Purcell

“ In May, 1688, Purcell had a daughter born; she was baptized in Westminster Abbey, receiving the name of Frances. This child attained to years of maturity, surviving both her father and her mother.
This year was a troublous one; the political horizon was black, and the national fortunes were in great jeopardy, people had small time or inclination for public amusements, but Purcell contributed music for at least one play, The Fool's Preferment, or the Three Dukes of Dunstable, a comedy by D'Urfey. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is, both in its strength and weakness, a good specimen of Purcell's dramatic music. A great deal of it is childishly helpless, and the music, so far as it expresses anything, only expresses the composer's entire inability to express anything at all. But here and there are wonderful passages, which give as complete a proof of Purcell's natural genius as anything he ever wrote. The close of the opera with Dido's famous death-song and the tender little chorus of Cupid's is inexpressibly touching, and there is a curious note of weird horror in the strains of the witch-music. ”

“ It is difficult to say whether the English School owes most to Purcell's Compositions for the Church or for the Theatre; for he wrote with equal success for both; displaying in his Sacred Music the gravity inseparable from a devout appreciation of its true purpose; and in his Operas a greater amount of dramatic power than had ever before been exhibited by any of his countrymen, and more than had often been heard, even in Venice. In every branch of the Art he practised he was invariably in advance of his age; not by a few short decads, but, by little less than a century. ”

“ Alderman Head,' said Purcell sarcastically. 'Lucy knows very well what I think of an unchristian and immodest amusement. Other people must decide according to their conscience, I judge nobody.'
At this point David got up, and disappeared into the shop.
'Oh yes, you do judge, uncle,' cried Dora, roused at last, and colouring. 'You're always judging. You call everything unchristian you don't like, whether its dancing, or—or—early celebration, or organ music, or altar-cloths. But you can't be always right—nobody can.'
Purcell surveyed her with a grim composure. ”

“ In this eventful year, or the succeeding one, 1681, Purcell took unto himself a wife, and in the latter year he again composed an ode or "Welcome Song" which must have brought him favourably under the notice of the King. It commences, "Swifter Isis, swifter flow."
In July, 1682, his abilities were publicly recognised by giving him the appointment of Organist of the Chapel Royal in place of Edward Lowe, deceased. The honour [Pg 34] and the additional income would be welcomed by the young couple just starting on the voyage of life as a favourable augury for their future comfort and prosperity. ”

“ A music book intituled Harmonia Sacra will shortly be printed for Mr. Playford. I need not say anything more to recommend it to you, than that you will find in it many of Mr. Henry Purcell's admirable composures. As they charm all men, they are universally extolled, and even those who know him no otherwise than by his Notes are fond of expressing their sense of his merit. ”

“ This great advance in our music was carried on by the immortal Purcell, who, as a choir-boy under Humfrey, was, no doubt, an eager listener to the "new effects" which his master introduced. The pupil is so great, one is in danger of forgetting the master. At least here we have endeavoured to do some justice to the short-lived genius Pelham Humfrey. ”

“ The thought is that as the seabird opening his wings with a whiff of wind in your face means the whirr of the motion, but also unaware gives you a whiff of knowledge about his plumage, the marking of which stamps his species, that he does not mean, so Purcell, seemingly intent only on the thought or feeling he is to express or call out, incidentally lets you remark the individualising marks of his own genius. ”

“ A few months afterwards, July 31st, 1682, the old man died, and on the 2nd of August his mortal remains were laid to rest in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. We can easily imagine the grief of Purcell who had to mourn the loss of one who had been more than a father to him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may be that he was right: it may be that we stand, as he stood, but at the threshold of music: it may be that in his 'clear dream and solemn vision' he saw further than his successors: nor will it be denied, that some of its recesses have been further explored by geniuses and talent like his own; but all the great attributes which belong to the true artist, all the requirements which make the true musician, we may yet learn of Purcell. ”

“ Of Purcell's contrapuntal skill it would be impossible to speak too highly; he has left for our wonder and admiration numerous canons constructed in all the many and artful modes that species of composition is capable of ”

“ The men of power appeal to the vast public direct. In Purcell's day there was no vast public to appeal to. Concerts had scarcely been devised; no composer could live by publishing his works. The Court, the theatre, the Church—he had to win a position in one or other or all of these if he wished to live at all. So in 1680 Purcell the master passed over the head of his teacher, Dr. John Blow, to the organistship of Westminster Abbey—that is, he was recognised as the first organist living. ”

“ The work which in some ways is the crowning manifestation of Purcell's genius, viz. the opera ‘Dido and Æneas,’ has been conclusively proved to date from 1680, not earlier, and for a composer of twenty-two the feat is sufficiently surprising. At the time continuous dramatic music was unknown in England, and Purcell wrote his opera entirely without spoken dialogue, and with a sense of dramatic truth that was not surpassed by any succeeding musician for many generations. ”

“ Sometimes a Hero in an age appears,
But once a Purcell in a Thousand Years."
It is clear that Purcell attained the highest pinnacle in the estimation of his countrymen; [53] but his fame was not confined to England. I have seen a MS. volume of music written by a contemporary musician, a native of France, and in it he designates Purcell as M. Pourselle. Roger of Amsterdam engraved and printed a set of his Sonatas ”

“ Simon Purcell; but he had many passports, and was frequently a grandee of Spain, a French abbé, a cabinet courier of Russia, and a travelling monk, these travesties being all easy to one who spoke fluently every dialect of every continental language and seemed to enjoy the necessity of a deception. You could mark at once in his gestures and his tone as he came forward the stamp of one who talked much and well. There was ready self-possession, that jaunty cheerfulness dashed with a certain earnest force, that bespoke the man who had achieved conversational success, and felt his influence in it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Mrs. Purcell eventually removed from the house in Westminster to Richmond, in Surrey, where she died in February, 1706, and was buried on the 14th of that month with her deceased husband in Westminster Abbey, having survived him eleven years. On the 7th of February, 1706, she made a nuncupative will as she sat in the parlour of her dwelling house, by which she appointed Mr. Thomas Tovey her executor until her daughter, Frances Purcell, should reach the age of eighteen, when she was to be her executrix. Mrs. ”

“ How the quarrel ended is not known. However, Purcell did not leave the Abbey, but went on with his flow of compositions, and won from the poet Dryden the statement that "here we have at length found an Englishman equal with the best abroad." It was to Purcell that Dryden turned for the music to his opera King Arthur, "for," he declared, "the artful hands of Mr. Purcell compose with so great a genius, that he has nothing to fear but an ignorant, ill-judging audience." ”

“ Their melodic facility is charming; their appropriateness to the spirit of the words is convincing; and their delicate architecture makes them, apart from their vocal quality, polished works of art. Purcell still frequently (and justly) appears on song programs. Among his many lyrics which are worth knowing we may mention ‘Full [Pg 170] Fathom Five’ and ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands,’ to Shakespeare’s words, and ‘I Attempt from Love’s Sickness to Fly.’
But after Purcell English music showed a falling off in originality and spontaneous quality which has astonished and mystified historians. ”

“ The instructive comparison of this number with the ‘Crucifixus’ of Bach's Mass in B minor—a composition of a design almost precisely similar (see preface to the Purcell Society's edition of ‘Dido and Æneas’) —shows what a point of advance had been reached by the Englishman five years before the birth of the German master. It was this directness of expression rather than his erudition that raised Purcell to that supreme place among English composers which has never been disputed. ”

“ The music is of Purcell's very richest. Not even Handel in Israel in Egypt has given us the feeling of the sea with finer fidelity. Unluckily, to make this show Shakespeare's play was ruthlessly mangled, else Shakespeare's Tempest would never be given without Purcell's music. Many of the most delicate and exquisite songs are for personages who are not in the original at all, and no place can be found for their songs. ”

“ From the historical point of view Purcell's achievement remains a monument of sterile endeavor, yet his career is one which his countrymen can still regard with pride, and his personality still speaks to all who have ears and souls to appreciate the meanings that music conveys. ”

“ Mr. Purcell is not only a shrewd business man, but a man of broad and generous sympathies. He uses his great wealth to help his friends, loaning money at nominal interest in a way to win the gratitude of many men who but for him would find it impossible to get a good start in life. He also gives large sums for charitable and benevolent purposes. In religion Mr. Purcell is a Roman Catholic.
Nantel, Guillaume Alphonse, St. Jerome, Quebec, M.P.P. for Terrebonne, Editor of La Press and Le Nord newspapers, was born in November, 1852, at St. Jerome, in the county of Terrebonne, Quebec province. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Henry Purcell,’ who was a candidate for the post of organist, ‘in the room of his uncle, Mr. Daniel Purcell, deceased.’ After his death there appeared his ‘Six Cantatas for a Voice, ... two of which are accompanied with a Violin. Compos'd after the Italian manner’; and ‘the Psalmes set full for the Organ or Harpsicord, as they are Plaid in Churches.’
Daniel Purcell's music is so deeply tinged with the style of his illustrious brother that it would be exceedingly difficult to distinguish it from his on internal evidence alone. It is naturally a mere reflection, without creative genius ”