Music for a 'Brave Livlylike Boy': The Duke of Gloucester, Purcell and 'The Noise of Foreign Wars'

Abstract

Since the fragment of the ode ‘The noise of foreign wars’ was first brought to scholarly attention in 1964, the music has been attributed to Henry Purcell, though the date and occasion of its composition has remained a mystery. This article brings to light for the first time a complete manuscript copy of the text of the ode. It demonstrates that the ode was written for Princess Anne, to celebrate the birth of her son, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester on 24 July 1689. While the manuscript does not identify Purcell as the composer, it provides a context for the ode that fits well with the known facts of Purcell’s career. This article suggests that, given Purcell’s two known odes written for Princess Anne’s marriage in 1683 and for the Duke of Gloucester’s birthday in 1695, that works for her and her family may have been part of his court duties. The date of the ode and the likelihood that it was composed at short notice suggests a relationship with Purcell’s ode for Mr Maidwell’s school, performed on 5 August 1689. Hitherto, scholars have been unable to explain why Purcell recycled the symphony from his 1685 anthem ‘My heart is inditing’ as the opening symphony for ‘Celestial Music’. The short time-span in which he is likely to have been required to compose ‘The noise of foreign wars’ and its temporal proximity to ‘Celestial Music’ now provides a plausible explanation for this recycling. The manuscript copy of the poem demonstrates that the whole of the ode was set. This, combined with analysis of the extant manuscript copy of the music, provides grounds to hypothesize on the nature of the original lost source, probably a ‘fowle original’ that was not bound.