Who wrote If music be the food of love?

by Christopher Lawrence

In March 2001 we told you about the following new release:

PURCELL
Fairest Isle and other songs
Barbara Bonney (soprano)
The Academy of Ancient Music / Christopher Hogwood
Decca CD 466 132–2DH

This recording includes such Purcell favourites as Fairest Isle, If music be the food of love and Dido’s lament with The Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood accompanying Barbara Bonney, but also includes other English songs by Dowland, Campion, Morley, Byrd and Jenkins, accompanied variously by Jacob Heringman on lute and the Phantasm viol quartet.

So, to the question posed in the introduction at the start of this newsletter: whose words did Purcell set in his song If music be the food of love? Many (most?) of you will have said Shakespeare, this being the opening line (or more correctly the opening seven words) of his Twelfth Night. But the answer is in fact one Colonel Henry Heveningham, about whom I am afraid I know very little. (Indeed, I would welcome a short paragraph on him from any better informed readers.) The two texts diverge after this first line, and here they are for you to compare:

Heveningham

Shakespeare:

If music be the food of love, sing on till I am fill’d with joy; for then my list’ning soul you move with pleasures that can never cloy, your eyes, your mien, your tongue declare that you are music ev’rywhere. Pleasures invade both eye and ear, so fierce the transports are, they wound, and all my senses feasted are, tho’ yet the treat is only sound. Sure I must perish by your charms, unless you save me in your arms.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough! no more; ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe’er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy, That it alone is high fantastical.