Purcell: Full Anthems / Music On The Death Of Queen Mary

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Cat No: 8553129

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099412926

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: PURCELL

Description
Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695) Full Anthems and Organ Music Music on the Death of Queen Mary We find it easy enough to accept that a Tchaikovsky or Mahler symphony is to some extent autobiographical, but with earlier music we assume that the composer's inner voice is likely to have been forestalled by the functional rôle that music inhabited in earlier centuries. In Henry Purcell's day, the job of a composer in the busy courts and churches of the Baroque was to provide a well-crafted commodity designed to compliment a patron, entertain him, or adorn a ceremony or liturgy with an appropriate musical setting-the day-to-day grind of fulfilling regular and significant obligations was not often conducive to self-motivated composition. Perhaps the sign of greatness in a Baroque composer is that in spite of the strictures of patronage the music communicates integrity, value, and individualism above and beyond the call of duty. Purcell is one of very few composers in the Baroque whose musical language, at its richest, tempts us to speculate on the man's sense of being. Perhaps we feel less inclined to do this with Bach, say, since we know more about his life. More was written about Bach in his lifetime and in subsequent years than has ever been written about Purcell. Bach worked within a fervent religious and intellectual milieu a generation later than Purcell, where such genres as the concerto, cantata, and sonata were well established, and tonality fully formulated. We revere Bach's works as much as anything for their sense of stylistic finality, for their essentially solid state and outward-bound character (however inwardly motivated) which is why it hardly occurs to us to search for an autobiographical vein in his music. But Purcell is different: we know precious little of his personality; no great biography followed his untimely death at the age of only thirty-six; and more crucially, he was raised at a time of major social, religious, and musical flux. As the son of a musician at court, a chorister at the Chapel Royal, and the holder of continuing royal appointments until his death, Purcell worked exclusively in Westminster for three different Kings over twenty-five years. He grew up in a country very much 'on the make' following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. By the time Purcell's compositional career started to bear fruit in around 1679, he had witnessed London's bubonic plague of 1665 which wiped out nearly one sixth of the capital's population, the Great Fire a year later which left parts of London \nothing more than an open field, and watched the capital swiftly turn into an international centre of commerce and a hot-house of political intrigue, accompanied by constant overspending by the King and the same old barbaric habits (heads of traitors were still displayed on the southern turret on London Bridge). Facts about Purcell's activities at court are fairly well documented, but it is to this insecure and paradoxical time in Engli
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