Colonel henry heveningham biography of michael

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

Few composers—in his time and in the centuries since—have been as deft as Purcell at marrying text and sound. His opera Dido and Aeneas is a seminal work, the most important of his compositions for the stage, and his songs, of which he wrote more than 100, are exemplary (such 20th-century English composers as Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett would pay brilliant homage to them in their own ways). Between 1692 and 1695, Purcell composed three settings of Colonel Heveningham’s poem, all of them beautiful. The first two are more or less similar, but the third is a different work altogether, more florid, more darkly evocative.

It opens with a brief, enigmatic figure in the bass line, after which the soloist sings in the style of a recitative. As if to highlight the departure from Shakespeare (the exhortation in the text here is to Sing on, not play on), Purcell repeats that particular phrase, Sing on, each repetition becoming more and more embellished. The entire song is characterized by its melismatic style—that is, its use of melisma: the assigning of many notes, often in the form of an ornate run, to the singing of a single syllable.

more here.

In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, having been repeatedly rejected by the Countess Olivia, invokes a musical metaphor to describe his lovesick heart:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Listening to an ensemble of musicians perform at his palace, the duke believes that by gorging on these nourishing sounds he might be relieved of his longings for Olivia. He then hears a harmonic cadence, the culmination of a line so sweet that it wafts over him like the scent of violets. At this point, the music seems to lose its charms, yet Orsino’s musings continue, as befitting the young romantic that he is—he might express the desire to be free of love’s torments, but his words suggest otherwise.

Orsino’s opening speech, one of the most famous passages in English literature, must have been a favorite of a 17th-century colonel named Henry Heveningham, for he used its first seven words as a way to begin one of his own poems:

If music be the food of love,
Sing on till I am fill’d with joy;
For then my list’ning soul you move
With pleasures that can never cloy,
Your eyes, your mien, your tongue declare
That you are music ev’rywhere.

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Performances

Sheet Music

Scores

1st Substitute, Z.379a (1692)

2nd Version, Z.379b (1693)

3rd Model, Z.379c (1695)

Arrangements and Transcriptions

For Voice esoteric Piano (Arkwright)

General Information

Work Caption	If Penalty Be picture Food expend Love
Alternative. Title
Composer	Purcell, Henry
Opus/Catalogue NumberOp./Cat. No.	Z.379
I-Catalogue NumberI-Cat. No.	IHP 29
Year/Date go together with CompositionY/D disagree with Comp.	1692-5
First Publication.	1692
Librettist	Colonel Henry Heveningham (1651–1700)
Language	English
Composer Disgust PeriodComp. Period	Baroque
Piece Style	Baroque
Instrumentation	voice, bass

Navigation etc.

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