Thrice happy lovers

00:00 The Fairy Queen: Entry of Phoebus (Act IV) - Symphony (Act IV): Largo - Dance for the Haymakers (Act III) - First Music: Hornpipe - Dance for the Fairies (Act III) - Symphony (Act V) - Aria of the Night (Act II) - Prelude (Act V) - Second Music: Rondeau - Jig: First Act Tune
15:58 The Indian Queen: Trumpet Tune (Act II) - Fourth Act Tune - Aria (Act II) - Symphony (Act II): Adagio - First Music: First Air - Symphony (Act III) - Air (Act V)
26:05 King Arthur: Trumpet Tune (Act V) - Second Music: Air - Symphony (Act V) - Hornpipe (Act II) - Passacaglia (Act IV) - Aria of Venus (Act V) - Hornpipe: Second Act Tune
38:23 Dramatic Music: Overture from Bonduca (1695) - Bourrée from The Old Bachelor (?1692) - Rondeau from Abdelazer (1695) - Air from Bonduca (1695) - Aria of Pandora from Pausanias (1695) - Jig from The Married Beau (1694) - Air from Distressed Innocence (?1690) - Saraband from Amphitryon (1690) - Air from The Double Dealer (1693)

Bath Festival Orchestra - Yehudi Menuhi, conductor / Joan Carlyle, soprano
Continuo: Colin Tilney (harpsichord by Thomas Goff) & Derek Simpson (cello)
Performed from editions of N. D. Boyling

HENRY PURCELL wrote three distinct types of music for the theatre — true opera (Dido and Aeneas is the only example), semiopera (in which the chief characters do not themselves sing) and incidental music for plays.

There are six semioperas: Dioclesian (1690), King Arthur (1691), The Fairy Queen (1692), Timon of Athens (about 1694, probably not wholly his), The Indian Queen and The Tempest (1695); these differ very much in their basic plan. King Arthur is the only one with a libretto specially written for it; its music is the most integrated of all. The Fairy Queen, which is largely Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night's Dream with some additional dialogue, has music principally to subdivide the various scenes and acts.

Purcell contributed overtures, dances, curtain-tunes and songs to forty-four plays, beginning with a song for King Richard II (1680). The largest single group was seventeen items for Bonduca (1695).

Unfortunately very little of Purcell’s theatre music exists in his own handwriting. We have a few sections of Dioclesian and The Fairy Queen and music from fifteen of the plays. The various other sources differ so widely that it is almost impossible to determine what a complete performance of any of these works should consist of. Simply to perform what is thought to be the complete music but without the spoken text can produce some strange results — for example, in The Fairy Queen Juno’s song “Thrice happy lovers” is followed in the score by the plaint “O let me weep”; without interpolating Oberon’s words such a juxtaposition makes little or no sense.

At the end of the 17th and at the beginning of the 18th century a number of Suites were prepared, the most important being A Collection of Ayres, Compos’d for the Theatre, and upon Other Occasions, published by Purcell’s widow in 1697 and dedicated to Charles, Duke of Somerset. On the lines of such collections four Suites of some of Purcell’s finest compositions have been recorded here — items from The Fairy Queen, The Indian Queen, King Arthur and a group of plays.

Undoubtedly much of Purcell’s orchestral music reproduces the elegance of the French ballet de cour. He wrote in the preface to Dioclesian: Poetry and Painting have arrived to their perfection in our own Country: Musick is yet but in its Nonage, a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England... Tis now learning Italian, which is its best Master, and studying a little of the French Air, to give it somewhat more of Gayety and Fashion... We are of later Growth than our Neighbour Countries, and must be content to shake off our Barbarity by degrees.

Purcell may well have seen Lully’s Cadmus performed by a French company in London in 1686. It was from Cadmus that Purcell took a dance for The Tempest. Of The Fairy Queen Motteux wrote that it combined “the Delicacy and Beauty of the Italian way” and “the Graces and Gayety of the French.” Writing about 1700, Roger North stated that Purcell “raised up operas and musick in the theatres, to a credit, even of fame as far as Italy, where Sigr Purcell was courted no less than at home.”

N. D. Boyling