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Updated: May 13, 2025
When strength and sinew are wanted in the themes, they are there, and contrapuntal adaptability is there; but they are real living themes, not ossified or petrified formulas. Themes, part-writing and harmony are closely bound up in one another, and harmony is not the least important. Purcell liked daring harmonies, and they arise organically out of the firm march of individual parts.
They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the conclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things, take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had proceeded to incorporate his theories in tone.
It is full of astonishing points, of ingenious dodges used not for their own sake, but to produce, as here they nearly always do, particular effects; and throughout, the part-writing, the texture of the music, is most masterly and far beyond anything Tschaikowsky achieved before.
One can see what Purcell had gained by his study of Italian part-writing for strings, but he could not help penning picturesque phrases. The dances are, of course, simple in structure. When they are in the form of passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses.
What to them was an end I mean all the tricks of counterpoint was to him a means to expression: more expressive music was never dreamed of in a musician's imagination, and at the same time he accomplished with ease part-writing that the most skilful contrapuntists could only perform by labouring long at expressionless, stale old themes first contrived before the Flood to "work well," as the phrase goes.
Verdi told an interviewer that he thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and one can well believe his words. He has combined a schoolboy's sense of fun with the grace and science of a Mozart. The part-writing is often exceedingly elaborate, but the most complicated concerted pieces flow on as naturally as a ballad. The glorious final fugue is an epitome of the work.
But the parts of the work in which Goetz's indebtedness to Wagner are most apparent are the choruses, which, both in their tunefulness and in the elaborate nature of the part-writing, often recall 'Die Meistersinger, and in the orchestration, which is extraordinarily fanciful and imaginative.
This discord and his other favourites are beautiful in Purcell, and his determination to let them arise in an apparently unavoidable way from the collisions of parts, each going its defined road to its goal, must have determined the character of his part-writing.
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