John Dryden had been sitting on King Arthur for seven years. He had written it in 1684 as a flattering allegory for Charles II, but the king died, the politics shifted, and in 1688 the revolution put a Dutch Protestant on the throne that Dryden, a Catholic convert, had spent years defending. He lost his post as Poet Laureate. He needed money. So in 1691 he dusted off the old script, rewrote it to be safely patriotic, and handed it to the hottest composer in London.
The collaboration should have been awkward. Dryden was nearly sixty, the grand old man of English letters, and not known for sharing credit. Purcell was thirty-one. But in the published play Dryden went out of his way to praise the composer, admitting he had sometimes had to bend his own verse to fit the music. Coming from Dryden, that was close to a love letter.
What happens
The plot is a wartime fantasy. Arthur, king of the Britons, is fighting the pagan Saxon king Oswald. Both men love Emmeline, the blind daughter of the Duke of Cornwall. Each side has a magician: Arthur has Merlin, with the airy spirit Philidel; Oswald has the sorcerer Osmond, with the earthy spirit Grimbald. Over five acts the Saxons sacrifice to their gods, Philidel defects to the British side, Emmeline is kidnapped and has her sight restored, and Arthur fights his way through an enchanted wood full of tempting nymphs. In the end he defeats Oswald in single combat, spares his life, and the play closes with a pageant celebrating Britain.
As usual in a semi-opera, the leads don’t sing. Arthur, Oswald and Emmeline are acting parts. The music belongs to the spirits, priests, shepherds, sirens and gods, who are given huge set-piece scenes.
The music to know
The Saxon sacrifice (Act I). A brooding sequence of choruses and solos, Woden, first to thee, that sets the war going in a mood of dark ritual.
“Come if you dare” (Act I). A tenor and trumpet challenge the enemy over a chorus. One of the great battle songs of the Baroque.
“How blest are shepherds” (Act II). A pastoral interlude with a lilting song for shepherds, delicate and slightly too good to be true.
The Frost Scene (Act III). The centrepiece and the strangest scene of the score. Osmond conjures a winter landscape to show Emmeline the power of love. Cupid wakes the Cold Genius from his bed of snow, and he sings What power art thou, the Cold Song. Purcell marks the strings and voices to shiver on repeated notes. Then a chorus of Cold People enters, stuttering with the cold, before love thaws them out.
“Fairest Isle” (Act V). Venus’s gentle hymn to Britain, Fairest Isle, all isles excelling. It became a popular song in its own right and has been sung at patriotic occasions ever since.
Hearing it now
King Arthur is a problem to stage. The spoken play runs for hours and leans heavily on Restoration politics that few audiences now follow. Most modern performances keep all the music and cut or replace Dryden’s dialogue with a narration, and many listeners just know it from recordings. John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and William Christie have all made admired versions; see our recordings guide.
Come for the Cold Song, stay for everything around it. It is Purcell at his most theatrical, writing for a London audience that wanted thunder, sirens and flattery in roughly equal measure, and getting all three with his own sound.