Banking on Purcell
Post categories: Rick Jones
| 17:01 UK time, Monday, 12 January 2009
I very much enjoyed Purcell's Yorkshire Feast Song on Thursday's Composer of the Week, especially the sensuous ground bass number 'So when the grand glittering Queen'. Now I want to hear nothing but ground basses. The Yorkists seemed to be taking the credit for the Glorious, Bloodless Revolution which brought the replacement Protestant monarch, austerity, modesty, a preference for organs rather than strings in church and the Bank of England which has just announced its lowest lending rate since Purcell.
The idea and scheme for a national bank came, like the King, from Holland. A group of wealthy individuals, including His Majesty, raised £1.2 million which they then lent to the cash-strapped government which, in turn, agreed to pay back the interest on the loan (then 8 per cent) in perpetuity. This was the basis of Britain's trading supremacy for the next 300 years. Purcell meanwhile continued to write music of far greater worth and wit than the flattering political texts he set. His masters knew that almost any sentiment could be made to sound respectable dressed in Purcell's magnificent harmony.
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