George Jeffreys’ life (c. 1610-1685) sits in between that of two great pillars of English music: William Byrd (1540-1623) and Henry Purcell (1659-1695). He lived through the turbulent years of the English Civil War, and was for a brief time organist to King Charles I.
Being on the losing side of the war meant a life of discretion thereafter, looking after the stately home of his patron Christopher Hatton III’s in Northamptonshire. His musical passion was fuelled by Hatton’s love of all things Italian, which extended beyond architecture and gardening to the madrigal. Copying dozens of pieces by the Italian masters led Jeffreys to create his own style, a fusion of High Church Anglicanism and Italian fervour. Jeffreys’ strongly expressed, repressed religious feelings burn through his music in a way which belies the fact that he has all but disappeared from the history books.
William Lawes worked as a musician for Charles I for all of his adult life, and it is not impossible that he and Jeffreys met. The ’new version’ of his Royall Consort sets of viol pieces in some ways prefigure the string quartet, and if this is the birth of chamber music, George Jeffreys’ vocal music is the birth of the new, Italian style of declamatory expression in England. The last music that Jeffreys copied was the ’Sonnata’s of III Parts’ by the 24 year old Henry Purcell, in which the young composer ‘faithfully endeavour’d a just imitation of the most fam’d Italian Masters’. Here, the trio sonata as we understand it is well and truly established, and the Italian style fully fused with the English. With a Stuart monarch back on the throne, George Jeffreys must have looked forward to a bright, European future for English music.
