Oedipus is not a cosy play. Dryden and Lee’s version of Sophocles, first staged in 1678, has incest, plague, suicide and a final scene that left Restoration audiences reaching for the smelling salts. In the third act, the blind prophet Tiresias summons the ghost of the murdered king Laius from the underworld to name his killer. To ease the spirits while they work, a priest sings.
Purcell wrote the music for a revival, probably in 1692. It is one song, about three minutes long. On paper it is very simple: one voice, a keyboard and a bass instrument. In performance it is hypnotic.
The words
The text, now in the public domain, is just eight lines:
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.
Alecto is one of the Furies, the avenging goddesses of the underworld, with snakes for hair and a whip in her hand. The idea is that music can, for a little while, charm even her.
The walking bass
Everything rests on the bass. Purcell writes a three-bar ground that steps steadily upward in even notes, a little like someone climbing stairs, and repeats it, moving it through different keys as the song goes on. Over this endlessly patient tread the voice floats freely, stretching words like “eas’d” and lingering on “beguile.”
Then come the snakes. On “drop,” Purcell has the singer repeat the word, “drop, drop, drop,” in falling notes, the snakes sliding off Alecto’s head one by one. It is the kind of word-painting that could be corny. Purcell makes it witty and slightly unnerving.
At the end the opening returns, “Music for a while,” and the spell closes. Nothing has really happened. The Furies are still out there. But for three minutes, as the singer promised, the cares have been beguiled.
Hearing it
Music for a While belongs to everyone: sopranos, mezzos, tenors and, above all, countertenors, for whom it has been a calling card since Alfred Deller revived the voice in the 1950s. Listen to a few versions back to back. The bass line never changes, and every singer sounds different above it. That, more or less, is the whole art of the ground bass.
A note for searchers: the perfume called Music for a While, and the various ensembles and festivals that have borrowed the name, all owe it to these three minutes.