John F. Runciman

“ In these ten sonatas we have Purcell, the composer of pure music, independent of words and stage-scenes, at his ripest and fullest. The subjects are full of sinew, energy, colour; the technique of the fugues is impeccable; the intensity of feeling in some of these slow movements of his is sometimes almost startling when one of his strokes suddenly proclaims it. There are sunny, joyous numbers, too, robust, jolly tunes, as healthy and fresh as anything in the theatre pieces. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One spirit, the secular, pagan spirit, breathes in every bar of Purcell's music. Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred style of the anthems and services. Not resemblance, but identity, is the word to use. There is no distinguishing between the two styles. There are not two styles: there is one style—the secular style, Purcell's style. Let us pause a moment, and ask ourselves if any great composer has ever had more than one style. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The qualities we find in the music were in him before they got into the music; all that we can enjoy he enjoyed first. He had, too, a high destiny to work out, and he knew it. Thomas Tudway said he was ambitious to exceed everyone of his time. To the last he laboured unceasingly, and if he died, as has been suspected, of consumption, there is no trace of the fever of ill-health nor any morbidness in his creations. They are charged with energy—often elemental, volcanic energy that nothing can resist; and at its lowest, the energy is the energy of robust health and a keen appetite. ”

“ In set forms one has learnt from experience what to expect. In the dance measures and fugues, after a few bars, one has a premonition (begotten of oft-repeated and sometimes wearisome experience) of what is coming, of the kind of thing that is coming; just as in a Haydn or Mozart sonata one knows so well what to expect that one often expects a surprise, and may be surprised if there is nothing to surprise one. But in many of Purcell's largos, for example, the music flows out from him shaped and directed by no precedent, no rule; it flows and wanders on, but is never aimlessly errant ”

“ A mood very close to that of religious ecstasy finds a voice in "Thou knowest, Lord, the Secrets of our Hearts"—the mood of a man clean rapt away from all earthly affairs, and standing face to face, alone, with the awful mystery of "the infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed." ”

“ Some day that unheard-of thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works of England's greatest musician. Meantime, the reader must do as the writer did for some years—he must grub and laboriously copy in the British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of Dioclesian and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as The Tempest and The Indian Queen, and also the Orpheus Britannicus. ”

“ The old polyphonists he never tried to rival, but in the style of music he wrote no composer has gone or can go higher than he. A wiseacre has said that he left a sterile monument. It may be that monuments in the British Museum blow and blossom and reproduce their kind: outside they do not. If the wiseacre meant that Purcell did not leave, as Haydn and Mozart undoubtedly did, a form in which dullards may compose until the world is sick, then the wiseacre is right But the inventors and perfecters of forms have not always wrought an unmitigated good. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One may hear half a dozen bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic purpose with which the parts are moving, and the enormous heat and energy that move them. When strength and sinew are wanted in the themes, they are there, and contrapuntal adaptability is there ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a Handelian dignity without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a kind that Handel never attained to. Of course, it has no connection with the drama: it would serve for many another play just as well. What the theatre manager demanded of Purcell was a piece of music to occupy the audience before the curtain went up; and Purcell wrote it. There are songs and dances of a rare quality, and the biggest thing of all is the chorus, "Let all rehearse," which rivals Handel's "Fixed in his everlasting seat," a plain copy of it, down to many small points. ”

“ Along with some of the old-fashioned genuine devotional music, Purcell must have heard from childhood a good deal of the stamp he was destined to write; he must often have taken his part in Church music that might, with perfect propriety, have been given in a theatre. All things were ripe for a secular composer; the mood that found utterance in the old devotional music was a dead thing, and in England Humphries had pointed the new way. Purcell was that secular composer. ”

“ To penetrate to Purcell's intention, to understand with what skill and force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone hardly suffices. I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour to read the whole of the plays, but at least Boadicca, The Indian Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian and King Arthur must be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all the details of the masques. For themselves, few of the plays are worth reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant music. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Handel's mighty choral effects are English: he learnt from Purcell how to make them. It is true enough that Purcell learnt something from Carissimi; but Carissimi's effects are very often of that kind that look better on paper than they sound in performance. The variations over ground-basses are marvellously ingenious, but more marvellous than the ingenuity are the charming delicacy and expressiveness of the melodies woven in the upper parts. They are music which appeals direct to listeners who care nothing for technical problems. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Purcell liked daring harmonies, and they arise organically out of the firm march of individual parts. Excepting sometimes for a special purpose, he does not dump them down as accompaniment to an upper part. The "false relations" and "harsh progressions" of which the theorists prate do not exist for an unprejudiced ear. In writing the flattened leading note in one part against the sharpened in another he was merely following the polyphonists, and it sounds as well—nay, as beautiful—as any other discord, or the same discord on another degree of the scale. ”