Henry Purcell
English Baroque genius and the greatest composer Britain ever produced
1659
1695
English
Baroque
Dido and Aeneas, The Fairy-Queen
Early life
Henry Purcell was born in 1659 in Westminster, London, into a family of court musicians. His father, also named Henry, and his uncle Thomas were both Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. After his father's early death, the young Purcell became a chorister at the Chapel Royal, where he studied with Captain Henry Cooke and subsequently with Pelham Humfrey, who had absorbed the French style at the court of Louis XIV. He later studied with John Blow, the organist of Westminster Abbey, who in 1679 — in a remarkable act of generosity — resigned his post in favour of his twenty-year-old pupil.
Career and major works
Purcell held the Abbey post alongside numerous other roles: composer for the King's Violins, organist of the Chapel Royal, and keeper of the King's instruments. His output was prodigious and astonishingly varied. For the stage he composed the opera Dido and Aeneas (c. 1689), whose lament 'When I am laid in earth' is one of the most celebrated arias in the entire operatic repertoire, as well as semi-operas including The Fairy-Queen (1692, after Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), King Arthur (1691, with a libretto by Dryden), and The Indian Queen (1695). His sacred music includes a magnificent series of verse anthems, the funeral music for Queen Mary (1695), and numerous devotional songs. His chamber music, particularly the Fantazias for viols (1680) and the trio sonatas, reveals a contrapuntal mastery of the highest order.
Musical style and legacy
Purcell's music is characterised by expressive word-setting of extraordinary sensitivity, bold harmonic progressions — including daring use of dissonance — rhythmic vitality, and a gift for ground bass composition that yields inexhaustible variation from simple patterns. He assimilated Italian and French influences while retaining a distinctly English character. His death in Westminster on 21 November 1695, at the age of thirty-six, deprived English music of its greatest native talent; no English-born composer of comparable stature would emerge for two centuries.