Purcell

Abstract Holst and Vaughan Williams, and other composers of their generation, were very drawn towards folk-song and the music of the Elizabethans. But it was my generation, including, of course, Britten, that found a new source of inspiration and a fresh example in Purcell. We were not taught Purcell in the Consetvatoire: we discovered him independently for ourselves. When I went to study at the Royal College of Music in London in the early Twenties, Purcell’s music was much less played than it is these days. It seems to me incomprehensible now that his work was not even recommended in composition lessons as a basic study for the setting of English. I may have been unlucky, but I think the omission was general. However, when I was 19, I began to conduct small amateur choirs with the object of studying in action, as it were, the English madrigal school—a repertory equally neglected in my Royal College training. Thus, when much later I found out about Purcell, I already had a good ear for the setting of English by his predecessors. Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons, Dowland, were no longer names in a history book, but composers of living music. Through their works, these composers were as alive to me as their great contemporaries Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Sidney.