A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Purcell

I have spent a great part of my career singing the music of the Baroque Period, and consider myself most fortunate to have been involved with the finest baroque conductors and ensembles of the last 40 years, particularly here in Scotland with the Dunedin Consort, Ludus Baroque and the Scottish Early Music Ensemble, and further afield with the English Concert, Les Musiciens du Louvre, the Collegium Vocale Gent, Concerto Vocale and at the Handel Festival in Halle. 

The huge advantage of singing this music with these world-famous ensembles is that, apart from the fact that they are brilliant, they play at baroque pitch (415 Hertz) which, as I pointed out in my last piece, about Monteverdi, is a semitone lower than modern pitch. This makes an enormous difference, particularly to basses like me, who find this music at modern pitch very much at the top end of our range and often at an uncomfortable tessitura (i.e. it keeps being high for a long time). This little semitone, which appears so innocuous, is often an utter godsend for us lower voice types. For example, the famous aria ‘The Trumpet shall sound’ from Handel’s Messiah has, as printed, scores of high Ds and dozens of top Es, which are really high for us. Down a semitone, they are still high but manageable. To be briefly technical for a moment, all voices have what we call a “passaggio” which is where we change from chest voice to head voice. This passaggio is crucial to how the high voices work but less important for basses, as we use very little head voice. However, for us, the turn-over is around D or E flat but E natural is definitely on the other side. This semitone down to baroque pitch leaves most of the bass repertoire on the lower side of the passaggio, and thus is much more comfortable for us. Consequently, since I have sung a lot of baroque repertoire with these wonderful ensembles, I have been able to sing far more concerts and make more recordings than I would ever have done before the early music movement of the 70s and 80s. 

Henry Purcell was born in the heart of London in 1659. His father and uncle were both musicians, his father being a Gentleman of the Royal Chapel, who sang at the coronation of King Charles 11, and his brother Daniel also became a composer. Music was clearly a hugely important part of young Henry’s upbringing. And so it was not surprising that, after his father’s death in 1664, and under the guardianship of his uncle, he became a chorister in the Chapel Royal and studied under Pelham Humfrey, a fine composer in his own right. One of my engagements with Philippe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Gent was for a series of concerts of music by Purcell and Humfrey, which we toured throughout France and Belgium. Although not in the same league as his famous pupil, Humfrey’s music had a pleasant style, and was most interesting to sing. After Pelham Humfrey’s death, Purcell continued his studies with John Blow at Westminster School and was appointed copyist at Westminster Abbey in 1676, having already composed some music as a child. He appears to have been something of a prodigy and was already being talked of as a composer of note before he was 20, and in 1679, he took over from Blow as organist at Westminster Abbey. He composed several sacred works for the Abbey, and, in 1689, his most famous work, the short opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’ was performed at a school for young gentlewomen in Chelsea. This extraordinary piece, describing the tragic love affair of the Queen of Carthage and the founder of Rome, never made it to the theatres of London in Purcell’s lifetime, and was only performed privately from a manuscript for years. Not until it was printed in 1840 did the full wonder of the opera emerge, Purcell’s only through composed opera with recitatives, arias and choruses. The showstopping final Lament of Dido has become one of the great glories of the mezzo-soprano repertoire, perfectly recorded by, among others, Dame Janet Baker. Sadly, there is no bass role in ‘Dido’ (a voice type lacking in a school for young Gentlewomen!), and so I have never appeared in it.  

Working in the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, Purcell was directly involved in royal events, and he wrote, in 1685, two anthems for the coronation of King James II, one being ‘My Heart is Inditing’, which always stays in my memory as, early in my life at St Andrews University, we rehearsed this work ad nauseam in the Chapel Choir with the renowned Professor Cedric Thorpe Davie. Sadly, his renown didn’t stretch to being a good choral trainer, as over several months, we all grew heartily sick of this piece, and I have never listened to it since 1974! 

A few years later, Purcell wrote a wonderful celebratory piece for Queen Mary (she of William and Mary), ‘Come ye sons of Art’, which is a splendid example of his mature style. The death of Charles II was a blow to Purcell, as the king had been a great lover of music. His successor, James II, was a Catholic and his turbulent reign, followed by his overthrow in 1688 by William of Orange in the ‘Glorious Revolution’, caused much confusion in court life. Church music became problematic, as composers were shunted from Catholicism to Protestantism, but it proved fortuitous for theatre music, as Purcell wrote several scores with incidental music and more for plays presented in London free from the control of the court.

In 1690, he wrote a large work, the semi-opera ‘Dioclesian’, an adaptation of the play by Beaumont and Fletcher. The success of ‘Dioclesian’ persuaded the theatre manager, Thomas Betterton, to persuade John Dryden to revise his earlier unsuccessful play on an Arthurian theme with the help of Purcell’s music. The result was ‘King Arthur, or the British Worthy’, a semi-opera in which the major characters do not sing and which deals with the battles of the Briton King Arthur with the Saxon King Oswald of Kent, when Arthur is trying to rescue his fiancée, the blind Princess Emmeline from Oswald’s clutches.  Camelot, Guinevere, Lancelot et al are sadly lacking, and much of the verse is dreary and a forerunner to Little England in its denunciation of dodgy foreigners, but much of Purcell’s music is sublime.  

The Frost Scene in the 3rd Act which takes the work into a different level of greatness is one of the most extraordinary scenes in baroque music. The Cold Genius, who has laid waste the country with ice and snow, is warmed and thawed by the power of love, as Cupid emerges to tame his cruel spells. His aria “What power art thou” is genuinely astonishing, accompanied by shivering strings and magical harmony changes, and as the Cold People sing a freezing chorus of chattering teeth, Cupid reveals herself to the frozen deity,  he recognises the warmth and glory of love, and succumbs to her pleas. Each performer of this scene has to decide how to interpret Purcell’s wavy markings above the vocal and string lines, and there have been many variations. When I recorded the Cold Genius with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert on DG Archiv, we had many discussions on the tempi and the vocal tricks I could use in the scene. We agreed that both the voice and strings would perform a sort of trill on each note (my technical term is a ‘diddlyum’ sound) marked with a squiggle, with three notes a semitone apart (e.g. C, C sharp and C), but that the non-squiggled notes would be sung straight and without vibrato. I must say that I think the effect was marvellous, and the critics agreed, and when we toured King Arthur round the world after the recording, to the BBC Proms, to Berlin, Buenos Aires and other venues, it proved a showstopper, especially as we had the wonderful clear soprano of Nancy Argenta as Cupid to dispel the frost. 

There are more wonderful sections of King Arthur to be discovered beyond the Frost Scene: seductive sirens, comic rustics, invocations of Saxon deities and some great trumpet movements. As the work proceeds and Dryden becomes more jingoistic and annoying, Purcell provides music of unparalleled splendour, from the glorious soprano aria ‘Fairest Isle’ to the stirring aria for Aeolus, God of Wind, who dispels the inclement weather around the coast to reveal a serene calm. The English Concert recording of King Arthur, dating from almost 30 years ago, is still available, and I heartily recommend it, along with our recordings of ‘Dioclesian’, ‘Timon of Athens’ and ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (obviously the latter without me!). 

In 1692, Purcell composed another semi-opera, ‘The Fairy Queen’, based on Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. I have never sung in a performance of this work, lost until its rediscovery in 1901, but have performed some of the music, which is sumptuous. A Te Deum and Jubilate followed and funeral music for Queen Mary, and more operas and semi-operas, but, at the height of his powers, at the age of 35 or 36, he took ill and died in 1695. His funeral in Westminster Abbey featured the music he had written for the funeral of Queen Mary, and he was buried with great ceremony near the organ. Thus, almost exactly a century before the equally short-lived Mozart, one of Britain’s greatest composers was laid to rest. Who knows what extraordinary music he would have gone on to write? His legacy was strong, and certainly, Benjamin Britten was heavily influenced by his work, and was often described as the finest English composer since Purcell. 

Just 10 years before Purcell’s death two of the baroque period’s greatest geniuses were born in eastern Germany, and dominated music for the next century. We’ll meet Bach and Handel in the next chapter.