Sunday 18 January 2009

Henry Purcell - Coming Clean about the Name

The English can't lay claim to many of the world's greatest composers. A pity, then, that we can't even agree on the pronunciation of the immortal names the country has produced. Henry PurCELL was relatively uncontroversial until revisionist scholars (i.e. busybodies) adopted a stress on the first syllable - Henry PURcell. A least one blogger has pointed out that the last syllable stress is preferred by the composer's living namesakes. Could it just be that they, like the classical music community at large, chose to distance themselves from a certain leading brand of washing powder?

No comments:

Post a Comment