Purcell: Fantasias for the viols, 1680

The Fantazia for consort of viols is one of the glories of English music, and this unique repertoire, spreading over nearly two centuries, represents the loftiest and most perfect kind of instrumental chamber music written in Europe before the era of the classical string quartet. Between the early sixteenth and the late seventeenth century hundreds of such “Fancies” appeared, and the greatest masters of the age - Byrd, Gibbons, Lawes, Jenkins, Locke and many others produced masterpieces of the kind. But in the face of the victorious progress of “the new-fangled violin”, the Fantazia grew rapidly out of fashion, to be replaced by the Dance Suite or the Sonata: the Restoration of 1660 gave the signal to the invasion of continental music, above all French, which enjoyed the exclusive favour of Charles II. The admirable set of Fancies by Matthew Locke published in that very year, 1660, was the last of its kind to find a publisher. It was Purcell’s immediate model. Purcell’s fifteen Fantazias have come down to us as a manuscript kept at the British Museum, most of whose pieces are dated. As they would not have aroused any interest at the time, the young composer did not even attempt to have them published, and they only appeared in print, edited by Peter Warlock, in 1927! This unique collection of pieces of from three to seven parts, a true “sum” of polyphonic thinking, to which only Bach’s Musical Offering and Art of Fugue may be compared, are the product, incredible as it may seem, of a very young composer of twenty-one at the beginning of his all too-short career. Written during the summer of 1680, they bring two centuries of uninterrupted instrumental tradition in England to a crowning conclusion. Indeed, Purcell must have been aware that his endeavours were as out-of-date, and thus as transcendental and unselfish as Bach’s writing the Art of Fugue some seventy years later. In the manuscript just mentioned are to be found three Fantazias of three parts, nine (plus a fragmentary tenth) of four parts, most accurately dated and written in close succession between the 10th June and the 31st August 1680, sometimes succeeding each other at only one day’s interval, one of five parts, one of six and one of seven. These pieces are short, none of them exceeding a hundred bars in common time. . . .