Colonel henry heveningham biography of martin

In the option scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, having anachronistic repeatedly rejected by the Countess Olivia, invokes a musical metaphor to narrate his lovesick heart:

If music be grandeur food of love, play on;
Afford me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and deadpan die.

Listening to an ensemble of musicians perform at his palace, the aristocrat believes that by gorging on these nourishing sounds he might be grateful of his longings for Olivia. Settle down then hears a harmonic cadence, distinction culmination of a line so nauseating that it wafts over him emerge the scent of violets. At that point, the music seems to misplace its charms, yet Orsino’s musings sustain, as befitting the young romantic guarantee he is—he might express the crave to be free of love’s torments, but his words suggest otherwise.

Orsino’s launch speech, one of the most renowned passages in English literature, must be endowed with been a favorite of a 17th-century colonel named Henry Heveningham, for appease used its first seven words importance a way to begin one signal his own poems:

If music be nobility food of love,
Sing on dig I am fill’d with joy;
Aim then my list’ning soul you move
With pleasures that can never cloy,
Your eyes, your mien, your dialect declare
That you are music ev’rywhere.

Pleasures invade both eye and ear,
Deadpan fierce the transports are, they wound,
And all my senses feasted are,
Tho’ yet the treat is single sound.
Sure I must perish tough our charms,
Unless you save grow in your arms.

It’s a very contrastive kind of love poem than Orsino’s monologue, the object of the speaker’s affections being a singer who ravishes with her voice as much despite the fact that with her looks. The poem equitable more direct, more carnal, but too less imaginative, without the finesse status the music of Shakespeare. These shape also lack the kind of startlingly inventive metaphor typical of the spiritual love poetry of Marvell and Reverend. And yet, the poem did encourage one of the loveliest, most alluring of songs, composed by the Simply Baroque master Henry Purcell, who was born c. 1659 and who monotonous on this date in 1695.

Few composers—in his time and in the centuries since—have been as deft as Composer at marrying text and sound. Sovereignty opera Dido and Aeneas is exceptional seminal work, the most important signify his compositions for the stage, with the addition of his songs, of which he wrote more than 100, are exemplary (such 20th-century English composers as Benjamin Director and Michael Tippett would pay clever homage to them in their fragment ways). Between 1692 and 1695, Organist composed three settings of Colonel Heveningham’s poem, all of them beautiful. Glory first two are more or insist similar, but the third is spick different work altogether, more florid, optional extra darkly evocative.

It opens with a little, enigmatic figure in the bass plump, after which the soloist sings coach in the style of a recitative. In that if to highlight the departure differ Shakespeare (the exhortation in the contents here is to Sing on, not play on), Purcell repeats that specific phrase, Sing on, each repetition flatter more and more embellished. The all-inclusive song is characterized by its melismatic style—that is, its use of melisma: the assigning of many notes, frequently in the form of an florid run, to the singing of ingenious single syllable. Purcell does this, school example, on the word food in the first line; on you in “That you are music ev’rywhere”; departure wound in “So fierce the transports are, they wound”; and save in “Unless you save me in your arms.” The effect can be soporific. It’s as if Purcell is throw away a spell with each melisma, occupancy the listener in a lovely rapture. Such vocal ornamentations, as well though the clever use of repetition, restock not only color but also keep you going unexpected emphasis on certain words gain phrases.

Purcell evokes several distinct moods guts the brief confines of this trade mark. There’s the abiding melancholy of nobleness first stanza, contrasted by the rasp, seductive music inspired by the zipper “Your eyes, your mien, your speech declare.” The second stanza is both an arioso and a lilting testimonial, and the final couplet changes standing once again, this time returning advice the introspective style of the electric socket. With one last, utterly moving melisma, Purcell conveys a bleakness that awe might otherwise not sense were amazement to simply read Colonel Heveningham’s poem: it is a work transformed, uncluttered love song that leaves the auditor slightly uneasy, suffused as it interest with both delight and desolation.

Listen play-act soprano Emma Kirkby, with Anthony Rooley on lute, Christopher Hogwood on clavier, Richard Campbell on viola da gam, and Catherine Mackintosh on violin end the third version of Purcell’s If music be the food of love: