Atrium Musicologicum

Georg F. Handel's 'Joshua'

2012-02-10T16:38:00.000Z

Amongst Handel’s later Oratorios, Joshua was one of the most successful. Of those composed after Samson, only Judas Maccabaeus received more performances during the composer’s lifetime, and much of this popularity was due to the insertion after the first season’s performances of ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’, first written for Joshua.

Handel began the score of Joshua on 19 July 1747, just two weeks after completing Alexander Balus, and Act I was completed eleven days later. Act II took an even shorter time, finished on 8 August, and the whole work was completed by 19 August. The premiere took place at Covent Garden on 9 March 1748 and was followed by another three performances. Mrs Delany, who had proved such a good diarist of Handel’s financial state in previous years, had moved to Ireland with her husband, but turning to Handel’s bank statements we see that after the first concert he deposited £300, after the second £200 and after the third another £100. We do not know how much he paid his orchestra, although he withdrew £990 on 19 March, but by the start of May he was in a position to deal in annuities to the tune of £4500, suggesting that this particular Lenten season had been a great success at the box office.

Joshua certainly rated highly with Eliza Heywood who, writing in Epistles for the Ladies, (1749) was:

transported into the most divine Exstacy. I closed my Eyes, and imagined myself amidst the angelic Choir in the bright Regions of everlasting Day, chanting the Praises of my great Creator, and his ineffable ‘Messiah’. I seemed, methought, to have nothing of this gross Earth about me, but was all Soul! - all Spirit.

In Dublin after a rehearsal for the first of three annual performances in 1751, conducted by Bartholomew Manwaring for the charity of the Hospital for Incurables, Mrs Delany wrote to Mrs Dewes that she was ‘charmed with it - never heard it before’. An open letter from ‘A Virtuoso’ was printed in The General Advertiser of 13 March 1749 appealing for a revival of Joshua to satisfy ‘a Number of your Friends’, but Handel did not, in the event, oblige until 1752, when he made a number of alterations, including expanding the overture by adding the fugue and courante from the Solomon overture. In 1754 he gave a further single performance, inserting five movements, four of which were based on the Occasional Oratorio. Further performances took place in Salisbury in 1754 and in Oxford in 1756, and there were performances in London, though probably not under Handel’s direction, in 1755 and 1759. Later generations did not ignore the work, for Joshua was heard at the Three Choirs Festival in 1759, 1769, 1773 and 1781, at the Oxford Music Room in 1766, 1768 and 1773, in Salisbury in 1771 and at least four times in Winchester between 1770 and 1783. In the nineteenth century it was heard in Berlin in 1827 and 1832, and the Sacred Harmonic Society performed the work in London in 1839, setting the fashion for performances in Holland, Germany and England. Only the later twentieth century seems largely to have ignored the work.

Joshua was one of a quartet of oratorios written consecutively between 1746 and 1748 which have heavily militaristic overtones. The first of these was the Occasional Oratorio, performed three times at Covent Garden in 1746 and three more times in 1747. Judas Maccabaeus followed in 1747, extraordinarily popular in receiving at least 33 performances during the composer’s lifetime, and Joshua and Alexander Balus were premiered at Covent Garden on March 9 and March 23 in Handel’s 1748 oratorio season. It seems clear that, following Judas Maccabaeus, Handel and his librettist Thomas Morell were intent on repeating the formula of a Jewish hero and triumphing choruses that had been so successful, adding this time the romantic sub-plot that Judas had lacked. Scarcely recovered from his efforts on Alexander Balus, Morell took his libretto from a bloodthirsty account in the Old Testament ‘Book of Joshua’, condensing the campaigns against Jericho, Ai and the five Kings into one dramatic block, and enlarging the parts taken by Othniel and Achsah to provide the romantic foil necessary to break up and contrast with an otherwise almost continuously warlike story.

Handel’s extraordinary speed of composition must have tested Morell to the limit, and the result is perhaps more a series of incidents than a developed plot. But the characters are strong, with Joshua a commanding (if at times insufferably conceited) hero, Caleb a suitably patriarchal leader nearing retirement from the battlefield, his daughter Achsah a concerned, sometimes reproving character, betrothed to Othniel who is finding it hard to strike a balance between playing the young warrior and the devoted lover. There is an additional part, small but vital, for an Angel, named in a later score as having been sung by a tenor, but widely assumed to have been played in the earlier performances by the more expected soprano or boy treble.

As with many of Handel’s oratorios, later performances saw many revisions to the original score for all sorts of reasons, not always musical. The version of the 1748 performances, one concession being the inclusion of Handel’s undated (1752?) alteration to the second half of ‘Hark! ’tis the linnet’: this is the only change he later made which does not affect the original sequence of movements. Handel had surprisingly few boys to sing the top line of his choruses, though with voices breaking so much later in those days we can assume that some of them would have been powerful singers, but his solo singers usually joined in the tuttis (which must have made for an exhausting evening’s work). Our twentieth century choir needed no such assistance, but our Angel soloist follows historical precedent and sings in the choruses too! At three points in the score Handel indicates that brass fanfares are to be inserted, giving a short rhythmic cue over which the players (led by the principal trumpeter) would have improvised the necessary music.

Handel’s lavish scoring of the oratorio suggests that he was financially secure in his performances, for the large orchestra contains pairs of flutes, trumpets and horns, and timpani besides the expected strings, oboes and bassoons, and following eighteenth century accounts we have included harpsichord, organ and archlute as continuo instruments. Handel’s most powerful writing in Joshua utilises the brass and timpani to the full, with music of great effectiveness. With dramatic incidents such as the tumbling walls of Jericho, the razing by fire of the city, Joshua stopping the sun and moon in their tracks and his rousing an army of depressed troops, not to mention the triumphal return of the warrior after battle, here was heroic material to stimulate any composer. Perhaps not surprisingly, the destruction of Jericho in the second Act leads Handel into one of his greatest thunder choruses, and one which impressed Haydn at a large-scale performance in Westminster Abbey in 1791. He is reported as having:

long been acquainted with [the] music, but never knew half its powers before he heard it, and he was perfectly certain that only one inspired Author ever did, or ever would pen so sublime a composition.

Similarly the ‘Solemn March during the circumvection of the Ark of the Covenant’ which precipitates the destruction is one of Handel’s finest, startling in its huge solemnity, and Caleb’s following aria ‘See the raging flames arise’ a marvellous piece of drama. Othniel’s ‘Place danger around me’ too is a splendid Handelian aria. Joshua was also the original source for the chorus ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’, which was only added to Judas Maccabaeus once its potential was realised after the first performances of Joshua. But the quieter, more contemplative moments too deserve mentions, with Caleb’s resigned aria ‘Shall I in Mamre’s fertile plain’, the hymn-like chorus which follows from it, the chorus of defeated Israelites ‘How soon our tow’ring hopes are cross’d’, and Othniel’s ‘Nations who in future story’ all examples of Handel’s lyrical style at its best. In between the triumphs and disasters of battle, the scenes with Achsah lend further contrast, providing arias ranging from the wistful ‘Oh, who can tell’, through the birdcalls of ‘Hark! ’tis the linnet’ to the joyful, ever-popular ‘Oh had I jubal’s lyre’.

Synopsis

Act I - The single-movement orchestral ‘Introduzione’ is one of Handel’s shortest openings to an oratorio, lasting for just four lines of the score and leading straight into the opening chorus. Handel was clearly anxious to get on with the action. ‘Ye sons of Israel’ dispels any thought that the work is on anything but a grand scale with the Israelites rejoicing at the conquest of Canaan and their miraculous passage over the river Jordan which ends forty years in the wilderness. ‘In Gilgal, and on Jordan’s banks proclaim’ is introduced by an unaccompanied vocal entry - the first of many that form a thread running throughout the oratorio. Joshua enters, self-assured to the point of conceit, his confidence bolstered by the flattering tongue of the warrior Caleb, whose aria ‘Oh first in wisdom’ continues the jaunty, confident vein. Achsah, Caleb’s daughter, brings a dramatically necessary change of mood, contrasting the suffering of captivity in Egypt with the joy of arrival in Canaan in her wistful aria ‘Oh, who can tell’ whose prominent parts for solo violin and cello are reminiscent of La Resurrezzione. The calm interlude does not last long, for Joshua returns, giving orders in his recitative ‘Caleb attend’ to set up a monument in Gilgal to ensure that future generations are aware of the Israelites’ miraculous escape. Joshua introduces, with an unaccompanied phrase, the chorus ‘To long posterity we here record’, full of vivid effects of the floods rolling back and forth which hark back to Israel in Egypt. The theme of flowing water continues in the aria ‘While Kedron’s brook’, with Joshua’s lyrical thread punctuated by orchestral dotted rhythms.

Othniel, a young warrior (betrothed to Achsah) appears on the scene at the same moment as an angel. His aria ‘Awful, pleasing being, say’ is not Handel’s most memorable (but he compensates later in the work with some marvellous writing for his alto soloist) but the pace of the drama is quickly restored as the Angel presents his credentials. Joshua is (for a change) suitably reverent and, in a dramatic accompagnato, the Angel delivers his bloodthirsty message that Jericho must be destroyed, giving the comforting assurance that victory will be easy. No time is wasted, and in the splendid aria ‘Haste, Israel, haste’ Joshua commands his followers to carry out their destructive task. The results are immediately heard in the chorus ‘The Lord commands, and Joshua leads’. After such warlike thoughts it is again time for a pastoral interlude: Handel obliges with a gem, the accompagnato ‘In these blest scenes’ where Othniel, wandering through quiet countryside, is on his way to meet Achsah, Caleb’s daughter, to whom he is betrothed. Her entry ‘Oh Othniel’ is quite exquisite. Morell’s excuse for Achsah’s solo ‘Hark, ’tis the linnet’ is somewhat manufactured, but Handel’s response to the text, full of bird calls from solo soprano, flute and violin, is delightful. The two lovers dally a little longer in the duet ‘Our limpid streams’, but the scene is shattered by a warlike trumpet flourish, made all the more dramatic as this is the first time we have heard the brass. Othniel makes clear his desire to seek Achsah’s hand as soon as Jericho has been destroyed, and the chorus close Act I wishing their hero luck in the coming conflict.

Act II - In Act II Joshua has been laying seige to Jericho for six days. He orders the final trumpet blast. Handel’s ‘Solemn March during the circumvection of the Ark of the Covenant’ (adapted from Muffat’s Componimenti) is as awe-inspiring in its solemnity as it is in its sheer volume, and leads into the splendid three-section chorus ‘Glory to God’. Solo trumpet and horn echo the preceding March, Joshua praises God, the massed choral and orchestral forces reinforce him and, with insistent dotted rhythms in the orchestra, the walls begin to totter. But it is for the middle Adagio section ‘The nations tremble’ that Handel reserves his finest effects. In a musical score which is black with notes the awe-struck chorus cower, the brass blast chilling low fanfares, the strings vividly represent the tumbling walls in rapid scales and the timpani thunder. Jericho crashes down, and Caleb is triumphant in his command to lay waste to the remainder of the city and its populace, remembering though to command the sparing of Rahab, who had been sympathetic to the Israelites’ cause. ‘See, the raging flames arise’ reverts successfully to the type of operatic aria originally written for Montagnana: the rapid scales representing the flames which add to the destruction of Jericho are contrasted with the ‘dismal groans and cries’.

Once again it is Achsah who tries to bring the Israelites down to earth, attempting to convince them that their triumph will not last. ‘To vanity and earthly pride’ is a contrast to what has gone before, its simple melody added to by delicious harmony at ‘The firmest rock’. In the solemn ‘Almighty ruler of the skies’ Handel is again inspired, as the entire company of Israelites, including ‘High Priest, Priests, Chiefs, Elders and a full assembly’ celebrate the passover and praise God for their deliverence. Over a ground bass the voices of the chorus enter one by one, led by Joshua, joining together with the whole orchestra in great magnificence at ‘His glory did on Sinai shine’. Achsah’s reproving advice however is not heeded, for Caleb announces that disaster has struck: overconfident soldiers sent to test the defences of Ai have been repulsed, and Israel mourns. Handel’s appetite for a tragic chorus appears to have been inexhaustible for, in the type of movement which appears in half a dozen oratorios, but is no less effective here for that frequency, flutes and strings introduce a ‘Chorus of defeated Israelites’ - ‘How soon our tow’ring hopes are cross’d’.

Joshua, seeing such dejection, rouses the miserable troops, reminding them of their success at Jericho. ‘With redoubled rage return’ is a marvellous aria, made all the more effective as it swings into the chorus ‘We with redoubled rage return’. Seeing confidence restored to the masses, Othniel’s mind returns to other matters, and, seeking ‘breath’ he goes off to find Achsah, for soldiers need things other than war to balance their diet. The catchy tune of the gavotte ‘Heroes when with glory burning’ was used by Handel no less than seven times before it appeared in this context. Achsah too is pining for Othniel: her aria ‘As cheers the sun’ is a marvellous piece of craftsmanship, with the strings’ ‘falling show’r’ gradually reviving the ‘tender flow’r’ until the downward scales have taken over the whole movement. Caleb is furious seeing Othniel wasting his time with Achsah and, sending his daughter away, stirs Othniel back into warrior-like action with the news that the Gibeonite allies are endangered by a Canaanite league under Adoni-zedeck, King of Jerusalem. ‘Nations, who in future story’ has a quietly noble melody. Joshua is delighted by the united scene he now sees, and once again, two ‘Flourishes of warlike instruments’ introduce military action.

‘Oh thou bright orb’ is one of Handel’s most original movements. Over a soft accompaniment of violin semiquavers Joshua, seeing that bad light may stop the battle, commands the sun to stop in its course: as it does so, all orchestral movement ceases, with the violins holding their high A for nine bars. Then, addressing the slower-moving moon, represented by the violas, he commands that too to halt. Now the whole string section is motionless, and the chorus exclaim in wonder ‘Behold! the list’ning sun his voice obeys’. Over increasing choral movement the sustained high A still continues, first in the oboes, and then, for nine long bars, in a solo trumpet: disbelieving nineteenth-century orchestral editors re-scored Handel and spread this thirty-second ‘tour-de-force-de-poumon’ between two players! At ‘They yield, they fall, they die’, the solo trumpeter, too, gratefully expires (Handel evidently had a sense of humour), and then the tutti brass enter for ‘Before our arms the scattered nations fly’. Once again the enemy are routed and flee and, as section by section the voices and instruments expire, Act II ends quietly.

Act III - Act III begins with Joshua’s position once again that of a hero now guaranteed a position in history. In ‘Hail mighty Joshua’ Handel gives the fugal entries at ‘And grateful marbles’ a notable rising theme. Achsah too is delighted in her cheerful aria ‘Happy, O thrice happy we’. Joshua proposes to divide the conquered territory amongst the tribes and is reminded by Caleb of his part in the conquest of Hebron: Joshua immediately gives this land to Caleb and his Judaean tribe. Caleb however is starting to feel his age, and Handel produces another jewel with the hymn-like ‘Shall I in Mamre’s fertile plain’ whose theme of noble resignation is enhanced by the chorus’s entry ‘For all these mercies we will sing’. Othniel reminds Caleb that one city remains unconquered. Caleb announces that it is time to hand over military matters to a younger man and, as an inducement, the hand of Achsah will be the reward for whoever can subdue the remaining city of Debir. Othniel can hardly believe his good fortune, and in the splendidly rousing ‘Place danger around me’ (as lively an alto aria as Handel ever wrote) he goes off to war. The Israelites pray for him in battle in the moving slow chorus ‘Father of mercy’ and no sooner have they completed their prayers than Joshua enters to tell the good news that Othniel has been victorious.

The public reaction to ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ when it was first heard in Joshua was one of ecstasy: Handel too knew that he had scored another bullseye. Its great success ensured that he inserted it into revivals of Judas Maccabaeus. Its formula was simple, with a three-part procession: in the first verse a ‘Chorus of Youths’, accompanied by organ ‘tasto solo’ alternate and combine with two horns: in the second verse a semi-chorus (or possibly originally two soloists, mistakenly attributed by Chrysander as being a ‘Chorus of Virgins’) are accompanied by two flutes and organ, and in the third, formal verse the entire company, minus the horns, join together. Handel’s instruction to the ‘Tamburo’ (military side drum) was quite specific: ‘ad libitum; the second time warbling’.

Achsah now is delighted too, for Caleb gives his blessing to Othniel and her marriage, and she exults in the famous aria ‘Oh had I Jubal’s lyre’. The melody dates from nearly forty years earlier, first used in the settings of Laudate pueri dating from 1706 and 1707, and then used again the year after Joshua in Solomon. (Morell’s libretto read ‘Oh had I Jubal’s sacred lyre’ which manuscripts show Handel set for a couple of phrases before he realised there was a better scansion available by missing out the ‘sacred’). Before the final exulting chorus we are allowed one more gentle love duet, ‘Oh peerless maid’, before Caleb, now as an elder statesman, announces the final chorus. ‘The great Jehova is our awful theme’ begins in block chords as a solemn hymn but quickly switches to a fugal texture. The block chords return for the end, with the final massive ‘Halleluia’ dominated, significantly when we remember their important role in the work, by ringing brass fanfares.

Robert King
(1991)

Jacopo Peri’s 'Euridice'

2012-02-06T18:44:00.000Z

The “invention” of opera is the historic achievement of the Florentine “Camarata”, a group of aristocrats, artists, and scholars who in about 1580 came together with the common interest in a “Renaissance” of the ancient drama. Their theoretical preoccupation with the Greek tragedy, inspired by neo-Platonic humanism and by courtly pastoral drama, gave rise to the idea of a musical-poetic-scene overall art form, in which music – as the stylized declamation of the acting persons and of the ancient commenting chorus – was entirely subordinate to the word. From this theoretical conception, from the outset already at odds with the allegedly over-refined polyphony, a theatrical-musical practice evolved. This again, after many preliminary forms of instrumentally accompanied solo song, resulted in a musical declamation concentrated rigorously on text declamation and text expression: the “stile recitativo”.

The librettist of the first Florentine operas, Ottavio Rinuccini, as a Camarata member the most energetic pioneer of the neo-ancient drama, reduced the flowery lyricism of courtly favola pastorale to a language capable of composition, and aimed at economic, elegant simplicity and at clear uncomplicated dramaturgy, where the grand materials of rediscovered ancient tradition are represented as images of basic human situations. His “Dafne” (1594, composed by Jacopo Peri and Marco da Gagliano) still bears the generic title of favola pastorale – in “Euridice” (1600, composed by Peri and Giulio Caccini) the “tragedia” already appears as the prologue person, while “Arianna” (1608, composed by Peri and Monteverdi) is an ancient-style tragedy. The Medici court, however, adapted the new dramatic genre to suit its own purposes by making it the focal point of representative court festivities: “Dafne” was performed 1597-1599 in the house of Jacopo Corsi, head of the Camarata, then in 1600 went to the Palazzo Pitti. “Euridice” had its premiere in the same palace for the wedding of Maria de Medici and Henry IV of France on 6th October, 1600.

The composer members of the Camarata – Peri, Caccini, Gagliano, and Emilio de’ Cavalieri, who was active in Florence only until 1600 – approached their new tasks as laid down by the aesthetics of the Camarata and by Rinuccini’s texts, in very different ways. The fact that Peri was the most radical amongst them and the actual protagonist of the stile recitative is shown by “Euridice”, his only completely preserved opera. It also shows, however, that Peri’s radicalism was not an excuse born of musical inability, but the expression of a consistent stylization: the score – annotated only with the singing parts and ground bass, thus leaving harmonious completion by ground bass instruments and participation of melodic instruments to improvisation and arrangement – unfolds all the essential aspects of the drama in soloist monadic style, while choruses and enclosed numbers are restricted to a minimum. However, this speech-song is anything but monotonous; on the contrary it draws from the retracing of moderate pathetic and enhanced expressive declamation an astonishing degree of differentiation: the dramatic and emotional climaxes, in which voice intonations are emphatically super-elevated, contrast all the more effectively with the basic attitude of recitation, hardly marked by any melody above static chords. In such moments simplicity and strength of expression have a truly ancient grandness and the unused freshness of something entirely new. Not only the historical significance but also, and above all, the liveliness of “Euridice” rest precisely in this simple grandness and strength of expression, and in the freshness of its media.

Ludwig Finscher

Claudio Monteverdi's 'Laetatus Sum'

2012-02-01T16:20:00.000Z

'À 5 instrumenti e 6 voci'. It is a sobering thought that this gloriously exuberant setting for Vespers of Psalm 121 (Psalm 122 in the Book of Common Prayer) would probably have been lost for ever had it not been for the intervention of Monteverdi’s publisher, Alessandro Vincenti, who included it in the Messa a quattro voci e salmi of 1650. Most of the setting is based on a four-note ostinato – the first four notes of the ‘Ruggiero’ bass with which Monteverdi began his setting of the same text in the Vespers of 1610.

Where the 1610 setting is one of Monteverdi’s most complex and intellectually challenging pieces, however, here he seems to take a simple delight in overcoming the restrictions of the ostinato, introducing variety not only through melodic invention but by introducing a number of obbligato instruments – violins, trombones and bassoon. There are echoes of the well known Beatus vir setting in the opening violin melodies, and of the semiquaver roulades of the great seven-part Gloria. There is humour too, perhaps, in the seemingly endless sequences with which Monteverdi sets ‘ascenderunt’ in verse 4 and ‘Amen’ towards the end of the setting. The ostinato is presented in triple time in verses 8 and 9 and abandoned for the beginning of the ‘Gloria Patri’, but returns in its original metre to round off the setting.

Johannes Tinctoris - Missa Trium Vocum

2012-01-28T15:45:00.000Z

An "old-fashioned" version of Johannes Tinctoris's Missa Trium Vocum (mentioned here), by early music pioneers Blanchard & Poulteau Ensemble

Antonio Vivaldi's Concertos for Stringed Instruments

2012-01-25T17:09:00.000Z

On the evidence of musical style, paper, and handwriting the six works presented here can all be dated in or around 1720’s. Vivaldi’s most productive period for concerto composition. During these years Vivaldi operated as a freelance composer, supplying concertos on demand to patrons and customers all over Europe. One of his major customers was the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian institution for foundlings which he had earlier served (1703-17) as orchestral director.

RV 542 is one of six known concertos by Vivaldi for violin and organ. Most of these appear to be versions of double violin concertos in which the organist’s right hand takes over the second solo violin part and his left hand doubles the continuo bass, which is why the keyboard writing remains consistently in two parts and the style of the organ right hand follows that of the solo violin so closely. This concerto is preserved in a manuscript score in Dresden written out by J. G. Grundig, a copyist employed by the Saxon court orchestra during the period around 1730 when the “cult” of Vivaldi’s music in Dresden was at its height.

RV 551 is the only concerto Vivaldi is known to have written for three equal-ranking violin soloists. The asymmetry of the solo group makes itself felt in the musical construction, since simple dialogues of a “statement and answer” kind become difficult unless one solo instrument is excluded. For this reason the solo episodes in the outer movements are unusually complex in their make-up. In the Andante Vivaldi displays his aural imagination; against a lyrical melody played by the third solo violin he sets shimmering arpeggios on the muted first violin and rapid pizzicato figurations on the second violin.

RV 544 is a jeu d’esprit, a “novelty” concerto that Vivaldi called “Il mondo al rovescio” (The World Turned Upside Down); he later added a supplementary title, “Il Proteo”; Proteus was the sea-god of Greek mythology who had the power to assume different shapes. The novelty is the interchangeability of the solos for the two instruments. Those for violin are written in the bass or tenor clefs (to be performed an octave higher than notated); those for cello in the treble clef (to be performed an octave lower than notated). According to Vivaldi’s instructions, the violin can take the cello’s solos, and vice versa.

The Concerto for Two Violins, RV 531 was written by Vivaldi on paper used for a group of works from the period around 1716-17 which include the Gloria RV 588; however, RV 531 is shown from certain notational features to be a somewhat later composition. It opens in dramatic fashion with a preamble for the solo instruments alone, and the work retains a high level of intensity to the very end.

RV 564 is a “double” double concerto in which paired violins and cellos are the solo instruments. This combination enables Vivaldi to achieve a great richness of tone and complexity of texture in the sections of the solo episodes where all four solo instruments play together. Some of the principal themes of this concerto are known from other contexts. For instance, the opening of the first movement is reminiscent of an aria in Vivaldi’s opera “Ercole su’l Termodonte” (1723), while that of the finale, evocative of the braying of hunting-horns, recalls an aria in “Il Giustino” (1724) as well as the opening of the concerto for Two Horns, RV 538.

In its outer movements RV 561 resolves the problem of asymmetry referred to earlier by treating the two cellos as a single unit in dialogue with the solo violin. The pattern changes in the Largo, where the cellos, playing alternately, provide a discreet background of broken chords to the violin melody.

Michael Talbot

The Buxheimer Orgelbuch

2012-01-19T12:48:00.000Z

It would be a mistake to consider 15th-century instrumental music as primitive, implying thereby that it was still inchoate and characterless. From what we know of its subsequent evolution, we can indeed point to the toothing stones in it; but to reduce the compositions of the day to nothing more than a transition period is short-sighted. To experiment is one thing, to create masterpieces in an idiom that has reached the peak of its achievement is another: the anthology from the Buxheimer Orgelbuch offers examples of both of these types of expression.

Buxheim saw the erection of a Carthusian Monastery situated not far from Memmingen in Swabia. The organ book discovered here dates from the years 1460-1470; it contains over 250 keyboard pieces, which definitely puts it at the head of 15th-century collection of organ tablatures. Although it is in Germany that the harvest of such manuscripts has been richest up to now, we should not forget that the oldest text for organ dates back to about 1320 (the Robertsbridge Codex in the British Museum). A century later (about 1420) our instrumental literature was enriched by the Faenza tablature, then by that of Ludolf Wilkin (1432). These were shortly followed by the tablature of brother AdamIleborgh, rector of Stendal, a small town in the margraviate of Brandenburg. It is in Ileborgh – who composed or copied preludes in the modern manner (secundum modernum modum) – that we first find evidence of the use of pedal (about 1440): preambulum bonum pedale sine manuale. The Buxheimer Orgelbuch belongs to this large body of European manuscripts; the upper part appears in notes in a six or seven-line stave, using the black notation characteristic of the manner prior to 1450; but the other voices are notated in letters. A system of alternation favouring especially F (sharp) and B and E (flat) is proposed.

In the same style of composition we also have the famous manuscript of the organist Conrad Paumann Nuremberg’s greatest musician; the Fundamentum Organisandi (1452). If we relate this to manuscript of Wolflein von Lochamer (middle of the century), we obtain a fair idea of the tastes of Nuremberg society. Stylistically there is a progression towards increasing refinement, its highest achievement being the Buxheimer Orgelbuch until the emergence of Arnold Schlick in the early 16th century: Tabulaturen etlicher Lobgesang und Ladlein uff die Orgelb und Lauten, Mainz 1512 – which was the first tablature to be printed.

Like its predecessors in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Buxheimer Orgelbuch offers a style of writing divided into three manners derived from the following three sources of inspiration: firstly it is a verset of the liturgical Ordinary, a sacred motet or a secular song, which the composer transcribes directly from the polyphonic vocal work; secondly it is a cantus firmus, either secular or sacred, allotted to the tenor, and highlighted by an original higher voice, these two parts being sometimes complemented by a low contratenor; thirdly it is a new composition, a free prelude of improvised character and named differently according to the countries: preambulum, fantasia, intonazione...

The Buxheimer Orgelbuch contains arrangements of a large number of polyphonic compositions by renowned masters – Dufay, Binchois, Dunstable, Ciconia – side by side with those of lesser composers – Arnold de Lantins, Johannes Franchois de Bembloux, Guillaume Legrant, Jacques Vilette, Walter Frye, Robert Morton, Johannes Bedyngham, Jehan Pullois, Bartolomeo Brolo... The mere enumeration of these names underlines the international character of the musical exchanges from which this collection profited.

Let us return to Paumann. He was born in Nuremberg about 1410 (he is thus the exact contemporary of the great Ockeghem) and began his career as organist of St Sebald in the same city. His astonishing memory was praised in his day; his brain was said to be full of responses, hymns, introits, and antiphons; he could descant at the octave, improvise a fauxbourdon, play with syncopations. He bequeathed his secrets in the Fundamentum Organisandi, a didactic book intended for the improviser: the brief formulae contained in it teach how to turn a cadence (pausa) “accompany” an ascending (ascensus) or descending (descensus) tenor. Several examples illustrate this description. With the exception of the first two sixteen-bar models, all others do not exceed six or seven bars. Follow the bass line, generally in long values; be attentive to the superius, its passages, mordents, changes of rhythm, and typically 15th-century cadence (a descending trill of a third preceding the final). The charm born of the rhapsodic freedom which plays with syncopations and spangles with triplets a light binary beat, added to the delight in ornamenting brilliantly, result in pure intoxication – an unheard-of thing in the 15th century – that of a newly-conquered virtuosity. We are obviously far beyond the archaic style of Ileborgh’s preludes.

On the other hand, what surprises our 20th-century ear, though it by no means disturbed the 20th-century listener, concerns modality. The tyrant C had not yet opened up its narrow modal way into the musical field; the small paths of the antique octoechos were still traced, much as the ecclesiastic modes had used them. But there again, the composers do not shy from innovating. Thus we find that the Preambulum super sol plays with B and F natural just as with B flat and F sharp, the mode of D, with its initial minor third, flirts with ambivalence of two Bs (Kyrie); the mode of E is also heard (10th, 11th, and 12th variations of the Incipit Fundamentum), with its very typical melodic cadence. From the harmonic point of view, let us just call attention to the candential chords of fifths without thirds (thirds occur at times). The progressions by parallel fifths and fourths are among the favoured possibilities.

A detailed analysis of each piece in this anthology would show what great variation this one language employs in its different uses. Only a superficial and inattentive hearer would perceived here nothing but stylistic unity. With its held notes (and in contrast to the lute, the noble polyphonic instrument of the day) the organ already tempts one into contrasting timbres, for it now possesses the separate stops which its medieval ancestor had lacked. Formally the works are clearly individualized. Short liturgical preludes serve the function of introducing a choral section and imposing a tonic (prelude on G). In the Kyrie Angelicum, the vocal choir in singing the Kyrie; why is this latter called Angelicum when it is the cantus firmus of the Cunctipotens Genitor Deus that is being sounded? I do not know. The presence of a parallel contratenor, however, makes it perhaps difficult to locate it if one has not the musical score under one’s eyes.

Most of the time, a lower embroidery throws out the movement to the superius (Wolhin lass vogelin sorgen, Benedicte, Wachuff myn Hört etc...). in the Benedicte, the left hand part sometimes progresses in parallel notes with the right hand part and the hocket technique can also be found (also see Min Hertz in hoben fröuden). The spirit of the dance animates the German songs: Annahasama 3.m is remarkable for its use of rests for moulding the three voices and Wann ich betracht de tasenacht is a light duet in refined counterpoint. The French song Tant apart, on a gentle 8’ flute, contrasts markedly with the famous Se le fatze ay pale, enhanced by a superb plein-jeu, and rising into the higher register of the keyboard. Among other unexpected features, Kem mir ein trost contain an unusual cadence at the major third (about 2/3 of the work) and a brief imitation at the octave; we find one as well in Min Hertz, a choral more majestically developed than here the famous Crist ist erstanden, whose melody had been treated in polyphony about 1394 and was to become so popular in Baroque music. In Min Hertz and Ayden matres belle it is the contratenor that is embellished. The Amen of the end has a nimble left-hand part moving through an amazing scale of D with F sharp, B flat, rising to E flat only to fall back eventually upon G. If such compositions were unknown to you, doesn’t the consummate beauty and craftsmanship of the finest among them put them on a par with the best works of a Dufay or an Ockeghem?

Pierre-Paul Lacas

Anton Bruckner’s Mass Settings

2012-01-16T12:47:00.000Z

In concert hall and church alike, Bruckner’s three great masses can be approached as major works which laid the foundations of the symphonies. They were composed in the difficult years before Bruckner moved to Vienna. Organist at Linz Cathedral and a late developer as a composer, he was often ill and racked with self-doubt. He clung to the Ordinary of the Mass and the unchanging stations of Roman Catholic liturgy. The juxtaposition of his expressive gestures is very telling, especially in the two masses with orchestra, the D minor (first performed in Linz, 20 September 1864) and the F minor (finished 1868, first performed in Vienna, 1872); humble pleading and triumphal climaxes, mysticism and radiant certainly, contrapuntal gravity and symphonic drama.

Of the three, the one best suited to liturgical use is the Mass in E minor (composed 1866 and first performed in Linz in 1869), set for a large choir, accompanied and sometimes supported by a wind ensemble. One of the unmistakable features of this work is its reference back to Palestrina’s masses and vocal polyphony, but – unlike the church-sponsored “Cecilian” movement that sought to revive Palestrina’s style by means of bland imitation and a remote model – Bruckner’s instinct and his profound technical mastery enable him to combine the archaism with the dynamic principles of late Romanticism. The echoes of traditional a capella polyphony in the E minor Mass reverberate within a late Romantic sound-world.

Karl Schumann

Karl Ditters von Ditersdorf’s 'Ester'

2012-01-14T12:49:00.000Z

Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799), the Viennese contemporary of Haydn and Mozart, was one of the most popular musicians of his age. Owing to his success as a performer – he was a feted virtuoso violinist of aristocratic and court orchestras in Vienna – he began composing on a regular basis at a relatively late age, in the late 1760s. However, thanks to his fantastically fast rate of work, this technical accomplishment and diligence he still left behind an exceptionally rich life-work – we know of some 100 symphonies, 34 operas, 30 concertos and divertimentos as well as a large number of chamber and vocal works. His natural, carefree, almost routine method of composition was accompanied by a stylistic ideal that set as its aim the basic rules of social music fashionable both with the aristocracy and the general public – good taste, elegance of form and adherence to tradition. As a result of a visit to Vienna in 1772, after his work Isacco written in 1766, he once again embarked on composing oratorios which are nor intended for the stage.

The oratorio, which bears the title La liberatrice del popolo giudaico ossia L’Ester (The Rescuer of the Jewish People, or Esther) is based on parts three and four of the Book of Esther, or more exactly, if uses the motifs of these sections. The writer of the Metastasianic libretto Salvator Ignaz Pintus, renounces the requirement of presenting the whole story, and indeed, he even renounces following the dramatic thread which was usual in the earlier baroque oratorios, as for example, in Handel’s Esther Oratorio. Instead of adhering to the logic inherent in the pilot, the poet places tableaux and scenes depicting emotions which were arrived at by magnifying certain episodes, side by side, often in an arbitrary manner, without any interrelationship. The original story relates how, at the time of their Babylonian captivity, the Jewish people, with the help of Esther, escape being massacred. Esther, the lovely wife of King Ahasverus (Xerxes) undertook, at the risk of her life, to plead with the king for mercy for her people, to save them from the wrath of the Persians. At Dittersdorf’s request, it was really the mass scenes that received emphasis in the libretto. With the exception of the duet of Ahasverus and Esther, only the choral sections refer directly to the biblical story. In the introduction of the various characters the librettist distorts the essence, and reduces characterization to the love relationship. The texts of the solos, recitatives and arias refer in such symbolical and abstract manner to the imaginary background of the plot that often we can only surmise which biblical character corresponds to the relevant role.

Yet from a musical standpoint the aria texts are of immeasurable value: by means of a detailed, pliant introduction of the various emotional states and situations they created conditions for the realisation of more complex musical forms, arias of sonata form or of several sections. In other words they helped the development of baroque da capo arias into multi subject classical forms. Under the influence of the heritage of Carissimi’s and Handel’s choral oratorios. Dittersdorf’s choral movements evoke the memory of the old, more severe, restricted style. The recitative accompagnatos and arias are already unambiguous classical vocal forms, characters and intonations.

Márta Grabócz

George F. Handel's 'Acis and Galatea'

2012-01-11T11:29:00.000Z

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)

Vincenzo Galilei's 'Fronimo'

2012-01-09T17:39:00.000Z

Whenever we nowadays hear the surname Galilei it tends to invoke the image of Galileio, the Great mathematician and astronomer, who played out that fundamental role in that which is today conventionally defined as the "scientific revolution of the XVIth century". Only those informed in musical history and other adepts in the theory of music know that Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, was the author of various musical treatises that were to gain him a certain reputation in Italy towards the end of the sixteenth century. Fewer still actually know his musical output, devoted as it was almost to accompany him throughout his lifetime.

Notwithstanding his noble Florentine origins, Vincenzo Galilei was born in about 1530 in Santa Maria a Monte, a tiny town within reach of Pisa. His family had been obliged to leave Florence due to financial problems, and he himself was a complain throughout his life of economic difficulties maintaining his immediate family. Under such conditions, one may understand why the lute was to fulfill such an important role for Vincenzo since it was to be his principal means of support through income derived from the lessons that he gave until the end of his life, and it was not merely an activity of diversion.

We know little of Galilei’s youth: we do know that subsequently he was to benefit from the generosity of the Florentine patron “from his early years”, Count Giovanni Bardi. It was undoubtedly the latter who was to have encouraged Galilei to take lessons in musical theory from the greatest specialist of the time, the future chapel master of Saint Mark’s in Venice, Gioseffo Zarlino. This contact with this great teacher was decisive in Vincenzo’s subsequent career, since, alongside his musical output (which totaled two books of madrigals, a book of music for lute and a book of contrapunti in two voices, and not including the various manuscripts) he was to dedicate a great part of his energy towards the drawing up of various treatises on musical theory, certain amongst which were to take a clear stance against the position taken by Zarlino himself.

Amongst all the theoretical works left by Galilei, Fronimo is probably that which best demonstrates his abilities. Written in the period in which he was living in Pisa, his home since 562, the treatise was published in 1568 in Venice with a dedication to Prince William, the son of the Duke of Bavaria, Fronimo, as its title would suggest, “in which be contained the true, and necessary rules for the intabulation of the Music for the Lute” is of interest for various reasons. Firstly for its discursive structure of a dialogue between teacher (Fronimo) and his pupil (Eumatio) it gives a convincing view of the actual lessons that Galilei was imparting in that period, and allows us an insight into his teaching method; secondly it acquaints us with the principal concerns of the instrumentalists of the XVIth century, and hence with their repertoire; finally his treatise is of value in that it has no peer within Italy, nor indeed within Europe: in the same period, only the French lutenist Adrian le Roy was to publish a work, albeit one less detailed, that was comparable with Fronimo.

The principle of Fronimo is simple: to furnish the lutenist with a method for the arrangement of vocal works for his own instrument. In this respect, a comparison between the treatises of Le Roy and Galilei brings immediately to the fore the qualities that made this Italian lutenist particularly outstanding. As compared with his French counterpart, he asked his reader to remain as faithful as possible to the original model, and to modify neither the polyphonic structure (even were the piece to be of four or more voices), nor its melodic character. Whereas for the great majority of lutenists of Galilei’s time the art of setting vocal music to tablature amounted to the addition of numerous ornamental figures and at the same time simplifying the primary polyphonic structure where convenient. Vincenzo Galilei himself was to exhort his pupil to rather greater rigor. The second part of his treatise also contains an important anthology of Italian madrigals in from four to six voices, selected in order to serve as examples for the novice lutenist. The madrigals are from the most famous of the time, a few of which were published little before 1568 (Tanto co’ lieti suoni by Claudio Merulo), others being rather older, such as the madrigal in six voices by Verdelot, or the one by Domenico Ferrabosco.

If as we may hear from these examples, Galilei, does not totally transform the original vocal work within his tablature transcription, he does on the other hand allow himself to compose instrumental pieces that were greatly inspired by several of the madrigalists that were to appear in his treatise. This is the case with the Fantasia sopra Anchor che col partire, constructed from the similarly named madrigal published in 1547 by Cipriano de Rore. This work, one of the longest and most ambitious instrumental pieces by Galilei, shows how he was able to develop a complex composition using a simple arrangement as his point of departure.

The success that was to greet Fronimo amongst Italian lutenists must have been significant, since Galilei was to reprint his treatise sixteen years later, in 1584. In this period he had already left Pisa in favour of Florence in order to be within reach of his principal patron, Giovanni Bardi. It was in the entourage of the latter that the lutenist was to take part in the renowned «camerata» at the behest of the Count, this being an informal academy that aimed at the better understanding of the musical praxis of Greek antiquity, with the intention of being able to apply certain of its principles to «modern» music. Such researches resulted in the publication in 1581 of his most famous work, il Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (Dialogue of ancient and of modern music), and whose content is somewhat remote from the practice of lute-playing. Nevertheless, this instrument cannot have been complete absent from his thoughts in this period, since the second draft, Galilei having profited from the opportunity of making extensive changes to the contents of the treatise. Whereas the general principles, as described above, had not changed from 1568, the repertoire itself has been almost entirely renewed, and entire chapters have been added, such as the one which explains to the reader how modality functions. Each of the twelve modes (defined as «tuoni» or tones) is illustrated with two brief ricercari, small inventions which, apart from having a pedagogic function, may also have an introductory role in preparing the listener for the mode used in the following piece.

During the same year that the second edition of Fronimo was published, Galilei brought to conclusion the manuscript for a book of lute music that was never in fact to see publication, and which he decided to call Libro d’intavolatura di liuto. Exclusively dedicated to instrumental dances, this substantial volume is divided into several sections, which gather the dances together by type, or by cycle.

Finally, the remaining pieces, that stand out due to their titles which are tinted with a suggestion of Greek antiquity, are part of the third section of Galilei’s collection of dances. This contains fifty or so short galliards each bearing the name of a female character or personage (in this case honour is paid mainly to the muses, though the pastoral world and mythology are also referred to), one manner by which Galilei might have evidenced the extent to which the ancient culture might have influenced his own musical creativity.

Philippe Canguilhem

Giovanni P. da Palestrina's 'Tu Es Petrus' a 6

2012-01-06T13:45:00.000Z

The motet Tu es Petrus,for the Feast of St Peter and St. Paul, was published in Rome in Palestrina’sSecond book of motets in 1572. Scored for SSATBB, it is written in a bright major tonality, andhas a very clear antiphonal structure in which constantly varying combinations ofvoices pass phrases of the text back and forth to great effect, giving thewhole a wonderfully joyous and uplifting quality.

Balli and Dramatic Madrigals from Monteverdi's 'Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi'

2012-01-04T18:00:00.000Z

On 1 September 1638 Monteverdi sat down to write the dedication of his eighth and largest book of madrigals. He addressed it to the newly crowned Austrian emperor Ferdinand III, and proudly entitled it ‘Warlike and Amorous Madrigals’. In a preface to the reader he explained that the idea for the volume arose from his perception that the musical style of his day was well fitted to express love and passion, less so to express the contrary emotions of anger, disdain and war. Monteverdi’s solution to the problem was characteristic of the man and his time. He looked to Classical precedent, and in particular to the pyrrhic measure of Greek poetic theory. By combining its repeated ‘hammer strokes’ with the conventional fanfares and simple diatonic harmony of Renaissance battle music, he developed a new style, the stile concitato, and organized his eighth book in two volumes – one warlike, one amorous – to demonstrate it. The respective themes are announced by elaborate concerted settings of complementary sonnets: Altri canti di Marte (‘Let others sing of Mars’, a poem by Marino) is matched by Altri canti d’Amor (‘Let others sing of Love’, an anonymous imitation of the Marino). The bulk of the volumes are taken up with smaller madrigals, many of them duets and trios, but they end with larger-scale pieces ‘in genere rappresentativo’ – in the dramatic genre. War is represented by Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and the ballo Volgendo il ciel, Love by Il ballo delle ingrate.

The texts of Altri canti d’Amor and Volgendo il ciel are both in praise of the Austrian emperor Ferdinand III, though Volgendo il ciel was second-hand: Rinuccini wrote the original version in honour of Henry IV of France. Both of them may be second-hand in another sense, for the 1638 collection seems to have been planned originally as a tribute to the previous emperor, Ferdinand II, who died in December 1636; the warlike sentiments would certainly have been more appropriate to him than his more peaceful and artistic son. However, they were probably not performed until 1637, when Ferdinand III was crowned King of Hungary and then emperor, and there was a series of festivities in Regensburg and Vienna. The scoring of Altri canti d’Amor certainly seems to reflect Austrian practice in the way violins and violas are combined with bass and great bass viols, as in the sonatas of Schmelzer and other Austrian court composers; viols became obsolete in northern Italy soon after 1600. The presence of glaring consecutives in the inner string parts suggests that they are not Monteverdi’s work, though the six-part writing adds greatly to the effect.

It is not hard to imagine a simple staging of Volgendo il ciel. The Poet appears with his attendants, some of whom represent Danube water nymphs and dance to the opening entrata. The dancing is interspersed by a recitative in which he calls for a cup of wine, flowers for his hair, and his ‘nobil cetra’ – probably a stage prop representing an antique lyre. The ballo proper consists of a pair of concerted movements in galliard rhythm, each artfully constructed over two statements of a long modulating ground bass. Monteverdi suggests that a canario, passo o mezzo or some other balletto can be danced between them. Altri canti d’Amor may also have been staged. It opens with a sinfonia for two violins, bass viol and continuo announcing a classic amorous theme: the four descending notes of the passacaglia, used at the time for countless love songs. It is taken up by three of the voices, and is elaborated at such length that one begins to suspect that Monteverdi’s tongue was firmly in his cheek. After a splendid warlike section for six voices and two violins the bass, accompanied by all the strings and perhaps dressed as another antique poet, presents ‘this work still green and new’ to ‘gran Fernando’; his words and music are then taken up by the full ensemble.

Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, Monteverdi explained in the 1638 volume, was first performed during the 1624 carnival in the palazzo of the Venetian nobleman Girolamo Mocenigo. The text is taken from an episode in Tasso’s famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, a fantastic account of the Crusades. Tancredi, a Christian knight, challenges a Saracen opponent to single combat. They fight until the Saracen falls mortally wounded; only then, as Tancredi’s opponent asks to be baptized, does he realize to his horror that he has been fighting the maiden Clorinda. Monteverdi included enough production notes with the music to make it possible to visualize the 1624 performance. It begins without warning after a few conventional madrigals have been sung. Clorinda enters first, armed and on foot, followed by Tancredi on a ‘cavallo mariano’ – perhaps a hobby horse rather than a live animal. Then Testo (the narrator) appears and begins to sing. His descriptions of the combat, graphically illustrated in the music, are matched exactly by gestures from the performers.

Perhaps the most remarkable and forward-looking aspect of Il combattimento is that most of the word-painting is provided by the instruments rather than the voices, though Testo has his version of the stile concitato in the form of some fearsome tongue-twisting semiquaver passages. Monteverdi uses the conventional fanfares and rushing scales of battle music, but adds to them a battery of novel devices: the repeated notes of the pyrrhic measure are rendered in the strings as a measured tremulando, which Monteverdi insists must not be simplified by the bass players; music for Tancredi’s horse doubles speed as it breaks into a gallop; pizzicato, the strings struck with two fingers, illustrates short-range blows with the hilt of the sword; Clorinda begs for baptism to string chords using a kind of sforzando, forte to piano within a single bow, and she dies to the accompaniment of ‘smooth bow-strokes’. Such detailed instructions to string players were unprecedented at the time, even in virtuoso violin music.

Il ballo delle ingrate is almost certainly the oldest piece in the collection. Its first version was written in 1608 for the wedding of the ruler of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga, to Margherita of Savoy. It was performed in Mantua on 4 June amid festivities that included plays, tournaments, a simulated naval battle and Monteverdi’s lost opera Arianna. By comparison with the opera, reputedly his masterpiece, Il ballo delle ingrate was a modest jeu d’esprit. But it had a number of novel features: it brought a measure of irony and even satire to a genre, the ballo, that was normally taken up with elevated sentiments and courtly flattery. It is a cautionary tale of the fate that awaits the hard-hearted in love – of which, it seems, there were a number among the ladies in the audience. Amor (Cupid) complains to his mother Venus that his arrows have ceased to have their usual effect. They visit Pluto at the gates of Hell, and Cupid asks him to release some ingrates from his subterranean realm as a warning to the audience; as they appear Cupid and Venus express their horror and sympathy in a delicate and expressive duet. The women dance two-by-two ‘with grave steps’ to equally grave music, pavan-like and galliard-like by turns, and then Pluto addresses the audience in a formal aria, the verses marked off with ritornelli for two violins and continuo. He ends by commanding the women to return to ‘the infernal kingdom’; they respond, perhaps in desperation, by dancing a livelier ballo, with passages of corrente and gagliarda. As they disappear one of them turns and sings a heart-rending farewell to the ‘pure and serene air’.

We do not know how close the printed version of Il ballo delle ingrate is to that performed in Mantua in 1608. For one thing, the piece was evidently performed in Vienna in the 1620s, and it has been suggested that at least some of the vocal writing dates from then. The role of Pluto, with its virtuoso runs and wide leaps, is closer to the bass parts of Monteverdi’s late operas than Charon and Pluto in Orfeo, and Venus’s little passage of stile concitato at the words ‘gentle warrior’ can hardly be earlier than 1624, when Monteverdi wrote Il combattimento. The five-part string writing in Il ballo delle ingrate probably dates from 1608, for it is much more old-fashioned than the four-part writing in Il combattimento, and it is laid out in the characteristic one-violin, three-viola configuration of northern European violin bands around 1600. A twelve-man French violin band, composed of musicians from Marseilles and Avignon, is known to have toured northern Italy in 1608 before settling in Florence, and the ‘French’ string writing in Il ballo raises the intriguing possibility that they were in Mantua for the wedding celebrations.

The placing of the dance music in Il ballo is a problem. The stage directions call for it in four places: an entrata when the ladies first appear (1), two sections of dancing (2 and 3) – one when the ladies assemble in the middle of the dancing place, the other when Pluto commands them to leave – and a final entrata as they leave (4). In the 1638 volume all of it was printed in a block at 2, but this may have been just for the convenience of the printer; a possible solution, is to place the first entrata at 1, the first half of the ballo itself at 2 (which explains the subsequent stage direction ‘they dance the ballo up to the middle’), the second half (a self-contained set of variations on a ground bass) at 3, and the last, strangely shortened version of the entrata at 4, where it acts as a moving reminder of the ladies’ short period of freedom.

Peter Holman

(1991)

Giovanni P. da Palestrina's Missa 'Te Deum Laudamus'

2012-01-02T16:40:00.000Z

The earliest known source of the Missa Te Deum laudamus, set for SAATTB, is a manuscript in the Papal Chapel, Codex 32, into which it was copied in 1585. Later included in Palestrina’s ninth book of Masses, published in Venice in 1599, the Mass, like the chant on which it is based, is in the Phrygian mode, which in modern terms can be regarded as a modal form of E minor. Haberl, a late nineteenth-century editor of the complete works of Palestrina, commented that ‘this gives the Mass a certain severity of colouring, but [it is] full of holy fire’.

This is a paraphrase Mass, which means it is based on an existing chant, in this case the ‘Te Deum’, from which it draws some of its musical material, often as a source of melodic motifs. An example of this can be heard in the opening bars of the Kyrie where, in their first entry, the basses sing the notes to which the words ‘Te Deum laudamus’ are set in the first half verse of the chant.

Jon Dixon

Tomás L. de Victoria's Te Deum Laudamus

2011-12-31T12:31:00.000Z

The ‘Te Deum’ is a hymn of thanksgiving, the origins of which are thought reach a long way back towards antiquity. The text is constructed from a number of complex and diverse elements, some of which are thought by scholars to point to an origin before the mid-fourth century.Nowadays this is a chant of praise to God which is sung at the end of Matins on Sundays or on Feast days, but it is known to have been used in early times as a processional chant, as the conclusion of a liturgical drama, for thanksgiving at the consecration of a Bishop or to celebrate a battlefield victory.

In his setting of the ‘Te Deum’ (published in Madrid in 1600) Victoria divides the text into thirty-one verses. These he sets in alternatim style with alternate verses set to chant and for the full choir. In verses 1-4 the text is constructed on a quasi-‘antiphonal’ basis (‘Tibi omnes angeli’ – ‘tibi caeli et universae potestates’ – ‘tipi cherubin et seraphim... proclamant’): verses 5-8 then insert slightly adapted words from the Sanctus of the Mass. In verses 9-12 the text reverts to the ‘antiphonal’ manner (‘Te gloriosus apostolorum...’ – ‘te prophetarum...’ – ‘te martyrum...’ – ‘Te per orbem...’). verses 13-15 are tought to be a doxology inserted later into an earlier basic text. Then comes a section, beginning in verse 16, of praise for Christ (‘Tu, rex gloriae Christe’). In the last section a great deal of the text is derived from the Psalms. Thus verses 24 and 25 (‘Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine... / Et rege eos et extolle...’) are a prayer based on a text from Psalm 28: 9; verses 26 and 27 (‘Per singulos dies benedicimus te, / et laudamus nomen tuum in saeculum, et in saeculum saeculi’) borrow text adapted from Psalm 145: 2; and finally there is a distinct echo in the closing verse of the hymn of words of Psalm 24: 2.Less information is available about the melody for the ‘Te Deum’ chant. All the earliest sources of the text are without musical notation. It is not until the twelfth century that manuscripts containing musical indications of the chant are known, and scholars are still seeking precise early sources.

Moving forward to more recent times, transcriptions, not always from completely specified sources, are available in the Solesmes edition, the Antiphonale Monasticum and the Liber usualis, which provide a working basis for performance of the hymn; the present recording of the ‘Te Deum’ is based on the solemn chant to be found in the Liber usualis.

Victoria’s setting of the hymn, which provides choral music for all the even-numbered verses, is rather unusual ofr an alternatim composition in that virtually all the music he writes for the choral verses is in a non-fugal homophonic style. Nonetheless, he achieves great liveliness and variety by using shorter and longer note values to underline the rhythm of the words, by embellishing the approach to cadences, by well-chosen changes in vocal register, and by using predominantly a bright major tonality. This provides an excellent contrast to the more sombre mood of the chant.

John Dixon

Adriano Banchieri’s Theoretical Works on Keyboard Playing

2011-12-28T11:17:00.000Z

Adriano Banchieri (Bologna, 1568-1634), Benedictine monk of the Olivetan order, was active as an organist in the Italian regions of Emilia, Veneto and Tuscany. A pupil in Lucca of Gioseffo Guami, after 1608 he became one of the principal figures of musical life in Bologna. A versatile and prolific musician, he reconciled the diverse activities of organist, composer, theoretician, teacher, organizer of musical academies, and even inventor of musical instruments. His publications are numerous, and some are of great historical significance. An example is his Concerti ecclsiastici of 1595, the first printed work with basso continuo. The name of Banchieri is tied to the cycles of madrigal comedies (La pazzia senile, Il Festino nella sera del Giovedi grasso, etc.) which he composed on the models of the celebrated collections by Orazio Vecchi (Amfiparnasso, Le veglie di Siena, and others). The keen and at times sarcastic wit of these compositions comes through in the relationship between text and music, though there lacks a corresponding originality in the formal structure.

In the field of secular music, Banchieri was limited by an archaic style and a polyphonic language which was already amply surpassed by the innovations of musical theatre. On the contrary, it is in the area of sacred music that Banchieri emerges as an innovative composer, sensible to the new and multifaceted tendencies resulting from the rise of monody over traditional renaissance polyphony. His sacred vocal writing reflects the influences of the Florentine recitative style, Venetian polychoral writing, and the daring harmonic innovations of Gesualdo and Monteverdi. As a theoretician and teacher as well, Banchieri demonstrated a predilection for novelty. Intent on finding solutions to real problems of performance and composition, he was not immune to pedantic scientific displays in his treatises.

L’organo Suonarino, published for the first time in Venice in 1605, testifies to the Bolognese monk’s willingness to introduce concrete solutions to musical questions. This treatise is a practical-didactic manual aimed at helping organists (and players of polyphonic instruments in intabulation in general) to carry out their liturgical duties. Divided into five “registers”, it deals with all of the musical texts for the liturgy: from the ordinary of the mass to the psalmodic formulas, from hymns for the festivities and Magnificats based on the eight church modes to Marian antiphons. At the end of the first, second and fourth “registers”, Banchieri included various compositions for organ: sonatas and capriccios whose apparent simplicity in no way diminishes the felicitous inventiveness of the composer. The term “sonata”, still far from acquiring its later formal connotations, is here a simple and generic indication for an instrumental work. In the later editions of the treatise (1611, 1622, and the posthumous edition of 1638), many other types of compositions will be added: ricercatas, canzonas, fantasias, dialogues, toccatas and a battaglia, the latter particularly rich with markings of accentuation, registration and realization.

The Vezzo di perle musicali... opera ventesima terza (Venice, 1610) is a collection of duets composed for the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria della Neve. An unicum copy is still preserved in the Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale in Bologna. In the dedication “To the most illustrious and venerated Mother D. Flavia Clemenza Gazzi, diligent concertatrice at the most honoured monastery of S. Maria della Neve in Piaxenza”, Banchieri refers to one of his own festive masses composed for double choir which had been performed the previous year “to the delight and satisfaction of all those reverend nuns, singers and listeners – all women”. Of the 21 pieces from the Vezzo, published in separate part books, 11 are for equal voices (two sopranos and bass instrument), while the other 10 are for unequal voices (soprano, bass, and bass instrument). Banchieri concludes his publication with notes “to the performer” in which he recommends in particular that the pieces be executed “with affect and gravity” and “without divisions or gorghe”. Moreover, he leaves to the performer the liberty of substituting one or both the voices with instruments (violin, cornett or trombone), or performing them with a solo voice on one or the other part (“whichever he best prefers”).

Of the four books which make up the Nuovi Pensieri Ecclesiastici by Adriano Banchieri, only the third (Bologna, 1613) is complete. Dedicated by the printer Perseo Rossi “to the most illustrious Senate of Bologna”, this work presents a curious preface entitled “The work [presented] to the reader”. Here the publication, “almost a newlywed bride consecrated to the divine cult”, is presented to “virtuous men and women in the musical profession [...]” and “adorned with sacred words containing affective accents”. The collection is a “little garland” of compositions, “a gift by five organists who are friends and well-loved by the author” (Guami, Vernizzi, Poggliolini, Barbieri and Porta). In addition, it includes Concerti for 1 and 2 voices, which, in the final table of contents, are classified according to the compositional style as “passaggiati, accentuate, affettati, in eco, in sinfonia, in dialogo, in ricercata”. For the realization of the basso continuo, the frontispiece foresees, in addition to the organ, the harpsichord, theorbo and arpichitarrone. This last instrument, invented by Banchieri himself in 1608, is decribed in detail on pages 66 and 67 of the publication: “instructions and measurements for constructing the modern musical instrument ‘arpichitarrone’, so-called because it has the body of an arpicordo and the harmony of a chitarrones”.

If the duets of Vezzo di perle musicali are characterized by a still restrained style and rather strict imitation – albeit with a melodic freedom of invention and a perfect adherence to the affects of the text – in the Nuovi Pensieri Ecclesiastici it seems that Banchieri wanted to experiment with the diverse possibilities of a vocal and instrumental language in full renewal. He does not disdain to introduce the most varied compositional devices borrowed from contemporary sacred and secular music; divisions and gorge, sections in recitative style, dotted rhythms, echo effects, instrumental ritornellos and sinfonias, and ascending and descending chromatic passages which, as in the case of the eight concerto on the adjective “liquefacta”, create harmonic situations of unfettered liberty.

Gino Nappo

Joseph Eybler’s 'The Shepherds at the Crib in Bethlehem'

2011-12-27T12:53:00.000Z

Music history has known many composers who were highly esteemed during their own lifetimes but later went on to fall into oblivion. This posthumous judgment does not seem to be unjust for some composers, but such is not the case with Joseph Eybler (1765-1846). It is only in recent years that his compositions have begun to receive their proper due. They certainly merit rediscovery in that they show us an inventive and interesting figure from the Viennese classical period.

Eybler received his first instruction in music at his family home. His studies at the Vienna City College, where Joseph and Michael Haydn had studied before him, were of decisive importance for the whole rest of his career. As a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Eybler enjoyed thorough instruction in composition. When he finally decided to pursue a career in music (the difficult financial straits caused by a fire in his parents’ home meant that he was unable to pursue the jurist’s career originally intended for him), well-intentioned patrons stood at his side. These patrons included not only Albrechtsberger, who wrote a glowing recommendation for him in 1793, and Joseph Haydn, who always lent his friendly support to him, but also Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who described him as «a solid composer, equally talented in both the chamber and church styles, very experienced in the art of song, also perfect as an organ and piano player», as a musician «such as it is only to regret that composers of his kind are so rare».

What distinguished Albrechtsberger, Haydn, and Mozart also left its mark on Eybler’s style: thorough knowledge of counterpoint and in the «high art» of composition in general, experience in the symphonic and chamber compositional styles, and a special feeling for captivating motifs and tone color. Eybler’s career enabled all these influences to come together in a special way. He composed a great many sacred compositions, which is explained in part by the fact that he served as a regens chori for decades, with the Vienna Carmelites during 1792-94 and beginning in 1794 for thirty years with the Schottenstift in Vienna. He wrote more than thirty masses, oratorios, a requiem, and some shorter sacred works. His long years at the imperial court also clearly influenced his style. He became a music teacher for the imperial family in 1801, assistant court music director twenty years later, succeeding Antonio Salieri. Eybler was no revolutionary; he complied very well with the aesthetic-musical wishes of the court music tradition in Vienna and rejected the turning away from this tradition (as in Franz Schubert’s Mass in A flat major). Remarkably, however, he did indeed develop his own individual expressive palette within the established framework set by church and imperial taste.

Eybler composed his first oratorio, Die Hirten bei der Krippe zu Bethlehem (The Shepherds at the Crib in Bethlehem) for the Musicians Retirement Institute in Vienna. The score bears the date of December 22, 1784. He later formed a cantata from the two-part work. The author of the text is unknown. In keeping with its Christmas theme, the texts, in part almost with a folk effect, in part based on biblical passages, create a more lyrical-meditative than dramatic atmosphere full of contemplative moments.

Eybler drew on a great many musical models. The gentle siciliano in the concluding chorus of Part One and the bass aria «Er ist in Bethlehem geboren», to name two examples, point to baroque predecessors such as Handel’s Messiah or to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The influence of Mozart’s music is clearly recognizable not only in some motivic elements (e.g., in the minor beginning of the orchestral introduction, which recalls the character of the Piano Sonata in C minor KV 457) but also in the treatment of the voice parts, which is sometimes distinguished by virtuosity and sometimes by smooth cantability. Eybler’s sovereign command of the orchestral structure recalls the symphonic style of Mozart and Haydn with its skilfully employed wind effects and elaborated voice leading in the strings. Despite these roots; Eybler’s music offers a wealth of original, sometimes surprising compositional ideas. One example occurs right at the beginning, where the musical effect of the sunrise points ahead to Haydn’s The Creation; other examples are to be found in the various designs of the arias. The tenor aria «Sehet Hirten den Heiland» combines the tripartite structure of the da capo arias with the sonata-form-like modulation plan (the first part modulates to the dominant, while the third part remains in the tonic key), each of the two Allegro moderato sections of the soprano aria «Er ist’s Gott slbst» are prepared by an Adagio recitative, and the soprano voice is accompanied only by the winds in the cadenza of the highly virtuoso coloratura aria.

Eybler repeatedly came up with subtle solutions for the illustration of the text. In the alto aria «Das Kind streckt seinen Arm den Gaben wonnelächlend hin», the sixteenth passages based on broken chords solo depict quiet beating of the heart. The unusual beginning of the soprano aria «Bald weidet sich am Kind ihr Blick», where the motif begins on the dominant seventh chord and finds the tonic key only after it, has the effect of seeking, wandering glance. In the quartet «Selbst aus ihren Blicken» the devotional and moving atmosphere full of sighs and tears is underscored not only by actual «sighing motifs» but also by the unusual instrumentation in which the solo clarinet and three trombones join in with the strings. The counterpart to this quartet in Part Two, «Holter Knab aus Juda Samen», has uniquely beautiful tone colors with its two clarinets, two bassoons, and strings.

The two «divisions» or parts of the oratorio exhibit some similarities of structure. A meditative quartet stands at the center of each part. Aris placing high demands on the singer prepare for the concluding chorus in each part: the soprano aria «Er ist’s Gott selbst» in Part One and the bass aria «Er ist in Bethlehem geboren» in Part Two. The chorus of angels, «Euch ward er geboren», concluding Part One and is a siciliano which sometimes has gentle thirds and sometimes is of contrapuntal design. The concluding chorus of Part Two, «Gott sey Ehren in der Höhe», based on the biblical words «Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe», based on the biblical words «Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe» captivates the listener not only with its strong dynamic contrasts but also with the finely crafted fugue in its last section.

Éva Pintér

Johann S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV 248

2011-12-26T12:56:00.000Z

The term ‘oratorio’ is usually associated with a large dramatic musical work which tells a story – much in the same way as does an opera with arias, recitatives and choruses – and which is performed at one sitting in the concert hall. Oratorios that fit this description include Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The Weihnachts-Oratorium (Christmas Oratorio) by Johann Sebastian Bach is certainly dramatic and has an important story to tell but it was never intended to be performed in its entirely in the concert hall.

Bach created his Weihnachts-Oratorium during 1734 for performance in church over the ensuing Christmas period. It consists of six cantatas which between them tell the story of the Nativity and the events of the following week or so. The first of these cantatas, which should be performed on Christmas Day itself, tells how Joseph and Mary travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem to fulfil the decree of Caesar Augustus and how, when they arrived there, Mary gave birth to the baby Jesus in a stable, there being no room at the inn. The chorus opens this cantata by exhorting Christians to be joyful and ends it with a lullaby to the new born babe. The cantata for the next day opens with a Pastoral Symphony, thus setting scene for the story of the shepherds who, while keeping watch over their flocks by night, suddenly saw an angel proclaiming that a Saviour had been born that day in the city of David. Much of the recitative sung in this cantata by the soprano (taking the part of the angel) and the tenor uses the same biblical words that Handel set in the Christmas section of Messiah. During the cantata, for the following day the shepherds make their decision to go to Bethlehem to see the baby Jesus, whom they eventually find lying in a manger. They then return home, glorifying God and telling everyone about the wondrous things they have heard and seen. As the fourth cantata deals with the naming of the child and his circumcision, which took place when he was eight days old, it should be performed on New Year’s Day. The next cantata is intended for the following Sunday and is the one which tells of the three wise men who came to Jerusalem asking where they could find the new-born King of the Jews, for they had seen his star in the East. This request caused King Herod great anguish so he called together all his chief priests and scribes to ascertain where the child could be. In the final cantata, the one for the Feast of the Epiphany, Herod charges the wise men to go to Bethlehem, find the child and then come back with news of his whereabouts, for the King says that he too wishes to go and worship him. The wise men follow their star and when they have found the young child they kneel to worship him and offer him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod they go home another way. At the end of this cantata the chorus sings – to the same chorale melody that was heard in the first cantata – of how sin, death, hell and the devil have all been vanquished now that God has sent his Son to earth.

When the Christmas Oratorio was performed in Leipzig for the first time at the end of 1734 and the beginning of 1735, Bach had been working in that city as Cantor at the St Thomas School for nearly twelve years. He had arrived in Leipzig on 22 May 1723 and had immediately taken up his duties at the school and at the city’s two major churches, the Thomaskirche and the Nikolaikirche. These duties included providing a regular supply of new cantatas, both sacred and secular. Apart from the weekly church services and the Saints’ Days, there were civic occasions that required festal music and royal birthdays that needed to be celebrated in musical terms. It seems that the people of Bach’s time were less interested in hearing repeated performances of tried and tested compositions than in listening to new compositions by tried and tested composers

Sometimes, however, audiences and congregations would have noticed that Bach was in the habit of recycling his material and, in particular, that music from his secular cantatas would often reappear in his sacred ones. In the Christmas Oratorio, for example, Bach made use of two secular cantatas – Hercules auf dem Scheidewege (BWV 123), which was written for the birthday of Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony on 5 Setember 1733, and Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet Trompeten! (BWV 214), composed for the birthday of the Electress Maria Josepha on 8 December 1733. Indeed, the trumpets and drums in the opening chorus of the Christmas Oratorio bear witness to its origins in BWV 214 whose title translates as ‘Sound the drums, ring out the trumpets’.

The first performances of the six cantatas which make up Bach’s Weihnachts-Oratorium were given on the appropriate days (25, 26 and 27 December 1734, 1, 2 and 6 January 1735) in the two main Leipzig churches. The complete cycle was given at the church of St Nicholas and all but parts three and five at that of St Thomas. Those attending would have been doing so as part of their regular pattern of worship, not as if going to a concert, and they would also have been encouraged to join in the various chorales.

Peter Avis

Marc-Antoine Charpentier's 'Messe de Minuit'

2011-12-23T11:16:00.000Z

Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s early life is shrouded in mystery. Even his date of birth is unknown (estimated today as some time during the late 1640s in Paris), and although it is known that he went to Rome to study with the early master of the oratorio, Carissimi, the period of his stay there remains uncertain. Upon his return to France he is known to have fulfilled a number of church and aristocratic appointments as maître de musique. He now found himself in the paradoxical situation of being a Frenchman espousing the Italian liturgical style of Carissimi against the largely secular French style promoted by Lully, who was himself an expatriate Italian.

By the 1690s Charpentier’s style had gradually begun to merge both national characteristics. In the Messe de minuit pour Noël, probably written at some time in the early 1690s for use in the Christmas midnight Mass of the main Jesuit church in Paris, we find him combining traditional French carols with a contrapuntal manner that is typically Italian. A different carol melody forms the basis of the material for each section of the text. These sections (within the movements) alternate between solo and choral forces, while Charpentier’s use of the instrumental accompaniment is especially subtle, with the woodwind in particular imparting a pastoral flavour that is in keeping with the nature both of the folk tunes and of the festival itself.

Matthew Rye

Christmas Music

2011-12-20T12:58:00.000Z

The category of ‘Christmas music’ is not, contrary to expectation, a modern commercial invention; ‘per il natale’ was a valid and evocative selling-line throughout the Baroque period, calling on the traditional images of shepherd musicians, the pastorale and noel and the peculiar characteristics of rustic instruments. These include two of the most popular of the concerti grossi that were associated with church music for Christmas Eve in Italy and two scene-Setting sinfonie of Bach and Handel, all of which draw on a familiar folk-style of southern Italy, where, in the weeks before Christmas, the shepherd bagpipers and shawm players would come down from the mountains to play in the large towns. The music of these zampognari and pifferari seems to have remained basically unchanged for several centuries; Spohr in his autobiography quotes a tune that – in 1816 – he heard played all over Rome by Neapolitan pipers and which is almost identical with the melodic line of Handel’s Pifa from Messiah. The tune was played, he says, on a sort of coarse, powerful oboe with an accompaniment on a bagpipe, which sounded like three clarinets at once, playing in thirds and sixths or adding a double drone. There is little to distinguish these pifas from the sicilianas, and almost all 18th-century pastorals draw on this common vocabulary with varying ingenuity.

For Handel, the resources of a string orchestra were sufficient; in his Pifa he divided the violins into three parts, and thus was able to double his two melodic lines at the lower octave (first and third violins for one line, seconds and violas for the other). In its oratorio context this movement seems to have given Handel recurrent trouble; his original version consisted of eleven bars only, which then led into the following recitative (‘There were shepherds abiding in the field’). He subsequently made two attempts at extending the movement with a further nine bars and a da capo, and the second of these versions was copied into the score. Later, probably in the interests of dramatic pace, he deleted the extra section (revealed by the Foundling Hospital parts). Although the title of ‘Pastoral Symphony’ seems to have been in use during the 18th century, it did not originate with Handel, who specifically identifies the music he must have heard in Rome and in Naples in 1708-9 through the title of ‘Pifa’.

Bach’s Sinfonia sets the scene for the second of the cantatas that make up the Christmas Oratorio, to be performed on the second day of Christmas; it precedes the same line of recitative as does Handel’s Pifa (‘Und es waren Hirten...’) but makes with an evocation of the shawm and bagpipes (two oboes d’amore and two oboes da caccia).

Torelli’s concerto ‘in forma di Pastorale per il Santissimo Natale’ is taken from his Opus 8 concerti published posthumously in Bologna in 1709. Burney thought them ‘the best of his works, and the model of grand concertos for a numerous band’. Torelli’s introduction explains carefully that the two parts for solo violins are not to be doubled, and lists those works of the set (including this concerto) where the viola part is essential. The pastorale material is used exclusively for the two fast movements, thus lending weight to the theory that, despite frequent markings of larghetto, such Christmas evocations were played faster in the 18th century than they normally are today. The intervening Largo displays the two soloists against simple reiterated tutti chords in a manner very like Vivaldi.

Unlike Torelli, Corelli made no mention on his title-page of the concerto ‘fatto per la notte di natale’, and in fact tried to minimize the Christmas associations by marking the final Pastorale ‘ad libitum’; at other seasons apparently the concerto could end with the preceding gavotte. Further pictorialism, if it exists at all in the concerto, is much more subjective; the hushed mood of the first Grave, marked by Corelli ‘Arcate sostenute e come sta’ (‘sustained bowing, and play as written’, that is without embellishment), may be thought to evoke Christmas night, just as the final diminuendo of the Pastorale may depict the angels disappearing into heaven (a device later used by Handel in Messiah at the end of ‘Glory to God’). But the abstract qualities of this popular piece are more striking: ‘the harmony is so pure, so rich, and so grateful; the parts are so cleary, judiciously, and ingeniously disposed; and the effect of the whole, from a large band, so majestic, solemn, and sublime, that they preclude all criticism, and make us forget that there is any other Music of the same kind existing’ (Burney).

Other music draws its Christmas connotations from the less universal music of local shepherd music, national folk songs and noels, Two sonatas by Pavel Vejvanovsky, a master trumpeter at the court of Kromeríz in Moravia, draw on elements of a folk lullaby, ‘Hajej, muj andílku’ (Sleep, my little angel...’). The scoring, for two trumpets and four- or five-part strings, is typical of much of the repertoire that is still unexplored in the archives of Kromeríz and provides the brass player’s answer to the virtuoso compositions of Vejvanovsky’s contemporaries and colleagues, Schmelzer and Biber. The autograph of the Sonata a 7 is dated 1666, and that of the Sonata Natalis 1674.

Werner’s Pastorella for solo organ and strings also reflects the idiom of middle Europe and, to a slight extent, the influence of trumpet technique. Much of the Bohemian and Hungarian Christmas music of the 18th century calls on the effects of the shepherd’s trumpet, the tuba pastoralis; this type of alpen-horn is responsible for the triadic, almost fanfare nature of the Christmas melodies, and the curious cadences to the first and last movements of Werner’s Christmas piece imitative the distinctive octave over-blowing effect of the pastoral trumpet. Gregor Joseph Werner was Haydn’s predecessor at the court of Nikolaus Esterházy and during Haydn’s first years as director of music Werner continued as Oberhofkapellmeister, though on increasingly strained terms with the younger musician (‘little song-maker’ [‘Gsanglmacher’] as he disparagingly called him).

The Suite de noels by Gossec, probably written around 1774, represents the most naive use of familiar Christmas melodies in a style differing very little from that of the most simple opéra comique. It is possible that the various arrangements of well-known carol were intended for use as instrumental interludes during the Christmas Eve mass; in fact several of the noels will be familiar from their inclusion, for a similar purpose, in Charpentier’s Messe de minuit. Paris boasted large numbers of expert wind players (many of them from Bohemia), and Gossec’s scoring gives prominence to the oboe and the two horns. The third noel, titled here Le Chant, represents the song of the angels, taken up fortissimo by the earth, and ending with the familiar diminuendo to ppp. For the final arrangement a four-part chorus of shepherds enters, alternating with a simple wind-band and encouraging the population to ‘hasten and bring gifts’.

Christopher Hogwood

Christoph Graupner: Christmas in Darmstadt

2011-12-17T12:27:00.000Z

“His penetrating understanding of all aspects of musical science and in particular His abilities in sacred music, a field in which he knows no rivals, assure him of an imperish able reputation, as the great qualities of his heart assure that all who have known him will never forget him”.

Hamburger Relations- Courier (Hamburg newspaper), May 29, 1760; chronicle of Graupner’s death.

According to Alberto Maguel, in his remarkable book A History of Reading (Vintage Canada, 1998), every reader needs information concerning the creation of a text – or musical work – its historical context, its particular idioms and that mysterious thing Saint Thomas called quem auctor intendit: the intentions of the author – or composer. Every listener can obviously find meaning to music without this kind of prior knowledge. However, I think it useful here, in order to better understand Graupner’s Christmas cantatas, to outline several important aspects of his cultural environment in Darmstadt, where bustling musical activity reached its peak during the years he worked at court there (1707-1753).

Graupner’s Sacred Music

Graupner’s sacred music represents 75 per cent of his total output, that is to say a colossal collection of 1418 cantatas. Contrary to the secular music performed at the Darmstadt court, only the music written by the Kapellmeister and the Vice-Kapellmeister were heard in the court church on Sundays and feast days. It was therefore necessary to compose and perform a new cantata for each of these occasions, which is what Graupner did uninterruptedly from 1709 till 1753.

Graupner was an exception among Lutheran Baroque composers. Cantors regularly performed their own works several times over or chose to play those of other composers. However, from the time of his appointment in 1709, Graupner fulfilled this duty in rotation with the current Kapellmeister Wolfgang Carl Brieged until his death in 1712, and then with Gottfried Grünewald, his friend and old colleague from Leipzig and Hamburg, who was Vice-Kapellmeister at the Darmstadt court from 1713 until his death in 1739. Graupner then solely took over court sacred music until he went blind in 1753. From this exceptional workload stemmed an equally exceptional body of work, the autograph scores of which are still kept at the Darmstadt palace library. Of these, 55 relate to Christmastide.

Johann Conrad Lichtenberg (1689-1751): Graupner’s Librettist

Lichtenberg was a theologian, pastor, architect, and prolific writer who excelled in cantata texts. He also showed great interest in mathematics, philosophy, and especially astronomy. He studied at the University of Leipzig, and in 1711 attended the University of Halle, birthplace and stronghold of pietism.

Pietism was a Lutheran theological movement that dominated Germany in the middle of the 18th century. It sought to oppose hedonism with introspection and subjectivity and had a marked disdain for theatrical music. Graupner, like J. S. Bach, was attracted to the devotional qualities of the movement. Kant, Schiller, and Goethe were all brought up in the pietistic tradition.

In the course of his functions as poet at the Darmstadt court, Lichtenberg wrote 35 cantata cycles, meaning over 1500 texts. He sometimes wrote up to 12 in a single day (a productiveness rivalling Graupner’s own...). Graupner’s friend, Lichtenberg was also his brother-in-law: their wives were sisters. Both men worked fruitfully together from 1719 to 1743.

Lichtenberg’s religious literary style was similar to that of the famous pastor Erdmann Neumeister, who wrote volumes of sacred cantatas published as of 1704 and who established a form that became widespread in 18th-century Germany, known as the “mixed madrigalian style”. Lichtenberg was also drawn to Biblical thought and Symbolism. Just as Graupner’s style was to prove transitional between the Baroque and Pre-Classicism, Lichtenberg was part of the late-Baroque literary tradition that was to usher in budding Romanticism.

Lutheranism: Religious Themes and Texts

Martin Luther’s musical reform raised the cantata to the status of a musical sermon. Composers who wished to attain the ideal of the Reformation adhered, as did the pastors, to rhetorical figures that emphasized key words.

Apart from the texts directly related to the Nativity and to the coming of the Saviour (Nun freut euch No. 3), there are few jubilant texts for Christmas. The emphasis is mostly on the representation of the world as a test of faith, and so the texts express a mix of joy and penance.

Formulas that showed the soul adrift in life’s perilous waters or described a faith that is rock-solid against the assaults of Satan were dear both to the Baroque spirit and to pietism. Lichtenberg put them to much use (Gedenket an den, recitative No. 4, but also No. 2, as well as the arias Nos. 3 and 6) and they gave Graupner, always mindful of word-painting, ample substance for his musical creations. This is particularly evident in the Aria No. 6 of Gedenket an den (bars 17 to 26) on the word bewegt (Mein Glaube ist auf Gott gegründet trutz dem, der diesen Grund bewegt; My faith is founded upon God, despite he who attacks this foundation). Graupner depicts the world’s attempts at shaking faith in a long ascending and descending melisma sung by the tenor, accompanied by a violin playing repeated notes during the tenor’s rests, as if to insist on Satan’s assaults.

Form in the Mixed Madrigalian Cantata

“Madrigalian verses” were incorporated into the German Lutheran cantata by Neumeister in 1704. The recitatives were no longer rhymed, contrary to the arias and recitatives of German opera. Neumeister added biblical verses as well as the chorale, a staple of the old German cantata.

This almost entirely poetic formal scheme was used by Lichtenberg and constituted the final developmental stage of the cantata, composed of six or seven pieces: an introduction borrowed from a biblical passage; two da capo arias; one chorale (with one or two verses); and the requisite number of recitatives.

The first piece, whose text is related to the day’s Gospel or Epistle reading, usually announces the theme of the cantata and is often called Dictum by Graupner. The dictum is generally composed in the manner of an accompanied recitative and is sung by the tenor. The recitatives and chorales are narrative exegeses of biblical passages and profess eternal truths, formulated in the third person. The arias are personal reactions to the decreed truths, and are in the first person. With the grouping of the recitative and aria, it befalls the singer to assume the double responsibility of proclaiming the message (recitative) and offering a moral reaction to it (aria). This was Lichtenberg’s preferred method, which he used in the recitative and aria of Nun freut euch (Nos. 2 and 3).

The chorales are of the utmost importance to Graupner. As he explained in his Choralbuch (1728), it is primordial that the chorale melody be clearly heard. To achieve this, he harmonizes the melody homophonically for 3 voices (Gedenket an den) or for 4 voices (Machet die Tore weit and Wie schön), or yet again simply assigns ut to the solo voice (Nun freut euch). An independent instrumental part, almost always one or more violins, completes the texture. This is the structure in which Graupner is at his most conventional, yet he still seems bold enough occasionally to develop a modern, even gallant voice, which he saves for the instrumental accompaniment. Such is the case in the opening chorale of Nun freut euch.

Geneviève Soly
(2004)

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

2011-12-16T13:06:00.000Z

Cyprien de Rore's Missa 'Praeter Rerum Seriem'

2011-12-12T13:15:00.000Z

In the revival of interest in Renaissance composers very few have become known through a balanced appraisal of all their work. Such lop-sidedness is extreme in the case of Cipriano de Rore, who since his lifetime has been celebrated as an epoch-making composer of madrigals, one of the most significant precursors of Monteverdi. Inconveniently for those who like to keep things simple, Rore was also a composer of sacred music of genius, a true successor to Josquin des Prés.

Rore followed the natural course of a talented Renaissance musician born in the Low Countries. Having been educated in his native Flanders, he sought employment in Italy where he made contacts in Venice, not least with Adrian Willaert, maestro di cappella at St Mark's and also a Netherlander. From 1547 to March 1558 he was employed uninterruptedly at the court of Ferrara by Duke Ercole II d'Este, for whom he composed the Missa Praeter rerum seriem. When, in 1559, Duke Ercole's successor, Alfonso II, refused to continue Rore's employment in Ferrara he moved, at the request of the Farnese family, to Parma. In 1563 he was elected to succeed Willaert at St Mark's, Venice, which was even then probably the most prestigious post for a musician in Italy. At the age of 47 it must have seemed as though Rore's future was set very fair indeed; unfortunately, for whatever reason, it appears he was not suited to the task at St Mark's and by September 1564 he had returned to Parma where he died in August or September 1565.

Despite the impressive number of madrigals which Rore wrote, his sacred output was not small: over 80 motets and five Masses. Of this music it is the motets which show most clearly Rore's training as a Franco-Flemish musician in the Josquin tradition; the Mass, although not in the least madrigalian, contains some fascinating pre-echoes of Monteverdi despite the fact that it was written some years before his birth. This Mass, based on Josquin's Christmas motet Praeter rerum seriem, is one of the most elaborate parody masses of its epoch. In writing it, Rore was paying homage both to his employer, Duke Ercole II of Ferrara, and to Josquin, who was not only the greatest single influence on him but also his most celebrated predecessor at the d'Este court.

Josquin's Praeter rerum seriem must rank amongst his very greatest achievements. It takes the form of a succession of carefully worked motifs around the devotional song on which it is based. For much of the piece the polyphony is presented antiphonally between the three upper voices, when the song is in the first soprano, and the three lower voices, when it is in the tenor. This method is introduced at the very opening with the lower scoring, resulting in so powerful a piece of writing that Rore based the openings of all five of his movements on it, as well as one subsidiary section (at 'Et iterum' in the Credo). The second part of Josquin's motet is rather freer than the first, concealing the song in what has become a more consistently six-part texture, which breaks into triple-time where the text makes final reference to the mystery of the Trinity, before returning to the duple time of 'Mater Ave'.

In one sense very little of Rore's Mass is original composition, yet he parodies his model so resourcefully that the stated material seems to take on new perspectives. To Josquin's original six voices Rore added an extra soprano part. He then turned one of the existing parts, the first alto, into a long-note cantus firmus line which sings the words 'Hercules secundus dux Ferrarie quartus vivit et vivet' throughout to the devotional song melody quoted by Josquin. Rore's extra soprano line gives a new colour to the writing, creating a brighter sonority which seems to take the music out of the middle Renaissance period altogether, even occasionally hinting at the Baroque. The passage at 'Et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum' in the Credo is almost pure Monteverdi.

The most impressive writing of all comes at the start of each of Rore's Mass movements, where he develops the magisterial opening of Josquin's motet. In the Kyrie Josquin's version is given almost straight for lower voices, though Rore adds a new line in the second alto. In the Gloria an inversion of Josquin's ascending scale is used alongside its original; this occurs again in the Credo in a more ornate form. But it is only in the Sanctus and Agnus Dei that the full potential of Rore's two soprano parts becomes apparent in the context of this phrase, which seems to have expanded and broadened. The Sanctus opens with long rhapsodic lines in a widely-spaced sonority; the Agnus Dei goes a stage further in involving all the voices from the outset and for the first time underpinning everything with a statement of the song. In general the song is not heard until a movement or a section is well under way, when the extreme length of its notes effectively prevents it from blending into the texture. Only in two reduced-voice passages, the 'Pleni' and 'Benedictus' (both in the Sanctus), is it omitted altogether.

Peter Phillips
(1994)

Claudio Monteverdi's Beatus Vir a 6

2011-12-08T16:19:00.000Z

The Beatus vir I ‘à 6 voci concertato con due violini et 3 viole da brazzo ovvero 3 Tromboni quali anco si ponno lasciare’ is one of the most attractive and inspired settings of the Selva morale e spirituale (1640) and one of the few sacred works of Monteverdi’s later years that has become widely known.

The musical setting is constructed in three sections: A (verses 1 to 4), B (verses 5 to 8), A1 (verse 9) plus the Gloria Patri. The two A sections are an elaboration on a large scale of the music that Monteverdi had earlier invented for a slight, but very charming canzonetta for two voices and violins, ‘Chiome d’oro’ (Hair of gold) included in his seventh book of madrigals (1619). They are set over a ‘walking’ bass using recurring patterns of notes (though not quite a ground bass) of a kind that became popular in Venetian song-books of the 1620s and ’30s. And as if this were not enough to bind the texture, Monteverdi also repeats the opening phrase ‘Beatus vir’ or, in its fuller form ‘Beatus vir qui timet Dominum’ as a refrain. In the second A section he produces particularly vivid musical images of the wicked man, his desires thwarted, gnashing his teeth in angry envy of the (admittedly rather smug) righteous and blessed man. In the B section of the setting, perhaps prompted by the initial image of happiness, Monteverdi changes to triple time and a new set of bass patterns; again, not quite a ground bass, but with recognizable repetitions.

John Whenham

Franz J. Haydn's Missa 'in Tempore Belli'

2011-12-06T15:31:00.001Z

Posterity has good reason to thank Prince Nikolaus I Esterházy, who as Haydn’s employer provided him for almost 30 years with facilities that were to stimulate his growth as a composer. Less obvious is the debt we owe to Nikolau’s grandson, Nikolaus II, who in renewing Haydn’s appointment as court Kapellmeister demanded of him principally that he provide a new mass each September to celebrate the name day of his wife, Princess Maria Hermenegild. The resulting six works that Haydn composed between 1796 and 1802 comprise the greatest set of masses produced by any composer since the Renaissance.

The Missa in tempore belli (or Paukenmesse) may have been the first or the second of the series. (The other mass in question is the Heiligmesse; both works are dated 1796, and no mass is dated 1797.) The Pauken of its German nickname are timpani which, in the Agnus Dei, evoke the distant rumblings of war and then, with trumpets and woodwind, passionately reinforce the final prayer, “Dona nobis pacem”. The war to which the Latin nickname refers is Napoleon’s Italian campaign of 1796, news of which was causing almost daily consternation in Vienna throughout the latter half of that year.

So symphonic is the Kyrie that it would be possible to remove the voices and be left with a coherent, if short, symphony movement. The Largo introduction lead to an Allegro which, in addition to a symphonic solo opening statement and tutti continuation, actually recalls some thematic procedures from the first movement of Haydn’s last symphony, no. 104, completed the previous year. The Gloria is subdivided according to Haydn’s normal practice: the opening Vivace – another sonata form – closes at the words “Filius Patris”. A ravishing cello solo in A major, in which each Adagio phrase fervently climbs to a higher peak than its predecessor, announces the “Qui tollis” for solo bass. The closing “Cum sancto spiritu” recalls material from the opening section of the movement.

There is no final fugue in the Gloria, probably because Haydn chose to affirm the strength of “Credo in unum Deum” with one, after which the “Et incarnates est” – Adagio, in C minor – contains one of the most telling movements in the whole work: Haydn has saved the first lone entry of the tenor solo for the words “et homo factus est”. It is accompanied by low strings, clarinets, and bassoon, which create a beautiful yet strangely subdued atmosphere, quite different from the enraptured textures normally associated with this part of the text. Although unusual, it is then entirely fitting that “Crucifixus etiam” follows as the unmistakable outcome of the tenor solo. The Sanctus, “Pleni sunt coeli” and Osanna form a short, self-contained and jubilant movement in C major, probably as a foil to the more austere Benedictus, in C minor. Only in its recapitulation does the latter turn (with trumpets and drums already anticipating the Agnus Dei) to C major, and the restatement of the Osanna text is woven into a coda, mutterings in the timpani and the strident fanfares from trumpets and wind that will soon take over. When they do supervene in the “Dona nobis pacem” – the prayer for peace – they leave us with the compelling speculation that this is the first religious work in the history of music explicitly to condemn war rather than to glorify it.

Robert Meikle

Wolfgang A. Mozart's Coronation Mass K 317

2011-12-02T13:16:00.001Z

It was a reluctant Mozart who returned home to Salzburg n 15 January 1779. He had been away for almost eighteen months, looking for work in some of Europe’s most prestigious musical centres, among them Mannheim, Munich and Paris. Not only had His efforts been unsuccessful, however, but His mother had died while they were in Paris; now, back in Salzburg, he had to content himself with an appointment as court organist to Prince-Archbishop Colloredo. The Mass in C major K. 317, was written as part of His duties, probably for an Easter service in April of that year. And apart from the unfinished Mass in C minor of 1782-83, the liturgical music that Mozart produced in the archbishop’s service during 1779-80 was the last that he was to compose for about ten years, as the strictures of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II were soon to impose limitations on both its lavishness and the occasions for its use. Consequently, when Salieri decided in 1791 to take three Mozart Masses to Prague for the festivities marking the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, he had to go back more than a decade to find suitable settings. Among them, as H. C. Robbins Landon relates, was K 317; it was sung a the celebration of Mass on 6 September 1791. It is also possible that it was heard in Frankfurt at two other coronations that of Leopold himself as Holy Roman Emperor eleven months previously and, after his brief reign, that of his successor, Franz II, in 1792. But whether it was performed once, twice or three times, it is from the second of these royal occasions – in 1791 in Prague – that the work acquired its nickname as the “Coronation” Mass.

Mozart’s fifteenth Mass looks in two directions at once. It is partly in the missa brevis tradition, that is, a mainly homophonic setting, with little text repetition, and so short hat (as Mozart had written to Padre Martini in 1776) the whole, including parts of the Proper, should not last more than three-quarters of an hour. At the same time, it is one of the earliest of the “symphonic” masses, its movements constructed with the thematic tautness, and often the sonata structure, of purely instrumental works. Yet while Haydn’s style in his masses is symphonic through and through, Mozart’s symphonic instincts continually lean towards opera. Operatic lyricism permeates many of the solo sections in this work, even to the extent of anticipating, in the Agnus Dei, the Countess’s “Dove sonno” from Le nozze di Figaro, while frequent turns of phrase provide even more distant pre-echos of Cosi fan tutte.

After a maestoso Kyrie movement, which is in three sections but which does not treat “Christe eleison” with the customary tender contrast, the Gloria is a terse sonata form. It skilfully preserves, in the development section, the threefold prayer beginning with the words “Qui tollis peccata mundi”, and reaches the recapitulation at “Quoniam”, combining the second subject in the orchestra with the word “Amen” for the soloists.

The Credo is a rondo – an ideal structure, for it constantly returns to and reiterates its refrain in a manner analogous to the text, which throughout is almost entirely a series of grammatical objects to its opening verb. The initial jubilant affirmation of “Credo in unum Deum” will reappear at “Genitum non factum”, “Et resurrexit” and “Et unam sanctam catholicam”; and the movement is rounded off by a final restatement of the opening text, this time to a different musical phrase. The “Et incarnates est” (soloists) and “Crucifixus” (chorus) – with an accompaniment in the violins that may derive from Bach’s setting of the same text in his Mass in B minor – provide no more than a brief, if beautiful, interlude in a movement whose predominant mood is one of joy.

After the Sanctus (like the opening Kyrie, maestoso, and also turning momentarily from C major to the somewhat unusual key of A minor), the Benedictus is remarkable for the treatment of the repetitions of the Osanna, which begins as if it were to be the customary da capo; but it breaks off after twelve bars, and the first eleven bars of the Benedictus reappear. Only then does the Osanna resume where it had left off, and complete the movement. The threefold division of the Agnus Dei text – set first for soprano solo – provoke another rondo. Mozart’s continuing efforts to bring structural unity to the work culminate in the setting of “Dona nobis pacem”, which returns to the music of the Kyrie, a reminiscence even carried over into parts of the final Allegro con spirito.

Robert Meikle

[Not my favourite version, but the only decent one on YouTube. I suggest Trevor Pinnock's 1994 version.]

Carlos Seixas's Keyboard Music VII

2011-11-29T23:32:00.000Z

Sonata N.º 8 in C major
Sonata N.º 16 in C minor
Sonata N.º 44 in F minor
Sonata N.º 40 in F major

Carlos Seixas's Keyboard Music VI

2011-10-29T23:21:00.000+01:00

Sonata N.º 65 in A minor
Sonata N.º 27 in D minor
Sonata XVI in D minor
Sonata N.º 46 in D minor
Sonata I in C major
Sonata II in C minor

Henrique Carlos Correia

2011-10-23T11:02:00.002+01:00

Henrique Carlos Correia was born in Lisbon, 10 February 1680 and died after 1752. A member of a rich family, he studied with Domingos Nunes Pereira, mestre de capela of Lisbon Cathedral. After about a decade as director of music at Coimbra Cathedral, he took the military order of Santiago in the royal monastery of Palmela on 24 July 1716, also becoming mestre de capela of that monastery, a post he retained until at least 1752. His now lost compositions, as catalogued by Barbosa Machado, included 42 sacred works, some for as many as 18 voices. 18th-century copies of the parts for Holy Week Matins survive.

Filipe da Cruz

2011-10-19T11:02:00.000+01:00

Portuguese composer partly active in Spain, Filipe da Cruz was born in Lisbon, c1603 and probably died in Lisbon, c1663. He took the white habit of a friar of Santiago at the royal monastery of Palmela (near Lisbon) and was mestre de música at the Santa Casa da Misericórdia at Lisbon. He then went to Madrid, where he became a naturalized Castilian and was on 1 June 1641 appointed a singer in the Spanish royal chapel. Despite a salary rise on 1 August 1642 and other favours, he composed a solmization mass in which he cryptically declared his allegiance to King João IV of Portugal. On 1 September 1655, pretending that he wished to compete for the post of maestro de capilla at Málaga, he fled to Córdoba where he wrote a self-incriminating letter to his sister at Madrid. By a decree dated 18 May 1656 João IV made him mestre of the Portuguese royal chapel, a post which he continued to occupy during the reign of Afonso VI.

Although he was recognized in both Spain and Portugal as a composer of the highest gifts, only two secular songs by him now survive, in a manuscript (E-Mn 1262) copied in 1655. No cantéis, dulçe ruyseñor, for three voices, one of the most emotional songs in the entire 1655 collection, aptly proves that in 17th-century Spain mi–fa could, on the composer's demand, be sung as a whole step and sol–la as a semitone.

According to Barbosa Machado, Cruz also wrote before 1649 two masses, one, in ten parts, entitled Que razón podeis vos tener para no me querer and presumably parodying Juan Vásquez, the other Sola reynas tu en mi, the solmization syllables of which, as mentioned above, were intended for ‘Joannes Quartus Rex mi’; various sets of polychoral vespers and compline services; and two motets, Dimitte me, for 12 voices, and Vivo ego, for five.

Of his five villancicos listed in João IV's catalogue (1649), the one for Christmas is in Portuguese, the four for Corpus Christi in Spanish. Francisco Manuel de Melo credited him with the music of the 24th tono, Sy apagar que eres Lucia, in La avena de Tersicore.

Music by Estêvão Lopes Morago and Diogo Dias Melgás

2011-10-10T21:52:00.000+01:00

The fact that Estêvão Lópes (or Esteban López) Morago, a significant figure in Portuguese musical history, was in fact Spanish by birth is indicative of the natural processes of cultural interchange between the two countries at the time – an interchange which was independent of the fact of Portugal’s being under Spanish rule from 1581 to 1640. Morago was one of the three known pupils of Filipe de Magalhães at Évora. The two other, Estêvão de Brito and Manuel Correia, followed the opposite course from Morago and went to work in Spain.

Morago was born in Vallecas (now part of Madrid) in about 1575, but subsequently spent nearly all his life in Portugal. After studying at Évora with Magalhães he became canon and mestre de capela of the Cathedral of Viseu (in the north of the country) from 1599 until 1628. He then retired to the Franciscan monastery at Orgens, not far from Viseu, and died in or after 1630. His music survives in archives in Viseu.

Magalhães’s influence shows quite clearly in Morago’s clean contrapuntal technique (as indeed it does in the work of Brito and Correa), but what is especially impressive about Morago’s music is the daring handling of dissonance and, in several works of more straightforward harmonic character, an interest in antiphonal effects. Motets such as Oculi mei, tonally ambiguous and dripping with diminished fourths, demonstrate perfectly the expressive use to which such harmonic adventurousness could be put. The alternations of this kind of intense, closely-woughy imitative writing sudden outbursts of rhythmic homophony is also characteristic of Versa est in luctum and Commissa mea. In fact, Morago’s setting of penitential or funeral texts is sensitive in the extreme. Earlier composers such as Cardoso, or indeed Magalhães (not to speak of their Spanish antecedents such as Guerrero), could never have conceived the kind of abrupt juxtaposition which occurs in Versa est when the word ‘organum’ suddenly springs out of the polyphonic context, ‘underlined’ so to speak, in a flash of dancing homophony. The plangent piling-up of suspensions at ‘nihil enim sunt dies mei’ later in the piece certainly is anticipated in earlier composers, but even so, for intensity or effect in only four parts, Morago is unique.

Pieces such as Laetentur caeli and Montes Israel show that Morago was equally capable of responding to other sorts of text, as do his surviving Psalm settings and responsórios for Christmas matins. But it is for what have often been called the ‘mannerist’ qualities of his settings of more emotive texts that he is known, and it is something which is often seen to be representative of Iberian music of this period at the expense of other aspects. (The modern emphasis on Victoria’s Missa pro Defunctis and Tenebrae Responsories at the expense of his other Mass settings or motets is the prime example of this.) Nevertheless, Morago’s music for precisely this reason complements extremely well of the later composer Diogo Dias Melgás.

According to the bibliographer Barbosa Machado’s Bibliotheca Lusitana, Father Diogo Dias Melgás (also spelt Melgáz) was born in April 1638 in the town of Cuba, not far from Évora. It is probable that he was admitted to the choir school of Évora Cathedral in 1647, and in 1663 succeeded his former teacher, Bento Nunes Pegado, as mestre da claustra. In fact he succeeded all three of his teachers, becoming rector of the choir school two weeks after the resignation of Manuel Cid in 1662, and mestre da capela on the death of António Rodrigues Vilalva (in late 1663 or early 1664). He thus received not only three salaries but had to take on the responsibilities of all three positions. His health seems to have suffered from this, as one might expect, and he resigned the rectorship in 1888. His failing sight obliged him to retire from his two other posts in 1697, and he was succeeded by Pedro Vaz Rego. He died on 11 March 1700.

Melgás surviving works (others, no longer extant, were listed by Barbosa Machado) are to be found in the archives of the cathedrals of Évora and Lisbon. There is a remarkable series of fifteen Lenten motets (presumably written for use during the offertory of the Mass or some similar moment, since they are not strictly liturgical), and a collection of miscellaneous motets, turbae for the four Passions, two ferial Masses, sequences, and the Lamentations. Melgás’s work fits very well into the Portuguese tradition in that, however horizontally conceived his harmonic procedures may be, contrapuntal skill is never absent. This is a characteristic that runs through Portuguese music from the generation of Cardoso to the Italianate composers of the Baroque, such as Teixeira.

The series of Lenten motets shows the contrapuntal element in its purest form. When it is remembered that Lully, for example, was born six years before Melgás and died three years before him, and that Monteverdi had died in 1643, it will be seen just how entrenched in Portugal was the spirit of polyphonic writing for a cathedral musician, and how remarkable these motets are in the way they incorporate elements of the stile modern into the kind of polyphonic construction essentially unchanged for two centuries.

Memento homo, the first of a series, begins in a conventionally imitative way, but the harmony soon becomes more ‘expressively’ baroque, and at ‘quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris’ there appears a quite unexpected series of recitative-like reiterations of the word ‘pulverem’ (reminiscent, in fact, of Morago; see above). Magister volumes is startling from the very beginning, with its leaps of a minor sixth and rapid textual changes. Another feature of Melgás’s writing is the use of literal or near-literal repetition of phrases. This happens, for example, in Ecce ascendimus in which the same musical phrase is used for ‘ad illudendum’ and ‘et flagellandum’: a passage of repose preceeding the unstable final section. For advanced harmonic treatment, however, it would be hard to find a better candidate than In ieiunio, whose interweaving of plangent vocal lines suggests a nineteenth-century piano piece!

The four-part pieces in the other collection show the same harmonic daring in combination with contrapuntal working, as the middle section of Adiuva nos, for example, with its series of rising semitones, shows. The apogee of this straining at the limits of polyphonic imitative writing must surely be found in the Salve Regina, which is a veritable anthology of Melgás’s techniques. Especially noteworthy are the very literal sighing at ‘suspiramus’ and the outrageous sequences at ‘O dulcis’. The eight-part pieces, which oviously rely more on textual effects than on linear conception behind the Lenten motets, are of great importance as being among the few surviving Portuguese polychoral works (most of them having been lost when King John IV’s library was destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake). The beautiful Lamentations and the antiphon Recordare Virgo Mater are typical of the broad Iberian polychoral style, comparable with Patiño or Mateo Romero in Spain.

While Melgás’s treatment of text can hardly be described as madrigalian, his sensitivity to the setting of words is certainly that of what we could now think of as a ‘baroque’ composer; a dichotomy like that of Morago, hovering in the shadowy area of ‘mannerism’. Perhaps these artificially imposed problems of stylistic classification may encourage us to look again at the labels so freely applied to the history of music, particularly since the word ‘baroque’ is in origin Portuguese.

Ivan Moody
(1994)

Carlos Seixas's Keyboard Music V

2011-09-29T23:13:00.000+01:00

Symphonia Angelica

2011-09-23T11:06:00.004+01:00

SYMPHONIA ANGELICA DI DIVERSI ECCELLENTISSIMI MUSICI A III. V. ET VI. VOCI, NUOVAMENTE RACCOLTA PER HUBERTO WAERANT, ET DATA IN LUCE. NELLA QUALE SI CONTIENE UNA SCIELTA DI MIGLIORI MADRIGALI CHE HOGGIDI SI CANTINO; ANVERSA, PIETRO PHALESIO & GIOVANNI BELLERO, 1585.

In the 16th century Antwerp was a great centre of printing and publishing, but this flourishing industry came to an abrupt end, since King Philip II of Spain was not exactly in Flanders for the cultural development of the country. From a population of 90,000 more than 38,000 left the city between 1585 and 1589, and in 1609 the printers of Antwerp made strong representations to the Magistrate to intervene, because the last remaining typographer was preparing to take the road to the Low Countries in the north. There previously existed a prosperous guild, that of St. Lucas, which contained a number of music printers. Jan de Gheet, Christoffel van Ruremund and Simon Cock were the founders. Tielman Susato started the first great company, and even Plantin realised that this field could provide a very lucrative side-line. Johannes de Laet and his musical adviser Hubert Waelrant were connoisseurs responsible for internationally famous anthologies. They also made contact with the Vande Phaliesen family which moved to Antwerp from Leuven and established the greatest publishing house in the north. Despite economic and social difficulties the business prospered, and remained under the direction of Pierre, now called Phalesius or Phalèse, until 1629, at times in association with Johannes Bellerus. He was followed by his daughters Madeleine and Marie Phalèse, who took over the direction of the firm until 1673.

Hubert Waelrant was a tenor at Notre-Dame in Antwerp, and later had his own school of music, where he taught a new style of solfège. It was probably he who added the ‘b’ to the ancient hexachord, in order to encompass the whole octave, and avoid or diminish mutations from one hexachord to another. (Did he know the work of Ramos de Pareja?) His pupils had to sing their notes on the syllables bo-ce-di-ga-lo-ma-ni. The vowels were in fact the same as the todays French do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si, and so his theory of solfège was called ‘bocedisation’. He must have been an indefatigable worker, for in 1554 he became associated with the printer Jan de Laet. Between 1554 and 1558 they published 16 collections together, including some cantiones sacrae, three issues of the Jardin Musical and a volume of madrigals by Waelrant himself. Several earlier bibliographies also refer to a 17th Century collection: Symphonia Angelica of various excellent pieces of music for four, five and six voices. Newly collected and published by Hubert Warlrant. In Antwerp, printed by Waelrant and Jean Laet. No copy has come down to us and we do not even know what pieces it contained. In 1585, however, a collection of 58 madrigals was issued by Phalèse with exactly the same title. At first glance it seems unlikely that Waelrant had assembled an entirely new collection for Phalèse, giving it the old title. On the contrary it is more logical to suppose that he had re-edited an old and highly successful publication with the same or slightly enlarged confents. Since Jan de Laet had died in 1558 and his press had been closed, it seems quite natural that Waelrant had turned to the most important publisher in Antwerp at the time. An analysis of the contents of the Symphonia Angelica of 1585 shows us that this supposition must be wrong. In fact, apart from the madrigals composed by Waelrant, the repertory is fundamentally different to the 16 volumes published by de Laet previously, and contains only a few works written before 1565 (V. Ruffo; G. de Wert). Apparently Waelrant took most of the madrigals from Italian publications dating from 1572 to 1582 (Marenzio 1580-1582; de Monte 1581; de Macque 1581; Gastoldi 1581; Ferretti 1575; A. Gabrieli 1580; Conversi 1572), and from the point of view of style most of these works are reminiscent of the so-called ‘hybrid madrigals’ of Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Ferretti. ‘Hybrid’ because the serious madrigal style is mixed with the characteristic lightness of the ‘canzona villanesca alla napolitana’ and vice versa. Phalèse, however, did not only put recent Italian publications at the disposal of his compiler from which to make his choice. He must also have had direct contact with the musicians, either through their printers or through diplomatic channels. Dissi a l’amata of Marenzio had already appeared in this collection in the same year that he had published it in his own Madrigale a Quattro. Mentre ti fui si grato is unique. It is a composition in four parts made by four composer friends in Rome, G. M. Nanino, G. B. Moscaglia, L. Marenzio and G. de Macque (from 1574 and 1584). Moscaglia was also a poet (he wrote the text of Dissi a l’amata by Marenzio), but as he could not set his own poems to music, he enlisted the help of his colleagues named above. (Il second libro de madrigal, 1582, published in 1585).

Waelrant dedicated his Symphonia Angelica to the senator and treasurer of Antwerp Cornelis Pruenen. The latter was also one of the deputies who had to negotiate with Alexander Farnese for the surrender of the town on the 8th July 1585. The opening madrigal by Waelrant could not refer to the siege of the town more clearly, and must have been written during the second half of 1585 Pruenen was, on the other hand, the patron of Cornelis Vedonck, who lived in Flanders between 1581-1584 after a long stay at the Capilla Flamenca in Madrid. The madrigals of the latter must also have been written specially for this collection. We have, therefore, sufficient reasons to conclude that the old Symphonia Angelica of 1565 was na imaginary collection, owing its existence to a misprint in some catalogue!

Waelrant had good taste and was perfectly well aware of what was in fashion, for his Symphonia Angelica was a great success, with new editions appearing in 1590, 1591, 1594 and 1629. That was nothing exceptional in the affairs of Phalèse for several similar anthologies were reprinted up to the end of the 17th Century. They were either put together by Phalèse himself, as for example the Musica Divina (1583) and the Paradiso Musicale (1596), or by his musician friends such as Andries Pevernage for the Harmonia Celeste (1583), Emanuel Adriaensen for the Pratum Musicum (1584) and Peter Philips for the Melodia Olympica (1592). These anthologies probably inspired in their turn other collections, transcriptions for lute and translations such as the Novum Prtum Musicum, of Adriaensen (1592), the Florida sive Cantiones of Joachim Van de Hove (Utrecht, 1601), the Flores Musicae (Heidelberg, 1601), and the 84 madrigals in the Gulde-Jaers Feest-Dagen of J. Stalpart van de Wiele (Antwerp, 1634).

Pieter Andriessen
Translation: Christopher S. Cartwright

Excellentissimus et Celebris Famae Symphonieta

2011-09-11T10:58:00.010+01:00

The small town of Marino, a stronghold of the Colonna family situated on the hill about 20 km south-east of Rome, had being developing more and more during the second half of the 16th century. This development resulted from the urban reorganization and expansion ordered by Marcantonio, master of the place, whose fame and fortune were derived largely from the fact that he had been one of the great craftsmen of the victory of Lepanto. The town, whose inhabitants at the time numbered about 2000, had expanded until it occupied almost the whole of the space available within its walls. The surrounding areas, mostly farmed as vineyards, had grown in number and size; the population had increased rapidly because of immigration, which was encouraged by the opportunities for work and the relative prosperity that Marino offered at the time. The peperino quarries attracted stonecutters from Florence and Massa, while Lombard masons were needed for the new buildings. The shoemakers came from Varese, the grocers from Modena, the coopers from the Marches. All this can be inferred from the christening records of the time. Among the newcomers in search of work, there arrived in Marino in 1578 the four sons of a certain Carissimo: Giacomo, Amico, Cola and Fiorenzo, all from Castelsntangelo in the province of Macerata, and all with their father’s well-established profession of cooper, that is, maker of casks and barrels. On 14 May 1595, Amico, the eldest by 17 years, married in the Church of Santa Lucia to Livia Prosperi, a thirty-year-old woman of the humbler classes of Marino, who lived in the high part of the town. He then went to live with her in the district of Castelletto. The couple had four daughters and three sons: Giovanna, Oleria, Pilinnia, Giovanni, Francesco, Angela and Giacomo. Giacomo, the last of seven children, was born on 18 April 1605. The patronymic, derived from the grandfather’s name, although used at the time within the community, was not recorded on Giacomo’s certificate of baptism, but appeared in the parish records only in later transcriptions.

Giacomo learnt the rudiments of music at Marino, probably from a chapel-master active in his parish or in the parish of Santa Lucia, seat of the Confraternity of the Gonfalon which owned its own Oratory, and had been preserving for centuries such artistic traditions as those of the sacra rappresentazione. In any case, familiarity with music and musicians was probably quite wide-spread in Marino at the time. To begin with, the Colonna court was still under the influence of cultural refinements imported by Agnese, daughter of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and mother of the celebrated poetess Vittoria. Moreover, evidence for musicality in the general population often appears in the marriage records of the time, “violone players” employed for the ceremony often being chosen as witnesses at weddings. The proximity of the hospitable princely courts in the villas of Tusculo should also be taken into account. Those at Frascati mirrored the magnificence of the nearby city of the Popes.

It is worth mentioning also the Abbey of Grottaferrata, where still today the monks of the order of St. Basil preserve the rites and music of the entire Byzantine liturgical repertoire. All this may help to explain how it was that from one small town in Latium there emerged at the same time both Giacomo Carissimi and his contemporary, Bonifacio Graziani (Marino 1604 – Rome 1644).

In 1622, when Giacomo was 17, his mother died. In all probability it was his father, who lived until 1633, who started him in a musical career, perhaps to encourage the natural gifts that the young man was already showing, perhaps to ensure for his youngest son a secure profession, and in any case one different from that of cooper, which was that of all the other male members of his family.

After having overcome his sorrow at his mother’s death, which left a decided mark on his character – the contemporary biographer Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni describes him as “tall, delicate and inclined to melancholia” – at the age of 18 Giacomo left his native town and started work as a singer in the cathedral of Tivoli, for the modest monthly salary of one scudo, as appears from the archive of wage accounts published by Giuseppe Radiciotti. In 1623 the staff of the Tiburtine Chapel, which dated from the beginning of the century, was completely overhauled. A chapel-master, some singers, an organist, and a schola cantorum were appointed, under the direction of the dean, Aurelio Briganti Colonna, who was succeeded in the following year by the well-known Roman madrigalist Alessandro Capece. In 1625, Capece decided that Giacomo could be better employed as an organist than as a singer. Giacomo stayed on in Tivoli in this role, with his salary increased by fifty baiocchi, until October 1627, serving also under Maestro Francesco Manelli, who succeeded Capece. It was under these two musicians that Giacomo learned and perfected the art of composition.

In this way began the musical career of the man who was to leave the unmistakable mark of his genius on the 17th century.

He was noticed by the apostolic vicar of Assisi, Getulio Nardini, who thought so highly of him as to call him to be chapel-master of the Cathedral of San Rufino, a position that had just become vacant. Carissimi arrived in November 1627 and stayed until 5 January 1630.

In his next post Carissimi received an annual salary of eighty scudos, plus food and lodging, from 15 December 1629, but it was only at the beginning of the new year that he actually moved to Rome, to the Collegium Germanicum-Ungaricum annexed to the Church of Sant’Apollinare. The duties of “Maestro di Capella” in which he was warmly supported by the rector, Father Bernardino Castorio, included teaching music to the students and leading the chorus, as well as composing music for the ceremonies and festivities celebrated by the Collegium in both the Church of Sant’Apollinare and in the Church of San Saba.

From 14 May 1653 Carissimi went into Minor Orders, observed the rules of the Jesuit Collegium in which he was working, shaved his head, wore a habit and as a cleric was able to serve Divine Offices. On this account, he was assigned the preceeds of the Chapel of Santa Maria di Nazareth at Ravenna, a benefice granted by Pope Urban VIII following a personal intervention by Giacomo’s protector, Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, Bishop of Frascati and Duke of Marino. It was Colonna who in the middle of the century was to bring the completion in the Maestro’s native town the building of the new collegiate Basilica of San Barnaba, under the direction of the architect Antonio del Grande.

At that time, Rome was the centre of the Counter-Reformation, and the Collegium Germanicum, which bore responsibilities for the education and the training of both laymen and ecclesiastics, was one of its principal motive forces. Furthermore, the city was undergoing a broad cultural and artistic development that displayed various aspects of the Baroque. Among other significant events was the inauguration of the Barberini Theatre in 1634 with the performance of Landi’s Sant’Alessio, a sacred drama that reconciled Florentine monadic style with Roman polyphony.

The Oratory founded by Saint Philip Neri, was the prime location for oratorio in the vernacular, while the Oratory of the Holy Crucifix played the same role for the Latin. Carissimi, succeeding Emilio de Cavalieri and Paolo Quagliati, soon became one of the protagonists of Roman musical activity. In the hot-house climate of preparation for the jubilee year of 1650. Carissimi was charged with the organizing of musical activities for the Holy Year. Other musicians, among them Ercole Bernabei, Bernardo Pasquini, and Alessandro Melani, were involved, but Carissimi was the one who enjoyed the greatest prestige. A witness to this not unmerited fame was the Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher, a scholar of the widest interest, who inter alia published in the middle of the 17th century a work on musical theory fundamental for an understanding of baroque aesthetics, the Musurgia universalis. Discussing there the genre of the oratorio, Kircher extols “Jacobus Carissimus excellentissimus et celebris famae symphonieta” [Giacomo Carissimi, most excellent and famous composer], adding furthermore: “Sunt enim ejus compositions succo et vivacitate spiritus plenae” [his composition are full of the essence and liveliness of the spirit].

Carissimi’s fame reached every part of Italy; he was loved and respected by a number of students with whom he frequently corresponded, including some of noble origin, such as Giovanni Paolo Colonna and Giacomo Ratti.

At the death in 1643 of Claudio Monteverdi, Carissimi was urged to put himself forward for the position of master of the prestigious Chapel of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, but he declined to do this, because of his attachment to Rome and to the austere life-style that he had adopted.

Another enticing offer, also refused, came to him from the Archduke Leopold William of Habsburg, son of the Emperor Ferdinand II, who invited him to the court at Brussels, with the promise that he would be completely free to specify whatever remuneration he wanted for his services.

Christina, queen of Sweden, who was particularly attached to literature and the arts, sought out Carissimi’s work and granted him her royal patronage. When the queen, now abdicated, came to Rome in 1655, the Jesuits arranged for Carissimi’s Historia Abraham et Isaac to be performed in her honour in the Church of Sant’Apolinare. This work was particularly close to the heart of the ex-queen, and its performance was much discussed in the courts of Europe. In July 1656, Christina, filled with enthusiasm by the musical climate of Rome, formed a “concerto di camera” and called on Carissimi to direct it.

Carissimi’s reputation crossed the Alps and reached the court of France, where, in the presence of King Louis XIV, his cantata Le férited’un cor was performed in 1656, earning wide acclaim. He was known not only for his religious works, but also for some secular pieces, such as the Ariette in musica, collected and printed in Bracciano in 1646, and L’amorose passion di Fileno, a theatrical work of 1647, which went to rounds of the Academies that were flourishing at mid-century. In those very years, Carissimi was consecrated “father of the oratorio” with the insertion of his Jephte in the 1646 collection of Mottetti d’autori eccellentissimi, edited by B. Pace.

Written reports about Carissimi’s last years, many of which have been found and published by Lino Bianchi, are full of money matters. He had in fact amassed a fortune, sizable for his time, that, in the form of loans, he put at the disposal of relatives, friends and the Collegium Germanicum where he lived and worked.

Besides money his papers mention also vineyards, cane-brakes, barrels of wine, houses and shops; he required punctual confirmation from his relatives of the yields of all assets. When a nephew, Domenico, the eldest son of his brother Giovanni Francesco, was in 1641 involved in a murder of one Nicolò di Lelio, from Marino, Carissimi turned to his protector, Cardinal Girolamo Colonna for help. The nephew was immediately exonerated and released from prison by the Auditor of Gennazzano, who enjoyed judicial authority.

Carissimi was not yet seventy years old, when, on 12 January 1674, he suddenly died in his rooms in the Collegium Germanicum. The solemn funeral was celebrated the next day in the Church of Sant’Apollinare, where he was buried in the tomb of the students opposite the baptismal font. What inscriptions there may have been, and therefore also any knowledge of the exact location of his remains, were lost in 1748 during the rebuilding of the church by the architect Fernando Fuga, who had been commissioned by Pope Benedict XIV. Carissimi’s portrait, kept in the Collegium, was also lost, together with a large quantity of compositions collected there, when the Society of Jesus was dissolved in 1773. The documents in its archives, at one time protected by a papal brief of Clemente X that threatened excommunication to anyone who might even dare to lend the precious papers, were ruthlessly looted, and the sheets of paper sold by weight to Roman grocers and fishmongers.

Later, Carissimi’s date and place of birth were forgotten. They were only definitively re-established by Alberto Cametti at the beginning of this century. Even his name was corrupted to “Gian Giacomo”, in which form it appears in several biographies of the 18th and 19th centuries, but Carissimi was remembered thanks to the success he had enjoyed during his life. In fact, the scarcity of printed editions of his works and the loss of the original manuscripts were compensated for by the many copies, today still extant, made by his students, who thus contributed not only to the spread of the art of the Maestro, but also to the rescue of the works themselves. The body of work that has reached us, bedeviled by a number of problems of textual criticism, consists of more than two hundred pieces, comprising oratorios and sacred motets in Latin, for from one to twelve voices, a comparable amount of secular and spiritual cantatas in Italian, eight masses, four humorous cantatas, and forty-two versicles for organ.

His legacy has not been merely an inventory, but above all a new conception of the oratorio, and his contribution is characterized by the creation of an “oratorial” climate and by the new expressive procedures that he used, which transformed biblical episodes into sacred epics.

His testament, in the sense of testimonies, comprises above all the musical experiences transmitted by him through his four decades of teaching to generations of Italian and foreign students. It is not too rash to speak of a school, for his discourse earned itself a following among numerous disciples throughout Europe: in Italy, Bassani, Cesti, Scarlatti, Steffani, Colonna; in Germany, Bernhard and Baudrexel; in France, Charpentier and so on. Handel took inspiration from his oratorios; Perosi from Jephte… To sum up, if Carissimi is not the father of modern European music, at least we can consider him its “grandfather”, and with the greatest respect.

Ugo Onorati

Fr. Manuel Cardoso's Missa 'Miserere Mihi Domine'

2011-09-06T11:42:00.000+01:00

The prestige of the Portuguese nation attained its peak in the first half of the 16th century under the reigns of Manuel I and João III. But in the course of the sixty years between 1580 and 1640 Portugal fell under the sway of the Habsburgs of Spain. After having occupied a brilliant position in the concert of nations linked together by a multitude of political, economic and cultural interests, the country experienced an eclipse accompanied by sudden isolation. In this context the connotations and the aesthetics of the words by Cardoso appear in a new light.

To be sure, connections with Palestrina are obvious: the training that the young Manuel Cardoso received at the seminary of Évora from the age of nine bears the imprint of his teacher Matheo de Aranda, who had several extended visits to Italy. The fact that Cardoso possessed a thorough knowledge of the works of the Roman master is borne out by the five parody Masses in the Liber Primus based on motets by Palestrina. The ‘Miserere mihi Domine’ Mass is founded on an even earlier principle of composition: the cantus firmus, a melodically unifying element of the various sections of the Mass. Here it is taken from the antiphon for Compline [the last service of the day].

This cantus firmus is sung in long note values and appears in different voices, alternating between its original presentation in the mode of G and its transposition in the mode of D. In compliance with the edict of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), it appears in its entirely without either textual or melodic alternation.

However, the prolongation of the Renaissance tradition that is a feature of Portuguese music of this period was accompanied by greater depth and enrichmenet the superiority of which was acknowledged by the Spanish theorist Hieronimo Román in his book Republicas del mundo, published in 1595: ‘I shall quickly state in what respect the Portuguese surpass us: it is the sumptuous character of their instrumental music and of their singing of the divine office that gives them a place of honour in the Catholic Church’. Thus, in these three works the art of counterpoint attains a high degree of elaboration: each section combines a motive with its inversion in the more or less condensed entries. Listen, for instance, to these combinations in the magnificent progression of the entries in Sitivit with its leap of a fourth followed by a semitone. This contrapuntal artistry cultivates occasions for stressing or illustrating passages of the text, thereby causing the listener to appreciate the poetic taste or the religious sensibility of the composer. Two moments in the Mass are worth noting: the ‘Et incarnatus’ of the Credo and the ‘Hosanna’ of the Sanctus are emphasised by the diminution of the cantus firmus with the effect of effacing the superimposition of two different melodic speeds for the sake of an enhanced homogeneity of texture. In the motet Non mortui the words ‘justificationem’ and ‘super magnitudinem’ are stressed by reverting to a vertical manner of writing that interrupts the horizontal flow of the entries in imitation. Note, too, the use of madrigalisms in the depiction of the flight of the dove in the motet Sitivit and the long falling phrase representing the dejected soul in the motet Non mortui. This quest for expressiveness often results in audacious harmonies and false relations that have been regarded as an Iberian peculiarity.

The five-part Magnificat secundi toni comes from the first of two collections of Magnificats published in 1613 and 1648, the first and the last publications of his sacred music. A song of praise, the canticle of the Virgin from the Gospel of Saint Luke is sung daily at the end of the office of Vespers. Faithful to tradition, Cardoso alternates verses taken from plainsong with verses treated polyphonically. In the ‘Esurientes’ passages, at the very heart of the work, the polyphonic texture is lightened when the altos and the basses fall silent. Then it unfurls again on a long ascending motive and is amplified in the doxology ‘Sicut erat in principio’ by the addition of a second alto part, thereby concluding the work with a superb peroration.

A country cut off the outside world by its occupiers, a composer who spent over sixty years in the Carmelite monastery in Lisbon – these congruent factors might explain a form of aesthetic nonconformity, and perhaps they are at the source of so genuine and profoundly expressive an utterance.

Sylvie Pébrier
Translation: Derek Yeld

Chansons by Alexander Agricola

2011-09-01T11:47:00.000+01:00

“If it is possible to rank the Christian world according to nobility of voice, then Flanders is the mother of the most excellent singers. First among them is Alexander, singer of Philippe le Beau...”

A Florentine courtier familiar with the circle of musicians associated with ‘Il Magnifico’ Lorenzo de’ Medici might well have agreed with Jacobus Meyerus that Flanders produces the world’s “most excellent singers” and that at the head of the list should be Alexander Agricola (ca. 1446-1506), whose name shone “a hundred times brighter than fine silver” and who was “illustrious of voice and hand” (for his singing as well as for his compositions).

“Agricolla, Verbonnet, Prioris, Josquin Desprez, Gaspar Brunel, Compere,
Ne parlez plus de joyeux chantz ne ris
Mais composez ung ne recorderis
Pour lamenter nostre maistre et bon pere”

Unlike his “master and good father” Ockeghem, Agricola spent many years in Italy, in particular Florence. While it is interesting to note contemporary references to Agricola’s fame, we must search a bit further for comments from his musical peers if we want information concerning his style or method of composition. The music theorist Pietro Aaron, who called him “the divine Alexander”, writes:

“According to the practice and method of older composers, a composition must first begin with the cantus. Then the tenor should follow, the contratenor bassus thir, and finally the contratenor altus. The composers of our time do not follow the custom of the older composers (to put these four parts together always in this order). The most outstanding men in this art are Josquin, Obrecht, Isaac and Agricola, with whom I had the greatest friendship and familiarity in Florence. It is quite difficult to do it (composition) this (new) way, and requires considerable practice and experience.”

If Agricola has been relatively neglected by his twentieth-century colleagues in comparison with, for example, Josquin and Isaac, it is perhaps his instrumental works which least deserve neglect. Precursors to the sixteenth-century “fantasia” and “diminution” appear without these formal names already in the 1480’s and 90’s (perhaps earlier) in Agricola’s catalog of works, and his De tous biens playne settings and other compositions furnish clear evidence of a fifteenth-century instrumental ensemble repertoire. As one of the foremost exponents of the ‘new’ style, Alexander Agricola’s influence upon his contemporaries was felt both in music written for voice and for instruments.

“Thus, I observe and respect the old style (of composition) and with gratitude will highly praise of that art: Ockeghem is correct and technically very well made; the same of Larue; Josquin is intellectually sophisticated and subtle (clever); Finck is also worth mentioning; concerning the unusual, crazy, strange manner (of composition), how clearly Alexander is the leader in this style.”

And how clearly this description of Agricola’s music reminds us of his Flemish contemporary working in the visual arts, Hieronymus Bosch. What exactly did Brätel have in mind when he formulated his comment? Perhaps he was getting at something along the lines of what the contratenor bassus does in Agricola’s setting of Tandernaken al up den rijn, or the unusual crafting of the outer voices in either the two 3-part settings of De tous biens playne. Twelve years after the discovery of the New World Agricola and Bosch both had the same employer, Philip the Fair, King of Castile and Duke of Burgundy. It may be that both men won his patronage on account of the part of their creative personalities that seem to us to be so concerned with giving expression to the unexpected, the irrational, the rare.

Crawford Young

Tomás Luis de Victoria died 400 Years Ago...

2011-08-20T13:18:00.013+01:00

Taedet animam meam and the Introitus from Victoria's magnificent Officium Defunctorum a 6 (1605).

Il Ballarino: Italian Dance Music c.1600

2011-08-15T22:22:00.009+01:00

In the dance treatises, music is provided in lute tablature, plus – usually – the melody and occasionally the bass line too in staff notation. These parts might seem at first sight to constitute a performing score for two or three instruments, but since the staff-notated melody is almost always doubled in the lute tablature it is perhaps more likely that the publisher was providing an outline guide to the music with alternative forms of notation. The aim, after all, was to show dancer how to dance and not to provide a full score for a dance band.

Although the treatises were aimed at the nobility and the rich, the music in them varies greatly in character, from the lengthly, fully developed dances in two, three or four sections such as the balleti Celeste Giglio and Alta Carretta, to the catchy, popular-sounding tunes of Allegrezza d’Amore and La Nizzarda. The composers are unknown; it is possible that the authors of the treatises played some part in the musical settings. In those days, as mentioned below, dancing masters were also musicians.

The keyboard pieces span a period of seventy years from 1551 to 1621, yet they show little stylistic development. The melody is supported by chords, usually in root position, giving rise to parallel block harmonies full of consecutive fifths. This writing creates powerful resonances on the harpsichord, and, combined with great rhythmic vitality, makes the pieces all very danceable – a contrast to the sophisticated English keyboard style which developed over the same period, where elaborate embellishment and counterpoint often serve to obscure any dance origins. Many of the dances are based on familiar grounds or chord sequences of the period, the most prominent being the ubiquitous passamezzo antico.

The Dances

Fabritio Caroso, Cesare Negri and Livio Lupi were dancing-masters to the noble and wealthy families of Italy and to French and Spanish royalty. Their task was to teach young gentlemen and ladies to maintain standards of social conduct, and to invent new dances and dance spectacles. The manuals they wrote at the end of their careers are systematic and detailed compendiums of dancing in sixteenth-century Italy. They cover a broad timespan by including dances of unknown origin, regional dances, balli by other contemporary masters and new dances of their own. In Caroso’s second book we can detect a change in dance style that emphasises smooth, fluid movements and symmetrical patterning, presaging the development of late seventeenth-century Baroque technique.

Italian dance was influential throughout Europe. Even Queen Elizabeth I was said to dance high in the Italian style. Reconstruction of the dances reveals the high level of skill in the gagliarda and canario could be formidable. However, as he danced for social pleasure, his skill was masked by a nonchalant demeanour. The masters urged their pupils to move with grace and dignity and always create a pleasant spectacle for the onlooker. As the couple, or set, had the ballroom floor to themselves, dancing combined rapport between partners and awareness of an audience.

Professional dancers used both the social dance forms and theatrical forms such as moresche and mattacine to entertain at court. Unfortunately, only a few details of these have survived, but Livio Lupi’s book includes advice to those who wish to make a profession of dancing. Musicality was an important attribute, and some masters were very competent instrumentalists.

Jeremy Barlow/Anne Daye

Girolamo Frescobaldi: Linking Renaissance and Baroque

2011-08-10T21:33:00.003+01:00

Frescobaldi was born into a faily well-to-do family in Ferrara, but His general education seems to have been sketchy. One contemporary classed him among those who are “so ignorant in letters that they scarcely know how to write their own names” (and certainly those writing of His that have survived are full of idiosycratic spelling and syntax); and another, who called him “a very common man”, accused him not merely of faulty word-setting in his vocal music but of not even understanding any unusual words. It was a very different matter when it came to his talent as a performer, which commanded universal admiration. He was called “the prodigy of his time”: one musician wrote that “for organ and cembalo he carries off all the honours, both in his skill and in the agility of his hands”, and another commented that he had “found a new style of playing, especially on the harpsichord”, adding that “today anyone not playing in this style is hardly to be considered”. As a composer, Frescobaldi exercised great influence, especially through his pupil Froberger (who left his post at the Imperial court in Vienna for over three years in order to study with him); J. S. Bach as a young man attempted to copy his style.

Frescobaldi’s importance lay particularly in his development of keyboard music, in which sphere his contribution was equalled at the time only by Sweelinck in Amsterdam and John Bull in London and Antwerp: he represents a link between the contrapuntal disciplines of the late Renaissance and the freer, more decorative flights of the Baroque, often with bold usage of dissonance (in which he was influenced by Gesualdo, who had spent some time in Ferrara, and by other Neapolitan composers), and in particular displaying a talent for improvisatory figurations and for variation technique (of which Cabezón had been the father-figure). He also gave unusually precise and practical directions for the performance of his works: players were encouraged to “discover the right affective expression of each passage” and to feel free to alter speeds within a piece as the character of the music changed (as was the custom in contemporary madrigal singing), to begin toccatas slowly so as to increase the brilliance of later, faster sections, to slow down toward cadences and make pauses between sections.

Frescobaldi’s first publication for keyboard, in 1608, consisted of 12 Fantasias: though printed in score, each voice line on a separate stave, they are entirely apt for keyboard performance. The most intellectual of his works, each fantasia strictly derives the whole of its contrapuntal texture from the initial soggetto or soggetti (melodic figures rather than “subjects” in the modern sense), which vary in number from one to four. In Fantasia III (which changes for a while to triple metre halfway through) the contours of the sigle soggetto – a rising second, a rising fourth and five notes of an ascending scale – are clearly recognisable throughout: the three soggetti of Fantasia IX – one ascending, another descending, the third circling round one note – are all presented at the beginning, the first eventually engendering a figure of rising semitones. In contrast, normally in ricercari the soggetti were deployed in successive sections, but Ricercar IX from Frescobaldi’s 1615 collection is exceptional in developing all four of its themes simultaneously – a remarkable contrapuntal feat which has been called a distant forerunner of Bach’s uncompleted Contrapunctus XV in “Die Kunst der Fuge”.

In 1615 also appeared the First Book of Toccatas, an immensely popular volume that was reprinted several times (with revisions and additions). The toccatas represent a transition from the traditional modes (N.º 7 is basically in the Aeolian, N.os 10 and 11 are in the Ionian) to the new system of tonality, bringing in its train a shift from linear to harmonic thinking (N.º 11 is strikingly free in this regard, employing many chromaticisms). More importantly, to an extraordinary degree they mirror Frescobaldi’s acclaimed art of improvisation – full of brilliant passaggi and ornamental cadences, the chordal framework embellished with decorative flights passed from one voice to another, and with an unmistakable expressive quality. His relative indifference to the structure of the whole is shown by his remark, in the second edition, that each section “may be played on its own apart from the others, so that the performer is not obliged to finish the whole work but may stop where he desires”. The same volume also contains a few partite (sets of variations) on popular melodies. That adopted for “La Folia”, however, is not the familiar theme used by Corelli and others, but a binary one usually called the fedele.

1624 saw the publication of a book of 12 cappricci which also enjoyed a wide popularity. Although all employ an abundance of imitative counterpoint, they cover a variety of treatments. The majority are multisectional pieces based on such familiar subjects as ascending or descending hexachords, the cuckoo’s call or traditional dance tunes from the Low Countries, but one is a riddle for a fifth singing part – the entry points left to the four-part instrumental composition. The “Cappriccio sopra un soggetto” displays Frescobaldi’s mastery of variation technique, the rhythmically energetic soggetto itself becoming modified (as in the canzone form) in the successive variations of pace, metre and figuration. On the other hand, the shorter “Cappriccio di durezze” (on dissonances) is more akin to a ricercare: it is a structurally continuou whole with well defined, well developed motifs but without passaggi or metrical changes: its chromaticism lends it great expressiveness.

The Second Book of Toccatas of 1627 in fact contains, besides 11 toccatas (some specifically designated for organ), a great diversity of other forms, including canzonas, liturgical movements, variations and dance pieces. Frescobaldi announced it as exemplifying a “new manner... with novelty or artifice” and calling for “grace, ease, variety of measure, and elegance” in performance. Certainly the complexity of the texture is greater than in the First Book, with elaborate passage-work, sequences, more pronounced contrast between the various sections, and lengthly preparation of cadences. N.º 10 is especially notable for the variety of its rhythmic patterns, which include Lombard snaps and dotted figures. The spirited Canzona N.º 4 from this book falls into several sections (the first a short fugue) strongly differentiated in metre and rhythm, though unity is preserved by all the material being derived from that in the initial part.

In the third edition (1637) of his First Book of Toccatas, Frescobaldi added several extra pieces, among them some miniature dance groups. In both the first and second of these there are two binary movements – a balletto in duple metre and a triple-metre corrente which is thematically related (more obviously in N.º 1); but N.º 1 concludes with a passacaglia (consisting of six appearances of the two-bar ground bass). Two years after Frescobaldi’s death, 11 canzoni alla fracese were brought out by the Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti. The title “La Crivelli”, the third of these, almost certainly refers to Giovanni Battista Crivelli, who some time in the 1620’s was maestro di cappella in Frescobaldi’s native town of Ferrara: it is in effect a fugue in firmly regular duple rhythm.

Lionel Salter
(1991)

Claudio Monteverdi’s Madrigals and Sacred Concertos

2011-08-05T21:41:00.000+01:00

The Works presented here were written when Monteverdi was living in Vencie. After his miserable years in Mantua – underpaid, overworked, humiliated by petty court officials, buffered by personal tragedy when his wife died – to be maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s came as a blessed relief, and he was soon a great success. Not only was he highly respected in his official post; he received commissions from the nobility to compose and perform chamber music in the palazzo throughout the city. “Chamber music” meant madrigals, but madrigals in a new style, with several voices accompanied by harpsichord or lute. These were in a lighter, more tuneful vein than the gloom-ridden pieces so fashionable at Mantua. Monteverdi’s assistants and colleagues – men such as Berti and Alessandro Grandi – set the pace with their popular song-books. Monteverdi himself could never quite shake off his earlier manner, especially in his concern for expressing the detailed meaning of the text. When he sets off to write a tune, a tinge of sadness in the verse will distract him, so that the mood becomes more complex, the structures a shade more complicated than necessary to please the public. Monteverdi’s works were therefore not published so frequently as some of those of younger men, being mainly collected after his death, or in the grand retrospective volume, the Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi which appeared from the famous press of Vincenti in 1638.

His favoured medium for this kind of music was the duet, two equal voices accompanied by a harmony instrument. The voices are very often tenors, since, unlike at Mantua where it was the women of the madrigal ensemble who were the marvels, his best singers must have been members of the choir at St. Mark’s. The verse also contrasts with the Mantuan repertoire, for in place of the elegant “arcadian” style of Guarini, most of the poems are merely “poesia per musica” of no great distinction. Noticeably Monteverdi prefers verse with concrete images that he can express in musical symbols, and especially images connected with war; this the outcome of his thinking about the stile concitato, or “agitated style”, which expresses the aggressive side of man’s nature.

Se vittorie sì belle shows this preoccupation, the idea of victory suggesting some fanfare-like motifs, the fight (‘pugna’) a little semiquaver (16th-note) figure which is constantly repeated. Non voglio amare is a canzonetta for a trio – two tenors and a bass – displaying Monteverdi’s tendency to sophisticated music: the verse could have easily been set to a simple tune, whereas here there are interjections by the bass interrupting the tenors and melody, and Monteverdi adds a characteristic minor chord at one moment to depict the poet’s reluctance to love. Vaga su spina ascosa and Augellin che la voce al canto spieghi both belong to Monteverdi’s earliest years in Venice, being published in a volume entitled Concerto in 1619 and dedicated to the Duchess of Gonzaga in an effort to get his Mantuan pension paid (all he got in the end was a valuable necklace). The first is a cheerful rhythmic piece with attractive roulades to show off the skill of the singers. The second is more typical of the composer, with some dissonances, unusual melodic intervals and broken-up lines to express “aspri tormenti” (bitter torments) and “soffrirete” (suffer).

Ninfa che, scalza il piede is as near as Monteverdi usually approaches to popular style, the first section a tuneful solo with vital dance-like rhythms which are used in the subsequent sections (a duet and trio respectively). Even so there is considerable word painting, as in the lover’s realistic cries of “ah” near the end of the whole work. O mio bene is also a tuneful work, although “fanfare” figures dominate the concluding section in each strophe “non più guerra...” (“no mor this war...”).

Zefiro torna is a setting of a famous sonnet by Petrarch as reworked by one of Monteverdi’s librettists, Ottavio Rinuccini (which in turn Monteverdi himself altered in certain particulars). The first half is a celebration of the pleasures of the countryside, the sweet winds and gentle waves, the murmuring branches in the breezes, the echoes across the valleys. This dances over a chaconne bass and Monteverdi misses no opportunity to depict the poetry’s imagery. Then comes the rub: “Only I, through desolate and lonely woods now weep, now sing”, says the poet. The metre changes from lively triple time to a slower, recitato passage culminating in a chromatic groan. But the chaconne returns, the virtuosity of the tenors flowers as the poet resumes his singing. Mentre vaga Angioletta is in a similar vein, making even greater demands on the singers. Again the word painting is exuberant: “veloce” (quick) expressed by flourishes of semiquavers, “fughe” (flights) by the tenors following each other in a brief canon; “respiri” (breathing) by a broken melodic line.

The original singers of these works must surely have been members of the capella at St. Mark’s. Monteverdi spent the first few years as maestro there recruiting new singers, for the choir had deteriorated in the years before he arrived. Among the tenors (and therefore one of the possible singers in these duets) was Francesco Cavalli. That such fine singers and musicians were necessary is made clear by the repertory of the basilica. While masses and vesper psalms were naturally sung in either a retrospective “a capella” style or a modern concertante manner, motets celebrating various festivals were sung by soloists. Monteverdi provided a substantial repertory of these (his assistants were even more fecund in this sphere), especially settings of texts in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, several of whose festivals were celebrated with great pomp in Venice. In these Marian motets, he made little distinction between sacred and secular styles, treating the Virgin Mary as though she were a much beloved lady in a pastoral poem.

Exsulta filia is a miniature cantata, published in 1629 just a year before the plague struck Venice and decimated the choir at St. Mark’s as it did the population at large. Probably, intended originally for one of the soprano castrati in the choir, it is built as a series of separate sections, linked by recurrent passages so that the whole is given unity. The singer is taxed by ornaments, including the famous trillo used much by Caccini and the Florentine opera singers – and by Monteverdi himself in both Orfeo and the Vespers music published in 1610. Audi caelum sets a motet text he had used in that Mantuan Vespers, being an echo piece, with a second, hidden tenor replying to the first with significant changes in the words (“gaudio” becomes “audio”, “benedicam” changes to “dicam”, and so on). But by the end such tricks are put aside, and the motet becomes a tender and emotional solo, with highly charged chromatic melody for the words “o dulcis virgo Maria” the Salve, Regina setting is even more passionate, its emotion expressed in sudden changes and turns of phrase, its final cry of “Maria” one of the most urgent calls for divine intercession in all church music.

Denis Arnold

Motets by Giacomo Carissimi

2011-08-02T22:00:00.000+01:00

“Giacomo Carissimi was honoured more than anyone else even by the French, although they seldom show respect for anyone other than their compatriots” – this was written in 1740 by the German musical theorist Mattheson. This statement may give an idea of the composer’s fame and reputation, since to win renown throughout 17th century Europe transgressing the competition between the two decisive musical styles of the age, the French and the Italian was indeed an achievement not to be underestimated.

Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674) was appointed the musical director of the Collegio Germanico in Rome as a successor of Victoria and Agazzari. From the 16th century this institution was regarded as a major centre of the Counter-Reformation, and thus the title of maestro di capella meant that Carissimi, when in 1643 he was offered the post of choirmaster at St Mark’s, Venice after Monteverdi’s death, chose to remain in the Collegio until his death. Besides the musical direction of the college’s church, his tasks included training the choir members and teaching music to the students.

His work as a teacher spanning for several decades had an influence on his Italian students including Alessandro Scarlatti, Bassani and Cesti as well as German students were J. K. Kerll and the famous disciple of Schütz, Christoph Bernhard, who later adapted Carissimi’s teachings to German Protestant church music. As Mattheson stressed, Carissimi had a perhaps even more important effect on French music, which was the most clearly apparent in Charpentier’s oeuvre and the genre of oratorio in Latin. The oratorio latino belonged, like opera and the oratorio, to the new 17th century genres. With his 16 works classified as “oratorios” or “histories”, Carissimi made a major contribution to its development. These were usually 3-11-part works (some of them employing more than one choirs) and the vocal parts are accompanied by basso continuo and sometimes two violins. Generally based on an Old Testament text, constructed from homophonic choral movements and monadic solo recitatives and always paying a special attention to the meaning and distinctness of the text, these works ensured Carissimi’s fame in the eyes of posterity. Although the composition of Latin oratorios was limited almost exclusively to Rome – the exceptions are the French Charpentier’s 24 works – Carissimi’s oratorical pieces served as models even decades after his death chiefly for composers working in England, and above all for Handel. In Handel’s English-language oratorios the similarity of the musical material of certain choirs and recitatives clearly attest to a connection between the two masters composing principles. Nevertheless, in England Carissimi’s posthumous fame was based much more on his sacred motets and rearranged so as to fit into the Anglican liturgy. Carissimi’s music, a few of his oratorios and cantatas were still remembered in the 19th century. Most of his motets, however, are unknown for the public to this day, despite the fact that they are outstanding works both compared to his contemporaries compositions and measured by the standards of musical history.

According to Mattheson, Carissimi was called a “musical orator” in his time. This does not only mean that the word stresses, the articulartion of the language and the text and the melodic rhythmic world are closely linked but also that he strove to reflect the emotional atmosphere of the text in the music and to make the meaning of the individual works more expressive with the help of musical-rhetoric figures. Thus, the third line (“Quem hodie deduxit Dominus in via mirabilis”, “Whom God shall lead today, along the miraculous path”) of the text in the motet “Laudemus virum gloriosum” gets an almost three-bar melisma, or at the word “vana” (mirages) in “Sed frustram” the melody drops by one and a half octaves.

In contrast with the general 16th and early 17th century composing practice, only a few of Carissimi’s motets follow the liturgical text of the mass or the offices word for word. Some of his works are based on psalm or hymn texts, but in the majority of the motets the composer loosely “paraphrases” the liturgical or Biblical lines. For instance, the motet “Exulta, gaude filia Sion” recalls the words of the Old Testament prophet Zachariah, “Vanitatum vanitas” evokes the Ecclesiastes and “Cantabo Domino” the Book of Psalms. Other pieces, however, as for instance the “O dulcissimum Mariae nomen” seem to echo the word of medieval mystical poetry. Due to this very textual diversity, his works were performed at various non-liturgical devotions of the Collegio Germanico as well as within the framework of church liturgy. The majority of Carissimi’s motets were written for one or two voices and continuo. Thanks to the above mentioned functional diversity, the selection of the continuo or instrument group allows for a quite wide range of options: the players could use an organ, a harpsichord, a lute or occasionally even more than one instrument. Compared to other motets from the same period, the formal variety of the compositions is indeed striking. For instance, Viadana’s concertos or G. F. Anerio’s works, all brief one-movement pieces, demonstrate the traditional constructing principle of the motet, where the text divided into small sections (lines) is set to music in subsequent imitative sections. In Carissimi’s motets, on the other hand, the soloistic monodic sections also play a dominant role besides the traditional motet technique. In several cases, the structure of the motets is based on the alternation of one-, two- and three-part sections. Other form-determining elements may be seen in the alternation of recitative and arioso-type sections, the succession of units separated by a change of metre or the alternation of imitative and isorhythmic lines.

Márta Katona
Translation: David Olah

Renaissance Music: Tallis, Taverner, Josquin, Palestrina, Byrd and Victoria

2011-07-25T22:04:00.004+01:00

The High Renaissance is well known for its cultural giants. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and above all Michelangelo epitomize a period when the human spirit seemed to grow and gain in confidence. There is no more visible proof of this than Michelangelo's seventeen-foot-tall statue of David, more than twice the height of any major piece of sculpture before it. And Italy was not the only country which suddenly seemed to be populated by more-than-life-size men of genius, Shakespeare and Cervantes among them.

Music and musicians can bestride their world in one of two ways. They can either write a masterpiece which is in itself colossal; or they can write so many great works that they slowly change the countryside around them. Thomas Tallis did both. By writing music of the highest quality in every style of the period for nearly sixty years he influenced everybody who followed him. And he also wrote Spem in alium, perhaps not his most influential composition - who could follow it? - but unquestionably the largest single work of the period. Conceived for forty independent voice-parts arranged in eight five-part choirs, Spem in alium, like Michelangelo's David, seems to break through what lesser men had come to accept as normal in music and enter a new world. The effect of forty parts coming together in properly argued polyphony is quite staggering. How did Tallis do it, without modern aids like computers or even sufficiently large pieces of manuscript paper on which to line up all the voices? There is much about Spem in alium which is not known - like why he thought of such a thing in the first place - but the greatest imponderable is how any mind could invent so much detail. Nothing comes close to rivalling it.

The Western Wind Mass by John Taverner is big in a quite different way from Spem in alium. Throughout the Renaissance period there was a vogue for taking popular tunes of the day and dressing them up, a technique which jazz musicians were to emulate in later times. Taverner chose the beautiful melody known as ‘Westron Wynde', a love song which encourages the wind and the rain to do their worst so long as the singer and his beloved can be together. In choosing such a profane model for a Mass-setting Taverner was not in fact doing anything very uncommon; what was unusual was quoting the tune thirty-six times. I do not know any set of variations before Purcell's ‘grounds' to go so far; and, like Purcell, Taverner has the imagination to make them all interesting. He is quite deliberate about it: nine statements in each of the four movements, each one taking on new ideas and counter-themes. No one can miss the tune itself, since it is quoted twenty-one times in the top part, where it is always perfectly audible. It also comes ten times in the tenor part and five in the bass, though it is never sung by the altos. Taverner also helps the listener by making each variation self-contained and running them straight into each other without extra material. This makes the music quite sectional, alternating solo and full passages, but with the melody always present. Taverner was sufficiently a giant of his time to start a brief tradition of Western Wind settings: there are examples by his younger contemporaries Christopher Tye and John Sheppard.

If ever there was a giant among Renaissance composers, it was Josquin. It has become something of a modern cliché to compare his standing with that of Beethoven: a composer who could take any form of music and transform it. Part of his great influence came from the fact that he travelled throughout Europe, the first super-star among composers, a fact which was acknowledged at the time not least because he expected to be paid more than anyone else. He was especially present in Rome, from where he undoubtedly shaped the course of Italian polyphony in general, and Palestrina's style in particular. Josquin's Missa Pange lingua is perhaps his best-known work and possibly his last Mass-setting. In general outline it is not dissimilar from Taverner's Western Wind Mass: a set of variations on a well-known tune, but in this case the tune is a chant melody from the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi; and Josquin almost never quotes it straight. Indeed it is so hidden in the polyphonic texture that one may think of the whole composition as a fantasy on a plainsong, rather than a set of variations. The clearest statement is at the beginning of the third Agnus Dei, where the melody finally emerges in recognizable form in the soprano part.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was by far and away the most celebrated Italian composer of the High Renaissance and, like Josquin, a legend in his lifetime. He was also, unlike any other Renaissance composer of any nationality, celebrated from his own time to ours without interruption. I wonder if any other composer in the history of music, apart from Wagner, has had so much written about him. And apart from all this he was working in and around the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo in his later years, whom he must have known. As a result there is no other composer who is so closely identified with the culture of the Italian Renaissance period. His Missa Brevis was probably written for the Sistine Chapel choir to sing, which would mean that its first performances would have taken place surrounded by Michelangelo's newly painted frescoes. Why the piece is called ‘Brevis' is something of a mystery, since the music is not especially short and all the usual movements are present. It may be because it is scored for only four voices, though this was quite commonplace. The final, glorious Agnus Dei increases the number of voices to five by introducing a second soprano part, in canon with the first.
Unlike his teacher Tallis, William Byrd didn't write any single gigantic work by which he may be remembered. Indeed he is best remembered for his many small-scale pieces which, despite their size, revolutionized English composition. Like several of the other giants, Byrd turned his hand to every form of music available to him, transforming them as he went: music for keyboard, lute, viol consort, voices with viol consort, sacred vocal writing for both the Catholic and Protestant churches, and madrigals. To compare him with Shakespeare has some force since their lives overlapped, they both worked in London at the same time, and they both had the same characteristic intelligence of mind which penetrated to the heart of the words they were involved with. Byrd's Mass for four voices is one of the three Masses he wrote in the 1590s and published, without title pages, in defiance of the Protestant ban on Catholic artefacts. This is not gigantic music in any sense, but subtle, intimate writing which in recent times has achieved greater renown than many much weightier musical edifices of the period.

The Spanish sixteenth century had its own great men and women to celebrate, from St Ignatius Loyola and St Teresa of Avila, to El Greco, Morales and Victoria. It will be seen from these names that the accent there in the High Renaissance was on the Catholic Church and spiritual life. Tomás Luis de Victoria was no exception to this. After being ordained priest in Rome in 1575 he spent the years from 1587 until his death employed at the court in Madrid, initially acting as chaplain to the Dowager Empress Maria, for whose funeral he wrote this Requiem in 1603. It comes as no surprise to discover that Victoria only wrote sacred music, and not very much of it by some standards, but what he did write is of such intensity that for many people his larger works, and especially the six-voice Requiem, are without rival amongst High Renaissance masterpieces. The slow, inevitable unfolding of this music, movement by movement, in complete serenity surely has a message for all time.

Peter Phillips
(2006)

Nicolas Gombert's Magnificat Settings

2011-07-20T12:10:00.005+01:00

Of all the many masters of the Flemish Renaissance who are held to be of minor interest, Nicolas Gombert (c.1495-c.1560) least deserves it. Although his star has risen appreciably in the last ten years, there is a long way to go before his uniquely expressive style is properly recognized for what it was; and this will never be achieved without reference to his 'swansong' and most substantial masterpiece, the set of eight Magnificats, one on each of the eight Tones.

They form an anthology of everything he was capable of. Throughout his career he had developed an interest in dense textures. Very rarely resorting to chordal writing and preferring bass- and tenor-heavy textures, he had specialized in the kind of polyphony which makes a virtue of detail; and to pack in yet more of it he tended to use five or six voices where, in Josquin, four would have sufficed, sometimes fitting in lines where the outside observer would have sworn that to add anything further was impossible. With such a starting-point, it is a miracle of his art that he always managed to avoid a featureless muddiness. Indeed, the way the imitation works between the voices is as clear as it is resourceful and intensely argued, as tight as a bud which occasionally is allowed to blossom into fully fledged sequences and brief melodies.

What will surely strike the listener's ear is the number of dissonances which Gombert wrote. In part these are the inevitable result of his habit of filling up the sonority. The polyphonic strands, more motivic than straightforwardly melodic, can seem deliberately to bump into each other, the range of expressive possibilities increased by his cavalier interpretation of the rules of normal part-writing. Particular examples of this are his delight in leaping from dissonant notes and not preparing suspensions properly; and yet he always moves his lines within narrow tessituras, in a restricted overall range, the top notes never very high, the low notes not low. One unexpected aspect of this technique is that the actual voice ranges are constantly shifting about: what is meant by 'tenor', for instance, is never stable. Another is the constant opportunity to deploy false relations, sometimes known as 'English clashes', by inflecting notes at cadences.

There is some historical evidence (and a story worth retelling) to suggest that this set of Magnificats was indeed the summation of all that Gombert had striven for in his music. The source of it is a contemporary physician and polymath named Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) who recounted that Gombert was at one point imprisoned in a galley on the orders of Charles V, after having been convicted of molesting a choirboy in his care, and secured his release by composing his 'swansongs' which so pleased the Emperor that he was pardoned and allowed to retire to a benefice. It is known that Gombert did retire to a benefice in Tournai, and the Magnificats (his last major works, and in a genre in which he had previously shown no interest) fit the designation 'swansong' very well, for all that it is a little hard to imagine why he should have turned his mind to such things when bobbing around on the ocean chained in a cabin. Previous to this imprisonment he had, in 1526, joined the chapel of Charles V as a singer, and by 1529 was the master of the choirboys of the Imperial Chapel. He is present in documents from 1526 to 1537 but is not present in a chapel list of 1540. In 1547 he describes himself as a canon of the Cathedral of Tournai, and he appears to have died before 1560.

All the Magnificats follow the same basic pattern: setting the even-numbered verses to polyphony and leaving the odd-numbered ones in chant. The early verses tend to be scored for four voices, increasing to five or more by the last one. Much of Gombert's material is derived from the chant itself, as can be clearly heard in the points of imitation at the beginning of each setting. Furthermore, he faithfully retained the pitches of the cadences within the chant tones, using them in the polyphony both at the halfway point and at the end of each verse. (In his settings of Tones 3 and 6 he gives the performer two options, made possible by the fact that the contours of Tones 3 and 8 are similar, as are those of 6 and 1. In both cases he provides a setting of Tones 3 and 6, complete with final cadence in each verse and a sign to show that those tones end there. However, he then extends each setting to accommodate Tone 8 and 1 endings respectively, presumably for practical reasons for performance within the liturgy.).

Each of the Magnificats has its own characteristics:

Tone 1 introduces the listener to the essential method, beginning with the four standard voices SATB and eventually scoring up to five and then six, always doubling the lower parts, never the soprano and rarely the alto. As with some of the later settings, all the verses (except the three-part 'Fecit potentiam') begin with two melodies sounding together, one derived from the chant and the other apparently free - what is known as 'double counterpoint', a device much favoured by J S Bach in his fugues. The relationship between the various statements of these ideas, and how they combine, is unbelievably intricate. The intensity of this kind of writing is, however, regularly lightened by outward-going cadential flourishes, like the extended one into B flat at 'et in saecula' in the last verse.

Tone 2 again features four-part writing at the beginning, scoring down to three and then two parts in the middle verses, finally expanding to five in the last. Nowhere is the overall tessitura wide enough at written pitch to accommodate a soprano part (and the first tenor part is persistently a third higher than the second). Gombert's ability to derive points and imitative schemes from the chant tone alone is crystal clear in this setting, and nowhere more so than in the two-part 'Esurientes'. Only in the last two polyphonic verses does he turn to the relative complexities of double counterpoint again.

Tone 3 presents what might be called the ideal Gombert scheme for the Magnificat: beginning with three voices and then adding one with each new verse, ending up, five verses later, with eight. The effect of these additions, while working the same basic (chant- based) material, is to state that material in an ever-denser context: a kind of aural perspective which opens out before your ears, the music acquiring extra dimensions as the same ideas are deepened and intensified. Gombert keeps the opening point unaltered until he reaches the seven-voice 'Sicut locutus est', when it goes into long notes, first in the top part and then in one or other of the tenors. The last verse employs four of the eight voices in two separate canons, one of them (between a soprano and a tenor) reverting to the chant- based point of the earlier verses. From the third verse (in five parts) onwards this Magnificat provides some of the most exhilarating polyphony of the mid-sixteenth century.

Tone 4, like Tones 2 and 5, is essentially a four-part setting - without a soprano part but including two unequal tenors. It is probably the strictest of all the settings in deriving its material from the chant, the extra bass part in the last verse (now in six parts) providing a further resonant example of aural perspective. Just when one might conclude that one has heard all that can possibly be done with the basic material, Gombert underpins the texure with yet another entry, lower in pitch than anything stated previously. There is little else in the period to rival the intensity of this technique, which Gombert revisits even more memorably in the last verse of Tone 8.

The chant of Tone 5 is transparently rooted in what the modern ear would call F major, beginning with the three notes of the triad F-A-C. Gombert equally transparently takes this as his starting point in each polyphonic verse, either using the triad in imitation (‘Fecit potentiam' and ‘Sicut locutus est') or filling it in to make a scale in imitation (‘Quia fecit' and ‘Sicut erat'). This is the only Magnificat of the set to add a voice on top of the previously established texture in the last verse, necessitating the introduction of sopranos.

Although Gombert's setting of Tone 3 is the most elaborate of his Magnificats in terms of numbers of voice-parts, Tone 6 is the most substantial in polyphonic terms, as beautiful in its detail as it is exquisitely crafted. All the basic material is consistently worked at greater length than elsewhere, which gives Gombert scope for such things as memorable sequences (especially at ‘et nunc, et semper' in the last verse), double points and even, at the very opening, augmentation. Added to this is the effectiveness of the scoring, the last three polyphonic verses (TTB, TTBB, ATTBB) proceeding as if in a broad sweep to the final few bars. These bars are among the most highly dissonant, thickly scored and intense Gombert ever wrote.

By contrast Tone 7 is the least orthodox of the set. Gombert's writing here has a harmonic uneasiness, often to be found in music based on this Tone, which is inherent in the chant melodies themselves. In modern terminology, although the notes of these melodies seem loosely to move around the triad of A minor, at the same time they convey a feeling of F major. And there is the further complication of the tritone between F and B natural, also characteristic of this Tone, though the angularity of it can be eased in the polyphony by applying musica ficta. It was part of Gombert's musical personality to explore and if possible emphasize problematic issues like these, which he does here by regularly writing phrases which include the tritone, and by beginning four of the six polyphonic verses in F, but ending them all in A. The result, in its own way, is a tour-de-force.

Tone 8 makes a fitting climax to the set, both in the subtlety of its motivic elaboration and, unusually, in the beauty of its melodies. In addition Gombert's scoring is at its most flexible here, the fifth polyphonic verse adding an extra alto part to the established SATB choir, which gives the only incidence of doubled altos in the set (he never did double the sopranos). This part then disappears again in the last verse which resumes Gombert's favourite technique of adding new parts below the prevailing texture, conjuring a low bass out of nowhere. The result is the five lower voices presenting and representing musical motifs in a narrow vocal range while the sopranos sing unforgettable arabesques above them (‘et in saecula'). To conceive such involving detail within a deliberately restricted idiom is a characteristic of chamber music of any period at its very best.

Peter Phillips
(2002)

Juan G. de Padilla's 'Lamentations of Jeremiah'

2011-07-16T15:16:00.009+01:00

Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (c.1590-1664) is the best-known representative of the Spanish school of composers in Mexico. Born in Málaga, he was employed as a church musician firstly in Jerez de la Frontera and then in Cádiz before moving to New Spain no later than the autumn of 1622. On 11 October he was named cantor and assistant Maestro at Puebla Cathedral with an annual salary of 500 pesos, at a time when this Cathedral boasted a musical establishment on a par with the best in Europe. In 1629 Padilla became Maestro de Capilla, a post he retained until his death.

His six-voice setting of the Lamentations is one of his finest achievements, employing an impassioned musical language which is spiced up with the augmented intervals beloved of every Iberian composer of note in the early seventeenth century, Portuguese as much as Spanish. The reduced-voice section at 'Ghimel', followed by the verse 'Migravit Judas', is a classic case of this. I have never elsewhere come across the astonishing harmonic move he makes at ‘inter gentes'. The fact that this set is scored for SSATTB points to the influence of Victoria and other Spaniards, who tended to favour this line-up in six parts. Victoria's seminal setting of the Requiem is scored like this. Quite why it was thought appropriate to use such a potentially bright sound for Requiems and Laments is one of the many mysteries of the Spanish school.

Peter Phillips

Oratorios by Giacomo Carissimi

2011-07-13T20:27:00.009+01:00

Giacomo Carissimi was born inn 1605 in Marino not far from Rome. His musical career began as a member of the choir at Tivoli Cathedral, where in 1627 he was appointed organist. After subsequently serving for a short time as organist and maestro di capella in Assisi he received the prestigious position of maestro di capella at the Collegio Germanico in Rome, one of the most important Jesuit educational institutions where his predecessors included notable composers such as Victoria and Agazzari. Although Carissimi, received offers to succeed Monteverdi at St. Mark’s Venice and from the Viennese court he preferred to stay in Rome in the same position for the rest of his life. After his death the sale of his compositions was forbidden by the pope Clement X with the intent of saving them for prosperity; the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 and the destruction of the S. Apollinare music archives resulted in many of his compositions being lost. Fortunately however, the fame of Carissimi in his own lifetime lead to the widespread dissemination of his music throughout Europe and many of his compositions survive in French, German and English manuscripts. Among his pupils were Charpentier, Kaspar Förster, J. K. Kerll, and Christoph Bernhard.

This text presents four hitherto unknown oratorios, which were considered either to have been lost or in the case of Diluvium Universale only known in a completely preserved French manuscript, belonging to the Hamburg State Library.

Apart from his duties at the college and at the church of S. Apollinare which belonged to it, Carissimi is known to have frequently taken part in performances at the Oratorio del Ss Crocifisso. The French viol-player Andrè Maugars, who visited Rome in 1639 described performances of music at Crocifisso as follows:

«There is yet another kind of music, which is not at all in use in France, and which for that reason well merits my giving you a detailed account. It is called stile recitatif. The best that I have heard has been in the Oratory of San Marcello, where there is a congregation of the Brothers of the Holy Crucifix, composed of the most important gentlemen of Rome, who consequently have the means to assemble the rarest that Italy produces; and in fact, the most excellent musicians pride themselves in being there, and the most competent composers solicit the honour of having their compositions heard here and try to show in them all the best results of their study. This admirable and ravishing music is performed only on the Fridays of Lent from three until six o’clock. The church is by no means as large as the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; at the end of [the church] there is a spacious loft with a medium-sized organ, very soft and very suitable for the voices. On the two sides of the church there are two more small stages where there were the most excellent instrumentalists. The voices would begin with a psalm in motet form, - and then all the instruments would play a very good symphony. Afterwards the voices would sing a story from the Old Testaments in the form of a spiritual play, such as that of Susanna, Judith and Holofernes, or David and Goliath. Each singer represented a personage of the story and expressed perfectly the force of the words. Then one of the most celebrated preachers would give the exhortation. That finished, the singers performed the Gospel of the day, such as the story of the Samaritan woman, the woman of Cana, Lazarus, the Magdalen, or the Passion of our Lord; the singers imitated perfectly the different personages whom the Evangelist mentioned. I could not praise enough that musique recitative; it is necessary to have heard it on the spot to judge well its merits. As for instrumental music, it consisted of an organ, a large harpsichord, a lyra, two or three violins, and two or three archlutes».

Whether any of the music heard by Maugars was by Carissimi, we do not know; of the oratorios described the only surviving oratorio by Carissimi is David and Goliath. Performing forces seem to have varied considerably from six to twenty singers and three to fifteen instruments. A later source, Arcangelo Spagna writing in 1706 tells us «The greatest attention was paid to the multiplication of instruments, separating them into various choruses for the grandiosity of the pomp, and, to make room for the great number of singers who performed there, various platforms were constructed» - a description which would seem to apply to Carissimi’s larger-scale works such as Diluvium Universale.

Among musicologists there has been much discussion as to which – if any – of Carissimi’s works should be considered oratorios, or whether they should be designated dialogues, historiae or simply motets. These terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive and performance of these works was by no means limited to oratories. They could equally well be performed within the liturgical context during mass or vespers. Spagna also tells us «the Latin oratorios, in the beginning, were like those motets... heard on every feast day instead of the antiphons, graduals and offertories». Nevertheless, it would seem likely that at least the longer compositions Regina Hester and Diluvium Universale were originally conceived by Carissimi for oratory performances.

All four works are free dramatic texts, perhaps by the composer himself, based on biblical episodes. The passages for the historicus, the narrator, which form the framework of the story, the text uses suitable passages from the Vulgate Bible, sometimes quoted literally, sometime paraphrased. Chosen elements of the basic story are freely embellished and enlivened with short arias and choruses of lamentation, joy, war or victory to make a dramatic whole. The choruses are generally set in a harmonically simple, homophonic style; rhythmic vitality and accentuation are of foremost importance, with the aim of making the words and content clearly understood by the listener.

The imagery of the texts give the composer plenty of opportunity for sound painting; cloudbursts, thunder and lightening for example are vividly depicted in the Diluvium. Dactylic rhythms, derived from Monteverdi’s stile concitato are often used by the poet and composer to depict war and shrive.
Carissimi makes only modest demands on the lower voices in these oratorios but he seems to have had some excellent castrati available for the soprano voices. He makes extensive use of coloraturas to portray affects such as joy and glory. Aman’s vanity and arrogance is brilliantly depicted by a run over two octaves up to high c, two notes higher than the highest note, that otherwise occurs, the pride in his achievement coming directly before his fall.

Regina Hester is for the main part limited to a portrayal of the two characters Aman and Esther. Mordechai, Esther’s uncle, who through his refusal to bow down to Aman has provoked his hatred of the Jews is not mentioned. Despite the prominence of the role of Aman, it is the dialogue between Assuerus and Esther which represents the central part of the story. The dialogue – between David and Goliath and Noah and God respectively – also plays a central role in two of the other oratorios. However they differ from older Latin dialogues through the important role given to the choruses as well as the connection of the parts through a narrator which makes them into real oratorios. Interfecto Sisara is here an exception; apart from the narration at the beginning from the tenor, a solo soprano alternates with the chorus in the manner of a concerto grosso.

However one chooses to name these pieces there can be no doubt that they are important rediscoveries that contribute welcome additions to the repertoire of a great composer who, in the words of Athanasius Kircher, writing in 1650 could better than all others «move the minds of his listener to whatever affection he wishes».

Roland Wilson

Giovanni P. da Palestrina's Missa 'Nasce la Gioja Mia'

2011-07-10T15:09:00.001+01:00

The model for Nasce la gioja mia has never been in doubt, though it remains a slight curiosity, for Palestrina rarely used secular music as a starting-point for his masses. Of the 104 masses by him so far catalogued (there may be others in manuscript), 53 are of the parody type. Of these, nine are founded on secular polyphonic works - madrigals in the case of eight of them, and a chanson. Their composers were Domenico Ferrabosco (twice), Cipriano de Rore (twice), Palestrina himself (three times) and Lupi or Cadeac for the chanson. Primavera in some ways was a strange choice. His contemporary reputation was for writing light Napolitane for three voices to texts in Neapolitan dialect and Palestrina never showed much interest in that kind of music.

Then there is the question of where Palestrina found this unusual example of a Primavera madrigal. Since it was not in print until 1565, by which time it is generally reckoned that Palestrina had given up this kind of composition, he must have sought it out in manuscript, which would make it one of the latest, if not the latest 'parody' mass in his output.

Primavera was born between 1540 and 1545. He spent most of his life working in Naples, though for about ten years after 1565 he worked in Milan. He probably died in Naples around 1585. His Napolitane are full of popular melodies and famously contain chains of consecutive fifths in the part-writing. He dedicated his Seventh Book of Madrigals to Carlo Gesualdo, though his music shows no influence from that wayward genius. Palestrina did well to find this work, for it is a fine example of the larger-voiced madrigal - stately in effect and full of sonorous writing, which Palestrina knew very well how to make the most of. Indeed, Primavera's music here consists largely of well-spaced chords in compact phrases, and the whole piece is cast in ABB form, the repeat coming at 'O sol'.

The main differences between the mass-setting and its model are the length of Palestrina's phrases and an increased brilliance in the overall sound caused by raising the tessitura of the two tenor parts. With little imitation in the original to show him the way, Palestrina nonetheless managed to extend the ingredients of this material into one of the longest and most magnificent of all his settings. For instance the opening of the madrigal uses a figure of three notes which is continued for four bars before a new phrase starts. Palestrina immediately led off in the first Kyrie with eleven bars of this, returning to its basic outline at the beginning of every subsequent movement. Another motif which features regularly in the mass is the powerful leap up a fourth at 'E la mia vita' in the first soprano part, imitated in the madrigal immediately by the second tenor. This was parodied for the first time by Palestrina at the beginning of the second Kyrie, and most memorably at the beginning of the second Agnus Dei. However, in general Palestrina did not try to preserve strict imitative schemes in this mass, no doubt partly encouraged by the nature of his model, but partly also because his mature style, despite what the text-books tell us, often ignored this procedure. Both works are scored for SSATTB.

Peter Phillips
(1986)

Josquin Desprez's 'Pange Lingua' and 'La Sol Fa Re Mi' Masses

2011-07-08T12:18:00.000+01:00

These two mass-settings, both for four voices, were written at different periods in Josquin's long career. La sol fa re mi was published in 1502, whereas Pange lingua was a late work, possibly Josquin's last mass-setting, not published until after his death, in 1539. The change in style is immediately apparent. In the middle of his life, Josquin often liked to tax his powers of invention by setting himself difficult puzzles to solve, but later relaxed until he came to perfect a freer kind of music. In the case of Pange lingua, widely acknowledged as one of his masterpieces, this freedom takes the form of 'a fantasy on a plainsong'. In both settings Josquin's mastery of vocal texture may be fully admired: many of his contemporaries needed five or six voices to achieve the kind of sonority which he could conceive with four.

By taking a plainsong melody for his setting entitled Pange lingua, Josquin gave himself much more scope than in La sol fa re mi. However he decided to extend this freedom by writing such expansive vocal lines that it is sometimes impossible to tell whether the melody is being 'paraphrased' or not. At any rate it was in this work that Josquin finally made the art of imitation, by which all the voices must be treated as being equal, of primary importance. This technique had profound repercussions for later renaissance music throughout Europe.

The Pange lingua chant was originally intended as a hymn for the feast of Corpus Christi. It may be heard clearly in Josquin's setting in the soprano part of the final 'Agnus Dei' where it at last emerges in recognisable form. Elsewhere it tends to be the soprano part which makes the most obvious references to the melody, for instance in the Kyrie, at the beginning of the Gloria and at the 'Et incarnatus est'. For the rest, fragments appear and disappear, either forming part of longer, quite new melodies, or abbreviated into one of Josquin's characteristically terse rhythmic units. In this way he achieved the variety of expression which has led to this mass being so widely admired.

La sol fa re mi, as its name implies, is based on the solmisation notes which these syllables represented in the medieval scale: A, G, F, D and E. Virtually the whole mass is derived from this single five-note phrase, which may be clearly heard in different note-lengths and occasionally in different pitches in one or other of the parts. It is mostly found in the tenor (which in fact does not differ significantly in tessitura from the alto part). To write an entire mass-setting which strictly retains the statement of five notes throughout as a kind of very abrupt cantus firmus is an astonishing feat of sheer inventiveness. Josquin had tried out the same technique in an earlier mass entitled Faisant regretz (based on 'fa re mi re') but had there allowed himself the opportunity of transposing the ostinato up and down by step, a procedure which was commonly followed by other composers of the time, like Obrecht and Isaac. The technique of La sol fa re mi, on the other hand, was sophisticated and rare.

However it was not Josquin's idea in the first place to use these notes. According to Glareanus, writing in 1547, they originated in mimicry of an unknown potentate who used to send away importunate suitors with the words 'Lascia fare mi' (Leave it to me). Whether this is true or not, a number of popular songs of the time were written around the phrase. Apart from basing the tenor on it almost exclusively, Josquin was able to lend it to the other parts in his mass-setting by the technique of initial imitation, for instance in the 'Christe' and first 'Hosanna'. The 'Pleni sunt' is imitative throughout. Only once (in the bass part at the end of the 'Christe') is the ostinato transposed to begin on D (subsequently necessitating a B flat). Otherwise, in more than two hundred repetitions, it starts on A or E. Perhaps the finest moment comes at the very end of the 'Agnus Dei' (I and III) where the note-lengths of the ostinato become shorter and shorter as the mystical nature of the music intensifies.

Peter Phillips
(1993)

Josquin Desprez

2011-07-07T12:19:00.000+01:00

On the Way to Bethlehem: Music of the Medieval Pilgrim

2011-07-05T22:23:00.000+01:00

Whan that April with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
-
Thane longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowth in sundry londes.

(Chaucer, excerpt from The Prologue of The Canterbury Tales)

A traveller in the Middle Ages, whether pilgrim, crusader, messenger, cleric, student, beggar, merchant, king or Pope, was faced with dangers and difficulties along the road which we could barely imagine today. While this was especially true of journeys of some distance, into familiar territory, such travel was nevertheless common for a variety of reasons. We will concern ourselves here with travel to the Holy Land. For some people the journey was penance for a crime, others were motivated by deeply religious conviction, and still others were mainly interested in acquiring relics to bring home.

The relationship that developed between Europeans and non-Europeans through foreign commerce contributed greatly to the expansion of the travel routes. Trading in spices, perfumes, incense, narcotics and aphrodisiacs provided for centuries of contact between the Christian and the Islamic world. A negative aspect of this was the smugglers who sometimes disguised themselves as pilgrims. According to reports of the time, silkworm eggs were being smuggled from China to Jerusalem or, secret messages were hidden in pilgrim staffs. Because of this, anyone dressed as a pilgrim could be suspected of spying, subversion or dealing in contraband. So it was that Saint Coloman, while on a pilgrimage from England to the Holy Land, was hanged as a spy near Vienna.

While early pilgrimages, between the fourth and seventh centuries were thought of as a journey into penitence and solitude, or as a final destination in seeking a sanctified death, a radical change in philosophy took place when organized tours to the Holy Land, whatever Crusades or group pilgrimages, began. Now, rather than dying in the Holy Land, the lucky pilgrim who reached his goal was thought to be rewarded by God with earthly and heavenly riches, which he could then bring home. A pilgrimage no longer meant the end of one’s life – it could even be repeated.

Maps were available for pilgrims. In extant maps of the Orient from the high Middle Ages, Jerusalem is pictured as the centre of the holy experience; the known continents of the time, Europe, Asia and Africa, are pictured surrounding it.

As early as the late fifteenth century, pilgrimages to the Holy Land, most by sea, were well-planned of differing class fares, with interpreters, tour guides, and phrasebooks, according to the 1484 travel report of the Canon of Mainze, Bernhard von Breydenbach. While these journeys eventually became routine, the ever-present obstacles of wheather, disease, robbery, etc., could not be overlooked: it was usual to expect a pilgrimage to take an entire year.

Every pilgrim who wanted to return home safely needed to have some facility with Latin, Greek, and Arabic. In Eastern Europe he could get by with a mixture of rudimentary Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as with words from German, French (Franconian) and Italian dialects. Where words failed, sign languages, gestures and music helped. Musical talent was often useful in the search for food and lodging along the way, and was offered as thanks, as a symbol of gratitude and honour. Reports tell of a traveller who was a frequent or long-term guest in a place being given a parting dinner which included a complete musical programme. This is one of the ways that travellers came into contact with unknown and exotic musical practices.

About a century after the founding of Islam, Sufism was developed. Spawning a new epoch of the classic Arabic school, the Sufi and Dervish orders believed that only those who understood “how to hear music” could experience higher truth through spiritual ecstasy.

Reports of people who died while in an ecstasy trance, inspired by listening to music, are not uncommon in Arabic literature. The music responsible for such rapture is based on a modal system using untempered intervals. Each melody has its own scale, pitch and range. A modern Mevlevi Orchestra is made up of singers and instrumentalists; flutes and drums accompany the dance of the Whirling Dervishes. Dinarezade and Mevlana are examples of melodies that invite the listener to spend time with the music, enough to absorb and feel its full effect.

It offers a musical journey from England, the most western country and launching point of the first Crusade, through France, Germany, Eastern Europe, as far east as Syria. The music from the Balkans and the Near East are traditional, meaning, with the exception of the Sufi music, that it is popular music, rather than art music. As is usual with popular music, the melodies were not, or were only partially, notated. Information about the performance practices is obtained only from secondary sources, such as travel reports and iconography. This music was orally transmitted, slowly changing over generations, before it was, only recently, written down, within the last few centuries. It is therefore not surprising to encounter different versions of the same piece of music.

Michael Posch/Marc Ambrosini
(1995)
Translation: Ellen Santaniello

Carlos Seixas - Harpsichord Concerto & Sympony

2011-07-02T22:58:00.000+01:00

Orlando di Lasso - Lagrime di San Pietro

2011-06-29T02:45:00.000+01:00

This is a fantastic work by one of the most notable composers of the 16th century.

(random order)

Cor Mio, Deh Non Languire: 21 Settings of Giovanni B. Guarini

2011-06-25T10:25:00.024+01:00

Cor mio, deh, non languire, | Dear heart, I prithee, do not waste away,
Che fai teco languir l'anima mia. | for my soul would waste away with you.
Odi i caldi sospiri: a te gl'invia | Hear my urgent sighs: they come to you
La pietate, e 'l desire. | borne by pity and by tender longing.
Mira in questi d'amor languidi lumi | See from my eyes, dimmed by a lover's tears,
Come il duol mi consumi. | how grief consumes me.
S' i' ti potessi dar morendo aita | If my death could bring relief to you,
Morrei per darti vita. | I would die that you might live.
Ma vivi, oimè, ch'ingiustamente more | Oh live! for death, alas, is culpable
Chi vivo tien nel'altrui petto il core. | when other lives depend upon your own.

Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538-1612), Rome, 1598,

This apparently simple poem proved to be one of the most popular texts for setting to music in the early seventeenth century: twenty eight different settings of the poem were published between 1597 and 1656, and two more settings (there may well be more waiting to be discovered) exist in manuscript sources, one of which was not composed until around 1700.

Of the thirty surviving settings, nine are incomplete. It is a sobering thought that the ravages of the four intervening centuries have rendered about one third of our musical culture irretrievable. The total of thirty settings of Guarini's poem might have been increased by twenty five percent if the project had included 'parody' poems directly influenced by Cor mio (emulating its rhyme sequence, imagery and vocabulary, for instance) but for the sake of clarity - and to keep the project within reasonable bounds - it was decided to limit the research to settings of the original poem only. Just as there were poetic 'parodies', however, so we will find that there was a vigorous tradition of musical 'parodies' too.

In addition to charting the fortunes of one (relatively insignificant) poem, this project also allows us to enjoy the historical development of at least two strands of music: first, the maturing of the prima prattica style, the fullest flowering of renaissance secular polyphony, and second, the emergence and emancipation of the solo song with continuo accompaniment at the beginning of the seventeenth century. If the writers of our history books had been wiser, we would also have been able to enjoy a third style, the merging of the previous two, but no label exists for such a harmonious (and mature) development. Nevertheless, several of the pieces really do belong to an unacknowledged terza prattica.

One feature that will be immediately clear is that few of the composers' names are familiar. This period, more than any other in European musical history, abounds with forgotten names whose owners reveal themselves to be at least craftsmen and at best unsung geniuses. Several of these settings - such as those by Grabbe, Nantermi and Scialla, to name but three - are arresting enough to make us want to search out more of their works.

It all starts (and ends) with the poem, a mere trifle by Guarini, the master poet of the last twenty years of renaissance Italy who captured the attention of the cognoscenti. Thanks to the exacting and discriminating taste and support of Duke Alfonso II d'Este, Ferrara was the focal point for a great deal of advanced musical and poetic activity. The scene was rich in creative possibilities and it is likely that much of Guarini's work was oriented towards Ferrara.

Duke Alfonso's great pride was his concerto delle donne - three singing ladies of exquisite charm and great beauty of voice, who were stunning performers. Few had actually heard them, but anyone in Europe of any breeding had certainly heard about them. The work by the Ferrarese Luzzasco Luzzaschi (?1545-1607), gives some idea of how they must have sounded. Although not published until 1601, this is one of the earliest settings of Cor mio.

In contrast, the next four settings present a more normal display of the art of vocal polyphony at the end of the sixteenth century, which by this time had already passed through a 'classical' phase to enter the affected mannerist style. The first published setting of Cor mio, by Alessandro Savioli (1544-after 1623), appeared in 1597 - that is, one year before the poem was first printed: Savioli must have had access to a manuscript version. This very individual setting of Cor mio shows Savioli to be typical of the forgotten men of genius, whose work is excellent, original, and worthy of our best attention. He uses compositional devices with freshness and deep skill - a delight to the sense and a challenge to the mind.

Gemignano Capilupi (1573-1616) shows a more prolix approach to composing, using repetition much more liberally than Savioli. This is followed by a setting by Benedetto Pallavicino (1551-1601), whose mature style was influenced by Giaches de Wert and possibly the young Monteverdi. The fourth and last setting from this early group of Cor mio madrigals brings in a new element to the pure vocal polyphony of the first three examples. The composer is Salomone Rossi (1570-c.1630), who, despite an essential conservatism of style, was the first composer to include an instrumental continuo accompaniment to a five-voice texture. This was to become normal practice over the next twenty years, but Rossi can lay claim to be the innovator.

It is not easy to see why Cor mio was so popular. To the twentieth-century mind there seems to be little to distinguish it from numerous other verses of the time devoted to the languishing thoughts of a melancholy lover. The poem certainly doesn't have that universal power of a sonnet by Petrarch or Shakespeare, but perhaps that partly answers the question: the poem is insufficient in itself, and cries out to be set to music! It has ten lines of 7 and 11 syllables, and a fairly typical rhyme-scheme and structure: two quatrains and a concluding couplet (which acts as a summation of statements in the quatrains). The natural pauses happen at different points in the rhyming sequence, and this subtle interplay between pauses and rhymes offers the composer a delightful array of choices for musical setting, such as deciding which phrases can take repetition in order to complete a satis fying musical architecture. In addition, Guarini's vocabulary offers enough potent images for these to be captured in the music without overloading the flow of musical line and melody. The composer can dwell on 'languir', 'sospiri', 'pietate' if he desires - basically one image per line - whilst still maintaining an essential tactus. As the poem proceeds, the images become stronger, allowing the composer to increase the tension by numerous techniques such as word-repetition, shortened note values, active rhythms, and harmonic suspensions. In summary, then, the poem's simplicity, clarity, brevity (and, one might almost add, banality) make it a perfect subject for musical treatment.

The famous Giulio Caccini (c.1545-1618) chose this poem to reveal some of his ideas on vocal ornamentation in his epoch-making Le nuove musiche of 1602. In the preface he gives a number of musical examples defining the new style, which he claims to have invented. These examples consist of two- and three-bar fragments of Cor mio, yet no complete setting by Caccini of the text survives. The aim of the new style was to 'delight the senses' and to 'move the affect of the soul' (touch the heart). To this end, Caccini elaborated many vocal techniques within the new recitative style whose sole function was, through sprezzatura and grazia, to reach the soul of the listener.

In the first example Caccini explains the esclamazione. A straightforward crescendo can sound 'harsh and unbearable to the ear', but a much more effective result is obtained if the singer first 'relaxes the voice', so that the crescendo is preceded by a diminuendo. Caccini speaks next of the trillo and gruppo, saying that there is more grace in the trillo than in other ornaments. He goes on to say that if these examples (which combine several vocal effects) are practised diligently, then 'one may train oneself in every most affective turn and thereby gain greater perfection'. Thus, the singer's art is developed to raise the soul of the listener. Caccini's grazia is the stuff of Orphic legend.

Though we might regret not having a complete Cor mio setting by Caccini, other composers of monody did follow his inspiration and have left quite beautiful versions of their own. For the moment, though, back to polyphony - a form of musical structuring not without its own powerful Orphic influences. The next three unaccompanied five-voice settings were published at the beginning of the new century. The first, by Leone Leoni (c.1560-1627), strikes one as well-constructed but lacking inspiration. There are, however, some excellent musical images, particularly the figure he creates at the word 'ingiustamente'. In contrast, the setting by Giovanni Priuli (c.1575-1629) reveals this composer's contribution to the new Venetian style - exotic, deliberately fragmented, soloistic, with a hint of antiphonal writing, and wonderfully affective false relations at the end. The last of this group of three is by the Sicilianborn Sigismondo d'India (c. 1582-1629), from his first youthful collection of 1606. Already he establishes his credentials, which commentators now describe as being second only to Monteverdi in this period. His style can only be described as bizarre, a touch quirky, and ultra-mannered.

Giovanni Ghizzolo (fl. 1608-1625), like d'India, was equally at home in the polyphonic and monodic traditions, but for his Cor mio he chose to use one voice and continuo and to keep the style simple, leaving little room for the singer to apply the decorative techniques espoused by Caccini. This is followed by the only Cor mio setting by a German composer, Johann Grabbe. (1585-1655). It displays remarkable flexibility and invention within the chosen constraints of polyphony.

Next come two more masterly settings produced in those fertile years 1609 and 1610, again by little-known composers. The first is by Filiberto Nantermi (fl. 1609), in a style which is motet-like, conservative, yet very expressive, rich and emotionally expansive, and the second, by Alessandro Scialla (fl. 1610), is a charming, gem-like piece of assured craftsmanship.

We turn now to something of a novelty, and a discovery of ours: the only setting of Cor mio by an English composer, the madrigalist John Ward. His style is majestic, resonant and lofty - inspired melancholy, in the true Jacobean manner. His setting survives in two separate sets of manuscripts. One source contains only the music, in five parts; bearing just the incipit, it resembles a viol fantasia, and has been described by scholars as a fantasia with a colourful Italian title. The other source consists of a bass line only, but it is fully texted with the entire Guarini poem. By piecing the two together an excellent Italian-style madrigal is revealed, proving that John Ward was not so insular in his Englishness after all, but responsive to, and conversant with, the latest Italian mannered style.

Next come the last two purely vocal settings of Cor mio. All subsequent versions require continuo participation and move away from the hitherto dominant five-voice texture. Enrico Radesca da Foggia (d. 1625) was at the forefront of a lighter, more refreshed style of composition which was a reaction against the heady intellectual polyphony around him. Giuseppe Palazzotto (c.1587-after 1633) could be considered conservative in writing for the older five-voice texture, but his emancipated polyphonic writing, characteristic of the southern Italian style of chromatic, nervous tension, suggests that Palazzotto deserves to be seen as a Sicilian Monteverdi.

The solo songs which follow range from the wayward turbulence of the untamed noble amateur, Claudio Saracini (1586-after 1649), to the setting by Adriano Banchieri (1586-1634), the only one to be scored for vocal duet with continuo, while the last piece in this group, by Giovanni Pasta (1604-1663/64), has an excellent four-voice texture, sonorous harmonies and wellspaced entries.

After the 1620s there is a long gap before any new settings of Cor mio appear. Even the incomplete sources reveal only one, published in 1640. The next complete version was printed in 1656, by the Roman composer Pompeo Natali (d. after 1681), who clearly enjoyed reviving the oldfashioned poetry of Guarini for a little light-weight diversion.

Reasons for this gap of over thirty years are not hard to find: the impetus of renaissance equalvoiced polyphony had completely run down, giving way to a new soloistic virtuosity, to theatrical vocal display and the desire to expose every fleeting nuance of the text. New musical architectures emerged to carry the new concepts, such as the developing cantata style. Madrigals continued to be composed throughout the seventeenth century, but were profoundly influenced by these changes, and the output was greatly reduced compared to the outpouring around 1600. The poetry of Guarini was considered old-fashioned, too, and the more cavalier style of younger poets such as Marini was preferred.

The middle years of the seventeenth century were certainly ones of change and are even, perhaps, to be seen as a watershed - man now placed himself at the centre of his own observable universe, instead of kneeling awestruck before a theocentric creation. Such momentous concepts had a fundamental effect on vocal polyphony, which had, after all, been created by men to sing God's praises in imitation of eternalfychoiring angels.

We turn now to the final chapter of the onehundred-year saga of Cor mio. In the closing years of the seventeenth century there was a rising interest in musical antiquarianism (it was a reaction to the ever more facile music for theatre), encouraged by certain discerning patrons. Those with long memories harked back to the towering stature of the music of their youth, and found the current output wanting. But in addition to this fin de siècle tendency, some composers, of their own volition, began to study again the great polyphonic masters, and were deeply impressed by their purity of style and level of craftsmanship.

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) was one such composer. His setting of Cor mio comes from a remarkable collection of his polyphonic madrigals which use the poetic texts popular one hundred years earlier. Clearly having steeped himself in polyphonic techniques, Scarlatti fuses, in a most imaginative way, the extended harmonic language of his day with the strict rules of renaissance counterpoint. The result is beautiful, bizarre and stirring music that sounds utterly new. In a strange way, history repeats itself in another respect, too, for Scarlatti chose to set Cor mio for five high female voices (four sopranos and one alto), as though recalling the initial inspiration of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara and his fabled concerto delle donne. A finer end to an amazing tradition cannot be imagined.

Anthony Rooley

Claudio Merulo’s Influence in Italy and Germany

2011-06-23T11:14:00.005+01:00

With Merulo, Renaissance organ music in Venice comes to a close; however, many stylistic elements of his music are taken up and elaborated by other composers at the beginning of the Baroque era, such as Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643). Although the influence of the 16th-century Venetian toccata is still traceable in his first book of toccatas, the Ferrarese composer developed an individual style characterized by a blending of his own personal creative fantasy with stylistic traits of the Neapolitan school of Macque, Mayone and Trabaci.

Whereas in the 17th and 18th centuries the toccata went its own way in Italy ad was further elaborated by Michelangelo Rossi, Storace, Pasquini and Alessandro Scarlatti, Frescobaldi’s style predominated in southern Germany and Austria, thanks to its dissemination through Froberger. Thus a type of toccata whose structure is related to that of Merulo’s continued to hold its own north of the Alps: episodes of an improvisatory nature alternate with parts in imitative style. Buxtehude’s toccatas and preludes are based on this structure, in whicg virtuoso runs and pedal soli in the stylus phantasticus alternate with fugato parts following the general pattern prelude-fugue-interlude-fugue-postlude.

Stefano Molardi

Soon on Atrium Musicologicum... #10

2011-06-22T11:27:00.002+01:00

Hello to all!

In the past months there have been made some improvements on Atrium Musicologicum. A new design for the blog and some features on the side bar were made. Some pages were also added: Portuguese Composers, and Composers in general to facilitate the search for posts. There were also added pages for music edition of works by portuguese composers and a a page especially for useful links. We hope you enjoy these new features.

Thank you for your visit!

The management,

Claudio Merulo and Renaissance Music

2011-06-21T11:13:00.000+01:00

The 16th century is considered one of the most fruitful periods in European history with respect to culture and the arts. During the Renaissance, society underwent far-reaching cultural transformations in the political, religious and especially artistic spheres, which were determined by a steadily growing interest in the art and literature of classical antiquity. This is particularly evident in Italy, where the study of antiquity and the creation of outstanding works of art enjoyed a long flowering thanks to the patronage of the Medici in the 15th and 16th centuries. One need but mention Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Raphael. Music also underwent many changes which we owe chiefly to this climate of cultural renewal that fostered the development of new musical forms. In this context, music served above all to provide refined amusement to a courtly society. Next to the strict, classical polyphony of sacred music, Renaissance composers also experimented with new structures in their works for lute, organ and harpsichord. The new flowering of poetry and the importance of Petrarch’s artistry promoted the development of a secular repertoire consisting of canzonas and madrigals, which could now co-exist alongside the sacred genres of the motet and the mass.

Claudio Merulo (1533-1604) was born in Correggio in Italy’s Emilia region. He began his brilliant musical career at an early age, working in several Italian cities such as Brescia and Venice. In Venice he came into contact with one of the most influential musical institutions in Europe: San Marco, where in 1577 he became assistant organist of Annibale Padovano. A multi-faceted personality, he devoted himself not only to the composition of instrumental and vocal music, but also to the construction of organs: he had several additions carried out on the organ in San Marco and build a little positive organ himself, which is preserved today at the Conservatory in Parma. He went to this city in Emilia Romagna in 1586 as an organist, obtaining employment first at the court of Prince Ranuccio Farnese, then at the cathedral and the church of the Steccata.

Merulo’s oeuvre encompasses the entire spectrum of keyboard music as it developed in the 16th century: here the forms of the toccata, canzone and ricercare reach a level of perfection that had only been hinted at before. With him ends an era characterized by vital creativity – but at the same time, he opened the way to a new one, the Baroque era, in which the musical forms were further elaborated, especially in the works of the Ferrarese composer Girolamo Frescobaldi. Among the musical genres of the Renaissance, the toccata, canzone and ricercare played the most important role in organ music in the 16th century.

The Toccata. The term is derived from toccare that is, to probe and explore the technical potential of the instrument. It is thus clear that this form has an improvisatory character. This form is already found in the repertoire of lute music in the early 16th century, where it served as a prelude to a series of dances (pieces designated as tastar de corde); in organ music, however, it generally appears at the beginning of the mass or as an intonation for the singers. This musical form is thus less bound to the rules of counterpoint, which strongly influence the part-writing of the ricercare. With Andrea Gabrieli, the toccata evolved into a virtuoso piece, rich in runs and arpeggios, which was intended to arouse the admiration of the listeners and to give the performer an occasion to demonstrate his talent. In Merulo’s oeuvre (in the collections of 1598 and 1604), the form continued to expand and to take on an even more virtuoso character through additional parts in imitative style. This type of toccata anticipated the typical characteristics of the North-German toccata of the second half of the 17th century.

Already in the 13th century the Canzona was a poetic form that was set to highly embellished music. In the Renaissance, it evolved into a setting of secular texts that reflected the new stylistic orientations of the text (poetry in the style of Petrarch) and of the music. The music closely respected the mood and meaning of the words, which were either sentimental, serious or even filled with pathos. It is the vocal canzona that gave rise to the practice of intabulation for keyboard instruments or lute. This is an adaptation or arrangement of the original vocal piece through the addition of ornaments and virtuoso runs typically found in the music for keyboard instruments or lutes (called diminutions).

With his inventiveness and fantasy, Merulo treated the diminutions in such a way as to heighten the musical form, sometimes even leading it quite far from the original vocal source. The canzonas for organ published in 1592, 1606 and 1611 are often supplied with characteristic names (La Pazza: The Crazy One; La Gratiosa: The Gracious One, etc.) or allude to members of distinguished families (La Bovia, La Zambecara, etc.). The Ricercare, in contrast, is a form based on the development and elaboration of a musical motif that is presented in every imaginable technical and contrapuntal variant. Whereas the canzone stems from secular music, the ricercare’s compositional model is the motet. The pieces by Gabrieli and Merulo distinguish themselves from the strict models of Cavazzoni, Willaert and Buus by being more richly elaborated and making a broader use of virtuoso runs in addition to presenting the strict motivic material.

Stefano Molardi
Translation: Roger Clément

Heinrich Schütz’s Book of Italian Madrigals

2011-06-20T15:44:00.000+01:00

When Heinrich Schütz went to Italy to complete his musical studies he was no longer a young man by the standards of the time. Born in the Thuringian town of Köstritz in 1585, he owed his musical career to coincidence: while passing through the town, the young Landgrave Moritz of Hesse heard the 12 year-old boy’s beautiful treble voice and shortly afterwards invited him to join the choir of his chapel at Kassel. Schütz could not have encountered a more suitable princely patron: Moritz of Hesse was not given the nickname of «the Scholar» for nothing; he spoke several languages, and was interested in science and the arts – very unusual virtues in a ruler of the period. His court was one of the most brilliant in Germany. But Moritz did not spend money only on keeping an extravagant court and on expensive studies; he was also a patron, especially of the young and gifted among his subjects. Thus it came about that after his voice had broken, Heinrich Schütz was permitted to remain as a pupil at the newly founded Collegium Mauritianum, and after finishing his school studies he began, much to the relief of his parents, a «proper» study of jurisprudence at Marburg. But the prince once again intervened in favour of the musical career of his protégé. He made him an offer which would have shaken even the firmest determination to renounce music: he was given the opportunity, and a well-filled purse of 200 taler a year, to go to Venice to study composition with the most famous organist of his time: the aging Giovanni Gabrieli. In 1609 the now 24 year-old Schütz arrived in Venice and soon became the favourite pupil of the master of the chapel of St. Mark’s. The originally planned two-year period of study grew into four, and even after the death of Gabrieli in the summer of 1612, Schütz remained several months longer and returned to Germany only at the beginning of 1613.

The most palpable result of the Venetian student years was his Opus primum, printed in 1611, a collection of eighteen five-part madrigals with an additional eight-part dedicatory madrigal for double choir, composed for the dedicatee (who also footed the printer’s bill) of the publication, Count Moritz.

The collection, which was entitled «Libro primo de Madrigali» - not that there was ever to be a «Libro secondo» - is regarded by Schütz scholars as the beginning of a musical career, and as a journeyman’s piece, a point of departure. In the history of the madrigal, however, it is for several reasons more in the nature of a conclusion. Coming eleven years after the first operas, six years after Monteverdi’s programmatic Fifth Book of Madrigals with continuo, these madrigals are among the last examples of fully polyphonic madrigals without continuo. And they represent a final peak in the textually interpretative, emotionally charged art of the 16th century madrigal, an art which was sensitive as it was intellectual, and which was soon to be replaced by the new, more theatrical language of affeti of the solo song. From the Italian madrigal Schütz learnt just as well in Germany, but above all, he learnt how to combine the form and the content of a poetic text with an adequate musical setting, to trace the connotations and the tone of the words in musical terms without allowing the composition to didintegrate into incoherent fragments.

The assertation that Heinrich Schütz taught German music to speak is confirmed here in his only Italian work where one can clearly see how he learnt to make music speak. Six of the poems of the madrigals come from Giovanni Battista Guarini’s pastoral play, «Il pastor fido». They are all lyrically veiled laments of spurned lovers, poems full of woe and yeaning for death, which are easily lifted out of their dramatic context, as Monteverdi did for his Fifth Book. However, most of the poems are by Giambattista Marino, the early 17th century word magician, the great master of the «concettismo», that witty, artificial verse full of metaphors and wordplay that builds up to a cleverly phrased point at the end.

Marino’s ten madrigals in Schütz’s Opus primum are completely different in nature from Guarini’s plaintitive poems. They are humorous and fresh, elegant and witty, but not as heartfelt as Guarini’s. Schütz did not show any particular originality in his choice of madrigal texts – all of these poems were set to music many times. But his choice of poems does show that he set himself a different type of exercise in two such widely differing emotional spheres. The remaining three madrigals are settings of lesser known or unknown poets.

The madrigal-motet principle of investing each new idea in the text with a new musical idea was rigorously respected by Schütz in his madrigals. At the same time one observes the constant inclination towards an overall musical architecture. Schütz had a wide range of musical and textual interpretative means at his disposal – harsh chromaticisms at particularly intense moments of sorrow, sospiri, playful or circling movements on words like «scherzar», «gir» or «ride». But the knew how to incorporate all of these individual elements, often disapprovingly spoken of as «madrigalisms», into a structure in which fully scored passages alternate logically with lightly scored sections, and in which the texture of the writing becomes increasingly dense in the course of the composition and develops into a musically coherent whole.

Silke Leopold

Holy Week at the Chapel of the Dukes of Braganza

2011-06-19T15:15:00.000+01:00

"The palace of the Braganza family, heirs to the Portuguese throne, is situated in Vila Viçosa near to the Spanish border and, in the sixteenth century, boasted a musical tradition second to none, having more musicians in its employ than any of Portugal's many cathedrals.

This recording is a celebration of the vast outpouring of masterpieces which survived the destruction by earthquake of the Lisbon libraries solely due to the dedication of the Vila Viçosa copyists. The particular items here represented come from Holy Week, and fully live up to what we might expect from this most impressive and elaborate of ceremonies in the liturgical year."

Tracklist

01. Manuel Mendes - Asperges Me, for Palm Sunday
02. Anonymous - Hosanna, Filio David
03. Gabriel Díaz Bessón - Sanctus and Benedictus, for Palm Sunday
04. Gregorian Chant - Pueri hebræorum portantes, antiphon in mode 1 (Liber Usualis No. 581; GR 138)
05. Tomás Luis de Victoria - Pueri Hebraeorum, motet for 4 voices
06. Anonymous - Ante sex dies, Chant for Palm Sunday
07. Francisco Antonio de Almeida - Gloria, Laus, et Honor (with refrain by anonymous composer)
08. Alonso Lobo - Tristis Est Anima Mea, motet for Holy Week
09. Juan de Esquivel Barahona - O vos omnes, Motet for Holy Week
10. Giovanni Giorgi - Clarifica me Pater, Motet for Holy Week
11. Fernando de Almeida - Incipit Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, for Maundy Thursday
12. Fernando de Almeida - In monte Oliveti, for Maundy Thursday
13. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Fratres ego enim accepi, motet for 8 voices
14. João Lourenco Rebelo - Panis Angelicus, hymn
15. Fernando de Almeida - Miserere mei Deus, for Good Friday
16. Ginés de Morata - Cum Descendentibus, for Good Friday
17. Juan de Castro y Malagaray - Caligaverunt Oculi Mei, offertory motet for 6 voices

A Capella Portuguesa
Owen Rees (dir.)

Available at Hyperion

Andrea Gabrieli: Missa ‘Pater Peccavi’ and Other Music

2011-06-16T22:50:00.000+01:00

Just as, to most people, the name ‘Bach’ on its own will normally conjure up Johann Sebastian, so ‘Gabrieli’ normally refers to the great Giovanni, the composer of sumptuous and expressive church music whose fervour and directness give it a universality far beyond the particular Catholic liturgy that brought it into being. And, like Bach, the strength of Giovanni’s musical personality has tended to cast the work of his predecessors into deeper shadow; with our Darwinian attitudes to music history, it is all too easy to see earlier Venetian composers like Willaert, Rore, and Gabrieli’s own uncle, Andrea, as merely paving the way for the great man. Particularly in the case of Andrea, his very closeness to Giovanni has, it seems, obscured the fact that he is himself one of the greatest and most approachable composers of the High Renaissance. Late in his life Andrea composed a Mass for four choirs, but most of his music requires only relatively modest forces; yet it has all the colour, imagination and emotional immediacy that we associate with the best Venetian art of the sixteenth century.

At a time when Italian music was dominated by Flemish composers, Andrea Gabrieli was a native Venetian, born around 1510, probably in Cannareggio in a northern part of ‘the floating city’, where he became organist of the Church of San Geremia. He may have sung at the basilica of St Mark’s as early as 1536, but was unsuccessful when he applied for the post of second organist there in 1557; the successful applicant was Claudio Merulo, whom Girolamo Diruta claimed was the finest player in Italy. Andrea eventually succeeded Merulo when the latter became first organist in 1566, and finally became first organist in 1584. A year later his nephew Giovanni joined him as second organist.

Neither of the Gabrieli’s ever became maestro di cappella, but both wrote large amounts of church music for St Mark’s and other Venetian musical establishments. Andrea was also a successful composer of madrigals and festive secular music. He seems to have travelled little outside Venice, but an important journey, in the company of his nephew, was to Germany in 1562, when they accompanied the Munich court on a state visit to Frankfurt-am-Main. At this time Andrea formed a lasting friendship with Roland de Lassus, whose music was an important influence on his own.

In his Grove article on the Gabrieli’s the late Denis Arnold points out that, although the Venetian printing trade was flourishing, Andrea seems to have been reluctant to publish his work, and consequently much of his music cannot be precisely dated. Indeed, his instrumental music was not printed until after his death, mostly in editions overseen by his nephew. However, the music is remarkably consistent in style, quality and personality, even if it was published over a period of more than forty years.

The Missa Pater Peccavi is one of three Masses for six voices (expanding to seven in the Agnus Dei) printed in 1572, and is a ‘parody Mass’ based on Andrea’s own motet Pater peccavi in caelum, which had been included in his earliest published collection, the Sacrae cantiones of 1565. As in many such works composed in the period after the Council of Trent (1542), this mass eschews elaborate counterpoint - or rather, wears its polyphonic art lightly – so that the words and their meaning may be clearly understood by the listener. Pietro Cerone’s prescription for a well-set Mass, codified some decades later in his El melopeo y maestro of 1613, applies well to the Missa Pater peccavi:

The Gloria and Credo... are composed as continuous movements, without solemnity and with less imitation of the parts, using imitations that are short, clear, familiar, and closely woven, unlike those of the Kyries, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Deis, which (as I have said) should be long, elaborate, less familiar, and less closely woven.

It may be seen that composers have taken care to make the parts sing all together, using such slow notes as the breve, semibreve, and minim, with devout consonances and with harmonious intervals, upon the words ‘Iesu Christe’. This is done because of the reverence and decorum due to their meanings. The same is usually observed upon the words ‘Et incarnates est’ to ‘Crucifixus’. To use imitations and lively progressions here, with other graces, is a very great error and a sign of great ignorance.

The composer... is at liberty to write the Christe, the Crucifixus, the Pleni sunt caeli, the Benedictus, and the second Agnus Dei for fewer voices than are used in the work as a whole...

Gabrieli does not in fact reduce the number of parts for the ‘Christe’ or ‘Pleni sunt caeli’, but he does use smaller contrasted groupings of three or four voices for certain phrases, sowing the seeds, as it were, for the tonal contrasts and conversational responses that would later lead to the Venetian polychoral style.

Venetian title pages of this period frequently refer to mixed vocal and instrumental scorings, as do contemporary descriptions and depictions of actual performances. But composers rarely specified which parts should be sung and which played (all were customarily texted, even when intended for instruments); this was to some extent a matter of the performers’ choice, and only later did Giovanni Gabrieli and others make the conventions explicit in certain works.

Though Andrea Gabrieli’s works for instrumental ensemble are few in number and modest in scale, they are as masterly as his vocal music and have much in common with the more familiar language of Giovanni’s canzonas and sonatas. Seven four-part Ricercari were printed in 1589 at the end of posthumous collection of madrigals. These are not necessarily intended for instruments: they could be sung, either wordlessly or to solmisation syllables (ut re mi etc.), or indeed intabulated as keyboard music. Each is composed on one of the traditional church modes or tones, which in Renaissance theory had their own expressive characteristics.

Ricercari are often serious contrapuntal pieces that explore (‘ricercare’ means ‘to seak’) all the possibilities of a single theme, and this is true of the long Ricercar in the first mode. Its sad opening tune (later transformed by Giovanni Gabrieli in his four-part canzone La Spiritata) is heard in many plangent harmonisations, in various combinations with two subsidiary themes, and finally at both half and double speed simultaneously. This is a masterpiece worthy to stand beside Bach’s essays in similar style in The Art of Fugue.

Other two four-part Ricercars are livelier, canzone-like pieces with a sectionalized ‘quilt’-like construction similar to contemporary madrigals. The one in the sixth tone is dark-hued, with a low-lying top part, while that in the triumphant twelfth mode is bright, and has two contrasting triple-time sections. Though only for a single ‘choir’, once again the music of Giovanni Gabrieli seems but a simple step away.

Only one larger-scale Ricercar by Andrea Gabrieli survives, an eight-part piece that, similarly, appeared in print only after the composer’s death. It looks dense on paper, but in performance reveals itself as a gorgeous piece of Venetian colouristic writing in which the contrapuntal skill is almost submerged by the richness of the instrumental sonority. It was designed to reveal a glorious moment when the instruments, for three bars only, divide into two groups of four – giving birth to the polychoral canzone. This is an unusual piece with few successors, the most notable of which are two of the ten-part pieces of Giovanni’s 1597 collection.

Timothy Roberts
(2000)

Music for Whit Sunday by Tomás L. de Victoria

2011-06-13T12:45:00.006+01:00

Tomás Luis de Victoria, the greatest composer of the Spanish sixteenth-century ‘golden age’ of polyphonic music, was born in Avila 1548 and in about 1558 became a choirboy in Avila Cathedral, where he received his earliest musical training. When his voice broke he was sent to the Collegium Germanicum at Rome where he was enrolled as a student in 1565. He was to spend the next twenty years in Rome and he occupied a number of posts there of which the most important were at S. Maria di Monserrato, the Collegium Germanicum, the Roman Seminary (where he succeeded Palestrina as Maestro di Cappella in 1571) and S. Apollinare. In 1575 he took holy orders and three years later was admitted to chaplaincy at S. Girolamo della Caritá. Around 1587 he left Italy and in that year took up an appointment as chaplain to the dowager Empress Maria at the Royal Convent for Barefoot Clarist Nuns, where he acted as maestro to the choir of priest and boys.

Victoria’s musical output was relatively small compared with other major Renaissance composers such as Palestrina (who published five times as much music) and Lassus (who published even more), and he published no secular music. The music he did publish, however, generally shows a very high level of inspiration and musical craftsmanship and it is clear, from the constant revisions he made to successive editions of his works that appeared during his lifetime and from some of his comments in prefaces to his works, that he adopted a highly critical attitude to what he wrote. In the dedication to Pope Gregory XIII of his 1581 volume of Hymni totius anni, he speaks of music being an art to which he was instinctively drawn, and to the perfection of which he had devoted long years of study, with the help and encouragement of others of critical judgment; “ad quae naturali quodam feror instinctu, multus iam annos, et quidem, ut ex aliorum iudicio mihi videor intelligere, non infeliciter, versor, et elaboraro’.

Victoria’s style shows the influence of earlier masters in the Spanish school and also that of his long stay in Rome, where it is likely that he had considerable contact with Palestrina. From 1566 to 1571, during the period when Palestrina’s sons, Angelo and Rudolfo, were students at the neighbouring Roman Seminary. Casimiri has suggested that this may have resulted in Victoria having direct contacts with the older Roman master, at that time acting as Maestro di Cappella of the Roman Seminary, even before Victoria took over that post from him in 1571. Be that as it may, Victoria certainly shares with Palestrina a liking for smooth conjoint melodic lines and carefully worked double counterpoint, but his music contains (even after making allowances for changing conventions about the use of musica ficta) more accidentals and a subtle use of harmonic colouration which sets it apart from that of any of his near contemporaries and gives it that quality of passionate intensity for which it is so justly renowned.

Veni Sancte Spiritus is the sequence at Mass on Whit Sunday. The sequence originated as a form of chant, usually fairly extensive in length as well as range, which was interpolated into the liturgy after the Gradual and the Alleluia. Although the earliest versions were in prose (hence, perhaps, the alternative name of ‘prosa’), it later developed as a type of rhyming verse. Special melodies, outside the scope of the traditional plainsong, were composed for them and the texts were often associated with particular events in the church year so that in medieval times they became in effect an addition to the proper of the mass. There was a great literary and musical flowering of the form in the period from about 850 to 1000. The tradition of polyphonic setting of sequences began in this period with simple organum versions and continued through to the Renaissance period. After the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which abolished nearly all the body of sequences that had by then grown up, only five sequences, none of them from the early repertory, were retained in the liturgy: the ‘Dies irae’ for the Mass of the Dead; ‘Lauda Sion’ for Corpus Christi; the ‘Stabat mater’ for the feast of the Seven Dolours; ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’ for Whit Sunday and Whitsun Week; and ‘Victimae Paschali’ for Easter and Easter Week.

Victoria’s double-choir setting of ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ is included in a mixed collection of his masses, magnificats, psalms and other pieces published in Madrid by Ioannes Flandrum in 1600. The setting leaves out verses 4, 6 and 8 and the final Alleluia of the full text of the sequence and the way the music is written precludes the insertion of these verses as plainsong interpolations into the polyphony. The music begins slowly, with solemn imitative entries of a theme loosely based on the opening phrase of the plainsong, but soon blossoms into more homophonic antiphonal exchanges between the thwo choirs and breaks into triple time at the words ‘consolator optime’. After a brief passage in full eight-part harmony, the music returns to antiphonal exchanges between the two choirs until, at the words ‘da perenne gaudium’, both choirs join in a final eight-part section of impressive beauty and sonority.

The Feast of Pentecost (in Greek, ‘fiftieth day’) was originally a Jewish feast, falling on the fiftieth day after the Passover, when the first fruits of the corn harvest were presented. With the descent of the Holy Ghost onto the Apostles on this day the Christian Church adopted this feast, now popularly known as Whitsun, for a celebration of that event. The text Dum complerentur comes from the First Responsory at Matins on Whit Sunday and is based on the account in Acts 2:1-2 of the descent of the Holy Ghost. Victoria’s five-part setting was included in his first book of motets, published in Venice in 1572, and was subsequently reissued in a number of other editions by various publishers. The motet opens with a rich web of imitative entries, breaking suddenly into homophony at the words ‘omnes pariter’ (‘all with one accord’). This is followed by a short set of Alleluias, cut short by several repetitions of the words ‘et subito’. Another, faster moving, Alleluia follows, with two strongly homophonic triple-rhythmic statements of the phrase ‘Tamquam spiritus vehementis’, and the first part of the motet concludes with a wonderful set of pealing polyphonic Alleluias. The second half opens with a series of finely wrought imitative entries in double counterpoint but soon breaks into homophony at the words ‘unum discipuli’, following this is a set of running entries presenting the ‘sound from heaven as of a mighty rushing wind’. The motet concludes with a restatement of the second half of the first part, ending with the same exhilarating set of Alleluia, this time with the soprano parts exchanged.

Victoria’s Missa Dum complerentur is a six-part parody mass based on his five-part motet of the same title. It was published in his first book of masses in Venice in 1576 by Angelo Gardane and later in Rome in 1583 by Angelo’s brother Alessandro in a second book of masses. The Mass contains much new material but makes considerable use of the opening counterpoints of the motet, and the pealing Alleluias which conclude the motet appear and are elaborated upon the Amens of the Gloria and Credo. The mass text does not present the same opportunities for word-painting that Victoria seizes on so effectively in the homophonic passages of the motet, but he uses the extra voice to create a six-part texture of great richness and harmonic variety and also adds an extra part, as was often done in masses of the period, for the second Agnus Dei, enabling him to bring the work to a close with music of great spaciousness and sonority perfectly fitting the final appeal, ‘dona nobis pacem’.

Among the more striking and moving parts of the extensive Roman liturgy for Holy Week are the Improperia, or Reproaches. These come from the liturgy for Good Friday and are the words addressed by the crucified Saviour to his people. They are chanted by two choirs during the Veneration of the Cross and comprise twelve verses which contrast Divine compassion towards the chosen people with the with the sufferings inflicted on Christ during his Passion. In the full rite the first verse is preceded by the refrain Popule meus and each of the three verses is followed by the Trisagion (in Greek, ‘thrice holy’), a refrain chanted first in Greek and then in Latin, and the remaining nine by the refrain ‘Popule meus, quid feci tibi’, etc. This rite has an ancient history, parts of it being traceable back to the seventh century. As part of his sumptuous volume of Holy Week music, the Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae published in Rome by Alessandro Gardane in 1585, Victoria provides a simple four-part setting of these two refrains in music of compelling beauty, which illustrates well his extraordinary capacity to create through simple homophony extremely moving music of great expressiveness.

Vexilla Regis is a hymn written by Venantius Fortunatus (c530-c610), a Latin poet and later Bishop of Poitier, which celebrates the mystery of Christ triumphant on the Cross. In the Liber Usualis (the book codifying the modern Roman Rite up to the major revisions introduced after the Second Vatican Council in 1962-1965) it is prescribed to be sung at Vespers on Passion Sunday and, in the Antiphonale Monasticum (a similar book codifying some of the rather fuller monastic rite), also at Vespers on the Finding of the Holy Cross (3 May) and at Vespers on the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September). Victoria provided, in the Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae at the end of his music for Matins on Holy Saturday, an alternatim setting of the hymn, but both the words and the chant of this setting of the hymn differ from those found in the Liber Usualis. In the original print the hymn is described as ‘Vexilla Regis, More Hispano’, indicating that it is bases on Spanish plainsong; and the words, with one small difference are those found in the Antiphonale Monasticum. One other singularity of Victoria’s setting is that, although it provides written-out chant for all the other odd-numbered verses, it does not do so far verse five: whether this omission was deliberate or accidental is not clear. In Victoria’s setting the plainsong is used as a cantus firmus in the tenor at first and later in the soprano is where it soars above the polyphonic texture created by the other voices. The final verse is a set for six voices to music of sublime serenity which strongly recalls the style of writing in his last musical utterance, the six-part Requiem of 1605. It is perhaps significant that the words of the last verse of the hymn (‘Te summa Deus Trinita, collaudat omnis spiritus quos per crucis mysterium, salvas rege ser saecula. Amen’) are printed after the words ‘Finis’ at the end of the print of Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae.

Veni Creator Spiritus is a hymn prescribed for second Vespers on Whit Sunday, but often used apart from this at the ordination of priests and bishops. The hymn is of considerable antiquity and is thought to have been composed in the ninth century, probably by Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mainz. It was included in a comprehensive collection of Victoria’s hymn settings covering the whole church year which was published in Rome in 1581 by Francisco Zanetti. Victoria’s four-part alternatim setting begins with the plainsong melody, which will be familiar to those who know the Whitsun Hymn ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’. Victoria uses all seven verses of the hymn and, once again, the plainsong is employed in the polyphonic sections as a cantus firmus moving from part to part and sometimes augmented or lightly ornamented.

Pange lingua gloriosi is a Corpus Christi hymn written by St Thomas Aquinas who died in 1274. In the Liber Usualis it is prescribed as a processional hymn at Mass on the Feast of Corpus Christi and it appears as a communion hymn. Victoria’s for-part alternatim setting, also part of the 1581 collection, makes use of all seven verses as a cantus firmus in the tenor and then the soprano parts. The last verse, unusually, breaks into a lively triple time and ends with a beautifully ornamented Amen.

Lauda Sion Salvatorem is the sequence, composed by St Thomas Aquinas, for the Feast of Corpus Christi. As explained above, it is one of the only five sequences which survived the weeding out of the Council of Trent. In the Roman liturgy it is sung at Mass on this Feast Day and survives in the Anglican liturgy as a communion hymn. Victoria’s brilliant eight-part setting was published first in 1585 in Rome by Alessandro Gardane and subsequently in 1600 in Madrid by Ioannes Flandrum. Victoria sets verses, 1, 2, 5, 12 and 23 of Aquinas’s twenty-four-verse poem in equal-voiced choirs. The music begins quietly with the first choir presenting the opening phrase of the plainsong in the soprano line, but soon the second choir intervenes with a lovely falling third in the top part at the words ‘Lauda ducem’, and there follows a rapid series of exchanges illustrating the words ‘In hymnis et canticis’. The second verse of the hymn is set to the same music as the first. The next section, beginning with the words ‘Sit laus plena’, sets verses 5 and 12 of the text to music of almost madrigalian lightness and vivacity with much exciting rapid movement and syncopation. This leads to a setting of verse 23 of the poem, which opens in a gentle swinging triple time and concludes, at the words ‘In terra viventium’, with an extended final section in full eight-part harmony of great energy and sonorousness.

Jon Dixon
(1996)

Music for Pentecost by Giovanni P. da Palestrina

2011-06-12T13:17:00.001+01:00

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (his name derives from a town not far from Rome) was probably born in 1525 or 1526. After seven years as maestro di capella at the cathedral of his native town, he went to Rome at the summons of Pope Julius III to become chapelmaster of the Cappella Giulia at St Peters. He later became a singer at the Sistine Chapel but was dismissed by Paul IV on account of his unacceptable married status. After other appointments, Palestrina returned to the Julian Chapel in 1571 as chapelmaster. He died in 1594.

Though he is still thought of today as the grand master of the polyphonic style, as Christopher Reynolds has pointed out, it is wrong to view him as a conservative: ‘Neither his contemporaries, nor musicians of the following generation, perceived him as such. Agostino Aggazzari went so far as to name Palestrina and the Council of Trent as sources of the seconda prattica (1607), a claim endorsed by Michael Praetorius (1619)’ (see Christopher Reynolds: ‘Rome: A City of Rich Contrast’, Man and Music, volume 2, The Renaissance, London, 1989, pp. 95-96). Palestrina was highly regarded and much published in his own lifetime. His total output comprises 104 certainly attributed masses, over 375 motets, 68 offertories, at least 65 hymns, 35 magnificats, four (possibly five) sets of Lamentations for Holy Week, and over 140 madrigals, both secular and spiritual. His publications bear dedications to men of great power: discerning and wealthy patrons of the arts such as Guglielmo Gonzaga, foreign princes and potentates (there are two books of masses inscribed to Philip II of Spain) and, increasingly in his later years, popes.

These works are built around the theme of Pentecost, for which Palestrina wrote some of his most lyrically exuberant music. The celebrated motet Dum complerentur was published in the Liber primus motettorum, containing works for five to seven voices, printed at Rome in 1569. It is a vivid pictorial evocation of the ‘rushing wind’ of Pentecost, the sudden outpouring of the Holy Spirit described in the Acts of the Apostles, Palestrina uses the repeated ‘Alleluias’ of the text as a cue for a flowing musical figure precisely suggestive of this, and the exultant abundance of musical ideas during the course of the motet – each phrase has its own distinctive musical motive – similarly reflects the Spirit ‘blowing where it listeth’.

It was upon this motet that Palestrina based his Missa Dum complerentur, which appeared in the 1599 Missarum liber octavus published in Venice. The mass shows Palestrina’s parody technique at its most brilliant. The motet’s vast array of musical ideas are worked through with a dazzling inventiveness, as the composer expands, contracts and alters according to the demands of the new text, that of the proper of the mass.

All five sections beging with a variant of the motet’s opening, but the way in which the rest of the model’s material is treated thereafter varies considerably from section to section. It is in the Gloria that the model’s identity is most clearly audible, though the original order of the phrases is not maintained; it is in many respects the most ‘workmanlike’ of the sections of the mass, dispatching as it does its considerable quantity of text with efficiency and utter certainly, liberally employing declamatory writing for the purpose. In the Credo, on the other hand, the music of the motet is treated with the descending figure that accompanies the word ‘Alleluia’ is kept in reserve and used only at certain significant points, notably the two visions of the Kingdom to come to be found in the text of the Creed, after ‘Et resurrexit’ and at the end, ‘Et vitam venture saeculi’.

The Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, on the other hand, while they also take the music in the directions, show their basis in the motet much more clearly, and attain a luminous majesty in their finely sculpted lines. In the Benedictus, however, the thematic deconstruction achieved by the double imitative point takes us into quite a different realm, revisited in the second Agnus Dei, which brings back the descending music o the ‘Alleluia’ in its final supplications for peace.

In the eight-part motets Spiritus Sanctus and Veni Sancte Spiritus, Palestrina takes the antiphonal writing implicit in Dum complerentur to its logical conclusion, using the two groups in alternation to provide dramatic textural contrasts and achieving magnificent climatic moments by bringing them together again. This is particularly striking in Veni Sancte Spiritus (a setting of the sequence from Pentecost, from the 1575 book of motets), in which one group is composed of higher voices, the other of lower. The strophic imploring of the text is marvellously conveyed by these means. Note, for example, the alternation of the choirs at ‘Consolator optime, dulcis hospes animae, dulce refrigerium’, and the massive full climax conveying the ‘perenne gaudium’ of the final line of the text – perfect liturgical theatre. Spiritus Sanctus is a joyful explosion of sound, depicting in the clearest of terms the Holy Spirit ‘filling the whole house0 and ending with a magnificent ‘Alleluia’.

Veni Creator Spiritus is a hymn, from the composer’s 1589 collection (published by Angelo Gardano in Venice), alternating chant with polyphony. The reformed Breviary, which appeared in 1568 induced a number of illustrious composers to write cycles of hymns, including Lassus, Victoria and Guerrero. Though the hymns – true liturgical gems – are today a barely known part of Palestrina’s output, there is no good reason why this should continue to be so, as the limpid beauty of this setting well shows. It is scored for four voices, except for the doxology, which is set for five.

Also relatively infrequently heard are the Magnificats which are similarly alternatim settings. The six-voice Magnificat on the sixth tone is one jewel among the many to be found in Palestrina’s numerous setting of this text. Here the scoring favours the lower voices, giving that richness of sonority which is characteristic of the famous Missa Papae Marcelli, shot through with rays of light from the upper voices. There is palpable joy in the way Palestrina responds to the text: two of the most striking moments of this particular setting are the mysterious majesty of ‘et sanctum nomen eius’. Both of these remind us that Palestrina was not only a model of liturgical propriety and contrapuntal perfection, but an inspired melodist, able to react with genuine sensitivity to the texts of the Curch.

Ivan Moody
(2003)

Carlos Seixas's Keyboard Music IV

2011-05-29T22:51:00.003+01:00

Giovanni P. da Palestrina's Missa Brevis

2011-05-26T18:31:00.012+01:00

Palestrina’s four-voiced Missa Brevis was first published in 1570, in the third book of masses, and several times reprinted. Its title has been the subject of considerable but fruitless speculation – it is not particularly short, and could indeed be considered quite substantial as a four-part work. Though many have looked for a model, this does not seem to be a “parody” Mass; the world brevis was probably used simply because no other title suggested itself. Haberl’s idea that it was because each movement opens with a breve is certainly not be worthy of note.

One of the most frequently sung Masses in Palestrina´s oeuvre, the Missa Brevis has been an immediacy of melodic and a notable clarity of texture. Its lack of recurrent reference to a musical model is compensated for by the regular appearance of a particular melodic features, notable a descending minor third followed by a brief scalic ascent – this is clearly audible at the very opening of the Kyrie. The four-part texture gives way in the Benedictus to a flowing trio (SAT), and in the second Agnus Dei to a five-part setting, with trebles in canon at the unison.

Ivan Moody

Sacred Music by Sebastián de Vivanco

2011-05-23T10:23:00.005+01:00

Sebastián de Vivanco stands, without doubt, as one of the most neglected composers of the Spanish Golden Age. Ironically, the greatest contribution to this neglect is the accident of his having been born in Ávila at about the same time as that other colossus of Spanish music from Ávila, Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611). Blinded, perhaps, by the stunning brilliance of Victoria, scholars and performers alike have been slow to discern an equally bright star sparkling in the same constellation. Despite important studies by a small group of scholars, most notably Dámaso García Fraile and Dean I. Nuernberger, research into the life and works of Vivanco is still in its infancy. We cannot even be sure of his date of birth. If Montague Cantor’s reasoning that Vivanco must have been 70 when he retired as catedrático de prima [morning professor] at Salamanca on January 9, 1621, is correct, then we may place his birth date at about 1551. Of his childhood we know nothing, though it is reasonable to assume that he served, perhaps alongside Victoria, as a member of the so-called seises, or boy choristers, of Ávila’s cathedral. As a boy, Vivanco would have come under the decisive influence of the composer Bernardino de Ribera (1520-1572?), maestro de capilla from 1559 to 1571/1572, and his successor Juan Navarro (c.1530-1580), who served in the same post from 1564 until 1566.

By his mid twenties, Vivanco had left his native Castile for Catalonia, where in 1573, as a cleric still in subdeacon’s orders, he was appointed maestro de capilla at Seo de Urgel in Lérida. Here, Vivanco was initiated into the profession he would practice for the rest of his life. As chapelmaster, he took charge of all the polyphonic music performed in the cathedral, and was also responsible for the musical training and education of the seises. On 4 July 1576, Vivanco’s tenure at Lérida came to an abrupt and unexplained end.

The decade from1576 saw Vivanco occupying the more prestigious and well-paid post of cathedral chapelmaster at Segovia. If Vivanco had earned the esteem of the chapter of Segovia’s cathedral, it seems he was also well regarded among his musical colleagues. In 1586 Francisco Guerrero sent to Segovia a book of Magnificats for which the chapter agreed to recompense the composer with 300 reales. Since Vivanco acted as intermediary between the chapter and the Sevillian master, we may infer that Vivanco and Guerrero were on friendly terms.

At Segovia, Vivanco was raised to the diaconate and then ordained priest in 1581, but otherwise we know little more about his activities there than we know of his activities at Lérida. From records of bonus payments he received for special music on feast days, we know he was valued as a composer, though none of his compositions can be positively dated to his period in Segovia. We can be sure, however, that it was a time of marked change in the life of any Spanish chapelmaster. Gradually, during the mid 1570s, the traditional medieval diocesan liturgies of all the Spanish cathedrals were superseded by the reformed Roman Missal and Breviary, books promulgated for universal use in the Catholic Church in the wake of the Council of Trent. We know that Vivanco became especially attuned to the contents of the new Missal, for many of the motets he published later in life draw directly upon texts found in it.

In mid 1587, by then probably approaching his late thirties, Vivanco received an invitation from the elderly and eminent Guerrero to come to Seville to work as his assistant there, and in particular to take over the training of the seises. At around the same time, however, Vivanco was also invited to take up the chapelmastership of the cathedral of Ávila. For the next eight months, he was courted by the cathedral chapters in both places. A welter of documentary references reflects his indecision. Though he had accepted the Ávila post by the end of July, he was soon using a counter offer from Seville to bargain for better terms and conditions. Since they could not match the salary offer from Seville, the Ávila authorities responded by granting Vivanco a more senior prebend than that usually assigned to the chapelmaster, with rights and privileges similar to those of a cathedral canon. Despite this, Vivanco elected to make the journey south to Seville early in 1588 in order to spend a trial period in the post there. For a week or two he gave every appearance of wanting to settle. However, on 17 March he petitioned the Seville Chapter for payment to cover his expenses for returning to Ávila for good.

Our records of Vivanco’s fourteen years in Ávila are also scarce. Thanks, however, to a splendid account of the translation of Ávila’s patron Saint Segundo published by Antonio de Cianca in 1595, we have a very detailed description of the ten days of celebration that accompanied this remarkable event in September 1594. In addition to the processions, bullfights, fireworks, and theatrical presentations, Cianca provides precious details about the performance of liturgical music while Vivanco was maestro de capilla. Indeed, Ecce sacerdos magnus that Cianca tells us accompanied one of the most solemn moments of the 1594 ceremonies. The remains of the saint were held high before an impressive array of ecclesiastical and political dignitaries, and the townspeople of Ávila, while the chapel sang the motet, its text presumably altered to name San Segundo rather than St Gregory.

We cannot be sure about Vivanco’s compositional activity in Ávila, but it does seem likely that a significant proportion of the three large collections of compositions he published between 1607 and 1610 was composed there. Certainly a number of hymns, possibly composed during these years, do still exist in a very late copy (dated 1796) at Ávila.

Vivanco left his hometown for a second time in 1602, when he moved to become maestro de capilla of Salamanca Cathedral, following the footsteps of his former master Navarro almost forty years earlier. On September 30 Vivanco was formally appointed as maestro de capilla with an annual salary of 100 ducados, and on October 7 he wrote a letter of resignation to the Ávila chapter. This was the last and most significant move of his career, and musically it is the best documented. Indeed, apart from a handful of compositions surviving in manuscript, the great corpus of his music is traceable to three publications that Vivanco saw through the presses of Artus Taberniel at Salamanca between the years 1607 and 1610. Issued under Vivanco’s own supervision, these volumes – books respectively of Magnificats, Masses, and motets – surely represent the composer’s own selection of his best work from a career then spanning over forty years.

Soon after Vivanco’s arrival in Salamanca, on November 11, 1602, Bernardo Clavijo de Castilla was named professor of music at the University. Such was Clavijo’s fame, however, that he was soon called to serve the Royal Chapel, and on 10 January 1603 the University Chair was declared vacant. Vivanco presented himself before the tribunal, whose members included Clavijo, to demonstrate his ability and competence, and on 19 February 1603 he was formally appointed to the chair recently vacated by Clavijo. Vivanco continued to hold both cathedral and university post until his death in Salamanca on 25 October 1622, though again we have no sure information concerning his final years. Nor do we know if, after publishing the great retrospective collection of his works, he continued to composed in the decade and more left to him.

Ecce sacerdos magnus is a motet that may be described as a “musician’s motet”. Its text honours St Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope traditionally held responsible for the composition of the curch’s great repertory of Gregorian chant that now bears his name. Fittingly then, the plainchant melody associated with the main part of the text is quoted in long notes in one part, around which Vivanco composes a freely contrapuntal texture. A little later, he adds a second brief chant in one of the upper voices quoting from the litany of the saints: “Saint Gregory, pray for us”. At the end, a rousing concerted coda is a final invocation of the saint. Many large cathedrals employed small bands of wind instruments in addition to their singers, and there even exist manuscript collections of motets shorn of their texts, clearly for use by such cathedral bands. Though none of Vivanco’s music survives in this manner, motets by his contemporaries Guerrero, Lobo and Rogier do, including, incidentally, another setting of Ecce sacerdos magnus (by Rogier), re-arranged for wind band. We might well imagine that this is precisely how the motet may have been performed during the ceremonies in honour of San Segundo in Ávila in September, 1594.

The tiny In manus tuas, not even strictly speaking a motet, is the source for Vivanco’s Missa In manus tuas, one of at least four masses he composed based in his own previous works (the others are masses on the motets O quam suavis, Assumpsit Jesus, and Tu es vas electionis). As a self-parodist, Vivanco was hardly alone among his contemporaries, though his approach to the task is highly individual. Not once in the openings of any of his Mass movements, or elsewhere, does he quote the full texture of his model in a literal manner. Rather, at the outset of each of the movements and many of the main internal divisions, he uses his characteristic rising opening phrase (g-a-c-c-b) and its continuation as a sort of variable cantus firmus, often in longer note values, about which he creates new counterpoints. When it is in the uppermost voice, as in the opening of the Kyrie, Credo and Sanctus, it is clearly audible. Elsewhere, as in the opening of the Gloria and Agnus, the cantus is hidden in the inner parts, or, at the Benedictus, in the bass. Likewise, for the opening of internal sections such as the Christe, Vivanco paraphrases the mains descending phrase set in his model to the word commendo (g-e-f-d-c). These two phrases, ascending and descending, are the main material with which he works, sometimes imitatively, at others homophonically, sometimes reworking them separately, sometimes in close alternation, as in the opening sections of the Gloria and Credo, or in the Osanna section of the Sanctus. The latter sets out with a closely imitative retreatment of the rising phrase in triple time, after which the falling phrase takes over as the main material about a half way through the section. Two more far-reaching changes, however, ensure that little other sense of the model motet is maintained. Rather than adhering to the original’s tonality, Mode 6 (as noted, on F), Vivanco bases his reworking in a bright Mode 7 on G. Meanwhile, he derives an entirely new sense of energy and excitement from his use not of one, but of two four voice ensembles, often in close alternation. Miraculously, though, while little of the Mass could truly be said to sound anything like the motet upon which it is based, almost all of it is somehow related.

A major manuscript source of Vivanco’s music is a sumptuous choirbook, copied for use at the monastery of Nuestra Señora, Guadalupe, in Estremadura, in the early years of the seventeenth century. Vivanco’s music shares pride of place with Palestrina and Morales, and includes a Requiem Mass by him. Some of its contents are motets also found in the 1610 book, only very recently edited by Dámaso García Fraile. However, among items uniquely preserved at Guadalupe is the short ritual piece, In manus tuas, labelled in the source as “Del M[aestr]o Vivanco”. The text, here adapted to the form of a short responsory sung at the late evening office of Compline, quotes the final words of Christ on the cross (Luke 23:46), setting a mood of death a suffering. Caritas Pater est is one of the crowning glories of Vivanco’s 1610 motet collection. It is composed in nine (three-three-three) parts, signifying the Holy Trinity, for which feast day it is intended.

Quis dabit capiti meo, in five parts, is a motet for Good Friday, its text again recalling Christ’s betrayal and death. Out of the bare opening motif (d-f-e-d), Vivanco weaves a gradually intensifying contrapuntal web in the minor mode that reaches its focus in the heartfelt Et plorabo die ac nocte... (“And i will weep day and night...”). Versa est in luctum, is for six parts. This text from the book of Job was set to a number of Spanish composers from Peñalosa onward as a motet for use in Requiem Masses. With its clearly musical imagery, it became the quintessential musician’s lament upon the death of a patron or prince. Victoria composed his setting for the death of his benefactress, the dowager Empress Maria, in 1603, whereas Alonso Lobo’s setting was composed earlier on the death of Philip II in 1598. We do not know, however, if Vivanco’s setting was composed with a dedicatee in mind. Continuing the mourning theme, his Circundederunt me, again in five parts, is another motet for Requiem Masses. This time, the opening motif is in the major mode, and Vivanco treats it inventively in both original ascending (c-e-f-c) and inverted descending (c-a-g-c) forms, thus encircling the central note, c, as if so symbolise the encompassed soul.

The text of Christus factus est is recited as the final antiphon at Lauds on the last three days of Holy Week. Vivanco borrows the opening figure of its traditional chant melody to use as his own opening motif (f-g-f), for a freely evolving motet in no fewer than twelve parts. In the 1610 book it is designated for use on the Wednesday of Holy Week, and it was probably at Mass on this day that Vivanco himself performed it annually at Salamanca Cathedral during his tenure there.
Assumpta est Maria, for the Assumption of Mary (15 August), is a celebratory motet scored not only with high clefs but an unusually high pitch throughout (the lowest voice part is written in the alto clef), that captures the airy imagery of the text, which, though borrowed from an Office antiphon, is here intended for use during Mass.

The stylistic contrast with the intimate O quam est could hardly be greater. In only four parts, and in a plangent minor mode, it is a classical piece of freely-composed polyphony, probably intended to be sung during the elevation at Mass, the most solemn point of the liturgy. As noted above, Vivanco later composed a parody mass upon this motet. Its text, in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, is borrowed from Vespers on the feast of Corpus Christi, where it is sung as an antiphon before the Magnificat.

All of Vivanco’s Magnificats follow the format, standard until well into the seventeenth century, whereby alternate verses only of the text are set to polyphony, the remainder sung to a traditional repeated plainchant tone. Even in the polyphonic verses, however, at least one of the voices always carries a paraphrase of the same plainchant tune. Indeed, in the Magnificat Quarti toni (based on the fourth of eight plainchant tones), the chant is quoted almost exactly in the long notes of the soprano part in the verse Deposuit potentes... . In this, as in his other Magnificats, Vivanco provides two different settings of the final polyphonic verse Gloria Patri... , one simple, the other usually remarkable for some feat of technical brilliance. This quite extraordinary alternative version, in which the choir, previously divides into only five parts, is now divided into eight. One of the two soprano voices again paraphrases the fourth-tone chant. However, on one of the tenor parts, Vivanco places the label “Hic Tenor in ordine decantat octo tonos” – in other words, this tenor sings in order the tunes of all eight Magnificat tones. In practice, this is not quite the musical sleight of hand one might expect, since the contours of the other seven tones are modified to match the prevailing fourth tone. However, there is more to come, for simultaneously other voices sing the words and melodies of three more chants in honour of the Virgin: in the alto the hymn Ave maris stella, in the first bass the antiphon Ave Maria, and in the second bass the hymn O gloriosa domina.

To conclude, Vivanco´s most forward-looking and extrovert Marian works, the motet Cantate Domino. On a text from psalm 97, this eight-part motet takes much of the division into two four-part ensembles and is almost dance-like in its jubilant syncopations. Its use of equal but alternating ensembles demonstrates the composer’s familiarity with the most up-to-date international idioms. Like so many other of his works, it demonstrates that, while he himself never left Spain, Vivanco was a fully abreast of musical developments in Italy as was Victoria, who had actually lived there for two decades.

Michael Noone

Francisco Guerrero's Vesper Psalms and Missa pro Defunctis

2011-05-19T16:44:00.003+01:00

Francisco Guerrero was the most widely known and respected composer in Spain during the second half of the sixteenth century. In our time, he has been overshadowed by Morales, a generation older, and by Victoria, Guerrero's junior by some twenty years. If, now, we esteem Victoria as the supreme master of the era, it is partly because his works have long been published and widely performed. Guerrero's much more varied legacy of music is still awaiting complete publication; the majority of what has been printed in modern editions has come out only in the last twenty years.

This much loved composer died on November 8th, 1599, at the age of seventy-one, having served at the cathedral of Seville for most of his life. His influence was widespread in Spain, Portugal and the New World. For more than two centuries his works were copied and re-copied, adapted and imitated. Some of his finest motets were taken by his juniors and by much later successors as models for masses; his Magnificats became paradigms for a century after his passing.

Most modern attention, at least from performers, has been devoted to his exquisite motets and Marian antiphons, also to some of his masses. The forms and melodies of these, plainchant or mensural chant, their manner of recitation and repetition of the texts, completely control the musical outcome and determine the composer's overall structures and most of the formal detail. The chant melodies permeate the music at almost every moment.

The Psalms for the Vespers of the Feast of All Saints (November 1st) begin with two, Dixit Dominus and Confitebor tibi, Domine, that Guerrero set intending alternate verses to be sung to simple polyphony incorporating the recitation tones of psalmody, the first to Tone I, the second to Tone VII. The choice of tones is dictated by the modes of the antiphons associated with the psalms on a particular Feast. The third psalm, Beatus vir, is here performed in chant only, to Tone VIII. The fourth, Laudate pueri Dominum, is sung with its even-numbered verses rendered in fabordón-a method in which simple chords and a cadence are adapted to the words, verse by verse, not unlike the Italian falsobordone or the later development of Anglican chant. This example is by Guerrero's younger friend Rodrigo Ceballos. It is based on Tone VIII but with a different termination (verse ending).

The last of the five psalms for All Saints at Vespers is Guerrero's shortest, again in Tone VIII. Its doxology, Gloria Patri..., swings into triple time, a lively ending. Indeed, Guerrero's last verses in his psalms are always impressive in various ways. The close of Dixit Dominus requires the choir to expand to six voices and Confitebor goes to five from the standard four. These are not exceptional procedures, but Guerrero's variety and subtlety within a self-imposed discipline of conciseness and total commitment to the plainchant melodies show why his Vespers music was so admired, used and emulated in the Hispanic world.

In the celebration of Vespers, two other important texts are usually set to follow the psalms, the Hymn and the Magnificat. The hymn text, usually of five to seven verses, was designated for the liturgical occasion, saint's day or other feast-in the present programme, All Saints-and it was customary for alternate verses to be sung by the opposite 'sides' of the choir, antiphonally. Polyphonic singing was widely used, though often instrumental intervention was allowed by the resident wind band of shawms, cornetts and sackbuts or by the organ. Guerrero composed a cycle of twenty-three hymns for Vespers of many of the important Feasts or regular uses during the ecclesiastical year. In these he employs quite elaborate polyphony.

Following the splendid examples of Morales and Costanzo Festa, as well as Sevillian precursors like Escobar and Peñalosa, Guerrero preserves the model, evolved in the fifteenth century, in which the plain (or mensural) hymn tune was always present in one voice or another. Sometimes it is quoted literally; often it is stretched, ornamented or varied, but it is always clearly heard. The All Saints Vespers hymn Christe, redemptor omnium is one of Guerrero's finest in this form.

The climax of Vespers is the invariable text of the Canticle of the Blessed Virgin, the Magnificat. This joyful song has had the attention of composers of all periods from the late Middle Ages to our own time. It seems to bring out some of their most happy and shining music. Perhaps Guerrero's setting on the Fourth Tone is more subdued than others, but it has in its minor key a haunting quality that is enhanced by the sharp accidentals which colour the recitation tone not only in Guerrero's polyphony but in the chant. This is a sixteenth century Spanish twist to the Fourth Tone, one that is clearly notated in a number of contemporary chant books like the Intonarium Toletanum (1515) and, notably, in the plainsong tutor (Breve instrucción de canto llano-Seville, 1565) published by Luys de Villafranca, Guerrero's colleague for many years as plainchant master at Seville Cathedral.

All the Vespers music comes from Guerrero's Liber vesperarum (Rome, 1584) and it is from his own printed intonations and from the evidence of Villafranca that we know of the semi-mensural method of psalmody in Spain. This is well documented in both theoretical and practical books from around 1450 to 1890. It requires us to abandon the plain method of modern times (e.g. Solesmes), instead prolonging many strong syllables, shortening others. It is what Guerrero would have expected.

O Domine Jesu Christe is an extra-liturgical text in which the wounded Saviour is adored upon the Cross. Guerrero treats it with tragic expression. It has become one of his best loved pieces. He set the text twice; the present version is that of 1570, later reprinted. A quite different setting was published in 1589.

Polyphonic composition of the Requiem Mass (Missa pro defunctis) was late to develop. The Ordinary - Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei - were standard texts throughout the Western Church, though not all composers would set all of them; Ockeghem's has only a Kyrie, at least as it now survives. The composers of the sixteenth century usually set the words of the Ordinary and of the Proper-Introit, Gradual, Tract, Offertory and Communion-although these varied in text and in melody from country to country, indeed from one diocese to another. As a result of the reforms of the Council of Trent these were standardised for all the diocesan uses of the Roman Rite and the Sequence-Dies irae-was required. These new disciplines were enshrined in the Roman Missal issued by Pius V in 1570.

The new Missal was accepted at Seville in January, 1575, due preparation having been made for its adoption. Guerrero dutifully revised his setting of the Mass for the Dead. This new version was published in 1582. The composer made a few small changes to the movements that could be preserved, though he completely changed the Benedictus. Now obsolete texts had to be removed, others changed to conform with the Roman texts. Inevitably, it is the 1582 version that is better known and more likely to be performed.

The present recording presents Guerrero's unreformed Missa pro defunctis, printed in Paris in 1566; it follows the pre-Tridentine use of Seville. Throughout, Guerrero bases his music on the plainchant melodies, clearly placed in one voice or another, more often in the top, always audible. These are always traditional Hispanic melodies or, at least, Hispanic variants of those in general use. The Tract is given twice: one is specified in The Seville Missal for the obsequies of members of the clergy, Sicut cervus and its verse Sitivit anima; the other is specified for use in Paschal Time, Dixit Dominus: Ego sum resurrectio. The Offertorium - Domine Jesu Christe - is unreformed, using the phrase 'ne cadant in obscura tenebrarum loca' rather than the succinct '....in obscurum' of the 1570 Missal. Guerrero did not compose music for the two lengthy verses Hostias et preces and Redemptor animarum specified in the Seville use.

The settings of the Sanctus, Benedictus and the three-fold Agnus Dei are given in the unrevised versions. They are followed by what many may find a surprise. Lux aeterna, the Communion (Guerrero calls it Communicanda, a term long used in Spain), begins and ends with the familiar words but contains a late medieval verse, widely used until the reforms; it may be found elsewhere including the English Sarum Use. Guerrero set this Communion twice, for four voices and then for five. He did the same thing to the reformed text when he came to write his revised Mass for the Dead (1582).

The music's cool beauty, the unpretentious proportions and the calm unfolding of the ancient melodies to the venerable texts reveal Guerrero's approach to his art as devout and contemplative. There is a stillness and ceremonial formality about it, characteristics that may have become lost in the world of zealous passions in the times of religious conflict.

Bruno Turner
(1999)

Masses and Motets by Claudio Monteverdi

2011-05-15T21:20:00.015+01:00

The listener seeking sixteenth-century church music at its best is likely to turn to setting of the ordinary of the Mass. This may in part be the consequence of the post-symphonic assumption that a Mass lasting half an hour is somehow more significant than a three-minute motet. But for the composer of the time too, the Mass was an important medium; often one in which he could display his skill on a large scale, honour a particular occasion or person (a saint or a patron), and sometimes pay homage to a fellow composer by choosing in friendly emulation to model his work on his important musically. One reason was the greater respect given to the meaning of the Mass. The Reformation’s arguments on the nature of the Mass, and the Catholic church’s reaction exemplified in the Council of Trent, diminished its use as an occasion for ostentatious display. It is significant that there are no complete Masses by Giovanni Gabrieli, who was writing for the church most famous for the musical elaboration of its ceremony, St Mark’s, Venice.

The fundamental changes of musical style in this period took place apart from music for the Mass. Sixteenth-century composers published books of masses and motets, but in the seventeenth century, these were replaced by collections of psalms, antiphons and solo motets intended as antiphon substitutes, usually written in the new stile concertato and intended chiefly for Vespers. The best-know example is Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, though that is unusual in its careful presentation of music for just one service. The music is in the new style, even the psalms for several voices requiring soloists and demanding a more virtuosic manner. An organ continuo accompaniment is necessary, and sometimes other obbligato instruments too. Masses appeared rarely, and tended too. Masses appeared rarely, and tended to be written in a more traditional manner.

Monteverdi must have written considerably more than the three setting of the Mass which have survived. In 1601, when applying for the position as successor to Pallavicino as maestro di cappella to Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, he mentions his motets and masses, and in a letter of 1634, he implies that he was expected to write a new Mass every Christmas. In 1631, the thanksgiving for the end of the plague included a solemn mass by Monteverdi, with loud trumpets playing during the Gloria and Credo: the Gloria may perhaps have been the one published ten years later in his massive collection of Venetian service-music Selva morale. But it is significant that his concertato Masses were not published: there was evidently to market for them. Each of the three publications of Monteverdi’s church music begins with a Mass, but they are all in the old a capella style, contrasting with the concertato style that predominates in the rest of the collections.

On 16 July 1610 Bassano Casola, a Mantuan singer, wrote to Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga (younger son of Duke Vincenzo):

Monteverdi is having printed an a capella Mass for six voices written with much study and toil, since he had to continually manipulate every note through all the parts, always further strengthening the 8 themes from Gombert’s motet In illo tempore. And he is also having printed with it some psalms for the Vespers of the Virgin, with various and diverse manners of invention and harmony, all on a cantus firmus. He intends to come to Rome this autumn to dedicate them to His Holiness.

This is a not-too-inaccurate description of the publication which appeared later that year in Venice, dedicated to Pope Paul V. This begins with a ‘Missa da capella a sei voci fatta sopra il motetto In illo tempore del Gomberti’, to quote the fullest version of the title, which heads the organ part. There is no contradiction in having an organ part to a Missa da capella: the term lacked the implications that a capella was later to acquire. There was, however, one place where church music always was sung unaccompanied, the Sistine Chapel in Rome; so it is not surprising that the copy of the Mass surviving there omits the organ part. Monteverdi visited Rome in the autumn of 1610 to present a copy in person, hoping to receive in return a scholarship for his son Francesco (and perhaps some advantage for himself as well). Although the entire publication of Mass and Vespers was dedicated to the Pope, it is likely that only the Mass was in fact presented, since the Vesper music was hardly in accordance with Papal taste: the Vespers were far more suited to Venice, where the edition was published and where the composer soon secured one of the most highly prized positions available, taking charge of the musical forces of the basilica of St Mark.

Nicolas Gombert was born in Flanders around 1495, studied with Josquin and spent most of his life as a member of the chapel of the Emperor Charles V. He was sacked for pederasty in 1540 and sentenced to the galleys: he was soon pardoned, but little is known of his subsequent career. He died between 1556 and 1561. There are connections between Gombert and one member of the Gonzaga family, Ferrante, to whom Gombert sent a motet in 1547; the library of the Gonzaga chapel, Santa Barbara, included at least one of Gombert’s published sets of motets. There is no obvious reason why Monteverdi should choose a work by him on which to model his Mass; but he was clearly intent in going back beyond the preceding generation of Italian composers to the Flemish sources of the polyphonic style.

Monteverdi self-consciously heads the work with a list of the themes he has extracted from Gombert’s motet (tem of them; in fact), perhaps because he realized that it would be unknown, perhaps to show that he was interested in the abstrct treatment of the conventional thematic tags rather than in parodying it as a whole. Six-voice writing was becoming unusual for polyphonic writing: it is symptomatic that Palestrina’s most famous six-voice Mass, the Papae Marcelli was rewritten after his death for the more fashionable four voices. In the Vesper psalms which completed the 1610 publication, Monteverdi shows impressive skill in writing idiomatically for many voices within the clearer harmonic patterns of the new style. In the Mass, the harmony is still generated from a bass line which is part of the contrapuntal network, though there is a clear sense of tonality. The texture is dense, with few rests for individual parts, and only one section of chordal writing, ‘Et incarnates est’, which draws attention to the change to E major from the prevailing C major. The following ‘Crucifixus’ restores C major, but uses the highest four voices only. E major is again used for tonal contrast in the ‘Benedictus’. The final ‘Agnus Dei’ is for seven voices, following the tradition of adding an extra voice for the last section of the Mass.

In 1620, Giulio Cesare Bianchi issued two anthologies of motets, one in praise of God, the other of the Virgin. The former included four item by Monteverdi, among them Cantate Domino and Domine, ne in furore. The scoring is again for six voices, but the writing is considerably more relaxed and unselfconscious than in the Mass, with homophonic sections and a more integral and madrigalian relationship between word and note.

Of the two large collections of Monteverdi’s Venetian church music, the composer was responsible in some degree for the 1641 Selva morale, much of whose contents dated back at least a decade. After his death, the publisher Alessandro Vincenti collected ‘the sacred relics of the work of the most excellent Monteverdi’, beginning his volume with a ‘Messa a 4 voci da Capella’. The composer shows himself to be particularly concerned with thematic economy, and much of the music is derived from the descending scale of a fourth and the rising thirds of the opening theme. The power of the descending fourth as a ground had been demonstrated in the Lamento della Nifa: here it is less regular and often disguised. The vocal lines are more florid than in the 1600 Mass and nearer those of Monteverdi’s concerto music; the texture is varied with duets and trios, time changes and chordal passages with strong rhythms. In 1610 Monteverdi was looking backwards; but later in his life (there is no clue when the 1650 Mass was composed, but it is inconceivable that it antedates the 1610 one), he could write in a more uninhibited way, combining the practices of both old and new styles without incongruity, the fruits of his labours on Gombert’s themes being the contrapuntal freedom of this four-voice Mass.

Clifford Bartlett
(1985)

Renaissance Portugal: Sacred Music of Cardoso and Lôbo

2011-05-14T07:10:00.014+01:00

This is The Sixteen's 2005 release of motets and the Missa "Regina Coeli" by Fr. Manuel Cardoso and motets and the Missa pro Defunctis a 8 by Duarte Lobo.

This is one of those cds that you listen and never forget. This edition, on The Sixteen's lable Coro, is in fact a re-edition of a previous release. This release was made in 1994 under the sponsouring of European Cultural Capital Lisbon 94

Renaissance Portugal: Sacred Music of Cardoso and Lôbo, The Sixteen, Harry Christophers, Coro, 2005.

The Review from the 94' edition:

Hot on the heels of their outstanding disc of music by John Tavener (14052), for their latest recording under their exclusive contract with Collins Classics, Harry Christophers and The SIxteen now go back the best part of four centuries to music of the "Golden Age" of Portuguese polyphony, and to two of its finest composers, Manuel Cardoso (1566-1650) and Duarte Lôbo (1565-1646). The results are very fine indeed.

The principal works presented here are two large-scale mass settings, Cardoso's Missa Regina Caeli published in 1636 and Lôbo's first (eight-part) setting of the Missa pro Defunctis (1621 – there is also a six-part setting from 1639). The works are similar in that they share a general sobriety of approach: neither grabs the listener immediately, and there is little of the feeling for dramatic opportunity or individualist idiosyncrasy that pervades the work of, say, their near-contemporary Rebelo and not much of the hieratic austerity in some earlier Spanish masters. They are dissimilar in tone: the Cardoso is bright, light, floats in effortless lines (Ivan Moody's articulate notes ascribe this quality to its being in the equivalent of F Major); the Lôbo, virtually ignoring the harmonic possibilities of his eight parts, is simple and unassertive in a rather bashful, confessional manner – this is the serenity of resignation, not of transfiguration. But what both masses unambiguously are is deeply attractive; and if their understatement makes their character less than obvious, all the more reason to persist until the refined flavour reveals itself.

The accompanying motets offer a series of little gems, from the restrained dignity of Cardoso's Sitivit anima mea, the dramatic purposefulness of his Tulerunt lapides ut iacerent in eum and the restrained Non mortui qui sunt in inferno to Lôbo's poignant Audivi vocem de caelo and Pater peccavi. Each evokes a feeling of timelessness in the space of a few brief minutes.

It goes without saying that the performances are faultless, the vocal lines clear, firm and weightless, and the recording, made in St. Judes on the Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb, combines a marvellously resonant acoustic with immediacy of sound – crystalline clarity with the sense of space that the music requires. Last year Naxos released the Lôbo mass in a performance by the Schola Cantorum of Oxford under Jeremy Summerly (8.550682; the coupling is the Cardoso setting of the Requiem). Summerly's sound is softer, with the upper voices more prominent than with Christophers, who manages a harder, more pointedly focussed tone that gives a more Ibérian tang to the music. The Naxos disc, of course, is half the price of this new one, which may decide your choice. But The Sixteen sing with far more character and the recorded sound is superior. If you can afford a few extra quid, go for Christophers. Strongly recommended.

Martin Anderson.
(1998)

Tracks:

Fr. Manuel Cardoso
   1. Sitivit anima mea
   2. Tulerunt lapides
   3. Non mortui
   4. Missa Regina caeli: Kyrie
   5. Missa Regina caeli: Gloria
   6. Missa Regina caeli: Credo
   7. Missa Regina caeli: Santus/Benedictus
   8. Missa Regina caeli: Agnus Dei

Duarte Lobo
   9. Audivi vocem de caelo
10. Pater peccavi
11. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Introitus
12. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Kyrie
13. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Graduale
14. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Offertorium
15. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Sanctus/Benedictus
16. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Agnus Dei
17. Missa Pro Defunctis a 8: Lux aeterna

Giovanni P. da Palestrina's Missa 'Viri Galilei'

2011-05-12T12:56:00.001+01:00

Viri Galilaei is a motet for Ascension, published in the 1569 Liber primus mottettorum, containing motets for five, six and seven voices. The joyful element of Ascension is what gives this motet its character. The six-part Viri Galilaei is a dramatic work, with striking use of different groupings of voices: the opening duet is succeeded by a five voice passage, then by a high-lying quartet and a lower-pitched passage again for four voices. This continues throughout the motet, as also does the constant use of homophony (which is used to astonishing effect for dramatic purposes, for instance at the five-voiced entry at “Viri Galilaei” and at “quid statis”). There is an excursion into more florid writing at “hic Iesus”, but this again returns to homophony is explained by the sudden dazzling cascades of descending figures at the “Alleluia”, which make some of the most bright and shinning music Palestrina ever wrote.

The Mass Viri Galilaei was printed in the Missarum liber duodecimus of 1601, published in Venice. This Mass makes much less use of the homophonic writing of its model (perhaps strange when one considers the extent of its use in the motet), exploring instead the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in the scalic figures of the motet’s “Alleluia” – these appear early in the Kyrie. When reference is made to the static passages of the motet, it tends to be of an inexact nature, though it is always entirely clear. This is the case with the Kyrie’s reference to “hic Iesus”: the reminiscence is quite detectable, but the counterpoint is more developed.

As with the four-part Mass, there is a scalic point to highlight “Iesu Christe” in the Gloria, though here it is even more pronounced and remarkable in the context of the surrounding stasis. The contrasting of different group of voices is also carried over into the Mass, particularly in the Gloria and Credo in which the volume of text demands contrast. The meditative quartet at the “Cruxifixus” is particularly beautiful, seeming to contain the essence of the text of the Creed. The Agnus Dei is in similar vein, being a calm remembrance of the motet, but turning the original descending scales into ascending ones.