The Opera | Page 8

which they had held at his father's court. Christopher
Gibbons, Child, and other relics of the dead polyphonic school were
quietly dismissed to provincial organ-lofts, and Pelham Humphreys, the
most promising of the 'Children of the Chapel Royal,' was sent over to
Paris to learn all that was newest in music at the feet of Lulli.
Humphreys came back, in the words of Pepys, 'an absolute Monsieur,'
full of the latest theories concerning opera and music generally, and
with a sublime contempt for the efforts of his stay-at-home colleagues.
His own music shows the French influence very strongly, and in that of
his pupil Henry Purcell (1658-1695) it may also be perceived, although
coloured and transmuted by the intensely English character of Purcell's
own genius. For many years it was supposed that Purcell's first and,
strictly speaking, his only opera, 'Dido and Æneas,' was written by him
at the age of seventeen and produced in 1675. Mr. Barclay Squire has
now proved that it was not produced until much later, but this scarcely
lessens the wonder of it, for Purcell can never have seen an opera
performed, and his acquaintance with the new art-form must have been
based upon Pelham Humphrey's account of the performances which he
had seen in Paris. Possibly, too, he may have had opportunities of
studying the engraved scores of some of Lulli's operas, which,
considering the close intercourse between the courts of France and
England, may have found their way across the Channel. 'Dido and
Æneas' is now universally spoken of as the first English opera.
Masques had been popular from the time of Queen Elizabeth onwards,
which the greatest living poets and musicians had not disdained to
produce, and Sir William Davenant had given performances of musical
dramas 'after the manner of the Ancients' during the closing years of the
Commonwealth, but it is probable that spoken dialogue occurred in all
these entertainments, as it certainly did in Locke's 'Psyche,' Banister's
'Circe,' in fact, in all the dramatic works of this period which were
wrongly described as operas. In 'Dido and Æneas,' on the contrary, the
music is continuous throughout. Airs and recitatives, choruses and
instrumental pieces succeed each other, as in the operas of the Italian

and French schools. 'Dido and Æneas' was written for performance at a
young ladies' school kept by one Josias Priest in Leicester Fields and
afterwards at Chelsea. The libretto was the work of Nahum Tate, the
Poet Laureate of the time. The opera is in three short acts, and Virgil's
version of the story is followed pretty closely save for the intrusion of a
sorceress and a chorus of witches who have sworn Dido's destruction
and send a messenger to Æneas, disguised as Mercury, to hasten his
departure. Dido's death song, which is followed by a chorus of
mourning Cupids, is one of the most pathetic scenes ever written, and
illustrates in a forcible manner Purcell's beautiful and ingenious use of
a ground-bass. The gloomy chromatic passage constantly repeated by
the bass instruments, with ever-varying harmonies in the violins, paints
such a picture of the blank despair of a broken heart as Wagner himself,
with his immense orchestral resources, never surpassed. In the general
construction of his opera Purcell followed the French model, but his
treatment of recitative is bolder and more various than that of Lulli,
while as a melodist he is incomparably superior. Purcell never repeated
the experiment of 'Dido and Æneas.' Musical taste in England was
presumably not cultivated enough to appreciate a work of so advanced
a style. At any rate, for the rest of his life, Purcell wrote nothing for the
theatre but incidental music. Much of this, notably the scores of 'Timon
of Athens,' 'Bonduca,' and 'King Arthur,' is wonderfully beautiful, but
in all of these works the spoken dialogue forms the basis of the piece,
and the music is merely an adjunct, often with little reference to the
main interest of the play. In 'King Arthur' occurs the famous 'Frost
Scene,' the close resemblance of which to the 'Choeur de Peuples des
Climats Glacés' in Lulli's 'Isis' would alone make it certain that Purcell
was a careful student of the French school of opera.
Opera did not take long to cross the Alps, and early in the seventeenth
century the works of Italian composers found a warm welcome at the
courts of southern Germany. But Germany was not as yet ripe for a
national opera. During the first half of the century there are records of
one or two isolated attempts to found a school of German opera, but the
iron heel of the Thirty Years' War was on the neck of the country, and
art struggled in vain against overwhelming odds. The first German
opera, strictly so called, was the