Purcell by John F. Runciman
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John F. Runciman >> Purcell
PURCELL
BY JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
Bell's Miniature Series of Musicians
LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1909
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
LIST OF WORKS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
HENRY PURCELL
_(From the portrait by Kneller, in the possession of
Henry Littleton, Esq.)_
PURCELL
_(From a portrait by Clostermann, in the National
Portrait Gallery.)_
PURCELL SEATED AT THE HARPSICHORD
_(From a portrait by Clostermann, in the National
Portrait Gallery.)_
PURCELL
_(From an engraving after a portrait by Clostermann
in the possession of the Royal Society of Musicians.)_
PART OF THE AUTOGRAPH SCORE OF
PURCELL'S ANTHEM "BEHOLD, NOW PRAISE THE LORD"
_(In the British Museum.)_
CHAPTER I
We once had a glorious school of composers. It departed, with no sunset
splendour on it, nor even the comfortable ripe tints of autumn. The sun
of the young morning shone on its close; the dews of dawn gleam for ever
on the last music; the freshness and purity of the air of early morning
linger about it. It closed with Purcell, and it is no hyperbole to say
the note that distinguishes Purcell's music from all other music in the
world is the note of spring freshness. The dewy sweetness of the morning
air is in it, and the fragrance of spring flowers. The brown sheets on
which the notes are printed have lain amongst the dust for a couple of
centuries; they are musty and mildewed. Set the sheets on a piano and
play: the music starts to life in full youthful vigour, as music from
the soul of a young god should. It cannot and never will grow old; the
everlasting life is in it that makes the green buds shoot. To realise
the immortal youth of Purcell's music, let us make a comparison.
Consider Mozart, divine Mozart. Mixed with the ineffable beauty of his
music there is sadness, apart and different from the sadness that was of
the man's own soul. It is the sadness that clings to forlorn things of
an order that is dead and past: it tinkles in the harpsichord
figurations and cadences; it makes one think of lavender scent and of
the days when our great-grandmothers danced minuets. Purcell's music,
too, is sad at times, but the human note reaches us blended with the
gaiety of robust health and the clean young life that is renewed each
year with the lengthening days.
The beauty of sanity, strength, and joyousness--this pervades all he
wrote. It was modern when he wrote; it is modern to-day; it will be
modern to-morrow and a hundred years hence. In it the old modes of his
mighty predecessors Byrde and Tallis are left an eternity behind; they
belong to a forgotten order. Of the crabbedness of Harry Lawes there is
scarcely a trace: that belonged to an era of experiments. The strongest
and most original of his immediate predecessors, Pelham Humphries,
influenced him chiefly by showing him the possibility of throwing off
the shackles of the dead and done with. The contrapuntal formulas and
prosaic melodic contours, to be used so magnificently by Handel, were
never allowed to harden and fossilise in Purcell's music. Even where a
phrase threatens us with the dry and commonplace, he gives it a
miraculous twist, or adds a touch of harmony that transforms it from a
dead into a living thing, from something prosaic into something poetic,
rare and enchanting. Let me instance at once how he could do this in the
smallest things. This is ordinary enough; it might be a bit of
eighteenth-century counterpoint:
[Illustration]
But play it with the second part:
[Illustration]
The magic of the simple thirds, marked with asterisks, is pure Purcell.
And it is pure magic: there is no explaining the effect. He got into his
music the inner essence that makes the external beauty of the
picturesque England he knew. That essence was in him; he made it his own
and gave it to us. He did not use much of the folk-songs born of our
fields and waters, woods and mountains, and the hearts of our
forefathers who lived free and did not dream of smoky cities and
stinking slums; though folk-song shaped and modified his melodies. In
himself he had the spirit of Nature, and it made his music come forth as
it makes the flowers blow. The very spirit of the earth seemed to find
its voice through him, the spirit of storm and the spirit of fair
weather that sports when sweet rains make a musical clatter among the
leaves. The music in which he found a voice for Nature cannot grow old
while the earth renews its youth with each returning spring. In its
pathos and in its joy the soul of seventeenth-century England is in his
music in perennial health.
This is not a fanciful description: it is the plainest, most
matter-of-fact description. Purcell's music has the same effect on the
mind as a crowd of young leaves shooting from a branch in spring; it has
a quality of what I risk calling green picturesqueness, sweet and pure,
and fresh and vigorous. It is music that has grown and was not made.
That Purcell knew perfectly well what he was doing we realise easily
when we turn to the music he set to particular words. Take _The Tempest_
music, and turn to the song "Arise, ye subterranean winds." See how the
accompaniment surges up in imperious, impetuous strength. Turn to "See,
the heavens smile": note how the resonant swinging chords and that
lovely figure playing on the top give one an instant vision of vast,
translucent sea-depths and the ripples lapping above. Look at "Come unto
these yellow sands" and "Full fathom five": he almost gives us the
colour of the sea and the shore. These things did not come by accident,
nor do they exist only in an enthusiastic fancy. They were meant; they
are there; and only the deaf and the stupid, or those over-steeped in
the later classical music, can help feeling them.
Purcell, then, was the last of the English musicians. So fair and sweet
a morning saw the end that many good folk have regarded the end as the
beginning, as only the promise of an opulent summer day. How glorious
the day might have been had Purcell lived, no one can say; but he died,
and no great genius has arisen since. As for the cathedral organists who
followed him chronologically, the less said about them the better. What
kind of composers they were we can with sorrow see in the music they
wrote; what skill as executants they possessed we may judge from the
music they played and the beggarly organs they played on. We read of our
"great Church musicians"--but these men were not musicians; and of the
rich stores of Church music--but, however vast its quantity, it is not,
properly speaking, music. The great English musicians who wrote for the
Church before Purcell's time were Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons,
and they composed not for the English, but for the Roman Church. When I
say that Pelham Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but
purely secular composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply--or, if
you like, exply--that the Church of England has had no religious
musicians worth mentioning. Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety
of the men who grubbed through life in dusty organ-lofts. Their
intentions may have been of the noblest, and they may have had, for all
I or anyone can know, sincere religious feeling. But they got no feeling
whatever into their intolerably dreary anthems and services; and as for
their intentions, the cathedrals of England might be paved with them.
Tallis has often been called "the father of English Church music." If
his ghost ever wanders into our cathedral libraries, let us hope he is
proud of his progeny. He, like his contemporaries, was a Catholic, and
he dissembled. About his birth it has only been conjectured that he was
born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. He was organist of
Waltham Abbey in 1540, and remained there till the dissolution of the
monasteries, when he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He and
Byrde in 1575 got a patent giving them a monopoly of the printing of
music and of music paper, and they printed their own works, which it is
a good thing publishers abstain from doing nowadays. In 1585 he died. He
was a fine master of polyphony, and as a genuine composer is second only
to Byrde. William Byrde, however, stands high above him and all other
composers of the time. He was born about 1538, and died in 1623. His
later life would have been full of trouble, and the noose or the flames
at the stake might have terminated it, if powerful patrons had not
sheltered him. The Nonconformist conscience was developing its passion
for interfering in other people's private concerns. Byrde, to worship as
he thought fit, and to avoid the consequences of doing it, had often to
lie in hiding. But he got safely through, and composed a large quantity
of splendid Church music, besides some quite unimportant secular music.
His masses have a character of their own, and in his motets one finds
not only a high degree of technical skill, power and sheer beauty, but
also a positive white heat of passion curiously kept from breaking out.
There were many others of smaller or greater importance, and the school
of English religious composers, properly so called--the men who wrote
true devotional music--ended with Orlando Gibbons in 1625. Since then we
have had no religious musicians. The Catholic Church brought them forth,
and when that Church suffered eclipse we got no more of them.
Not that music was at all eclipsed. The last great English musician was
not born till more than a hundred years after the Reformation. Between
Gibbons and Purcell came, amongst others, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes,
Matthew Locke, Pelham Humphries, Dr. Blow, Captain Cooke and the
madrigal writers. These last, however, mainly used contrivances adapted
from sacred music. Some really beautiful madrigals exist, but Purcell
could have done almost if not quite as well without them. During this
period the old style of polyphonic music went out and the new came in.
To understand the change, I beg the reader to refrain from impatience
under the infliction of a few technicalities; they are a regrettable
but inexorable necessity.
The old polyphonic music differed from the newer harmonic music in three
respects:
1. _Form and Structure_.--Nearly all the important old music, the music
that counts, was for voices--for chorus--with or without accompaniment.
"Forms," in the modern sense of the word--cyclical forms with recurring
themes arranged in regular sequence, and with development passages,
etc.--of these there were none. Some composers were groping blindly
after a something they wanted, but they did not hit on it.
Self-sustaining musical structures, independent of words, were poor and
flimsy. The form of the music that matters was determined by the words.
From beginning to end of each composition voice followed voice, one
singing, higher or lower, what had been sung by the others, while those
others added melodies that made correct harmony. Thus a web of music was
spun which has to be listened to, so to speak, horizontally and
vertically--horizontally for the melodies that are sung simultaneously,
and vertically for the chords that are produced by the sounding together
of the notes of those melodies. When the words were used up the
composition came to an end. Often the words were repeated, and repeated
often; but there should be reason in all things, and the finest
composers stopped when they had finished.
The tendency in the new music was to abandon the horizontal aspect.
Purcell, in his additions to Playford's "Brief Introduction to the
Skill of Musick," remarks on the fact that musicians now composed "to
the treble, when they make counterpoint or basses to tunes or songs."
Music became, broadly speaking, tunes with an accompaniment. The fugue
was no contradiction of this. Even in its heyday, though the parts were
ever so independent of one another, the mass of tone forms a great
melody, or _melos_, moving on a firm harmonic foundation in the lowest
part. The great choral fugues of Bach and Handel have often in the
accompaniment a bass moving independently of the bass voice part, and
this instrumental bass was figured so that the harmonies could be filled
in, on the organ.
2. _Melody_.--There was fine melody enough in the old music, but its
rhythm was very subtle, and there was no suggestion of catchiness in it.
Melody of a familiar folk-song or dance type now came in, divided into
regular periods with strongly-marked rhythms. This may be seen clearly
in, for example, Morley's "ballets"--part-songs that could be danced to.
Clear, easily understood, when once it came in it, never went out again.
Its shaping power may be felt in the fugue subjects of Bach and Handel,
as well as in their songs. This folk-song type of melody was modified
during the search after expressive declamation. The ideal was to get
tunes which were beautiful as tunes, and at the same time did full
justice to the composer's words, to preserve the accent and full meaning
of the poetry. Henry Lawes won Milton's approbation by his success in
doing this, and Milton wrote:
"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes First taught our
English music how to span Words with just note and accent."
Lawes was not always successful: when his tunes do not disregard the
words they are apt to be angular.
3. _Harmony_.--- When a modern person first hears a piece of accompanied
plainsong sung, he is generally bewildered. The beginning may trouble
him and the middle worry him--the ending invariably confounds him. The
thing ends in no key recognised by the modern ear. In the old days there
were no keys, but modes, each with its dominant, its tonic, and proper
and appropriate ending. Until comparatively recent times musicians
understood this quite well; to Purcell, and to composers much later than
him, the old endings were perfectly satisfactory. This, for instance,
left no sense of the unfinished:
[Illustration]
Gradually two keys swamped and swept away the modes--our major and
minor; then our modern feeling for key relationships was born. Here is
the major scale of C with a satisfactory harmonic ending:
[Illustration]
It will be noticed that the top note of the chord marked with a star,
the last note but one of the scale, is a semitone below the last note of
the scale and rises to the last note. That is a proper ending or full
close; what was called a half-close was:
[Illustration]
As a termination to a piece of music made up of the notes of the scale
of C, and therefore said to be in the key of C, this was not
satisfactory. To set the ear and the mind at ease, to get a feeling that
the music has settled down on a secure resting-place, the first chord
had to be repeated. And in these chords
[Illustration]
lies the germ of the whole of the later music. Only two more steps were
needed. By adding an F, or writing an F instead of the upper G in the
middle chord, the chord of the dominant seventh was obtained:
[Illustration]
And anyone can try for himself on a piano, and find out that this chord
makes the longing for the tonic chord--the chord of C--more imperious
and the feeling of rest satisfying in proportion when the last chord is
reached. That was one step: the next was to convert the dominant, G, of
the key of C into a tonic for the time being, to get a sense of having
reached the key of G. That was done by regarding G as a tonic, and on
_its_ dominant, D, writing a chord, either a dominant seventh or a
simple major common chord, leading to a chord of G--thus:
[Illustration]
But if after this a seventh on the dominant is played, followed by the
original key-chord
[Illustration]
then we are home once more in the original key. If the reader will
imagine, instead of a few simple chords, a passage of music in the key
of C, followed by a passage in the dominant key of G, and ending with a
passage in the key of C, he will perceive that here is the deep
underlying principle of modern music: that after a certain length of
time spent in one key the ear wearies, and the modulation to the new key
is grateful; but after a time the ear craves for the original key again,
so after getting to that, and spending a certain time there, a piece
closes with perfectly satisfying effect. Haydn was the first to get that
principle in an iron grasp and use it, with numberless other devices, to
get unity in variety. Not till nearly a hundred years after Purcell's
day did that come to pass; but the music of Purcell and of others in his
period, showing a sense of key relationships and key values, is a vast
step from the music written in the old modes. Let me beg everyone not to
be so foolish as to believe the nonsense of the academic text-books when
they speak of the new type and structure of the newer music as an
"improvement" on the old. The older were perfect for the things that had
to be expressed; the newer became necessary only when other things had
to be expressed. By the substitution of the two scales, the major and
the minor, with the dominant always on the same degree of the scale, the
fifth, and the order of the tones and semitones fixed immovably, for the
numerous modes with the dominants and the order of the tones and
semitones here, there and everywhere, the problems of harmony could be
grappled with, and its resources exploited in a methodical way that had
been impossible. But melodically the loss was enormous. We of this
generation have by study to win back some small sense of the value and
beauty of the intervals of the ancient scales, varying in each scale, a
sense that was once free and common to everyone who knew anything of
music at all.
Purcell and his immediate predecessors and contemporaries came into what
Hullah rightly called the "transition period." Purcell is now to be
considered, and of the others it need only be said that we see in their
music the old modes losing their hold and the new key sense growing
stronger. Their music compared with the old is modern, though compared
with all music later than Handel it is archaic.
CHAPTER II
What we know of Purcell's life is nothing, or next to nothing; what is
written as his life is conjecture, more or less ingenious inference, or
pure fiction. In that we know so little of him he is blessed, but the
blessedness has not as yet extended to his biographers. At one time a
biographer's task was easy: he simply took the hearsay and inventions of
Hawkins, and accepted them as gospel truth whenever they could not be
tested. The fact that whenever they could by any means be tested they
were found to be false--even this did not dismay the biographer.
Hawkins's favourite pastime was libelling the dead. He libelled Dr.
Johnson, and Boswell promptly and most vigorously dealt with him; he
libelled Purcell grossly--he deliberately devised slanderous tales of
him. The biographers, with simple, childlike credulity, went on whenever
possible repeating his statements, for the obvious reason that this
course was the easiest. Hawkins knew nothing of Purcell. He can be
proved to be wrong, not merely about this or that detail, but about
everything. He is said to have known one Henry Needler, a pupil of
Purcell, and also Gostling, the son of the singer of the same name for
whom Purcell wrote; but neither acquaintance seems to have profited him
aught. His anecdotes are the product of inborn wickedness and an
uncouth, boorish imagination. When we have cleared away his garbage,
there remains only a skeleton life, but at any rate we have the
satisfaction of knowing that is pure fact.
Henry Purcell was born (probably) about the end of 1658, and (probably
also) in Westminster. Some of his family were musicians before him. His
father, Henry Purcell the elder, was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal
(that is, a singer in the choir, and in many cases organist as well),
and was master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey for three years.
He held various posts in the "King's Musick," sharing the duties of
"lute and voyce" for a time with one Angelo Notari. The latter appears
to have died in 1663; but strangely enough after his death he asked for
arrears of salary for 1661 and 1664. However, in 1663 Henry Purcell the
elder seemed to have taken over the whole duties of their joint post;
and he, Purcell, died in 1664. If Henry the younger was six years old at
the time of his father's death, then he must have been born in 1658 or,
at latest, the early part of 1659; if he was born in 1658 or the early
part of 1659, then he must have been six years old at the time of his
father's death. So much we know positively; anything more is
supposition--that is, the whole affair is supposition; but this
supposition has one merit: it cannot be very widely wrong. Pepys knew
Henry the elder, and refers to him in his Diary; and it may be remarked
in passing that those who wish to grow familiar with the atmosphere in
which Purcell was brought up, and lived and worked, must go to Pepys,
who knew all the musicians of the period, and the life of Church, Court,
and theatre. Thomas Purcell, brother of Henry the elder, was also a
Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He succeeded Henry Lawes as Court
lutanist, and held other positions, and evidently stood high in favour.
This Thomas certainly adopted Henry the younger at the death of Henry
the elder, and afterwards he wrote of him as "my sonne." Young Henry
seems to have become a choir-boy as a mere matter of family custom. He
joined as one of "the children" of the Chapel Royal, with Captain Cooke
as his master. Cooke must have been a clever musician in spite of the
military title he had gained while fighting on the Royalist side in the
Civil War. He had an extraordinarily gifted set of boys under him, and
he seems to have trained them well. When some of them tried their
infantile hands at composition he encouraged them. Pepys heard at least
one of their achievements, and records his pleasure. And it must be
remembered that Pepys was a composer and connoisseur--he would go many
miles to hear a piece of music. Cooke died in 1672, and Pelham Humphries
became master of "the children." He was born in 1647, and therefore was
eleven years older than Purcell; he, too, had been a child of the
Chapel Royal. In 1664 Charles sent him abroad to study foreign methods.
In the accounts of the secret-service money for 1664, 1665, and 1666
stand sums of money paid him to defray his expenses; yet in 1665 the
accounts of the "King's Musick" show that Cooke received L40 "for the
maintenance of Pelham Humphryes." In less than a year's time he was
appointed musician for the lute--in the "King's Musick"--in the place of
Nicholas Lanier, deceased. Two months after this entry the appointment
is confirmed by warrant. He undoubtedly did go abroad. He got, at any
rate, as far as Paris, and came back, says Pepys, "an absolute
monsieur"--very vain, loquacious, and "mighty great" with the King. Most
of the musicians of the time were vain. Cooke must have been
intolerable. Perhaps they learnt it from the actors with whom they
associated--many of them, in fact, were actors as well as musicians.
Humphries had worked under Lulli. It is not known that he had any other
master in Paris or in Italy, or whether he ever got as far as Italy. Up
to that date no opera of Lulli's seems to have been produced, but he was
none the less a master of music, and he could hand on what he had learnt
of Carissimi's technique. Humphries, highly gifted, swift, returned to
England knowing all Lulli could teach him. He had not Purcell's rich
imagination, nor his passion, nor that torrential flow of ever-fresh
melody; but it cannot be doubted that he was of immense service in
indicating new paths and new ways of doing things. He had--at second
hand we must admit--Carissimi's methods and new impulse; and, at the
very least, he saved Purcell the trouble of a journey to Paris. It was a
misfortune for English music that he died so early. These Restoration
geniuses had a way of dying early. He distinctly had genius, a very
different thing from the plodding industry of Dr. John Blow, who
succeeded him in 1674. Dr. Blow afterwards claimed to have been
Purcell's master, and, as Purcell was certainly his pupil, there seems
no reason for doubting him. Purcell was, of course, sixteen years of age
when Humphries died, and no longer a mere choir-boy; but he remained
attached to Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal. According to the
records of the "King's Musick," on June 10, 1673, there is a "warrant to
admit Henry Purcell in the place of keeper, maker, mender, repayrer and
tuner of the regalls, organs, virginalls, flutes and recorders and all
other kind of wind instruments whatsoever, in ordinary, without fee, to
his Majesty, and assistant to John Hingston, and upon the death or other
avoydance of the latter, to come in ordinary with fee." So late as 1683,
when Purcell had been organist of Westminster Abbey for about three
years, he was appointed to be "organ-maker and keeper in the place of
Mr. Hingston, deceased." The conjecture of Rev. Henry Cart de
Lafontaine, editor of these records (published by Novello) seems to be
correct: Purcell must have been apprenticed to Hingston and afterwards
succeeded him. In later warrants he is authorised to buy wood, metal and
Heaven knows what else--he can buy what he likes as long as he keeps the
instruments in order and in tune. Charles II. had a good ear. In 1676
Purcell was appointed "copyist" of Westminster Abbey, whatever post that
may have been. In 1677 "Henry Purcell" is "appointed composer in
ordinary with fee for the violin to his Majesty, in the place of Matthew
Lock, deceased." I fancy that his tuition from Dr. Blow must have been
mainly in organ-playing, in which art Dr. Blow was an esteemed master.
At the same time, we must not forget that we have Purcell's own word for
it that Blow was one of the greatest masters of composition in the
world. Purcell spoke of Dr. Blow's technical mastery of the tricks of
canon-writing, which Purcell himself was much addicted to, and greatly
enjoyed. Dr. Blow may have taught Purcell something of the older
technique; that of Lulli and the Italians he must have learnt from
Humphries, for Dr. Blow knew next to nothing about it. Dr. Blow was born
in 1648, and was one year younger than Humphries, and ten older than
Purcell. In 1669 he became organist of Westminster Abbey. He, like
Humphries, and, indeed, all the foremost musicians of the period, was a
bloated pluralist, and held other positions. It is said that he resigned
Westminster Abbey in 1680 in Purcell's favour. Whether the resignation
was voluntary or not, Purcell assuredly took his place at that date.
After Purcell's death in 1695 Dr. Blow took the position again, and
retained it until his own death, in 1708. It is also said that he
resigned another place to make way for another pupil, Jeremiah Clarke.
This apparent passion or mania for resigning posts in favour of gifted
pupils might easily have led to a pernicious custom amongst organists.
However, since Dr. Blow's time the organist of Westminster Abbey has
always been a more business-like person, though rarely, if ever, a fine
artist. Dr. Blow, living amongst men of such genius, caught a little--a
very little--of Humphries' and Purcell's lordly manner in the writing of
music; but no sweet breath of inspiration ever blew his way. Burney,
unfortunate creature, found fault with his harmonies, and these have
been defended as "spots on the sun." As a matter of fact, the harmonies
are good enough. There are no spots--only there is no sun. His claim to
have taught Purcell is a claim for such immortality as books give.
Purcell's teacher will be remembered long after the composer of anthems
has been crowded out of biographical dictionaries.