David Starkey's Music and Monarchy (2013) s01e02 Episode Script
Revolutions
1 What do you get a queen for her birthday? Diamonds? She's got more than she can wear.
Dresses? Already wardrobes full.
Paintings? Two a penny.
In despair, how about this? (Uplifting overture) This is the glorious overture to an ode for Queen Mary II's birthday, written in 1694 by Henry Purcell.
It's a work of a man who received his musical education at court, was paid by the court, and who, for most of his career, composed very largely for the court.
It would be hard to imagine a narrower or more exclusive world.
And yet, you know, it produced the greatest musical genius ever to have been born on British soil.
In this series, I'm exploring how monarchy has shaped the history of British music.
And that story is never more dramatic than in the 17th century.
A battle raged about the religion and the power of kings, which threatened not only the future of the monarchy, but the lives of musicians and the whole tradition of English music.
And yet, in the midst of this upheaval, the monarchy presided over a series of musical breakthroughs.
From the first chamber concerts and proto-operas to the triumphant debut of the baroque orchestra.
A fault line ran through the entire 17th century.
Religion.
It was the divide between the old faith and the new, between Catholic and Protestant and increasingly between different kinds of Protestant.
In 1603, England lost Queen Elizabeth, the monarch who had for 44 years kept some kind of peace.
Her successor had the potential to reopen all the wounds of the religious schism.
The accession of King James VI of Scotland as James I of England could have been revolutionary.
As a Scot, James was a foreigner.
He'd also been brought up in the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, which was much more radically Protestant than the Church Of England.
But the moment he crossed the border, he embraced the splendour of the English court and the power of his new role as the supreme head of the Church Of England.
At the same time, he anglicised musically.
He left behind in Scotland the musicians who'd served him hitherto and instead he took over complete, and as a going concern, the Tudor Chapel Royal, which included all the major composers of the day.
O, clap your hands together all ye people O, clap your hands together O, clap your hands together all ye people The very same year James came south, the author of this piece, and one of the greatest in English history, made his first appearance in royal records.
Orlando Gibbons was from humble but musical stock.
The son of a civic minstrel in Cambridge whose talent had won him a place as chorister, then student, at King's College.
He was barely 20 years old when he joined the most prestigious musical institution in the land - the Chapel Royal.
This was the monarchy's personal choir, which had a home in each of the King's palaces, and which sang at all the great occasions of state.
God is gone up with a merry noise And the Lord with the sound of the trum God is gone up with a merry noise Gibbons brought a new energy and directness to sacred music.
His choral works are still sung in the Church Of England today.
In his own lifetime, however, Gibbons was still more prized as a keyboard player and as the composer of groundbreaking instrumental music.
This he created, not primarily for the King, but for his heir, Prince Charles.
ORLANDO GIBBONS: Fantasia In 6 Parts, No.
3 This was the kind of music for which Charles had a particular fondness.
It's an example of an English musical invention.
The fantasia suite.
As Prince Of Wales, Charles had his own royal household, and that allowed him to build a musical establishment of his own.
It was second in size only to the King's, but it served a very different purpose.
The King's music made the music of state, the Prince's band, the music of pleasure.
So it featured new composers like Orlando Gibbons who worked directly for Prince Charles in addition to his Chapel Royal duties.
And it also made new kinds of music.
This instrument, the viol, was a particular favourite of the English in the 17th century and it's what Charles himself played rather well.
In earlier centuries, instrumental music had been seen as little more than a hobby for amateurs, or something to dance to.
Charles, unusually for the time, took non-vocal music seriously and - as well as performing - would listen with the appreciation of a true connoisseur.
I think this was the beginnings of the musical concert.
But it wasn't just to anybody.
It was a very specific A tiny circle around the King or the Prince.
- This is household or, literally, chamber music.
- Yes.
The Gibbons we've just heard, for example, is very intricate music, very subtle.
Barely a melody.
There was something slightly avant-garde going on.
Something forging new ways of doing this music.
For example, the opening of the Gibbons, we have this extraordinary soundscape where these very close dissonances are piled one on top of the other so that there seems to be no relief from them.
You don't feel that there's any relaxation coming.
On the one hand, there is this searching emotion.
On the other, there's a quite extraordinary technical complexity.
Music, at this point, is considered a high academic subject, isn't it? And music is often regarded as a science rather than an art at this point.
Revealing the underlying harmony of the universe is in some ways the business of the composer.
Throughout his life, Charles yearned for this harmony, elegance and order.
Not just in art, but in his faith and, he was determined, in his rule.
His coronation on the 2nd February, 1626, is the first way we know who wrote the music.
Orlando Gibbons had died the previous year, so the role was taken by the Welsh composer Thomas Tomkins.
O, Lord O, Lord Grant the King a long life Grant the King This is probably the oldest surviving anthem written specifically for a coronation, sung here as it would have been four centuries ago by the choir at Westminster Abbey.
his years may endure Tompkins work has none of the pomp of later coronation music by Purcell, Handel or Parry.
At this time, trumpets and drums were not deemed appropriate for the sacred part of the rite.
He shall dwell before thee For ever O, prepare they loving mercy and faithfulness What the anthems do is take an individual action, like the action of anointing, and they lift it out of merely the context of Westminster on this day, and they place it on a kind of celestial scale.
It becomes part of, not simply the theatre of an individual monarch, but it becomes part of a divine theatre of power and authority in which the King on earth becomes assimilated to the King in heaven.
So will we always sing praise unto thy name So will we always sing praise unto thy name That I may daily perform my vows That I may daily The music - like all aspects of the ceremony - confirmed for Charles the divine right of his royal rule, a belief he held more passionately and inflexibly than any of his ancestors.
That I may daily The coronation also confirmed the value of the cleric who would become his chief adviser, as well as head of the Chapel Royal and, in time, Archbishop Of Canterbury, William Laud.
Laud acted as master of ecclesiastical ceremonies.
He took the King through the first ever coronation rehearsal and on the day itself, he arranged signals to cue the choirs when to come in.
The result was that the five-hour ceremony passed with scarcely a hitch.
It also suggested to Charles that Laud's managerial talents could be deployed on a bigger stage.
The King wanted the solemnity, elaboration and beauty of the service which Laud had orchestrated at the Abbey to be the model for the whole nation.
Charles decreed that England's churches should be like the chapels in his palaces, such as Hampton Court.
This was the monarch's personal religious space, known, just like the choir which sang here, as the Chapel Royal.
And when Charles came to worship here he would have felt the presence of his predecessors.
He found the fabric of the interior pretty much as Henry VIII had left it.
Similarly, the worship, liturgy and magnificent musical tradition of the chapel still owed everything to Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I.
In most churches, ornate beauty such as this had been destroyed by the Protestant Reformation.
The King's subjects, generally, worshipped in far more austere surroundings.
Now, Charles I, with his love of order, beauty and uniformity, was determined to go the whole hog and make the Chapel Royal - hitherto the exception - the rule.
With Laud as his eager enforcer, the King decreed that churches in England should re-establish the symbols and practices of the past.
Charles felt that this was entirely compatible with being Protestant, but to the most devout of his subjects, the Puritans, the changes looked like a return to Catholicism.
And music like this, by Thomas Tompkins, sounded like a return to Catholicism.
It's being played on an instrument built during Charles's reign and found today in Tewkesbury Abbey.
Nowadays, we think of organs as the most traditional form of church music.
But in the reign of Charles I, organs and indeed church music itself were profoundly controversial.
This is because church music lay at the heart of the revolution which Laud and King Charles I were determined to impose on the Church Of England.
They called it "the beauty of holiness".
By this they meant that God should be worshipped, not only in words and by the mind, but also through the senses - by sight, through stained-glass and painting.
And, above all, by hearing.
Through music.
Under Laud's direction, a multitude of grand new organs were built to replace the many which had been removed or silenced by the Protestant Reformation.
The best, like this one, were built by a Lancashire father and son - the Dallams.
For Laudians, music like this made a joyful sound unto the Lord.
For Puritans, though, it was a mere obstructive noise.
One of them thundered against the "horrible profanation of both the sacraments with all manner of music, both instrumental and vocal, so loud that the minster could not be heard.
" The organ wars would eventually be fought on a national scale.
Laudians versus Puritans, high church versus low church, Royalists versus Parliament, Cavaliers versus Roundheads.
And yet, whatever the discord in his wider kingdom, the art of his court presented Charles with the vision of perfect harmony.
Here at the Whitehall Banqueting House, the King, and his Queen Henrietta Maria, presided over the greatest musical occasions of his reign.
Court masques were the multimedia spectaculars of the day.
A mixture of music and poetry, singing, dancing, comedy and fashion show.
Perhaps the most spectacular - and certainly the most expensive - was The Triumph Of Peace staged here before the King and Queen in 1634.
It cost a staggering £21,000.
That's to say several tens of millions of pounds in today's money.
(Man singing) The music was the work of a rising new talent at the court of Charles I.
A dashing blade called William Lawes, who would turn out to be as handy with the sword as with the bow.
abhorrest What is rude, or apt to wound Canst throw proud trees to the ground And make a temple Of a forest No more No more, no more This song, by Lawes for The Triumph Of Peace, has rarely been performed since 1634.
The world shall give prerogative to neither It sounds rather like opera.
The masque, however, had been developing at the English court since Tudor times, and until the 18th century was preferred here to its Italian relative.
We cannot flourish but together But masques were more than mere entertainments.
They acted as allegories of how monarchy brings harmony to the whole world, as did the great painting, by Peter Paul Rubens, which Charles commissioned for the Banqueting House ceiling.
Rubens's ceiling is the perfect representation of divine right monarchy in which the king - like God, in whose image he is made - rules by reason, law and order.
Outside the court, however, there were people who felt that the monarchy fell far short of this ideal and that the masque itself was an example of royal corruption.
For Puritans, masques were sinful.
One, William Prynne, unwisely went into print with his criticisms.
Prynne's thousand-page diatribe called actresses "notorious whores" just at the time when, in an astonishing development, the Queen herself had appeared in a speaking part on the stage.
Archbishop Laud, who had a well-reciprocated loathing for Prynne, denounced the work as an "infamous treason" and had Prynne hauled before the Star Chamber.
There he was condemned to a huge fine, to stand in the pillory, to have both his ears cut off and to be imprisoned for life.
Charles took the same perfectionist approach to politics as he did to his patronage of the arts.
Opposition was like an ugly picture or a wrong note.
He would not tolerate it.
By the late 1630s, Charles's relations with Parliament had broken down.
The elegant fictions of court culture broke with them.
In this atmosphere, William Lawes wrote music which reflected the disintegration of the old order.
It's difficult to avoid the feeling that there is something something about Lawes's own personal experiences - Broken times.
- Yes, broken times indeed.
DAVID: Before I did this series, I'd never heard of William Lawes.
And at the same time, listening to the music, it is extraordinary.
It's unlike anything else, isn't it? I think A little bit of me says, "Thank God.
" It is very strange.
It's very, very strange and the first time You ask any viol player and they'll tell you the first time they played Lawes is like coming across late Beethoven for the first time.
You feel like you're breathing the air from other planets.
Lawes could have become one of the greatest composers of English music but in 1642 his career was halted when civil war finally began in earnest.
William Lawes, passionately loyal to his royal master, was amongst the very few royal musicians who signed up for the King's army.
There was an attempt made to protect him from the worst risks of war by making him a provisioning officer.
But Lawes, as daring in life as in his music, was killed at the Siege Of Chester in 1645.
Charles, who'd lost his own cousin in the same action, nevertheless ordered special mourning for the man that he called the father of music.
Amid the outpouring of grief, a fellow Cavalier poet wrote a bitter, punning epitaph.
"Will Lawes was slain by those whose wills were laws.
" Royal music now took on a very different character.
As the King's men went into battle, this is what they heard.
Charles, punctilious as ever, insisted that a standardised drum march was used by his forces.
In vain.
By 1644, his Puritan opponents were clearly winning.
And wherever they gained control, church music became a casualty of war.
Take the sad fate of Thomas Tompkins.
Since the start of the 17th century, he'd combined his duties at the Chapel Royal with the job of organist and choirmaster at Worcester Cathedral.
In September 1642, Parliamentary troops burst into the cathedral and desecrated it.
But this wasn't the random violence of rampaging soldiers.
Instead, it was a carefully targeted attack on the symbols of the beauty of holiness most offensive to the Puritans.
So the troops smashed the stained glass.
They pissed in the font because they thought the use of the sign of cross in baptism was popish.
And they silenced Tompkins's beloved organ by ripping off the pipes.
These scenes were repeated across the country.
The attempts by Charles and Laud to revive the older traditions and music of worship were systematically undone.
Then Tompkins's study, at the top of his house here, where he kept his musical manuscripts, was hit by cannonballs fired during the Parliamentary bombardment of the city.
Tompkins had faithfully served his king and his church.
Now, in his 70s, he saw everything that he had lived for and worked for destroyed.
The court's vast musical establishment, by far the best in the land, had been disbanded, its talent destroyed.
The Chapel Royal ceased to exist and so, in time, did the monarchy itself.
On the 30th of January, 1649, King Charles returned to the Banqueting House - where previously he had savoured the finest music - to be beheaded on a scaffold built outside.
Within a fortnight, Thomas Tompkins wrote this piece, which he entitled A Sad Pavan For These Distracted Times.
25 years after writing music for the King's coronation, he'd now written his funeral dirge.
Most organs had been destroyed during the Civil War and Commonwealth.
But one that survived was the magnificent Dallam organ in its original home at Magdalen College, Oxford.
In 1654, it too was taken down.
But it wasn't destroyed like the rest.
Instead, it was carefully dismantled and re-erected at Hampton Court Palace, which had just been given to Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector of England, as his summer residence.
Cromwell? Organs? Wasn't the Puritan Lord Protector supposed to hate music? Well, he did and he didn't.
He hated music in church but he loved it when he dined or when he relaxed.
So we can imagine Cromwell listening to this organ as it was played at Hampton Court by his Latin secretary, fellow Puritan, poet and musician John Milton.
Which is why, centuries later, this instrument is known as the Milton Organ.
During the years of Cromwellian rule, Charles I's son lived in exile on the Continent.
His supporters rallied round this song.
And after Cromwell's death in 1658, Parliament did indeed invite the King to return.
With Charles II came the revival of sacred music which the Puritans had fought so hard against.
Zadok the priest And Nathan the prophet Anointed Solomon king When the new king was crowned on St George's Day, 1661, amongst the music composed for the occasion was a piece by Henry Lawes, brother of the slain William.
It was a text heard at coronations since Anglo-Saxon times and still in use today, though for the last three centuries known in its magnificent setting by Handel.
Hallelujah Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah Hallelujah Musically, the coronation of Charles II was a case of new wine in old bottles.
The music, like Henry Lawes's Zadok The Priest, was new and by a new generation of composers.
But everything else was old or tried to be.
So the same order of service was used and the same anthems were sung as at the coronation of Charles I, in 1626.
The coronation regalia - the crown, the orb, the sceptre - which had all been destroyed during the Commonwealth, were remade, given their old names and used in the traditional time-honoured way.
Even the singing was led, as in the old days, by the choir of the Chapel Royal.
But since the last boy treble who had sung before King Charles I was now a man of 30, the choir of the Chapel Royal had to be reconstructed from scratch.
At the coronation, the new choristers were still so young and untrained that their voices had to be reinforced by men singing falsetto, and were at times drowned out by loud cornets.
And yet, from this revived Chapel Royal, would come all the leading composers of the next few decades.
Among them Pelham Humfrey, John Blow and - within a few years - the greatest of them all.
HENRY PURCELL: Trumpet Tune And Air Henry Purcell was born in 1659, the year before the monarchy was restored.
Both his father and his uncle were at the heart of the new regime's musical establishment, working at Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal.
And very soon, Henry joined them.
From the age of about seven the young Henry Purcell was singing for Charles II in the Chapel Royal here at Hampton Court, or wherever else the King happened to be in residence.
By the time that he joined the choir, the Chapel Royal had recovered all its former glory.
This meant, as for the last three centuries, that Purcell was now a pupil in by far the best music school in the kingdom.
As a choirboy, he learned to read music at sight, to perform confidently on the grandest occasions and also to play and improvise on keyboard instruments, which gave him an insight into the basic principles of composition.
"Some of the forwardest and brightest children of the Chapel began to be masters of composing.
This His Majesty greatly encouraged by indulging their youthful fancies so that every month at least they produced something new.
Otherwise it was in vain to hope to please His Majesty.
" When his voice broke, he became a kind of apprentice to the senior musicians of the Chapel Royal, who included the best composers of the day.
He transcribed, edited and arranged their music.
He also began to compose seriously himself.
As well as absorbing the glorious English choral tradition, Purcell's musical imagination would be influenced by another aspect of his king's tastes.
Though in most respects Charles restored the customs of his father's court, he was known to utterly detest the kind of serious chamber music that Charles I had loved.
So out went esoteric, vile fantasias.
In came revelry and rhythm to entertain the Merry Monarch.
"He could not bear any music to which he could not keep the time, and that he constantly did to all that was presented to him.
" He wanted to sit back, tap, listen to a jolly good tune and have a good dance.
It's a completely different approach.
But that's also a public approach.
This is music as part of pleasure.
For Charles I, I'm sure it was a pleasure also but it was a much more intellectual, refined pleasure.
"Refinement" is not a word that springs to mind with Charles II.
In exile during the years of Cromwell's Republic, Charles had spent a lot of time with his wealthy autocratic cousin Louis XIV.
At the French court he saw grand opera ballet, learned new and fashionable dances and heard the band of 24 violinists drilled by the great Jean-Baptiste Lully.
When Charles returned to England, he brought back French tastes, French fashions, and the determination to have exactly the same number of violinists himself.
This was a crucial step on the road to the orchestra.
Violins are the foundation of orchestral sound to this day.
Charles loved their sound so much he even wanted to hear them in his Chapel Royal.
His royal taste led to a unique English form which Henry Purcell would make his own.
The symphony anthem alternates rich string segments with sung sacred texts.
Rejoice in the Lord alway And again I say rejoice Rejoice in the Lord alway And again I say rejoice Not everyone approved of this new approach to church music.
The diarist John Evelyn grumbled "24 violins after the French fantastical light way, better suited to a tavern or a playhouse than a church.
" Only a few years before, even the sound of an organ in church had been controversial.
Now Charles was rolling back the boundaries of musical taste just as Purcell was expanding the creative possibilities of musical form.
Be careful for nothing But in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving There's an operatic quality to the music Purcell writes for the soloists.
He was clearly paying attention to developments in Italy at the time.
By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving Let your requests be known unto God But he was also writing here for the specific voices of the Chapel Royal.
Shall keep your hearts and minds With the Restoration, female singers had begun to perform on stage, and even at court, but the Chapel was still a male preserve.
With all understanding So Purcell wrote the top line here for a counter-tenor.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord Through Jesus Christ our Lord Purcell made fair copies of his sacred anthems into this score book here in his own handwriting.
But Purcell didn't only write sacred music.
Turn the book over, like this, and we find, from the other end, a similar record of the secular music that he composed for the court of Charles II.
These are odes to mark royal birthdays, weddings, military victories and peace treaties.
Welcome Welcome Welcome Vicegerent of the Mighty King This is one of Purcell's welcome odes written for the annual occasion of the King's return to London from the country.
Why on earth welcome the King back to his own capital and, moreover, do it over and over again at the same time each year? Partly it was sycophantic nonsense.
The court followed the same routine every year with the summer at Windsor and the winters in London.
The odes here gave a ceremonial shape to the year just as once upon a time the church's calendar had done before the Reformation.
Welcome Welcome One of the reasons why Purcell isn't listened to as often now as he should be is that his genius was poured into this kind of occasional royal piece which teeters on the verge of absurdity today.
The welcome ode to Charles, you sung it with an admirably straight face, as though you actually believed it.
Do you simply go into a state of suspension on the words? I think you have to kind of sing what you've been given.
But it's set very well.
It's very easy to understand.
However clumsy the words, they're still made to work.
Exactly.
Purcell's very good at making the music move with what the words are doing.
He makes it clear what he's trying to say.
and hope or wish for does allow I'm relatively confident that he had a jolly good sense of humour.
I think there's an amount of tongue-in-cheekness going on.
All we can hope or wish for does allow All we can hope Whatever Purcell thought of the odes, there's no doubt that the King would have approved.
He's addressed at one point as "our mottled deity".
Charles, like his father, believed he ruled by divine right.
But he was at least politically shrewd enough not to press the point home.
And then he's succeeded by a king who has absolutely no sense of political reality whatever.
Though Charles fathered many, many children, none of them were by his Queen, so none were legitimate heirs.
When he died in 1685, the throne passed instead to his brother, James, who would reopen the wounds of the religious divide once more.
Because James had - scandalously and publicly - converted to Catholicism a few years previously.
Fears of what this meant were initially vanquished by James's magnificent coronation.
Purcell, of course, wrote the music.
His genius is such that he produces music which immediately kind of raises the musical game of the coronation service.
For example, My Heart Is Inditing starts in a very dense way.
There's a seven-part vocal group.
My heart is inditing My heart is inditing And the vocal parts start one at a time singing the words after each other.
My heart is inditing So you build up the texture.
So it sounds like a very busy, colourful tapestry.
There was a sense of trying to achieve, in a way, a pictorial idea of what the coronation is.
I speak of the things I speak of the things Which I have made unto the King Purcell's anthem is the best music yet performed at a coronation.
It's also on much the largest scale.
The words are new and there'd never even been an anthem at this point of the service, the coronation of the Queen, before.
Why all the fuss now? She shall be brought to the King In raiment of needlework She shall be brought The answer lies in what was left out.
The coronation of the Queen, which was simpler and far shorter than that of the King, normally followed on the coronation communion service.
But in 1685, both the King, James II, and the Queen, Mary of Modena, were Roman Catholics and absolutely refused to take the Protestant communion.
The omission of the communion service left a gaping hole spiritually and musically at the heart of the service, which the splendours of Purcell's music were almost certainly designed to fill.
With joy and gladness shall they be brought And shall enter Shall enter into the King's palace With joy and gladness With joy and gladness shall they be brought With joy and gladness With joy and gladness Though Purcell successfully diverted attention from James's Catholicism at the coronation, the new King's faith was harder to ignore once his reign was under way.
Things could have been very different if James had had only a modicum more political skill.
Perhaps, can one put it differently, had been even moderately dishonest.
Rather than a determined Catholic convert.
Into the King's palace But James believed he had been chosen by God to lead the whole nation back to the Catholic faith.
Lillibullero The result, within three years, was open rebellion.
The rebels sang a popular song of the day which lampooned the hopes of Catholics complete with the mocking cod-Irish lyrics.
Lillibullero bullen a la Lillibullero bullen a la It became the popular rallying cry against King James II.
"The whole army and the people both in city and country were singing it perpetually.
" It's only a song but it sang King James II out of three kingdoms.
In 1688, James was deposed by his own daughter, Mary, and her husband, William Of Orange, who invaded from the Netherlands at the invitation of James's leading subjects.
William and Mary were Protestants and so for evermore was to be Britain's monarchy.
It was known as the Glorious Revolution and it changed the meaning of monarchy and its music for ever.
William and Mary were crowned the following April.
But this was to be a very different service from any of its predecessors.
The preacher at the coronation rejoiced in the fact that in 1688 the English had chosen the happy middle way between the monarchical despotism of France, on the one hand, and the republican chaos and disorder of the English Commonwealth on the other, and he was roundly applauded by the audience.
The political atmosphere was further heightened by the presence, for the first time, of MPs.
This was the inaugural event of a limited parliamentary monarchy.
Divine right was dead and the sacredness of kings very nearly died with it.
But if the coronation was no longer a sacred rite which consecrated a priest-king, what point was there in Purcell writing sublime music for the occasion? Praise the Lord Praise the Lord O, O Jerusalem Praise The Lord O Jerusalem seems rather austere.
It starts in the minor key, which is an unusual choice of a composer for a praising song.
It's written in a more intimate way and a less obviously jolly, flamboyant way.
The texts chosen reflect the changed circumstances.
The Queen is given equal weight with the King.
But Queen Mary thought the coronation all vanity.
King William thought it a popish absurdity.
Purcell's music no longer had any raison d'être.
Without wishing in any way to denigrate the music, it sounds less expensive than the music of My Heart Is Inditing of a few years earlier.
It's saying this is a little bit more pared down, it's less ostentatious, it's a little bit more sombre.
Praise the Lord At previous coronations, music had acted to sanctify the monarchy.
From now on, that's not what composers would be required to do, in the Abbey or anywhere else.
William and Mary largely withdrew from the traditional centre of music and monarchy - the Palace Of Whitehall - and came instead to Hampton Court, which they commissioned Christopher Wren to rebuild.
It was a case of out with the old and in with the new.
Out went the opulent private apartments of Henry VIII and his queens.
In came William III's plain Jane baroque.
Sober, practical, modern.
A bit like William III himself.
As for music, whether sacred or secular, he was indifferent, if not actually hostile.
Nothing escaped William's reforming zeal.
Not the fabric, the liturgy or the musical traditions of the Chapel Royal.
Having survived both Reformation and revolution, all of these were to be shipwrecked on the rock of William III's religious principles.
For William, as a committed, life-long Calvinist was a Protestant of the most thorough-going sort.
This meant that he thought many, if not most, of the rituals of the Chapel Royal were popish, idolatrous survivals of the worst sort.
The elaborate and theatrical music of the Chapel Royal, always a Protestant bugbear, was struck down when, as one of their first acts, William and Mary forbade the use of strings here in the chapel.
It sounds so little but it destroyed so much.
The glorious and quintessentially English symphony anthem died a strange and sudden death.
But, most striking of all, was the effect on the Chapel Royal itself which changed from a hothouse of creativity to the merest backwater almost overnight.
Purcell, the great symphony anthem composer, found himself neglected but he did still have one royal commission.
Writing the annual birthday ode for Queen Mary.
His composition for 1690 represented the culmination of a century of instrumental innovation at court.
From Charles I's chamber concerts, through Charles II's 24 violins, to this - a full baroque orchestra.
Arise My Muse - suddenly you have everything there.
You have the trumpets, the oboes, the violins.
And Purcell doesn't allow the trumpets to just play simple parts.
They play pretty much the same kind of material the violins are playing.
So they were incredibly virtuosic.
And also the oboes.
It's quite a strange new animal which came into the orchestra at this time.
It's extraordinary the way he combines those instruments, the way he orchestrates them.
It's an unbelievably skillful and colourful use of an orchestra.
And yet, just two days after Arise My Muse was first performed, William III ordered the Lord Chamberlain to slash the number of royal musicians by a third.
Court music, brought to such heights by Charles I, and Charles II, went the same way as the Chapel Royal - downsized, neglected, now used merely for the odd ball.
Purcell was forced to take his genius elsewhere and the orchestra went with him.
The work of both would henceforth be enjoyed by a rather broader audience than the exclusive world of the court.
This was to be Purcell's principal habitat for the remainder of his career.
Up to the Glorious Revolution, Purcell had been a court composer.
But now that William III's austere Protestantism declared that Purcell's luscious orchestrally accompanied music was too theatrical for the Chapel Royal, Purcell turned to the theatre proper.
And henceforward wrote almost exclusively for the London stage.
But one thing didn't change, however.
Purcell's staggering productivity.
Over the course of the next five years, he wrote music for over 40 stage plays.
For love ev'ry creature is formed by his nature For love every creature Purcell even wrote one of the very first English operas, Dido And Aeneas.
They were scarcely performed in his lifetime.
Restoration audiences instead preferred spectacular romps like King Arthur.
No joys are above The pleasures of love No joys are above The pleasures of love No joys No, no No, no, no, no, no joys Are above Love Love Love No joys are above the pleasures The pleasures The pleasures of love Despite Purcell's resounding success in the theatre, there's a sense of loss, of exile.
Purcell was no longer in demand in the court that had nourished his genius.
His principal librettist, John Dryden, had actually been dismissed from his royal post of Poet Laureate.
Even the form of the dramatic opera, with its lavish combination of music, words, dance and spectacle, was a descendant in exile of the court masques of Charles I's reign.
And all of them - composer, librettist, dramatic opera - were on the London stage only because they were unwanted at the new court of the Glorious Revolution.
(Sombre music) But then English music suffered a still more grievous blow.
Purcell died at the - even then - shockingly early age of 36.
At the start of 1695, he'd written this music to mourn the premature passing of Queen Mary.
Before the year was out, it was played at his own funeral.
That flat, hollow sound, it's the majesty and the finality of death.
It is no exaggeration to say that English music died with Purcell.
He was the last composer in the great Chapel Royal tradition which had stretched back through Orlando Gibbons, to Thomas Tallis, to John Dunstable, and even beyond.
Where now was capable of producing a successor? The great tragedy of England is that nobody steps into the gap as far as music is concerned.
Once, for the political, the religio-political reasons of 1688-89, the Chapel Royal is shuttered down, nothing steps into the gap.
It leaves England with an appetite for music but with no musical infrastructure to provide it.
Audiences continued to pack out London theatres, but Purcell's death left a vacuum of native talent.
Al lampo dell'armi quest'alma guerriera vendetta farà And so, as I'll explore next time, the London stage was invaded by Italian opera - foreign composers, foreign stars, performing in a foreign language.
Al lampo dell'ar Paradoxically, this happened just at the same time that Britain became the great power in Europe.
And more ironically still, the composer who restored the fortunes of music made in Britain was German - Georg Handel.
Quest'alma guerriera Vendetta farà Al lampo dell'armi quest'alma guerriera vendetta farà Quest'alma guerriera vendetta farÃ
Dresses? Already wardrobes full.
Paintings? Two a penny.
In despair, how about this? (Uplifting overture) This is the glorious overture to an ode for Queen Mary II's birthday, written in 1694 by Henry Purcell.
It's a work of a man who received his musical education at court, was paid by the court, and who, for most of his career, composed very largely for the court.
It would be hard to imagine a narrower or more exclusive world.
And yet, you know, it produced the greatest musical genius ever to have been born on British soil.
In this series, I'm exploring how monarchy has shaped the history of British music.
And that story is never more dramatic than in the 17th century.
A battle raged about the religion and the power of kings, which threatened not only the future of the monarchy, but the lives of musicians and the whole tradition of English music.
And yet, in the midst of this upheaval, the monarchy presided over a series of musical breakthroughs.
From the first chamber concerts and proto-operas to the triumphant debut of the baroque orchestra.
A fault line ran through the entire 17th century.
Religion.
It was the divide between the old faith and the new, between Catholic and Protestant and increasingly between different kinds of Protestant.
In 1603, England lost Queen Elizabeth, the monarch who had for 44 years kept some kind of peace.
Her successor had the potential to reopen all the wounds of the religious schism.
The accession of King James VI of Scotland as James I of England could have been revolutionary.
As a Scot, James was a foreigner.
He'd also been brought up in the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, which was much more radically Protestant than the Church Of England.
But the moment he crossed the border, he embraced the splendour of the English court and the power of his new role as the supreme head of the Church Of England.
At the same time, he anglicised musically.
He left behind in Scotland the musicians who'd served him hitherto and instead he took over complete, and as a going concern, the Tudor Chapel Royal, which included all the major composers of the day.
O, clap your hands together all ye people O, clap your hands together O, clap your hands together all ye people The very same year James came south, the author of this piece, and one of the greatest in English history, made his first appearance in royal records.
Orlando Gibbons was from humble but musical stock.
The son of a civic minstrel in Cambridge whose talent had won him a place as chorister, then student, at King's College.
He was barely 20 years old when he joined the most prestigious musical institution in the land - the Chapel Royal.
This was the monarchy's personal choir, which had a home in each of the King's palaces, and which sang at all the great occasions of state.
God is gone up with a merry noise And the Lord with the sound of the trum God is gone up with a merry noise Gibbons brought a new energy and directness to sacred music.
His choral works are still sung in the Church Of England today.
In his own lifetime, however, Gibbons was still more prized as a keyboard player and as the composer of groundbreaking instrumental music.
This he created, not primarily for the King, but for his heir, Prince Charles.
ORLANDO GIBBONS: Fantasia In 6 Parts, No.
3 This was the kind of music for which Charles had a particular fondness.
It's an example of an English musical invention.
The fantasia suite.
As Prince Of Wales, Charles had his own royal household, and that allowed him to build a musical establishment of his own.
It was second in size only to the King's, but it served a very different purpose.
The King's music made the music of state, the Prince's band, the music of pleasure.
So it featured new composers like Orlando Gibbons who worked directly for Prince Charles in addition to his Chapel Royal duties.
And it also made new kinds of music.
This instrument, the viol, was a particular favourite of the English in the 17th century and it's what Charles himself played rather well.
In earlier centuries, instrumental music had been seen as little more than a hobby for amateurs, or something to dance to.
Charles, unusually for the time, took non-vocal music seriously and - as well as performing - would listen with the appreciation of a true connoisseur.
I think this was the beginnings of the musical concert.
But it wasn't just to anybody.
It was a very specific A tiny circle around the King or the Prince.
- This is household or, literally, chamber music.
- Yes.
The Gibbons we've just heard, for example, is very intricate music, very subtle.
Barely a melody.
There was something slightly avant-garde going on.
Something forging new ways of doing this music.
For example, the opening of the Gibbons, we have this extraordinary soundscape where these very close dissonances are piled one on top of the other so that there seems to be no relief from them.
You don't feel that there's any relaxation coming.
On the one hand, there is this searching emotion.
On the other, there's a quite extraordinary technical complexity.
Music, at this point, is considered a high academic subject, isn't it? And music is often regarded as a science rather than an art at this point.
Revealing the underlying harmony of the universe is in some ways the business of the composer.
Throughout his life, Charles yearned for this harmony, elegance and order.
Not just in art, but in his faith and, he was determined, in his rule.
His coronation on the 2nd February, 1626, is the first way we know who wrote the music.
Orlando Gibbons had died the previous year, so the role was taken by the Welsh composer Thomas Tomkins.
O, Lord O, Lord Grant the King a long life Grant the King This is probably the oldest surviving anthem written specifically for a coronation, sung here as it would have been four centuries ago by the choir at Westminster Abbey.
his years may endure Tompkins work has none of the pomp of later coronation music by Purcell, Handel or Parry.
At this time, trumpets and drums were not deemed appropriate for the sacred part of the rite.
He shall dwell before thee For ever O, prepare they loving mercy and faithfulness What the anthems do is take an individual action, like the action of anointing, and they lift it out of merely the context of Westminster on this day, and they place it on a kind of celestial scale.
It becomes part of, not simply the theatre of an individual monarch, but it becomes part of a divine theatre of power and authority in which the King on earth becomes assimilated to the King in heaven.
So will we always sing praise unto thy name So will we always sing praise unto thy name That I may daily perform my vows That I may daily The music - like all aspects of the ceremony - confirmed for Charles the divine right of his royal rule, a belief he held more passionately and inflexibly than any of his ancestors.
That I may daily The coronation also confirmed the value of the cleric who would become his chief adviser, as well as head of the Chapel Royal and, in time, Archbishop Of Canterbury, William Laud.
Laud acted as master of ecclesiastical ceremonies.
He took the King through the first ever coronation rehearsal and on the day itself, he arranged signals to cue the choirs when to come in.
The result was that the five-hour ceremony passed with scarcely a hitch.
It also suggested to Charles that Laud's managerial talents could be deployed on a bigger stage.
The King wanted the solemnity, elaboration and beauty of the service which Laud had orchestrated at the Abbey to be the model for the whole nation.
Charles decreed that England's churches should be like the chapels in his palaces, such as Hampton Court.
This was the monarch's personal religious space, known, just like the choir which sang here, as the Chapel Royal.
And when Charles came to worship here he would have felt the presence of his predecessors.
He found the fabric of the interior pretty much as Henry VIII had left it.
Similarly, the worship, liturgy and magnificent musical tradition of the chapel still owed everything to Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I.
In most churches, ornate beauty such as this had been destroyed by the Protestant Reformation.
The King's subjects, generally, worshipped in far more austere surroundings.
Now, Charles I, with his love of order, beauty and uniformity, was determined to go the whole hog and make the Chapel Royal - hitherto the exception - the rule.
With Laud as his eager enforcer, the King decreed that churches in England should re-establish the symbols and practices of the past.
Charles felt that this was entirely compatible with being Protestant, but to the most devout of his subjects, the Puritans, the changes looked like a return to Catholicism.
And music like this, by Thomas Tompkins, sounded like a return to Catholicism.
It's being played on an instrument built during Charles's reign and found today in Tewkesbury Abbey.
Nowadays, we think of organs as the most traditional form of church music.
But in the reign of Charles I, organs and indeed church music itself were profoundly controversial.
This is because church music lay at the heart of the revolution which Laud and King Charles I were determined to impose on the Church Of England.
They called it "the beauty of holiness".
By this they meant that God should be worshipped, not only in words and by the mind, but also through the senses - by sight, through stained-glass and painting.
And, above all, by hearing.
Through music.
Under Laud's direction, a multitude of grand new organs were built to replace the many which had been removed or silenced by the Protestant Reformation.
The best, like this one, were built by a Lancashire father and son - the Dallams.
For Laudians, music like this made a joyful sound unto the Lord.
For Puritans, though, it was a mere obstructive noise.
One of them thundered against the "horrible profanation of both the sacraments with all manner of music, both instrumental and vocal, so loud that the minster could not be heard.
" The organ wars would eventually be fought on a national scale.
Laudians versus Puritans, high church versus low church, Royalists versus Parliament, Cavaliers versus Roundheads.
And yet, whatever the discord in his wider kingdom, the art of his court presented Charles with the vision of perfect harmony.
Here at the Whitehall Banqueting House, the King, and his Queen Henrietta Maria, presided over the greatest musical occasions of his reign.
Court masques were the multimedia spectaculars of the day.
A mixture of music and poetry, singing, dancing, comedy and fashion show.
Perhaps the most spectacular - and certainly the most expensive - was The Triumph Of Peace staged here before the King and Queen in 1634.
It cost a staggering £21,000.
That's to say several tens of millions of pounds in today's money.
(Man singing) The music was the work of a rising new talent at the court of Charles I.
A dashing blade called William Lawes, who would turn out to be as handy with the sword as with the bow.
abhorrest What is rude, or apt to wound Canst throw proud trees to the ground And make a temple Of a forest No more No more, no more This song, by Lawes for The Triumph Of Peace, has rarely been performed since 1634.
The world shall give prerogative to neither It sounds rather like opera.
The masque, however, had been developing at the English court since Tudor times, and until the 18th century was preferred here to its Italian relative.
We cannot flourish but together But masques were more than mere entertainments.
They acted as allegories of how monarchy brings harmony to the whole world, as did the great painting, by Peter Paul Rubens, which Charles commissioned for the Banqueting House ceiling.
Rubens's ceiling is the perfect representation of divine right monarchy in which the king - like God, in whose image he is made - rules by reason, law and order.
Outside the court, however, there were people who felt that the monarchy fell far short of this ideal and that the masque itself was an example of royal corruption.
For Puritans, masques were sinful.
One, William Prynne, unwisely went into print with his criticisms.
Prynne's thousand-page diatribe called actresses "notorious whores" just at the time when, in an astonishing development, the Queen herself had appeared in a speaking part on the stage.
Archbishop Laud, who had a well-reciprocated loathing for Prynne, denounced the work as an "infamous treason" and had Prynne hauled before the Star Chamber.
There he was condemned to a huge fine, to stand in the pillory, to have both his ears cut off and to be imprisoned for life.
Charles took the same perfectionist approach to politics as he did to his patronage of the arts.
Opposition was like an ugly picture or a wrong note.
He would not tolerate it.
By the late 1630s, Charles's relations with Parliament had broken down.
The elegant fictions of court culture broke with them.
In this atmosphere, William Lawes wrote music which reflected the disintegration of the old order.
It's difficult to avoid the feeling that there is something something about Lawes's own personal experiences - Broken times.
- Yes, broken times indeed.
DAVID: Before I did this series, I'd never heard of William Lawes.
And at the same time, listening to the music, it is extraordinary.
It's unlike anything else, isn't it? I think A little bit of me says, "Thank God.
" It is very strange.
It's very, very strange and the first time You ask any viol player and they'll tell you the first time they played Lawes is like coming across late Beethoven for the first time.
You feel like you're breathing the air from other planets.
Lawes could have become one of the greatest composers of English music but in 1642 his career was halted when civil war finally began in earnest.
William Lawes, passionately loyal to his royal master, was amongst the very few royal musicians who signed up for the King's army.
There was an attempt made to protect him from the worst risks of war by making him a provisioning officer.
But Lawes, as daring in life as in his music, was killed at the Siege Of Chester in 1645.
Charles, who'd lost his own cousin in the same action, nevertheless ordered special mourning for the man that he called the father of music.
Amid the outpouring of grief, a fellow Cavalier poet wrote a bitter, punning epitaph.
"Will Lawes was slain by those whose wills were laws.
" Royal music now took on a very different character.
As the King's men went into battle, this is what they heard.
Charles, punctilious as ever, insisted that a standardised drum march was used by his forces.
In vain.
By 1644, his Puritan opponents were clearly winning.
And wherever they gained control, church music became a casualty of war.
Take the sad fate of Thomas Tompkins.
Since the start of the 17th century, he'd combined his duties at the Chapel Royal with the job of organist and choirmaster at Worcester Cathedral.
In September 1642, Parliamentary troops burst into the cathedral and desecrated it.
But this wasn't the random violence of rampaging soldiers.
Instead, it was a carefully targeted attack on the symbols of the beauty of holiness most offensive to the Puritans.
So the troops smashed the stained glass.
They pissed in the font because they thought the use of the sign of cross in baptism was popish.
And they silenced Tompkins's beloved organ by ripping off the pipes.
These scenes were repeated across the country.
The attempts by Charles and Laud to revive the older traditions and music of worship were systematically undone.
Then Tompkins's study, at the top of his house here, where he kept his musical manuscripts, was hit by cannonballs fired during the Parliamentary bombardment of the city.
Tompkins had faithfully served his king and his church.
Now, in his 70s, he saw everything that he had lived for and worked for destroyed.
The court's vast musical establishment, by far the best in the land, had been disbanded, its talent destroyed.
The Chapel Royal ceased to exist and so, in time, did the monarchy itself.
On the 30th of January, 1649, King Charles returned to the Banqueting House - where previously he had savoured the finest music - to be beheaded on a scaffold built outside.
Within a fortnight, Thomas Tompkins wrote this piece, which he entitled A Sad Pavan For These Distracted Times.
25 years after writing music for the King's coronation, he'd now written his funeral dirge.
Most organs had been destroyed during the Civil War and Commonwealth.
But one that survived was the magnificent Dallam organ in its original home at Magdalen College, Oxford.
In 1654, it too was taken down.
But it wasn't destroyed like the rest.
Instead, it was carefully dismantled and re-erected at Hampton Court Palace, which had just been given to Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector of England, as his summer residence.
Cromwell? Organs? Wasn't the Puritan Lord Protector supposed to hate music? Well, he did and he didn't.
He hated music in church but he loved it when he dined or when he relaxed.
So we can imagine Cromwell listening to this organ as it was played at Hampton Court by his Latin secretary, fellow Puritan, poet and musician John Milton.
Which is why, centuries later, this instrument is known as the Milton Organ.
During the years of Cromwellian rule, Charles I's son lived in exile on the Continent.
His supporters rallied round this song.
And after Cromwell's death in 1658, Parliament did indeed invite the King to return.
With Charles II came the revival of sacred music which the Puritans had fought so hard against.
Zadok the priest And Nathan the prophet Anointed Solomon king When the new king was crowned on St George's Day, 1661, amongst the music composed for the occasion was a piece by Henry Lawes, brother of the slain William.
It was a text heard at coronations since Anglo-Saxon times and still in use today, though for the last three centuries known in its magnificent setting by Handel.
Hallelujah Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah Hallelujah Musically, the coronation of Charles II was a case of new wine in old bottles.
The music, like Henry Lawes's Zadok The Priest, was new and by a new generation of composers.
But everything else was old or tried to be.
So the same order of service was used and the same anthems were sung as at the coronation of Charles I, in 1626.
The coronation regalia - the crown, the orb, the sceptre - which had all been destroyed during the Commonwealth, were remade, given their old names and used in the traditional time-honoured way.
Even the singing was led, as in the old days, by the choir of the Chapel Royal.
But since the last boy treble who had sung before King Charles I was now a man of 30, the choir of the Chapel Royal had to be reconstructed from scratch.
At the coronation, the new choristers were still so young and untrained that their voices had to be reinforced by men singing falsetto, and were at times drowned out by loud cornets.
And yet, from this revived Chapel Royal, would come all the leading composers of the next few decades.
Among them Pelham Humfrey, John Blow and - within a few years - the greatest of them all.
HENRY PURCELL: Trumpet Tune And Air Henry Purcell was born in 1659, the year before the monarchy was restored.
Both his father and his uncle were at the heart of the new regime's musical establishment, working at Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal.
And very soon, Henry joined them.
From the age of about seven the young Henry Purcell was singing for Charles II in the Chapel Royal here at Hampton Court, or wherever else the King happened to be in residence.
By the time that he joined the choir, the Chapel Royal had recovered all its former glory.
This meant, as for the last three centuries, that Purcell was now a pupil in by far the best music school in the kingdom.
As a choirboy, he learned to read music at sight, to perform confidently on the grandest occasions and also to play and improvise on keyboard instruments, which gave him an insight into the basic principles of composition.
"Some of the forwardest and brightest children of the Chapel began to be masters of composing.
This His Majesty greatly encouraged by indulging their youthful fancies so that every month at least they produced something new.
Otherwise it was in vain to hope to please His Majesty.
" When his voice broke, he became a kind of apprentice to the senior musicians of the Chapel Royal, who included the best composers of the day.
He transcribed, edited and arranged their music.
He also began to compose seriously himself.
As well as absorbing the glorious English choral tradition, Purcell's musical imagination would be influenced by another aspect of his king's tastes.
Though in most respects Charles restored the customs of his father's court, he was known to utterly detest the kind of serious chamber music that Charles I had loved.
So out went esoteric, vile fantasias.
In came revelry and rhythm to entertain the Merry Monarch.
"He could not bear any music to which he could not keep the time, and that he constantly did to all that was presented to him.
" He wanted to sit back, tap, listen to a jolly good tune and have a good dance.
It's a completely different approach.
But that's also a public approach.
This is music as part of pleasure.
For Charles I, I'm sure it was a pleasure also but it was a much more intellectual, refined pleasure.
"Refinement" is not a word that springs to mind with Charles II.
In exile during the years of Cromwell's Republic, Charles had spent a lot of time with his wealthy autocratic cousin Louis XIV.
At the French court he saw grand opera ballet, learned new and fashionable dances and heard the band of 24 violinists drilled by the great Jean-Baptiste Lully.
When Charles returned to England, he brought back French tastes, French fashions, and the determination to have exactly the same number of violinists himself.
This was a crucial step on the road to the orchestra.
Violins are the foundation of orchestral sound to this day.
Charles loved their sound so much he even wanted to hear them in his Chapel Royal.
His royal taste led to a unique English form which Henry Purcell would make his own.
The symphony anthem alternates rich string segments with sung sacred texts.
Rejoice in the Lord alway And again I say rejoice Rejoice in the Lord alway And again I say rejoice Not everyone approved of this new approach to church music.
The diarist John Evelyn grumbled "24 violins after the French fantastical light way, better suited to a tavern or a playhouse than a church.
" Only a few years before, even the sound of an organ in church had been controversial.
Now Charles was rolling back the boundaries of musical taste just as Purcell was expanding the creative possibilities of musical form.
Be careful for nothing But in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving There's an operatic quality to the music Purcell writes for the soloists.
He was clearly paying attention to developments in Italy at the time.
By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving Let your requests be known unto God But he was also writing here for the specific voices of the Chapel Royal.
Shall keep your hearts and minds With the Restoration, female singers had begun to perform on stage, and even at court, but the Chapel was still a male preserve.
With all understanding So Purcell wrote the top line here for a counter-tenor.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord Through Jesus Christ our Lord Purcell made fair copies of his sacred anthems into this score book here in his own handwriting.
But Purcell didn't only write sacred music.
Turn the book over, like this, and we find, from the other end, a similar record of the secular music that he composed for the court of Charles II.
These are odes to mark royal birthdays, weddings, military victories and peace treaties.
Welcome Welcome Welcome Vicegerent of the Mighty King This is one of Purcell's welcome odes written for the annual occasion of the King's return to London from the country.
Why on earth welcome the King back to his own capital and, moreover, do it over and over again at the same time each year? Partly it was sycophantic nonsense.
The court followed the same routine every year with the summer at Windsor and the winters in London.
The odes here gave a ceremonial shape to the year just as once upon a time the church's calendar had done before the Reformation.
Welcome Welcome One of the reasons why Purcell isn't listened to as often now as he should be is that his genius was poured into this kind of occasional royal piece which teeters on the verge of absurdity today.
The welcome ode to Charles, you sung it with an admirably straight face, as though you actually believed it.
Do you simply go into a state of suspension on the words? I think you have to kind of sing what you've been given.
But it's set very well.
It's very easy to understand.
However clumsy the words, they're still made to work.
Exactly.
Purcell's very good at making the music move with what the words are doing.
He makes it clear what he's trying to say.
and hope or wish for does allow I'm relatively confident that he had a jolly good sense of humour.
I think there's an amount of tongue-in-cheekness going on.
All we can hope or wish for does allow All we can hope Whatever Purcell thought of the odes, there's no doubt that the King would have approved.
He's addressed at one point as "our mottled deity".
Charles, like his father, believed he ruled by divine right.
But he was at least politically shrewd enough not to press the point home.
And then he's succeeded by a king who has absolutely no sense of political reality whatever.
Though Charles fathered many, many children, none of them were by his Queen, so none were legitimate heirs.
When he died in 1685, the throne passed instead to his brother, James, who would reopen the wounds of the religious divide once more.
Because James had - scandalously and publicly - converted to Catholicism a few years previously.
Fears of what this meant were initially vanquished by James's magnificent coronation.
Purcell, of course, wrote the music.
His genius is such that he produces music which immediately kind of raises the musical game of the coronation service.
For example, My Heart Is Inditing starts in a very dense way.
There's a seven-part vocal group.
My heart is inditing My heart is inditing And the vocal parts start one at a time singing the words after each other.
My heart is inditing So you build up the texture.
So it sounds like a very busy, colourful tapestry.
There was a sense of trying to achieve, in a way, a pictorial idea of what the coronation is.
I speak of the things I speak of the things Which I have made unto the King Purcell's anthem is the best music yet performed at a coronation.
It's also on much the largest scale.
The words are new and there'd never even been an anthem at this point of the service, the coronation of the Queen, before.
Why all the fuss now? She shall be brought to the King In raiment of needlework She shall be brought The answer lies in what was left out.
The coronation of the Queen, which was simpler and far shorter than that of the King, normally followed on the coronation communion service.
But in 1685, both the King, James II, and the Queen, Mary of Modena, were Roman Catholics and absolutely refused to take the Protestant communion.
The omission of the communion service left a gaping hole spiritually and musically at the heart of the service, which the splendours of Purcell's music were almost certainly designed to fill.
With joy and gladness shall they be brought And shall enter Shall enter into the King's palace With joy and gladness With joy and gladness shall they be brought With joy and gladness With joy and gladness Though Purcell successfully diverted attention from James's Catholicism at the coronation, the new King's faith was harder to ignore once his reign was under way.
Things could have been very different if James had had only a modicum more political skill.
Perhaps, can one put it differently, had been even moderately dishonest.
Rather than a determined Catholic convert.
Into the King's palace But James believed he had been chosen by God to lead the whole nation back to the Catholic faith.
Lillibullero The result, within three years, was open rebellion.
The rebels sang a popular song of the day which lampooned the hopes of Catholics complete with the mocking cod-Irish lyrics.
Lillibullero bullen a la Lillibullero bullen a la It became the popular rallying cry against King James II.
"The whole army and the people both in city and country were singing it perpetually.
" It's only a song but it sang King James II out of three kingdoms.
In 1688, James was deposed by his own daughter, Mary, and her husband, William Of Orange, who invaded from the Netherlands at the invitation of James's leading subjects.
William and Mary were Protestants and so for evermore was to be Britain's monarchy.
It was known as the Glorious Revolution and it changed the meaning of monarchy and its music for ever.
William and Mary were crowned the following April.
But this was to be a very different service from any of its predecessors.
The preacher at the coronation rejoiced in the fact that in 1688 the English had chosen the happy middle way between the monarchical despotism of France, on the one hand, and the republican chaos and disorder of the English Commonwealth on the other, and he was roundly applauded by the audience.
The political atmosphere was further heightened by the presence, for the first time, of MPs.
This was the inaugural event of a limited parliamentary monarchy.
Divine right was dead and the sacredness of kings very nearly died with it.
But if the coronation was no longer a sacred rite which consecrated a priest-king, what point was there in Purcell writing sublime music for the occasion? Praise the Lord Praise the Lord O, O Jerusalem Praise The Lord O Jerusalem seems rather austere.
It starts in the minor key, which is an unusual choice of a composer for a praising song.
It's written in a more intimate way and a less obviously jolly, flamboyant way.
The texts chosen reflect the changed circumstances.
The Queen is given equal weight with the King.
But Queen Mary thought the coronation all vanity.
King William thought it a popish absurdity.
Purcell's music no longer had any raison d'être.
Without wishing in any way to denigrate the music, it sounds less expensive than the music of My Heart Is Inditing of a few years earlier.
It's saying this is a little bit more pared down, it's less ostentatious, it's a little bit more sombre.
Praise the Lord At previous coronations, music had acted to sanctify the monarchy.
From now on, that's not what composers would be required to do, in the Abbey or anywhere else.
William and Mary largely withdrew from the traditional centre of music and monarchy - the Palace Of Whitehall - and came instead to Hampton Court, which they commissioned Christopher Wren to rebuild.
It was a case of out with the old and in with the new.
Out went the opulent private apartments of Henry VIII and his queens.
In came William III's plain Jane baroque.
Sober, practical, modern.
A bit like William III himself.
As for music, whether sacred or secular, he was indifferent, if not actually hostile.
Nothing escaped William's reforming zeal.
Not the fabric, the liturgy or the musical traditions of the Chapel Royal.
Having survived both Reformation and revolution, all of these were to be shipwrecked on the rock of William III's religious principles.
For William, as a committed, life-long Calvinist was a Protestant of the most thorough-going sort.
This meant that he thought many, if not most, of the rituals of the Chapel Royal were popish, idolatrous survivals of the worst sort.
The elaborate and theatrical music of the Chapel Royal, always a Protestant bugbear, was struck down when, as one of their first acts, William and Mary forbade the use of strings here in the chapel.
It sounds so little but it destroyed so much.
The glorious and quintessentially English symphony anthem died a strange and sudden death.
But, most striking of all, was the effect on the Chapel Royal itself which changed from a hothouse of creativity to the merest backwater almost overnight.
Purcell, the great symphony anthem composer, found himself neglected but he did still have one royal commission.
Writing the annual birthday ode for Queen Mary.
His composition for 1690 represented the culmination of a century of instrumental innovation at court.
From Charles I's chamber concerts, through Charles II's 24 violins, to this - a full baroque orchestra.
Arise My Muse - suddenly you have everything there.
You have the trumpets, the oboes, the violins.
And Purcell doesn't allow the trumpets to just play simple parts.
They play pretty much the same kind of material the violins are playing.
So they were incredibly virtuosic.
And also the oboes.
It's quite a strange new animal which came into the orchestra at this time.
It's extraordinary the way he combines those instruments, the way he orchestrates them.
It's an unbelievably skillful and colourful use of an orchestra.
And yet, just two days after Arise My Muse was first performed, William III ordered the Lord Chamberlain to slash the number of royal musicians by a third.
Court music, brought to such heights by Charles I, and Charles II, went the same way as the Chapel Royal - downsized, neglected, now used merely for the odd ball.
Purcell was forced to take his genius elsewhere and the orchestra went with him.
The work of both would henceforth be enjoyed by a rather broader audience than the exclusive world of the court.
This was to be Purcell's principal habitat for the remainder of his career.
Up to the Glorious Revolution, Purcell had been a court composer.
But now that William III's austere Protestantism declared that Purcell's luscious orchestrally accompanied music was too theatrical for the Chapel Royal, Purcell turned to the theatre proper.
And henceforward wrote almost exclusively for the London stage.
But one thing didn't change, however.
Purcell's staggering productivity.
Over the course of the next five years, he wrote music for over 40 stage plays.
For love ev'ry creature is formed by his nature For love every creature Purcell even wrote one of the very first English operas, Dido And Aeneas.
They were scarcely performed in his lifetime.
Restoration audiences instead preferred spectacular romps like King Arthur.
No joys are above The pleasures of love No joys are above The pleasures of love No joys No, no No, no, no, no, no joys Are above Love Love Love No joys are above the pleasures The pleasures The pleasures of love Despite Purcell's resounding success in the theatre, there's a sense of loss, of exile.
Purcell was no longer in demand in the court that had nourished his genius.
His principal librettist, John Dryden, had actually been dismissed from his royal post of Poet Laureate.
Even the form of the dramatic opera, with its lavish combination of music, words, dance and spectacle, was a descendant in exile of the court masques of Charles I's reign.
And all of them - composer, librettist, dramatic opera - were on the London stage only because they were unwanted at the new court of the Glorious Revolution.
(Sombre music) But then English music suffered a still more grievous blow.
Purcell died at the - even then - shockingly early age of 36.
At the start of 1695, he'd written this music to mourn the premature passing of Queen Mary.
Before the year was out, it was played at his own funeral.
That flat, hollow sound, it's the majesty and the finality of death.
It is no exaggeration to say that English music died with Purcell.
He was the last composer in the great Chapel Royal tradition which had stretched back through Orlando Gibbons, to Thomas Tallis, to John Dunstable, and even beyond.
Where now was capable of producing a successor? The great tragedy of England is that nobody steps into the gap as far as music is concerned.
Once, for the political, the religio-political reasons of 1688-89, the Chapel Royal is shuttered down, nothing steps into the gap.
It leaves England with an appetite for music but with no musical infrastructure to provide it.
Audiences continued to pack out London theatres, but Purcell's death left a vacuum of native talent.
Al lampo dell'armi quest'alma guerriera vendetta farà And so, as I'll explore next time, the London stage was invaded by Italian opera - foreign composers, foreign stars, performing in a foreign language.
Al lampo dell'ar Paradoxically, this happened just at the same time that Britain became the great power in Europe.
And more ironically still, the composer who restored the fortunes of music made in Britain was German - Georg Handel.
Quest'alma guerriera Vendetta farà Al lampo dell'armi quest'alma guerriera vendetta farà Quest'alma guerriera vendetta farÃ