Journey to England, Part 2

NOTE: All of the music on this program comes from the recording The Last Rose: Songs, Tunes and Dances from a Mysterious Manuscript. It is on the Harmonia Mundi label and is HMM 902505.

The meeting between a twenty-first-century musician and an instrument crafted four hundred years earlier is bound to be emotionally charged. What Thibaut and I experienced upon first encountering the two instruments from Paris’s Museum of Music collection, which we played for this recording, was something of a miracle.

June 5, 2023. Our appointment at the Cité de la musique is set for 2 p.m., to be led by Jean-Philippe Échard, the Museum’s curator in charge of string instruments. We are about to discover three magnificent instruments liberated from their display cases for the occasion. The archlute made by Christoph Koch in 1654 is an absolute wonder at first glance. The marquetry of the neck, and in particular the medallions representing small pastoral or mythological scenes, is of immense refinement. Of the two violas da gamba laid out on the table, the small English viol made by John Pitts in London in 1679 is a revelation: this instrument, I am told, has hardly been played since it entered the Museum’s collection. And yet, the magic begins to operate from the very first moment. The beauty of the craftsmanship, the quality of the timbre, the rapport with this viol are so evident that there is no longer a shadow of a doubt: it is around this instrument that a cohesive programme must be constructed, ensuring the right conditions to spotlight, delicately awaken, and make it sing again at full force after centuries of silence. We come out of our visit more enthusiastic than ever!

England. 1679. We have a blank sheet of paper in front of us; it is now up to us to devise a programme that lives up to the beauty of these instruments. Our initial research quickly leads us to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on the trail of a certain Anthony Poole, an English violist and Catholic who had taken refuge in Saint-Omer. There is a manuscript containing this little-known composer’s works. Then another encounter, truly providential, awaits us. After a long wait in the beautiful reading room of the Library’s Richelieu site, we are handed the manuscript, divided into two volumes (separate parts for viol and bass) bearing the reference labels ‘RES VM7-703’ et ‘RES VM7-697,’ respectively. We open the cover with great emotion to discover nearly two hundred pages of music written for the viol and basso continuo.

The manuscript’s very first page appears to have been torn out. No name, no initials that would allow us to put composer names to the pieces copied into the manuscript. Only a few pieces can be attributed to Anthony Poole, after cross-referencing with other sources in which these works are found. Such is the case with the very first piece, titled Chacone, which we discover when we open the manuscript. Thus we do not know, except for a scant dozen pieces, the identity of the mysterious creators hiding behind these pages of music. We do know, by contrast, that this manuscript was probably copied by several hands in the years 1660-1670, in Saint-Omer, where Anthony Poole resided.

Filled with a sense of wonder, we peruse the two hundred pages of pieces for viol and are immediately struck by the beauty of the music in front of us. The manuscript is in perfect condition, the quality of the copy allows us to decipher without any difficulty the dozens of pieces that we leaf through, one after the other. We photograph a few of the pieces that strike us the most (particularly, the one titled Greensleeves).

When we get home, we take up our instruments without further delay and begin to decipher these pieces. We are thrilled to discover this magnificent music unheard for nearly four centuries, now being revealed, little by little, in the course of the suites which intermingle preludes in French style, lightfooted dances, and wild variations on typically English grounds. We have found the beating heart of our project, the engine that would motivate us during months of preparation of the final choice of pieces on this recording that we present to you today, nearly half of which have never been recorded before.

To hear the music that had been long forgotten but is now played on instruments that remained silent for centuries is to embark on a journey through time, to discover a singular world of sound, to experience what will always connect us to the past: the timeless emotion music can offer us. It is this unique journey that we invite you to take while listening to this recording. We are, for the duration of a moment, transported to the second half of the seventeenth century and surrounded by English musicians. The viola da gamba’s reign is about to end in England. Anthony Poole is one of the last great virtuosos of this instrument. Having fled his native country to escape religious persecution, he found refuge in the Jesuit College of Saint-Omer and was one of the composers of the pieces in our priceless manuscript: two hundred pages of music for the viol—like so many petals of a rose: a last blossom of a once-flourishing summer.

MATHILDE VIALLE
November 2024

England’s seventeenth century was described by the poet and essayist Abraham Cowley as ‘a warlike, various and tragical age’ and so indeed it appears to us nowadays.

Conspiracy, assassinations, civil war, revolution, one king beheaded, two others driven into exile, all of these ordained the destiny of Europe’s stormiest, most unpredictable nation, a place which contemporaries in France and the Netherlands chose to call ‘the devil’s island’.

Yet against this turbulent background a remarkably vigorous musical culture continued to flourish. The venerable tradition of English viol consort music, for example, refused to die completely, even as civil conflict tore the country apart during the 1640s. Several gifted viol players found themselves driven abroad and these included the Jesuit priest Anthony Poole. From a Catholic family in a remote corner of the wild Peak district in Derbyshire, he had grown up under the shadow of religious persecution before fleeing to France, where he entered the Jesuit training college at Saint-Omer. Here the broad-based curriculum included music, much of it contributing to the Latin plays performed each year by pupils and staff.

Though almost none of Poole’s compositions were ever published, they became widely known in manuscript copies, distributed in France and his native England, where his contemporary Francis Withy, member of a family of Catholic musicians in Oxford, would have known them. Withy’s own Divisions perhaps reflect this influence. Poole himself, having moved to the English College in Rome, clearly profited from the rich musical world of the Papal capital at this period, in which instrumental forms like the sonata and the dance suite were starting to flourish. An interesting feature of his works included on this disc is their ambiguous role, nuanced by both the sacred and the secular. Both the Fortunatus Allemande and the Martina Courante carry the names of Roman martyrs especially cultivated by the Jesuit order. Yet these are also movements for dancing, which ordained clergy might hardly be expected to favour. So too is the Chacone, an example of that robust triple-time dance measure, originating in Spain, on which composers like Purcell, Handel and Bach would later raise such magnificent musical structures.

In the same Bibliothèque nationale de France manuscript from which these works by Anthony Poole are taken, we find some anonymous suites for viol which mirror the growing popularity of such collections, soon to reach their apogee in the works of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais. Performers of the G minor, D minor and D major suites are encouraged to show off their virtuosity in minuet-type movements where the initial melodic statement is brilliantly fragmented into increasingly dazzling variations.

English violists of a more conservative turn than Poole could look back longingly to a golden age of consort music in the reign of King James I (1603-1625) Two of its leading exponents were Tobias Hume and John Coprario, though each of them followed a very different career path. Hume, referred to as ‘Captain’ or ‘Colonel’, was a Scottish soldier who had fought for the King of Sweden and the Tsar of Russia. The Spirit of Gambo, conveying the sense of a musical dialogue voiced by a single player, is typical of his humorous, freewheeling approach to composing for what he called ‘the stateful instrument Gambo Viol’, employed to convey ‘mine own Fancies, expressed by my Proper Genius’.

Coprario, on the other hand, was dedicated to serious self-improvement, travelling across Europe, possibly as far as Italy. On returning, he italianized his English surname – John Cooper became Giovanni Coprario – and entered the service of King James’s elder son Henry, Prince of Wales. This ‘hopeful prince’ became a focus for national expectations as a future king, vigorous, handsome, highly intelligent and a generous patron of the arts. In 1612, however, following a long game of tennis, he jumped into the river Thames to cool  off and died soon afterwards from typhoid caught from the massively polluted stream.

Sorrow was universal, expressed in elegies, sermons and pamphlets as well as by music such as Coprario’s Songs of Mourning Bewailing the Untimely Death of Prince Henry. The texts here are by the poet-composer Thomas Campion and each poem is dedicated to a member of the royal family. O Grief, how divers are thy shapes addresses itself to ‘the most Sacred King James’, the dead prince’s father. The poet boldly reminds his sovereign that regal status offers no guarantee against the impact of personal loss or the workings of destiny.

Coprario’s eloquent setting of Campion’s lines (the pair of them, incidentally, had collaborated on masques and court entertainments) seems to carry the imprint, however faintly, of the new seconda prattica style being espoused in Italy by Claudio Monteverdi and his contemporaries. Coprario here, we might say, is validating his change of surname.

Genuinely Italian musicians had already begun visiting England during the reign of King James’s predecessor, Queen Elizabeth. Half a century later, with the civil war over and the monarchy restored, saw London welcoming numerous singers and instrumentalists from Italy as well as several composers. Additional impetus was given to this by the marriage, in 1673, of James, Duke of York (future King James II) to the Modenese princess Maria Beatrice d’Este, who brought with her a host of artists from the court of her music-loving brother Duke Francesco.

Already settled here was the Genoese composer and lutenist Pietro Reggio. Something of a hardened traveller, he had been employed in Stockholm by Sweden’s Queen Christina before going to work in Madrid and spending time in Paris. For Londoners he was a valued (if sometimes rather expensive) teacher and performer. The diarist Samuel Pepys, after their first meeting, described Reggio as ‘one slovenly and ugly fellow who sings Italian songs to the theorbo most neatly’. He soon became popular for his settings of English poetry, including To Corinna, whose dexterous handling of the vocal line rather gives the lie to a contemporary accusation that its composer was ‘not perfect in the true idiom of our language’.

The charge was levelled by the music publisher John Playford, who had nevertheless printed Reggio’s The Art of Singing in 1677. Viol players were grateful to Playford for his ‘Musick’s Recreation on the viol, lyra-way’, which included Bonny Brow, a Scottish song of the kind on which violists enjoyed improvising. ‘Scotch tunes’ enjoyed something of a vogue at this period for their catchy syncopations and distinctive melodic style, though it is interesting that Benjamin Hely in his The Compleat Violist (ca. 1699) opts for a somewhat more plaintive and sombre type of Scottish folk tune as the basis for the player’s divisions.

London’s musical scene during the Restoration epoch (1660-1700) was dominated by two exceptional spirits, John Blow and his astounding young pupil Henry Purcell. Blow freely acknowledged Purcell’s genius and his music reflects the younger man’s influence. Both composers excelled in the writing of single songs for chamber performance – what we nowadays call ‘art song’. Blow’s essays in this field, sometimes ironic, sometimes touching, are attractively shaped and Tell me no more you love, published in his Amphion Anglicus (1700) is no exception.

In the realm of solo song Purcell was in constant demand from theatre companies mounting new productions at the playhouses of Dorset Garden and Drury Lane. In 1692 a revival of Oedipus, a skilful adaptation of material from Sophocles’s tragedy by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, featured Music for a while, which perfectly mirrors its text’s evocation of music’s power to soothe listeners on the one hand and arouse them on the other. Purcell here uses his favourite device of a ground bass over which to lay out a vividly descriptive vocal line. No wonder this soon became one of its composer’s best-loved airs.

JONATHAN KEATES

Mathilde Vialle, bass viol
Thibaut Roussel, archlute
Ronan Khalil, virginals
Zachary Wilder, tenor