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Henry Purcell (1659–1695)

The Fairy Queen (1692)

Purcell’s ‘opera’ scores were not written for performance in a dedicated opera house: London managed without one of those until 1708. They were theatre commissions, in which the actor-shareholders running London’s single officially licensed theatre company (The Queen’s) had invested heavily, intended to make a strong dramatic impression and to make a profit that the actors would get to keep. This explains why the singing characters contributed so little to plot development and why the musical episodes were neatly self-contained, handy for separate rehearsal while the actors worked on their spoken sections. Acting, singing and dancing threads were pulled together late in the production process. In 1692, shortly before the premiere of The Fairy Queen on 2 May, The Gentleman’s Journal attempted to rationalise England’s preference for semi-opera: ‘Other Nations bestow the name of Opera only on such Plays whereof every word is sung. But experience hath taught us that our English genius will not relish that perpetual Singing.’ Contemporary critics and playwrights (often the same people) found aesthetic reasons to object to ‘perpetual singing’, but they too had a vested interest in the continuing health of the home theatre industry.

From Dioclesian (1690) through King Arthur (1691) to The Fairy Queen (1692), Purcell and his collaborators worked to maximise the popular appeal of the semi-operatic genre. Although Dioclesian was an instant success, and much revived over the next few decades, Purcell refined the formula at each attempt. Coming last in the series, The Fairy Queen is in many ways the most effective. Dioclesian and King Arthur both include musical comedy numbers, but only The Fairy Queen stoops to drag and slapstick (in the scenes for Coridon and Mopsa and the Drunken Poet). Oberon and Titania, the Fairy King and Queen, were played by child actors in the original production. Bottom the Weaver, with his ass’s head, adds animal interest; so do six dancing monkeys. There was, and is, something in the show for practically everyone – a wider variety of musical experience than any other Purcell theatre score offered, then or now. People who expect ‘great’ art to be consistently elevated in tone and elevating in effect find this aspect of Purcell’s semi-operatic aesthetic particularly problematic.

Shakespearean purists should stay well away. The Fairy Queen is an unapologetically free adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s language was modernised, not-strictly-necessary plot strands were cut away, scenes reordered; and the Drunken Poet crashes in from another play altogether (Sir John Suckling’s The Goblins, 1638).

Each of the five acts contains a substantial masque (entertainment of music, speech and dance), all but one of which would have involved spectacular scenic transformations with which the music co-ordinated. The Act 2 masque features ‘a Prospect of Grotto’s, Arbors and delightful Walks’, with instruments hidden in the grottos to play echo-imitations. For the Act 3 masque the ‘Scene changes to a great Wood … [with] A River in the middle’, two arch-backed dragons making a bridge over it. The Act 4 masque was set in ‘a Garden of Fountains’; the Act 5 masque, famously, in ‘a Chinese Garden’, dark to begin with, ‘suddainly Illuminated’ to the sound of trumpets. Not all the music is contained within the masques: Purcell provided ‘First Music’, ‘Second Music’ and an overture for use before the main show began – pre-performance demonstrations of orchestral virtuosity – and a tune to end each act. While these ‘act tunes’ played, shutters closed over the masque sets, returning actors and audience to ‘the wood, by moon-light’. Acting resumed; behind the shutters stage-hands got to work preparing the next transformation as quietly as they could. Magic.

The new Purcell Society Fairy Queen edition used tonight is based squarely on the theatre score prepared shortly before the opera’s opening run. Purcell supervised the copying-out and in places composed straight into it. He was working in a hurry, needing to finish both the opera and a birthday ode for Queen Mary within weeks.

The theatre score went missing in 1695. It reappeared in the library of the Royal Academy of Music around 1900. By then the Purcell Society’s first Fairy Queen editor, John Shedlock, had pieced together an incomplete score from other sources. This had been engraved but not yet printed. The Society could not afford to re-engrave from scratch so a compromise edition emerged, changing previously prepared printing plates as little as possible. For understandable economic reasons, all subsequent editions until the present one – as far as we know – have been tweaked from Shedlock’s: a fundamental reappraisal of the textual evidence has not been attempted for over a century.

In fact the theatre manuscript differs noticeably from other sources, mostly in small details but sometimes over substantive features of orchestration, or the addition or omission of entire bars. Its authority as the reference document from which performing material was prepared in 1692 is beyond dispute, though there are occasional slips which need correcting, and several numbers possibly or definitely missing. For a Fairy Queen revival in 1693 Purcell added ‘O let me weep’, the highly memorable ‘Plaint’, and he may have relocated one or two dances. The new edition identifies options, leaving performers to choose between them. New orchestral partbooks allow mixing and matching. The music director can decide where strings should be doubled by woodwind for extra colour, just as happened in 1692.

Programme note © Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock

Bruce Wood is Professor of Music at Bangor University and Chairman of the Purcell Society. He has edited several volumes in the Society’s collected edition and in the series ‘Musica Britannica’, and has been writing and broadcasting on music, especially that of English Restoration composers, for many years. Andrew Pinnock is Reader in Musicology, Arts Management & Cultural Policy at the University of Southampton.  He is a much-published Purcell scholar, and current Hon. Secretary of the Purcell Society. His research collaboration with Bruce Wood goes back 20 years: their new Purcell Society edition of ‘The Fairy Queen’ is about to appear.

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