Henry Purcell, 1659-1695: His Life and Times by Franklin B. ZimmermanReview by: Robert DoningtonJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1968), pp. 112-114Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830395 .

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S12 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

The credibility gap between the man and his pretensions is widened by M. Jacquot when he assesses the author's intellectual status and cultural signifi- cance. At least, it seems a little extrava- gant of him to conjure up such figures as George Herbert, Evelyn, Pepys, Richard Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Isaac New- ton-the Royal Society itself-to pro- vide a context for the work of a humble singing-man. The fact that Mace lived and worked in Cambridge is misleading, since there is little evidence that he was affected by the intellectual climate there. It is true that dons, unlike musicians, are plentiful in the list of subscribers to Musick's Monument. But patronage is one thing, acquaintance another. Even discounting personality, the author's social position and lack of learning (there is not a single classical reference in the book) would be sufficient to guarantee his exclusion from the most desultory High-Table conversation, let alone the real meeting of minds.

PnLIp BRETrr University of California, Berkeley

Franklin B. Zimmerman. Henry Purcell, z659-z695: His Life and Times. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967. xvii, 429 PP.

WITH ALL THE diligence that Mr. Zim- merman characteristically employs in searching out the materials for Purcell's life story, they remain too scanty in themselves to sustain a lengthy study. Sir Jack Westrup's still unequalled Purcell (London, i937), though not short, is of a moderate length, proportionate to its materials; and Westrup included a most perceptive discussion of the music, whereas Zimmerman postpones most of this for a third volume, which will com- plete the trilogy begun by his thematic catalogue of Purcell's works. The greater bulk of Zimmerman's biography is due in part to his new discoveries, for which we can gratefully thank his abilities and

still more his persistence as a musical sleuth. Elsewhere, it is due to specula- tions, some more convincing than others, about his discoveries, and about the still large and tantalizing areas of the apparently undiscoverable. Additional bulk is gained by bringing in an un- usually high proportion of background material. And if we wonder for a moment why we need be told (p. 6) the full maiden names of Pepys' wife and the date and place of his marriage to her, and the same with Milton's, we quickly grasp that these events happened to be at Westminster, where Prof. Zimmerman believes (though his fathering of Pur- cell on Henry the elder rather than Thomas is not really quite proved) that young Purcell was both born and bred. Decidedly there is order and method, and what Hercule Poirot used to call the little grey cells.

There is a good deal of straight Eng- lish history, mainly culled I suppose from Traill and Trevelyan, but none the worse for that; the chief drawback is that just as we are getting interested in some dramatic episode, it has to be broken off to take us back to Purcell, and just as we are getting interested in Purcell again, that has to be broken off for lack of source material, and back we go to poor old Charles II in another of his recurrent crises. Since the result was commonly that the musicians had to wait once more for their pay, we can- not complain that the matter is irrele- vant; but it does not quite conduce to a clear and simple narrative of what can be said of Purcell's life. And though there is always a case for discussing the music apart from the man, yet where relatively little is known of the man, it would have made a more real story if the music had been brought into the present volume. Personally, I prefer to have the music and the man discussed in one con- tinuous narrative, though this too can bring its difficulties.

The documentation is splendidly thor- ough. The arrangement of the book-and here order and method seem to have got the upper hand-is so complicated as

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REVIEWS I 13

nearly to topple back again into dis- order so far as the average reader is concerned. He may simply give up the intricate pursuit, say, from a super- script numeral in the text, which he learns is to take him on to a note in Appendix One-and where is this? At the end of the book, of course; but first he must leaf back to find what is the number of the chapter he is reading. With this firmly in mind, he must turn to Appendix One, and leaf on to dis- cover that portion of it belonging to the chapter in question. By that time, he has forgotten the superscript number he first thought of; but this does not take too long to recover provided he has kept one of several fingers now employed in the place he was reading. Considerably encouraged, he begins the note, only to find that it contains material indis- tinguishable from much of what is in the main text. But now, in that text, he meets an asterisk, a dagger, etc.; and this really does mean some routine refer- ence for which a note at the end of the book would do well enough; yet this is printed conspicuously and even pictur- esquely at the foot of the page. Some asterisks have the distinction of bearing a superscript number in addition; and asterisks occur also in the Bibliography, the explanation of which defeated me for a long time before I found that I was supposed to have remembered it from the Preface 400 pages earlier. To the author, I am certain, everything was lucid; to the publisher, the author gets the bene- fit of the doubt; to the printer, it is all in a day's work; but to the reader? Nearly all explanatory footnotes, in my experience, are afterthoughts which the author has been too negligent to work properly into the text. But what must be in a footnote, let it be in a footnote; and what belongs in an Appendix, let it not claim connection with the text. Any other method is a strain on fingers, eyes and patience alike.

Apart from this, the orderliness is genuine. The author's judgement will be better revealed in the third volume on the music; but there are one or two

statements here which raise a doubt. An example concerns the trio-sonatas. "These putative Italian models" writes Prof. Zimmerman (p. 103), "should they be discovered one day, were probably not very important. Purcell's trio-sonatas are so like some of his fantasias in style and expression that it is fairly safe to assume that here as elsewhere he had been for the most part his own instructor in studying English masterpieces of the im- mediate past." He had studied these in- deed, and not only Jenkins among the instrumental composers, as Zimmerman brings out well (pp. 56-7), but William Lawes (nowhere mentioned) still more, to judge by style. Besides, there are pieces by William Lawes, as well as by Jenkins and Locke, and twenty-two "Italian sonatas" (one and perhaps all by Maurizio Cazzati) in, for example, Brit. Mus. MS Add. 31431, which was men- tioned by Westrup in 1937 (see his pp. 23iff., where he discusses this issue in a more balanced way). The differences be- tween the fantasies and the trio sonatas are nevertheless far greater than the likenesses. The Italian influence on the sonatas is not only important but de- tailed. It is quite easy to see; and it has been studied further by Helene Wessely- Kropik ("Henry Purcell als Instrumen- talkomponist," Studien zur Musikwissen- schaft XXII, 1955, and Lelio Colista, Vienna, 1961)-she argues for Colista largely because Purcell actually men- tioned, and made use of him (see her book, p. 7). Her book is mentioned, and so is her article, in Zimmerman's Biblio- graphy, and so, again, is Michael Til- mouth's article, "The Technique and Forms of Purcell's Sonatas" (Music and Letters XL, I959), which deals with this question very well.

Mr. Zimmerman (p. 84) lists the fol- lowing dates: "his twenty-two trio- sonatas (one a chaconne) were composed between i68o and 1683." Westrup did not quite think this (his p. 235). I looked it up in Zimmerman (Analytical Cata- logue). Of course the first twelve were published in 1683. But the rest? "The similarity of hand, paper and ink makes it

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114 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

seem unlikely that they were copied long after the fantasies"-a reasonable point; and further interesting reference is given to a study by Thurston Dart in Publications of the Royal Musical Society 85 (1958/59)-where, however, no evi- dence is advanced on this question. Zim- merman (catalogue entry) concludes: "until further, more concrete evidence comes to light, these works should be listed without dates."

I quite agree, they should; and next time, I hope that Zimmerman will not neglect the obvious precaution of look- ing it up in Zimmerman. After all, on such a matter he is our best authority.

ROBERT DONINGTON University of Iowa

Hans Eppstein. Studien iiber J. S. Bachs Sonaten fiur ein Melodiein- strument und obligates Cembalo. (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Stu- dia musicologica Upsaliensis, Nova Series, 2). Uppsala: 1966. 199 PP. BACH'S SONATAS with obbligato harpsi- chord occupy a peculiarly isolated histori- cal position, anterior to the French ex- periments stimulated by the appearance of Mondonville's Pieces de clavecin en sonates avec accompagnement de violon around 1734 but without observable con- nection to the few scattered examples of the genre that might have served as models. In fact, as Hans Eppstein shows in this first monograph on the subject, there is every reason to think that Bach himself evolved the setting and textures of these sonatas, first arranging move- ments from existing trios and concertos, then composing fresh works in imitation of the transcriptions, and finally working toward freer and more idiomatic solu- tions of the problems of balance and projection posed by the new medium. The common misconception that lumps together the whole body of works as trios for two players is decisively laid to rest. Over half the movements, to be sure, answer this description, but the

rest cover a range of relationships from one of equality between keyboard and melody instrument to that of solo with keyboard accompaniment-the latter type of movement offering superb examples for continuo improvisation. The relation- ship is not always apparent at a glance. Spitta, one of the few to discuss the sonatas in any detail, described the double stops of the violin part in V/f III (third movement of the harpsichord and violin sonata in f minor) as lending gentle chordal support to the richly figured harmonies of the harpsichord. Dr. Eppstein shows, on the contary, that it is the harpsichord that accompanies a violin part worked out in two-part imitative counterpoint.

Nearly half the book is taken up with a chapter on "questions of origin." (The philological background of the sonatas is dealt with elsewhere: "Zur Problematik von J. S. Bachs Sonate fUr Violine und Cembalo G-Dur [BWV ioi9]," Archiv fiur Musikwissenschaft XXI [1964], 214- 242; although the most important in- formation is summarized in the book, the article must be consulted for details.) Here, in a series of brilliant exercises in inductive reasoning, the author recon- structs the probable history of each sonata on evidence derived from a minute analysis of certain aspects of the music-the discussion of Fl b I alone runs to thirteen pages. In a few cases, of course, more than one version exists, and these provide useful hand-holds. The method is to search for instances of ap- parent illogic, places where notes seem to have been transposed or voices turned back on themselves because of restric- tions of instrumental range or to avoid collisions with another transposed part. An earlier version with different in- strumentation-sometimes in another key -is then postulated and carefully ex- amined to see whether it allows the mu- sical lines to proceed on a more "natural" or plausible course without at the same time raising new problems. Other fac- tors having to do with the general char- acter of the parts and the composition as a whole are taken into account as well.

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