Giovanni P. da Palestrina's 'The Song of Songs'

‘There are far too many poems with no other subject than love of a kind quite alien to the Christian faith.’

In this way Palestrina began the dedication to Pope Gregory XIII of his Fourth Book of Motets. He continued with an apology that has seemed to some modern historians to be pure hypocrisy. The composer ‘blushed and grieved’ that he was one of those whose musical art had been lavished upon such love-poems and that he had been in company with those who were ruled by passion and corrupted by their youthfulness.

But this was not the first time that Palestrina had claimed to suffer a bad conscience about the use of his composer’s gifts in the service of ‘light and vain ideas’. Indeed, in 1569 at the age of about forty-four, he regarded himself as getting elderly and assured another of his dedicatees and his public that his gifts would henceforth be devoted to things ‘dignified and serious, worthy of a Christian soul’.

When in 1584 the Roman printer Alessandro Gardano brought out Motettorum Quinque Vocibus Liber Quartus there was no mention on the title page that the contents were drawn entirely from what the Latin Bible calls Canticum Canticorum. In his dedication Palestrina follows his apology with this resolution: ‘But as what is past cannot be altered nor deeds undone, I have changed my purpose’. Recently, he explains, he had laboured upon poems ‘written of the praises of our Lord Jesus Christ and His most Holy Mother the Virgin Mary’ (a reference to his Madrigali spirituali of 1581), and now upon poems containing the divine love of Christ and His spouse the soul, indeed the ‘Songs of Solomon’ (Salomonis nimirum cantica). In the numerous later editions from 1587 to 1613, the title pages become more explicit, with phrases like motettorum ex canticis Salomonis or ex cantico canticarum (sic).

There are indications of haste in the first printing. The tenor and bass part-books are dated 1583, the other three 1584. There are a few obvious errors and omissions in this original set. We may assume publication early in 1584, perhaps to meet a special demand. For these are not thinly disguised erotic madrigals that happen to be in Latin, nor are they liturgical motets. They are exactly what Palestrina said they were, and precisely what suited the private and public devotional gatherings of people encouraged most notably by St Philip Neri, a man of extraordinary influence who had transformed religious and cultural life in Rome since the early 1560s. Under his persuasion confraternities were formed for the practice of spiritual exercises. Laudi spirituali were revived and madrigali spirituali became a popular musical genre. Indeed, Palestrina was a founder member of the Compagnia de i Musici di Roma dedicated to St Cecilia, begun in 1584. Bringing out his Song of Songs collection just in time may well have been Palestrina’s inaugural contribution.

By dedicating the set to his patron and employer Gregory XIII, Palestrina not only followed convention but honoured a reforming Pope who had supported him in his post as master of the Julian Chapel Choir, who had commissioned him (with Zoilo) to revise and reform the Roman chant books, and who had continued to keep Palestrina in his private chapel as an unofficial Papal composer.

There is every reason to believe that the earliest performances would have been by Palestrina’s small group of colleagues, adult male singers of the Papal choirs, the Julian in particular. Palestrina’s twenty-nine motets are vocal chamber music with a wide appeal that was recognized in his own time. The eleven editions in part-books are testimony to the popularity that Palestrina clearly expected. He may not have been a hypocrite but he was no fool in his business dealings or his publishing acumen. His Song of Songs was eminently suitable then, as it is now, for every kind of small singing group from male-voice soloists to mixed voices in small choirs, in low- or high-pitch performance.

Our modern age can hardly avoid some cynicism in regard to the traditional Jewish and Christian allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs: the texts clearly evolved from the love poetry of desert people, from cult-mythology and tribal wedding songs. But the Songs must be seen, and the music heard, in the context of an age of Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation fervour, an age devoted by Roman authority to the triumph of the Virgin as well as her tenderness. The Spouse of the allegory is not only the Church or the individual soul but the bride who is represented by Our Lady the Mediator and by the Queen of Heaven, the One arrayed for battle, even the woman of the Apocalypse; certainly to Palestrina’s contemporaries, the Virgin who won the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and for whom the Papacy instituted the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. The gentle enclosed garden of Virginity is balanced by the Catholic vision of triumph over evil; in the words of the Spaniard, Luis de Leon: ‘Virgin, arrayed in the sun, crowned with eternal stars, who walks her sacred feet upon the moon’. Fray Luis wrote his poems in 1572 when he was imprisoned for translating the Canticum Canticorum into Spanish. St Teresa of Avila had to burn her Meditation on the Song of Songs. It seemed to the authorities that the allegory could be preserved in the Latin but that the eroticism would prevail in the vernacular.

Although some have thought to impose a story-line upon Palestrina’s twenty-nine motets, with a narrative continuum between Bride, Bridegroom and Chorus, there is little evidence that the composer has attempted this at all. He rarely even observes these exchanges, nor does he characterize or dramatize the persons or events. His selection and division of the texts ignores what we see in modern editions of the Bible. In fact Palestrina was working from the Latin Bible prior to the Biblia Vulgata revision of 1592. This also accounts for some variants in the Latin text as set by Palestrina. Palestrina was setting the Latin as he knew it, in the way that he and his Church understood it.

Bruno Turner

(1994)

George F. Handel's 'Acis and Galatea'

After his early visits to Italy, Handel’s desire to experience music in all the main European countries was great enough for him to insist that, on his appointment as Kapellmeister in Hanover in 1710, he should have an immediate twelve months leave of absence to visit England. The Elector’s apparent generosity in so readily agreeing to this has to be seen in its wider context, for as heir to the British throne he was in effect simply allowing the transfer of his employee from one court to his next. Handel was favourably received at Queen Anne’s court, and certainly performed there once, but his eyes were already on Vanbrugh’s new opera house, the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. With his introduction to the publisher John Walsh, numerous society contacts and the sensational success of the first Italian opera especially composed for London, Rinaldo, which opened on 24 February 1711, his reputation seems already to have been partly made.

Handel left for Germany in June 1711, but remained in contact with people in London, including the poet John Hughes. In the Autumn of 1712 he returned to London (on his employer’s condition that he remained only ‘a reasonable time’), staying first in Barnes, and then for three years (1713–16) with the young Lord Burlington in Piccadilly. A great patron of the arts, Burlington’s circle included the poets Pope, Gay and Arbuthnott: Arbuthnott in particular became a supporter of Handel’s music. The Queen also commissioned works including the ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and the ‘Ode for Queen Anne’s Birthday’ and provided Handel with a pension of £200 a year. In 1714 the Queen died, and was succeeded by Handel’s German employer, now King George I. Handel had far exceeded the ‘reasonable’ conditions of his stay, but some diplomatic work on the part of Baron Kielmansegge mended any damage, and there appears to have been no real royal disfavour. Indeed, George doubled Handel’s pension. But, royal favour apart, the greatest attraction for Handel was still the theatre, and Silla, Teseo, Il pastor fido and Amadigi were all produced, though without the wild success of Rinaldo, which was revived four times in five years.

During the summer of 1717 Handel entered the service of the Earl of Carnarvon (who became Duke of Chandos in 1719) at Cannons, his palatial new residence in Edgware, just north of London. The Duke maintained a resident group of musicians, instrumentalists and singers and, with Pepusch already installed as master of music, Handel’s job was that of court composer.

Acis and Galatea was one of Handel’s most popular works, revived no fewer than eight times and performed at least seventy times by the middle of the century. It was also one of the few large scale-works to remain popular after his death: Mozart re-orchestrated it in 1788 for the celebrated concerts of music organized by van Swieten, Mendelssohn performed it in 1828, and Meyerbeer even planned a staged performance of it in 1857. It was in fact Handel’s second setting of the myth, for the first, a serenata entitled Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, had been composed in Naples in 1708, probably for the wedding of the Duke of Alvito. We know little of the first performance of the Masque, which was a private affair at Cannons, other than a letter from Sir David Dalrymple to the Earl of London in May 1718 which mentions Handel being at work on a ‘little opera’. A manuscript of the score was included in a catalogue of the Duke’s music library made in 1720, and although Handel’s ‘conducting score’ of 1718 does not survive, several contemporary manuscripts do, including one in the British Library.

Acis and Galatea is first mentioned as being a ‘Masque’ in the Duke’s catalogue of 1720. The heyday of the form had been nearly a century before when mime, music, dancing, spoken dialogue and lavish spectacle had been combined by figures such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones to make court entertainments of great splendour. The Masque never again recaptured the full glory of its Elizabethan form, but it did continue to serve as entr’actes in plays and operas for many years. In early eighteenth-century London the form recurred, partly as a home-grown reaction against the increasing popularity of Italian opera. Mostly these masques were short operas on pastoral or mythological subjects, usually divided into two ‘interludes’ or ‘entertainments’, and Handel would certainly have had first-hand experience of the work of two principal providers, the composer Pepusch and the poet John Hughes.

The story comes from Dryden’s translation of the thirteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which appeared in London in 1717. In a libretto of 1730, Alexander Pope is named as the author of Handel’s text, but in one of 1739 John Gay is credited; the words of the aria ‘Would you gain the tender creature’ are certainly by John Hughes. As Handel would have known the three poets through Lord Burlington’s circle it would not be unreasonable to suggest that all three may have had a hand in the libretto: such a practice was not uncommon.

Handel made numerous revisions of the score, especially for later revivals, adding extra movements (in Italian) and a chorus version of ‘Happy we’ (rather than the original duet). He also increased the scoring to include violas (which were absent from the Cannons orchestra) and even a carillon in 1739. Some versions included a third tenor part for the character named Coridon, giving him Damon’s aria ‘Would you gain the tender creature’: in most versions, however, this fifth voice appears only in the choruses, being suited to either a very high tenor or a countertenor. (The possibility of the former must be considered as the Chapel choir at Cannons did not employ countertenors, though the range is much more suited to a falsettist.) The 1718 version uses a small orchestra: Handel’s score specifically mentions violoncelli, suggesting that two were present, and we know the names of at least five violins in the Duke’s orchestra. The presence of a bassoon too is indicated in the score: in original performances the oboes would have doubled on recorders. With such pastoral subject matter, and knowing the Duke to have had a suitable small organ at Cannons, a keyboard must of been used for continuo (harpsichord and organ) and, much used in the opera houses, an archlute.

Throughout the masque the chorus plays an important role, setting the scene, observing and commenting, and ultimately even participating in the action. Not since Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas had it been so inextricably bound up with the drama. After a splendid Overture the scene opens on ‘a rural prospect, diversified with rocks, groves and a river’ and the chorus sets the happy scene of Arcadian bliss. Only the sea nymph Galatea is unhappy, and in ‘Hush ye pretty warbling choir’, delightfully scored for sopranino recorder and upper strings, she pines for her beloved Acis and rebukes the birds. However, unknown to Galatea, Acis too is distracted by love, and in ‘Where shall I seek the maiden fair?’ comes across as suitably youthful and impetuous. Damon is the rational element, worldly-wise and always advising caution. Here he reminds Acis that he is neglecting his shepherdly duties: there is plenty of time for such passions. But Acis is not listening, and Damon’s attempts to keep up with him are portrayed in the running bass line of ‘Shepherd, what art thou pursuing?’. The pace relaxes with the siciliano ‘Love in her eyes sits playing’ and Galatea’s elegant minuet ‘As when the dove’, before young love can wait no longer, and the lovers finally meet in the breathless duet ‘Happy we’.

Act Two increases the pace of the drama: the foreboding opening of the chorus ‘Wretched lovers’ is overtaken by the arrival of ‘the monster Polypheme’ whose enormous strides and thunderous voice are graphically portrayed in yet another change of mood. Of the four characters, it is the monster Polyphemus who is the most complex, for we are left unsure whether to take him seriously or not. Handel portrays him with more than a note of humour and certainly as being larger than life: at the same time as being a pathetic failure, the monster’s behaviour is horrific. This contrast is shown between the recitativo accompagnato ‘I rage, I melt, I burn’ (which parodies moments of similar tension in opera seria), and the following aria ‘O ruddier than the cherry’ which goes to the opposite extreme, earnestly tuneful and incongruously delicate, with a monster who has just demanded ‘a hundred reeds of decent growth to make a pipe for my capacious mouth’ accompanied by the smallest instrument in the orchestra, a sopranino recorder. Love has temporarily reduced Polyphemus to a gentle giant. But the humour does not last, and Galatea’s abrupt dismissal of him ‘Go monster, bid some other guest: I loathe the host, I loathe the feast’ brings on impatience. Polyphemus does not even wait for the orchestra’s opening ritornello in ‘Cease to beauty to be suing’. Damon urges Polyphemus to try the soft approach in the charming aria ‘Would you gain the tender beauty’, but Acis is already preparing for combat in the military ‘Love sounds the alarm’ (no need for trumpets here: Handel uses the oboe and strings to great dramatic effect). Damon once again tries the cautious approach, with a liltingly pastoral aria ‘Consider, fond shepherd’, and Galatea begs Acis to trust her constancy. But the couple can wait no longer, and Handel is able to employ a movement of great drama with the gentle duet ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains’ subjected to Polyphemus’s ferocious interruptions. Here we are left in no doubt that we have a none-too-intelligent brute with murder on his mind. Already furious at his failure to woo Galatea, Polyphemus cannot cope with the scene he now sees in front of him. He exacts his furious revenge by crushing Acis beneath a stone, and Acis, crying for help in a highly charged chromatic accompagnato, dies. The chorus laments his death in ‘Mourn all ye muses’, and Handel uses the unaccompanied consort of voices particularly effectively at ‘The gentle Acis is no more’. Galatea mourns her loss, and it is the chorus who advises Galatea to invoke her divine powers. After a particularly poignant recitative she immortalizes Acis in the deliciously scored aria ‘Heart, the seat of soft desire’. Two treble recorders and gently undulating strings provide an exquisite texture: Galatea has turned Acis into a fountain. But it is left until the middle of the aria for the moment of magic. Galatea commands: ‘Rock, thy hollow womb disclose the bubbling fountain’ and (almost disbelieving her own power), ‘Lo! it flows’. All that now remains is for the chorus to end the work: Galatea is told to dry her tears, for the murmuring stream that flows out across the plain still speaks of their love.

Robert King
(1989)

Jean P. Rameau - Platée

Platée (Plataea) is an opera in a prologue and three acts by Jean-Philippe Rameau with a libretto by Adrien-Joseph Le Valois d'Orville. Rameau bought the rights to the libretto Platée ou Junon Jalouse (Plataea, or Juno Jealous) by Jacques Autreau (1657–1745) and had d'Orville modify it. The ultimate source of the story is a myth related by the Greek writer Pausanias in his Guide to Greece.

 

Francesco Cavalli - Eliogabalo

Eliogabalo (Heliogabalus) is an opera by the Italian composer Francesco Cavalli based on the life of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus. The author of the original libretto is unknown but it was probably reworked by Aurelio Aureli.

The opera was composed in 1667 and premiered during the Carnival season of 1668 but it was withdrawn after only a few performances and replaced by another opera of the same name by Giovanni Antonio Boretti.

Silvia Tro Santafé (Eliogabalo), Giorgia Milanesi (Alessandro), Lawrence Zazzo (Giuliano), Annette Dasch (Flavia Gemmira), Nuria Rial (Eritea), Céline Sheen (Atilia), Mario Zeffiri (Lenia), Jeffrey Thompson (Zotico), Sergio Foresti (Nerbulone), Joao Fernandes (Tiferne), Mario Zeffiri, Jeffrey Thompson (Due Consoli)

Concerto Vocale, dir. René Jacobs

Adrian Willaert’s Missa 'Christus Resurgens'

‘Our good Lord... by his grace gave us in our time Adriano Willaerrt [sic], truly one of the rarest intellects ever to have practised music, who, in the manner of a new Pythagoras, studying minutely everything that can occur [in music] and discovering an infinite number of errors, has begun to remove them to raise it to that honour and dignity which was once hers’. – Gioseffo Zarlino

‘[Willaert’s motets] are not like the harmonies of his said new manner [nuova maniera] composed by these novel composers: mournful, lugubrious, disconsolate and without beautiful melody at all’. – Ghiselin Danckerts

Of all composers of the first half of the sixteenth century, Adrian Willaert is perhaps the most appreciated by contemporary composers and theorists such as Zarlino and Danckerts. Occupying for 35 years one of the central positions in the musical life of Northern Italy, that of maestro di capella at St Mark’s, Venice. Willaert made significant contributions to the development of vocal music both sacred and secular. Not only that, but he was a renowned theorist and teacher, numbering many of the most important figures of the time – including Cipriano de Rore and Andrea Gabrieli – amongst his pupils.

Neither Willaert’s date nor place of birth is known for certain, though the latter is claimed by contemporary writers as both Bruges and Roulaers. The date can be inferred from the fact that he was by 1515 a singer in the service of Cardinal Ippolito I d’Este brother of the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este. He left the d’Este family only in 1527 when he was appointed to St Mark’s. Willaert’s pupil and greatest enthusiast Zarlino credited him with the invention during his years at St Mark’s of the famous cori spezzati technique of double- (and later poly-) choral writing. The discovery by modern scholars of examples from earlier in the sixteenth century has shown this claim to be inaccurate, but it is undeniably the case that Willaert’s double-choir psalm settings (some written in collaboration with Jacquet of Mantua) are seminal to the style. In addition to his contemporary pre-eminence in sacred music, Willaert was simultaneously at the forefront of developments in the emerging secular form of the madrigal. This is not the place for a discussion of developments in secular music; Alfred Einstein’s opinion, expressed in his pioneering 1949 study The Italian Madrigal will suffice:
“To call Willaert the creator of the madrigal would be as absurd as to deny that he played an important part in the creation of the genre... Adrian Willaert surely belongs in the company of Verdelot, Festa and Arcadelt”.

Finally, an illustration of Willaert’s advanced knowledge of contemporary compositional and notational debate gives us an idea both of the esteem in which he was held and of the extent to which he expanded the boundaries of musical possibility. The quartet Quid non ebrietas, a setting of a drinking-song written around 1518, appears from its notation to end on a seventh. Owing, however to a process of modulation into successively flatter hexachords, the final interval in fact turns out to be an octave (strictly an augmented seventh). As Karol Berger has pointed out, this conceit can be resolved successfully only by a musician thinking in terms of a flat sign as an inflection (as we do now) rather than as an indication of where in the gamut (the system of hexachords devised by Guido d’Arezzo around AD 1000) a note occurs. Obscure as this distinction may seem to us 480 years later, it is notable that contemporary musicians had problems with it as well: writing in 1524 about Quid non ebrietas, another theorist, Giovanni Spaaro, observes that “the Pope’s singers were never capable of performing it; it was then played on viols, but not very well”.

An inspection of Willaert’s treatment of his model in the parody Mass Christus Resurgens gives us some insight into both the ambitions of the two composers and the degree to which these were achieved. Richafort’s Christus resurgens is far from unusual in form for a motet of the post-Josquin era in its working though of a succession of largely unrelated polyphonic motifs. As is frequently also the case, its two sections are linked by means of a shared ending: the words vivit Deo, Alleluia, which bring the motet’s first section to a close are repeated at the end of the piece and are set almost identically, beginning with a striking homophonic passage. Aside from the opening phrase of the motet – as one would expect in a setting of a text such as Christus resurgens, this is an upward leaping figure – this burst of homophony is the major feature of interest, and not surprisingly these two motifs are the ones most often included by Willaert in his Mass setting. Two further points draw themselves to one’s attention: first, Richafort makes no attempt to move outside the mode – all cadences are on F or C. Second, the part writing contains several moments which although not noticeably jarring in performance, might well have been frowned upon by contemporary theorists such as the same Zarlino who praised Willaert highly. The first page of music contains several instances of consecutive sevenths and ninths, for example.

The Mass which is named after Richafort’s motet is standard, even punctilious, in its practice of beginning each of its five movements with Richafort’s opening material: it also, as mentioned earlier, makes reference on two occasions to the homophonic material used later in the motet. Apart from this, however, the Mass is very largely freshly composed; it is true that the Gloria and Credo, whose  long texts favour a syllabic style as used in the model, feature two or three other motifs which occur in the motet, but in general these are musical commonplaces (the descending scale which opens the motet’s the motet’s second section, and which Willaert uses at Qui tollis peccata mundi in the Gloria, is a case in point) and furthermore, they are liberally interspersed with Willaert’s own material. The later and more melismatic movements are almost entirely freely composed.

Even when Willaert does use Richafort’s original, he takes only the smallest sections before modifying the material to suit his own more fluid style. The opening motif (only two bars of which are ever used), and the modifications to which it is later subjected are themselves heavily varied from movement to movement. So far as the homophonic passage is concerned, it is also restricted to two bars, eschewing Richafort’s fanfare-like figuration after the block chords. In the Gloria it is used not at the cum sancto spiritu, where one might have expected it to provide a climactic finale to the movement, but at the structurally important but less triumphal agnus Dei, filius patris, where Richafort’s fanfares are replaced by an altogether more mellifluous ending to the section. At every turn we see Willaert amply justifying his superior reputation by improving on his original.

Stéphan Perreau

Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 'Vespro della Beata Vergine'

There is nothing to be perplexed about in the title of the 1610 publication: The Vespers, to us one of Monteverdi’s major works, is there relegated graphically to the second order, after the 6-part Missa da capella fatta Sopra il motetto In illo tempore del Gomberti. There has often been attempt to explain this presentation by the dedication of the volume to Pope Paul V. This theory has the advantage in the first place of bringing up the problem of style: Monteverdi would have placed the emphasis on a Mass composed in the ‘old style’ (stile antico) in order to make the modern audacities of the stile concertato of the Vespers more palatable and easier to accept... One could also see in the stylistically composite publication a kind of manifesto: for ten years Monteverdi had been the target of Artusi’s attacks, and here he would have wanted to demonstrate his mastery of both styles...

It should, in any case, be observed that the two works did not have the same destination in mind: while the Missa da cappella was explicitly intended to be sung by church choirs (ad ecclesiam choros), the Vespers, like the concerti sacri that accompanied them, were aimed at performance in the private chapel or the chamber of princes (ad sacella sive principum cubicula accommodate). Reserved for the private use of a princely chapel, the licences of the stile concertato would similarly have been tolerated. In fact, it is most probable that the Vespers were at first a court composition, destined for the Chapel of the Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga. This is the same court for which Monteverdi has composed his Orfeo three years before. Its sumptuous musical equipment was therefore known: few places in Italy would have been able to assemble the necessary number of instrumentalists and virtuoso singers. Monteverdi was aware of this: as a composer in the service of the church, he thus admitted a certain degree of flexibility in the work so that it could be adapted to less imposing resources. Certain instrumental ritornelli in the Dixit, for instance, are optional (ad libitum); similarly, the volume contains two versions of the Magnificat_ the version for 7 voices and 6 obbligato instruments, could be replaced by a more modestly scored version for 6 voices and continuo. Moreover, the sonata sopra Sancta Maria and the concerti, which require, respectively, a solid instrumental team and virtuoso singers – as in the 7-part Magnificat – are ‘movable’ pieces, i.e. liturgically optional. They can be replaced by other motets, stylistically and technically to perform, or even quite simply by liturgical antiphons in plainchant.

We are here putting our finger on one of the major problems which have preoccupied commentators in recent years: are the Vespers really, on the whole, liturgical music? They do, in fact, contain, in correct liturgical order – rare for the period – the eight chants of the ordinary (the introit In adjutorium and its response Domine ad adjuvandum, the five psalms, Dixit Dominus, Laudate pueri, Laetatus sum, Nisi Dominus, Lauda Jerusalem, the hymn, Ave maris stella, and the Magnificat), interspersed with four motets or concerti (Nigra sum, Pulchra es, Duo Seraphim, Audi coelum) and an instrumental sonata sopra sancta Maria. It is, precisely, these five pieces that do not seem to conform to any Liturgy of the Holy Virgin. However, their place in the collection seems to attest to the fact that they fulfilled the function of the Proper, probably taking place of the repetition of the Antiphons after each Psalm. This was a relatively common usage in Northern Italy in the solemn liturgies of the Vespers. The instrumental Sonata itself could have had this function, too – the fact that it is constructed over a cantus firmus borrowed from the Litanies is of little consequence this phenomenon, particularly frequent in Venice, was also noticed in Rome in 1639, as reported by Maugas in his Réponse faite à un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique en Italie: ‘In the Antiphons they still play pretty symphonies with one two or three violins and the organ, and with several archlutes playing certain airs in dance measure, the one answering the other’.

Stylistically, as well, the concerti introduce an original dimension to the work, thereby adding to the paradoxical diversity of the publication. In many aspect these Vespers are really quite exceptional. In the first place, it is rare for collections intended for this type of office to present the works in precise liturgical order. In 1610, what is more, it was completely original for music for Vespers to require obbligato instruments. Finally – and this is by no means the least original aspect – we know of no other publication of this kind, except the concerti, in which the totality of the composition is constructed on liturgical canti firmi. It is true that Monteverdi is careful to stress at the beginning of the Vespers, Vespro della Beata Vergine da concerto, compost sopra canti ferm... as if, apart from the stylistic boldness, he explicitly wished to be sure to be regarded as part of a very old and unassailable tradition.

Indoing this the composer is laying a veritable wager with himself: to reconcile irreconcilable stylistic objectives. In the face of Artusi’s attacks, around 1605 and the Fifth Book of Madrigals, we know that Monteverdian poetics took on a form which attempted to define the seconda prattica: ‘the text must be the master of the music and not its servant’ (l’oratione sia padrona del armonia e non serva’). But how to reconcile this aim of expressiveness with the thematic and structural yoke of the cantus firmus, especially when one is dealing with psalm tones, the very musical nature of which implies from the outset obvious constraints in uniformity, especially modal and harmonic ones? It is this incredible challenge that Monteverdi so magisterially succeeds in surmounting in the Vespers. To measure the extent of this success one need only listen, for example, to the Dixit or Magnificat: despite the constant presence of the armature of the psalmodic recitation treated as a cantus firmus and moved from place to place in the polyphonic line, from cantus to bassus, each verse of the text has its own colour and constitutes an autonomous entity. In a way which is again different, the Introit Domine ad adjuvandum, by its prefatory position, emblematically sets the tone of the work is presenting an almost provocative stylistic confrontation: the psalmodic recitation, treated polyphonically in falso bordone, according to traditional liturgical usage, finds itself superimposed by an instrumental toccata which is no less than an ouverture to Orfeo. The intention to re-unite, in this work, the profane and the sacred in one and the same expression, could hardly be better said. Monteverdi succeeds in doing the same thing in the four concerti by clearly adopting in them the style and expressive techniques of the concertato madrigal and of the opera. Here he mixes the recitar cantando and the affetti of the new style of singing (in the manner of Caccini) – in Nigra sum – with late 16th century mannerist vocal virtuosity – Duo Seraphim and Audi coelum – and with the almost scenic universe of the in echo – Audi coelum -, where the play on the central word (maria-Maria) has something essentially Baroque about it, in its relation to the work as a whole, as well as a premonition of Venice.

Jean-Pierre Ouvrard

Handel in Hamburg

George Frideric Handel arrived in the city of Hamburg in the spring or early summer of 1703 at the age of eighteen. He had been trained by F W Zachow, the leading composer of his home town Halle, had studied law at the University of Halle, and had served a year as the organist of that town’s Calvinist cathedral. According to the Hamburg composer, singer and theorist Johann Mattheson, who became his friend, he was already ‘strong at the organ’, but ‘knew very little about melody’: ‘he knew how to compose practically nothing but regular fugues’. Hamburg quickly broadened Handel’s musical outlook. Then as now, it was an important commercial and cultural centre and possessed the only commercial opera house in Germany, founded in 1678. Handel obtained a post as a violinist in the opera orchestra, and quickly came under the influence of Reinhard Keiser, the leading Hamburg opera composer. By the beginning of 1705 he had written two operas for the opera house, Almira and Nero, first performed on 8 January and 25 February respectively. Handel subsequently wrote a third opera for Hamburg, though for some reason it was not performed before he left for Italy in the autumn of 1706; it was staged at the Hamburg opera house in January 1708 as two separate works, called Florindo and Daphne.

The Hamburg opera style was remarkably eclectic. Like some of Keiser’s operas, Almira has a libretto in a mixture of Italian and German, and its music mixes Italian, German and French elements in more or less equal measure. The French influence is largely confined to the orchestral music: Hamburg operas tended to have spectacular ballets in the French manner, and the Hamburg orchestral idiom was largely modelled on Lully’s writing for the French court orchestra, the Vingt-quatre violons. Keiser’s operas contain a good deal of Lullian orchestral writing, and Johann Sigismund Kusser, his predecessor at the Hamburg opera house, published orchestral suites in the French style and was one of the most prominent members of the group of German composers known today as Les Lullistes.

If, as is usually assumed, Handel began his career as an orchestral composer with Almira, then his debut was remarkably assured: its French Ouverture is one of the most daring, bravura examples of the genre, with elaborate written-out tirades (rushing scales) and unexpected changes of pace and harmonic direction. It is followed by a selection of dances from the opera: the next five movements, a Courante, a Bourrée, a Menuet for two oboes and bassoon, a Rigaudon and a graceful Rondeau, come from a ball scene at the end of Act I, the Sarabande and the concluding Chaconne are the dances of Spanish men and women in Act I, while the Gigue is a ‘Dance of Charlatans’ in Act III. If it is true that Handel ‘knew very little about melody’ when he came to Hamburg, he must have learned remarkably quickly; these dances already have a delightful sureness of touch, and several of them were returned to again and again in later works. The first half of the Bourrée is familiar to us from the Water Music, while the Sarabande is the earliest member of a family of pieces that includes the famous ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ in Rinaldo (1711). In the surviving score, prepared for Telemann’s 1732 Hamburg revival of the opera, some of the dances lack their inner parts.

Until recently it was thought that the music for Florindo and Daphne was entirely lost, but Bernd Baselt showed in 1983 that a group of orchestral dances in a manuscript from the Aylesford collection (now in the British Library) comes from them, and that a second Aylesford manuscript associates keyboard versions of three of the dances with the early Overture in B flat, HWV336. Thus it is possible to assemble a substantial orchestral suite from the fragments. It begins with the overture (partly reused in II trionfo del Tempo), followed by a Sarabande in the ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ mould, a Gavotte, a Menuet, a lively Allemande enclosing a Bourrée for two oboes and bassoon, another dance called Menuet that really seems to be a wild polonaise, another Allemande with an irresistible motif that suggests a peasant stamping dance, a minuet-like Coro (probably an instrumental version of a chorus), and a delicious third Allemande, this time enclosing a Rigaudon for two oboes and bassoon. Again, one can only marvel at the young Handel’s gift for memorable turns of melody and harmony, and his unerring ear for orchestral sound.

The Suite in G minor, HWV453, only survives in another Aylesford keyboard manuscript, dating from the 1730s, but scholars are agreed that it comes from Handel’s Hamburg period - Bernd Baselt suggesting that it is the overture for Nero - and the lack of idiomatic keyboard figuration strongly suggests that it was originally written for orchestra; I certainly found it easy to score up for four-part strings with two oboes and bassoon, adding solos for two violins in the concluding Chaconne. The first section of the overture is related to the equivalent movements of the Italian sacred cantata ‘Donna che in ciel’ and the opera Agrippina (1709), while, as we might expect, there are a number of fleeting similarities between the dances and numbers in Almira.

The Oboe Concerto in G minor also probably dates from Handel’s Hamburg period, and seems to be his first essay in the Italian concerto form, though it has a Sarabande in the French style instead of a proper slow movement. The last movement is the earliest version of one of Handel’s most popular and memorable pieces, best known from the Organ Concerto in G minor, Op 4 No 3.

Handel wrote his opera Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria, commonly known as Rodrigo, for Florence; it was probably first performed there in November 1707. The work in general represents a turning-point in Handel’s composing career, though the extended overture is still largely in the Franco-German style, and a number of scholars have suggested that it began life as an independent work, written in Hamburg before he left for Italy. To complicate things further, all the movements except the concluding Passacaille were used in London in January 1710 as a suite for Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist, though Handel was still in Italy at the time and it is unlikely that he knew of the production or the subsequent publication of the music. It certainly makes a highly effective concert suite, with a series of delightful dances sandwiched between one of his most concisely effective overtures and the striking and elaborately scored Passacaille, with its brilliant violin solo. This movement is certainly a spectacular farewell to the world of the Hamburg opera and its Francophile orchestra.

Peter Holman
(1998)

Claudio Monteverdi's 'Dixit Dominus' [2]

'À 8 voci concertato con due Violini et quattro viole o Tromboni, quali se portasse l’accidente anco si ponno lasciare' [Selva Morale e Spirituale, Venice, 1640-41]. In the liturgy of St Mark’s, Venice, the evening service of Vespers on important feast days was marked by the uncovering of the Pala d’Oro, the church’s great gold altarpiece, and on these occasions the choir was obliged to sing double-choir psalms in eight parts. Monteverdi follows this convention in this second Selva morale setting of ‘Dixit Dominus’, the psalm with which most Vespers services begin.

Unlike some of his predecessors at St Mark’s, however, he did not follow the practice of dividing the two choirs rigidly and alternating between them verse by verse. Instead, he produced a setting of a grandeur suitable for the great state church of the Venetian Republic and one that, through its colourful mixing of voices, violins and trombones, matches the rich decoration of the church.

In his setting Monteverdi contrasts passages for a few voices with full scorings that emphasize the idea of a powerful God, sometimes speaking loudly from heaven, as in ‘sede a dextris meis’ (verse 1), or emphasizing the word ‘tu’ in ‘tu es sacerdos’ (verse 5), or exulting through the joyful figuration of ‘exaltabit’ (verse 8), or represented as helping to crush the enemies of the psalmist (or, in this case, Venice), as we can hear in verse 2 and the second half of verse 3, and in verses 6 and 7, the texts of which Monteverdi rolls together, beginning them with a tremendous crescendo on ‘Dominus a dextris tuis’.

The passages of reduced scorings are characterized by extensive use of duets, sometimes overlapping, as in the setting of ‘Tecum principium in die virtutis’ (verse 4), sometimes, as at the beginning of the ‘Gloria Patri’, in intimate dialogue with the two violins.

Jon Whenham

Isaac Albéniz's 'Iberia'

Iberia! Iberia!’ cried Enrique Granados in a letter he wrote shortly after the death of his friend Isaac Albéniz in May 1909. His grief was shared by all those familiar with the late composer, whose passing from Bright’s disease at the age of forty-nine seemed cruelly premature. But it also reflected an assessment Debussy offered and that posterity confirmed: in Iberia, Albéniz had given the best that was within him, a work Olivier Messiaen would later describe as ‘the masterpiece of Spanish music’. It was the culmination of a remarkable career. 

 Born in 1860, near the French border in the Catalonian town of Camprodón, Albéniz was a phenomenal child prodigy who began touring Spain and Cuba as an itinerant piano virtuoso already in his early teens. He was not yet twenty when he finished his studies, avec distinction, at the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels. During the 1880s and ’90s, Albéniz emerged as a composer of originality and significance, creating a Spanish national style in such evergreen favourites as the Suite española, Recuerdos de viaje, and Cantos de España. In these musical travelogues for solo piano, Albéniz combined Romantic harmony with Spanish rhythm and melody to capture the allure of exotic peninsular locales, especially Granada, Sevilla and Córdoba.

However, despite the nationalist orientation of his music, Albéniz felt increasingly disenchanted with the conservative politics, religion, and cultural backwardness of Spain. So, in 1890 he moved to London, and four years later to Paris, which remained his principal residence for the rest of his life. Under the influence of French music, Albéniz’s style underwent a dramatic transformation, represented chiefly by the works on this recording. Friendship with Ernest Chausson and Gabriel Fauré, association with the Schola Cantorum, and studies with Vincent d’Indy and Paul Dukas expanded his musical horizons. The pieces he composed during the Paris years exhibited increasing formal complexity and careful working out of ideas, resulting in longer, more substantial compositions than his youthful essays of the 1880s. In addition, he came under the spell of Impressionism and adopted some of Debussy’s musical vocabulary. Estrangement from his homeland combined with both persistent physical ailments and a tendency towards depression added yet another element to the works on this recording: the nostalgic introspection and frequent dreaminess that characterize what Albéniz called his ‘second manner’.

The first compositions in this new ‘manner’ were La vega and España: Souvenirs, both dating from 1897. La vega was originally intended to be part of a suite entitled The Alhambra, based on a set of poems by Albéniz’s English friend and patron Francis Burdett Money-Coutts. La vega presents two distinctive themes: the opening section is loosely based on the Andalusian petenera and exudes a brooding melancholy. The middle section, however, is more buoyant and evokes the jota, a dance native to Aragon in the north of Spain. Albéniz wrote of La vega to a friend that ‘What I have composed is the entire plain of Granada, contemplated from the Alhambra’. The same reflective mood prevails in España: Souvenirs. Here, too, Impressionism combines with abstracted references to Spanish folklore to create a hauntingly meditative effect.

Albéniz began work on his monumental Iberia collection in 1905, putting the finishing touches to it in 1908. Iberia is not a ‘suite’ in the traditional sense because the twelve numbers, arranged into four books of three pieces each, can be played in any sequence. Indeed, their order of composition was not the same as that of publication, and it is clear that the composer expected they would be programmed piecemeal and in variable order. Though Iberia was premiered in its entirety by French pianist Blanche Selva, Albéniz’s correspondence makes it clear that he had the Catalan virtuoso Joaquim Malats in mind when writing it. Apparently only Malats could do justice to music in which Albéniz declared he had taken ‘españolismo and technical difficulty to the ultimate extreme’ – as indeed he had, for the music abounds in counter-rhythms, interweaving of the fingers, hand crossings, difficult jumps, and nearly impossible chords. With its superabundance of accidentals and multilingual markings, the score itself is dauntingly hard to read. In fact, Albéniz almost destroyed his manuscript at one point, as he feared it was impossible to play.

Iberia represents Albéniz’s distinctive merging of three principal style elements: Impressionist harmonies, especially the use of whole-tone scales; Lisztian virtuosity taken to the limits of human ability; and the Spanish nationalism he himself had developed and defined. This nationalism evoked a variety of regional styles of song and dance, especially Andalusian flamenco, along with intimations of the guitar’s rasgueo and punteo (strumming and plucking) and of the singer’s coplas (songs or song verses). However, as Albéniz insisted, ‘I never utilize the “raw material” in its crude state’. Rather, as Debussy noted, he had absorbed native melodies and rhythms so completely that ‘they have passed into his music, leaving no trace of a boundary line’.

‘Evocación’ (‘Évocation’) is a prime example of these traits. But what most impresses us is the profoundly interiorized mood that pervades this piece, as Albéniz views his homeland from a distance in time and space, through a haze of memory and nostalgia. This is one of the eight Iberia selections in sonata form, with its attendant exposition, development, and restatement of themes. While the principal theme here harkens to southern songs and dances of the fandango/ malagueña type, the second theme evokes the northern jota. Thus, this ‘evocation’ (entitled ‘Prélude’ in the manuscript) seems to embrace the entire country in a sweeping musical gesture. ‘El puerto’ exudes a completely contrasting atmosphere of noisy good spirits, the hustle and bustle of a seaport, El Puerto de Santa María near Cádiz. It is in the style of the zapateado, a dance based on an insistent rhythm in 6/8, and Albéniz highlights his score with occasional rhythmic flourishes suggesting rasgueo. ‘El Corpus en Sevilla’ (or ‘Fête-Dieu à Séville’) is a programmatic piece in ternary form (aba) that paints a captivating picture of Corpus Christi in Seville, during which a statue of the Virgin is carried through the streets accompanied by marching bands, singers, and penitential flagellants. The piece begins with some rataplan, then introduces a march-like theme inspired by the popular song ‘La Tarara’. What follows in the ‘b’ section is an evocation of the soulful saeta (literally ‘arrow’), a piercing cry of religious ecstasy. Despite all the festive tumult, the piece concludes in a tranquil mood, as if the procession had passed into the cool evening of the composer’s romantic imagination.

Book Two commences with ‘Rondeña’, a type of song and dance named after Ronda in western Andalusia. But this piece bears only passing resemblance to it and is a hybrid of various styles. The hemiola rhythm of the principal theme marks it as Spanish, while the copla secondary theme is suggestive of the jota. ‘Almería’ is a city on the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia, where Albéniz’s father once worked briefly in the 1860s. Hemiola rhythms dominate this piece as well, but the mood is altogether different, and there is a strong suggestion of the siguiriyas, a jondo (literally ‘deep’) gypsy song and dance. The secondary theme is again a copla à la jota, but stretched out in slow motion, over a gently rocking accompaniment. As in ‘El Corpus en Sevilla’, Albéniz resorts to three staves here, giving the score the appearance of organ music. ‘Triana’ is the gypsy quarter in Seville and one of the cradles of flamenco. This number resounds with all the clamor of a juerga (flamenco party), with the strumming of guitars, snapping of castanets, palmas (clapping), and percussive zapateo (footwork). After a pasodoble-like introduction, the principal theme evokes the sevillanas, a lively and lighthearted song and dance popular in Seville.

Book Three begins with ‘El Albaicín’, the gypsy quarter of Granada, a city Albéniz loved and often evoked in his works. This number is structured as a series of three alternations between a dance-like principal theme and a freer, copla-style secondary melody. The dance section recalls the rhythm of the flamenco bulerías, while the distribution of the notes simulates a guitar technique alternating thumb and index finger. The jondo-style copla has a chant-like quality that creates an entrancing reverie. Albéniz’s ‘El polo’ does not bear much of a resemblance to the flamenco song after which it is named, except in its inconsolably melancholy character. The most famous concert polos are those of Manuel García, but Albéniz does not seem to have used them as a model either. What most interests us about this selection is the persistence of the rhythmic pattern from the first beat to the last, giving the piece an almost obsessive quality consistent with its mood. In fact, Albéniz instructs the performer to play as if ‘sweetly sobbing’ and again ‘always in the spirit of a sob’. The rhythmic figure itself suggests this. Book Three concludes with ‘Lavapiés’, a district in Madrid named for the local church where a foot-washing ritual was performed on Holy Thursday. This locale was known in Albéniz’s time for its low-class denizens called chulos. There was a lot of noisy street life in this district, which Albéniz simulates through a riot of wrong-note dissonance. Both principal and secondary themes are based on the Cuban habanera, which was all the rage in Madrid in the late nineteenth century.

Book Four opens with ‘Málaga’, one of the shortest pieces in the collection. The rhythmic freedom, triple metre, and modality of the principal theme suggest the malagueña, while the secondary theme evokes a jota malagueña, one of many regional varieties of jota. The reappearance of the jota throughout the collection, in one guise or another, gives it the character of a leitmotif, unifying the various numbers. ‘Jerez’ is a city in western Andalusia famous for producing the liquor named after it: sherry. This is the only piece in the collection with a key signature of no flats or sharps. Its emphasis on A minor and melancholy mood have reminded some of the soleá, one of the most jondo of flamenco songs and dances. The rhythms may not be quite right for a soleá, but the unusual alternation of metres gives the piece a rhythmic complexity thoroughly flamenco in character. In any case, Albéniz masterfully elicits from the keyboard colourful suggestions of singing and guitar-playing. The final piece in Iberia takes us again to Seville, this time to the Venta Eritaña, a popular inn on the outskirts of the city that was famous for its flamenco entertainment. The rhythms of the sevillanas permeate the entire piece, and there is no contrasting copla section. The exuberant spirit and piquant dissonance of ‘Eritaña’ convey in unforgettable fashion the excitement of a juerga, and Debussy singled out this number as the finest in the entire collection.

Albéniz left two works unfinished at his death: Azulejos (‘Tiles’), which was completed by Enrique Granados, and Navarra, which was first completed by Albéniz’s pupil Déodat de Séverac. Unusually, however, Marc-André Hamelin plays the more thorough completion of Navarra by William Bolcom (b1938); whereas de Séverac wraps up Albéniz’s music to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, Bolcom makes a more substantial and stylistically convincing work with a recapitulation of Albéniz’s opening material and a coda (Bolcom’s completion commences at 4'51''). Albéniz had originally intended to include Navarra in the last book of Iberia, but then he decided that it was ‘shamelessly cheap’ and did not belong there; he composed ‘Jerez’ as a substitute. From our perspective, Navarra seems more than worthy of inclusion in Iberia, as it exhibits the same masterful exposition and development of folkloric themes in the context of sonata form.

Albéniz’s association with the Schola Cantorum inspired his most charming work for piano, Yvonne en visite!. It appeared in a collection of pieces for children ‘small and large’ by musicians at the Schola and was published by Édition Mutuelle in Paris, around the same time as Iberia. This delightfully humorous work contains Albéniz’s annotations (in the manner of Erik Satie) describing a visit of the young pianist Yvonne Guidé, who is forced to perform by her mother. Yvonne gets a bad case of nerves and stumbles through her repertoire, while her increasingly unhappy mother threatens her with ten days of Hanon exercises!

Walter Aaron Clark

(2005)

Francisco Guerrero's Missa 'Congratulamini Mihi'

Francisco Guerrero - Missa 'Congratulamini Mihi'

Kyrie

Gloria

Credo

Sanctus & Benedictus

Agnus Dei

The Cardinall's Musick, Andrew Carwood (dir.)