Purcell’s King Arthur!Let’s do this skit.
I’m actually a huge fan of Medieval art. I just went to Paris last month and obsessed over the Cluny Museum. My fav part of the Met is the Cloisters. And a big part of all that culture comes from Arthurian legend and lore. The reading list that comes with the territory is mammoth: Le Morte d’Arthur, Arthurian Romances, Idylls of the King… it’s all very Round Table ’round midnight.
Purcell wrote King Arthur for another king, King Charles II, for the 25th anniversary of Charles’s Restoration which, among other things, would spawn the Tumblr F uck Yeah, Restoration England. It also brought us lots and lots and lots of dogs running around the Upper W/E(a)st sides. Charles II, you may remember from eons ago, was also instrumental in bringing the first opera to England’s shores.
PUPPIES!!!!!!!!!!
So there’s already a lot for me to like about King Arthur. I dig the humanistic touch in the overture, more warm than Dioclesian and less dour than Dido and Aeneas. There’s yet another Bachian chaconne with a Goldberg–like theme and variations, capped off by an infectious bass line that flows into an earworm of a fugue. It infiltrates each section of the orchestra, much like the Saxons invading England during Arthur’s time.
Unlike the Saxons, however, they succeed (that bit of history comes from Purcell’s libretto, which is more cohesive and less…well…boringstories than Dioclesian). Purcell’s counterpoint reaches a zenith of sophistication among his three priests in the first act, which in a way reminded me of the three Norns in Götterdämmerung, especially since they bow to Wodan. How cutting edge are you now, Wagner? Huh??
There’s a wide-ranging diversity in the music, one that seems to capture as much English spirit as Purcell can possibly manage. The chorus “Brave souls, to be renown’d” is downright Handelian, while “Die and Reap the Fruit of Glory” is very Stile Antico, somwehere between John Sheppard, Clemens non Papa and Palestrina. There’s a nostalgic pastorale in “How blest are Shepherds,” lightly and lutily underscored like sunset on a harvest day. And there’s even some sea shanty in “Your Hay it is Mow’d” (how’s that for a double entendre?). An enterprising director would do well to have the Chieftains on hand for this number, whose masculine brawniness is offset by a very feminine aria, “Fairest Isle,” which predates the vocal line of “Ah perdona al primo affetto” in La Clemenza di Tito, and provides a similar setting with its purity of tone and intentions.
King Arthur had its own revival in New York at City Opera, thanks to a production that came via English National Opera and Mark Morris, a choreographer who in his own right has been ascribed a “joyful, Restoration-style sensuality.” The bawdiness of the work comes through in Morris’s hands. The opera’s most notable tune, “What power art thou?” is sung with all its bristly, chromatic icicles (it is set in a Snow Miser-y land) from a refrigerator. Which SO goes against what GI Joe taught us, but I’ll let that slide.
There’s an explosion of Anglomania in Purcell’s world via Morris, and even merely listening to the opera again on Spotify, it’s hard not to fall under its spell. Musicologists argue that this is a play with music and firmly not an opera. That may be, but semantics are semantics. Awesome music is awesome music.
