Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources.(Review)

Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources. By Robert Shay and Robert Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xxii, 353 p. ISBN 0-521-58094-3. $90.]

It has to be said that there are catalogs of manuscript sources that are difficult to use. Organized by bibliographical principles totally obscure to all but the most passionate bibliographers, or by equally obscure collection groupings, or by chronological date of acquisition by the institutions concerned, they are usually badly indexed and defeat anyone attempting to retrieve material for all but the most obvious sources. Not so in the case of Robert Shay and Robert Thompson's new volume, Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Sources. Here we have a well-indexed volume, carefully organized so that those who are likely to use it--most of whom, I would guess, have a working knowledge of seventeenth-century English music--can navigate their way through its pages with ease.

The short biographical sketch with which the study opens confirms again that our knowledge of Henry Purcell's life is limited to little more than an outline provided by records of professional appointments. Nevertheless, while it is true that other biographical material is scarce and inconclusive, the authors' claim that "the man himself often emerges more clearly from music manuscripts than from any other kind of material" (p. 1) is scarcely credible; nothing, I would argue, of the "man" is thus revealed, although the history of the works certainly is.

And this, in fact, is the most valuable aspect of the catalog, for close examination of the manuscripts shows with striking clarity the process of composition, "storage," and in some cases, performance. In the case of The Fairy Queen, for example, the state of the pre-prepared manuscript--revealed here as having a total of five hands, including the composer's--enables us to speculate on the process by which the opera may have been composed and performed. There is the copyist who compiled the 1692 "file copy" but did not work closely with the composer; the copyist who appears to have worked with Purcell and to have been involved in checking the product of the first three copyists; and, most evocative, the "inexperienced" copyist, whose hand is detectable only in the First Music. (Was this a young composer, just starting out on a career, who nervously and late at night in a squalid room at the theater copied out a movement for the revered Purcell? A nineteenth-century romantic notion perhaps, but all the same, a fantasy at least possible.) Lastly, there is the shady figure of the copyist who filled in the overture; he appears to have had in his possession the scorebook of the opera when the theater had mislaid it and was offering a reward of twenty guineas for its return.

In interpreting such a manuscript, it would have been appropriate for the authors to have referred to the librettos; some of the questions posed in the running text have at least possible solutions when the books are consulted. Such speculation would not be Out of place, for Shay and Thompson do, after all, use the 1700 libretto of Dido and Aeneas, recast as The Loves of Dido and Aeneas in Charles Gildon's adaptation of Measure for Measure, as well as the 1704 version to support their arguments on the state of the surviving manuscripts of the opera, in ...