 | | Henry Purcell |
Now, thanks to some musical detective work by The University of Manchester’s Dr Rebecca Herissone, the work - one of Purcell’s that is best-loved by audiences – has been turned into something that will be radically different to a contemporary ear, but would have sounded perfect to Purcell himself. It turns out that the version played for the past couple of centuries was actually corrupted in the eighteenth century. Purcell wrote the piece for Queen Mary’s birthday in 1694, but the only surviving complete source of the ode was copied by a little-known musician called Robert Pindar in 1765. What Dr Herissone has discovered is that Pindar, for some inexplicable reason, changed Purcell’s music. He used different instruments, changed repeats, notation and words and may even have replaced a whole movement with completely different Purcell piece. Piecing together the Purcell puzzle The discovery came after Dr Herissone used other Pindar copies to piece together the original Purcell piece.
 | | Purcell's inspiration: Queen Mary |
"As we don’t know if the autograph score survives," she explained, "we don’t have any way to check Pindar’s copy with the original. "But Pindar also copied three other odes by Purcell, and we are able to compare the composer’s autographs with Pindar’s versions of these pieces. It’s not been done before because not many people are aware of these Pindar copies. "So when I did compare them, I was amazed to see enormous differences. I’ve identified how Pindar makes changes to Purcell’s music and have used this knowledge to reconstruct Purcell’s original version of Come ye sons of art. "It’s now almost a new piece, but I’m confident it’s pretty close to the original." "He wasn’t a very good musician" | "Since this piece has a regular spot in the music-society repertoire, it might be a bit of a shock for some Purcell aficionados." | | Dr Herissone on what the change might mean to music lovers |
The notion that there may be something wrong with the version that we know came to Dr Herissone when she read an article about an 1825 work by Thomas Busby. It contained a facsimile which appears to come from Purcell’s lost autograph of Come Ye Sons Of Art. "It was only a small fragment," she said, "but the first bar is scored very differently from Pindar’s version. That spurred me into carrying out a bit of detective work. "No one really knows who Pindar was - and it’s probably not even his real name. But for sure he wasn’t a very good musician. He gets his harmony wrong and uses a kind of cut-and-paste approach to his arrangements that really isn’t very imaginative. "Since this piece has a regular spot in the music-society repertoire, it might be a bit of a shock for some Purcell aficionados."
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