King Arthur

King Arthur (1691) was the most popular and enduring of all Purcell’s stage works. It is not an opera, but a British theatrical hybrid known as a semi-opera, in which a spoken play was interspersed with substantial musical scenes. The main characters were taken by actors, while the singers only had minor roles, so the music itself actually played little part in the unfolding drama. The plot, in which Arthur triumphs over the Saxon king Oswald, owes hardly anything to history or Arthurian legend, and was largely invented by the poet Dryden. When the Saxons capture Arthur’s beloved, the blind Emmeline, and imprison her in a magic castle, Oswald’s evil magician Osmond makes advances to her and conjures up a frost scene. Purcell’s music (“What Power art thou”) is thrillingly graphic, using intense (chromatic) harmonies and shuddering rhythms to evoke the shivering cold. In Act IV, Arthur celebrates his victory over Oswald in the magnificent “How happy the lover”, whose varied textures are developed over a repeating four-bar ground bass. Finally, Merlin prophesies that Britons and Saxons will eventually unite, and Purcell conjures up a patriotic miscellany including the mock folk song “Your hay it is mowed” and one of his most sublime melodies, “Fairest isle”.