ABSTRACT
If there was one thing about the tercentenary of Purcell’s death on which reviewers were agreed, it was that the 1995 anniversary spawned an abundance of publications on the composer.1 While these were very broad-ranging – both in terms of their intended readership and of their quality – they included a substantial amount of genuinely new research, which not only significantly changed our understanding of Purcell and his music, but has also shaped much of the subsequent work carried out in the field. The tercentenary understandably provoked a good deal of reflection on the state of Purcell scholarship, which was largely optimistic in tone, but nevertheless showed an awareness that the field had not been especially well served in previous decades and that much remained to be done. Writing in the Introduction to Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, for example, Nicholas Kenyon recalled the words of Vaughan Williams, penned in 1951 – ‘We all pay lip service to Henry Purcell, but what do we really know of him?’ – and lamented ‘More than forty years on, are we much the wiser?’;2 and Peter Holman was able to note enthusiastically that Purcell scholarship was ‘on the move after a fallow period’, but nevertheless cautioned that there was ‘a pressing need at the moment for informed and up-to-date writing on his music’.3
