‘“Studying a little of the French Air”: Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius and the dramatic operas of Henry Purcell’

Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius (1685) is an important landmark in the dissemination of French operatic practice in England, and it played a limited, but crucial role in the shaping of seventeenth-century English semi-opera. Albion and Albanius was the most elaborate production of the Restoration period, and the last opera to be mounted by an English company before the series of semi-operas, beginning with Dioclesian (1690), for which Henry Purcell provided the music. Grabu’s credentials as a skilled exponent of French opera were announced in Dryden’s preface to the libretto, and his intimate knowledge of Lully’s tragédies lyrique can be demonstrated unambiguously through his borrowing from and imitation of them. Albion and Albanius provided English composers, and Purcell in particular, with immediate experience of Lullian-style opera. Several writers on Purcell’s semi-operas have acknowledged the debt Purcell owed to Grabu’s work, but no detailed examination of the range and degree of Grabu’s influence has been undertaken. This paper will examine the ways in which Purcell emulated Grabu’s musical techniques in Dioclesian, and to a lesser extent in his subsequent semi-operas. In particular, Grabu’s French-style choral movements, his use of concerto-like alternation between groups of instruments, and his extended chaconne provoked direct responses in the Purcell’s music. Such influences must be understood in the context of the wider range of English, Italian and French music circulating in Restoration London; the extent to which such influences may have coincided with or superseded Grabu’s immediate influence on Purcell will be considered.