Purcell’s O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice (Z. 406) is a miniature masterpiece of English Baroque melancholy.
The piece sets Katherine Philips’s 17th-century poem as a ground-bass lament for a single voice and continuo. The mechanism is simple and devastating: a four-bar descending chromatic bass line repeats throughout, anchoring nine stanzas while the vocal line floats above it in increasingly expressive, almost grieving arcs. Purcell uses the ground not as mere repetition but as a structural cage—the harmony is locked, the singer is trapped in solitude, and every variation in the melody heightens the sense of inescapable inwardness.