Homage to Orpheus Britannicus
THOUGH Purcell may not be in into as great a composer as Byrd, he was probably more richly endowed with creative genius than any British musician; both what he achieved and what he failed to achieve make him a crucial figure in our history. To British musicians in the twentieth cen- tury he is inexhaustibly fascinating and illuminat- ing; and the most significant merit of this collec- tion of essays is that it sees Purcell in the light of our own creative and executive practice. Reading it, we are aware of the living reality of history : of those elements in the past which are still present; of those aspects of the present that relive the past.
Indeed, the book is perhaps more valuable for the general impression it makes than—with two exceptions—for its intrinsic content. The first and most important exception is Robert Donington's article on interpreting Purcell today. This com- bines historical accuracy with an awareness of the twentieth century : is at once scholarly and humane, practical and imaginative. In the space available it could hardly be better done. Re- inforced by Donington's brilliant articles in Grove it provides a guide to the interpretation of Purcell which should be obligatory reading for all profes- sional performers: and which amateur performers will _want to read anyway, since it is so lucid, sympathetic and urbane.
The other exceptional essay is Michael Tippett's characteristically stimulating reflections on Purcell and the continuity of the English tradition. Shake- spearean poetic drama, Tippett suggests, offered a creative fusion of drama and music that might have been translated into operatic terms. But by the time Purcell had forged a dramatic-musical idiom, our drama had lost its imaginative integrity. So the twentieth-century composer might profit- ably learn from both Shakespeare and Purcell: seeking a twentieth-century synthesis of the poetic- dramatic and musical-dramatic values that, for fundamentally social and `philosophical' reasons, failed to come to terms in the seventeenth century. '
The remaining essays are comparatively slight. Imogen Hoist puts in a welcome, because deserved, word for Nahum Tate as librettist, though she might have made more of Tate's intelligent, English-middle-classical rehandling of the tradi- tional heroic theme of the conflict between private passion and public duty. Peter Pears does not Pretend to do more than pay graceful homage to Purcell as word-setter and melodist. Benjamin Britten properly points out that Purcell's continuo parts have periodically to be re-realised with creative imagination; and then describes what he has done in some of his own realisations. This is hardly intelligible unless one has the scores in front of one; and if one has, the description seems re- dundant. One would have welcomed some discus- sion of the point at which 'realisation' becomes re-creation,' This is justifiable, of course, when, as in Britten's case, a twentieth-century composer of genius is dealing With a seventeenth-century com- poser of genius. But the humbler editorial prob- lems as outlined by Donington remain : how is the average' musicianly continuo player to realise Purcell's basses with a convincing equilibrium between historical authenticity and creative imagination?
Scholarship is represented in this collection by Jeremy Noble's article on Purcell and the Chapel Royal and by Eric Walter White's piece on early editions of Dido and AEneas. Some, not all, of the information contained in Noble's essay hears on our experience of Purcell's music, in that it tells us what resources were available to him. The information about Dido is interesting but not
inspiriting; it leaves us much where we were. F. B. Zimmerman contributes a note on Purcell's hand- writing which helps us to distinguish the genuine from the spurious Purcell autograph. Sundry reproductions of Purcell's calligraphy are beauti- ful and curiously moving; we recognise the com- bination of baroque flamboyance with an almost bluff honesty : the 'forged feature' of 'own, abrupt self.'
WILFRID MELLERS
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