Doomed heroism, noble leadership, questing knights seeking spiritual truth, good versus evil—the stories surrounding King Arthur have continued to resonate with people since the Middle Ages.
Henry Purcell’s Arthur
Henry Purcell is arguably England’s greatest composer, and one of his best works is his opera “King Arthur, or The British Worthy.”
Premiering in 1691 with a libretto by the poet John Dryden, the story departs from the familiar Arthurian legends of Camelot. Instead of falling in love with Guinevere and battling his son Mordred, he has to rescue his fiancée Emmeline, a blind princess, from the clutches of a Saxon king named Oswald.
How blest are shepherds, how happy their lasses, While drums and trumpets are sounding alarms. Over our lowly sheds all the storm passes, And when we die ’tis in each other’s arms, All the day on our herds and flocks employing, All the night on our flutes and in enjoying.
Set in G major with a clear, hymn-like melody, the piece alternates between solo and ensemble passages, contrasting the carefree life of shepherds with the chaos of war.
Wagner and ‘Parsifal’
Richard Wagner is famous for adapting German myths for his operas. The King Arthur legend is Welsh in origin, though. So what could Wagner have to do with Arthur?
As it turns out, the King Arthur legend appealed to many cultures, transcending its local origins to become something of a pan-European mythos. While Wagner never directly dealt with Arthur himself, over the course of his long career, he adapted three different Arthurian tales to Germanic themes and settings.
The first was “Lohengrin” (1850). Drawing on lore about the Holy Grail, this work is most famous for its “Bridal Chorus,” known to most people now as the wedding march, “Here Comes the Bride.”
Wagner again tackled Arthurian subject matter with “Tristan und Isolde.” One of his best-known works, it was groundbreaking in its techniques, using notes outside the standard major and minor scales to create harmonic progressions of dissonant chords that add to the story’s emotional tension.
At the end of his life, Wagner returned to the Arthurian mythos a final time with “Parsifal,” drawing on the medieval German epic poem “Parzival” by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wagner retold the story of one of Arthur’s greatest knights—better known as Percival to English-speaking audiences—as he protects the Holy Grail from the evil sorcerer Klingsor.
“Parsifal” was Wagner’s last completed work, taking his compositional techniques to their furthest point of development while exploring Christian themes. Musical ideas are first heard as fragments in the prelude played by the orchestra, then developed in vocal lines by the characters. There is less of a boundary line between leitmotifs than Wagner’s earlier works, and motives from one character often blend into another. In Act II, for example, a woman named Kundry attempts to seduce Parsifal in Klingsor’s enchanted realm. Parsifal’s rising lyrical melody, symbolizing hope and purity, intersects with Klingsor’s more dissonant motif played by the brass and woodwinds, representing the corruption of desire.
Edward Elgar’s ‘King Arthur Suite’
Along with Purcell, Edward Elgar is another luminary of British music. It should come as no surprise that he also tried his hand at adapting the Arthurian legend. Unlike with Purcell’s (or Wagner’s) treatment, though, Elgar’s version of the story is recognizable to everyone.
However, during a two-week period at his daughter’s farm the following month, he drew on some old sketchbooks for ideas and wrote more than 20 minutes of music for the play, providing introductions and entr’actes to connect the different scenes. Since its premiere, it has usually been performed as a stand-alone concert work.
The “King Arthur Suite” begins heroically with stately rhythms and sweeping melodies. First, a figure moves up the scale, transitioning through a series of scales and chords that give a rich, medieval feel, eventually settling in the key of E minor. Then two themes are introduced that intertwine: an adagio (slow) “Fate” motif, representing Arthur’s doom and a more energetic rhythm in allegro moderato that uses brass to evoke the chivalry of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table.
Throughout the six movements, Elgar matches music to character. An ethereal harmony of strings and woodwinds evokes the supernatural mystery of Merlin. The fourth movement introduces a lyrical melody portraying Queen Guinevere in her tower at night, torn by the conflict between her love for Lancelot and her duty to Arthur. Following the climactic battle of the fifth movement, the last scene features a simple melody, repeated in chant-like fashion with the tolling of a single bell, to signify Arthur’s death. The violins then rise over the harmony towards E minor, bringing in the barge carrying off his body to Avalon that was alluded to in the opening.
Arthur has been worked into music on many other occasions beyond these three examples, of course. Jerome V. Reel Jr., a scholar associated with The Camelot Project sponsored by the University of Rochester, compiled a vast list of all the known Arthurian music that has been composed as of 2005. In the 20th century alone, more than 100 operas on Arthurian subjects were written, and more than 500 pieces of music in other categories. Works continue to be written in our own century, like John McCabe’s ballet, “Arthur” written in 2000, Richard Peaslee’s opera “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” a year later, and Daniel Hart’s score for the more recent film “The Green Knight” (2021). Britain’s national legend remains as popular as ever.
