Hail, bright Cecilia

In 1683, a newly formed London society for “Gentleman Lovers of Musick” commissioned the first of a sequence of Odes to mark the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. Purcell obliged with Welcome to All the Pleasures. But when he was again commissioned in 1692 he outdid himself with the even more elaborate and ambitious Hail! Bright Cecilia. Its text, adapting John Dryden’s “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day”, celebrates music as “nature’s voice”, the celestial harmony of the world itself. Instruments are individually named and explored in movements that conjure the distinctive character of each. The countertenor’s wonderfully warlike “The Fife and All the Harmony of War” is all trumpet fanfares and kettle drums, a contrast both to the delicious sensuality of the duet “In Vain, the Am’rous Flute” with its tugging suspension and suggestively intertwining vocal lines, and the nimble “The airy violin”. The organ, Cecilia’s own instrument, is given a starring role in the athletic bass aria “Wondrous Machine”, reeds imitated by a pair of woody oboes. The society had access to “the best voices and hands in town”, clear not only from Purcell’s orchestration rich with woodwind, timpani and brass but also the elaborate chorus writing. In “Soul of the World” Purcell must represent no less an image than the music of the spheres—the “one perfect harmony” that unites the universe. It’s an idea that reaches its perfection in the ecstatic finale “Hail! Bright Cecilia”, complete with fugue—the form, above all others, that spins every sound together into a single miraculous whole.