EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Henry Purcell and Billy the Kid
JUST OVER A CENTURY before angry mobs stormed the Bastille in Paris on July 14th, 1789, the then 22-year-old English composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was on this day in 1682 appointed organist of the Chapel Royal, where he had previously served as a chorister. Not only was it a royal acknowledgement of the already apparent genius of Purcell, the son of a court musician, it was further indication that the Restoration had done more than reinstate the monarchy; it was actively restoring cultural life. He was highly original, as vital to the development of English music as Lully was to its French equivalent, or Monteverdi to the Italian. Purcell’s art soared through his command of melody. At eight he published his first song. Within seven years he was tuning the organ at Westminster Abbey and by 1679 had succeeded his former teacher, John Blow, as the Abbey’s organist.
Had Purcell lived longer, English opera might have challenged the dominance of the Italian form. His one opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), although technically a masque, was written for performance at a London girl’s school. He also wrote innovative trio sonatas. He is the bridge between Byrd and Gibbons and the first great modern English composer, Edward Elgar. Purcell’s secular court music includes Come, Ye Sons of Art, Away – composed for Queen Mary II’s birthday in 1694. A year later he provided the magnificent March and Canzona for four slide trumpets at her funeral, following her death from smallpox. In common with Mozart and Schubert, Purcell died tragically young, mere months after the queen. From chamber music to incidental songs and dances for theatre, religious and secular, his range is extraordinary. Of particular beauty are his lamentations.
Likely to be marking today’s 223rd Bastille Day in her charmingly breathy little voice is former French first lady Carla Bruni, keening the fall of her Homeric consort Nicolas Sarkozy, rejected by his famously intolerant countrymen for his cavalier “let them [French taxpayers] wear Gucci” attitude.
William Bonney, born William Henry McCarty jnr in 1859, exactly 200 years after Purcell, employed several aliases but remains best known as Billy the Kid. Believed to have committed his first murder at the age of 18, he was the son of a good-natured Irish cleaning lady who had fled the Great Famine, making a life for herself in the US, only to die in 1874 of tuberculosis. The Kid is remembered less for his criminal career – possibly inspired by cheap fiction glorifying crime – than for his demise on Bastille Day 1881 at the hands of Sherriff Pat Garrett.
Outlaw and/or folk hero Billy reiterates the notion that early death can prove the ultimate career move. Only one photograph of him survives.
Hollywood has sustained his legend, releasing at least 25 movies with Roy Rogers, Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson and Val Kilmer playing him. Not bad for a guy shot dead while calling into the semi-darkness of a New Mexico bedroom “Who’s that?”