In the spring of 1689 the guests at Josias Priest’s boarding school in Chelsea took their seats for an evening of entertainment by the pupils. Priest was a dancing master; the performers were, in the words of the printed libretto, “young gentlewomen.” The piece they had rehearsed ran about an hour. It had witches, a storm, a band of drunken sailors, and a Carthaginian queen who sings her own death over a bass line that sinks by half-steps like a body lowered into the ground.
The composer was twenty-nine years old. He was already organist of Westminster Abbey, had written music for two coronations, and kept the king’s instruments in good repair. Nobody in the room that night could have known that this school play, Dido and Aeneas, would turn out to be the first English opera to hold the stage for three centuries. Its composer would not live to see forty.
Henry Purcell packed an extraordinary amount into a short life. In roughly twenty working years he turned out some 800 catalogued pieces: anthems for the Chapel Royal, odes for royal birthdays, songs for the London theatres, fantasias for viols, harpsichord suites, and a stream of bawdy tavern catches that would make a Victorian blush. He wrote for three monarchs of wildly different faiths and temperaments and kept his job under all of them. His contemporaries called him Orpheus Britannicus, the British Orpheus. The title stuck, mainly because nobody arrived to take it from him until Elgar, two hundred years later.
A boy in the king’s chapel
Purcell was born in Westminster in 1659, probably in September, a few months before Charles II came back from exile and the theatres and choirs that Cromwell’s Puritans had shut began to reopen. His timing was perfect. The restored court wanted music, lots of it, and fast.
The family was already in the business. His father, also Henry, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal; so was his uncle Thomas, who took charge of the boy after the elder Henry died in 1664. (Scholars still argue about which of the two men was actually his father. The documents are maddeningly vague, and the Purcells, like most families of the day, reused first names with abandon.) His younger brother Daniel would also become a composer, and would one day finish Henry’s last opera for him.
By the late 1660s Henry was a chorister in the Chapel Royal under Captain Henry Cooke, a veteran Royalist soldier who ran his boys like a regiment and drilled them in the new, Italian-flavoured style the king liked. When Cooke died in 1672, the choir passed to Pelham Humfrey, a gifted, by most accounts insufferable young man just back from studying in Paris. Humfrey died two years later at twenty-seven. Purcell then went to the man who would shape him most: John Blow, organist of Westminster Abbey and the finest English composer of the generation before his own.
When his voice broke in 1673, the court found him a job anyway, as unpaid assistant to John Hingeston, keeper of the king’s keyboard and wind instruments. It was the Restoration version of an internship. He tuned organs, copied music and watched. By 1677, at eighteen, he had succeeded Matthew Locke as composer for the king’s string band, the Twenty-Four Violins. Two years later Blow stepped aside, and Purcell became organist of Westminster Abbey. He was about twenty.
The workhorse of Westminster
What followed was a decade and a half of relentless output. In the summer of 1680 he wrote a set of fantasias for viols, dense and slightly old-fashioned pieces that look like a young man proving to himself that he had mastered the hardest counterpoint in the book. In 1682 he added the post of organist of the Chapel Royal. In 1683 he published his Sonnatas of III Parts with a preface explaining that he had “faithfully endeavour’d a just imitation of the most fam’d Italian masters.” That same year he took over from Hingeston as keeper of the king’s instruments.
He married Frances, about whom frustratingly little is known, around 1680. They had at least six children; only two survived infancy. Several of the others lie in the cloisters of the Abbey where their father played every Sunday.
Kings came and went around him. Charles II died in 1685, and Purcell wrote the eight-part anthem My heart is inditing for the coronation of his Catholic brother, James II. When James was chased out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Purcell turned out music for William and Mary instead. At their coronation in 1689 he got into a row with the Abbey authorities for selling seats in the organ loft and pocketing the takings, which he seems to have regarded as a perk of the job. They made him hand the money over.
The anecdote is a useful corrective. The Purcell of legend is a pale, doomed genius; the Purcell of the archives is a working court musician with a family to feed, a second career in the theatre and a keen eye for a side income.
Hits on the London stage
The theatre was where the money was, and from about 1690 Purcell went at it hard. The fashionable form was the semi-opera, a spoken play with long musical scenes bolted on for the gods, fairies and allegorical figures. Purcell wrote four of them in five years: Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691, with a libretto by John Dryden), The Fairy Queen (1692, a lavish reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and The Indian Queen (1695). In between he supplied songs and overtures for more than forty plays.
Some of his most famous music started life as filler. Music for a While was a song for a revival of Oedipus. The Rondeau that Benjamin Britten would later use for The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was a dance in the incidental music for Aphra Behn’s blood-soaked tragedy Abdelazer.
In the printed dedication to Dioclesian he laid out his ambitions with remarkable candour. Poetry and painting, he wrote, had already reached perfection in England, but “Musick is yet but in its Nonage, a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England.” He was talking about the nation. He might as well have been talking about himself.
He also kept writing for the court: a string of odes for Queen Mary’s birthdays, ending with Come, ye sons of art in 1694, and the grand Hail, bright Cecilia for the musicians’ feast of St Cecilia in 1692. Then, at the end of 1694, the queen died of smallpox at thirty-two, and Purcell wrote the stark music for brass and voices that was played at her funeral in Westminster Abbey in March 1695.
Death at thirty-six
Eight months later the same music was played again, at his own funeral.
Purcell died at his house in Dean’s Yard, in the shadow of the Abbey, on the evening of 21 November 1695, the eve of St Cecilia’s Day. He had been ill for some time; he signed his will that day, leaving everything to “my loving wife Frances.” The cause of death was not recorded. That gap has been filled by gossip ever since: a chill caught after his wife locked him out late at night, a dose of bad chocolate, or, most likely, tuberculosis. (We look at the theories on How did Henry Purcell die?.)
He was buried in the Abbey on 26 November, beside the organ he had played. The tablet on a nearby pillar reads: “Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq; Who left this Life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only his Harmony can be exceeded.”
The long afterlife
The tributes started at once. John Dryden, who had worked with him on King Arthur, wrote an ode on his death that John Blow set to music. In it the birds of England stop singing to listen to him. Frances published a collection of his harpsichord lessons the next year, and the London publisher Henry Playford brought out Orpheus Britannicus, a fat anthology of his songs, in 1698.
Then, slowly, the music went quiet. Handel arrived in London in 1710 and Italian opera swept the capital. Purcell survived in cathedral choir stalls and a few favourite songs, but the stage works largely vanished. The score of The Fairy Queen was lost for two centuries.
The revival came in fits. The Purcell Society, founded in 1876, began a complete edition of his works that took more than a century to finish. In the twentieth century Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett championed him as the lost father of English music, and Britten reworked his songs and borrowed his tunes. From the 1970s the early-music movement, with gut strings and period trumpets, made his theatre music sound as sharp as it must have done in 1691. Pop and film followed: Wendy Carlos’s synthesiser version of the Queen Mary funeral march opens A Clockwork Orange, and Klaus Nomi turned the Cold Song from King Arthur into a new-wave anthem.
Each year at the Cenotaph in London, on Remembrance Sunday, the massed bands play Dido’s Lament before the two minutes’ silence. It is the same melody those young gentlewomen in Chelsea first heard in 1689: a queen asking to be remembered and her fate forgotten. On the first count, at least, England has done as she asked.