Purcell: The Food of Love

Henry Purcell is often considered the quintessentially English composer representing almost alone a golden age of British music, but Henry was born at a key moment in the turbulent days of the seventeenth century in England and perhaps that fabled English musical language was pronounced with a distinctly continental accent.
Purcell must have heard a great deal of French music during his formative years and equally have known well the monarch’s taste. He would have known and worked with French musicians and he would have had an intimate knowledge of Lully’s compositions (so much so that he quotes Lully’s Isis in the Cold Scene of King Arthur).
There is no denying the originality and genius of Henry Purcell. His voice is as distinctive as any truly great composer, but the building blocks of his musical language must certainly, and by necessity, have included a whiff of garlic.
We made no great effort to make the music sound French because no such effort is needed. It has a similar turn of phrase and line, and the ornaments that Purcell writes out himself could easily have come from the treatises of Bérard or Bacilly. It may be a surprise to the British to find out how popular Henry Purcell’s music is to this day in France, but then, it is perhaps because the French recognise in him something of their own.
In Purcell’s vocal music we find recitative in the French style, in which the movement of the continuo perfectly espouses the text, the better to serve it; but we also encounter – true to the tradition of the polyphonists – a bass line written out as if to be sung: only the text is missing. This line is intended for
a melody instrument (string bass) accompanied by harmony instruments such as the harpsichord, organ, guitar or theorbo. But its text, which will be played and not sung, is the same as that of the singer, often in imitation. It precedes or follows the voice, like an echo, to underline the effects the latter produces. The challenge faced by performers is therefore to illustrate this text to best advantage with all the resources available to them. They must choose the instrumentation according to its character (‘O Solitude’ with viol alone, for example), but also decide on the phrasing, the dynamics, the note lengths, the articulation, the respirations, with the aim of sticking closely to the text, to the music of its language, the rhythm of the consonants and the meaning of the words, so as to highlight the poetry and its affects. All of this of course demands a high degree of complicity between them.

Paul Agnew and Anne-Marie Lasla

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