Purcell's Fairest Isle

CD liner note

Peter Holman writes:

There were two main types of song in Elizabethan England. The older of the two, represented on this recording by William Byrd’s ‘O Lord, how vain are all our frail delights’ and ‘Though Amaryllis dance in green’, seems to have had its origins in the laments sung in choirboy plays at court in the 1560s and 70s. These plays were mostly put on by members of the Chapel Royal, with the boys taking the female parts and the gentlemen playing the adults and providing the music. Thus the laments were written for a soprano with four viols, and they gave rise to a genre of independent consort songs for the same combination. At first, composers writing consort songs tended to set serious poetry, often dealing with religious sorrow and penitence, to grave contrapuntal music. Byrd’s ‘O Lord, how vain are all our frail delights’ is a good example of the type. It was not published at the time, though it was probably written in the late 1570s and is a setting of poem once thought to be by Sir Philip Sidney. By the middle of the 1580s, when ‘Though Amaryllis dance in green’ was written, the subject-matter of consort songs had widened considerably to take in light-hearted pastoral verse, set in this case to lively music in galliard rhythms, with the characteristic alternation of 6/4 and 3/2 patterns. Although it was written as a consort song for solo voice and four viols, it was published in 1588 with text added to all the parts – a change that reflected the increasing popularity of the madrigal in England.

The other type, the lute song, had quite different origins. It was effectively created by John Dowland, whose First Booke of Songes or Ayres of Foure Parts (London, 1597) was an outstanding success and became the model for all other lute song collections. Most of Dowland’s early lute songs are based on dance forms and rhythms, and pieces such as ‘If my complaints’ and ‘Flow my tears’ seem to have been adaptations of instrumental Pieces— the galliard Captain Digorie Piper his Galliard and the pavan Lachrimae respectively— using a technique of adding words to existing tunes borrowed from the broadside ballad ‘Away with these self-loving lads’ and ‘Come again: sweet love doth now invite’ use the rhythms of the almand, though the former sets an existing poem attributed to Fulke Greville (and is therefore clearly not an adaptation of an instrumental piece), while the latter has the lively interplay between the voice and the lute we associate with the madrigal. As these matchless songs show, Dowland revelled in the discipline of finding precise correspondences between poetic metre and musical rhythm, line and phrase lengths, rhyme schemes and dance structures. The lute songs by Thomas Morley and Thomas Campion recorded here follow the pattern established by Dowland, though ‘It was a lover and his lasse’ is much more extended and complex than most almand-like lute songs. A variant of its text appears in Act V of As You Like It (?1599); it is not clear whether Shakespeare borrowed an existing song for the play, or whether Morley set his text for the original stage production.

A work by John Jenkins is an appropriate interlude between the Elizabethan songs on this recording and the works by Henry Purcell. Jenkins was born in 1592, and was therefore old enough to have known Byrd (who died in 1623) and Dowland (1626), and yet he lived until 1678, and as a court musician after the Restoration would certainly have encountered the young Purcell, who was rapidly making a name for himself in the middle of the 1670s, and whose early consort music was heavily influenced by Jenkins. The four-part fantasia comes from a set probably written near the beginning of Jenkins’s career, and shows his fondness for subtle contrapuntal manipulation: the theme with its classic canzona-like long-short-short rhythm is heard in one guise or another virtually throughout the work.

By the time Purcell was writing his first mature songs in the 1680s, English song was being transformed rather rapidly by the influence of Italian music. In particular, there was a sudden enthusiasm for songs on a ground bass (constantly recurring theme in the bass), often imitating examples in imported Italian collections, or by Italian composers resident in London. ‘She loves and she confesses too’ is a good example, for it is based on an Italian ground bass, the ciaccona, and is related to a setting of the same words (lines from Abraham Cowley’s The Mistresse) over the same bass by the immigrant composer Pietro Reggio. Purcell seems to have written it in part as a criticism of Reggio’s setting of English, for the publisher John Playford wrote in the preface to the song collection in which it appeared that Reggio was ‘a very able Master but not being perfect in the true Idiom of our Language, you will find the Air of his Musick so much after his Country-Mode, that it would sute far better with Italian than English Words’. ‘The Plaint’ uses a freely varied ground derived from the four descending notes of the passacaglia, the other most popular Italian ground. It was sung by June in Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen, though it was not used in the original 1692 production, and may not be by Henry Purcell at all: its inordinate length and rather exaggeratedly ‘Purcellian’ lamenting style suggests that it could be by Daniel, Henry’s younger brother. ‘When I am laid in earth’, Dido’s Lament in Dido and Aeneas, needs no introduction, except to say that it is based on a chromatic version of the passacaglia, the most potent emblem of love and death in Italian seventeenth-century opera.

Although Purcell was much taken-up with writing Italian-style vocal music in the 1690s, he still occasionally returned to the English tradition of dance songs. ‘Fairest isle’, sung by Venus in the Act V masque in his opera King Arthur (1691), is perhaps most perfect minuet song. The first setting of ‘If music be the food of love’ was written the following year, and is a beautiful example of an aimand-like air cast in the fashionable flowing quavers of the time. The text, incidentally, is not by Shakespeare, but by Colonel Henry Heveningham.

© copyright The Decca Music Group,
and reproduced with their kind permission.