Two ‘highly significant’ Purcell works discovered, hidden among legal documents

7 October 2025, 17:50

One song and a keyboard manuscript were discovered in two local authority archives.

The last two years have seen the discovery of unheard music by Mozart and The Beatles, and now another composer is joining their ranks.

Two pieces of music by English Baroque composer Henry Purcell have been discovered by teams of musicologists in Worcestershire and Norfolk, 330 years after the composer’s death.

The printed score of a previously unknown Purcell song was found in the Worcestershire local archives and the original manuscript for various keyboard compositions, partly in the composer’s own hand, was found in Norfolk. This second discovery also contained what is thought to be the first Purcell autograph to be found for more than 30 years.

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Stephen Rose, a professor of music at Royal Holloway, University of London, told The Guardian: “Both discoveries show the crucial role of county council archives and their staff in preserving this musical heritage. Both give important insights into the type of music Purcell was writing in the last five years of his short life.”

Purcell was a leading English composer of the 17th century, most famous for his works Dido and Aeneas, ‘Music for a While’, and The Fairy Queen. He died in 1695, aged just 36.

The newly-discovered song, ‘As soon as day began to peep’, was written for a character called Monsieur le Prate - a French fop - in a 1691 play titled Love for Money.

Rose described le Prate as “not quite in control of his emotions” as he tries to win over the woman of his affections: “He comically compares himself to a cat howling and scratching at the door of his beloved, with Purcell representing the miaows in music.”

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These discoveries were part of a project, titled Music, Heritage, Place: Unlocking the Musical Collections of England’s County Record Offices, headed by Rose and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project catalogues music manuscripts in local archives that are “often struggling after decades of local authority funding cuts”.

Rose also told the Guardian that, when the play was performed in London, it was booed by audience members as a harsh putdown on a girls’ boarding school in Chelsea, where D’Urfey had stayed in 1690: “Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas was performed at the same school in around 1687, so it is interesting to see Purcell also involved in a play that satirised the venue of his opera and the girls who sang in it.”

The song is incomplete and had survived among legal warrants. It was completed and reconstructed by Alan Howard, chair of the Purcell Society and college associate professor of music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and can now be performed again.

Howard said of the “highly significant” find: “This is a piece we were completely unaware of by Purcell, the major composer of that era in England. It’s almost unheard of for something like that to turn up. We would normally know about it from the published play text or a diary entry by someone who heard it in the theatre. But there’s just nothing like that.”

The keyboard manuscript contains nine pieces by Purcell and his contemporary John Blow, in different versions from those currently known.

It is bound in red leather with gold decoration, and had been repurposed around 1810, with some of the blank music staves being used as lines for the index of Thetford town council records. Rose said: “Three of the pieces by Purcell are in the composer’s own hand, recognisable for its distinctive note-shapes and musical symbols.

“They include early versions of his G minor suite. It contains many differences of keyboard texture and ornamentation, giving insights into how Purcell may have played the harpsichord.”

Digitised versions of both discoveries are being made available by the Norfolk and Worcestershire archives.