The Great Musicians: Purcell

Henry Purcell died at thirty-six, yet in that brief life he became the finest English composer before the twentieth century. His range astounds: towering sacred works, haunting airs, ribald tavern songs, and Dido and Æneas, the first great English opera. This Victorian biography, revised for the 250th anniversary of his birth, traces that singular career through the turbulent musical landscape of Restoration England. Cummings, Principal of the Guildhall School of Music, writes as both scholar and passionate advocate, correcting decades of negligent historiography that left Purcell's life woefully undocumented. The book confronts the stark reality of the Commonwealth years, when Cromwell's regime silenced church music and dismantled the institutions that might have nurtured young talent. Purcell emerged from that suppression to become organist at Westminster Abbey at twenty-one, and ultimately the composer who redefined English music. This edition includes valuable appendices on Purcell's family, the Abbey's organists and copyists, and a chronology of his life. For musicians, historians, and anyone drawn to the Renaissance and Baroque eras, this remains an essential window into Purcell's world and the cultural context that made his genius possible.