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Fantasia 12 a4
Purcell: Complete Fantasies for Viols
In Henry Purcells youthful Fantasies,
most of which he composed in the year 1680, the composer adds what was to be the final and
most brilliant chapter in the history of the English viol fantasy or fantazia,
as Purcell spelled it in his autograph. These amazing works find the 21-year old Purcell
composing in a contemplative idiom that many would think better suited to an old man, that
is, turning to the most severe forms of imitative and invertible counterpoint as a highly
speculative and experimental field for musical exploration. There is, in fact, some
evidence from pages which are left intentionally blank in Purcells autograph
manuscript that he intended to return to these pieces and add further works in this
old-fashioned genre, but, as it turned out, he never did so. Purcell makes clear his
awareness of past masters of the Fantasy, and it is not difficult to discern an
indebtedness to the consorts of Matthew Locke, in particular, as well as to the works of
some 16th-century composers in the case of the two In Nomines, based on the
chant Gloria tibi trinitas from John Taverners Mass by that name. To focus too
intently on the retrospective traditions that are present in these great works is,
however, also to miss the entirely novel forms of expression which Purcells
Fantasies manage to evoke. We are confronted here with a musical language - by and large
the result of strict contrapuntal thinking - that finds itself in the throes of making
fundamental discoveries about tonal harmony. These were discoveries which, in a sense,
were to be locked away in a compositional vault for nearly a century and a half until they
were excavated anew by the likes of the late Beethoven, Schubert and the German Romantics.
Purcell has clearly studied the tricks of the trade from his English predecessors but he
goes far beyond them in creating a sense of musical inevitability even whilst pursuing the
most remote harmonic regions.
Some writers, struck by the historical oddity
of a set of viol Fantasias written as late as in 1680, have concluded - in the absence of
any known coteries of viol players - that Purcell conceived of these pieces chiefly as
compositional exercises, but this view becomes difficult to maintain the more intently one
engages with the profound musical quality of these works. Even from the viewpoint of
common sense, it is difficult to understand why mere exercises - even those composed in a
very specific style - ought to have included performance markings such as
Slow, Brisk, Quick, and Drag which are
scattered across the score. To whom would these kinds of performance indications be
directed? Surely the composer himself would have had no need of them. It is also useful in
this regard to compare Purcells 1694 examples of counterpoint and canon that he
compiled for the twelfth edition of John Playfords tutor An Introduction to the
Skill of Music in 1694. Especially striking is the absence of any inspired music in the
Playford snippets: the diatonic tedium and humdrum harmonies quality found in the examples
of double descant, augmentation canons and so on - while they help us understand
Purcells categories of strict counterpoint - simply bear no relation to what Purcell
has striven to achieve in the Fantasies, where every arcane device points to a new form of
expressivity quite without par in the tradition in which the composer was working. So even
if Purcell was not writing the Fantasies with the equivalent of a Kolisch Quartet in mind
- to compare his pieces with similarly difficult music by Arnold Schoenberg and Béla
Bartók - it is entirely fair to say that he had some ideal ensemble in mind when putting
pen to paper. And given the fact that the extended range required of the individual voices
makes the upper parts unsuitable for violins or violas, Purcell must have been thinking of
a consort of viols to realise his compositional and expressive intentions.
Although arcane counterpoint - through which
one or more melodic subjects are combined, inverted, and augmented in a variety of strict
ways - can seem remote when considered in the abstract, it affords pleasures that are
unavailable even to advanced homophonic music dominated by one main theme, not to mention
that it also grants access to a strikingly multi-dimensional form of musical hearing. It
is true that some devices are so well embedded into the musical substructure that even
astute musicians find themselves surprised to discover the kind of algorithmic motor which
has been pulling the strings beneath the surface of their individual parts. The six-part
In Nomine offers a telling example of this kind of structural secret, since one could play
this piece for a lifetime without being aware that each imitative theme is based on
successive bits of the austere cantus firmus and therefore projects a consistently
diminutive miniature of the supernatural cantus firmus enunciated only subliminally in a
nearly inaudible middle voice.
On the other hand, Purcell also goes out of
his way to craft difficult bits of counterpoint that are more intentionally audible. The
opening section of Fantazia 8 provides such an example, in which the composer begins by
displaying a tantalising dual focus of a subject heard in a prime form simultaneously with
its inverted mirror image, or vice versa, as the case may be. Both thematic images
participating in this dazzling dialogue explore, if you will, the dynamics between an
ego and an alter ego, that is, two contrasting melodic contours
bound together by melodic inversion. The dialogue that ensues also takes on questions of
accent and metrical organisation, since neither theme possesses a stable basis of
scansion: already in the third bar Purcell encourages both players and listeners - because
of the initial falling or rising fourth - to hear the theme as starting on a strong beat
and - as an equally plausible alternative - to hear it starting on a weak upbeat as well.
Purcells harmonic vagaries - which
manage to shock and yet to seem entirely inevitable - suggest another fascinating realm to
admire in the fantasies. The progressions in the justly famous Fantasia upon one Note - in
which one player holds a middle C miraculously nourished by four other parts - go to some
lengths to locate permissible combinations without ever revealing that the composer is, as
it were, running a race with one foot encased in stone. More typically, though, the
striking range of harmonic motion in the fantasies results from the composers dogged
pursuit of musical implications, whether these emerge from the positioning of a thematic
entry on a new scale degree, or from simply following through on a pattern set up by a
melodic sequence. Again in Fantazia 8, Purcell devises harmony of nearly unbelievable
daring just before the final Slow (bars 42-44) merely by keeping the melodic
intervals in his sequence intact without succumbing to harmonic alterations. As a
consequence - in a piece nominally in D minor - the craggy descent heard in the treble and
bass lines hints - in direct succession - at B flat major, G major, E major (all root
chords separated by minor thirds and sharing only one note in common) only to land, of all
places, on C major as a temporary resting point. This kind of accidental foreshadowing of
harmonic processes (to be reinvented in an admittedly different guise) more than a century
later is the reason, perhaps, why many post-Romantic listeners will feel themselves
dragged through thoroughly anachronistic depths in Purcellian passages such as these: it
is not merely a coincidence that these advanced third relations resemble
highly emotive passages in mainstream Romantic language but that they indeed seem to carry
very similar associations. Perhaps these elective affinities are not coincidental at all,
but rather result from the metaphorical power of tonal harmony to represent propulsion
toward remote regions, together with all the emotional baggage that such an impulse
inevitably entails. Whatever the source of Purcells own harmonic imagery, it remains
for us to imagine how relatively modest contrapuntal works for viol consort composed by a
youthful Londoner in the early 1680s manage to scale such heights, a question that is sure
to endure in appreciating these magnificent works.
© Laurence Dreyfus 1996
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