Lecturing to a London audience in 1922, Gustav Holst singled out two composers who in their different ways were supreme in the art of dramatic characterisation. Both, he said, used ‘all their gifts of melody and harmony, all their mastery of orchestral colour, to give life to their characters and situations’. They were Richard Wagner and Henry Purcell. Holst's audience might have found his yoking of the two a shade provocative, but at least they would have been disposed to take it seriously. Fifty years earlier, a similar audience in London would have thought it wildly eccentric, for in 1872 little of Purcell's music was known and much of Wagner's output to date was not only controversial but—sundry concert-hall ‘bleeding chunks’ excepted—physically inaccessible unless you were able to take a trip to a Continental opera house. (By 1872 only his Flying Dutchman had been staged in the capital.) Of course, enthusiasm for Wagner grew prodigiously in Britain as the century wore on, helped by such things as Gustav Mahler's conducting Covent Garden's first Ring in the June and July of 1892. For some time, though, Purcell didn't fare as well, and the November of 1895 provides a good point of vantage to look at his standing towards the end of the nineteenth century, for it was the bicentenary of his death: an occasion which was marked in London by a Commemoration.