themes, they are there, and contrapuntal adaptability is there; but they
are real living themes, not ossified or petrified formulas. Themes,
part-writing and harmony are closely bound up in one another, and
harmony is not the least important. Purcell liked daring harmonies, and
they arise organically out of the firm march of individual parts.
Excepting sometimes for a special purpose, he does not dump them down as
accompaniment to an upper part. The "false relations" and "harsh
progressions" of which the theorists prate do not exist for an
unprejudiced ear. In writing the flattened leading note in one part
against the sharpened in another he was merely following the
polyphonists, and it sounds as well--nay, as beautiful--as any other
discord, or the same discord on another degree of the scale.[2] This
discord and his other favourites are beautiful in Purcell, and his
determination to let them arise in an apparently unavoidable way from
the collisions of parts, each going its defined road to its goal, must
have determined the character of his part-writing. In spite of his
remarks in Playford's book, it is plain that he looked at music
horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is
good no matter which way it is considered. His counterpoint has a
freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later
contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school. Though he was pleased with
musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of
producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill. Handel
frequently adopted his free contrapuntal style. Handel (and Bach, too)
raised stupendous structures of ossified formulas, building
architectural splendours of the materials that came to hand; but when
Handel was picture-painting (as in _Israel_) and had a brush loaded with
colour, he cared less for phrases that would "work" smoothly at the
octave or twelfth than for subjects of the Purcell type.