Purcell Why, why are all the muses mute?

 Day 17

Purcell Why, why are all the muses mute

Choir of New College Oxford

The King's Consort

Robert King

My first experience of Purcell was singing in the choir in a performance of Come Ye Sons of Art at school. We also did a production of Dido and Aeneas. I didn’t sing in that, though I helped backstage and as far as I remember I rattled the thundersheet at a dramatic moment!

We think of Schubert and Mozart as producing huge amounts of music in a short life time - we should put Purcell in that list. The Z numbers in the standard catalogue of his works go well into the 800s. One of the issues with all that music that it is difficult to place in modern concert life. The sacred music still works in a church context but much of the secular music is incidental music for long-forgotten plays, so we are unlikely to hear it in context. Hence the suites and arrangements of Purcell which were quite common during the last century, though we hear less of them these days. 

The operas are a special case. Dido and Aeneas still works well, though it is too short to make a full evening’s entertainment on its own. But the other ‘operas’ are more problematic. They are generally described as semi-operas because they are a curious mixture of play and opera which are difficult to bring off. How much of the dialogue do you retain where some of the main characters only speak and don’t sing? The last production of King Arthur I saw abandoned all dialogue and just presented the work as a series of musical tableaux. That’s one solution but I am not sure that it was an ideal solution. But the music in these semi operas is so wonderful that it cries out to be performed. If you don’t know it try the frost scene in King Arthur or If love’s a sweet passion from The Fairy Queen.

Why, why are all the muses mute is one of Purcell’s welcome songs. These are occasional pieces written largely for royal events. This one is for the return of James II to court after the successful putting down of the Monmouth rebellion. These welcome songs tend to have very sycophantic texts that seem all most comic to our ears. This one is no exception, comparing the King’s triumphs to those of a Caesar!. In many ways it is a curious piece. It has no instrumental introduction and goes straight into a recitative (perhaps the introduction has got lost somewhere over time) and it ends with a chorus lamenting that all things decay with the last words being His fame and the world together will die, shall vanish together away. The piece is quite long and episodic and one imagines that James II (if he was actually there) would have been metaphorically looking at his watch waiting for the final chorus in his honour only to find this very different sort of ending.

Musically this final chorus is the highlight of the piece. We see Purcell’s mastery of chromatic harmony and melodic invention in all its splendour. Else where I found the piece a bit patchy and somewhat discursive. The duet for the two basses (complete with fruity bottom Ds) was a bit hard to take seriously but the soprano duet was a delight in a work in which lower voices predominate. Perhaps most notable were the instrumental postludes, particularly the one after Britain thou now are great. These postludes are generally one of the high points of Purcell’s odes - he elaborates so inventively on the melodic material of the preceding songs and takes the harmony into quite unexpected places. Jazz musicians will recognise some of his ‘blue note’ chords!

So this was a curates egg of a piece. Not a place to start an exploration of Purcell’s - I’d go with Come Ye Sons of Art - but which shows , in its finest movements, just why Purcell is celebrated as one of England’s greatest ever composers.