Still, one movement leads
naturally into the next, and scrappiness is avoided, and the music is of
a high quality and full of vitality. Purcell frequently set a double bar
at the end of a section, and makes two or more numbers where a modern
composer would simply change the tempo and key-signature and go straight
on, so that the scrappiness is only apparent. In this ode an instance
occurs. There are fourteen numbers, but the last three are in reality
one--a chorus, a quartet and a chorus repeating the opening bars of the
first chorus. In a modern composition all would have run on with never a
double bar. Purcell seems to have had no opportunity of designing
another ode on the same broad scale as this. At any rate, he never did
so, and the ode which did more than any other of his achievements, save,
perhaps, the _Yorkshire Feast-Song_ of 1689, to convince his
contemporaries of his greatness, abides as his noblest monument in this
department of music.
Just as by writing music for plays which will never be acted again
Purcell cut off his appeal to after generations of play-goers, so by
writing anthems on a model sadly out of place in a sacred service he hid
himself from future church-goers.
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