Purcell Part 1

Purcell.

by John F. Runciman.

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 G.o.d 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:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

But play it with the second part:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 sh.o.r.e. 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 cla.s.sical 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 quant.i.ty, 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 n.o.blest, 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 pa.s.sion for interfering in other people's private concerns. Byrde, to wors.h.i.+p 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 quant.i.ty of splendid Church music, besides some quite unimportant secular music.

His ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sages, 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 ba.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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 ba.s.s moving independently of the ba.s.s voice part, and this instrumental ba.s.s 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:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Gradually two keys swamped and swept away the modes--our major and minor; then our modern feeling for key relations.h.i.+ps was born. Here is the major scale of C with a satisfactory harmonic ending:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

But if after this a seventh on the dominant is played, followed by the original key-chord

[Ill.u.s.tration]

then we are home once more in the original key. If the reader will imagine, instead of a few simple chords, a pa.s.sage of music in the key of C, followed by a pa.s.sage in the dominant key of G, and ending with a pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.s; but the music of Purcell and of others in his period, showing a sense of key relations.h.i.+ps 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 subst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sing 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 t.i.tle 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 40 "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 a.s.sociated--many of them, in fact, were actors as well as musicians.