Funeral Music

Kraus' last and greatest works, the Symphonie funebre and Funeral Cantata for Gustav III, are fully able to stand with the best works in the forms of the period, as great as the late symphonies of Haydn and Mozart and, yes, even as great as the Requiem of Mozart. Written under the overwhelming personal and national tragedy of the assassination of the King of Sweden then at the peak of its cultural and national greatness, Kraus' funeral music is numb with shock and wild with grief, but always completely controlled, masterfully balanced, and profoundly moving. If there are only two works you ever listen to by Kraus, let them be these two works.

Henry Purcell - Love's Goddess Sure was Blind: The Complete Funeral Music for Queen Mary
The Sixteen / The Symphony of Harmony and Invention / Harry Christophers
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC (tracks): 330 MB | Artwork: 36 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Coro # COR16024 | Country/Year: UK 2004
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal, Sacred

"…But now, in the middle of the 2000s, they're back, and they've brought with them an even more wonderful recording of Purcell's funeral music. It's more wonderful because, good as the Collins recording sounded, this Coro recording sounds even better: deeper, richer, warmer, and even more detailed. It's more wonderful because, good as the earlier performances were, these performances sound even better: more passionate, more precise, and even more powerful. And it's more wonderful because while this is exactly the same recording that appeared on Collins, it somehow sounds more wonderful released on the Coro label. How this is possible is impossible to know, but that it does is indisputable. If you don't have Harry Christophers and the Sixteen's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, here it is again. This time, don't miss it."

The assassination of Gustav III, Sweden's "theatre king", ended one of the most brilliant periods in the country's culture. And it was followed by a ceremony fully on a par with the tragic event itself: a kind of heroic opera about the Third of the Gustavs, staged in the royal burial church, Riddarholmskyrkan. Joseph Martin Kraus, the greatest of the Gustavian composers and royal Kapellmeister, conducted his Funeral Cantata. Strongly personal in its despair, wrath, and grief, this highly dramatic creation was the joint work of three of the age's leading minds, in music, poetry and décor.

Compilations are highly useful in understanding the works of the inexhaustibly tuneful British composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695). He had a few big hits, like the Funeral Music for Queen Mary (which is included here) and the opera Dido and Aeneas (which isn't). But much of his best music is scattered around in small bits, residing within genres that are rather odd from today's perspective. Purcell spent much of his short adult life as a theater composer, and his incidental music, for example, is filled with perfect miniatures…

We know now that Purcell's three Funeral Sentences were not written for the funeral of Queen Mary in 1695. Following the tradition of the English court, it was pieces by Thomas Morley, originally written for the funeral of Elizabeth I, that were sung there. Purcell's only contribution to the ceremony was the composition of two pieces for slide trumpets (March and Canzona), and the anthem in the archaic style Thou knowest, Lord. During the funeral procession to Westminster Abbey, a band of oboes played two marches written by John Paisible and Thomas Tollet. This recording assembles the music composed for the funeral of Queen Mary and that used at the funeral of Elizabeth I in 1603.