The Arthurian Legends tell us that Arthur will one day return to reunite and rule over Britain. Arthur’s reign represents perfect politics, and his Christ-like return would mark the beginning of a new golden age. Even so, King Arthur, quickly come. We need you on this side of the pond as well.

How fitting that Henry Purcell, the greatest English baroque composer during his life (and easily the greatest English composer since the renaissance) had written an opera based on the King Arthur legends. And, interestingly, it was politically poignant when it was composed, as England was struggling with who would be the heir to the throne – their choices were the King’s brother (that’s good) who was Roman Catholic (that’s bad) OR an illegitimate son (that’s bad) who was Protestant (that’s good). Sadly, Arthur didn’t return then to fix the political strife, but fingers crossed that he shows up in the US sometime soon!

This is an older recording (from 1956), and it shows its age in its over-romantic interpretation of the music. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s different from the way it sounded in Purcell’s day. For one, the instruments used have evloved significantly over the 200 years; secondly, musical styles and practices have evolved as well. For a “performance practice” version of some of the same music, click here.

A couple years ago, I was teaching a class on Musical Form & Analysis. I gave my students an assignment to take a short piece and analyze the phrase structure. For most people, their analysis looked like “A, A’, B, A'” or “A, A, B, A, C, D, C, A, B, A”. And then there was that one cheeky student who analyzed Edvard Grieg‘s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” —

A, A, A’, A’, A, A”; A, A, A’, A’, A, A”; A, A, A”’, A”’, A, A”; coda (based on A)

A lot of hip-hop, dance, and techno music is just a two-measure phrase repeated ad nauseam. Well, Grieg’s famous spooky work isn’t much more than that. It’s a four-measure phrase, grouped into a six-phrase unit which is repeated three times, with a little ending. He does two things to keep us from banging our heads against the wall in boredom: 1) in each six-phrase unit, the middle two phrases begin on a different note 2) each successive phrase gets a little bit louder and faster.

The work is from a suite of incidental music Grieg wrote for the Norwegian satirical play Peer Gynt. It’s the closest thing to humor a Scandinavian has ever created.