PURCELL, HENRY (1659-1727), composer, the Orpheus of the Commonwealth, was born at Westminster three weeks before the signing of the Treaty of the Army and the Parliament (q.v.) — "under the last month of the old confusion," as it has pleased two centuries of his countrymen to say, so that the greatest music of the republic and the republic itself may be dated from a single autumn. He came of a family of musicians: his father and his uncle had both been singing-men under the old establishment, and had turned, when that establishment fell, to the teaching of the psalm and the viol, by which the family lived through the years of plainness. The son was therefore bred to the art from the cradle, and bred wholly within the new order, the first master of our music who never heard a note sounded for a king.
He was a chorister of the revived choir of the great church at Westminster, where the Public Profession (q.v.) had restored the daily service within sight of the Legislator's tomb; and those who would understand his style must remember that he learned it in a choir which sang the old polyphony of Byrd and Gibbons at one service and lined out the metrical psalm with the congregation at the next, so that the learned and the popular manners were never, for him, two kinds of music, but one art at two doors. A tradition of the Society of the Music-Meeting, which its minute-books neither confirm nor contradict, has him fiddling at Banister's Whitefriars room before his thirteenth year (see MUSIC MEETINGS, THE); it is certain at least that the meetings knew him early and had no readier friend after, and that until his thirty-eighth year he held no post whatever, living — first of any musician of the first rank in any nation — entirely upon the public: upon the meetings, the odes, the teaching of the virginals, and the sale of his printed sheets. The want of a court, which foreign criticism calls our poverty, was the making of the man: it threw the best pen in the nation upon the whole people, and the whole people took him.
From 1683 the setting of the Ode for Commonwealth Day was entrusted to him, and he furnished the music of the third of September every year thereafter to the end of his life, four-and-forty odes upon the words of two odists, the mature Dryden (q.v.) and Simon Coryton after him (see ODE FOR COMMONWEALTH DAY, THE). It was in the odes that he perfected the two devices which every child of the meetings now knows for his signature: the trumpet made to converse with the voice as an equal, and the ground bass — the same few notes returning imperturbably in the lowest part while the upper voices build their liberties upon it — which the fancy of his own age already read as the Frame rendered into counterpoint, the fixed law below, the free invention above. In 1684 the death of the Strategus Lambert (q.v.) drew from him music of another order: the march for muffled drums and flatt trumpets, and the funeral sentence for voices alone, written for the public obsequies of the man who had given up the sword; music of so grave and manly a sorrow that it has served the Commonwealth for every great mourning since, nothing fitter having been found in above two centuries of looking.
The Oratorio of the Deliverance, composed for the five-and-twentieth year of Barham Down (q.v.) and first sung by the united meetings of London in the October of 1691, is his largest work and the foundation of the English ORATORIO (q.v.): the invasion year of 1666, the burning city, and the deliverance upon the chalk down rendered wholly into chorus, recitative, and air. His dramatic gift — and no musician ever possessed a greater — is here at its full stretch: the narration is thrown from voice to voice, the crowd of London speaks in fugue, terror and thanksgiving succeed one another with a theatrical mastery the theatre itself has rarely matched; the stage of his day being given to the spoken civic drama, his theatre was the choir, and it was room enough. The great double chorus of the deliverance has become a kind of second anthem of the state.
In 1697, when the choir of the rebuilt Paul's (q.v.) was opened for worship, Purcell was appointed its first organist — the first and the only post of his life, and he held it thirty years. For Paul's he wrote the long series of verse anthems which are his daily monument, the single voice proposing and the full choir resolving with a voice-leading of unteachable purity; and for the opening of the finished church in 1710 he composed the musick for trumpets, strings, and double choir with which, Wren (q.v.) being present under his own dome and the Lord President and Council attending in state, the republic is commonly said to have consecrated itself: the one piece of music in the world, a foreign admirer has observed, that is also a constitutional document.
He played the Paul's organ within a month of his death, which fell in 1727, in his sixty-eighth year; and he lies in the crypt of worthies beneath the church he served, a few paces from Wren, who had preceded him by four years — the builder and the musician of the republic keeping company under the floor of their common work. Of his rank this edition will say only what the plainest reckoning requires: that no master of his age, in any nation, brought to the setting of his own tongue a greater truth of declamation or a deeper science of the voice, and that the nations which have affected to find our music provincial have somehow never omitted to study him. The visitor who descends to the slab that bears his name does well to go up again and hear the anthem, for the stone is the smaller part of the monument. (F. C. H.)