VII. Western Europe 1650-1760
VIIa. Purcell with contemporaries
Music under the Commonwealth
In 1641, a House of Commons now
dominated by men of Puritan persuasion legislated for the
closing of the public theatres. For some ten years the king had
governed the country without recourse to Parliament, and within
two years a complex of social, economic and religious factors,
added to a tense political situation, were to plunge the
country into a civil war which ended in 1649 with the execution
of the king and the establishment of the Commonwealth.
Puritanism, which in some ways reflected the beliefs of
European Calvinism, had been a strong force in all classes of
English society since the later years of Elizabeth's reign. The
closing of the theatres was a quite simple though dramatic
Parliamentary gesture against the fashions of the court. It
also squared with a moral reaction felt by many people against
the growing licentiousness of the theatre; a licentiousness
which returned in the works of the Restoration dramatists,
whose immensely witty plays can still provoke a puritan
reaction in our own day. During the troubled years of the
1640s, music, in common with all the arts, went through
difficult times. Its problems were to be compounded when
religious principles led Parliament to prohibit the use of
music in churches, while some fanatics in the army destroyed
both organs and music books in various cathedrals. Yet to see
this in perspective we should remember that Calvinist courts on
the continent had similar prohibitions against church music;
one need only quote the example of Anhalt-Cöthen where J.
S. Bach, some seventy years later, was obliged to confine
himself largely to secular compositions. We should also
remember that the often quoted passion which Oliver Cromwell
had for music was shared by many of his co-religionists.
Indeed, the Protector himself seems to have had little
objection even to church music, one of his favorite relaxations
being to listen to the motets of
Richard Deering
, an English Catholic composer of the previous generation.
The musical life of England during the
Commonwealth, if not of the high quality of the past, was
certainly active, and the1650s witnessed a flood of
publications. In 1651, the publisher
John Playford
put out his
English Dancing Master,
which was to go through twelve editions by 1703. It may well
have served as the home tutor for some of the guests at the
wedding of Cromwell's daughter in the Banqueting Hall in
Whitehall, when the dancing went on to the small hours of the
morning. In the following year Playford published
Music's Recreation on the Lyra viol,
and three years later a
Brief Introduction to the Skill of Music.
In 1653
Henry Lawes
published his
Ayres and Dialogues for voice and lute or bass viol,
which came out in its third edition in 1658, while in the year
after that appeared one of the most famous English practical
music tutors,
Thomas Simpson
's
Division violist.
The English passion for music in the home continued to
flourish as it had during the golden age, though the madrigal
was gradually being replaced by the less complex form of the
catch
, represented by
Hilton
's
Catch that Catch Can
(1652, 1658, 1673). Furthermore, although the art of spoken
drama was denied its public, the masque continued to flourish
in the homes of the gentry. Finally, it was under the
Commonwealth that the first English opera was produced.
The birth of English opera
The masque
Cupid and Death
,performed in 1653, is a little masterpiece of musical drama.
The book by John Shirley was set to the music of
Christopher Gibbons
and
Matthew Locke
. Gibbons, who was the son of
Orlando Gibbons
, had served in the royalist army during the war and was to be
organist of the Chapel Royal under Charles II. He wrote a
number of pieces for viols and voices that are sometimes
mistakenly attributed to his famous father. Locke, who became
court composer to Charles II, wrote a number of other pieces of
stage music including
Psyche
(1673), an 'opera' with spoken words by Thomas Shadwell, and
music for performances of Shakespeare's
Tempest
and
Macbeth.
His other work includes a treatise on composition with basso
continuo.
The short history of early English
opera begins with the performance of
The Siege of Rhodes
in 1656, The music was contributed by five composers, among
them
Henry Lawes
and the young
Matthew Locke
, and the words by Sir William Davenant. Davenant, who had been
court poet to Charles I and was in effect poet laureate under
the Commonwealth, was reputedly Shakespeare's bastard son and,
as an actor manager, had been one of the first to use women
actors. He had visited Paris and, possibly under the influence
of the court ballets he had seen there, decided on a similar
venture in England. In May 1656, probably to test the attitude
of the censorship, he had a trial run -
The First Dayes Entertainment at Rutland House by
declamation and Musicke after the Manner of the Ancients.
Meeting with no opposition, he followed this with
The Siege of Rhodes,
set to music throughout, in the autumn of that year. Possibly
opera was smiled on by the authorities because of its serious
and 'improving' nature;
The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru
and the
History of Sir Francis Drake
were both performed in the Cockpit in Drury Lane before 1660.
Be that as it may, English opera was off to a fair start, and
its failure to establish itself during the Restoration must be
attributed to the predominance of French taste at court, or to
a national distaste for the art,
[For further treatment of early opera in England, see VIIF: Ballet and Opera]
Music of the Restoration
In music, as in so much else, the house
of Stuart was a disaster for England. After a century of rule
by the Tudors, monarchs who cultivated the art and had
pretensions to be musicians themselves, England found herself
with a dynasty which either showed little or no interest in
music (Charles I's enthusiasm for music extended only to the
founding of the office of Master of the King's Musick), or
admired only the foreign product.
Indeed the return of Charles II in 1660
marks a decisive turning point in the history of English music.
Under the influence of the monarch's personal tastes, formed
during his long stay in France, we find a cosmopolitan artistic
invasion which was to sweep away the last vestiges of the
golden age. To be sure, the examples of
LuIIy
and the Italians were to enrich with new elements the work of
several English composers of the first rank of this period.
However, the Restoration brought with it no resurgence of
native talent despite the presence of an English composer of
world rank.
Henry Purcell
, worthily seconded by his older contemporary
John Blow
, was not followed by a renewed flourishing of the national
school and, deprived (if nourishment from a healthy tradition
and ill-supported by those in power (who only regarded it as
conferring prestige on them and as an opportunity for lavish
entertainment), music fell into decline.
Religious music had been directly
suppressed under the Commonwealth and it was necessary to
re-establish a continuity of tradition. This was the task of
Henry Cooke
, known as 'Captain Cooke' from his rank in the royalist army,
who was appointed as Master of the Children in the Chapel
Royal. Singers and instrumentalists who had served Charles I
before the Civil War were scattered across England (and indeed
Europe). Recalling them was a simple enough matter -- nearly
all the survivors promptly returned -- but recreating the
Chapel Royal presented a much greater challenge, for there were
no trained boy choristers to be had after a dozen years in
which any church music more elaborate than congregational
singing had been outlawed. Cooke resorted to scouring the
country on horseback, conscripting any promising boys he found
on his visits to cathedrals and even parish churches as they
struggled to re-establish their choirs
Cooke proved an exceptional talent
scout. Within a year he had gathered the most brilliant group
of boys ever to sing together in any English choral foundation.
They numbered only the usual twelve, but all the leading
musicians of the next generation were to emerge from their
ranks.
Pelham Humfrey
and
John Blow
, in particular, began to make their mark even before their
voices had broken, and the king himself encouraged them to
compose new pieces for the Chapel: new pieces, furthermore, in
a new style.
A competent composer, actor and singer,
Cooke himself wrote some thirty anthems as well as part of the
score of
The Siege of Rhodes.
But his chief merit lies, as indicated, in the fact that he
trained a new generation of musicians among whom were Blow,
Purcell and Pelham Humfrey; the latter received a royal grant
to study in Italy and France and followed Cooke at the Chapel
Royal.
During his long exile Charles had
picked up continental, particularly French, tastes, which the
music of his Chapel soon reflected. Sunday anthems were now
enlivened with instrumental interludes or "symphonies",
dance-like in the French manner and played (to the scandal of
conservative-minded persons) not on the time-honored comets and
sackbuts but on new-fangled violins, instruments hitherto
associated more with the tavern than the church. The Chapel
Royal was only modest in size -- around seventy feet by thirty
-- but it had galleries along both sides. making it possible
for a string consort and a group of solo voices to answer each
other antiphonally at first-floor level, above the heads of the
full choir in the stalls below. This gave an extra dimension -
quite literally - to performances of the new "symphony
anthems".
There was no question of reviving the
old polyphonic style since too many continental influences and
the personal taste of the king were opposed to it. Also, with
the introduction of the verse anthem, orchestras were now
introduced into churches, with violins to the fore, supplanting
the old viols is they had already done in chamber music. The
new concerted harmonies with continuo displaced the polyphonic
fantasy.
The Consort of Four Parts
(1660) by Locke, which combines the fantasy with elements of
the dance suite, was the last of this genre to be published
while its glorious crown, the fantasies of the young Purcell,
was to remain in manuscript. The Italian trio sonata admired by
Purcell was having a growing success, but above all it was
dances in the manner of Lully that won the royal favour.
Charles II, in fact, formed a band of
twenty-four violins on the same pattern as the
Vingt-quatre violons
of the French king. This was under the musical directorship
first of a German, and later of a Frenchman, Louis Grabu, a
somewhat feeble imitator of
Lully
who for ten years enjoyed every mark of royal favour. Charles
II had even hoped to attract Lully in person to his court, but
instead was obliged to be content with Cambers, who was in fact
an excellent musician and had, with his partner Perrin, won a
royal monopoly in France for operatic performances, No doubt
delighted to obtain such a brilliant position after being
cheated of his monopoly by I,L Cambert enjoyed a brief success
in London before his unsatisfactory career ended in 1677 with
his murder by his valet.
In the meanwhile, thanks to the efforts
of
Locke
,
Blow
and
Purcell
, English opera was mounting the steps of its brief career. It
must, however, be emphasized that the number of operas in the
strict meaning of the word, that is works entirely sung, were
extremely few, Moreover the works were short, like the two
masterpieces,
Venus and Adonis
by John Blow and
Dido and Aeneas
by Purcell. Most popular was a hybrid entertainment in which
the core of the action was entirely spoken, the music being
confined to ayres, dances, instrumental preludes, interludes
and 'masques'. A masque at this period signifies an entree of
ballet mixed with songs. Purcell's scores for these semi-operas
with masques were much more developed and elaborately
orchestrated than those for the small-scale operas.
Unfortunately the texts were usually of a quite deplorable
quality Shakespeare and the great Elizabethans were shamelessly
adapted to suit the taste of the day.
A most important element in the musical
life of England was the creation of public concerts, a field of
activity in which the country was half a century in advance of
France.
John Banister
, the violinist, ex-director of Charles II's twenty-four
violinists, organized the first paying concerts between 1672
and 1679. The programmes which were of excellent quality were
chosen by the public themselves. Later, Thomas Britton
(1657-174), coal merchant and enthusiastic music lover,
organized a series of weekly instrumental concerts from 1678
until his death, in which the most illustrious musicians
participated including Handel himself. In 1689, Robert
King, himself a composer, also started public concerts, which
had great success. But such concerts fostered the invasion of
foreign virtuosi, who accentuated the cosmopolitan flavor of
musical life. The fine traditions of vocal and instrumental
polyphonic pieces performed in the home were now no more than
memories. The lutenist Thomas Mace, in his treatise
Musik's Monument
(1676), summons up with legitimate nostalgia the remembrance of
things past.
Very little organ music survives from
Restoration England. True, Locke published a slim keyboard
volume, entitled
Melothesia,
and both Purcell and Blow composed modest numbers of short
pieces; but there is nothing to compare with the output of
contemporary composers in France or Germany. Probably much of
what was required was improvised: Humfrey, Blow and Purcell,
among others, were renowned as performers as well as composers.
The works they did commit to paper all reflect the fact that
the English organ of the period was of comparatively limited
scope: even cathedral instruments rarely had more than two
manuals and perhaps twenty stops.
Whatever criticism may be directed at
the English music of the restoration-it is sometimes described
as shallow and frivolous in comparison with the music of
contemporary France and Germany-it is surely incomparably
sensuous, a quality that was typical of the Carolingian
court..
The Composers, and some others
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