalling Albion and Albanius (1685) of
Grabu and Dryden, and various commedia dell'arte episodes.
The following year (1697) he composed music for another
dramatic opera, Cinthia and Endimion, written by D'Urfey
and produced at Drury Lane. In 1698 he set an ode by Tate
entitled Lamentation on the Death of Henry Purcell, and
in the same year provided incidental music for a tragedy of
Gildon's entitled Phaeton. In the latter case, the playwright
was so delighted by the composer's contribution that he
wrote a special encomium in the preface to the printed text:
. . . But the Music was so admirable, that the best Judges tell me
(for I dare not give it as my own bare Sentiment) that there is the
true Purcellian Air through the whole: that tho' it be so very dif
ferent in the several Acts, it is everywhere Excellent; and thatMr.
Daniel Purcelk Composition in this Pky is a certain Proof, that
as long as he lives Mr. Henry Pur eel will never die; or our
English harmony give place to any of our Neighbours.
Only a few weeks before the production of Measure for
^2 New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas
Measure in 1700, the dramatic opera The Grove had its
first performance at Drury Lane with music by Daniel
Purcell to a libretto by Oldmixon.
All these close links with the librettist of Dido and Aeneas
and the author of its Epilogue, and with the adapter of
Measure for Measure and the author of its Prologue, make
it evident that if extra music had been needed for The Loves
of Dido and Aeneas, Daniel Purcell was the most likely person
to be asked. Furthermore, it seems that the setting of Tate's
masque-like prologue (whether in whole or in part) would
have been particularly congenial to him, since in 1700 he
decided to enter for a competition that had just been
announced in the London Gazette with four prizes of 100,
50, 30, and 20 guineas for the best settings of Congreve's
masque The Judgment of Paris, and in due course won the third
prize, his version being presented, first on its own, and then
with the other three winning scores, at Dorset Gardenin 1701.
One should also bear in mind that it was doubtless from the
Purcell family probably from the widow herself that the
management of the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre acquired
the score of Dido and Aeneas for their 1700 production; and
that would have made it easy for Daniel Purcell to have
access to it.
Apart from the two passages quoted above, the 1700 text
does not contain any new material. It corrects many of the
misprints and errors in the 1689 edition, but adds a few of its
own. The opening number of Act III, 'Come away Fellow-
Saylors', is ascribed to the Sorceress and not to the Chorus as
in the 1689 libretto or the ist Sailor as in the Tenbury MS.
(It is interesting to find the 1700 text prints the fourth line
of this number as 'Take a Bouze short; leave your Nymphs
on the Shore' instead of the Tenbury MS. 'Take a boozy
short leave of your nymphs of the shore', which sounds as
New Light on 'Dido and Aeneas 9 33
if it had been deliberately altered by Purcell for the sake of
melodic euphony.) The number of dances is reduced from
seventeen to ten, the display of the dancers' talents being no
longer so important a factor as it had been at Priest's School
in 1689.
Although the 1700 quarto gives the Measure for Measure
cast, it says nothing about the cast for The Loves of Dido and
Aeneas. In this connexion, a document from the Sackville
(Knole) MSS. quoted by Sybil Rosenfeld in an article on
'Unpublished Stage Documents' 1 is of importance. It
mentions the Lincoln's Inn Fields Company as containing
on 20 July 1695 fifteen actors and a dozen actresses, and in
addition:
Mr Downes Prompter
Mr Prince
r Dancers
Mr Bray
Mr Pate
Mr Reading I Singers
Mrs Hodgson J
The 4 Scene Keepers
Mrs. Hodgson, who played Aglaia in The Loves of Mars
and Venus, a play set to music by G. Finger and Eccles
and inserted into Edward Ravenscroft's farce The Anatomist
(Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1696), was certainly still in the com
pany during the 1699-1700 season; and it seems not urb-
reasonable to think she may have sung the role of Dido. The
only other likely candidate was the actress Mrs. Brace-
girdle, whose singing was specially singled out for praise
by John Downes in Roscius Anglicanus (1708) ; but as she was
cast for Isabella in Measure for Measure, it would have been
physically impossible for her to have sung Dido as well. It
appears from an advertisement in the Daily Courant that
1 Theatre Notebook, Vol. XI, 1956-7.
j^ New Light on 'Ditto and Aeneas
Mrs. Hodgson sang at Lincoln's Inn Fields on 23 March
1704; so there is good reason to think that she also appeared
as Dido in the 1704 revival. As for the men, both Mr.
Reading and Mr. Pate had sung in The Fairy Queen, so
they were familiar with PurcelTs operatic idiom. Mr. Pate,
however, was with the Drury Lane company early in 1699,
when he and Leveridge sang a dialogue in the third act of
The Island Princess ; and four seasons later he was still a
member of the same company, as appears from a Drury
Lane announcement dated n February 1703 advertising
'an extraordinary Consort of Musick by the best Masters in
which Mr. Pate (having recover'd his Voice) will perform
several songs in Italian and English'. So perhaps it was Mr.
Reading who was cast as Aeneas.
The extra music that was used in The Loves of Dido and
Aeneas in 1700 does not appear to have survived. It is even
doubtful whether it was carried over into the 1704 revivals,
for there is no trace of any consciousness on the part of the
Tenbury MS. scribe that there were omissions in the score
from which he was copying. It is always possible that this
extra music may turn up; but the likelihood now seems
rather remote. Meanwhile, any modern edition of the
opera (such as Britten's) that attempts to fill the gaps in the
score as it has come down to us with appropriate music by
Purcell is to be welcomed as a step towards the fuller
realization of the true nature of the operatic masterpiece that
Tate and Purcell planned and created together.
4
PurcelVs Librettist, Nahum Tate
IMOGEN HOLST
No one writing about PurcelTs dramatic music can escape
mentioning the fact that he never wrote another real opera
after Dido and Aeneas. The statement has been made over and
over again, in tones varying from mild regret to passionate
vexation. In an article written in 1927 for The Heritage of
Music my father even went so far as to say that it was a
'crime' for which Purcell had not been sufficiently blamed.
But it is surely a little hard to blame a composer for having
to earn enough to live on. Opera in seventeenth-century
England was no more a paying proposition than it is today.
'Ah, Mony, Mony !' sighs the writer of the Prologue to
D'Avenant's Siege of Rhodes, and his words have a familiar
ring, in spite of their period flavour, when he goes on to
wish that his patrons would
half that Treasure spare,
Which Faction gets from Fools to nourish War.
Audiences in the sixteen-nineties wanted stage plays with
'Singing, Dancing and Machines interwoven with 'em*,
and theatrical managers gave them what they were used to,
steering a safe middle course and taking it for granted that
the general public were not able to digest an entire opera.
IfDido and Aeneas had not been commissioned for a private
performance by amateurs it might never have been written:
36 Pamirs Librettist, Nahum Tate
it had to be disguised as a series of interludes for its first
public performance on the professional stage in 1700.
PurcelTs 'crime' was that he agreed to make the best of a
bad job, giving his audiences a taste of opera 'to try their
Palats' by providing superb incidental music for more than
forty plays that were soon to be swept aside and forgotten.
The operatic societies who now give concert performances
of the musical interludes in The Fairy Queen, King Arthur,
and Diodesian must feel frustrated almost beyond endurance
when they have to stand stock still during scenes that are
meant to be acted. Yet stage productions can be just as
frustrating, owing to the lack of unity in the works.
The astonishing unity of Dido and Aeneas is often men
tioned, but Tate's share in it has seldom been acknowledged.
He was PurcelTs only real librettist in our sense of the word.
If we could find his first rough draft of the libretto of Dido,
with PurcelTs comments in the margin, it might prove al
most as revealing as the discovery of the lost autograph
score of the music.
In planning the work as a -whole, and dividing it into
scenes, Tate and Purcell must surely have been influenced
by what they remembered of Blow's Venus and Adonis.
There are the obvious resemblances, such as in the final
chorus of mourning Cupids and in the dialogue between the
hero and heroine, where he protests that he has changed his
mind and will stay with her, and she drives him away against
her own inclination. There are the same swift changes of
mood, when one scene leads straight to the next with a
suddenness that some twentieth-century critics still find too
abrupt. And there is the same admirable directness in the
choice of words.
It would be easy to fall into the temptation of thinking
that Tate might have had a hand in the libretto of Venus and
Purcell's Librettist, Nahum Tate 57
Adonis, since he was collaborating with Blow in 1679. But
there is no evidence for this. What is certain, from the
evidence of Dido, is that Tate knew what was wanted in a
libretto. He had learnt that music was 'the exaltation of
poetry', and, unlike Dryden, he felt no need to complain
about having to cramp his verses or to apologize for having
to make his art subservient to PurcelTs.
If we pour scorn on his lines and describe them as flat-
footed or naive it is because we are not equipped with
enough musical imagination to realize their possibilities.
We are inclined to condemn the words of the Prologue to
Dido just because we have no tune to fit them to while we
are reading them:
See the Spring in all her Glory,
Welcome Yenus to the shore,
Smiling Hours are now before you,
Hours that may return no more.
Without any music the lines seem only half alive. But it
would be just as mistaken to complain that they are in
adequate as it would be to complain about the apparent
banality of the lines for Aeneas' first entry:
Belinda. See, your Royal Guest appears
How God-like is the Form he bears.
Aeneas. When, Royal Fair, shall I be blest,
With cares of Love and State distrest?
Dido. Fate forbids what you Ensue.
Aeneas. Aeneas has no Fate but you.
Let Dido smile, and Tie defie
The Feeble Stroke of Destiny.
In these eight lines the music exalts the libretto, but it is the
libretto that has brought the music into being.
On the professional stage this first entry of the hero would
38 Purcell's Librettist, Nahum Tate
have had all the splendour of a flourish of trumpets. But
there was no money to spare for trumpets and probably
no room for them, either in Mr. Priest's School at Chelsea,
so Belinda conveys the excitement of a fanfare in the actual
notes of her recitative:
Ex.1
f v* * E * F arr
j J _
f-
Belinda
y^ ^ * | . '_n fe=t=
See, See, your Roy-al
ji i ' y
Guest ap -pears, How
Continue
^ n t > _ja
etc.
^
god-like is the Form he bears.
ttjf)
Purcell's extraordinary power of dramatic characterization
can be recognized in the very first words that Aeneas sings;
faced with having to make a proposal of marriage in public,
the god-like Prince of Troy is as tongue-tied as any reticent
Englishman; he is so overcome by emotion that he begins
his recitative too low down and has to start again, a fourth
higher. When Dido tdls him that Fate is against them he
immediately becomes more confident: as a soldier, he feels
on firmer ground with an enemy to face. There is the
gesture of a drawn sword in his rising phrase : it is strength
ened by the wide-mouthed, bright insistence of the repeated
vowel 'i* in the line
Let Dido smile and Tie defie,
Purcell's Librettist, Nahum Tate jp
where Purcell seizes on what would be considered a weak
ness in poetry and triumphantly turns it to musical ad
vantage:
Ex.2
Aeneas t ^
~tf , ^_^ ^
Let Di-do Smile, and 111 de - fie, The Fee - ble_
\T\ h
Continuo
stroke ofDes-ti-ny.
^
The phrase is a wonderful example of PurcelTs 'genius for
expressing the energy of English words' ; after the climax of
'defie', the word 'feeble' sinks down with no strength left
in its curving spinelessness; the Y of 'stroke' cuts across
the cadence like a knife; while in the final word 'destiny', the
hero conveys his scorn in the low level of his voice, yet, at
the same time the harmonic resolution makes it quite clear
to the listener that Fate is going to have the last word in the
tragedy that is beginning to unfold.
Tate must have learned a good deal from his adaptations
of Shakespeare, for, in his libretto for Purcell, he was able
to reach beyond the physical barrier of the three walls of
the stage, particularly at the unforgettable moment when the
Sorceress and her witches hear the distant sound of the
royal hunt. It is interesting to compare his original lines
with the even more dramatic version that Puroell has made
of the words.
4 o Purcett's Librettist, Nahum Tate
Tate wrote:
The Queen and He are now in Chase,
Hark, how the cry comes on apace.
But when they've done, &c.
The word 'how' suggests that he thought that the first
sound of the distant hunt would be heard at the end of that
line. But by cutting out the 'how', Purcell was able to give
his pianissimo strings their first horn-call before the isolated
'Hark!'
ti the Grove scene, the sense of approaching disaster is
akeady suggested in the libretto, with its references to the
tragic fates of Actaeon and Adonis. And, in the last act,
when the disaster is reached, Tate never for an instant
allows the two lovers to utter any of the conventional
platitudes that would have transformed them into puppets.
He has been ridiculed for giving Dido such unexpected
lines as:
Thus on the fatal Banks of Nile,
Weeps the deceitful Crocodile.
But it is brilliant characterization. For Dido is obviously
working herself up into a state: Cleopatra and other
desperate Queens have done the same sort of thing when the
occasion has arisen. The fact that Aeneas gives way to her
makes matters worse, for she begins nagging him. I'm now
resolved as well as you' has the brittle self-assertion of one
whose nerves are strained beyond control.
The quarrel is so dramatically convincing that it is almost
too painful to listen to, especially when Dido is driven to the
fatal feminine weakness of saying: ' 'Tis enough . . . that
you had once a thought of leaving me.' It is this that makes
the entry of the chorus at 'Great minds against themselves
Purcell's Librettist, Nahum Tate 41
conspire' one of the most moving moments in the whole
work. Even the 'remember me' of the Lament owes some
of its poignancy to the way in which Dido's creators,
throughout the opera, have made her unforgettable as a
person. Every detail has helped, including that much-
maligned crocodile. And Tate must have his share of the
glory.
DHP
Our Sense of Continuity in English
Drama and Music
MICHAEL TIPPETT
When considering the heritage of our musical past it is
clear enough that we are contemplating a continuity, but it
is also clear that the continuity works by fits and starts.
This is so whether we think of ourselves as Europeans or as
English.
Although the rediscovery of Bach's music seems to have
been initially an accident, the tremendous and world-wide
revival has implied a general need to feed into the present a
music of the past; but a music which at Bach's death was
being forgotten and rejected as old-fashioned. This is an
example of what I mean by continuity by fits and starts.
I regard the revival of Purcell as less important than the
revival of Bach, but it is a revival of the same kind. We are
now in a period when music of the generation before
Bach, the music of Schiitz and Purcell and even of the
generation earlier, the music of Monteverdi is being
revived to meet some need of our time. But as before, with
the music of Bach, it is only gradually that the revival
spreads from the enthusiasts and the small societies to the
general public. And, as before, it is not easy to make music
of so distant a past fit into the concerts of our day.
If through this revival PurcelTs music becomes a living
though small part of our general European heritage (for
Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music 43
among English composers only Purcell can be said to belong
to a living European continuity), it must form a very im
portant part indeed of our local English heritage. This is
not only because of the lack of great names in English
musical history, but also because of the spoken language.
By this I do not mean so much the obvious fact that music
to English texts is naturally closer to English singers; I
mean that certain things in PurcelTs setting of English
words are vital to English composers. For, more than
anyone else, the creative artist needs a sense of continuity.
Now it can be said that in English poetry the heritage is
the richest, in English painting the poorest; and in English
music the heritage falls in between and is the least explored
that is explored in the sense that English poetry is always
being explored and revalued. Only English folk-song,
Tudor music, and the music of Purcell have so far given the
vital sense of continuity to latter-day English composers.
And if the generation older than my own has more fully
explored folk-song and Tudor music, my own generation
has more fully explored the music of Purcell. And it is
also our later generation that has come to maturity at a
time when, at last, there are regularly functioning English
opera houses in the capital. This makes it possible for
our sense of continuity with Purcell to be helpful in the
writing of opera. I think this is indeed so; though not by
any implied and thoughtless equation of Purcell with opera.
The period of the most vital English theatre is clearly
Elizabethan, not Restoration. The period of the most vital
English opera productions is the eighteenth century,
the period from Gay, Arne, Handel, to the London Bach.
It is a commonplace that while the Elizabethan composers
wrote music almost exclusively for the church and the house,
the Restoration composers wrote for the church and the
44 Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music
th.ea.tre. As to Purcell we can say that his public musical life
is triangular, stretched out between church, theatre, and
court. His church music follows on directly from that of
Gibbons with one significant difference. Gibbons, grounded
on Tallis and Byrd, wrote full verse anthems, as Purcell did
after him, but Gibbons was still part and parcel of the
church musical reform which substituted English for Latin,
and insisted on the strict rule of one syllable to a note. It
took virtually two generations of English composers to
carry this out, but by the time Gibbons died the work was
complete.
At the same time the shape of anthems was changing; the
accompanied verse anthem reaching out towards the
cantata. And here the work of reform was not complete.
When Purcell began to compose his church music, the
English language, as opposed to Latin, was already the
normal one, but for his purposes it was unduly restricted
to an old rule of syllable-to-a-note; while the verse anthem
as handed down from Gibbons was formal, stiff, and
contrapuntally too intricate to satisfy him. In the matter of
the English language Purcell broke away from the old
syllabic rule, and wrote, when he wanted, coloratura for
English words. This was a decisive change of practice.
And in the matter of the changing forms he learnt to drama
tize the verse anthem in a way denied to Gibbons. This can
be seen in an instant by comparing 'This is the Record of
John' with 'My Beloved spake'.
It is not that Purcell was any more alive to the English
language than Tallis, Byrd, or Gibbons. If we believed that,
it would be as if we failed to see the beauty of a dumpy
Elizabethan tune like 'O Mistress mine 5 because it hasn't
tke carry of 'Lilliburlero'. It is a different beauty arising
from a different purpose. The demands of the second Stuart
Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music 45
court and capital were for a civic music with all the elegance,
frankness, and immediacy of Restoration manners. The
only effective style at hand was an English version of that
which the Italian-born Lully had invented for Le Roi
Soleil. The Odes for St. Cecilia's Day and the Birthday and
Welcome Odes form PurcelTs legacy in this genre. The
demands of the theatre were for an unending stream of
rapidly-composed incidental music; overtures, dances,
songs, dramatic monologues, choruses, and indeed all the
ingredients of opera, though never the opera proper.
Diodesian, The Fairy Queen, King Arthur, The Indian Queen,
and the rest of the long list bear witness to PurcelTs industry
in providing the unending stream.
It is unthinkable that composers of my generation, caught
up in, if not actual instigators of, the general revival of
PurcelTs music, should not feel a special sense of continuity
with this Restoration composer. Failing an English opera
composer as such, Purcell is all that there is. His dramatic
music, though incidental, is wonderful in its own right.
The general style of his time had loosened the approach to
the language, and Purcell had the great gift to mate full use
of this new freedom, without ever departing from the
absolutely natural technique of setting English to music,
which had been handed on by the Elizabethans. So that
Purcell offers us something the Elizabethans did not possess
at all. By the time the next great composer of English is
writing, that is to say with the production of Handel's
oratorios, the whole scene has undergone another decisive
change, because Italian has become the universal language
for opera; and the English ballad opera has nothing to offer
us here. So Purcell stands at the only possible moment in
English musical history when a genius could have done what
he did. Since he was this genius our sense of continuity with
46 Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music
Kim, in respect of incidental music for the English theatre,
is vital.
There is a point to make here before we proceed. It must
not be thought that Purcell used only coloratura in the
setting of English. When he needed to do so he could set
words in as simple a manner as Gibbons. One has only to
think of the sustained line of Dido's Lament. The setting of
Tate's words is as uncomplicated as anything from the
earlier age. But what is unique is the placing and the timing.
The key-word 'remember' is not only used magnificently
for the sake of its own verbal rhythm, but is repeated and
placed in such a way as to give the greatest sense of sustained
passion and climax. The nearest approach to this in music
from the earlier age would be some of the monologues of
Dowland. But Dowland's is basically private grief, and
PurcelTs is public and theatrical.
With the single exception of Dido and Aeneas which is a
true opera, PurcelTs music for the theatre is incidental. It
offers, as I said before, all the ingredients of opera, but the
theatrical pieces for which it was written were not operas.
That is to say that PurcelTs relations with the dramatists
were never those of composer to librettist. From this it
follows that while PurcelTs dramatic music provides us with
the only exhaustive compendium of musical techniques
for use in the English theatre, it does not provide us with any
models for that unification of drama with musical tech
nique which we call opera. From every point of view this
is a loss; but it is as well to be quite clear about it.
Part of what this loss means can be gauged, I think, by
following a line of thought suggested by a modern poet-
dramatist, T. S.. Eliot, concerning Shakespeare. The matter
I have in mind appears near the beginning of his published
essay Poetry and Drama. Eliot wants to abstract a dramatic
Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music 47
element and a musical element from within the unified
verse play; and then to consider how the pattern of drama
and the pattern of music (the music of poetry of course, not
of playing or singing) has been correlated by the genius of
the poet-dramatist a practice very similar to the ideal
collaboration of composer with librettist. To exemplify his
argument Eliot analyses the 'opening scene of Hamlet
as well constructed an opening scene as that of any play ever
written which has the advantage of being one that every
body knows'. Eliot's analysis of the Hamlet scene often reads
nearly like a figurative analysis of a piece of music. To give
an extreme example; Eliot writes: 'It would be interesting
to pursue . . . this problem of the double pattern in great
poetic drama the pattern which may be examined from the
point of view of stagecraft or from that 'of the music/
By reading 'opera' for 'poetic drama', the word 'music' will
have the sense in which a composer uses it, not a poet.
I have begun with this extreme example because it shows
the deceptive ease with which one may equate verse-drama
to opera. As the danger of consequent misunderstanding is
real, I should like, before pursuing the Hamlet analysis, to
make my position clear.
I take Suzanne Langer's common-sense view that 'Every
work [of art] has its being in only one order of art; composi
tions of different orders are not simply conjoined, but all
except one will cease to appear as what they are'. This
principle is a vital one and needs to be understood as it works
out in practice. So I quote from Langer's exposition of what
happens to plastic art and to music when used as accessories
in a stage play. She says:
Drama . . . swallows all plastic creations that enter into its
theatrical precinct, and their own pictorial, architectural, or
sculptural beauties do not add themselves to its own beauty.
48 Ow Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music
A great work of sculpture, say the original Venus of Milo,
transported to the comic or the tragic stage would count only
as a stage setting, an element in the action and might not meet
this purpose as well as a pasteboard counterfeit of it would do.
And
A song sung on the stage in a good play is a piece of dramatic
action. If we receive it in the theatre as we would receive it in a
concert, the play is a pastiche.
I think Langer states the fundamentals very clearly. If,
e.g., the order of the work of art is that of a play, then the
drama proper will eat up stage settings and music and even
poetry in order to present us with a play, not an opera.
The complementary process Langer sums tip neatly in
one phrase: 'Music ordinarily swallows words and action
creating [thereby] opera, oratorio or song.'
If we keep these primal distinctions in mind, we can
pursue profitably I think the analogies that do really exist
between verse-drama and opera. So that we can follow
Eliot's analysis of the Hamlet scene with an eye to consider
ing what can be learnt from it as to the double pattern of
drama and music always keeping in mind that music in a
verse-drama is the music of poetry, and is to be eaten up by
the drama; while music in an opera is the music of instru
ments and voices and is to swallow the drama.
The analysis begins:
From the short, brusque ejaculations at the beginning, suitable to
the situation and to the character of the guards ... the verse
glides into a slower movement with the appearance of the
courtiers Horatio and Marcellus.
Horatio says ' Tis but our fantasy . . . and the movement changes
again on the appearance of Royalty, the ghost of the King, into
the solemn and sonorous What art thou, that usurp 9 st this time of
Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music 49
night . . . There is an abrupt change to staccato in Horatio's
words to the Ghost on its second appearance; this rhythm changes
again with the words
We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it a show of violence . . .
The scene reaches a resolution with the words of Marcellus:
It faded on the crowing of the cock . . .
Because of the use of words like 'slower movement 5 and
'staccato' this reads like the analysis of the opening scene of an,
opera, if we have deliberately turned our attention to that
possibility. This analysis of Eliot's, which I have of course
curtailed, aims at making us see how the movement of the
drama between the characters of the guards, the courtiers,
and the ghost, is matched by a movement of the nature and
speed of the verse just as in an operatic scene it is matched
by the nature and speed of the music.
When Horatio says:
But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
Break we our watch up.
Eliot observes: 'This is great poetry, and it is dramatic; but
besides being poetic and dramatic it is something more/ It
is verse-drama. It is opera !
There emerges, when we analyse it, a kind of musical design also,
which reinforces and is one with the dramatic movement. It has
checked and accelerated the pulse of our emotion without our
knowing it.
This would be ideal opera !
Note that in these last words of Marcellus there is a deliberate
brief emergence of the poetic into consciousness.
jo Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music
A scena in recitative stmmentato goes over for a moment
into arioso.
When we hear the lines
But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill
we are lifted for a moment beyond character, but with no sense
of unfitness of the words coming, and at this moment, from the
lips of Horatio.
What an example for the timing and placing of the arioso
within the scena \
The transitions in the scene obey laws of the music of dramatic
poetry.
Or if we rewrite the sentence: The transitions in the scene
obey laws of the natural movement of dramatic music.
Eliot's point is that only a master like Shakespeare can so
correlate the pattern of the drama with the pattern of the
music of the poetry that they are indistinguishable; and so
create that something extra, which, if taken into music-
drama, we call great opera. Purcell, the master of dramatic
music, was only once in a position to create this true
correlation of the two patterns. This was in Dido and Aeneas.
What he was asked to do on other occasions can be seen in
the music for The Fairy Queen; a set of five unrelated
masques, or divertissements, interlarded with a hotch-potch
version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Therefore it is useless
for us to go to Purcell for the secrets of the true correlation
of music and drama even though he is the unique master of
English dramatic music for the theatre. We should do
better, even if we are composers not poets, to go to Shakes
peare, and to pursue throughout whole plays the kind of
analysis which Eliot has made of one scene. If we were
Our Sense of Continuity in English Drama and Music 51
skilled enough, as a poet might be, to disentangle the
musical pattern of the verse in order to lay it alongside the
correlative pattern of the drama between the characters,
we might find that living continuity of our heritage which
we cannot hope to find in PurcelTs incidental music owing
to its unavoidable limitations.
The continuity with Shakespeare has never depended on a
revival in the manner of the present revival of interest in
PurceLL But I think it true to say that the deeper insights into
Shakespeare's art as a verse-dramatist, which we owe to the
successful verse-dramatists of our own time, are quite new.
I am suggesting that the English composer might be able to
profit by these new insights to procure for himself one of the
elements necessary to a sense of continuity of English opera,
but generally missing from Purcell, the element of the
double pattern of drama and music. But because this element
in Shakespeare is only exemplified in verse-drama and not
in opera proper, a composer has always to translate these
insights into other terms, and, obviously enough, the
Shakespearian drama does not provide that compendium of
dramatic music for the English theatre which PurcelTs
works alone provide.
It is a strange sense of continuity that has its elements so
divided in time and manner. Yet if it is really possible that
the English composer can see how to use Shakespeare as the
master for certain things that are usually only sought for in
great operatic composers as such, then our sense of musical
continuity with Purcell may be further developed and
fructified.
6
Purcell and the Chapel Royal
JEREMY NOBLE
More than a hundred years ago PurcelTs church music was
published in a practically complete, if not very accurate,
edition by Vincent Novello, yet it remains less well known
as a whole than any other branch of his output. Even in our
more enterprising cathedral and collegiate churches the
number of PurcelTs anthems in regular use is deplorably
small. There are various reasons for this, both of taste and of
technical difficulty. The frank directness with which Purcell
translates the joy or the grief of the Psalmist into the current
musical terms of his own day is felt by some people to be
too secular, too theatrical, but although no one in his senses
would claim that PurcelTs church music expressed a spiritual
experience as profound or intense as that of Byrd or Bach,
it is certainly less superficial than that of many composers
who figure prominently in cathedral music-lists, and as
music infinitely more rewarding. As for the charge that it
is too difficult for the average choir, this sounds more like an
excuse than a reason, when 'average choirs' can hardly be
restrained from tackling the much more difficult music of
Bach and Handel. In the near future the Purcell Society will
complete its authoritative edition of the church music; the
present article is intended as a brief footnote to it and an
encouragement not to allow the forthcoming volumes to
gather dust on their purchasers' shelves.
Purcell and the Chapel Royal 53
As a child Purcell was one of the twelve choristers of the
Chapel Royal, and at the age of twenty-three he followed his
father and his uncle in being appointed a Gentleman. With
twelve boys and thirty-two men (even though some of the
latter can have attended only rarely) the Chapel Royal was
the most sumptuous ecclesiastical establishment in the
country, and there is no reason to doubt that all of PurcelTs
church music was at some time performed by it, even
though some of the simpler pieces may have been written
with the capabilities of smaller choirs, such as that of West
minster Abbey, in mind. Quite apart from the interest that
naturally attaches to an institution with which Purcell was
so closely connected there is, therefore, the possibility that
the following brief account of the Chapel Royal in his day
may clarify some problems of performance.
The list on page 55 of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal
who were in office during PurcelTs own period as a Gentle
man (i.e. from July 1682 to November 1695) has been
compiled mainly from information in the Old Cheque-
Book, a comprehensive register kept by one of the Gentle
men known as the Clerk of the Cheque, to record such
matters as appointments, admonitions, and petitions. The
Old Cheque-Book was published by E. F. Rimbault in
1872 for the Camden Society (New Series, III); by kind
permission of the Sub-Dean of the Chapel Royal, Rimbault's
edition has been compared with the original manuscript,
still kept at St. James's Pakce, and it has also been supple
mented from other sources. The list is arranged in chrono
logical order of appointment and divided into four groups:
(a) those whose musical careers we know to have begun
before the Commonwealth, even though they may not have
been appointed to the Chapel until the Restoration; (V) the
remainder of the Gentlemen who were appointed to the
54 Purcell and the Chapel Royal
reconstituted Chapel in 1660 and the beginning of 1661;
(c) those appointed between the Restoration and PurcelTs
own appointment; (d) those appointed during his thirteen
years as a Gentleman to fill vacant places. Groups (a), (i),
and (c) taken together thus show the constitution of the
Chapel just before Purcell entered it; Edward Lowe, to
whose place he succeeded, has been included. Dates in
brackets indicate 'extraordinary', i.e. unpaid, appointments
as recorded in the Cheque-Book; these were sometimes
made for a particular occasion, sometimes as a first step to
an 'ordinary' place, and where a bracketed date is not
followed by an unbracketed one it is to be assumed that full
membership of the Chapel was not granted. In these cases
the second column of dates departure from the Chapel
? obviously does not apply. The office of Gentleman of the
Chapel Royal was normally held for life, and unless other
wise stated the date of 'departure' is the date of death. The
type of voice counter-tenor, tenor, or bass is indicated
by C, T, or B, and the post of organist by O.
One thing that emerges clearly from even the most
cursory examination of this list of Gentlemen of the Chapel
Royal is that a very high standard of professional com
petence must have been maintained. For a brief period after
the Restoration it seemed an almost impossible task to repair
the loss of traditional skill caused by sixteen years' interrup
tion of the musical services, and the preface to Edward
Lowe's A Short Direction for the Performance of Cathedrall
Service (1661; 2nd ed., 1664) reflects the anxiety of the older
generation of church musicians. But by^i682, the position
had improved immeasurably. For one thing, there were still
a number of musicians to provide continuity with the pre-
Commonwealth period. It was the death of Lowe, organist
of Christ Church, Oxford, since the 16305, that provided a
Purcell and the Chapel Royal
55
GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAPEL ROYAL, 1682-95
(a) John Harding
Thomas Blagrave
Dr. William Child
Edward Lowe
(b) George Bettenham
Edward Braddock
James Cobb
Henry Frost
John Goodgroome
Thomas Purcell
Rev. John Sayer
Nathaniel Watkins
(c) Rev. George Yardley
Rev. Bkse White
Thomas Richardson
Rev. William Hopwood
Rev. Henry Smith
William Turner
Rev. James Hart
Richard Hart
Rev. Andrew Trebeck
Rev. Stephen Crespion
Dr. John Blow
Rev. William Powell
Michael Wise
Alphonso Marsh, jun.
Rev. J. C. Sharole
Thomas Heywood
Rev. John Gostling
John AbeU
Morgan Harris
Rev. Leonard Woodson
HENRY PURCELL
(cf) Josias Boucher
Nathaniel Vestment
Rev. Samuel Bentham
Admitted
Died
B 1638
7 Nov. 1684
C 1660/1
21 Nov. 1688
O 1660/1*
23 (24?) Mar.
I6 97 2
O 1660/1
ii July 1682
B 1660/1
19 Sept. 1694
T 1660/1
12 June 1708
T 1660/1
20 July 1697
T 1660/1
after ii April
1689
C 1660/1
27 June 1704
T 1660/1
31 July 1682
T 1660/1
Jan. 1694
C 1660/1
8 May 1702
B 7 June 1662
after 23 April
1685
B 14 March 1664
25 Feb. 1700
C Aug. 1664 ,
23 July 1712
B 25 Oct. 1664
13 July 1683
T 4 Oct. 1666
23 May 1688
C ii Oct. 1669
13 June 1740
B 7 Nov. 1670
8 May 1718
B 26 April 1671
8 Feb. 1690
B 5 Oct. 1671
19 Nov. 1715
- 3 13 May 1673
25 Nov. 1711
O 1 6 March 1674
i Oct. 1708
T 21 July 1674
after 23 April
1685
C 6 Jan. 1676
24 Aug. 1687
T 25 April 1676
5 April 1692
B 26 Oct. 1676
5 Aug. 1687
T 29 March 1679
resigned Mich
aelmas, 1688
B (25 Feb. 1678) Feb.-
17 July 1733
March 1678
C (i May 1679) Jan. 1680
dismissed 1688*
T 20 Feb. 1680
2 Nov. 1697
B 15 Aug. 1681
14 March 1717
O 14 July i682 6
21 Nov. 1695
C 6 Aug. 1682
6 Dec. 16956
B (28 June 1683) 23 July
B (24 July 1683) 10 Nov.
23 Aug. 1702
March 1730
1684
Purcell and the Chapel Royal
Admitted
Died
Thomas Browne
Edward Morton
William Davis
John Lenton
John James Caches
Moses Snow
Rev. Thomas Linacre
Alexander Damascene
John Howell
David la Count
William Battle
Simon Corbett
Daniel Williams
Charles Greene
George Hart
Charles Barnes
- (1683)
C (12 April 1685)
- (23 May 1685)
- (10 Nov. 1685)'
- (8 Nov. i688) 8
T (17 Dec. 1689) 8 April
20 Dec. 1702
1692
T? (27 Dec. 1689) 2 March
Aug. 1719
1699
C (6 Dec. 1690) 10 Dec.
14 July 1719
1695
C (30 Aug. 1691) 10 Dec.
1 5 July 1708
1695
- (31 Aug. 1691)
- (10 Dec. 1691)
- (u Dec. 1691)
B (16 Dec. 1692) i April
12 March 1720
1697
- (2 Jan. 1693)
T (10 Sept. 1694) 9 Nov.
29 Feb. 1699
1697
C (10 Sept. 1694) June 1696
2 Jan. 1711
NOTES
1 Child was appointed one of the organists of St. George's Chapel, Windsor,
in 1632, and is stated in Grove and elsewhere to have served concurrently as an
organist of the Chapel Royal; there is no record in the Cheque-Book, however,
of his having any official appointment in the Chapel before the Restoration,
2 The date of Child's death is given as 24 March in the Cheque-Book, but in
Grove as the 23rd, possibly following the inscription on his tombstone.
3 Crespion was Confessor to the Royal Household and Precentor of West
minster Abbey, but there is nothing to show whether he sang tenor or bass in
the Chapel.
4 Abell became a member of James ITs Catholic Chapel (the only Gentleman
of the Chapel Royal to do so), and at the accession of William and Mary appears
to have been dismissed. He certainly left the country, and did not return until
1700. He died at Cambridge in 1724.
6 The date of the warrant for PurcelTs appointment. His swearing-in did not
take place until 16 September.
6 The Cheque-Book appears to give 16 December, and Rimbault reads it so;
but Boucher's successor, John Howell, was sworn in on the loth and the V in
the manuscript could be a blot.
7 Lenton probably died soon after 1718, when his name disappears from the
Royal Band.
8 The Clerk of the Cheque originally wrote 'extraordinary'; the 'extra* was
later crossed out, but as no further reference to Gaches occurs in the Cheque-
Book it seems unlikely that he was ever appointed to full membership.
Purcell and the Chapel Royal 57
place for Purcell. John Harding, who survived for another
two years, had been one of the choristers at James I's funeral
in 1625 and still took an active part in the work of the
Chapel, regularly attending the Court at Windsor. Blagrave,
a friend of Pepys and since 1662 the Clerk of the Cheque,
had entered royal service in 1638 as a member of Charles
I's band of hackbuts and hoboys' a group in which his
father also played. He later took up the violin, and was in
fact one of the founder-members of the select band of
twenty-four that Charles II formed in emulation of Louis
XIV. It comes as something of a shock, too, to realize that
the venerable Dr. Child, who had been born in 1606,
outlived Purcell by sixteen months.
Nor was Purcell alone in belonging to a family of
musicians. We have already mentioned that Blagrave's
father, Richard, was a member of the royal wind-music,
and it seems likely that Harding was related to the James
Harding who served Elizabeth and James I as a flautist.
Goodgroome was probably a brother of the Theodore
Goodgroome who taught Pepys and his wife singing; and
the John Goodgroome who was organist of St. Peter's,
Cornhill, was the son of one or the other. Alphonso Marsh's
father, also Alphonso, had been one of the royal musicians
since the reign of Charles I, and a Gentleman of the Chapel
Royal since 1660; he had died only a year before Purcell
was appointed. Thomas Heywood was almost certainly a
member of the famous family of actors and musicians
who had been connected with the Court for 150 years,
and the Woodsons were another family who had produced
at least three generations of musicians.
To a contemporary it might have seemed a lean period for
composers in the Chapel, with Matthew Locke and the
young Pelham Humfcey both recently dead, but a quick
$8 Purcell and the Chapel Royal
look reveals a number of prominent composers of church
music, apart from Purcell himself: Child, William Turner,
Blow, and the unfortunate Michael Wise, who rushed
from his house after a quarrel with his wife and was killed
by a blow on the head from a night-watchman whom he
encountered. Composers of church music are only to be
expected in the Chapel, but a surprising number of the
Gentlemen are also represented in the song-collections of the
time. Blow and James Hart were prolific song-writers, and
so too were several of the younger post-Purcelhan genera
tion: John Lenton (who was one of the royal violins and
wrote a considerable quantity of theatre music), Moses
Snow (also a violinist and a member of the Westminster
Abbey choir), and the famous French counter-tenor
Damascene.
Naturally enough, the Chapel contained a number of the
best singers of the time, and these are of particular interest in
that they were responsible for the first performances of many
of PurcelTs works not only the anthems, but also the
occasional cantatas. Most of the soloists whose names have
been preserved on manuscript scores of Welcome Songs
and Birthday and Cecilian Odes are drawn from among the
members of the Chapel. It has been conjectured that
Turner's St. Cecilia Ode for 1685, 'Tune the viol', was an
amateurish composition since it was never printed, but its
composer was regarded as an indispensable counter-tenor
soloist on these occasions. Boucher, PurcelTs almost exact
contemporary in the Chapel Royal, Damascene, and John
Abell are also frequently specified as counter-tenor soloists,
although Abell was on the Continent from about 1688 to
1700. (He had studied in Italy, and Evelyn describes him as
'that famous treble' and says of his voice that 'one would have
sworn it was a woman's, it was so high and excellently
Purcell and the Chapel Royal 59
managed'.) John Howell was also a high counter-tenor,
and his appointment to the Chapel was probably an attempt
to fill the gap in its ranks left by Abell,
Among the basses Gostling traditionally stands supreme,
but we should not let his great reputation blind us to the
fact that he had rivals. The extended range of PurcelTs
bass parts (which is considered on page 63 in another
context) can hardly have been due to one man's pheno
menal powers. Of the Gentlemen of the Chapel who are
named as bass soloists in PurcelTs Odes, Leonard Woodson
and Daniel Williams appear most frequently; but the most
important of Gostling's rivals was not a member of the
Chapel, although he was in royal service. John Bowman, a
theatre singer and member of the Private Music (as Gostling
was too), must have been at the height of his powers during
PurcelTs lifetime, for he died in 1739 at the advanced age of
eighty-eight. He was the original interpreter of the parts of
Grimbald in King Arthur and Cardenio in Don Quixote, and
the music Purcell wrote for him leaves no doubt that he was
one of the finest singers of the age. Bowman and the
counter-tenor Anthony Robert (perhaps the son of the
musician of the same name who had been in charge of
Henrietta Maria's music at Somerset House) are practically
the only singers taking solo parts in the Odes who were not,
either at the time or soon after, Gentlemen of the Chapel;
both were in the Private Music, and it may have been
religious reasons that prevented them from being appointed
v to the Chapel.
^ Tenor soloists play a less important part inPurcelTs scheme
of things than counter-tenors and basses; usually only two
are named in the scores of the Odes, as against three or four
of the other voices. However, among those named Alphonso
Marsh appears frequently, and so do Freeman and Church,
go Purcell and the Chapel Royal
both of whom were to be appointed Gentlemen of the
Chapel Royal soon after PurceU's death.
Originally there had been no specific post of organist in
the Chapel Royal; organists had been drawn from among
those Gentlemen with a particular aptitude for keyboard-
playing. But during the seventeenth century the organists'
special function came to be acknowledged officially, and
from the Restoration onwards it was normal for three to
hold office at any one time. Of the three organists in the
period immediately before Purceli's appointment two were
old men, each of them with commitments away from
London namely at Windsor and at Oxford. The main
burden of their duties must have fallen on Blow, and the
appointment of Purcell to the place made vacant by Edward
Lowe's death would bring the two men into close co
operation. Probably Purcell was appointed more on the
strength of his prowess as a keyboard-player than for his
voice, for although the organists had to take their turn in the
choir there is no independent evidence to suggest that any
of them was well known as a singer certainly not in the
same class as those mentioned above as soloists.
Purceli's own voice has been the subject of some specula
tion. The Gentleman s Journal for November 1692 is un
equivocal in its report of the St. Cecilia Ode for that year
(Purceli's own 'Hail, bright Cecilia !') :
The following Ode was admirably set to Music by Mj- Henry
Purcell, and perform'd twice with universal applause, particu
larly the second Stanza ['Tis Nature's voice], which was sung
with incredible Graces by Mr. Purcell himself
Now presumably Motteux, or his correspondent, cannot
have slipped up on so straightforward a matter of fact, yet it
seems amazing that if Purcell were capable of giving a really
Purcell and the Chapel Royal 61
satisfactory performance of such florid music we should hear
no more of him as a singer. And although it was probably
copied out for a later performance it is worth noting that
PurcelTs autograph score bears the name of *Mr. Pate'
against this particular verse. (Pate, who was a well-known
theatre singer, was dismissed from the Playhouse company
in June 1695 for his part in a Jacobite riot, and appears to
have travelled abroad: Evelyn heard him on 30 May 1698,
when he was lately come from Italy' ; on this occasion he
sang 'many rare Italian recitatives, &c., and several com
positions of the late Mr. Purcell'.) Thus in spite of the
evidence of the Gentleman s Journal it seems just possible
that the singer of * 'Tis Nature's voice' at its first performance
was Pate and not Purcell. Could someone have scribbled
down 'Mr. P.' in his notes and misinterpreted them when he
came to write the occasion up? Any music critic could
confirm that stranger things have happened.
In his admirable book on Purcell, Professor Westrup
made an attempt to reconcile the presumption that he sang
counter-tenor with the fact that Sandford lists him among the
basses in his account of James II's coronation. But although
Sandford's list is a useful guide, its purpose is primarily to
tell us in what order the Gentlemen processed, rather than
to give us information about their voices. For the sake of
easy reference it is given here, with the spelling of the
names brought into conformity with the previous list:
COUNTER-TENORS
i. (Wise) 2. (Heywood) 3. (Abell) 4. Boucher
Morton Dr. Uvedal Benford
5. Turner 6. Richardson 7. Goodgroome 8. Watkins
TENORS
9. Harris 10. Marsk n. Frost 12. Powell
13. Cobb 14. Braddock 15. (Smith) 16. Sayer
Geo.Hart
62 Purcell and the Chapel Royal
BASSES
17*
Richard Hart
18.
Bentham
19-
Woodson
20.
Gostling
21.
Purcell
22.
Vestment
23-
Sharole
24.
Trebeck
25.
Bettenham
26.
James Hart
27.
White
28.
Yardley
2p.
Blagrave
30-
Staggins
31-
(Blow)
32.
Child
Fra. Forcer
i. Crespion 2. Holder
The numbering is Sandford's; Crespion and Holder, as
Confessor and Sub-Dean, are numbered separately from the
Gentlemen of the Chapel, even though the former held a
Gentleman's place. The names given in brackets are those of
Gentlemen unable to attend the ceremony; Sandford, it will
be seen, even tells us who their deputies were. Now it is
clear that the last file, immediately in front of Crespion and
Holder, was made up not of basses, but of the Chapel's most
important members : seniority was conferred upon Child and
Blow by their doctorates, quite apart from the former's great
age; Blagrave was Clerk of the Cheque and Child's Closest
rival in length of service; and Nicholas Staggins, though not
actually a Gentleman of the Chapel, was Master of the
King's Music (namely, the twenty-four violins, who would
also be taking part in the ceremony), and had received a
doctorate only three years earlier. Purcell was not senior
enough to walk in this august group, and so he may well
have been included among the basses simply to make up a
complete file. At any rate, Sandford's list is insufficient
evidence on which to argue that he was a capable singer in
both bass and counter-tenor registers like Mr. Pordage of
the King's Catholic Chapel, who, according to Evelyn, had
'an excellent voice both treble and bass'.
In fact it seems to have been much more usual for singers
to combine with the role of counter-tenor that of tenor. A
perusal of the Cheque-Book shows that Thomas Richardson
Purcell and the Chapel Royal 63
signed an affidavit in March 1664 in which he refers to
himself as 'being to be sworn into the next place of a lay
tenor or counter-tenor' ; Andrew Carter in January of the
same year was c to come into pay when the next tenor or
counter-tenor's place shall be void'; and Thomas Heywood,
who succeeded to a counter-tenor's place and whom we see
in the first file of counter-tenors in Sandford's list, was in
1685 confirmed in the Private Music as a tenor. This
interchangeability of tenor and counter-tenor voices, even
though it may not have been very frequently practised,
does give us a clearer idea of the type of voice Purcell had in
mind for his counter-tenor parts. A cursory examination of
his anthems reveals that the sixteenth-century ideal of
voices of equal compass equally spaced at intervals of a
fourth or fifth from one another had been much modified.
PurcelTs counter-tenor and tenor parts have, as a rule, a
compass of a ninth or a tenth in the verse sections, an octave
or less in the choruses. Bass parts, on the other hand, often
approach a two-octave compass, and sometimes even exceed
it; this occurs too often to be attributed solely to the
phenomenal range of the Rev. Mr. Gostling. PurcelTs
basses were evidently real basses, from whom low E's
and D's could be demanded, but they must have been
expected to extend their compass upwards by a discreet
use of head-voice. As for the counter-tenors, it looks as
though they or at any rate the majority of those in the
Chapel Royal were more like high light tenors than purely
falsetto voices, for Purcell rarely makes them go higher than
B flat or B, while his tenors have an equal range about a
major third lower. This would tally with his usual manner of
writing for the conventional A T B trio, in which A and T
move in stepwise chains of parallel thirds, while B is
considerably more far-ranging and independent; the proper
fy Purcell and the Chapel Royal
blend could only have been achieved if counter-tenor and
tenor were similar in timbre.
An examination of the available records of the Chapel
Royal also gives us some idea of the balance of forces
Purcell would have regarded as normal. Although in the
total muster of the Chapel basses outnumbered both tenors
and counter-tenors it should be noted that they contain far
more than their fair share of clergymen, not all of whom
were as distinguished singers as Gostling. For practical
purposes the three kinds of male voice were regarded as
equivalent in weight, voice for voice; for when the Court
repaired to Windsor, and the Chapel with it, it was cus
tomary for between four and six of each voice to be deputed,
together with eight boys. This gives a much higher propor
tion of men to boys than we are accustomed to hearing
nowadays, but there can be little doubt that the over-weight
ing of the tap part so characteristic of modern church choirs
is a comparatively recent innovation due partly to a
change in musical taste and partly to the increasing difficulty
of maintaining a sufficient body of lay-clerks.
One of the main difficulties facing anyone who wishes
today to perform PurcelTs anthems in the course of a normal
service is the fact that some of the best of them make use of
strings and PurcelTs string-writing, as one might expect,
is too idiomatic to be happily transferred to the organ.
The story of Charles I's introduction of the band of violins
into the Chapel services in 1662 and the scandal it caused to
the more conservative musicians and, doubtless, divines
has often been narrated, but it is sometimes forgotten that
the period during which they were in regular use was a
comparatively brief one of about fifteen years at most.
However, the latter part of that period coincides exactly
with the time when most of PurceU's anthems were written.
Purcell and the Chapel Royal 65
Tudway should not be interpreted too literally when he
writes that 'after the death of King Charles symphonies
indeed with instruments were laid aside*, for about half of
the Purcell anthems that can with reasonable certainty be
ascribed to 1687 and 1688 still require strings, but it seems
likely that after the accession of William and Mary their use
was discontinued. How many strings took part in these
performances? On great occasions it is clear that all twenty-
four 'violins' were present, but it would be interesting to
know how many were considered necessary to balance the
reduced strength of the Chapel as it performed at other
times. Unfortunately, the published documents refer mainly
to the period before Purcell became a Gentleman, of the
Chapel. In 1671 the usual number was only five, in 1672
six, but this was very likely the number considered suffi
cient for the performance of symphonies written in only
three parts two violins and bass. In 1678, when eight boys
and sixteen men attended at Windsor, the number of
strings was twelve, and this seems a more reasonable body
for PurcelTs four-part writing. What its internal dis
position was it is impossible to say with certainty, but on the
analogy of some slightly later bands detailed in Carse's
The Orchestra in the XVIIIth Century we might hazard a
guess of 4:4:1 :2:i. Perhaps, when a full-scale church organ
with sixteen-foot pipes was available, it is possible that the
violone or double-bass was dispensed with, and in such
cases an extra viola may have been added.
It goes without saying that a modern performance of
PurcelTs anthems should attempt to reproduce the propor
tions of the forces to which he himself was accustomed
and for which he wrote. For easy reference it may be useful
to set these out in tabular form. The total number of
Gentlemen can only have been present on such occasions as
66 Purcell and the Chapel Royal
coronations, so that a minimal figure is given in the
suggested break-down into counter-tenors, tenors, and
basses :
Boys
Men
Strings
Full muster :
12
32 (at least 8:8:8)
24(8:8:3:4:1)
Reduced forces
8
1 8 (at least 4:4:4)
12 (4:4:1:2:1 or
(Windsor, etc.,]
|:
4:4:2:2)
7
An Organist's View of the Organ Works
RALPH DOWNES
The name of Henry Purcell has only to be mentioned in
connexion with the organ, and the air is immediately ablaze
with echoes of Trumpet Tunes and Voluntaries played on
the incomparable Tuba stops for which modern English
organ-builders have long been justly renowned, by well-
known English organists of our day, using the modern
'arrangements' produced by enterprising publishers in recent
years or alternatively, played with harsher effect possibly, by
even better-known French organists, who visit these things
on us more or less perennially.
That these compositions exist authentically only in the
form of minute trifles for harpsichord or spinet, though a
fact well-known to 'specialists' who have taken the trouble
to peruse Volume VI of the Purcell Society Edition or the
originals themselves, has been overlooked to a remarkable
degree by practising musicians both British and foreign,
some of whom have so effectively publicized this pseudo-
Purcell as to put under total eclipse the true character of the
composer's work for the organ and of the instrument for
which he composed.
The publication in 1957 of PurcelTs organ works, edited
by Hugh McLean (Novello), has pkced within the reach of
all it would seem the true picture: and a very excellent
68 An Organist's View of the Organ Works
piece of practical scholarship it is. But it is when the practis
ing organist really gets down to the study of these pieces
that he realizes that the creation of a pseudo-Purcell for his
instrument was perhaps justified by a kind of psychological
necessity: for the pieces are disappointing for the most part,
and exhibit few traces of the true and acknowledged genius
of the mature Purcell ( c if indeed they are his', as Professor
Westrup drily observes). Even their authenticity is estab
lished only at second hand: there is no autograph, and some
of the manuscript copies in which they occur contain
certain other suspect attributions.
It may well be that PurcelTs short and busy life as court
composer, singer, and > performer, as well as custodian,
tuner, and repairer of all the King's instruments (including
the organs in Westminster Abbey and the Chapels Royal)
left him little time for committing to paper solo organ
compositions which he .may largely have improvised as
occasion demanded there being no other performers to be
supplied with copies in such a case. Such a view is perhaps
supported by the meagre quantity of other keyboard music
which has survived, apart from the small volume of Lessons
for Harpsichord, published by his widow,
We can only guess what a wealth of musical enjoyment
was showered on the audience at the famous organ demon
strations ('The Battle of the Organs') in which he took part
with John Blow, playing on and championing 'Father'
Smith's new instrument at the Temple Church, during his
twenty-sixth year. The organ was a small one by modern
standards, and had no pedals and no id-foot pitch, but
it was remarkably rich for its time, containing the newly-
imported Continental stops of the Baroque style-r-mixtures,
reeds such as the Trumpet and Vox Humana, and the
Cornet stop which enjoyed popular favour throughout the
An Organist's View of the Organ Works 6p
whole of the eighteenth century. Not a trace of this organ
remains, and it was heard in original form by no one within
living memory. The same melancholy fate has overtaken
every one of Smith's instruments, and if one wishes to
reconstruct their approximate tonal effect, that can only be
realized by visiting one of the few unspoiled organs of the
same period in France, Germany, or Holland.
Whatever the explanation of the paucity of surviving
compositions, let us now consider what remains: two short
Verses and a short piece in C, all stylistically indistinguish
able from the work of his contemporaries; a kind of Choral
Prelude on the 'Old Hundredth' (attributed equally to
Blow), not very original, and interesting mainly as a very
early example of registration for the Cornet stop; two
longer pieces in D minor, one for Single and one for Double
Organ; and a piece in G major.
The works in D minor begin almost alike: it is impossible
to establish any chronology, but the piece for Single Organ
is stylistically the superior, and is simpler and more direct.
The opening consists of a terse fugal exposition, actually in
the traditional manner of voluntaries, though charged
with the Baroque emotional content found in Christopher
Gibbons, Blow, and Matthew Locke. It goes further, how
ever, than any of them: and an added intensity is produced
by the dramatic repeated notes, the forceful use of ornamen
tation, and the effect ofstretto nominating in a great roulade.
Ex.3
[Full orga'n] ,
70 An Organist's View of the Organ Works
r r r Mr
(Note: As is frequent at this period, some additional orna
mentation is implicit in the text, and must be supplied in
An Organist's View of the Organ Works 71
performance : my suggestions for this are shown in brackets.)
Unfortunately, some of the ground thus early and easily
won is as quickly lost until the emergence of a new motive:
Ex.4
which dominates the second half of the piece both rhyth
mically and melodically leading to a vigorous tonic pedal
cadence, the jagged outlines and satisfying harmony of
which again seem PurcelTs. But some crudity and ungain-
liness in the intervening harmonic structure suggest an
incomplete mastery of the material: some of this has been
refined away by Mr. McLean, a doubtful improvement.
However, the total impression is undoubtedly one of
dramatic grandeur.
The remaining piece in G major is in a different category.
Clearly it is descended from the Italian expressive Toccata
those of Frescobaldi were evidently known in England,
for two voluntaries attributed to Blow (one of them a
'Double Verse' occurring in the same manuscript collection
as this piece) make fairly extensive unacknowledged quota
tions from two out of his First Book (1614). It is also prob
able that the Toccatas of Michael Angelo Rossi had already
found their way here. The piece under consideration exhibits
none of the melodic extravagance or harmonic eccentricity
of the Italians' work: and though chromaticism, false
relation and the well-worn dissonances of the diminished
and augmented triads occur and are even dwelt on, the
whole remains tranquil and contemplative, with an air of
sweetness and refined comprehensiveness, typically English:
this impression is in no-wise contradicted in the neat round
ing off of the movement with a sprightly canzona section.
j2 An Organist's View of the Organ Works
It is a little gem of its kind, within a limited sphere, and that
limitation is largely instrumental.
Ex.5
[Soft]
a
ffi
o -I I.
<g *
K
Conclusion begins:-
An Organist's View of the Organ Works 73
Trifling as these works may appear, they stand out in
sharp relief against the formalized and sometimes vapid
organ music of the succeeding generation. But their fragility
is such that literal transposition on to the modern English
organ may be fatally damaging: these instruments, for all
their useful qualities, are not designed for contrapuntal
music, and therefore in performance, subterfuges have to be
employed, the success of which will vary enormously
according to the circumstances encountered.
Nevertheless, these pieces are all we^possess: therefore, at
least, they must be treasured with gratitude if regretfully:
and the pseudo-Purcell must die.
FHP
8
Performing PurceWs Music Today
ROBERT DONINGTON
There could hardly be a composer more sympathetic to the
present generation than Purcell. Yet three centuries is a long
time to bridge. And PurcelTs music was left unused for many
generations, so that the traditions in which it was originally
performed have been long since forgotten. We have there
fore certain difficulties in giving Purcell a completely under
standing performance: difficulties which would not arise if
his traditions had never been interrupted.
In my experience, these difficulties can best be met by a
double approach. In the first place, we can find out as much
as possible about how his own contemporaries performed
his music; we can do this by examining any evidence
which survives in written form. That is where scholarship
can make a useful contribution.
In the second place, we must trust our own musicianship
to respond, not only to this evidence, but above all to the
music itself. Unless we are capable of this response, scholar
ship cannot help us. There is, indeed, much to be found out
which musicianship by itself cannot be expected to recover.
But still less can we expect to recover it if we allow our
scholarship to override our musicianship. We are in the
position of explorers who will not neglect any map, how
ever inadequate, left by their predecessors, but who know
that when the real difficulties begin, it is to their own good
judgement that they must trust.
Performing PurcelYs Music Today 75
The most fundamental difficulty, I believe, is how to give
practical expression to what I should describe as the romantic
character of PurcelTs music. This romantic character shows
most obviously in his harmony. The heartrending suspen
sions, which are really written-out long appoggiaturas, in
Dido's famous Lament are romantic harmony in the same
sense in which the appoggiatura-based progressions in
Wagner's Tristan are romantic harmony. But we know now
as the previous generation did not know that the per
forming style which is right for Wagner's romanticism is
not right for PurcelTs.
In some quarters, the reaction has gone too far. We are
told that it is out of style to romanticize early music at all,
and that we need an unimpassioned rendering to which the
term 'objective' (first introduced by Schweitzer in connex
ion with J. S. Bach) has been applied. But what do PurcelTs
own contemporaries tell us?
They tell us that the serenity they undoubtedly achieved,
like all serenity real enough to be worth having, was
achieved not by any illusory exclusion of passion but by a
genuine richness of experience. The passion as well as the
serenity can be recognized in their music, and it could be
recognized in their performances. 1 Here is what the English
translator wrote (1709) in a footnote to a passage in Rague-
net's Comparison Between the French and Italian Music (1702)
where the turbulence of Italian violin-playing in agitated
movements is being contrasted with its lingering sweetness
in tender movements: 2
I never met with any man that suffered his passions to hurry him
1 For a sample of the evidence die reader is referred to Appendix B.
2 The translator was probably J. E. Galliard, The entire pamphlet is
reprinted, ed. O. S trunk, in Musical Quarterly, XXXQ, 3 July 1946,
pp. 4iiff.
j6 Performing PurceU's Music Today
away so much whilst he was playing on the violin as the famous
Arcangelo Corelli, whose eyes will sometimes turn red as fire;
his countenance will be distorted, his. eyeballs roll as in an agony,
and he gives in so much to what he is doing that he doth not
look like the same man.
If that is the impression (not exactly an objective one)
made on his hearers by the classical Corelli himself, it is
obviously not impassioned emotion that we have to be
afraid of when interpreting a born romantic like Purcell.
All we have to be afraid of is reading something into his
music which is not there; and this will only happen if we
have an insufficiently clear idea of what is there. False
romanticism is only false because, instead of growing out
of the music, it is grafted on to it without due regard for
what goes with what: in a word, for style.
But style is not some vague aesthetic mystery. Style is
mostly a matter of getting the details reasonably authentic.
If we can do that, the genuine romantic feeling which is
implicit in PurcelTs music will emerge almost of its own
accord.
THE PERFORMER'S SHARE IN PROVIDING THE
NOTES
We are so accustomed nowadays (with important ex
ceptions in dance music) to having the notes all settled for
us by the composer that we find it hard to realize the extent
to which the early performers were expected to add to them
impromptu as they went along. There is an element of sheer
spontaneity about most early music which any good inter
pretation of it needs to convey, even if there is no actual
improvisation going on. Hardly any modern musicians
are trained to improve and, indeed, to complete the com
position in this impromptu fashion as they go along. The
Performing PurceWs Music Today 77
editor has to do it for them in writing. But if the editorial
work is well done, and if the performer can keep the
necessary freshness of feeling, the result can sound spon
taneous without actually being improvised. It is the spirit
rather than the fact of improvisation which is important.
When supplying, in writing, many notes which the
composer left to be more or less improvised, an editor is
providing his performers with a working version which
they can use if they have not the skill to provide their own,
but can adapt or ignore if they have the necessary skill.
There is no final solution; there was never meant to be;
there can only be a good solution, by which I mean a good
example of the many which are possible.
ACCIDENTALS
Purcell was writing at a time that was only just out of the
period in which the performer was expected to regulate his
own accidentals, where necessary or desirable, under the
loose guidance of the conventions ofmusicaficta.
In this respect, PurcelTs written parts should normally be
performed as they stand, except where there are obvious
mistakes or where common sense suggests something not
actually written. For example, it was still by no means unusual
in PurcelTs day to sharpen the seventh degree of the minor
scale by writing in the necessary #, but to leave it to the per
former to sharpen the sixth degree without written indica
tion. In such cases, G#, F, G# is not meant as an augmented
second; the F was regarded as so obviously in need of a $ that
none was written.
The modern rule that the force of an accidental continues
until but not beyond the next bar-line was not yet established
in PurcelTs day. Thus, a passage written as at Ex. 6 is almost
certainly intended as at Ex. 7; whereas, on the contrary, a
jS Performing Purcell's Music Today
passage written as at Ex. 8 is quite certainly intended as at
Ex. 9.
Ex.6
As perhaps written then
Ex.7
As written now
Ex.8
Ex.9
As perhaps written then
As written now
In Ex. 6 the composer would further have relied on an
accepted disposition for stepwise passages in the minor
mode to go up sharp but come down flat. If, however, he
wanted to make doubly sure, his notation would probably
have been as at Ex. 10.
Ex.10
Observe that our Ij had no place in the standard notation
of seventeenth-century England. Thus b was used to cancel
jf, and # was used to cancel [> .
So much for the written parts; but there is also the ac
companiment and the ornamentation, neither of which
was usually written out. The accidentals which need to be
supplied for an ornamental embellishment are mostly clear
from the prevailing tonality; but those required for the
accompaniment are not always obvious, nor are they always
shown by the figuring. There are still a few remnants of
Performing Purcell's Music Today 79
musica ficta which a figured-bass accompanist in PurcelTs
music should know.
There is first of all the rule concerning the sharpened
leading note. In the case of music as relatively recent as
Purcell's, this rule can be put quite simply in Agazzari's 1
brief statement: 'All cadences, whether intermediate or
final, need the major third' whether indicated or not. This,
however, applies only to important cadences, not to passing
cadences. The major third in question is the sharp leading
note on the penultimate dominant.
There is next the Picardy third, another old convention.
'In a final cadence the last note must always be taken with a
sharp sign', i.e., major, whether so indicated or not. 2
Niedt 3 adds the reservation: 'French composers do the
opposite, but not everything is good just because it comes,
from France.' This reservation is interesting, but possibly
too sweeping; moreover, though French influence was
strong in Purcell's music, Italian influence was stronger. I
feel sure, from practical experience, that the convention of
making major the final tonic chord of a minor movement
can be applied to Purcell where the result sounds convincing.
ORNAMENTAL EMBELLISHMENT
The embellishment left to the performer by seventeenth
and eighteenth-century composers is 'ornamental' only in
the sense that it can take any appropriate form without
changing the substance of the music; not in the sense that it
can be left out entirely. At the astonishingly kte date of
1 Agostino Agazzari, Del stionare sopra il basso . . . (Sienna, 1607).
2 Wolfgang Ebner, German transL in J. A. Herbst, Arte pratttca e
poetica (Frankfort, 1653).
3 Friedrich Erhardt Niedt, Musicalische Handleitung (Hamburg, 1700),
vn,6.
So Performing PurceWs Music Today
c. 1805, Dr. Burney could still write in Rees's Cyclopedia J-
that 'an adagio in a song or solo is, generally, little more
than an outline left to the performer's abilities to colour. .' . .
If not highly embellished, [slow notes] soon excite languor
and disgust in the hearers/
There is a famous early eighteenth-century Amsterdam
edition of Corelli's violin sonatas, which was afterwards
pirated in London, showing the adagios printed in parallel
versions: the long, slow notes as ordinarily published (and
as nowadays performed, with soporific effect); and the
cascades of very rapid notes as Corelli himself allegedly
performed them. There is a large quantity of similar evidence
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including
examples from English sources. 'A number of English songs
of the period are known in the ornamental versions favoured
by particular singers, while the art of improvising instru
mental variations on a given ground was nowhere carried
further than in the examples in Christopher Simpson's
Division Violist of 1659.
There are instrumental movements by Purcell which, for
their full effect, require a continuous light ripple of added
ornamentation. But the important word here is light.
Anything at all heavy, either in the added notes or in their
manner of performance, will at once defeat its own object,
which is not to add weight to the texture but to enliven it.
Whether written out by the composer or left to the per
former, this kind of figuration should always sound as if it
had ordy at that very moment been thought of, so that it
seems spontaneous even when it is the result of forethought.
In his vocal movements, Purcell usually wrote out his
melodic figuration with more completeness than he did in
&e instrumental movements just mentioned. Such an
1 s.v. Adagio.
Performing Purcell's Music Today 81
approach, to completeness was unusual in a baroque com
poser. J. S. Bach carried it still further, although even in his
music there are passages in which additional melodic
figuration needs to be added. In Purcell's music, this need
arises somewhat more often, but not so often as in many
other baroque composers.
Melodic figuration added, either by the performer more
or less impromptu, or by the editor in writing, is one of the
two main kinds of embellishment described by the old
English word 'graces'. The other kind consists of a large
number of small specific ornaments, of which the most
important are the appoggiatura and the trill. These orna
ments are sometimes optional; but at other times they are,
in practice, obligatory. Where the context implies an
ornament, the gap in melody and harmony which results
from leaving out that ornament is really just a plain mistake,
like any other kind of wrong note. This is particularly true
of the trills implied by a majority of baroque cadences. In
Purcell's day, a performer who habitually left out his
cadential trills would have been sent back to school again to
learn his notes.
The table of ornaments in Purcell's posthumous Choice
Collection . . . for the Harpsichord, edited by his widow
(London, 1696), and not actually known to have been
compiled by Purcell himself, is brief, and like all such tables
approximate. 1 (See Facsimiles I and 2.)
Appoggiaturas in the seventeenth century are mostly of
short to moderate length, whereas those of the eighteenth
century tend to be either very short or, more commonly,
1 A general knowledge of the baroque musical contexts which imply
ornaments is more important than any of these tables. This is a large
subject, for which I may perhaps refer the reader to my articles on
Ornamentation and Ornaments in the new Grove.
4s&t*
'^ \ ^ g S fc g
^tjllllll^i,
Rf!-lllfp3l :
"5 v^J ., ^^S^2 <^ a^ull^^
8* ?S
^
V
JMP f!
4 ih'a ^.5 1 til
c//C//y/>A ; of (] races proper
>. to rbeV/tol orViolin .
ffrh ^holii
!- < -*4-
Illl&lNUll
iv "ilLi;?': II ilgiHTTffl
* -^ * ~^^~ ~\ Wf . I m I ' ^* f '^^
Cltvatiim ixnLnr jvmnticr&yM;ACatlcnt ixpwtt:
^ ^ .^, > I L- / 1 J
fti^rf ^/i/iW.
$
*
v
ig
AC-
w
Clertthiw- fxphn: tfufciit
Facsimile 2. Table of Graces from John Playford's An Introduction to
the Still of Mustek, thirteenth, edition, printed for Henry Playford in
1697. (This is the edition for which Purcell had collaborated with
Playford.)
84 Performing PurceWs Music Today
very long. Trills, both of the seventeenth and of the eigh
teenth centuries (with almost negligible exceptions) are
begun on their upper notes, and with a good accent on, and
often a decided prolongation of, these initial upper notes.
Since the upper note is normally a discord, the harmonic
effect is at least as important as the melodic.
It is by no means necessary to put in an ornament wher
ever a sign appears. There were always performers who liked
fewer ornaments than others; and so far as the optional
ornaments were concerned, this was a matter left to the
performer's taste. On the other hand he was always at
liberty, within reason, to add ornaments where no signs
were written. And he was, of course, obliged to add the full
complement of cadential trills, as well as certain appoggia-
turas, for which the signs were generally absent just because
the need was so obvious.
CONTINUO ACCOMPANIMENTS
Preparing continue accompaniments more or less im
promptu from a figured bass was perhaps the greatest of all
the challenges to a performer in connexion with the actual
notes of the music* As this is the subject of a separate
chapter in this book, the following remarks are in the nature
of footnotes.
The figures are essentially there to tell the performer what
the written parts are doing; they are not there to restrict
his liberty. A 6 or a 7 or even a 9 added to a 5-3 chord, or a
4 or a 5 added to a 6-3 chord, is not a crime, provided it is
in the style and is musically convincing. 1
As to how elaborate an accompaniment should be, that
depends partly on the performer's taste (which varied in
1 c R T. Arnold, Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass
(London, 1931), CL XXI, H.
Performing Purcell's Music Today 85
PurcelTs time as it does today) and partly on the require
ments of the music (which vary still more). It is always
worth remembering the common-sense ride of damping
down the elaboration when the written parts are themselves
in elaborate motion, but opening up when they are not,
THE PERFORMER'S SHARE IN THE EXPRESSION
Apart from the notes, there were, in PurcelTs time,
certain conventions influencing the expression conventions
which are not obvious to unaided musicianship, but which
have to be recovered from contemporary evidence. This
evidence is not always clear enough, or close enough in
time or place, for the matter to be an easy one. But we are
beginning to agree on the main conclusions, and the fact
that we never shall agree on their exact application is
entirely desirable, since such individual differences are, and
always have been, an important part of the value of good
interpretation.
TEMPO AND RUBATO
Tempo is among the responsibilities of the performer. It
is of paramount importance; but it varies in relation to
many other factors in the interpretation, and even in,
relation to the acoustics of the building. There is no such
thing as a 'right* tempo in the absolute.
The reader will find in Appendix B what may or may not
be PurcelTs own rules connecting tempo with a variety of
time-signatures such as C and <; and such rules abound in
the contemporary text-books. They are, however, so
contradictory as to make it obvious that the practice of
composers was quite arbitrary. This was recognized by the
most thoughtful writers from Pierre Maillant in 1610, who
admitted that 'the signs ... are superfluous and useless . . .
86 Performing Purcell's Music Today
everything is now in confusion', down to the Abbe Laugier
in 1754, who pointed out that 'each interprets the time-
movement in the light of his own imagination'. In 1650,
Kircher, whose account is particularly full and painstaking, 1
wrote of 'this most confused subject (confusissimam mater-
iam)' and 'utter nonsense (tota farrago)' adding that the most
experienced composers used C and (P 'for one and the
same sign (pro unico signo)'. Heinichen, in course of
another lengthy exposition, likewise warns us of their in
discriminate use in practice. 2 And indeed we find early
editions and manuscripts and even autographs showing
different time-signatures in the same passages with remark
able inconsistency. It is, therefore, obviously impossible to
rely on time-signatures as a precise indication of tempo.
There was, indeed, an imprecise and unreliable understand
ing that 2 or <p should suggest a faster tempo than C, and
2 or $ than $, etc. Those 'faster' signatures often (but
very far from always) go with two, rather than four,
changes of harmony in the bar (an important point for
continuo accompanists) ; and sometimes a rhythmic pulse of
two-in-a-bar can be sensed in the music. But it 15 from the
music and not from the time-signatures that the performer
has to find his tempo and his pulse.
A change from duple to triple time (shown by 3 or other
triple time-signature) may with much greater reliability be
taken to indicate an increase of speed, often amounting to
|o = C c jorJ c ) = Cj etc. Even here, the actual amount
of the increase is a variable quantity, which, like all other
tempo decisions, can only be found by innate musicianship.
Time-words such as grave, adagio, presto, etc. are also
1 Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650), pp. 679,
682* 684.
* J. D. Heinichen, General-Bass (Dresden, 1728), Part I, Ck IV, . 48ff.
Performing Purceffs Music Today 87
unreliable and inconsistent in their connotations, as may be
seen in Appendix B. The most valuable recommendation
for a modern performer to bear in mind is that he should not
take fast movements too fast or slow movements too slow.
In PurcelTs trio-sonatas we find movements headed
Largo, with the time-signature |, which become much
too sluggish if taken with anything like the slowness of a
common-time Largo (itself faster, in Purcell, than Grave
or Adagio) ; they need a good swinging 'tempo di minuetto*
to make their natural effect. And, on the other hand, many
of the allegros, especially those in canzona form, need a
very steady 'allegro moderate' if the rapid changes of
harmony in their close counterpoint are to unfold con
vincingly.
Fluctuations within the main tempo are not ordinarily
shown in baroque music, but the evidence tells us that they
were intended. Mace, 1 writing in PurcelTs lifetime, wanted
beginners to learn strict time-keeping first, but added:
When we come to be Masters, so that we can command all manner
of Time at our own Pleasures*, we then take Liberty, (and very often
. . .) to Break Time; sometimes Faster, and sometimes Slower,
as we perceive the Nature of the Thing Requires
This, of course, includes rallentandos, which we find
Frescobaldi describing as early as 1614 in the preface to his
Toccatas of that year. Baroque music is full of cadences, and
it would be intolerably disturbing to the natural momentum
of the music if we slowed down for each of them. Never
theless, the most important ones usually need to be
acknowledged by some yielding in the tempo, however
slight. Often the barest resilience, scarcely perceptible as a
raUentando, is quite enough, and anything more than this will
1 Thomas Mace, Mustek's Monument (London, 1676), p. 81.
88 Performing Pwcell's Music Today
sound cumbersome. Yet to avoid any resilience at all gives
the music that machine-like rhythm which does more to
destroy its true vitality than most other such misconceptions.
We need, in short, a certain musical tact, sensitive above all
to the implications of the harmony.
Final cadences naturally incline to slightly more con
spicuous rallentandos than intermediate cadences. The habit
of charging through a baroque movement with unyielding
impetus until the last bar or two, and then suddenly putting
on all the brakes as hard as possible, has no justification
either in music or in scholarship. A rallentando needs
starting early enough to take its own reasonable gradation.
However, it is also true that the rallentando must not be
exaggerated. A slight rallentando but a shapely one is per
haps the most usual requirement.
RHYTHM: DOTS AND INEQUALITY
Rhythm to a modern performer is a matter governed
mainly by the lengths of the written notes; but to a baroque
performer it was more a matter of expression, and was
governed largely by convention.
In modern music, a dot after a note increases its length
by half; not, of course, precisely, but as nearly as ordinary
freedom of expression permits.
In baroque notation the dot may have the same effect;
but it may also increase the length by any other appropriate
amount.
For example, we may often enough meet with a melodic
line in which one or more dotted notes occur. If these are
an integral part of the melody, in no way standing out
from any other part of it, and in no way dominating the
rhythm of it, then their value will probably be very much
the same as the mpdern value: i,e. as nearly exact as free
1
-
s
Performing Purceffs Music Today 89
expression (whether then or now) permits. But if they stand
out from the melody, or dominate its rhythm, as independ
ent rhythmic figures in their own right, then a baroque
convention applies to them which is no longer currently
accepted, though to some extent all good musicians still
follow it without realizing that they do so. By this con
vention, the dot is decidedly lengthened, the note after the
dot is correspondingly shortened, and the two are separated
by a silence of articulation taken out of the time of this
lengthened dot. We generally call this 'double-dotting',
though without meaning that the lengthening has to be
exactly that. In place of the silence of articulation, the notes
may alternatively be slurred, with a more expressive but
less brilliant effect.
The following extracts from the Chaconne in PurcelTs
Trio Sonatas (No. VI of the second set), show examples
of dotted notes:
Ex.11
As written
Adagio
, Bar I
.Ex.12
As conventionally performed (approx,)
Q ii M * m i m ' f>
etc.
Ex.13
As written and (approximately) performed
.Bar 55
Ex.14
As written
GHP
Ex.15
As conventionally performed (approx.)
etc.
po Performing PurceH's Music Today
There are further extensions of the same principle:
JT3 may become approximately J. f 3
JJ. may become /J
j. J^ may become J J3
become
may become
may stand for JOT or J :/ffl or
7 JT3 will almost certainly become r yJJ. ] or
and so with numerous other possibilities of the same kind.
In compound triple time (whether written as such, or as trip
lets in common time, &c.), the normal practice in seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century music is as follows:
i> -L and rv may both stand for JjJ.
An example of this occurs in bar 174 of the same Chaconne:
Ex.16
Ex.17
As written
As intended
^
etc.
^
etc.
Performing Parcel? s Music Today 91
Individual instances of the performance of dotted notes
are often difficult to decide; but a few doubtful decisions
either way are of no real importance. "What is of importance
is the radical improvement in zest and crispness which
follows any reasonably enterprising application of the
principle itself. Few changes in the direction of greater
authenticity have a more enlivening effect. 1
A further rhythmic convention concerns 'inequality'.
By this term is meant the treatment of a series of notes,
neither very fast nor very slow, mainly in stepwise motion,
and written evenly. They are, however, performed un
evenly, 'because', wrote Saint-Lambert in 1702, 'this un-
evenness makes them more graceful'. 2
The situation in which the convention of 'inequality'
applies were never clearly defined, and they are, once again,
often difficult to recognize in practice. The following hints
may be helpful. 3
The notes to which 'inequality' can be applied will be the
shortest notes to occur at all numerously in the movement.
If these shortest notes are either faster or slower than a
moderate speed, 'inequality' becomes ineffectual, and per
haps unpleasant; it should therefore not be applied to them.
Again, if the movement has a vigorous or march-lite
character, 'inequality' can only detract from that character,
and should not be applied. Further, although a few leaps
occurring in a mainly stepwise progression do not pre
clude inequality, a melody mainly progressing by leaps
1 Many excellent suggestions for the true conventional performance of
dotted notes in Purcell will be found in the new (not in the old) volumes
of the Purcell Society's edition, now under the general editorship of
Professor Anthony Lewis.
2 Michel de Saint-Lambert, Principes du Clavecin (Paris, 1702).
8 1 have gone into somewhat more detail in Grove, s.v. 'notes ingales* ;
but the main, principles are those given here.
g2 Performing PurcelTs Music Today
is not of the kind to which 'inequality' was intended to
apply-
The convention of 'notes inegales 5 was most highly
cultivated in (but not confined to) France. Performers could
give the notes an expressive lilt by somewhat lengthening
the first and shortening the second Dourer) ; they could give
them piquancy by decidedly shortening the first and length
ening the second (couler}\ if, among the evenly-written
notes thus performed unevenly, they came across some
notes written dotted, they marked the contrast by very
decidedly 'double-dotting' them (pointer).
Examples of the couler are very commonly found written
out in PurcelTs vocal parts, as if he particularly favoured this
effect and wanted to make sure of getting it.
The lourer, however, was always the most typical of the
various forms of 'inequality', and there seems little doubt
that Purcell got this from his performers in any case.
French influence had been paramount in England under
Charles II. It remained strong even in PurcelTs more
Italianate style. And in many of his passages this French lilt
is so beautiful that it seems innately as well as historically
probable. This probability is always at its strongest where
the notes (or enough of them to drop the hint) are written
slurred in pairs (as they must anyhow be slurred in perform
ance). If three or more are written slurred together, 'in
equality' is ruled out; and there are various other means of
contra-indicating it, none of which, however, occurs as far
as I know in Purcell.
The lourer and its accompaning pointer are both illustrated
in the following example from bars I44ff. of PurcelTs ode
'Hark, how the wild musicians sing'. 1
1 Vol. 27 of the Purcell Society's new edition, eeL Dennis Arundell
(but the lourer and pointer are my suggestion, not his).
Performing Purcell' s Music Today
93
Ex.18
As written
#=
r r
feast love's ea
- ger ap - pe - tite with
joys.
to which beau - ty and youth in - vite
Ex.19
As conventionally performed (approximately)
feast love's ea
(pointer)
A , 3 33 3
- ger ap
pe-tite with
fr
:etc.
joys
(kurer)
to which beau - ty and youth in- vite
PHRASING AND ARTICULATION
The present generation of good musicians has got into
close enough touch with Purcell to grasp his phrase endings
intuitively; but in performance these phrase endings,
though recognized, are seldom made audible enough. This
is not necessarily a matter of holding up the time; it is
usually a matter of taking a short 'silence of phrasing* out of
the time of the last note of the old phrase before beginning
the new. Less frequently, it may be necessary to add a
'comma' to the time.
Within the phrase, we need more 'silences of articula
tion'. The ability to sustain a smooth cantabile is as necessary
in Purcell as in Bellini; but so is a sense of where to break
the line. The note before a syncopated note, for example,
needs to be shortened by a silence of articulation (as if, in
94 Performing PurcelFs Music Today
modern notation, there were a staccato dot over it). And
there can be no doubt, on a comparison of many small
points of evidence, that the ordinary bread-and-butter
manner of stringing together unslurred notes of moderate
duration was less smooth and more articulate than our
modern training suggests. Attention to this most important
detail brings immediate vitality to many quick movements
in PurceU which might otherwise move a little stolidly.
His romanticism is of a more aerated brand than Wagner's,
and needs a lighter texture.
TEXTURE AND DYNAMICS
This lightening of the texture is particularly important
when, as so often in Purcell, that texture is of a contra
puntal nature. In the string fantasies, for example, and to
some extent in the trio sonatas, each player should take his
entry decisively and with that indescribable sense of signi
ficance which distinguishes thematic from subordinate
matter; then as he hears the next entry coming in, he should
get out of the way by lowering both the volume and the
intensity of his playing. That was the method recommended
in the sixteenth century for polyphonic music, and it is
just as valuable in Purcell, or for that matter in Bach. The
structure stands out as it is meant to do, no one has to force
his entry through a mass of competing sound, and the music
makes sense without an effort. The texture itself glitters
with ever-changing lights and shades.
The same play of light and shade is needed in the smaller
dynamic contrasts and gradations. The theory now fashion
able with some reformers under the name of 'terrace-
dynamics', to the effect that baroque musicians favoured a
long unbroken stretch on one dynamic level followed by
another level similarly sustained, is not supported by the
Performing Purcell's Music Today 95
evidence. 'We play Loud or Soft, according to our fancy, or
the humour of the music . . . some time ... in one and the
same Note' (Simpson, 1659) ; x 'The Viol and Violin excell in
lowdning, softning, and continuing a Note or Sound'
(Locke, i6y2); 2 'swellings of prodigious length' (Raguenet,
iyo2); 3 'courage as well as skill to fill and swell where the
harmony required an emphasis' (North, 4 early eighteenth
century, but reminiscing of PurcelTs lifetime) : these are
typical phrases, and the last draws attention to a crucial
principle. Normal crescendos and diminuendos, louds and
softs, are integral to baroque music in so far as they grow
out of that music, following rises and falls in the melodic
outline and intensifications and relaxations in the harmony.
It is only dynamic effects imposed on the music for effect's
sake which are harmful. But this is basically a principle of
good musicianship in any style.
INSTRUMENTAL STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
Modern wind players generally fall in with the technical
requirements of seventeenth or eighteenth-century music
very readily, provided they are well coached in the stylistic
requirements already discussed. This is not the case, however,
with modern string players, whose basic training has evi
dently diverged much further from the baroque norm. The
1 Christopher Simpson, Division Violist (London, 1659), 2nd ecL
(Division-Viol) 1667, p. 10 (facsimile ed. Nathalie Dolmetseh, London,
1955).
2 Matthew Locfcc, Observations upcm a Late Book, (London, 1672),
p. 36.
3 Franois Raguenet, A Comparison Between the French and Italian
Music (Paris, 1702), EngL transl. ? J. E. Galliard (London, 1709), ed.
O. Strunk, Musical Quarterly, XXXH, 3, p. 426.
4 MS. Autobiography, ed.Jessop, (London, 1890): see the whole
passage Sect. 94fF.
ptf Performing Purcell's Music Today
modern Tourte-pattern incurved bow is also rather different
from the old straight or slightly outcurved bow in its effect
on tone-quality and articulation; but this difference, though
not by any means negligible, can be minimized with fair
success in practice.
The primary difficulty is to articulate an ordinary series of
detached notes witho.ut too much legato or too much
staccato. Our present 'detache' is not, in fact, detached
enough. Our staccato is too detached, and our spiccato too
out of the ordinary for a regular effect (though it is perfectly
in style and period as a virtuoso effect).
The evidence 1 for the early technique of the violin points
to a bowing style well 'into the string' for the body of the
note. At the join, the elasticity of the bow is allowed to
lighten its pressure almost, but not quite to the extent of
leaving the string. This gives more resonance between
strokes than the staccato, but more separation than the
detache, and a more relaxed feeling than the spiccato. I have
suggested calling it the 'sprung detache'.
For moderately short notes the best part of the bow is
normally about half-way between the point and the middle,
with an easy movement of the arm and a relaxed wrist. The
flow of notes should, indeed, sound easy and, relaxed
neither forced uor sticky; neither disconnected nor merged.
The frequent modern practice of taking such notes at
the heel and from the air is absolutely unwarranted by
the evidence and as harmfully out of style as it could
be. The notes sound not less, but more brilliant if they
are allowed to ripple along without the least sense of
effort.
1 A selection will be found in my contribution on Violin Playing to
the new Grove. See also David D. Boyden, 'The Violin and Its Tech
nique in the Eighteenth Century', Musical Quarterly, Jan. 1950, p. 18.
Performing Purcelfs Music Today 97
The next consideration is the quality of tone. It is remark
able how many early descriptions of good string tone (e.g.
Playford, Simpson, and Mace from late seventeenth-century
England alone) include the adjective 'clear'. Leopold Mozart
in the mid-eighteenth century wanted 'an honest , and
virile tone from the violin' ; and it is a suggestive description.
Almost any kind of violin tone, including that produced in
high positions and by every variety of bow speed and
pressure, has some place in early violin playing; the virtuoso
violinists were exploring most available possibilities soon
after PurcelTs death, if not before. But for average workaday
purposes, and certainly for the greater part of PurcelTs
string writing, the tone wanted is indeed clear and trans
parent, honest and virile. That means using mainly the
lower positions; and above all it means using mainly a
steady speed of bow stroke with a fair pressure into the
string. Too much bow i.e. too fast, and too light on
the string is one of the chief mistakes detracting from the
natural brilliance and crisp sparkle proper to early string
writing.
Accentuation should also be crisp rather than massive,
and more often achieved by an instantly released finger-
pressure on the bow than by heavy arm-pressure or by
taking the attack from the air. A silence of articulation
before this crisp pressure will greatly increase/the effect of
accentuation.
Vibrato is entirely legitimate, there being a number of
seventeenth-century references to its use and techniques,
Some authors preferred to treat it as an ornament for rather
sparing use only; but others regarded it as an enlivenment
of the normal tone. In the 17305, Geminiani 1 unreservedly
1 F. Geminiani, Aft of Playing on the Violin (London, 1740, p. 8, fee-
simile, ecL David D. Boyden, Oxford, 1952).
gS Performing Purcell's Music Today
recommended it as making the 'Sound more agreeable, and
for this Reason it should be made use of as often as possible'.
But a very massive vibrato does undoubtedly sound anach
ronistic, just as an opulent quality of tone sounds anachron
istic. Early music should seldom sound massive in any way.
And that, perhaps, best sums up the difference. The
Wagnerian style has weight and power; its climaxes achieve
a wonderful intensity. The style of Purcell is sharper and
depends more on impetus. This does not make it any the less
intense. But its intensity has to be built up in a more con
centrated way.
PURCELL'S DANCES
By Imogen Hoist
Playford's English Dancing Master, or Plaine and easie Rules
for the Dancing of Country Dances, is one of the few surviving
sources of English dance notation in the late seventeenth
century. The ninth edition, published in 1695, contains the
tune of the hornpipe in the first act of Dioclesian. It is re
named The Siege of Limerick and is given with full instruc
tions as to how it is to be danced. The steps and figures are
not the same as those that would have been danced in stage
performances of Dioclesian, for the Playford country dances
were mostly 'longways for as many as will', and were meant
for social enjoyment, not for spectacular entertainment.
But the 'plaine and easie Rules' do, at any rate, give us some
of the ways in which PurcelTs music was actually danced
during the last year of his life. And, as such, they can be
helpful in phrasing his instrumental music, for the steps
fit the tunes as inevitably as the words fit the songs.
Today, when dancing a seventeenth-century country
dance, one of the first and most obvious things that one
Performing PwcelYs Musk Today 99
learns about the music is that all the repeats are essential.
Without them, the dancers would be stranded on the wrong
side of the set, with no hope of getting back to their own
partners. The convention of playing an instrumental
repetition piano or pianissimo may have its uses in the concert
hall, but it is seldom helpful to the dancers, who find infinite
variety in going through the same pattern of movements
with each new couple they meet.
At every double-bar, the dancers make a very slight
obeisance to their partners or 'contrary' partners. This court
esy movement, which is scarcely more than a nod of recog
nition, needs no extra time to perform; it is only at the
very end of the dance that partners 'honour' each other with
a full-length bow and curtsy, to a rallentando in the music.
The least hint of a calculated slowing down at any other
cadence can have a disastrous effect, for the dancer uses the
courtesy movement, with its slight give at the knees, as a
kind of springboard for the lift that will carry him into the
new phrase. If the player digs himself in at the cadence, the
unfortunate dancer is unable tp adjust his balance: he
suffers a physical shock that is just as uncomfortable as the
sensation, when going downstairs, of landing on a last step
that isn't there.
This wrong phrasing can be particularly frustrating in the
cadences of a Purcell hornpipe, such as the following
example from Abdekzar, which, in the early eighteenth
century, was danced as 'The Hole in the Wall':
Ex.20
Even sensitive string-players have been known to arrive
i oo Performing PurcelYs Music Today
on this last note with an unwanted stress that interrupts the
flow of the music and wrecks the dancers' hopes of an
instinctively-phrased repeat. One of the easiest ways for a
non-dancer to realize what is wanted is to look at the song
'There's not a swain', where the words take care of the
phrasing and dynamics :
Ex.21
r
There's not. a swain on the plain would be bless'd as
could you but, could you but, could you but on me smile.
c}ir Lf r Crg
But you ap-pear so sev-ere, That trembling with fear my heart goes
ft'FJT (j^^J^J- ^
etc.
pit-a-pat, pit- a-pftt, pit-a-pat all the while, /-
It is a perfect hornpipe: so perfect that it is almost im
possible to sit still through it while hearing it sung. At the
cadences, the dancers' courtesy movement as in other
hornpipes is already implied in the harmonies: the six-
four chord needs to be given its suitable weight before it
can relax at the third-beat resolution. When a Purcell dance
tune is phrased as unerringly as if it were a song, the dancer
can respond to any rubato the player may wish to make,
and, if he is sure of his musician, he himself can make an
unrehearsed rubato in his dancing, knowing that the player
will accompany him just as if he were a singer.
There are other lessons to be learnt from dancing PurcelTs
Performing PurcelYs Music Today 1 01
hornpipes. One of the most important is that the tempo must
not be too fast. With one step to each beat, the dancer may
have only six beats in which to cast off, (that is, turn away
from his partner) to go down the set to the second place,
to join hands with his neighbour, and to come up again to
his original place. In order to cover the distance in six
steps, the dancer will need to make a wide sweep in the
figure; when casting off, he will probably lean over at an
angle to help himself round the corner, and his steps will
have to have the weight of his whole body behind them if
they are to carry him back to his place by the end of the
second bar. If the tune is played too fast, he will be com
pelled to cut his corner too close, with the result that his
energy will fritter away in little upright, mincing steps.
Another fault to be avoided in playing hornpipes is the
habit of marking the syncopated notes with unnecessary
accents. Seventeenth-century musicians called their syn
copation 'driving'. 1 The dancer relies on the impetus of the
driving to carry him along; accents on the syncopated
notes create pitfalls of static silence that trip him up on his
journey. If there are to be any stresses on the syncopated
notes, they must be flexible stresses within a long, continuous
line of melody.
Some instrumentalists, in their misguided efforts to be
helpful to the dancers, are inclined to destroy the long line
of a tune by deliberately making all their staccato notes too
prickly. But country dancing, however buoyant and airy
it may be, is essentially a legato occupation. There are,
of course, frequently recurring moments when, for the
1 'Syncope, or Driving a Note, is, when after some shorter Note which
begins die Measure or Half-measure, there immediately follow two,
three, or more Notes of a greater quantity, hefore you meet with
another short Note (like that which began die driving.)* Christopher
Simpson, Compendium, 1665.
102 Performing Purcell's Music Today
fraction of a second, the dancer's two feet are both in the air.
But this does not mean that he consciously goes through the
motions of picking his feet up. Only beginners do that, and
they so soon get exhausted that they either give up altogether
or eke acquire enough technique to carry their own weight
effortlessly over the ground. The instrumentalist's staccato
notes in a Purcell dance need to be as casual and light-
hearted as the singer's consonants in the 'pit-a-pat' of 'There's
not a swain'. When this happens, there can be no danger of
the dancers wearing themselves out unnecessarily ; they will
be able to move, with the freedom of confidence, to the
music that has been described as 'the easiest in the world to
dance to*.
9
Purcell's Handwriting
FRANKLIN B. ZIMMERMAN
The accuracy and the completeness of a list of any com
poser's autographs both depend upon the certainty with
which his handwriting can be identified. PurceLTs hand 1 is
one of those which are almost always immediately recog
nizable. For this reason it has not been necessary to fall back
upon the analytical methods of the calligrapher or the
papyrologist in identifying the autographs listed in Appendix
A. The 'personality' revealed in PurcelTs handwriting if
I may go so far without venturing into the necromantic
realm of graphology 2 makes so strong an impression
upon the observer that once seen it is not likely to be
forgotten. For this reason, subsequent identifications
scarcely seem to require comparison with known authentic
autographs.
Nevertheless, there are a great many Purcell autographs
now missing which may one day be discovered. There are
also a great many manuscripts labelled 'PurcelTs autograph*
which are not in his hand. For these two reasons, there is
some purpose in outlining here a few of the characteristic
features of PurcelTs handwriting.
The robust style of his literal hand best described,
1 The only previous study on PurcelTs autographs is A. Hughes-
Hughes, 'Henry PurcelPs Handwriting', Musical Times, 1896, pp. 81-3.
2 For one such venture cf. F. H. Walker, 'PurcelTs Handwriting',
Monthly Musical Record, LXXII, 1942, pp. 155-7.
1 04 Purcell's Handwriting
perhaps, as a 'deliberate scrawl' is quite unmistakable. The
hand is perpendicular, though not rigidly or painstakingly
so, and each letter is 'full-blown* and boldly formed. Even
though there is something schoolboyish in the overall
appearance of the writing this is plainly the hand of a man
who thought clearly and methodically and knew what he
was about. In this connexion it is worth noting that errors
indicating lapses of concentration and miscalculations of
available space are quite rare in Purcell's autograph copies
even in those apparently done in a hurry.
Purcell's musical hand, though equally characteristic, was
more easily simulated by followers and admirers. This may
explain why a number of manuscripts in the hands of other
men have been attributed to Purcefi at one time or another
(see Section III of Appendix A). For this reason, it may be
well to single out here a few of the most characteristic
features of his musical as well as of his literal hand.
Of the capital letters Purcell used, the following seem to
be the most characteristic: A, C, E, H, I, L, M, O, P, S,
T, and Y. The forms of these letters as they most commonly
occur in Purcell's autographs may be seen in the plates
reproduced with this essay. Among lower-case letters the
same may be said of Purcell's d (nearly always with a very
large loop), e (of which there are two forms, the modern e
and the old backwards 9), f, h, s, t, y, and z. Other signs
important for purposes of identification include the amper
sand (&) and the contractions 'yt and 'yt*. Again, most
of these may be seen in the plates.
The most easily recognizable musical signs which Purcell
used include the clefs, key-signatures, and time-signatures.
Of these the clefs are perhaps the most distinctive. The
G-clef (as shown in the Monteverdi transcript) is quite
Purcellian and typical of his usage in both early and late
IV. PurcelTs handwriting. British Museum, Royal Music MS. 20.h.8, front
index. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.)
Purcell's Handwriting 1 05
manuscripts. The C-clefs shown on this same plate are even
more characteristic. Incidentally, these are a rather early
form of the Purcellian C-clef, which evolved from this
sign: ^j _ in the very early autographs to this: \^
in the later ones. The transitional state of these clefs is
particularly clear in Plate IE, where both types occur side
by side. The F-clef underwent a similar evolution from
g : to >y . Both forms are to be found in Plate HI.
Other important Purcellian signs include the pause signs
and the 'end of composition' signs.
I cannot end without mentioning one of the most dis
tinctive features of PurcelTs handwriting: the exact placing
of all notational symbols. These symbols are so placed that
scarcely ever is there any room for doubt as to their meaning,
even in the Gresham Manuscript or in some of the later
works in the Royal Music autograph, which betray signs
of considerable haste. Even the large, sprawling minims
and semibreves (like those shown in the Monteverdi
transcript) may be seen to have been carefully placed, so that
the reader or performer cannot have the slightest doubt as to
PurcelTs intentions. This feature has more than once served
to disprove a supposed autograph, which might otherwise
have been considered just possibly genuine.
HHP
Appendix A
PURCELL'S AUTOGRAPHS^
NIGEL FORTUNE and FRANKLIN B. ZIMMERMAN
Introduction
I Works by Purcell in his autograph
II "Works not by Purcell but in his hand
HI Supposititious autographs
IV Reliable non-autograph manuscript sources of major works by Purcell
ABBREVIATIONS
Barber Music Library, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Univer
sity of Birmingham
B.M. British Museum, London
Bodleian Bodleian Library, Oxford
Fitzwilliam Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Royal Academy Royal Academy of Music, London
Sibley Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music, Rochester,
N.Y.
Stanford Memorial Library of Music, Stanford University,
California.
Tenbury St. Michael's College, Tenbury, "Worcs.
INTRODUCTION
Section I of the following catalogue is basically a list of works by Purcell
surviving in his autograph. First, the contents of the four volumes
preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the British Mus
eum and Gresham College, London, and consisting to a gf eat extent of
PurcelTs music in his own hand, are listed as they occur. Works not by
Purcell copied by him and works by Purcell copied by amanuenses
1 We gratefully acknowledge the assistance given by Mr. Watkins
Shaw, Miss M. C. Cram of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Miss Pamela
J. Willetts of the British Museum, the Librarians of the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge, and of the Royal Academy of Music, London, and
the Gresham Committee, in the preparation of this appendix.
Appendix A 107
presumably closely connected with him are included here in order that
the reader may obtain a complete view of these important volumes. This
section ends with a list, arranged alphabetically by titles, of all other
autograph copies of PurcelTs works, which are to be found in single
manuscripts or in single gatherings within composite manuscripts.
Section n is a list of isolated copies of works by other composers which
are to be found in PurcelTs hand in composite manuscripts.
Section HI is a list of sources that have in the past been thought to be
autographs of Purcell. This list would have been very long had we not
decided to mention only those manuscripts which have been 'estab
lished' as autographs in various catalogues and other published sources
and to ignore those which appear to have been labelled 'autograph* for
other than scholarly reasons.
To complement these lists Section IV indicates reliable manuscript
sources of major works by Purcell for which there are no known auto
graphs. To keep this list from swelling beyond reasonable limits the
only works considered are Dido and Aeneas and other (so-called) operas,
the Morning and Evening Service in B flat, the Te Deum and Jubilate,
and the two sets of trio-sonatas.
In all these lists the titles of vocal works are given in modern spelling.
Headings written by Purcell himself to indicate a date or the genre to
which a particular work belongs or other important information are
reproduced within quotation marks exactly as he wrote them, except
that the abbreviations e ye 9 and *yt' and one or two other contractions are
written out in full and one or two other trifling adjustments have been
made on grounds of practicability. Where Purcell does not state the
genre we have added it after the title to correspond with the usual
modern terminology.
I. WORKS BY PURCELL IN HIS AUTOGRAPH
There survive three large folio volumes in which Purcell made what
appear to be fair copies of his own and other composers' works, arranged
by categories. It is die contents of these volumes that take pride of pkce
in the following catalogue. The first (Fitzwilliam MS.88) is dated 1677
(?) to 1682; the second (B.M. Add. MS. 30930) appears to have been
begun about 1680 and continued for about three years; and the third
(B.M. Royal (Music MS.20.k8) runs from about 1681 to 1690. The
paper is the same in all three, and each page contains sixteen staves.
i o8 Appendix A
(l) HTZWIILIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE. MS. 88(23 H 13)
The first of the three volumes of fair copies (measuring 44 X 28 cm.) is
devoted to anthems. Most of them are by other composers, flourishing
either before or during PurcelTs time. This is therefore an important
source of music that may be expected to have influenced the composer ia
his formative years.
There is at either end of the volume an index in PurcelTs hand. The
date at the head of the front index has for long been a source of dispute :
it has been stated, categorically, to be 1673 and 1681 and, tentatively,
to be I687 1 (a date that cannot be taken seriously). It is a very difficult
date to decipher, and it is only after an exhaustive scrutiny that we are
for the first time prepared to advance it here as our opinion that the
true reading is '1677'. This reading accords, moreover, with the fact
that on fE pv and I4v Blow is styled 'Mr' and on f. z8v 'Dr': Blow
received his doctorate on 10 December 1677.
Hughes-Hughes says 2 that the forty-two leaves containing die anthems
at the front end of the volume are not in PurcelTs hand. We can see
why he was led to say this, but would say ourselves that only the first
thirty leaves might be called in question and that anyway the assertion
requires substantiation. Certainly if these leaves are not in PurcelTs hand
then many others in the manuscript that are extremely similar to them
must also be thrown open to doubt. It is our belief that these leaves
(like the rest of the volume) are in PurcelTs hand; that they were written
in his late 'teens when his handwriting was in a transitional state; and
that they are almost certainly his earliest surviving autographs.
Front end On a fly-leaf: *A Table of all the anthems contained in this book Sep:
the I3th Anno Domini 1677*
Subheadings, original
Folios Titles subheadings, and
compilers' notes
i By Humfrey O praise the Lord Verse anthem
4 O Lord, my God
7 > Like as the hart
x c G. E. P. Arkwright, 'PurcelTs church music* (Musical Antiquary,
I, 1909-10, pp. 241 and 243); idem, in the Purcell Society edition, vol.
XIHa: Sacred Music, I (London, 1921), pp. ii-iii; A. Hughes-Hughes,
'Henry PurcelTs Handwriting* (Musical Times, 1896, p. 82); and J. A.
Fuller-Maitland and A. H. Mann, Catalogue of the Music in the Fite-
mlliam Museum, Cambridge (London, 1893), p. 37.
2 ioc.cit.
Appendix A
Folios
9v By Blow
I4v
21 By Humfrey
23V
26v Anon.
28v By Blow
31 By Locke
4ov
sing unto the Lord
Sing we merrily
Lord, teach us to number
Lift up your heads
Unidentified instrumental
movement in E minor, in
four parts
Cry aloud
Sing unto the Lord
When the Son of man
The Lord hear thee
1 will hear what the Lord
will say
Subheadings, original
subheadings, and
compilers* notes
Verse Anthem
Reverse end On a fly-leaf;
I42V By Blow
141
138
136 By O. Gibbons
I34V By Blow
I33V By Locke
131
129 By Byrd
I27V By Tallis
126 By Byrd
125
124 By O. Gibbons
I22V By W. Mundy
I2ov By T. Tomkins
upv By N. Giles
118 By Batten
116 By Purcell
II4V By Child
112 [By O. Gibbons]
in By Purcell
108 By Blow
io6v By Purcell
104
102
100
99 By Blow
96 By Purcell
93V By Blow
'God bless M r - Henry Purcell/i682 September the 10 th *
O Lord, I have sinned Verse anthem
God is our hope Full anthem with verse
God, wherefore art thou?
Hosanna to the Son of David Full anthem
Save me, O God Verse anthem
Lord, let me know mine end
Turn thy face from my sins Full anthem with verse
Bow thine ear, O Lord Full anthem
1 call and cry
Prevent us, O Lord
O Lord, make thy servant
Lift up your heads
O Lord, I bow the knee
O Lord, I have loved
O give thanks
Hear my prayer, O God
Save me, O God
Sing we merrily
Almighty and everlasting God Full anthem (anonymous
here) ; only the first few
bars copied, with space
to continue
Blessed is he whose unright
eousness is forgiven Verse anthem
My God, my soul is vex'd
Hear me, O Lord, and that
soon (second version)
Bow down thine ear
Man that is born Funeral sentences
Remember not, O Lord Full anthem
O Lord God of my salvation Verse anthem
O God, thou hast cast us out Full anthem, with verse
Christ being risen from the Verse anthem
dead
1 10 Appendix A
Subheadings, original
Folios Titles subheadings, and
compilers' notes
92 By Purcell O Lord God of hosts Full anthem with verse
89 O God, thou art my God
Unfinished, -with space to
continue
877 Lord, how long wilt thou be
angry? Full anthem with verse
86 O Lord; thou art my God Verse anthem
83v Hear my prayer, O Lord Full anthem. Unfinished,
with space to continue
(no complete copy known)
(ll) BRITISH MUSEUM. ADD. MS. 30930
The second of the three big books of fair copies (measuring 40-7
X 24-8 cm.) accommodates two types of music. The front of the book
is devoted mainly to three- and four-part hymns with continue, which
are settings of metrical versions of the psalms. At the back is instrumental
music. With the exception of a few random notes in the middle of f.44
(which is otherwise blank), the whole of this volume is in PurcelTs hand.
Some autographs must have been removed at an early date and may
have been replaced by blank leaves: 1 in fact, on f. 3 TV Joseph "Warren,
a nineteenth-century owner of the volume, wrote: '10 leaves have been
abstracted here, including the whole of the 4 th - 5 th - 6*. yth. gth. Sonatas.
The above is the ptb./ (He later crossed out V h - 8 th -'.) At all events
the volume contains many blank leaves, which are of exactly the same
sort of paper as those that are written on; while a number of these
leaves appear between separate items of music others actually occur during
the course of compositions that Purcell must be assumed to have copied
on successive leaves. It is probable that this eccentric sequence of
leaves originated accidentally when the volume was rebound early
in 1896: certainly when Warren described this volume 2 he mentioned
blank leaves only between and not during the course of works, and,
moreover, his statement that PurcelTs remark on f.5iv is 'followed by
9 blank pages' is no longer true (there are seven including f.5iv itself).
Front end Title on one of the fly-leaves: 'The Works/of Hen; Purcell./ Anno
Dom. 1680'
Folios Titles Subheadings, original
subheadings, and
3 Plung'd in the confines of despair Hymn compilers' notes
4 O all ye people
6 When on my sickbed
1 For an amplification of these theories cf. Denis Stevens, 'PurcelTs
art of fantasia* (Music and Letters, XXXIII, 1952, pp. 341-2).
2 cf. W. Boyce, Cathedral Music, ed. J. Warren (London, 1849),
vol. n, pp. 18-19.
Appendix A
111
Folios
Titles
7V Gloria Patri in C minor
8v Jehovah, quam multi
ii Beati omnes qui timent
13 Doming non est exaltatum
14 Lord, not to us
1 5v Ah! few and full of sorrows
1 8 O Lord our governor
2ov O, I'm sick of life
22 Lord, I can suffer
23V Hear me, O Lord, and that soon
(first version)
24v Since God so tender a regard
26 Early, O Lord, my fainting soul
28 Hear me, O Lord, the great
support
Reverse end
71 No. I
7ov No. 2
6pv No. 3
68 No. i
67 'Fantazia'
Canon
Motet 1
Subheadings, original
subheadings^ and
compilers' notes
Motet. Only the first few bars copied,
with space to continue (no other copy
known)
Hymn. Unfinished, with space to con
tinue (no complete copy known)
Hymn. Unfinished, with space to con
tinue. Probably only one section is
lacking (no complete copy known)
Hymn
Anthem. Unfinished. Only the first
section copied, with little space to
continue (no complete copy of this
version known, though it is scarcely
different from the second in Fitzwilliam
MS. 88)
Hymn
'Here begineth the 3 part FantaziaY
Very slightly unfinished, with space to
continue (no complete copy known)
'Here begine'th the 4 part FantaziaY
'June the 10. 1680.' The titles are always
at the top and the dates between the top
two staves
66 'Fantazia' 'June the n. 1680.*
65 'Fantazia' 'June the 14. 1680.'
64 'Fantazia* *J une t ^ ie X 9- I( 58o*
63 'Fantazia' 'June the 22. 1680.'
62 'Fantazia' 'June the 23 : 80.'
61 'Fantazia* 'June the 30. 80:'
60 'Fantazia' 'August the 18 80.' The day of the month
is not certain: it was altered from both
'16* and '19*
59 'Fantazia' 'August the 31: 1680.'
58 'Fantazia* 'Feb. the 24 th - 1682/3.' Unfinished. Only
the first 2j lines copied, with space to
continue (no complete copy known).
This looks more like the beginning of a
sonata than of a fantasia
1 Purcell did not himself use the term 'motet'; we use it here to distinguish
Latin settings from English.
112
Folks
Appendix A
Titles
57 'Pavan*
56 'Chacony*
54 'Overture*
53 Two short dances in G
52v Another short dance in G
51 v No". I
50 'Fantazia upon one Note'
48 'In nomine* (in 6 parts)
46 *In nomine*
43v No. i in B minor
4iv 'Sonnata* No. 2 in E flat
3pv 'Sonnata* No. 3 in A minor
Subheadings, original
subheadings, and
compilers' notes
37V 'Sonnata* No. 9 in F
35V 'Sonnata' No. 7 in C
34 *Sonnata* No. 8 in G minor
32 'Sonnata' No. 4 in D minor
Incomplete. First violin and bass only
Incomplete. First violin and bass only, on
the bottom half of the page. At the end:
'Finis*. These last three pieces no doubt
form part of a suite, of which the over
ture was probably intended as the first
movement
'Here Begineth the 5 Part: Fantazias'
'Fantazias of 5 Parts'
'Here Begineth the 6, 7, & 8 part Fan-
tazia's*
'7 Parts*
'Sonnata*s.' These are from the 10 Sonatas
of IV parts, for two violin^ bass and
continue (London, 1697)
This sonata, which lacks most of the
continue, ends on a small piece of a
leaf numbered 37*, bound in at the top
of the volume. On the reverse is part
of the Sonata No. 4 in D minor, in
PurcelTs hand, not copied on to fit but
already there before cutting. See note
to 32 below
On f.3dv three bars have been pasted over
the original
Lacking most of the continue part
Only the first three bars of the violin parts
copied, with space to continue. See
note to 3 9v above
31 *Sonnata* No. 10 in D
(ill) BRITISH MUSEUM. HOYAI MUSIC MS. 20.H.8
This is much the fullest of the three volumes of fair copies ; it measures
40-4 X 25 -2 cm. It contains, at the front, verse anthems (all, except the
one by Blow, with strings) and, at the back, welcome songs, odes, songs,
duets and secular cantatas. 1
Purcell indexed only the anthems. His index includes two associated
with the last days of King Charles n, *I will give thanks unto the Lord' and
1 We use the now accepted term 'cantata' for its convenience and to
avoid confusion, although we are well aware that Purcell himself did not
use it and that the works in questipn are not really comparable with
contemporary cantatas.
Appendix A 113
'O Lord, grant the King a long life', which he did not copy, presumably
because he was too busy composing the next anthem in this book, 'My
heart is inditing', for the coronation of King James II; he did not list
this and the three succeeding anthems in his index. (See Plate IV.)
These last three anthems, much of the third anthem, and the last three
works at the reverse end of the volume are in the hand of an amanuensis,
who was possibly PurcelTs brother Daniel. The greater part of the
previous item at the reverse end is in a third hand. At one or two other
places the hand alters slightly but not enough to suggest that it is not still
PurcelTs. Purcell numbered the works at the reverse end, and he also
added subsidiary numbers, which apparently refer to the number of
sections making up a work. He also marked certain works at either end
with a cross, of the precise significance of which we cannot be sure.
CONTENTS
Front end Title on one of the fly-leaves :
*A SCORE Booke/Containing Severall Anthems w tlL Symphonies*
Subheadings, original
Folios Titles subheadings, and
compilers' notes
4 It is a good thing to give thanks 'Anthems'
TV O praise God in his holiness
I3V Awake, put on thy strength Very largely non-autograph. 1 Lacking
final chorus
i6v By Blow: O pray for the peace
I7V In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust
22V The Lord is my light
25V I was glad when they said
28v My heart is fixed
32v Praise the Lord, O my soul, and
all that is within me
37v Rejoice in the Lord alway Lacking inner parts of symphonies
39V Why do the heathen?
43 Unto thee will I cry
48 I will give t-hanlcs unto thee, A few bars lacking
O Lord
52 They that go down to the sea in Only a few bars copied; this was aband-
slrips oned, no doubt, for the same reason
that the next two anthems in the index
were not copied at all: 1 space was left
for all the missing music
53V My heart is inditing *one of the Anthems Sung at the Corona
tion of King James the 2o7
67 O sing unto the Lord Not autograph 1
75 Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem Not autograph 1
8 1 Praise the Lord, O my soul, Not autograph. 1 Lacking the last few bars
O Lord my God
1 See introductory paragraph to this manuscript.
Folios
Titles
114 Appendix A
Reverse end Tide on one of the fly-leaves (in the hand of Edward Purcell,
father of the Edward Purcell who wrote on the fly-leaf at the front end: *E d H.
Purcell/Grandson to the Author of this Book'): 'Score Booke/ Anthems and
Welcome songs and other songs all by my father.'
Subheadings, original
subheadings, and
compilers* notes
*A Welcome Song in the Year 1681
For the King*
'A Welcome Song for his Royall High
ness at his return from Scodand in the
Yeare 1682'
'A Welcome Song for his Majesty at his
return from New Market October the
211682*
Cantata
Cantata. Unfinished.
Cantata
Cantata
Duet
'(The 9th Ode of Horrace imitated)
(A Dialouge betwixt the Poet &
Lydia)'
'(A dialouge between Charon & Or
pheus.)'
'(The Epicure)'. Duet
'(The Concealment)'. Song
Song
'(Jobs Curse)'. Sacred song
'(Song)'
Cantata
'(A Song that was perform'd to Prince
George upon his Marriage w th the
Lady Ann.)'
*(M r - Cowley's complaint)'. Cantata. On
199 two staves have been pasted over
the original
'(Song) out of Mr. Herbert.* Sacred song
'The Welcome Song perform'd to his
Majesty in the Year 1683'
'A Latine Song made upon S* Cecilia,
whoes day is commerated yearly by all
Musitians made in the year 1683*. Ode
Cantata
'a 2 voc.'
'(A Serandeing Song)'. Cantata.
'(A Seranading Song)'. Duet
245V Swifter, Isis, swifter flow
23 8 What shall be done in behalf of
the man?
232V The summer's absence uncon
cerned we bear
226 How pleasant is this flowery
plain
224 We reap all the pleasures
222v Hark how the wild musicians
sing
218 Hark, Damon, hark
217 Above the tumults of a busy
state
216 While you for me alone had
charms
215 Haste, gentle Charon
2I3V Underneath this myrtle shade
2i2v No, to what purpose should I
speak?
21 iv Draw near, you lovers
211 Let the night perish
210 Amidst the shades and cool re
freshing streams
209 See where she sits
207 From hardy climes
201 In a deep vision's intellectual
scene
198 v With sick and famish* d eyes
I97V Fly, bold rebellion
190 Laudate Cecilliam
188 Oh! what a scene
i86v Though my mistress be fair
i8sv Soft notes and gently raised
Silvia, thou brighter eye of night
Appendix A
Folios
Titles
i8sv Go, tell Aminta, gentle swain
1 82V From those serene and raptur
ous joys
175 Cease, anxious world
1 74v They say you're angry
173 When Teucer from his father
fled
172 If prayers and tears
I7ov p came, I saw, and was undone]
i6pv In some kind dream
169 Awake, and with attention hear
1 66 Why are all the Muses mute?
157 Here's to thee, Dick
155 Ye tuneful Muses
I44V If ever I more riches did desire
140 This poet sings the Trojan wars
139 Sound the trumpet
128 Begin the song
127 By Carissimi: Crucior in hac
Celestial music
Ii6v Now does the glorious day ap
pear
IO5V Of old when heroes thought it
base
90 Arise my Muse
Subheadings, original
subheadings, and
compilers* notes
'2 VOC.'
'The Welcome Song perform* d to his
Majesty in the year 1684*
'(Song On a Ground)*
'The Rich Rivall out of M r Cowly'. Song
Duet
'(Sighs for our Late Sov'raign King
Charles the 2 d )'. Song
'(The Thraldome out of M r Cowley)*.
Not copied, but space left for it
Duet
'(The 34 chapter of Isaiah paraphras'd
by M r Cowley)*. Sacred song
'Welcome Song 1685 being the first Song
performd to King James the 2<V
'The Words by M r Cowley*. Duet
'Welcome Song 1686*
Cantata
'(Anacreon's Defeat)*. Song
'Welcome Song 1687*
'The Resurrection; out of Cowley*s
Pindaricks*. Sacred song. Only a very
few notes of the beginning copied, with
space left to continue
Duet (anonymous here)
'A Song that was perfonn*d at M r
Maidwells a school master on the 5 th
of August 1689 The words by one of
his scholars*. Ode. The greater part is
non-autograph 1
Ode for Queen Mary's birthday, 1689.
Not autograph 1
Ode (Yorkshire Feast Song). Not auto
graph 1
Ode for Queen Mary's birthday, 1690.
Not autograph. 1 Unfinished
(iv) GRESHAM COIXEGE, LONDON. MS.VI.5.6 2
This autograph volume consists of songs, duets and dialogues, most of
them from operas or plays. It is not a companion to the preceding three
volumes: it is smaller (21 -2 X 28 cm.), and it dates from the end of Pur-
cell's life all the music in it that can be dated (and that means the greater
1 See introductory paragraph to this manuscript.
2 cf. "W. Barclay Squire, 'An unknown autograph of Henry Purcell (Musical
Antiquary, in, 1911-12, pp. 5-17).
Appendix A
part) was composed between 1690 and 1695. Purcell may have intended
it for his own use as a singer or for that of a pupil.
Folios Titles
I Now the maids and the men are mat
ing of hay
4 Thus the gloomy world at first
5V Come, all ye songsters
v May the god of wit inspire
TV Hark, how all things with one sound
8 v Thrice happy lovers may you be
lov I looked and saw within the book of
fate
12 Now the night is chas'd away
13 Hark, the echoing air
14 Turn then thine eyes
I5v No, no, poor sufFring heart
i6V In vain 'gainst love I strove
177 Yes, Daphne, in your face I find
i8v Corinna is divinely fair
19 v Thus to a ripe consenting maid
2ov *Tis Nature's voice
22v Thou tun'st this world
23v The fife and all the harmony
25 April who till now
26v Kindly treat Maria's day
27v Ah ! cruel nymph, you give despair
2ov Behold the man that with gigantic
might
34V I see she flies me
36 I love and I must
37v Come let us leave the town
39v Not all my torments can your pity
4OV Fair Chloe my breast so alarms
43v "What can we poor females do?
Sources, subheadings and notes
The Fairy Queen. 'Dialouge', trans
posed to F
The Fairy Queen. Song, transposed to
Bflat
The Fairy Queen. Song, transposed to
Bflat
The Fairy Queen. Song, arranged
from a trio
The Fairy Queen. Song.
The Fairy Queen. Song, with slight
variants
The Indian Emperor. Song
The Fairy Queen. Song, with slight
variants
The Fairy Queen. Song, with slight
variants in the bass
The Fairy Queen. Song, arranged
from a duet
Cleomenes, the Spartan Hero. Song
Henry II, King of England. Song
The Fairy Queen. Song. The original
has 'Xansi' for 'Daphne* and 'looks'
for 'face*
Song
The Old Bachelor. Song.
Hail, bright Cecilia: Ode for St.
Cecilia's Day, 1692. Song, trans
posed to D
Hail, bright Cecilia: Ode for St.
Cecilia's Day, 1692. Song
Hail, bright Cecilia: Ode for St.
Cecilia's Day, 1692. Song, trans
posed to A
Celebrate this festival: Ode for Queen
Mary's birthday, 1693. Song
Celebrate this Festival: Ode for Queen
Mary's birthday, 1693. Song
Song
The Richmond Heiress, or A Woman
once in the Right. *A Dialouge be
tween a Mad Man & Mad Woman'
Aureng-Zebe. Song
'Bell Barr'. Song
The Fairy Queen, 'a 2'
Song
Duet
Song
Appendix A
Folios
Titles
44V Celia frowns -whene'er I woo her
46v "What a sad fate is mine (first setting)
48v When first I saw the bright Aurelia's
eyes
5ov Since from my dear
5iv Sawney is a bonny lad
52v Leave these useless arts in loving
53v I sigh'd and own'd my love
55V There's not a swain on the plain
56v Strike the viol
57V Olinda in the shades unseen
58v I fain would be free
59v [I burn, I burn]
6ov Ah! how sweet it is to love
6iv Let the dreadful engines
66v Luanda is bewitching fair
6yv "Whilst I with grief
6pv Ah ! what pains, what racking
thoughts
70v "Tis vain to fly like wounded deer
117-
Sources, and compilers 9 notes
The Double Dealer. Song. The orig
inal has 'Cynthia' for 'Celia*
Song. Voice part and a few passages
of the bass only
The Prophetess, or the History of
Dioclesian. Song
The Prophetess, or the History of
Dioclesian. Song; the bass lacks
all but the last ten bars and two
bars to begin the reprise of the
second section
Song
Epsom Wells. Song, arranged from a
duet
The Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent
Adultery. Song
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. Song
Come ye sons of art away: Ode for
Queen Mary's birthday, 1694. Song
Song
Song. Voice part only (no bass
known)
The Comical History of Don Quixote,
part ii. The beginning of the words
only (no music by Purcell known).
A setting by John Eccles of this text
appears in Don Quixote. Purcell
may have intended either only to
copy this song (which, as sung by
Mrs. Bracegirdle, inspired his own
'Whilst I with grief see note to
fd-yv below) or to compose a
setting of his own
Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr,
Song. Voice part only
The Comical History of Don Quixote,
part i. Song. Voice part and a few
notes of the bass only
Abdelazer, or the Moor's Revenge.
Song. Voice part only
The Spanish Friar, or the Double
Discovery. Song. Unfinished, with
space to continue. 'On Mrs. Brace-
girdle Singing (I Burn &c) in the
pky of Don Quixote.'
Song. Voice part only (no bass
known). Unfinished, with space
to continue
Song. Not Henry Purcell's auto
graph. Attributed to Daniel Purcell
in Thesaurus Musicus (London,-
1096)
n8
Folios
Appendix A
Titles
Sources, and compilers 9 notes
72V What ungrateful devil makes you Song. Not Henry Purcell's auto*
come ? graph ; the handwriting is the same
as that of the previous song.
Attributed to Daniel Purcell in
Gentleman's Journal, 1693
Reverse end (upside down)
77V Since, Chloris, the power of your > Song. Voice part and first note of the
charms bass only (no complete copy
known). This setting is probably
not by Purccll. It is not in his hand;
the hand is different from that of
ff. 70-73
(v) MISCELLANEOUS MANUSCRIPTS
Titles
Behold now, praise the
Lord
Benedicite (from the
Morning Service in B flat)
Blessed are they that fear
the Lord
The Fairy Queen
Sources
B.M. Add. MS. 30932,
121 (the first system of
the opening symphony
on a pasted-on sh"p, 121*
(see under 'Sonata* below))
Bodleian MS.Mus.a. I (the
sole item)
B.M.Add.MS.3093i,f.6i
Genres and compilers 1
notes
Verse anthem with strings
Service. For one passage
on p. 2 there are two
versions. For a note on
the reverse side of the
second version see un
der Monteverdi in Sec
tion n
Verse anthem with strings
Opera
Hail, bright Cecilia
I was glad
Royal Academy MS.i
(the sole item)
Only a small part of this score is autograph, as follows:
2a First part of the Second Music, f.3 (partly autograph)
2b Rondeau, 4
6 First Act Tune, 20
26 Third Act Tune, f.54v
35 See my many-colour*d fields, 77 (partly autograph)
38 Fourth Act Tune, f.8iv
49 Sure the dull god of marriage, 97 (partly autograph)
51 Chaconne, i65V (probably autograph)
Bodleian MS.Mus.c.26,
22
Barber MS.sooi, p. 292
Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,
1692
Very largely autograph;
from half-way through
67 to the end (f-69v)
it is in the hands of
two copyists
Verse Anthem with
Strings
Appendix A
Titles
In the midst of life (fint
version)
In thee, O Lord, do I put
my trust
Let mine eyes run down
with tears
My beloved spake (first
version)
My heart is fixed
O give thanks
Of old when heroes
Out of the deep
Plung'd in the confines of
despair
Sonata for three violins
and continue
Sources
119
Genres, and compilers'
notes
B.M.Add.MS.3093 1, 81 Funeral sentences
Bodleian MS.Mus.c.26,
10
Bodleian MS.Mus.c.26,
U
B.M.Add.MS.30932,
87
Barber MS.50OI, p. 308
Fitewuliam MS. 152
(32 F 23), p. 5<5
B.M.MS. Egerton 2596
(the sole item)
B.M.Add.MS.3093i, 67
Barber MS-5ooi, p. 328
B.M.Add.MS.30932,
f.I2I*V
The Lord is my light
Thou knowest, Lord, the
secrets of our hearts (first
setting, first version)
Who can from joy re
frain?
Who hath believed our
report?
Barber MS.500I, p. 276
Verse anthem with strings
Verse anthem
Second versions of two
passages are inserted
over the first versions
Verse anthem with strings
Verse anthem with strings
Verse anthem
An organ score, dated
'1693'. The last page
(p. 61) is not autograph
Ode (Yorkshire Feast
Song)
Verse anthem
Hymn
Sonata
Three lines of the begin
ning of the second
violin part (marked
'flute') already on the
reverse side of the slip
used for the first system
of 'Behold now, praise
the Lord* (see above),
probably in PurcelTs
hand. In the Purcell
Society edition, vol.
Xma (London, 1921),
p. xi, it is printed a
third too low 1
Verse anthem with strings
B.M.Add.MS.3093i, 83 Funeral sentences
B.M.Add.MS.30934, 79 Ode for the Duke of
Gloucester's birthday,
1695
B.M.Add.MS.30932, 94 Verse anthem
1 Also c G. E. P. Arkwright's query in Musical Antiquary, I,
1909-10, p. 128.
120
II.
Composers
Anon
Humfrey
WORKS NOT
Titles
Holy, holy
By the waters
of Babylon
Appendix A
BY PURCELL BUT
Sources
Fitzwilliam MS. 152
(32 F 23), p. 54
B.M.Add.MS.30932,
52
IN HIS HAND 1
Genres, and compilers'
notes
Service. An organ score
Verse anthem. It has been
said that Purcell ad-
Monteverdi Cruda Amarilli
Bodleian MS.Mus.a. i,
p.2
this is probably not so.
Madrigal. For the second
version of a short
passage in his *Bene-
dicite* (from the Morn
ing Service in B fiat) (see
Section I (v)) Purcell
used the blank side of
a leaf containing on the
other side the begin
ning of his transcrip
tion of this madrigal
from Monteverdi's 'IZ
quinto libro de madrigal?
(Venice, 1605). What
remains is a slightly
altered version of the
first few bars of the top
four voices, with the
first two words only 2
III. SUPPOSITITIOUS AUTOGRAPHS
This is a list of manuscripts which have been described in authoritative
printed sources as wholly or partly autograph, concerning whose authen
ticity no refutation appears hitherto to have been published. In our
opinion they are certainly not autographs.
Sources
B.M.Add,MS.5337, 27
B.M.Add.MS.i7784
B.M.Add.MS.33240, i
Bodleian MS.Mus.c.27*
Works
The Music in Bonduca
Bass parts of anthems
Basso continue part of 'Welcome to all the pleasures'
(Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, i683) 3
Wno can from joy refrain? (Ode for the Duke of
Gloucester's birthday, 1695)
1 The works listed here are those not listed in Section I.
2 cf. Franklin Zimmerman, 'Purcell and Monteverdi* (Musical Times, July
1958, pp. 368-9) and Plate IL
8 A. Hughes-Hughes, having stated in 'Henry PurcelTs Handwriting' (Musical
Times, 1896, p. 81) that this is not an autograph, labelled it 'Autograph' in the
Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum, E (London, 1908), p. an.
Appendix A 121
Sources Works
Bodleian MS.Mus.c.27, 3 The songs in Don Quixote
Bodleian MS.Mus.c.28, Now does the glorious day appear (Ode for Queen
.78 Mary's birthday, 1689)
Fitzwilliam MS.I52 Organ score of Gloria in G (anonymous here, but
(32 F 23), p. 55 by O. Gibbons)
Library of Congress, Song, Underneath this myrtle shade (The Epicure)
Washington, D.C.,
MS.ML96.P.89
Sibley A manuscript containing the 12 Sonatas of III parts
(London, 1683)
Stanford, MS. i Te Deum and Jubilate in D, and song, When first
Dorinda's piercing eyes
IV. RELIABLE NON-AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SOURCES OF MAJOR
WORKS BY PURCELL
Works Sources
Dido and Aeneas 1 Tenbury MS. 1266
The Fairy Queen Royal Academy MS.i (partly autograph see
Section I (v))
The Indian Queen B.M.Add.MSS.3i449, 31453, f. 39, and 31455
King Arthur Royal Academy MS.3
The Prophetess, or the History of Tenbury MS.i266;B.M.Add.MS.3i455
Dioclesian
The Tempest, or the Enchanted Tenbury MS. 1266
Island
Morning and Evening Service in B Fitzwilliam MS. 117 (30 G 10), p. 23irev
flat
Te Deum and Jubilate in D Stanford, MS.i (cf. Section IE); York Minster
Library MS.M.9-S.
12 Sonatas of III parts Conservatoire Royale de Musique, Brussels,
MS-V.i4.98i (said to have been copied
from the autograph)
B.M. Royal Music MS.2O.h.9, f.98v; a MS.
in Sibley (cf. Section DO); Gresham College,
London, MS.VI.4.I9
10 Sonatas of IV parts Gresham College, London, MS.VI.4.I9
1 See Appendix C for recent information about the manuscript of Dido and
Aeneas in Tokyo. [Editor.]
IHP
Appendix B
FURTHER SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY EVIDENCE BEARING ON THE
PERFORMANCE OF PURCELL'S WORKS
Compiled by ROBERT DONINGTON
THE quotations printed below make interesting reading for the light
they throw on the interpretation of PurcelTs music, not as we see it
today, but as its own contemporaries and near-contemporaries would
have seen it. They contain, in fact, some of the evidence on which the
conclusions in Chapter 8 are based. Such evidence is not always avail
able from sources as near in time and place as we could wish, but none
of the following is far distant, and taken together we believe it builds up
a picture as authentic as it is in some ways unexpected.
[A composer must needs] be transported with some Musical fury; so
that himself scarcely knoweth what he doth, nor can presently give a
reason of his doing. . . .
Charles Butler, Principles of Mustek (London, 1636), p. 92.
But when that Vast-Conchording-Unity of the whole Congregational-
Chorus came (as I may say) Thundering in, even so, as it made the very
Ground shake under us; (Oh the unutterable ravishing Soul's delight!)
la the which I was so transported, and wrapt up into High Contemplations,
that there was no room left in my whole Man, viz. Body, Soul and Spirit,
for any thing below Divine and Heavenly Raptures. . . .
Thomas Mace, Musicfcs Monument (London, 1676), p. 19.
ACCIDENTALS
As for the [7 ... [except in the key signature] it serves only for that
particular Note before which it is placed. . . . [The] |j takes away a
Semitone from the sound of the Note before which it is set, to make it
more grave or fiat: [the] # doth add a Semitone to the Note to make it
more acute or sharp: . . . [except in the key-signature] it serves only for
that particular Note before which it is apphed.
Christopher Simpson, Compendium (London, 1665), ed. of 1732, p. 5.
Appendix B 123
ORNAMENTAL EMBELLISHMENTS
A piece of music can be beautiful, and please not, for want of being
performed with the necessary embellishments, of which embellishments
the most part are not marked on the paper, whether because in fact they
cannot be marked for lack of symbols for the purpose, or whether it has
been considered that too many marks encumber and take away the
clearness of a melody, and would bring a kind of confusion.
Benigne de Bacilly, UArt deBien Chanter (Paris, 1668), p. 135.
[The boy singer Jemmy Bowen] when practising a Song set by Mr.
Purcell, some of the Music told him to grace and run a Division in such
a Place. O let him alone, said Mr. Purcell; he will grace it more naturally
than you or I can teach him*
Anthony Aston, Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber,Esq. (1748), reported by R. W.
Lowe in his ed. of Gibber's Apology, n (London, 1889), p. 312.
It is the hardest task that can be to pen the manner of artificial [in
the sense of 'made with art'] Gracing an upper part. It hath bin attempted,
and in print, but with Woefull Effect . . . the Spirit of that art is Incom
municable by wrighting.
Roger North, B.M. Add. MS. 32533, very early eighteenth century,
f.io6v.
TEMPO AND RUBATO
There being nothing more difficult in Musick then playing of true
time, 'tis therefore necessary to be observ'd by all practitioners, of
which there are two sorts, Common time and Triple time, & is dis-
tinguish'd by this C this (p or this j) mark, the first is a very slow move
ment, the next a little faster, and die kst a brisk and airry time, & each
of them has allways to the length of one Semibrief in a barr, which is to
be held in playing as long as you can moderately tell four. . . .
Triple time consists of either three or six Crochets in a barr, and is to
be known by this ! , this zi, this 3 or this I marke, to the first there is
three Minums in a barr, and is commonly play'd very slow, the second
has three Crochets in a barr, and they are to be play'd slow, the third has
the same as the former but is play'd faster, the last has six Crochets
in a barr & is commonly to brisk tunes as Jiggs and Paspys.
Preface (not actually known to be PurceU's) in his posthumous Choice Collection
for the Harpsichord (London, 1696).
1 This quotation is cited by Professor. J. A. Westrup in his Purcell
(London, 1937), p. 76.
124 Appendix B
Sometimes a Tripla consists of three Semibreves to a Measure, each
Semibreve being shorter than a Minim in Common Time,
The more common Tripla, is three Minims to a Measure, each
Minim about the length of a Crochet in Common Time.
Christopher Simpson, Compendium (London, 1665), pp. 13 .ff.
Time . . . taken now slowly, now swiftly, and even held in the air,
according to the expression of the music, or the sense of the words.
The closes, though written quick, are to be performed much drawn
out; as the end of the section or close approaches, the tempo should be
increasingly held back.
Girolamo Frescobaldi, Toccatas (Rome, 1614), Preface, i.
Adagio and Grave . . . import nothing but a very slow movement:
Presto Largo, Poco Largo or Largo by it Self, a middle movement: Allegro,
and Vivace, a very brisk, swift and fast movement.
Henry Purcell, Sonatas of III parts (London, 1683), Preface.
Time is a various and undetermined thing . . . [there are] grave, adagio,
largo, vivace, allegro, presto, and sometimes prestissimo. The first
expresses the slowest Movement, and the rest gradually quicker; but
indeed they leave it altogether to Practice to determine the precise
Quantity Movements are swifter in triple than in, common time . . .
the allegro of one species of triple is a quicker Movement than that of
another, so very uncertain these things are.
Alexander Malcolm, Treatise ofMusick (Edinburgh, 1731), P- 394-
An allegro . . . ought never to exceed a controlled and reasonable
movement.
Joachim Quantz, -Essay (Berlin, 1752), XH, n.
[In slow movements, avoid] the error of a sluggish, dragging per
formance.
C. P. E. Bach, Essay (Berlin, 1753), transl. W. Mitchell (London, 1949), P- 152-
RHYTHM: DOTTED NOTES, ETC.
It is not possible to determine exactly the time of the little note
which follows the dot.
Joachim Quantz, Essay (Berlin, 1752), XI, 21.
The short notes which follow dots are always made shorter than the
written text indicates.
C. P. E. Bach, Essay (Berlin, 1753), P- JI 3-
Appendix B
Although, the values of the Treble do not seem to fit with those of the
Bass, it is customary to write thus.
Francois Couperin, Pieces de Clavecin, Bk. H (Paris, 1717), note to loth Ordre,
PHRASING AND ARTICULATION
On the last note of . . . passages . . . you must pause, even if this note
is a quaver or a semiquaver for such a pause avoids confusion between
one phrase and another.
Girolamo Frescobaldi, Toccatas (Rome, 1614), Preface, 4.
In proper places . . . make a kind of Cessation, or standing still,
sometimes Longer, and sometimes Shorter, according to the Nature, or
requiring ... of the Musick.
Thomas Mace, Mustek *s Monument (London, 1676), p. 109.
You must not join notes which should be detached, nor detach notes
which should be joined. The notes should not sound as if they were stuck
together with glue. On wind instruments the tongue should give
articulation, on stringed instruments the bow. . . . Ideas which belong
together should not be separated, but when their sense is completed they
should be made separate, whether a pause is shown or not.
Joachim Quantz, Essay (Berlin, 1752), X, 10.
If by your Manner of Bowing you lay a particular Stress on the Note
at the Beginning of every Bar, so as to render it predominant over the
rest, you alter and spoil the true Air of the Piece.
Francesco Geminiani, Art of Playing on the Violin (London 1740), ed. of 1751 ,
P-9-
TEXTURE AND DYNAMICS
If in the beginning of the composition an elegant fugal subject occurs,
this must be produced with a clearer and more decisive voice . . . and the
succeeding voices, if they begin the same fugal subject, ... are to be
enunciated in the same way: this is to be observed in all the voices, when
renewed fugal entries occur, so that the coherence and arrangement of all
the fugal entries can be heard.
Hermann Finck, Practica Musica (Wittenberg, 1556), Lib. V, p. 7.
Entries should be emphasized a little so as to be instantly and clearly
perceived by the hearer.
Ludovico Zacconi, Prattica di Musica (Rome, 1592), LXVI, p. 59.
126 Appendix B
Keep still an equal Sound [except in a point of imitation]. . . .
Charles Butler, Principles ofMusick (London, 1636), p. 98.
Always keep the advantage of being able to produce, at need, after the
forte & fortissimo, and after the piano a. pianissimo. . . For to perform a
whole piece in one uniform manner and with a melody always equal, in
short to keep, so to speak, always the same colour: that becomes tedious.
Increase or abate the tone as required.
Joachim Quantz, Essay (Berlin, 1752), pp. 92 and 108.
Dissonances are generally played more loudly and consonances more
softly, because the former stimulate and exacerbate the emotions, while
the latter calm them.
G, P. E. Bach, Essay (Berlin, 1753), I, 3-
INSTRUMENTAL STYLE AND TEXTURE
A Handsom-Smooth-Sweet-Smart-Clear Stroke; or else Play not at
all.
Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument (London, 1676), p. 248.
[Vibrato] imitates a certain sweet agitation of the Voice on [instru
mental] Sounds; that is why one uses it in all circumstances when the
length of the Note allows of it; and it must last as long as the Note.
Jean Rousseau, Traitt de la Viole (Paris, 1687), p. 100.
Appendix C
A NOTE ON THE NANKI COLLECTION OF
PURCELL'S WORKS
IMOGEN HOLST
WHEN the W. H. Cummings library was sold at Sotheby's in
1917, a 'remainder' of over four hundred items was bought by
the late Marquis Tokugawa and sent to Tokyo to form part
of the Nanki Library. The 'Catalogue of the W. H. Cummings
Collection in the Nanki Music Library', published in Tokyo
in 1925, mentions the following works by Purcell:
12 Sonatas of III parts, for 2 violins and bass. (3 MSS. and
two printed) folio, 5 vols. Pkyford and Carr, London,
1683.
Ten sonatas in four parts, for 2 violins and bass, bass parts, 1693.
An ode performed upon the Duke of Gloucester's birthday, 1695.
(Copies from composer's own MS. by V. Novello and
S. Wesley.) obL 8vo.
Di do and Aeneas, folio, Saec. XVHL
Indian Queen. (Full score) obi. folio.
Other references to Purcell in the catalogue include:
Purcell, Birds (sic) Tallis, &c.
Church Services
Early manuscript scores (containing 21 pieces by 6 composers)
folio. Saec. XWI
Purcell, Blow, Croft and others.
A collection of music compositions (written by different
bands) folio.
Purcell, Blow, Tallis, &c.
Anthems.
(containing 29 pieces by n composers in full-score with
autograph of Dr. Blow.) folio. Saec. XVm
128 Appendix C
The Dido and Aeneas is the copy which Cummings mentions
in the preface to his edition of the opera, published by the
Purcell Society in 1889. In this preface he also mentions 'an old
set of instrumental and vocal parts which had been used in per
formance'. These he collated with his own manuscript score and
the Ouseley MS. (now Tenbury 1266). Unfortunately he left
no record in his Purcell Society edition of where his own manu
script score had differed from the Tenbury MS. or from the
set of parts, with the result that since 1917 no other editor has
been able to find out what the Cummings MS. contained.
When Edward J. Dent prepared his edition of the work for
the Oxford University Press in 1925 he made a fresh collation
of the available manuscripts. He was able to see the set of parts,
which he refers to as representing the concert version printed
by the Musical Antiquarian Society in 1841. But he was not
able to see the Cummings score; he was not even aware that it
was in Japan.
This started the legend of the 'lost' manuscript of Di do. Other
legends have grown during the last few years. One of the most
recent was the legend that the score was in the possession of
an American collector, that it had been locked up in a cellar
in Baltimore and that all enquirers were turned away without
being allowed to see it. By the beginning of 1958 this particular
legend had become alarmingly persistent, so I wrote to Professor
Anthony Lewis, to ask if there were any truth in it. He replied:
'It would be an understatement to say that the position is ob
scure'; and he advised me to write to Dr. J. M. Coopersmith
of the Library of Congress in Washington. Dr. Coopersmith
wrote that in 1956 he had been asked to expertize a portion of the
Nanki Library which had been offered for sale in America, but that,
to his regret, he found no Purcell manuscript in the collection.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Britten was revising his edition of the
opera for publication, and was trying to make up his mind
about several inconsistencies in the Tenbury MS. When I told
him of the rumours about the lost' Cummings MS. he asked
his friend Mr. Reginald Close, who had been British Council
Appendix C
representative in Tokyo for many years, if he could get any
reliable information about the score. By that time the galley
proofs of this book had been corrected and I was beginning to
wonder if even the unfailing patience of the Oxford University
Press would allow me to take much longer over the search.
And then an exciting letter arrived from Miss Seymour Whin-
yates, Director of the Music Department of the British Council,
telling us that Mr. W. R. McAlpine, Deputy Director of the
British Council in Tokyo, with the help of Mr. Reiser Sakka
and Miss Dorothy Britton, had had an interview with Mr.
Kyuhei Oki, the present owner of the Di do manuscript, and that
Mr. Oki was most generously allowing Mr. Britten to see a
microfilm of the score.
The future of the manuscript is still uncertain, but further
letters from Tokyo have brought the welcome news that Mr.
Oki does not intend to let it go out of his hands unless he is
sure that it will be available for research. This statement is in
itself a valuable contribution to musicology, and will bring
Mr. Oki the gratitude of all lovers of PurcelTs music. Mr. Oki
has also suggested that it may be possible to arrange a loan
exhibition of the manuscript in England during 1959, as part
of the celebration of PurcelTs tercentenary.
The Oki MS. contains the same amount of music as the
Tenbury MS. The missing end of Act II (see p. 25) is not, alas,
included. The first nine pages are in a later hand than the rest
of the manuscript: they date from the second half of the nine
teenth century, and contain editor's marks such as 'sf, pp, ores,
Allegretto Grazioso\ &c. In these pages Belinda is Anna, as in
the Musical Antiquarian edition of 1841; she sings an octave
lower, in the alto clef. Then, on page 10, the writing changes
to early nineteenth century (approximately 1800 to 1810), and
remains the same for the rest of the work. Belinda becomes her
true self, and all rn^rn essentials in the work are the same as in
the Tenbury MS.
It seems possible that both the Tenbury MS. and the Oki
MS. were copied, at different times and in different hands, from
Appendix C
the same earlier manuscript of which no traces have so far been
discovered. Several obvious mistakes in copying are identical
in the Tenbury and the Oki manuscripts, though on the whole
the Oki MS. is the more accurate of the two in ordinary details
of copying where there can be no question of any alternative
interpretation.
In the Oki MS. time signatures are modernized, 3 becoming |,
&c. Key signatures are modernized: three flats for C minor
and four for F minor, compared with Tenbury's two and three.
Double bars are added at the end of each short section, contra
dicting the continuity of the Tenbury MS. Accidentals are
sometimes, but not always, modernized. For instance, the second
half of the third bar of the Ground in 'Oft she visits' has the
written natural and flat that were not considered necessary in
the Tenbury MS. Dynamics are not altered: the Oki copyist
keeps to PurcelTs 'soft* and 'loud 5 .
Many of the final cadences differ considerably in their melodic
interpretation from the written graces of Tenbury. In 'Fear no
danger', the end of the line 'The Hero loves as well as you' is
given three crotchets in the last bar but one instead of the familiar
crotchet and minim. Elsewhere, the cadences in Oki are 'plainer'
than in Tenbury: 'this open air' and 'Carthage flames to
morrow' are written as straightforward crotchets.
One of the most illuminating results of comparing the two
manuscripts is finding that they agree in several of the 'awk
ward' passages that editors have fought shy of. Near the end
of 'To the hills and the vales', at 'the triumphs of love and of
beauty', both manuscripts have a falling augmented fourth in
the soprano, involving consecutive sevenths with the bass.
Neither Cummings nor Dent found the cadence acceptable:
each of them smoothed it out and offered his own alternative.
This is one of many details in the Oki MS. which may bring
us nearer to what Purcell intended. 1
1 Mr. Britten wishes to acknowledge his gratitude to Mr. Oki for
his kindness in allowing these details of information about his manu
script to be given in this book.
INDEX
Abdelazar, 99
Abell, John, 56^, 58
accidentals, 77-79, 122, 130
Acts and Galatea (Eccles), i8n
Agazzari, Agostino, 79
Albion and Albanius, 31
Allegro, L', 3
Alleluia, 7
Anatomist, The, 22, 33
Annals of Opera, 17
Arkwright, G. E. P., io8n,
Arne, Thomas, 43
Arnold, F. T., 84**
Art of Accompaniment from a
Thorough-Bass, The, 84^
Art de Bien Chanter, I/, 123
Art of Playing on the Violin, The, 97,
98, 125
Arundell, Dennis, 92^
Aston, Anthony, 123
Auden, W. H., 4
Ayresfor the Theatre, in
Bach, C. P. E., 124, 126; J. C.,43 ;
J, S., 5, 42, 52, 75, 81, 94
y, Benigne de, 123
Balkd Opera, 45
Barber Institute of Fine Arts,
University of Birmingham,
106, 118, 119
Batten, Adrian, 109
Bellini, 93
Bergmann, Walter, 13
Betterton, Thomas, 16, 19, 20, 30
Birmingham University, see Bar
ber
Birthday Odes, 45, 46, 58, 59,
Blagrave, Richard, 57; Thomas,
57, 62
Blessed Virgins Expostulation, The,
5,12
Blow, John, 3, 36, 37, 58, 60, 62,
68, 69, 71, 108, 109, 112, 113,
127
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 106,
118, 119, 120
Boucher, Josias, 56^, 58
Bowen, Jemmy, 123
Bowman, John, 59
Boyce, William, lion
Boyden, David D., $6n
Bracegirdle, Mrs., 33, 117
British Council, The, 128, 129
British Museum, 106, 107, 110-15,
119, 120, 121
Britten, Benjamin, 25, 26, 28, 34,
128, 129, 130
Britton, Dorothy, 129
Brussels, Conservatoire Royale de
Musique, 121
Brutus of Alba (i) (Tate), 15, 31;
(2) Powell and Verbruggen,
31
Burnaby, William, 21
Burney, Charles, 80
Butler, Charles, 122, 126
Byrd, 44, 52, 109, 127
Carissimi, 115
Carse, Adam, 65
Carter, Andrew, 63
Coition Odes, see Odes for St.
Cecilia s Day
Celemene, 12
132
Index
Chapel Royal, 53-66, 68
Cheque-Book, see Old Cheque-
Book
Child, Harold, 18
Child, William, 56", 57, 58, 62, 109
Choice Collection of Lessons for the
Harpsichord or Spinet, A, 68,
81, 123
Christ Church, Oxford, 54
Church Services, 127
Gibber, Colley, 123
Cinthia andEndimion, 3 1
clefs, 104, 105
Close, Reginald, 128
coloratura, 10, 44, 46
Commedia dell'Arte, 31
Comparison Between the French and
Italian Music, 75
Comparison Between the Two Stages,
A, 19, 20
Compendium of Musick, A, loin,
122, 124
Congreve, William, 19, 3^
Coopersmith, J. M., 128
Corelli, Arcangelo, 76, 80
couler, 92
Country dances, 98-102
Couperin, Francois, 125
Crespion, Stephen, 56^, 62
Croft, William, 127
Cummings,W.H., 14, *5, *7, I2 7,
128
Daily Courant, 33
Damascene, Alexander, 58
D'Avenant, William, 35
Dennis, John, 20
Dent, Edward J., 18, 25, 128
detach^, 96
Dialogues, 12
Dido and Aeneas, 2, 3, 4, 8, 14-3 4,
35-41, 46, 50, 75, 121, 127-30
Diodesian, 4, 36, 45, 98
Divine Hymns, 3, 5, 8, n
Division Violist, The, 80, 95
Dolmetsch, Nathalie, 95
Don Quixote, 59
Dorset Garden Theatre, 18, 19, 3*,
32
dotted notes, 88-92, 124
Dowland, i, 2, 46
Downes, John, 33
Drury Lane, Theatre Royal, 19,
20, 31, 32, 34
Dryderj,4, 6, 31, 37
Duke's Men, The, 18
D'Urfey, Thomas, 16, 17, 31
dynamics, 94, 95, 125, 130
Eastman School of Music Library,
Rochester, N.Y., io6, i i2i
Ebner, Wolfgang, 79
Eccles, John, 20, 33, 7
Edmunds, Jonathan, in
Eliot, T. S., 46-50
Empress of Morocco, The, 22
English Dancing Master, The, 98
English Opera Group, The, 25
Essay (C. P. E. Bach), 124, 126;
(Joachim Quantz), 124-6
Evelyn, John, 58, 61, 62
Evening Hymn, 10
Fairest Isle, 9
Fairy Queen, The, i, 4, 18, 19, 34,
36, 45, 50
Fantasias, 94
Fatal Hour, The, 4
Faure, Gabriel, 7
'Fear no danger', 2, 17, 130
figuring, 7, 9, 78, 79, 4
Finger, Godfrey, 33
Fink, Hermann, 125
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge,
106, 107-10, 119, 120, 121
Folk-song, English, 43
Index
133
Foundations of English Opera, 18, 25
Frescobaldi, 71, 87, 124, 125
From rosy bowers, 4, 5
Fuller-Maitland, J. A., io8n
Galliard, I
GalliardJ. E., 75W, 95
Gay, John, 43
Geminiani, Francesco, 97, 125
Gentleman s Journal 60, 61, 118
Gibbons, Christopher, 69; Or
lando, 44, 46, 109, 121
Gildon, Charles, 17, 19, 20-23, 31
Giles, Nathaniel, 109
Gluck, 4
Golden Sonata, The, 8
Goodgroome, Theodore, 57; John
(i), 57; John (2), 57
Gostling, John, 59, 63
Grabu, Louis, 31
Graces, 60, 81, 123, 130
Gresham College, London, 105,
106, 115-18, 121
Grove, The, 32
Groves Dictionary of Music (5th
edition, 1954), S^n, 8in, 9in,
Hail, bright Cecilia, 60
Hamlet, 47-50
Handel, 3, 13, 43, 45, 52
Harding, James, 57; John, 57
Hark the echoing air, 10
Hark how the wild musicians sing, 92,
93
Harmonia Sacra, 8
Hart, James, 58
Heinichen,J. D., 86
'Here the deities approve', 3
Heritage of Music, The, 35
Heywood, Thomas, 57, 63
Hodgson, Mrs., 33, 34
Holder, William, 62
'Hole in the Wall, The', 99
Hoist, Gustav, 35
*How blest are shepherds', 3, 10
Howell, John, 59
Hughes-Hughes, A., 10371, 108,
Humfrey, Pelham, 57, 109, 120
I attempt from love's sickness to fly,
i, 2, 9, 12
I spy Celia, 12
I take no pleasure, 2
If love's a sweet passion, i
If music be the food of love, I
Improvisation, 3, 76, 77
from figured bass, 7, 9, 84
of instrumental variations, 80
of organ solos, 68
Indian Queen, The, 26, 31, 45, 127
inequality, 91-92
Island Princess, The, 34
Jew of Venice, The, 21
JoVs Curse, 4, 5, 7, n
Jones, Geraint, 26
Jonson, Ben, 20
Judgment of Paris, The, 32
Key signatures, 104, 130
King Arthur, 4, 9, 18, 19, 3<5, 45, 59
Kircher, Athanasius, 86
Lamentation on the Death of Henry
Purcell, 31
Longer, Suzanne, 47, 48
Lansdowne, George Granville
Lord, 21
Laugier, Abbe*, 86
Lenton, John, 5<5, 5&
*Let sullen Discord smile', 12
Leveridge, Mr., 34
Lewis, Anthony, 9 IK, 128
Library of Congress, Washington,
121, 128
134
Index
'Lilliburlero', 44
Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, 16-
19, 21-24, 30, 32-34
Lisle's Tennis Court, 19
Locke, Matthew, 22, 57, 69, 95,
109
Loewenberg, Alfred, 17
London Gazette, 32
Lord,, what is man, n
Louis XTV, 45, 57
lourer, 92, 93
Love Betray d, 21
Love for Love, 19
Loves of Mars and Venus, The, 33
Love's Victim, 20
Lowe, Edward, 54, 60
Lowe, R. W., 123
Lully, Jean Baptiste, 45
McAlpine, W. R., 129
Mace, Thomas, 87, 89, 97, 122,
125, 126
McLean, Hugh, 67, 71
Mad Bess, 5, n
Magic Flute, The, 4
Maillant, Pierre, 85
Malcolm, Alexander, 124
Man of Mode, The, 22
Mann, A. H., io8n
Marsh, Alphonso (i), 57; Al-
phonso (2), 57, 59
Masque, 4, 17, 18, 21
Man is for the woman made, 7, 10 Olinda, 2
Mozart, 4, 7, 46
Mozart, Leopold, 97
Mundy, William, 109
Music and Letters, lion
Music for a While, 10
musicaficta, 77-79
Musical Antiquarian Society, 14,
128
Musical Antiquary, io8, n$n
Musical Quarterly, 7$n, 95^, 96*2
Musical Times, 103 n, io8n, I2on
Musick's Monument, 87, 122, 125,
126
My Beloved spake, 44
Nanki Music Library, 14, 12in, 127
Niedt, F. E., 79
North, Roger, 95, 123
notes inhales, see inequality
Novello, Vincent, 52
O Mistress mine, 44
O Solitude, 4
Odes for St. Cecilia's Day, 45, 58,
59,60
Oki, Kyuhei, 129, 130
Old Cheque-Book, 53, 54, 62
Oldmixon, John, 30, 32
Measure for Measure, 16-18, 20-22, Oroonoko, 12
On the brow of Richmond Hill, 10
Orchestra in the XVIIIth Century,
The, 65
Ornamentation, 70, 78-81, 84, 123
26, 30-33
Merchant of Venice, The, 21
Mermaid Theatre, 26
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 50
Milton, 3
Mitchell, W M 124
Monteverdi, 42, 104, 105, n 8, 120
Monthly Musical Record, 103 n
Motteux, P. A., 60
Orpheus Britannicus, 8, 12
Orpheus and Euridice (masque), 22
Ouseley, Rev. Sir Frederick, 14, 128
Pate, Mr., 34, 61
Pavan, I
Pears, Peter, 7
Pepys,. Samuel, 57
Phaeton, 31
Index
135
Pious Celinda, 10
Playford, Henry, 98
Playford, John, 97, 9$
pointer, 92, 93
Pordage, Mr., 62
Powell, George, 31
Practica Musica (Fink), 125
Prattica cti Musica (Zacconi), 125
Priest, Josias, 16,23, 33, 3$
Principes du Clavecin, 91
Principles of Mustek, 122, 126
Private Music, The, 59, 63
Prophetess, The, 18, 19
Purcell, Daniel, 31, 32, i*3, Ir 7
118; Edward, (i), 114; Ed
ward (2), 114; Frances, 8, 32,
68, 81
Purcell Society, 14, 15, *7, &* 67,
119, 128
Quantz, Joachim, 124, 125, 126
Queen's Theatre, Haymarket, 18
Raguenet, Francois, 75, 95
Ravenscroft, Edward, 33
Reading, Mr., 34
Richardson, Thomas, 62, 63
Rimbault, E. R, 53, $6n
Rinaldo and Armida, 19, 23, 24^
Robert, Anthony, 59
Roi Soleil, Le, see Louis XIV
Roscius Anglicanus, 33
Rosenfeld, Sybil, 33
Rossi, Michael Angelo, 7*
Rousseau, Jean, 126
Royal Academy of Music, Lon
don, 106, 118, 121
Royal College of Music, London,
16
Saint-Lambert, Michel de, 91
Sakka, Keiser, 129
Sandford, Francis, 61, 62, 63
Saul and the Witch at Endor, 5, 12
Schubert, 6, 7
Schumann, 7
Schiitz, 42
Schweitzer, AlbeVt, 75
See }iow the fading glories, 2
Self-Banished, The, 3
Settle, Elkanah, 22
Shakespeare, 16-18, 20-22, 30, 39,
46, 50, 51
Sibley Library, see Eastman School
of Music
Siege of Limerick, The, 98
Siege of Rhodes, The, 35
Simpson, Christopher, 80, 95, 97*
loin, 122, 124
Sir Anthony Love, 26
Smith, Bernard, 68, 69
Snow, Moses, 58
'So when the glittering Queen*, 13
Sonatasy see Trio Sonatas
'Sound Fame', 13
Sound the Trumpet, 10
Staggins, Nicholas, 62
Stanford University, California,
106, 121
Stevens, Denis, non
Strunk, O., 75^, 9571
Sweeter than Roses, 4, 10
TalHs, 44, 109
Tate, Nahum, 3, *S, I<5 l8 2I
22, 28, 31, 32, 34> 35-41, 46
Tempest, The, 4
Temple Church, 68
Tenbury MS. 1266, 15, 17, 24,
30, 32, 34, *2i, 128-30
Tenbury, St. Michael's College,
14, 106
Theatre Notebook, 33
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, see
Drury Lane
There's not a swain, i, 7, 100, 102
136
Index
Thesaurus Musicus, 117
They tell us that yon mighty powers, I
This is the Record of John, 44
'Thou tun'st this world', 13
Time-signatures, 85-87, 123, 130
Tippett, Michael, 13
' 'Tis Nature's Voice', 60, 61
Tokugawa, Marquis, 14, 127
TorrJdns, Thomas, 109
Tourte how, 96
Traite de la Viole, 126
Travers, John, 15
Treatise of Musick, 124
Trio Sonatas, 87, 89, 94, 127
Tudor music, 43
Tudway, Thomas, 65
Tune the Viol 58
Turn then thine eyes, 10
Turner, William, 58
Twelfth Night, 21
Venus and Adonis, 36, 37
Verhruggen, John, 3 1
Verse anthems, 44
Verse-drama, 47, 48, 51
Versuch einer Anweisung die Flote
traversiere zu spielen, see Essay,
Joachim Quantz
Versuch uber die wahrer Art, das
Klavier zu spielen, see Essay,
C. P. E. Bach
vibrato, 97, 126
Wagner, 75, 94, 98
Walker, F. H., 103^
Walsh, John, 17
Warren, Joseph, no
Welcome Odes, 45, 58, 59
Welcome Song, 1687, 8, 58
Westminster Ahbey, 53, 56^, 58,
68
Westrup, J. A., 61, 68, 123^
Whatman, J., 15
Whinyates, Seymour, 129
'Why should men quarrel', 13
Williams, Daniel, 59
Windsor, St. George's Chapel,
$6n, 57, 60, 64, 65, 68
Wise, Michael, 58
Wolf, Hugo, 7
Woodson, Leonard, 57, 59
Wren, Sir Christopher, 18
Zacconi, Ludovico, 125
Zimmerman, Franklin, I2on
Printed in Great Britain by
The Camelot Press Ltd., London and Southampton
12519
