Rehabilitating William Lawes

Abstract

Even amid the celebrations of the Purcell tercentenary, the 350th anniversary of William Lawes's death at the Battle of Rowton Moor on 24 September 1645 did not go uncommemorated, and it has occasioned some significant and collectable souvenirs. They include the first complete recordings of the Royall Consort, a collection of instrumental pieces which, as Dr Burney remarked, 'was always mentioned with reverence' by the composer's admirers in the 17th century: William Lawes: The Royall Consort suites (Chandos CHAN 0584/5, rec 1994), by the Purcell Quartet with Nigel North and Paul O'Dette, and the first disc of William Lawes: Royall Consort suites (ASV CD GAU 146, rec 1995), by the Greate Consort directed by Monica Huggett. Their release coincided with the publication of David Pinto's edition of these suites, and also of his book For the Violls, which devotes a chapter to them (both reviewed by Mark Levy, EM, xxiv/3 (Aug 1996), pp.507-11). Burney transcribed samples of the Royall Consort from old partbooks, but they left him baffled and unimpressed-'one of the most dry, aukward, and unmeaning compositions I ever remember to have had the trouble of scoring', he wrote in 1789. Arnold Dolmetsch had greater faith in the work, and included a suite from it (performed on four viols and harpsichord) in a concert of music by William and Henry Lawes in February 1894. But the complexity of the work's textual history for a long time impeded proper appraisal. In Jeffrey Pulver's Biographical dictionary of old English music (1927), for example, it is misleadingly described as a 'set of short suites for three Viols, or other combination'. Ernst Hermann Meyer, too, could give only a flawed overview of the work, hampered as he was by the difficulties of research in wartime London, but he did at least conclude that it would be 'altogether well worth reviving' (English chamber music (London, 1946), pp.180-83). Thanks, however, to the work of Murray Lefkowitz, Gordon Dodd and now David Pinto, the Royall Consort has come to be seen as an important collection of 'progressive and beautifully crafted works' (to quote Bruce Wood's notes for the Purcell Quartet discs). In the 50 years since Meyer's book appeared its rehabilitation has come a long way, as these recordings comprehensively demonstrate. In one source (Oxford, Christ Church, Music Mss. 391-6) the Royall Consort is described as 'Sixe Setts of Musicke' in the six keys D minor, D major, A minor, C major, F major and B6 major. The D minor and D major 'setts' are substantially longer than the others, however, and (although the order of movements varies somewhat from manuscript to manuscript) each can be subdivided fairly naturally into three. Lefkowitz's consequent classification of the collection as ten suites (see William Lawes (London, 1960), pp.68-87, 267-8) has won general acceptance, although Pinto prefers to speak often 'setts'. ('Sett', 'suit' and 'suite' were virtually synonymous in Lawes's day.) Lefkowitz was also the first to recognize that most of the pieces exist in two different scorings: a so-called 'old version' for two trebles, tenor viol, bass viol and thorough bass, and a 'new version' whose instrumentation is made explicit by Lawes in his autograph score-book-'Two Violins, 2 Base Violls and 2 Theorboes'. A note by Edward Lowe, a friend of the Lawes family who was Professor of Music at Oxford from 1661 to 1682, in the bassus partbook of his 'parchment bookes' (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Mus. Sch. D.236, f.lv) sheds some light on the revision and the reason behind it: