Hear my Prayer, O Lord (Z. 15) is incomplete in its unique source, Cambridge University's MS. Fitzwilliam 88; perhaps it originally formed the opening movement of a longer Anthem. The surviving music takes as its despairing text the opening utterance of Psalm 104; this is one of only five anthems of Purcell's which do not contrast antiphonal vocal textures to the full choir. Even as a fragment, however, these pages of the autograph manuscript preserve perhaps the finest torso of a piece Purcell ever conceived, a stunning and extended outworking of a single imitative phrase to an eight-voiced climax.

The pungent harmonies which evoke its impassioned prayer derive from fairly strict outworking of inversions and permutations upon a concise pair of imitative motives. The first, which contains the text "Hear my prayer, O Lord" mimics a tense and compact chant invocation, while the corresponding second clause "And let my crying come unto thee" adopts in all voices a perilous chromatic rising motive. Both motives artfully link the demands of easy text-declamation (a characteristic of all Purcell's English music) and dramatic text-setting. And over the course of a lengthy thirty-four measures consisting only of these two motives, Purcell gradually amplified the vocal texture, and intensifies the harmonic complexity, until all eight voices combine in a towering dissonant tone cluster which desperately demands the final cadential resolution.



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