Henry Purcell
Funeral Music For Queen Mary - Five Anthems

The whole story revolves around Westminster Abbey.

There, along the Thames, for a thousand years it has pierced the sky with its gothic spire. Inside the abbey, right near the organ, Henry Purcell is buried. In the heart of England. In the heart of London. In the heart (perhaps) of the abbey itself.

There his father, like him, was a master of the choir. There this music will be played for the funeral of Queen Mary the second. It is 1685. Purcell is thirty-six years old and is the greatest English musician of his generation. He will die a few months later, and in that abbey for his funeral, the Funeral Music for Queen Mary will be played.

Yes, before Mozart, Purcell too had composed the music for his funeral.

Perhaps even better than Mozart.

The march that opens and closes the composition —later extremely stylized by Wendy Carlos for A Clockwork Orange—is the first march ever written for a funeral. But this might not interest us. The fact is, it is one of the hardest, most adamantine things ever written.

It sounds like something irrevocable, sudden. Like death, indeed. The brass instruments draw destinies, the drums mark the time. Then everything melts into round and warm voices, like ice in the sun. It intertwines every possible emotion, trembles, rises, falls, and fades. Then it returns to the beginning, resuming the initial march.

Now, Purcell is an enigmatic figure, very little is known about him.

Even his baroque style is strange because it's not sophisticated. It's not clean, sharp, and convoluted. There's no fugue, no counterpoint. It's not, as Glenn Gould would say, a wing of the intelligent whirlwind. His charm lies elsewhere, in the vertical and not in the spiral. In the earthy, in the painful and not in the opaline.

It took me a while, huh, but then I understood it. He, his music is all there. In that gothic spire of Westminster Abbey. In its piercing the sky.