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Henry Purcell

You are going to read a text about the famous English composer Henry Purcell.

Assignment 1

Download the worksheet and fill in the grid (on your own) and discuss the answers in your group.

Text: Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell (10 September 1659– 21 November 1695) was an English composer. Although incorporating Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, Purcell's legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music. He is generally considered to be one of the greatest English composers.

Purcell is said to have been composing at nine years old, but the earliest work that can be certainly identified as his is an ode for the King's birthday, written in 1670. (The dates for his compositions are often uncertain, despite considerable research.) He attended Westminster School and in 1676 was appointed copyist at Westminster Abbey.

In 1679 Purcell devoted himself almost entirely to the composition of sacred music, and for six years severed his connection with the theatre. Between 1680 and 1688 Purcell wrote music for seven plays. The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689. It was written to a libretto furnished by Nahum Tate, and performed in 1689 in cooperation with Josias Priest, a dancing master and the choreographer for the Dorset Garden Theatre. Priest's wife kept a boarding school for young gentlewomen, first in Leicester Fields and afterwards at Chelsea, where the opera was performed. It is occasionally considered the first genuine English opera, the action does not progress in spoken dialogue but in Italian-style recitative. The composition of Dido and Aeneas gave Purcell his first chance to write a sustained musical setting of a dramatic text. It was his only opportunity to compose a work in which the music carried the entire drama.

In 1692, he composed The Fairy-Queen (an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), the score of which (his longest for theatre) was rediscovered in 1901 and published by the Purcell Society.

Purcell died in 1695 at his home in Dean's Yard, Westminster, at the height of his career.

Assignment 3

Have you got time left and are you curious what music by Purcell sounds like?

Listen to this.