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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Since God so tender a regard is one of a small number of ‘domestic sacred’ pieces Purcell entered into his manuscript scorebook, London, British Library, Add. MS 30930. Its particular interest lies in its construction over a ground bass, and the range of artificial devices Purcell employs in its setting. Its background in seventeenth-century psalm settings, and its likely performance circumstances, allowed Purcell to turn these features to rhetorical advantage, with highly imaginative and individual results.
My thanks to Laurence Dreyfus for his encouraging comments after reading an earlier version of this article, and to the two anonymous JRMA readers for their helpful suggestions.Google Scholar
1 Robert S. Shay and Robert Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources (Cambridge, 2000), 86–7.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., 85–7.Google Scholar
3 Zimmerman, Franklin B., Henry Purcell, 1659–1695: An Analytical Catalogue of his Music (London, 1963), 89–90. A modern edition can be found in Henry Purcell, Sacred Music, Part 6, ed. Anthony Lewis and Nigel Fortune, The Works of Henry Purcell, 30 (London, 1959), 187–93. John Patrick, A Century of Select Psalms (London, 1679), 134–5.Google Scholar
4 For a discussion of this point, see Holman, Peter, Henry Purcell (Oxford, 1994), 49–50.Google Scholar
5 Since God so tender is on the fourth disc in the series (Hyperion, CDA 66644, 1993). The performers are Rogers Covey-Crump and Charles Daniels (tenors), Michael George (bass) and continuo players from the King's Consort (Helen Gough, bass violin; David Miller, theorbo; Robert King, chamber organ).Google Scholar
6 See, for example, Nigel Fortune, ‘The Domestic Sacred Music’, Essays on Opera and English Music in Honour of Sir Jack Westrup, ed. Frederick W. Sternfeld, Nigel Fortune and Edward Olleson (Oxford, 1975), 62–78; Holman, Henry Purcell, 47–56.Google Scholar
7 For example, in the full anthems he composed at around the time he was copying earlier sacred music by Byrd, Gibbons and others; see Shay, Robert, ‘Henry Purcell and “Ancient” Music in Restoration England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1991), 154–96. Purcell's attitude to more recent composers was not dissimilar, as recalled in Thomas Tudway's famous comment that Purcell ‘had a most commendable ambition of exceeding every one of his time, and he succeeded in it without contradiction’ (London, British Library, Harleian MSS 7337–42; quoted in Michael Burden, Purcell Remembered, London, 1995, 135).Google Scholar
8 Choice Psalmes, ed. Henry Lawes (London, 1648); Richard Dering, Cantica sacra (London, 1662); Christopher Gibbons, Matthew Locke et al., Cantica sacra (London, 1674). See Lefkowitz, Murray, William Lawes (London, 1960), 235–49; Andrew Robinson, ‘Choice Psalmes: A Brother's Memorial’, William Lawes (1602–1645): Essays on his Life, Times and Work, ed. Andrew Ashbee (Brookfield, VT, 1998), 175–95.Google Scholar
9 Fortune, ‘The Domestic Sacred Music’, 64–5.Google Scholar
10 Patrick, A Century of Select Psalms, [A5].Google Scholar
11 Ibid., A2.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., [A8].Google Scholar
13 Patrick, A Century of Psalms, [190].Google Scholar
14 For a more detailed examination of Purcell's relationship with the Charterhouse, see Porter, Stephen, ‘Henry Purcell and the Charterhouse: Composer in Residence’, Musical Times, 139 (1998), 14–17.Google Scholar
15 See Shay, Robert, ‘Purcell as Collector of “Ancient” Music: Fitzwilliam MS 88’, Purcell Studies, ed. Curtis Price (Cambridge, 1995), 35–50, on Purcell's scoring of sacred music by pre-Interreg-num composers including Tallis, Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins. Franklin B. Zimmerman ('Purcell and Monteverdi’, Musical Times, 99 (1958), 368–9) first discovered a fragment of Monteverdi's Cruda Amarilli in Purcell's hand, and Thurston Dart (‘Purcell and Bull’, Musical Times, 104 (1963), 30–1) brought to attention Purcell's scoring of a ten-voice canon by Dr John Bull.Google Scholar
16 George Sandys, A Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David (London, 1636). Sandys's paraphrases furnished many texts for the domestic sacred repertory, reappearing in John Wilson's Psalterium Carolinum (1656) and in Walter Porter's Mottets of Two Voyces (London, 1657); other works drew on non-liturgical devotional poetry, while the songs by Dering published by John Playford in Cantica sacra (volume I) were Latin motets. See Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947), 198; Holman, Henry Purcell, 48–9.Google Scholar
17 See Holman, Henry Purcell, 47–9.Google Scholar
18 7 November 1660, 14 December 1662, 12 April 1664; The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (London, 1986), 92, 241, 376.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 421.Google Scholar
20 Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument (London, 1676), 235. The ‘above-named authors’ are the composers of the consort music that was played at these same meetings, among whom Mace names Dering, William Lawes and ‘one Monteverde, a Famous Italian Author’ (ibid., 234).Google Scholar
21 Roger North on Music, ed. John Wilson (London, 1959), 10.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., 47.Google Scholar
23 See Adams, Martin, ‘Purcell, Blow and the English Court Ode’, Purcell Studies, ed. Price, 172–91; Bruce Wood, ‘“Only Purcell e're shall equal Blow”’, ibid., 106–44. Another example is Purcell's appropriation of Pietro Reggio's ground bass for his own setting of Cowley's ‘She loves and she confesses too’ (see Spink, Ian, English Song: Dowland to Purcell, London, 1974, 117–18).Google Scholar
24 See Holman, Peter, ‘Thomas Baltzar (?1631–1663), the “Incomperable Lubicer on the Violin”’, Chelys: Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society, 13 (1984), 3–38; idem, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993), 267–8; Michael Tilmouth, ‘Nicola Matteis’, Musical Quarterly, 46 (1960), 22–40.Google Scholar
25 Holman, Henry Purcell, 33–4. See also Margaret Mabbett, ‘Italian Musicians in Restoration England (1660–90)‘, Music and Letters, 67 (1986), 237–47; Reggio's songs were published as Songs Set by Signor Pietro Reggio (1680).Google Scholar
26 See the comments of Pepys and Evelyn reproduced in Mabbett, ‘Italian Musicians’, 238, 242; also J. A. Westrup, ‘Foreign Musicians in Stuart England’, Musical Quarterly, 27 (1941), 70–89 (p. 85). Evelyn was more complimentary in his assessment of Siface in 1687; see Dixon, Graham, ‘Purcell's Italianate Circle’, The Purcell Companion, ed. Michael Burden (London, 1995), 38–51 (p. 43).Google Scholar
27 The archaic English spelling of ‘fuge’ is retained throughout this article, following Purcell's terminology from ‘The Art of Descant’, John Playford, An Introduction to the Skill of Musick (12th edn, London, 1694), 85–144. This is in order to avoid confusion either with eighteenth-century ‘fugue’ or with the term ‘imitation’, which Purcell used only in particular circumstances (see below). Limitations of space prevent further examination of this approach here; for the present purposes, the term ‘fuge’ may be equated with imitative writing in general, and ‘point’ with the melodic subject that forms its basis.Google Scholar
28 Fortune, ‘The Domestic Sacred Music’, 77–8.Google Scholar
29 Martin Adams, Henry Purcell: The Origins and Development of his Musical Style (Cambridge, 1995), 39.Google Scholar
30 A. Margaret Laurie, ‘Purcell's Extended Solo Songs’, Musical Times, 125 (1984), 19–25 (p. 21); Curtis A. Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984), 309–11.Google Scholar
31 See Holman, Peter, ‘Compositional Choices in Henry Purcell's Three Parts Upon a Ground’, Early Music, 29 (2001), 256–8.Google Scholar
32 References to verses from this point onwards refer only to those set by Purcell, numbered consecutively 1–6 as in Table 1.Google Scholar
33 Fortune, ‘The Domestic Sacred Music’, 73.Google Scholar
34 Adams, Henry Purcell, 25. The song he refers to can be found in English Songs, 1625–1660, ed. Ian Spink, Musica Britannica, 33 (London, 1977), 4–6.Google Scholar
35 See Laurie, ‘Purcell's Extended Solo Songs’, 19–20; English Songs, ed. Spink, 209.Google Scholar
36 Purcell, ‘The Art of Descant’, 108. The passage of such imitation in Since God so tender is not, strictly speaking, the same as what Purcell describes here, since in ‘Imitation or Reports’, Purcell states, the imitation in the lower parts must conform to a pre-existent treble (ibid., 118). I adopt the term here, however, to draw attention to the difference between this kind of imitation and the more expansive expositions of bars 13–21 and 563–60.Google Scholar
37 Ibid., 144.Google Scholar
38 Holman, ‘Compositional Choices’, 256.Google Scholar
39 The following analysis draws on ideas and analytical approaches developed in my ‘Purcell and the Poetics of Artifice: Compositional Strategies in the Fantasias and Sonatas’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College, London, 2006).Google Scholar
40 For a simple example of this terminology in contemporary usage see Blow, John, ‘Rules for Playing of a Thorough Bass, upon Organ & Harpsicon’, London, British Library, Add. MS 34072; ed. Frank Thomas Arnold, The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass as Practised in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (Oxford, 1931; repr. New York, 1965), i, 165, 170, 172.Google Scholar
41 See, for example, Christopher Simpson, A Compendium of Practical Musick (London, 1678), 36–7.Google Scholar
42 Henry Purcell, Keyboard Works, ed. William Barclay Squire (New York, 1990), 39–40.Google Scholar
43 As in the Evening Hymn Upon a Ground (Z.193) in Purcell, Sacred Music, Part 6, ed. Lewis and Fortune, 70–4.Google Scholar
44 For background see Vickers, Brian, ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, Rhetorica, 2 (1984), 1–44 (pp. 1–16). Studies of English sources and music include Gregory G. Butler, ‘Music and Rhetoric in Early Seventeenth-Century English Sources’, Musical Quarterly, 66 (1980), 53–64; Robert Toft, ‘Musicke a Sister to Poetrie: Rhetorical Artifice in the Passionate Airs of John Dowland’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 190–9; idem, Tune thy Musicke to thy Hart: The Art of Eloquent Singing in England 1597–1622 (Toronto, 1993); Robin Headlam Wells, ‘The Ladder of Love: Verbal and Musical Rhetoric in the Elizabethan Lute-Song’, Early Music, 12 (1984), 173–89.Google Scholar
45 Vickers, ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, 23–8, 38–44; see also Mishtooni Bose, ‘Humanism, English Music and the Rhetoric of Criticism’, Music and Letters, 77 (1996), 1–21.Google Scholar
46 See Adams, Henry Purcell, 264.Google Scholar
47 Mace, Musick's Monument, 235.Google Scholar
48 Of Purcell's remaining eight settings of Patrick's psalms in Add. MS 30930, only two are written in the first person throughout.Google Scholar
49 Other, comparatively rare, instances of ground bass in contemporary sacred music do seem to explore the idea of constancy, but without the paradoxical relationship expressed in Since God so tender; see, for example, Martin Adams's comments on Purcell's anthem In thee, O Lord (Z.16) in Henry Purcell, 179, and William Turner's symphony anthem Behold now, praise the Lord, discussed in Christopher Dearnley, English Church Music 1650–1750 (London, 1970), 224–5. Similar instances crop up in secular music, too, such as Purcell's song O solitude (Z.406; Henry Purcell, Secular Songs for Solo Voice, rev. edn, ed. A. Margaret Laurie, The Works of Henry Purcell, 25, London, 1985, 75–9), on the same ground as the opening of In thee, O Lord.Google Scholar
50 Fortune, ‘The Domestic Sacred Music’, 67–9, 72–3.Google Scholar
51 In A Purcell Anthology, ed. Bruce Wood (Oxford, 1995), 18–21.Google Scholar
52 See, for example, Holman, Henry Purcell, 93.Google Scholar
53 Roger North on Music, ed. Wilson, 89.Google Scholar
54 Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c. 1698–c. 1703): A Physical, Physiological and Critical Theory, ed. Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler (Kensington, NSW, 1986), 229.Google Scholar
55 Curtis Price, ‘In Search of Purcell's Character’, Purcell Studies, ed. Price, 1–5 (p. 4).Google Scholar
56 English Songs, ed. Spink, 209.Google Scholar
57 Laurie, ‘Purcell's Extended Solo Songs’, 25.Google Scholar
