This evening’s concert is dedicated to Professor Bruce Wood – for me, my doctoral examiner, a senior and supportive colleague, and an enduring role model. I have the privilege of calling him a personal friend – as well as the privilege of suggesting that he was a non-personal friend to every enthusiast of Purcell and Blow, whether they realise it or not. If you are seated in this hall tonight, ready to hear music by Purcell and John Blow, then he is, in a very real sense, your friend as well – and I hope you will shortly understand why.
Bruce Wood was born in 1945 and passed away – far too soon, after a prolonged illness – in December 2023. He was a superb musician, a brilliant thinker, and one of the towering musicologists of our time. As most of you did not know him personally, I shall refrain from recounting anecdotes about Bruce the individual – although I have many to share. Indeed, I suspect that Bruce himself, in his characteristically warm and fatherly manner, would have hinted to me that by now, 40 seconds into the talk, it is time to speak of the music itself.
And so, I shall attempt – through the field in which Bruce was arguably without peer, namely critical editing in musicology – to illuminate both what you will hear this evening, and, in a broader sense, what you encounter at every concert of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra. What I shall say later about Bruce is not simply a tribute; it is professionally necessary. One cannot speak of Purcell or Blow in a serious scholarly context without addressing Bruce’s immense contributions to the field.
Let me begin with a few points that may already be familiar to many of you:
You are likely aware that the musicians of this orchestra perform on period instruments, or on modern replicas based on historical models – instruments chosen to reflect the time and place in which the music was originally composed.
You are also likely aware that they interpret their parts using historically informed techniques – again, chosen to match the repertoire’s original context.
And you may reasonably infer that in order to perform such music on appropriate instruments and using period-appropriate techniques, the notation itself – the score – must likewise reflect the music’s time and place of origin.
Although I cannot offer precise statistics, I can say with considerable confidence that the musicians of this orchestra – in their work outside these concert hours, whether as soloists, teachers, or chamber performers – often perform from original sources. These may include autograph manuscripts, contemporary copies, or printed editions dating from the composer’s lifetime. In general terms, it is fair to say that those who perform Mozart or Beethoven seldom rely on original sources, while those who specialise in Monteverdi or Buxtehude actively seek them out.
However, with larger-scale works – such as operas or odes, involving multiple instrumental and vocal parts and comprising numerous movements – performing directly from original sources becomes increasingly challenging. One must ask: does the source's being “original” assures that it is free of errors? In most cases, the answer is - on the contrary! Today, if one prints a page at home and notices an error, one simply presses Ctrl+P and prints it again. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the printing process was vastly different – and errors frequently went uncorrected. In manuscript sources, errors might have been corrected in the individual performance parts – but these rarely survive. At best, we are often left with an uncorrected score. And within an orchestral context, even a minor error can delay a rehearsal; a major one can bring it to a halt, incurring significant financial cost. No professional ensemble can afford such risks.
Correcting errors is a time-consuming process – and it requires someone who understands what is wrong and how to fix it. That person must know the sources, who copied or printed them, and what types of errors were typical. They must also have a deep familiarity with the composer’s style. When a bar is missing, the solution is not to abandon the piece, but to reconstruct the missing material. This is not unlike the work of an art restorer in a museum: the public deserves to experience the work in a condition that faithfully represents the original.
Even when no clear errors exist, large-scale works often survive only in fragmentary form:
– the vocal sections preserved in one tidy manuscript;
– the instrumental parts surviving in a disorganised print;
– and a libretto that does not precisely match the sung text.
Decisions must be made. Sometimes we know that a given work was performed several times under different circumstances – with a different cast, perhaps for a different court or monarch. An editor may attempt to reconstruct the earliest version or the one closest to what appears to have been the composer’s original conception.
All of this requires someone who understands the performers’ needs, can interpret the sources, and can compile an edition that is historically accurate, practical to perform, and, if published, informative to scholars who may wish to study the work without beginning the process anew.
This is the task of the musicologist – and more specifically, of the musicologist who specializes in critical editing. Such a scholar gathers the available sources, formulates an editorial policy, and produces a final version of the work, justifying each note according to clear and rigorous principles.
Indeed, this kind of work lies at the very origin of musicology as an academic discipline. Although histories of music began to appear in the eighteenth century, the earliest musicologists were more concerned with editing scores. Why? Because by the mid-nineteenth century, European nations were seeking to define their artistic canons. Just as a well-educated individual was expected to own a complete edition of Schiller or Goethe, so too was one expected to possess an authoritative edition of “The Complete Works of Bach.” That project began in 1850 and required fifty years to complete. A complete Handel edition followed in 1858 and took nearly forty-five years. The Germans were soon followed by the French, the Italians, and the English.
In 1876, the Purcell Society was founded (130 years later, Bruce would become its chairman). The Society's complete edition of Purcell’s works took nearly ninety years to complete. (I shall not delve here into an earlier and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to publish all of Purcell’s works – an extraordinary story in its own right, and one Bruce himself would have recounted far better than I). For composers of lesser national prominence, other solutions emerged. In Germany, for instance, the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst was launched in 1892. Back in England, Musica Britannica began in 1951. Even the Purcell Society added a "Companion Series" of non-Purcellian works that are essential for understanding Purcell’s compositional world.
The opera you are about to hear, Venus and Adonis, was published as Volume 2 in that Companion Series – because one cannot fully comprehend Dido and Aeneas without first understanding Venus and Adonis. I shall not discuss Bruce’s edition of Venus and Adonis in detail here, but his critical edition of Dido and Aeneas was one of his final major undertakings. It is a textbook case of a work for which no autograph manuscript survives. Two later manuscripts do, however – and the editor must assess how they relate to one another, which passages preserve earlier material, and how to peel away later accretions, even when doing so challenges long-accepted musical readings.
[Demonstration of “Death is now a welcome guest” – first with the familiar C-natural, then with Bruce’s historically-grounded C-sharp.]
Engaging deeply with sources, as one must when preparing a critical edition, often leads to fresh insights into a work’s history. Many of you may know that Dido and Aeneas was long thought to have been premiered around 1689 at a girls’ school in Chelsea. Yet about fifteen years ago, one of Bruce’s students – my colleague and friend Bryan White – discovered a remarkable letter written in early 1689 from the city of Aleppo, Syria, by an English merchant named Rowland Sherman. Based on Sherman’s travel itinerary, White was able to demonstrate that the opera must have been completed before July 1688. He could not, however, try to support the theory that Dido and Aeneas was written even earlier – before 1685.
Stylistically, Dido and Aeneas sounds very much like the younger sibling of Blow’s Venus and Adonis. We know that Venus and Adonis was originally performed for the King and only later at the Chelsea school. We know that Dido was performed at the same school. Could it not also have been originally intended for the court? Through their joint efforts, Wood and Andrew Pinnock (his long-time friend and collaborator) succeeded—largely thanks to the fact that, between them, they possessed thorough knowledge of all extant (and even some no-longer-extant) musical, literary, historical, architectural, and artistic sources—in establishing the earlier chronology. In doing so, they completed the circle and further strengthened the bond between Venus and Dido; between Adonis and Aeneas.
This brings us to the perennial question: What was the first English opera? Let us be precise: Venus and Adonis was not the first. But – and I say this without qualification – it is the earliest surviving English opera (plus another reservation - in a minute...).
The history is complex. English opera was born, in a way, out of a cultural workaround [originally, ישראבלוף, a trick characteristic of Israeli culture]. After the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, England entered the Interregnum – a period of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell, during which the theatres were shut down and most forms of public entertainment were banned. But the clever workaround was: “They told us we cannot act on stage, but no one said we cannot sing.” (Ephraim Kishon couldn't have written it better!)
Thus, during the 1650s, we see the emergence of operatic works such as The Siege of Rhodes (1656), The Cruelties of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659), Psyche, and Cupid and Death – the latter two with music by Matthew Locke, Purcell’s mentor.
Why are these not counted as operas? In most cases, the music has not survived. When it has, the works were often composed collaboratively – as in Cupid and Death, by Locke and Christopher Gibbons – which does not fit the later image of the Romantic “great composer” who can be creditted with unique psychological and dramatic insight. Many also featured extensive spoken dialogue, which diverges from the operatic model that would later become canonical.
Thus, while Venus and Adonis was not the first English opera, it is the first surviving English opera that is fully sung – with no spoken dialogue – and therefore aligns with the eighteenth-century understanding of what constitutes an opera.
Many have wished that English opera had continued along this path – the fully sung model pioneered by Blow and, arguably perfected by Purcell in Dido and Aeneas. But it did not. All of Purcell’s later stage works are semi-operas: plays interspersed with music.
Even tonight’s production straddles the boundary between theatre and concert. You will see sheet music on stage, but no elaborate scenery or seventeenth-century machinery. Consider this an invitation to imagine the wide spectrum between staged opera and concert performance – and to contemplate where Venus and Adonis might have been situated when presented before the King, or where Dido and Aeneas might have stood in the Chelsea school.
So yes – I wholeheartedly agree with the orchestra: Venus and Adonis is a magnificent work. And like Bruce, and so many others, I believe that once you have heard it, Purcell’s music never sounds quite the same again.
As for the instrumental suite that opens tonight’s concert – we have followed a practice typical of Blow’s and Purcell’s time. I selected several pieces that seemed well suited to one another, edited and corrected them as needed (and Maestro David Shemer corrected me when necessary). The result is a small suite functioning as a kind of First Music and Second Music – the instrumental numbers traditionally performed at the start of an English opera.
Of course, I would not presume to compare this modest undertaking to the intellectual and artistic achievement involved in producing a critical edition of the kind Bruce prepared on many occasions. But if there is one message I hope to leave with you tonight, it is this:
A Baroque orchestra such as this one strives to do things properly – historically, musically, intellectually. That requires commitment – and usually, support. Support from audiences, for instance.
Selecting historically appropriate instruments demands both effort and expense. Adopting historically informed performance practices takes time, training, and deep stylistic understanding. Choosing – or creating – the right version of a score, and editing it when necessary, is not merely a practical concern: it is the only historically responsible way to approach this repertoire. It is musical and intellectual independence in its purest form.
Whenever I have the joy and privilege of working in this way – editing, selecting, correcting, reconstructing – I always feel Bruce’s presence, figuratively standing behind me, smiling with his characteristic warmth, confirming that it is the right thing to do.
And as audience members, it is reassuring to know that we have an orchestra guided by that spirit – and that it has remained part of our cultural landscape for so many years. So let me end by congratulating the orchestra on this final concert of a wonderful season – congratulations to the orchestra and congratulations to us all.