From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony by Giovanni Battista Draghi (review)

There can be few late seventeenth-century English works as historically important or as musically rewarding as Draghi’s Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687 that have remained as obscure and inaccessible. Scholars and students of the music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries have had access to a good recording since 1995 (Hyperion CDA 66770, reissued 2007 as CDH55257; The Parley of Instruments / The Playford Consort / Peter Holman and Richard Wistreich, directors), but Bryan White’s latest contribution to the Purcell Society’s growing Companion Series represents, incredibly, the first time this music has ever appeared in print. Not even a facsimile of one of its many contemporary manuscript sources has hitherto been available. This is not for want of interest on the part of commentators, several of whom have drawn attention to the profound influence Draghi’s work had upon his contemporaries—and indeed on the development of a whole style of English concerted vocal music that flowered in the music of Blow and Purcell and ultimately established a context for the flourishing of Handel’s art during the first half of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Giovanni Battista Draghi—a native of Rimini who never held a position in the mainstream English profession and remained a Roman Catholic to the end of his life—has remained comparatively obscure alongside his native English colleagues: perhaps he simply fails to fit the narrative that sustained interest in Restoration English music between the deaths of its original proponents and its revival in the twentieth century.

In fulfilling its remit to make available important works by composers who were notable influences on Purcell, the Companion Series—and White’s contribution to it in particular—has now also virtually completed the representation in modern, reliable editions of large-scale musical works setting texts by John Dryden. Alongside King Arthur and The Indian Queen, which of course take their places in the Society’s main series of Purcell’s Works (revised edn., vols. 26 (1971) and 19 (1994) respectively), these comprise Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius, edited by White as PSCS 1 (2008) and the present edition of Draghi’s 1687 ode for the annual celebration of St Cecilia’s day (22 November) organized in late seventeenth-century London by a group known as the Society of Gentleman Lovers of Musick, for which Dryden contributed his masterly poem ‘From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony’. A third important setting, John Blow’s Ode on the death of Mr Henry Purcell (setting Dryden’s ‘Mark how the Lark and Linnet Sing’), will feature in PSCS 5, edited by the present reviewer and projected to appear during 2013. Of the remaining works Dryden wrote expressly to be set to music, his ‘Opera’ The State of Innocence (based on Milton’s Paradise Lost) was never produced and in any case contains only one extended musical episode; Jeremiah Clarke’s music for the 1697 Cecilian ode, for which Dryden penned his celebrated Alexander’s Feast, is unfortunately lost, though in its place we have of course the splendid 1736 setting by Handel.

Both text and music of From Harmony, from heav’nly Harmony seem to have caused a stir in London’s musical circles, establishing a pattern followed in a great many large-scale, non-theatrical musical entertainments during the 1690s. Dryden’s text exploited a rich vein of musical metaphor and imagery in the course of its progression from Creation to ‘last and dreadful hour’, from the common notion of the Music of the Spheres to the successive introduction of the different musical instruments—Jubal’s lyre, followed by the Trumpet, flute (i.e. recorder), violins, and organ—with their attendant passions; ample inspiration for the composer in marshalling both his instrumental and affective resources. Bryan White notes that these elements and even specific phrases from Dryden’s text remain pervasive in Cecilian odes thereafter (p. xiii), an observation that...