10 September: Henry Purcell

Composer Henry Purcell was born on this date in 1659. After Purcell died in 1695, there were no English composers who reached anything like the height of his fame for 200 years. Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Benjamin Britten didn’t come along until the 20^th century. 10 things you might not know about Purcell:

1. He was born in Westminster, London, in an area which later came to be known as Devil’s Acre.
2. Henry was born into a family which was both privileged and musical. His uncle Thomas sang at the coronation of King Charles II and Henry’s younger brother Daniel was also a composer. It was Uncle Thomas who arranged for the young Henry to become a chorister in the Chapel Royal.
3. It’s thought that Purcell was an accomplished composer by the age of nine, and that he wrote the three-part song Sweet tyranness, I now resign when he was a child. His earliest known work is an ode for King Charles' birthday in 1670, when he would have been ten or eleven.
4. By the time he was 20, Purcell had become the organist at Westminster Abbey, when the previous organist resigned to make way for him. Hence he played at William and Mary’s coronation on 11 April 1689.
5. For a time, when he was Westminster Abbey’s organist, he stopped writing anything but sacred Music, although he did write an opera called Dido and Aeneas which was based on the tale from Virgil’s Aeneid about the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he abandoned her. The libretto was written by Nahum Tate.
6. Contemporary reports suggest that he may have been a musical snob, believing that his work was too good for the general public to understand.
7. He was just 36 when he died. The cause of his death isn’t known but there are several theories. The most mundane of them is that he died of tuberculosis. A second theory is that he got home late after a night out with the lads to find that his wife, Frances, had locked him out and died from the chill he caught as a result. The third theory is quite literally death by Chocolate – that he drank a contaminated (or possibly even poisoned) cup of hot chocolate at one of London’s new chocolate houses.
8. The music he wrote for Queen Mary’s funeral was performed at his own. He is buried beside the organ in Westminster Abbey and his epitaph reads: "Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq., who left this life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only His harmony can be exceeded."
9. His music for Queen Mary’s funeral was used as the title music for the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.
10. Pete Townsend of The Who has said that Purcell was a great influence on the band, and in particular the tracks I Can See for Miles, Won’t Get Fooled Again and Pinball Wizard.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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