which nothing is recorded nor can be known. This holds, also, with
regard to the theatre music. We can merely guess at what his employers
asked him to provide. We can never know the means they placed at his
disposal. One significant thing must be noted here: the music
itself--its style, spirit, even mannerism--affords us no trustworthy
clue as to when any particular piece may have been written. For ages the
biographical copyists have not ceased to marvel at a boy of fourteen
writing the _Macbeth_ music. It is silly rubbish, with which I believe
Purcell had nothing whatever to do. They marvelled at the immature
power latent in the music to _The Libertine_, which they supposed he
wrote in 1676. Alas! the date is 1692. They marvelled still more over
_Dido and Aeneas_, attributed to 1680. Alas! again its date is much
later--1688 to 1690. The evidence of style counts for little. The truth
is that in Purcell's music there are no marked stages of development, no
great changes in style. Undoubtedly he gradually grew in power, richness
of invention, fecundity of resource; but the change was one of degree,
not of kind. He never, as Beethoven did, went out to "take a new road."
He struck what he knew to be _his_ right road at the very beginning, and
he never left it. His nature and the point in history at which he
appeared forbade that the content of his music should burst the form.
The forms he began with served him to the end.

I shall first deal with such of Purcell's compositions as may fairly be
considered as having been written before 1690. The music for the dramas
is not of an ambitious character. It consists mainly of songs, dances,
and "curtain tunes." In many cases half a dozen items are all that are
attached to one play, and many of the pieces are brief. Therefore that
formidable-looking list of what used to be called Purcell's "operas"
does not represent anything like the quantity of music we might suppose.
Purcell wrote only one opera--_Dido_. The word "opera" had not in his