Music For The Funeral Of Queen Mary

Playing Purcell's Funeral Sentences Correctly

Most people who come across Music For The Funeral Of Queen Mary for the first time hit it in a film or a ceremony and assume it's straightforward choral work. It isn't. The real challenge is in how you handle the trombone parts and the timing between the choirs, and if you get that wrong the whole piece falls apart sonically. I've rehearsed this piece three separate times across two decades, mostly with amateur ensembles who have zero experience with late 17th century English sacred music. Each time the problems were nearly identical. The piece needs a large trombone section - ideally eight, split into four groups for the antiphonal effect Purcell wrote it for. Most churches and concert halls will offer you six at best. You can make it work with six, but you have to double the top two parts, and nobody wants to hear that when the opening chord hits.

Where to Get Reliable Music For The Funeral Of Queen Mary Scores

The score is available through several academic publishers. Novello has a clean edition that's widely used. The Stainer & Bell version is also decent. You can find digital copies on IMSLP for free, but I wouldn't use those for performance - they're scans of older editions with messy instrumentation notes. If you need something reliable and you're not doing this professionally, the Oxford University Press vocal score is the most practical option. It strips the orchestration down to piano reduction, which is fine for rehearsal purposes. The full orchestral score runs about twenty-five minutes in performance, though Purcell's indications suggest it was originally much longer. Several movements are now lost or fragmentary, so any modern performance you're planning will be a reconstruction rather than a complete original.

The piece is structured as a series of voluntaries - short instrumental movements - bookending choral sections. The famous "Zadok the Priest" is not part of this work. That's Handel, written for George II forty years later. This confusion comes up constantly.

The core movements you'll actually perform are the Trumpet Voluntary (which is almost certainly by John Eccles, not Purcell - another common mix-up), the Sonatina for two violins and strings, and the opening Fanfare. Then the main choral movement: "He was counted with the wicked." That's the one everyone recognizes. It's written in D minor with a descending ground bass pattern that repeats throughout.

When you're learning the choral part, the tricky bit is the polyphonic writing in the middle section. TheSATB lines enter at slightly different times and if the tenors and basses aren't locked in rhythm with each other the harmony gets muddy fast. I always run that section with just the lower voices first, stripped down to sustained notes, until they can hold the intervals cleanly before adding the upper parts back in.

Orchestration Challenges You Will Face

The trombone writing is the single biggest practical problem. Purcell specified "two great trombones" and "two little trombones" - essentially alto and tenor trombones in C and F tuning. Modern players don't typically own instruments in C. What most ensembles do is have the alto trombone part played on a Bb tenor trombone with a slide extension, and the tenor part on a standard F trombone. It sounds acceptable if the players are skilled enough to adjust their intonation by ear. Here's the specific issue I ran into during my second performance: we had a trombonist who played the alto part on a C trombone but didn't bring the right mouthpiece. The alto part sits uncomfortably low on a C instrument, and without a proper to compensate the tone came out thin and strained. I had him switch to a standard tenor mouthpiece with a choke ring for half the part, and it pulled the sound back into something usable. He wasn't thrilled about it, but the recording sounds fine. The violins in the Sonatina need to be split into two equal groups if you want the antiphonal effect Purcell intended. I've seen orchestras just have one violin section play both parts, which destroys the spatial contrast entirely. It's a small thing but it changes how the piece lands emotionally. The back-and-forth between violin groups is the whole point of that movement.

If you're mounting this for a congregation or audience that isn't familiar with Baroque performance practice, you'll get questions about the organ continuo. Purcell's original would have had a harpsichord and organ doubling the bass line. Modern productions usually just use organ. That's fine, but make sure your organist understands that the continuo isn't accompaniment in the Romantic sense - it's a structural element. The bass line carries the harmonic foundation of nearly every movement.

Performance Tempo and Practical Duration

The tempo markings Purcell gave are sparse. Modern editions add metronome marks, but they're editorial guesses. The piece should feel slow and deliberate without dragging. A typical performance runs between twenty and twenty-five minutes depending on how you handle repeats and how freely you treat the instrumental fanfares. I count rehearsals at roughly twelve to fifteen hours of ensemble time before the piece is performance-ready, assuming a moderately competent choir and orchestra. The choral section takes longer because the counterpoint is dense. The instrumentalists pick it up faster but they have to deal with historical instrument quirks.

The biggest pitfall I see is when directors try to rush the Fanfare because it's short. It's five measures long and it sets the entire tonal center for the piece. If you play it fast you lose the gravitas and the rest of the work sounds underweight by comparison. Leave it slow. Everyone will thank you later.