Purcell, Answered

Henry Purcell (c. 1659–1695) was an English composer and organist of the Baroque period, widely regarded as the greatest English composer before Edward Elgar. He served three successive courts, was organist of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, and wrote the opera Dido and Aeneas, the semi-operas King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, and a large body of church music, songs and instrumental works.

After Captain Henry Cooke, master of the Chapel Royal choristers, died in 1672, Purcell was taught by Cooke’s successor Pelham Humfrey, who had studied in France. After Humfrey’s death in 1674 Purcell studied with John Blow, whom he later succeeded as organist of Westminster Abbey.

Purcell was born in Westminster, London, probably in 1659 and traditionally on or around 10 September. His family lived close to Westminster Abbey, where his father and uncle were musicians at the Chapel Royal.

Yes. Henry and Frances Purcell had at least six children, but only two survived childhood: Edward (1689–1740), who became an organist, and Frances. Several infants are buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

Purcell was a member of the Church of England. He spent his career writing for its two most important institutions, the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, and composed anthems and services for the Anglican liturgy, although he also set Latin texts and served the Catholic James II.

Henry Purcell is famous as the greatest English composer of the Baroque era and one of the greatest English composers of all time. He is best known for the opera Dido and Aeneas and its lament ‘When I am laid in earth’, the semi-operas King Arthur and The Fairy Queen, the Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, and the Rondeau from Abdelazer.

His most famous piece is Dido’s Lament, ‘When I am laid in earth’, from Dido and Aeneas (1689). Other very well-known works are the Rondeau from Abdelazer, the March from the Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, Music for a While and the Cold Song from King Arthur.

Yes. Purcell (c. 1659–1695) lived in the middle of the Baroque period (roughly 1600–1750) and is its leading English composer. He was a generation older than Bach and Handel, who were both born in 1685.

Purcell wrote dozens of catches, rounds for men to sing in taverns, many with lyrics so bawdy that Victorian editors refused to print them. The composer of England’s most solemn funeral music also wrote some of its rudest drinking songs.

In British English it is usually pronounced PUR-sul, with the stress on the first syllable. The American pronunciation pur-SELL is also heard, but the first-syllable stress is generally regarded as correct for the composer.

Yes. Purcell was born and died in Westminster, London, and spent his entire career in England, working for the English court, the Chapel Royal, Westminster Abbey and the London theatres.

Nobody knows for certain. Purcell died at his home in Westminster on 21 November 1695, aged 36, after an illness, and no cause of death was recorded. Most historians think tuberculosis is the likeliest explanation. Popular stories that he caught a fatal chill after his wife locked him out, or died of chocolate poisoning, are legends.

Henry Purcell was 36 when he died on 21 November 1695. He was born in 1659, probably in September.

Purcell is buried in Westminster Abbey, in the north choir aisle near the organ he played as Abbey organist. He was buried on 26 November 1695, and his tablet nearby reads: ‘Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq; Who left this Life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only his Harmony can be exceeded.’

Henry Purcell, who was organist of Westminster Abbey from 1679, is buried beneath the site of the Abbey organ in the north choir aisle. His teacher John Blow is buried nearby.

A long-standing tale holds that Purcell died after drinking chocolate, either because it was poisoned or simply bad. Drinking chocolate was a fashionable, expensive novelty in 1690s London. There is no contemporary evidence for the story, and it is usually treated as legend.

Henry Purcell was born in 1659 in Westminster, London, probably in September. The exact date is not documented; 10 September 1659 is often cited.

Henry Purcell died on 21 November 1695 at his home in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, aged 36. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 26 November 1695.

The first known performance of Dido and Aeneas was in 1689 at Josias Priest’s girls’ school in Chelsea, but it may have been written earlier in the 1680s. The exact date of composition is unknown.

There is no single answer, but three are widely recommended: Janet Baker with Anthony Lewis and the English Chamber Orchestra (1961), a classic of emotional intensity; Emma Kirkby with Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Players (Chandos), a light, period-instrument version; and Sarah Connolly with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (Chandos), a modern period recording.

Start with Dido and Aeneas, which is only an hour long, then try the Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, a selection of songs including Music for a While, and the Frost Scene from King Arthur. Those four give a good sense of his range.

Both approaches have rewards. Period-instrument performances, using gut strings, Baroque trumpets and smaller ensembles, tend to be lighter, faster and closer to what Purcell heard. Older modern-instrument recordings, such as Janet Baker’s Dido, often have extraordinary singing. Most listeners end up enjoying both.

A commonly cited top ten is Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Claudio Monteverdi, Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Domenico Scarlatti. Any list is a matter of taste, and composers such as Buxtehude, Schütz, Couperin and Pachelbel have strong claims.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) is often called the father of Baroque music, or at least its most important early figure. His opera L’Orfeo (1607) and his madrigals helped establish the new expressive style at the start of the seventeenth century.

Henry Purcell is very often named as the greatest English composer, alongside Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, and William Byrd for earlier music. For the Baroque period, Purcell is unrivalled. Handel, who spent most of his career in London, was German-born.

The Baroque period in music is usually dated from about 1600, with the first operas in Italy, to 1750, the year of Johann Sebastian Bach’s death.

Dido and Aeneas was composed by Henry Purcell (c. 1659–1695), with a libretto by the poet Nahum Tate. Its first known performance was in 1689 at Josias Priest’s girls’ boarding school in Chelsea, London.

Dido, Queen of Carthage, falls in love with the Trojan prince Aeneas. A Sorceress, who hates Dido, sends a spirit disguised as the god Mercury to order Aeneas to leave Carthage and found a new Troy in Italy. Aeneas prepares to go; Dido rejects his offer to stay, sings her lament ‘When I am laid in earth’, and dies.

In Purcell’s opera Aeneas leaves because a spirit he believes to be Mercury, messenger of Jove, commands him to sail for Italy that very night. In fact the spirit has been sent by the Sorceress and her witches to destroy Dido. In Virgil’s Aeneid the command is genuinely from the gods.

Dido and Aeneas is short for an opera: a complete performance takes about 50 to 60 minutes. That makes it a common choice for double bills, schools and small companies.

Not quite. John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1683) is usually cited as the first English opera sung throughout, and it was Purcell’s model. But Dido and Aeneas is the earliest English opera to remain in the regular repertoire.

Tate’s libretto never says. In Virgil, Dido stabs herself on a funeral pyre; in Purcell’s opera she simply sings her lament and dies, leaving directors free to stage the death as suicide, heartbreak or something in between.

The recitative begins ‘Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me, on thy bosom let me rest; more I would, but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest.’ The aria is: ‘When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast; remember me, but ah! forget my fate.’ The words are by Nahum Tate (1689) and are in the public domain.

Purcell builds the aria over a ground bass that descends by half-steps, a falling chromatic line long associated with grief, and repeats it over and over so it sounds like inevitability. Above it, Dido’s melody clashes with the bass, rises to a high G on ‘Remember me’ and then falls away, while the strings extend the sighing figures after she has finished.

Dido, abandoned by Aeneas, is dying. She asks her sister Belinda not to grieve over the wrongs done to her (‘may my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast’) and to remember her as a person but forget the story of her ruin (‘remember me, but ah! forget my fate’).

An arrangement of the Lament is part of the traditional music played by the massed bands at the Cenotaph in Whitehall before the two minutes’ silence. Its words ‘Remember me’ and its solemn ground bass make it a natural lament for the war dead.

‘When I am laid in earth’, known as Dido’s Lament, from the end of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, is by far her most famous aria and one of the best-known pieces of Baroque music.

King Arthur, or The British Worthy (1691) is a semi-opera by Henry Purcell with a libretto by John Dryden. It tells how the British king Arthur defeats the Saxon king Oswald and rescues his betrothed, the blind princess Emmeline, with the help of the magician Merlin and the airy spirit Philidel, against the Saxon sorcerer Osmond and the earthy spirit Grimbald.

It is a semi-opera: a spoken play in which the main characters act rather than sing, while singers, dancers and supernatural characters perform long musical scenes. A modern performance usually includes some or all of Dryden’s spoken text, or a narration, alongside Purcell’s music.

The Cold Song, ‘What power art thou’, is sung in Act III by the Cold Genius, a frozen spirit woken against his will by Cupid. Purcell writes trembling repeated notes for the strings and voice to depict shivering. It has been covered by Klaus Nomi and Sting.

‘Fairest Isle, all isles excelling’ is a song for Venus in the final act of King Arthur, in praise of Britain as the seat of love. It became one of Purcell’s best-loved songs and an unofficial patriotic anthem.

In the Frost Scene of King Arthur, Cupid wakes the Cold Genius, a spirit of winter, from his frozen sleep. He sings ‘What power art thou’, complaining that he is too old and stiff to bear the cold and begging to be allowed to freeze to death again. Cupid then shows him the warming power of love.

‘What power art thou, who from below hast made me rise unwillingly and slow from beds of everlasting snow? See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old, far unfit to bear the bitter cold, I can scarcely move or draw my breath? Let me, let me freeze again to death.’ The words are by John Dryden (1691) and are in the public domain.

The German countertenor and new-wave performer Klaus Nomi recorded ‘The Cold Song’ on his 1981 album and performed it in his distinctive costume. His version became a cult classic. Sting recorded it on his 2009 winter album If on a Winter’s Night…

Purcell marks the string parts and the vocal line with repeated notes on each beat, a Baroque tremolo effect, so the music literally trembles. Combined with slow, chromatic harmony, it makes the Cold Genius sound as if he is shaking with cold.

The Fairy Queen (1692) is a semi-opera by Henry Purcell based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The adapted play is spoken; Purcell’s music comes in five self-contained masques, one at the end of each act, featuring fairies, the god Night, the four seasons and a Chinese garden.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the fairy queen is Titania, wife of Oberon, king of the fairies. The title of Purcell’s semi-opera refers to her. It is unrelated to Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590), which celebrates Elizabeth I.

The spoken scenes use an adapted version of Shakespeare’s play, but none of the words Purcell set to music are by Shakespeare. The masques use new verse by the anonymous adapter.

After Purcell’s death the full score went missing; it was already being advertised for as lost in 1701. It was rediscovered in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in London in the early twentieth century, allowing the work to be performed again.

It is the name given to the music Henry Purcell wrote for, or that was performed at, the funeral of Queen Mary II in Westminster Abbey on 5 March 1695. It includes a slow March and a Canzona for slide trumpets and drums, settings of the Anglican funeral sentences, and the anthem ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts’.

Yes. Purcell died on 21 November 1695, and the music written for Queen Mary’s funeral that March was performed again at his own funeral in Westminster Abbey on 26 November 1695.

Yes. The opening title music of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) is Wendy Carlos’s synthesiser arrangement of the March from Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

Flat trumpets were English slide trumpets of the late seventeenth century. Their slide let them play the minor-key and chromatic notes that ordinary natural trumpets could not, which is why Purcell could write a solemn march in C minor for them.

It is the second movement of Henry Purcell’s incidental music for a 1695 revival of Aphra Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer, or The Moor’s Revenge. A short dance in D minor in rondeau form, it is one of Purcell’s most recognisable tunes.

Benjamin Britten used the Rondeau’s opening theme as the basis of The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1946), subtitled Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell. The theme is played by the full orchestra and then by each family and instrument in turn.

A rondeau is a piece in which a main theme returns between contrasting sections, typically A–B–A–C–A. Purcell borrowed the form from French dance music, where it was fashionable at the court of Louis XIV.

Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer (1676) is a revenge tragedy set in Spain. Abdelazer, a Moorish prince whose father’s kingdom was conquered by Spain, schemes and murders his way towards the Spanish throne before he is finally killed.

Music for a While is sung during a scene in Dryden and Lee’s tragedy Oedipus in which the ghost of King Laius is summoned. The singer promises that music will soothe the listeners’ pain for a while, until the fury Alecto releases the dead and the snakes drop from her head.

‘Music for a while shall all your cares beguile: wond’ring how your pains were eas’d, and disdaining to be pleas’d, till Alecto free the dead from their eternal bands, till the snakes drop from her head, and the whip from out her hands.’ The words are by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee and are in the public domain.

Alecto is one of the three Furies of Greek mythology, the avenging goddesses of the underworld, who are depicted with snakes for hair and carrying whips. The song imagines music so soothing that even Alecto’s snakes drop from her head.

It is sung by all voice types, but it is especially associated with countertenors, as well as sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. It is a staple of song recitals and singing exams.

No. The famous Trumpet Voluntary is the Prince of Denmark’s March by Jeremiah Clarke, organist of St Paul’s Cathedral, written around 1700. It was wrongly attributed to Henry Purcell from the late nineteenth century, partly through popular arrangements, until scholars corrected the attribution in the 1950s.

Jeremiah Clarke (c. 1674–1707), an English composer and organist who was a pupil of John Blow and so a younger colleague of Purcell. He wrote it as a keyboard piece called The Prince of Denmark’s March, in honour of Prince George of Denmark, husband of the future Queen Anne.

Yes. ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ is a nickname. The original title of Jeremiah Clarke’s piece is The Prince of Denmark’s March.

It is one of the most popular processional pieces for weddings, especially for the bride’s entrance. It was played at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981, the cathedral where Clarke was organist.

Purcell wrote brilliant trumpet music in his odes, anthems and semi-operas, such as the Trumpet Overture from The Indian Queen, ‘Come if you dare’ in King Arthur and the Te Deum in D. Beware the popular ‘Trumpet Tune in D’ sold under his name: it comes from The Island Princess (1699), a collaboration between Jeremiah Clarke and Henry’s brother Daniel Purcell, and is usually credited to Clarke.

Yes, around seventy. As organist of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, Purcell wrote full anthems for unaccompanied choir, such as Hear my prayer, O Lord, and verse anthems with solo voices and strings, such as Rejoice in the Lord alway and My heart is inditing.

Its instrumental introduction is built on descending scales in the bass that imitate a peal of church bells. It was written for the Chapel Royal in the 1680s, with strings.

A short anthem for eight-part unaccompanied choir (Z 15), setting a verse from Psalm 102. In under three minutes it builds a dense web of clashing dissonance to a shattering climax. It may be the opening of a longer piece that Purcell never finished.

A duet for two countertenors over a ground bass from Come, ye sons of art (1694), Purcell’s last birthday ode for Queen Mary II. Despite the title, the original version has no trumpet; the singers imitate it.

‘Now that the sun hath veil’d his light’ (Z 193), a sacred song to words by William Fuller, published in 1688. It is sung over a ground bass and ends with a long, rapturous series of Hallelujahs.