Henry Purcell: Towards a Tercentenary

Abstract We all pay lip service to Henry Purcell, but what do we really know of himã The words are those of Ralph Vaughan Williams, in the Foreword to Eight Concerts of Henry Purcell’s Music, given during the Festival of Britain in 195 1. More than forty years on, are we much the wiserã We know little more of Purcell’s life now than we did then, in spite of strenuous researches. His personality is, save for a few enigmatic clues, a shadowy, elusive thing onto which we can project almost anything we choose. In our understanding of Purcell’s music and its manner of performance, we may claim some signal advances, but who is to say whether they have brought us closer to the composer or merely closer to the taste of our own times in dealing with his musicã Many composers have been celebrated with conferences during their anniversary years, and the idea of those organizing ‘Performing the Music of Henry Purcell’ to hold it in advance of the tercentenary was an excellent one for it has helped to set the agenda for 1995 in the broadest possible terms. Performance and scholarship are as much of a ‘blest pair of sirens’ as words and music, and their imperatives frequently pull in different directions. But this conference showed players and directors and dancers and scholars all pulling together to establish the most fruitful lines of enquiry for the future. If the Purcell tercentenary achieves nothing else, this blueprint for future research and development will have been set. There is certainly more to be discovered (where is the elusive record of Purcell’s birthã!), and what we think we know already would benefit from further analysis. Many stimulating arguments of recent years, notably that over the dating of Dido and Aeneas chronicled in the pages of Early Music, depend on a heady mixture of factual hypothesis and stylistic analysis, which require further exploration.