Chapter 3 - ‘The chiefest instrumental musick now in request’: Canzonas and Other Sonata Fugues

Summary

Most of Purcell’s sonatas contain at least one fugal movement in duple time, usually the second movement of the sonata and frequently entitled ‘canzona’. In many respects this kind of movement enshrines in miniature the full range of issues behind the varied and contradictory reception of Purcell’s instrumental music examined in the Introduction. It certainly brings into sharp focus the dichotomy between, on the one hand, those who wish to hear in Purcell’s sonatas the echoes of a dying tradition of English consort music and, on the other, those for whom they sound a triumphant herald for the coming of the age of Bach and Handel. For all that Purcell’s canzonas superficially resemble the fugues familiar from eighteenth-century repertoire, however, the techniques he deploys in his canzonas and related movements can be clearly related back to his concern for compositional artifice.