Читать книгу Old Scores and New Readings: Discussions on Music & Certain Musicians - John F. Runciman - Страница 9

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So far I have spoken of his music generally, and now I come to deal (briefly, for my space is far spent) with the orchestral, choral, and chamber music and songs; and first with the choral music. I begin to fear that by insisting so strongly on the distinctive sweetness of Purcell's melody, I may have given a partially or totally wrong impression. Let me say at once, therefore, that delicate as he often was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could write melodies which are mere iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby or other than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible, sinewy, unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these themes he could lay together and weld into choruses of gigantic strength. The subject and counter-subject of "Thou art the King of Glory" (in the "Te Deum" in D), the theme of "Let all rehearse," and the ground bass of the final chorus (both in "Dioclesian"), the subjects of many of the fugues of the anthems, are as energetic as anything written by Handel, Bach or Mozart. And as for the choruses he makes of them, Handel's are perhaps loftier and larger structures, and Bach succeeds in getting effects which Purcell never gets, for the simple enough reason that Purcell, coming a generation before Bach, never tried or thought of trying to get them. But within his limits he achieves results that can only be described as stupendous. For instance, the chorus I have just mentioned—"Let all rehearse"—makes one think of Handel, because Handel obviously thought of it when he wrote "Fixed in His everlasting seat," and though Handel works out the idea to greater length, can we say that he gets a proportionately greater effect? I have not the faintest wish to elevate Purcell at Handel's expense, for Handel is to me, as to all men, one of the gods of music; but Purcell also is one of the gods, and I must insist that in this particular chorus he equalled Handel with smaller means and within narrower limits. It is not always so, for Handel is king of writers for the chorus, as Purcell is king of those who paint in music; but though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt to Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral tone at his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that this is the music of the open air, not of the study, that does more than this, that actually floods you in a moment with a sense of the spacious blue heavens with light clouds flying. For instance, one gets it in the great "Te Deum" in the first section; again at "To thee, cherubin," where the first and second trebles run down in liquid thirds with magical effect; once more at the fourteenth bar of "Thou art the King of Glory," where he uses the old favourite device of following up the flattened leading note of the dominant key in one part by the sharp leading note in another part—a device used with even more exquisite result in the chorus of "Full fathom five." Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—pathetic because of the curious sense of human weakness, the sense of tears, caused by the sudden relaxation of emotional tension that inevitably results when one comes on a patch of simple naked beauty when nothing but elaborate grandeur expressive of powerful exaltation had been anticipated. That Purcell foresaw this result, and deliberately used the means to achieve it, I cannot doubt. Those momentary slackenings of tense excitement are characteristic of the exalted mood and inseparable from it, and he must have known that they really go to augment its intensity. All Purcell's choruses, however, are not of Handelian mould, for he wrote many that are sheer loveliness from beginning to end, many that are the very voice of the deepest sadness, many, again, showing a gaiety, an "unbuttoned" festivity of feeling, such as never came into music again until Beethoven introduced it as a new thing. The opening of one of the complimentary odes, "Celebrate this festival," fairly carries one off one's feet with the excess of jubilation in the rollicking rhythm and living melody of it. One of the most magnificent examples of picturesque music ever written—if not the most magnificent, at any rate the most delightful in detail—is the anthem, "Thy way, O God, is holy." The picture-painting is prepared for with astonishing artistic foresight, and when it begins the effect is tremendous. I advise everyone who wishes to realise Purcell's unheard-of fertility of great and powerful themes to look at "The clouds poured out water," the fugue subject "The voice of Thy thunders," the biting emphasis of the passage "the lightnings shone upon the ground," and the irresistible impulse of "The earth was moved." And the supremacy of Purcell's art is shown not more in these than in the succession of simple harmonies by which he gets the unutterable mournful poignancy of "Thou knowest, Lord," that unsurpassed and unsurpassable piece of choral writing which Dr. Crotch, one of the "English school," living in an age less sensitive even than this to Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great that it would be a desecration to set the words again. Later composers set the words again, feeling it no desecration, but possibly rather a compliment to Purcell; and Purcell's setting abides, and looks down upon every other, like Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's Ninth upon every other symphony, or the finale of Wagner's "Tristan" upon every other piece of love-music.