Oh, fair Cedaria is a masterpiece. It was not published until seven years after Purcell’s death, when it appeared in the 1702 second edition of Orpheus Britannicus. It is one of the most perfect of all Purcell’s songs. The opening is exquisite, with a ravishing melisma on ‘Oh’ leading to a series of sighing ‘hide those eyes’ and erotic settings of the word ‘dies’. ‘Such beauty and charms are seen’ is underpinned by a graceful, four-bar ground bass; the tantalizing melismas on ‘charms’ leave us in no doubt of Cedaria’s matchless ‘beauty, wit, and grace’. The last stanza is extraordinary, containing a series of increasingly desolate pleas to ‘pity me’, the last of which is worthy of Dido, as is the magically descending bass line of the last ‘Unless I may your favour have, I can’t one moment live’. Such a song leaves us in no doubt whatsoever as to why Purcell’s contemporaries held him in universal awe.

from notes by Robert King © 2003