Active Years: 1680-1695 (born 1659)

Position: England’s greatest composer

Career Highlights: The Fairy Queen, The Masque from Dioclesian, Dido and Aeneas, Hail Bright Cecilia, The Golden Sonata.

Career Totals: Six dramatic works, sixty-five anthems, twenty-four odes, over fifty songs, twenty-two fantasies for viols, twenty-two trio sonatas, eight suites for harpsichord, songs and music for over forty plays, other instrumental works.

Scouting Report: Henry Purcell’s warm, gracious music embodies all the best qualities of the English musical tradition. His anthems add genuinely glorious music to some of the greatest texts in the English language. Purcell died before opera fully penetrated England, but he wrote music for the stage spectacles and “masques” that preceded opera. His “semi-opera,” Dido and Aeneas, contains one of the most famous arias ever written, Dido’s Lament. If you listen to his dramatic music, you’ll notice stylistic approaches that can be heard centuries later in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Broadway musicals. His instrumental music included old fashioned contrapuntal music for consorts of viols (the older cousins of the violin family) and up-to-date trio sonatas in the latest Italian fashion.

Teammates and Contemporaries: Prokofiev came from the Russian school of Rimsky-Korsakoff and Glazunov, and worked with the ballet impresario Diaghilev.

Teammates and Contemporaries: Purcell played in a high-powered seventeenth century Baroque league that included Couperin and Lully.

Fun Fact: Charles II claimed he liked music he could keep time to, so Purcell produced a piece called the Fantasy on One Note. The king played a single bass note over and over on his own instrument and the rest of the musicians played lines that harmonized with that one note.