The tercentenary of Purcell's death, coming as the ‘early music’ movement reached its peak, was celebrated in triumphant style, onstage and in print.

the forgèd feature

Now more than ever we are listening for what Gerard Manley Hopkins found—or, rather, for what famously found him.

‘So that’—to continue the poem in the poet's gloss—‘while he [Purcell] is aiming only at impressing me his hearer with the meaning in hand I am looking out meanwhile for his specific, his individual markings and mottlings, “the sakes of him”.’

We might think we are better placed to find these ‘markings and mottlings’, these ‘sakes of him’, now that Purcell's music is vastly more available than it was to a young priest in Oxford in April 1879, when the Purcell Society had only just set out on a complete edition, and when the ‘forgèd feature’ cannot have been finding anyone from out of its ensconcement in much more than those relatively few anthems, sonatas and songs that had been in regular performance since the composer's death.