Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell was born in 1659 in Westminster, in the heart of London, into a family of musicians. The following year, 1660, the monarchy was restored and Charles II took the throne after the austere years of Cromwell’s Puritan regime, during which church music and theatre had been banned. Purcell’s father, a singer in the Chapel Royal, died in 1664, and the boy was probably brought up by his uncle Thomas, also a court musician.

Around 1668 Henry became a chorister of the Chapel Royal, where he studied with Henry Cooke, then Pelham Humfrey, who had studied in France and Italy, and John Blow. He learned singing, organ, composition and the care of instruments. When his voice broke in 1673 he became assistant to the keeper of the king’s instruments. In 1677, aged eighteen, he succeeded Matthew Locke as composer for the king’s violins.

In 1679 he succeeded his teacher John Blow as organist of Westminster Abbey, and in 1682 became one of the organists of the Chapel Royal. Around 1680 he married Frances, with whom he had six children, only two of whom survived. He composed many anthems for the Anglican liturgy, welcome odes for the king, viol fantasias of great harmonic daring and trio sonatas inspired by the Italian style.

Purcell served three successive monarchs: Charles II; James II, for whose coronation in 1685 he wrote the anthem My heart is inditing; and William III and Mary II, who took the throne in 1689 after the “Glorious Revolution”. He composed six birthday odes for Queen Mary, including Come, Ye Sons of Art (1694), and odes for St Cecilia, patron saint of music, such as Hail, bright Cecilia (1692).

In 1689 he composed Dido and Aeneas, probably for a girls’ school in Chelsea, although the exact date and circumstances are debated. This hour-long opera, to a libretto by Nahum Tate after Virgil, is regarded as the first great English opera. It ends with Dido’s famous lament, When I am laid in earth, built on a repeated descending chromatic bass of overwhelming tragic intensity.

In the 1690s Purcell turned to the theatre, composing music for more than forty plays. He wrote “semi-operas”, a typically English genre combining spoken drama with grand musical scenes: Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691), to a text by John Dryden, with its famous Frost Scene in which the Cold Genius sings shivering, The Fairy-Queen (1692), after Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Indian Queen (1695). His incidental music for Abdelazer contains a rondeau that became famous.

At the end of 1694 Queen Mary died of smallpox. For her funeral in March 1695 Purcell composed music of sober grandeur, with a march and canzona for slide trumpets. A few months later, on 21 November 1695, he died in turn, aged thirty-six, probably of illness. His funeral music for the queen was played at his own funeral. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, at the foot of the organ. Nicknamed “Orpheus Britannicus”, he remains the greatest English composer before the twentieth century.