Arthur Bliss's "Pastoral"

Bliss’s Pastoral for clarinet and piano was written in December 1916 or in January 1917 during his military service, and the first performance took place on 17 February 1917. Originally Pastoral formed the second of two pieces, the first being Rhapsody. Pastoral was published in 1980, but the music of Rhapsody has never been published and the where-abouts of the original manuscript remain unknown. Pastoral is therefore one of Bliss’s earliest surviving works. Tonally, it is centred on D. Such a key, as always in Bliss’s music, is not rigidly adhered to; soon the long, arching clarinet theme which begins the piece hints at broader tonal regions. A secondary idea on the piano, marked ‘grazioso’, begins in a clear C major, although that too is not held for long as the clarinet takes up the new idea (with an important triplet insertion), again stretching the tonality. An extended piano passage leads to a quiet 6/8 aspect of the second subject. The 3/4 returns at the passionate climax before the piano ushers, in the final part, Tempo primo, a gentle restatement of the long initial theme which now reveals its affinity with the second subject. Gradually the music winds to a pianissimo close, the bare fifth D - A leaving the mode unresolved.

Francisco Guerrero's Missa 'Surge Propera' and Motets

It has proved difficult to find just the right place for Francisco Guerrero amongst the composers of his time. A contemporary of Palestrina, although they are not known to have met, he was the pre-eminent Spanish composer of the generation between Morales and Victoria. Like Victoria he was a church musician, yet wrote as much secular music as he did sacred. And although he made his career entirely in Spain, he owed more to Palestrina's methods and ideals than either Morales or Victoria, both of whom lived in Rome for many years.

But the formal perfection on the surface of all Guerrero's writing - something which is maintained in his chanzonetas and villancicos - often only serves to smooth over an emotionally complex and demanding interior. The way these opposites meet in his church music has long fascinated me and has led to this anthology. Emotion filtered through formal balance can make for especially powerful experiences, and every piece included here has something of this. Usquequo, Domine and Hei mihi, Domine, for example, are classic examples of seemingly understated penitence; passionate in a different way are the great Marian pieces, for which Guerrero was so famed: Ave virgo sanctissima, possibly the most famous single piece of music to come from Spain in the sixteenth century, and the eight-voice Ave Maria and Regina caeli laetare.

Guerrero lived a colourful life, the details of which were relatively well documented at the time. After studying with Morales he began his life-long association with Seville Cathedral in 1542, initially being appointed as a ‘contralto' (apparently he was an exceptionally gifted contra alto, or high tenor). Both the cathedral chapters in Jaen and Malaga tried to entice him away, but he always found his way back to Seville where, in 1551, the authorities offered him the right to succeed the ageing maestro, Pedro Fernandez. Unfortunately for Guerrero Fernandez lived another twenty-three years, and it was only in 1574 that he finally took over. By then he was internationally renowned as a composer, having had his works published not only in Seville, but also in Paris, Venice and Louvain; and outside Europe, in the Spanish-American empire, his works were far better known than those of any of his contemporaries. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian composers, under orders from the Catholic authorities, tried to perpetuate the style of Palestrina, in the New World Guerrero's music continued to be sung as if it were new, helped by its proto-baroque harmonic clarity. Indeed his Magnificat secundi toni, when published in 1974 from an anonymous eighteenth-century copy in Lima Cathedral, was taken to be an eighteenth-century work.

In 1588 Guerrero undertook a journey which truly sets him apart from every notable composer of the period: he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Leaving Venice on 14 August and travelling via the island of Zante (now Zakinthos), he visited Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Damascus before returning to Venice on 9 January 1589. On the way back his ship was twice boarded by pirates, who threatened his life and exacted a ransom. When he finally resumed his duties at Seville Cathedral the cost of publishing his music and the depredations of the pirates had placed him in such serious financial difficulties that in 1591 he was committed to a debtors' prison. The cathedral chapter secured his release by paying off his creditors; and they also engaged Alonso Lobo to act as his assistant. In 1590 he published what proved to be a popular book about his journey to the Holy Land (El viaje de Hierusalem), during the course of which he wrote that he longed to return there. On 11 January 1599 he obtained another year's leave in order to go, but delayed in starting out and died from the plague that struck Seville in the late summer.

Guerrero's Missa Surge propera is the only one of his eighteen settings to be scored for six voices; all the others are for fewer. Its model has not been identified. The Mass has a sweep of phrase which may remind of some of his Marian motets - Maria Magdalene immediately comes to mind. The polyphony seems to glow with an inner sonority, yet the melodic lines are always grateful to sing, the classic shape of them often anticipating later writing. One might use words of this kind about much of Palestrina's music, but there should be no confusion. Guerrero's underlying harmonic sense is so strong that he hardly ever needs to resort to block chords, instead always keeping some sense of independent movement alive between the voices, even when setting a long text in an economical way (as in this Credo). The beauty is in the stability which the harmony brings, coupled to the easy flow of the melodic ideas as they move between the contributing voices. In this Mass Guerrero favoured full textures more than was usual for him, and also liked to group the three higher voices against the three lower ones, as at the beginnings of the ‘Christe eleison', the ‘Qui tollis' and the ‘Agnus Dei'. The Missa Surge propera was published in Guerrero's Missarum Liber Secundus, in Rome in 1582.

Usquequo, Domine and Hei mihi, Domine must rank as two of the most powerful penitential motets of the period. Both scored for SSATTB they were eventually both published alongside Requiem Masses. The surface of Usquequo, Domine is faultlessly spacious and sustained, the material not looking on paper - there are few dissonances or suspensions - as though it could bear the weight of these words. Yet it creates an unforgettable atmosphere, the simpler the more passionate, and nowhere more remarkable than at the first inversion chords on ‘dolorem in corde meo'. In Hei mihi, Domine the imitation at the opening is similarly architectural, though here a chromaticism in the manuscript has led to the editorial addition of two further accidentals which greatly intensify the prevailing mood of desolation. Later on Guerrero allows himself a very brief moment of madrigalian word-painting, at ‘Ubi fugiam?' (‘Where should I flee?'), before the music culminates, as in Usquequo, in simple block chords, here to underline the words ‘Miserere mei' (‘Have mercy on me').

Surge propera and Beata Dei genitrix are the most substantial motets, by virtue of having two halves. Many composers of the period, including Palestrina, liked to work with this format because it gave them the opportunity for the symmetrical restatement of material. In Beata Dei genitrix this is obviously the case when the ‘Alleluias' we have heard at the end of the first half return at the end of the second; in Surge propera the use of the two halves is more strictly mathematical. This elaborate motet is unusual in having a long-note, so-called cantus firmus, chant part. This is given to the second sopranos, who sing an ostinato made up of the first five notes of the chant melody associated with the words ‘Veni, sponsa Christi' (‘Come, bride of Christ'); and they also very deliberately sing these words against the voluptuous text of the other parts, thus sanctifying the sensuousness of the love poetry of the Song of Songs. Guerrero set this love poetry of the other parts with suitably diaphanous music, while tempering it with the chant which is quite severely disposed according to the kind of abstract pattern which might have been found in music of a hundred years earlier. At the beginning of the motet the chant motif starts on a C, and in five statements descends by step until it reaches F. In the second half it starts on F and rises back up to C, meaning that the piece ends with the part on its highest notes. Such a complicated marriage of texts and musical styles was not usual by the 1570s, when Surge propera was published, and it poses some exceptional interpretative challenges.

One of the features of Guerrero's music is the number of outstanding motets he wrote on texts praising the Virgin, to such a degree that commentators in his lifetime and beyond have been tempted to say that he had a fixation about her. His contemporaries even called him ‘El cantor de Maria'. But this is really a tribute to the power of his music, since Mary has been of central importance to most Catholic composers, even if they could not match Guerrero's balance and serenity. Beata Dei genitrix is one of the most admired, its gentle mood culminating in a plea ‘pro devoto femineo sexu' (‘for all women dedicated to God'), asking the Virgin to intercede for them. More famous still is Ave virgo sanctissima, which became so popular in Guerrero's lifetime that it was regarded as the quintessentially perfect Marian motet and used as a parody model by a host of composers, many of them Flemish. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this masterpiece is that the intense emotion is generated within the confines of a canonic structure: the two sopranos parts echo each other throughout at an eight-beat interval, yet they move so smoothly and effortlessly that it would be easy to assume that there was no complexity involved. The phrase at ‘margarita preciosa' (‘precious pearl') is one of the loveliest in all renaissance music.

Ave Maria is a classic late renaissance double-choir setting, with short answering phrases between the groups which culminate in sonorous eight-part sections. The alternatim method is especially effective at ‘ora pro nobis peccatoribus' (‘pray for us sinners'). Regina caeli laetare, by contrast, is a more through-composed eight-part setting, with Guerrero picking out the vocal groupings at random. Behind this teeming polyphony are repeated chant statements - whole sections built up on them in fact - though, as with so much else on this disc, the writing is so fluent the listener can easily not notice them. To be able to write eight-part counterpoint of this calibre has been the dream of many composers, but very few in the history of music have been able to rival what Guerrero shows us here.

Peter Phillips
(2005)

Alessandro Stradella

Stradella was born in Nepi in the province of Viterbo on 3 April 1639; he died by the hand of an assassin in Genoa on 25 February 1682. Originally from Tuscany, his family had moved to Nepi and later settled in Rome. It was in Rome that his first compositions were commissioned. Here, besides Queen Christina of Sweden, he counted among his clients Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and other members of the most illustrious families of the Roman aristocracy. Having written both sacred and secular chamber works, the composer turned his attention to the theatre, writing a series of operas as well as a variety of other stage works and serenades, all of which received performances not only in Rome but also in the other major Italian cities. His growing fame as a musician was, however, severely compromised by scandalous behaviour which included various amorous intrigues and dubious enterprises.

One of Stradella’s lucrative sidelines was matchmaking, but when he arranged a marriage in 1677 for a niece of Cardinal Cibo, the Papal Secretary of State, his already troubled life was threatened and he was obliged to flee the city. Having taken refuge briefly in Florence he settled for a time in Venice. Here he was soon in trouble again on account of an illicit relationship. Agnese Van Uffele, who lost her heart to the handsome young musician, was unfortunately the mistress of Alvise Contarini, a Venetian nobleman. When the lovers fled to Turin, Contarini had them followed by two thugs who assaulted the musician violently with every intention of making an end of him. Unfortunately for Stradella, he managed to escape. The incident provoked a diplomatic row between the Venetian Republic and the Sun King, Louis XIV of France. Although the French regent in Turin, Maria Giovanna, offered the composer the protection of the court, once healed of his wounds Stradella decided to move to Genoa.

Arriving there in 1678, he was offered an annual salary of 100 Spanish doubloons by a group of noblemen on condition that he stayed in the city writing music. Stradella accepted the offer, resumed his work as a successful composer, arranged performances of his music in Modena and Bologna and engaged in correspondence with several Roman aristocrats. But yet another scandal, this time involving a Genoese noblewoman, proved fatal. He was stabbed to death by hired assassins. A contemporary report describes the incident in the following terms:

While returning home accompanied by a servant and wearing a cloak, the musician Stradella was stabbed three times and died without being able to utter a word, and the servant who was walking before him noticed nothing except that he fell flat on his face, and so he died, and as yet it is not known by whose hands.

The composer’s tomb in the church of Santa Maria delle Vigne in Genoa was only identified in 2003.

Stradella’s output, characterised by intensity and expressiveness, includes oratorios, operas, incidental music for plays, serenades and stage works. The total number of his cantatas, arias, songs and madrigals, religious and instrumental works, is around three hundred. Apart from the romantic fascination aroused by his turbulent life, Stradella’s work is of fundamental historical importance for its outstanding stylistic modernity, the result of a remarkable synthesis of the music of his time. His influence upon contemporary musicians and those who followed him was considerable, as is clearly shown, for example, by the fact that Handel made ample use of it in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, written in London in 1738, taking the music for no less than six choruses directly from Stradella’s trio serenade Qual prodigio è ch’io miri.

Finally, among the curiosities inspired by him are two operas: Stradella, by the Swiss composer Louis Abrahm de Niedermeyer, produced in Paris in 1837, and Alessandro Stradella, written by the German composer Friedrich von Flotow in 1844 to a libretto by one W. Friedrich, which was loosely based on the composer’s amorous adventures.

Estevan Velardi
(2006)

Johann Sebastian Bach's Masses BWV 233 and BWV 236

I place music next to theology and give it highest praise.
(Martin Luther)

Nearly half a Millenium ago mounting tensions within the Western Church exploded in the crisis of the Reformation. Given the extreme rejection by some Reformed churches of Roman observances, one might be surprised to find parts of Roman observances, English audiences might be surprised to find parts of the Latin Mass still included, more than two centuries later, in the church music of the foremost composer of Luther’s church. And yet Luther’s quarrel was not so much with the liturgy, to which he had adhered as an Augustinian monk since the age of twenty-two, as with corruption within the hierarchy of the church itself and with the venality of priesthood and papacy which so insulted his sense of what was vere dignum et justum. The reforms of the liturgy which he was persuaded to enunciate (and publish, in 1523 and 1526) can be seen as having careful regard for a diversity of needs and aspirations within the wider congregation. He proposed both a Latin and a German version of the Eucharist. Paradoxically the retention of a Latin version could both satisfy the sensibilities of the most learned and comfort those who treasured familiarity above all – even the familiarity of gobbledygook. The Formula Missae, published first, was followed by a radical revision designed to engage German speakers more directly in the liturgy, but even in this Deutsche Messe many of the elements of the old Mass (the Ordinary and, to a lesser extent, the Propers) kept their places in the scheme of things, however changed in appearance by translation: from Latin to German, from plainchant to hymn, from prose to verse and from priesthood to congregation.

In the 200 years separating Luther’s publication of the Formula Missae and Bach’s appointment as Thomaskantor in Leipzig – one of the most prestigious posts a musician could hold within the Lutheran church – church music in the various states of Germany had attracted and exercised the talents of many fine composers and some considerable geniuses. Luther’s own ringing endorsements of music, as well as the seedcorn of his own melodies which made German versifications of Latin originals singable by the congregation, will have encouraged the serious appreciation given to music in Reformation Germany:

[N]ext to the Word of God music deserves the highest praise. She is a mistress and governess of those human emotions which govern men or more often overwhelm them... For whether you wish to comfort the sad, to terrify the happy, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate, or to appease those full of hate... what more effective means than music could you find?

But for Luther, himself singer and lutenist, music was more than simply the means to an end:

But when [musical] learning is added to all this... at last it is possible to taste with wonder (yet not to comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music... those who are the least bit moved [by music] know nothing more amazing in this world.

By Bach’s time even Luther’s hymns had acquired the patina of age, and Latin had all but disappeared except in some large churches. Meanwhile there had been a swing against the congregational in the cultivation of an intensively personal religious observance. This was raising the emotional temperature again and Pietism, as it is known, was fuelling a theological debate within Lutheranism which, inevitably, affected those who wrote the poetry and music of the musical sermons we now call ‘cantatas’. The importance of these pieces, their close association – at the heart of the church service – with the reading of the Gospel for the day, the singing of the (German) Creed, and the sermon proper, will have made them an absolute priority for a composer like Bach in a post like Leipzig, and their production throughout the 1720s (along with the Passions to which they are closely related) must have required almost all his energy. It is not surprising then that he did not turn his attention until later to providing his own music for the vestigial Ordinaries, the Kyrie and Gloria, which could still be performed in elaborate (Latin) setting toward the beginning of the service on high days and holy-days. And when he did, he approached the task mainly as one of selecting and reworking of masterpieces from the cantatas, a process known as ‘parody’ – a process which would find its apotheosis in parts of the B minor Mass.

In the Mass in G major all the movements are parodies and it is fascinating to find Bach choosing earlier compositions whose musical architecture (if not the surface detail) suits his purpose and completely altering their emotional impact by extensive recomposition of the individual lines. In the Mass in F major, on the other hand, it is tempting to wonder (despite the difficulty of proving a negative) whether the first three movements derive from no such models and are original compositions inspired directly by the texts they set. A comparison of the Kyries makes the point. The (Greek) text (‘Kyrie eleison’ – ‘Christe eleison’ – ‘ Kyrie eleison’) exhibits both duality and tripartite structure and in the music borrowed for the Mass in G (the opening chorus of BWV 179) the emphasis is on duality. Bach naturally chooses a piece with two distinct and metrically appropriate themes, each of them treated fugally in turn and, importantly (a theological point informing the choice?), combining towards the end of the movement. The corresponding movement in the F major Mass concentrates more on the number three: it is in three clear sections (‘Kyrie’ – ‘Christe’ – ‘Kyrie’), there are three strands (the basso continuo, the voices, and a cantus firmus for the winds), the cantus firmus is Luther’s German version of the Agnus Dei (‘Christe du Lamm Gottes’) which is not only another Ordinary of the Mass but also has a structure based on (two and) three: ‘Agnus Dei... miserere nobis’, ‘Agnus Dei... miserere nobis’, ‘Agnus Dei... dona nobis pacem’. It is virtually impossible to imagine Bach conveniently recalling an earlier piece written to such a template but as vehicle for some other text.

The G major Gloria is another borrowing (and another opening chorus: ‘Gott der Herr ist Sonn’ und Schild’ from BWV 79) and whether this was a stroke of inspiration or desperation cannot be decided here. In the literature it is intriguing to come across the outrage once expressed by some of Bach’s most devoted commentators at his extensive self-borrowing in the masses; they seem to be taking offence (parti pris) on his behalf and even suggest that he deliberately chose inappropriate models for the purpose of demonstrating (covertly, to the initiated, in another century?) his own disgust at being expected to provide music for such unworthy purposes. Unless they have a window on the composer’s conscience denied to the rest of us, it must be that they are so dazzled by the originality of Bach’s first thoughts, directly inspired by and therefore at the service of the text, that they miss the subtlety of his ability to refashion the purely musical product to other words and meanings. They also fail to appreciate the opportunity thus given for music written for a particular date in the calendar to be heard now on several of the Feast Days and Sundays in any Church Year.

On the page of G major Gloria could be read either way – only in listening to a performance can a judgement be made, the sensibilities of the audience. Does it really weaken the music if Bach decides to rescore the original’s military opening for horn and kettledrums, giving the horn part to the angels of heaven (the high voices) and jettisoning the literal drumbeats altogether? The underlying principle of abrupt contrast is, after all, strictly preserved at what had previously been the colossal first entry of all four voices with the words from Psalm 84: ‘For the Lord God is a light and defence’. Now it is, if anything, enhanced by transposition of the outer parts downwards for ‘et in terra pax’, a heartfelt expression of the desire for peace on earth.

In the long Gratias for bass voice Bach rewrites the vocal solo in almost all matters of detail and clarifies many points of articulation in the instrumental accompaniment, although leaving their notes largely unchanged. For the duet Domine Deus all the parts have been so thoroughly rethought in terms of affect that is at least halfway to being a new piece entirely. One wonders what prejudice had its hand up the back of a commentator as sensitive as William Whittaker when he suggests that Bach was ‘guilty’ of an inappropriate and ‘absurd act’ in lavishing such care upon the task. Bach nevertheless persisted with similar efforts in the remaining movements.

In the F major Gloria (original composition? Who knows?) there is real horn writing to be enjoyed, never mind their suppression in the G major. Their glorious ‘whooping’ figure, with its two harmonies pulling against the bass line’s obstinate pedal, crowns the full ensemble just before the continuo section relents and joins the chase. It reappears throughout the movement doubled by the voices, now for ‘Gloria in excelsis’, now for ‘Gratias agimus’. The Domine Deus, with its linked apostrophes to two of the persons of the Trinity (Father and Son), constructs such a convincing bridge between the movements on either side that it is hard not to feel that it was built specifically to carry the listener from Gloria to Qui tollis. It consists of an ‘A section’ setting ‘Domine Deus’ etc. plus a complete reprise of the opening ritornellos, after which the new material for ‘Domine Fili unigenite Jesu Christe’ etc. sounds like the ‘B section’ of a da capo aria. But the expected return does not materialise and, leaving the Domine Deus to refer back to the Gloria, we are pitched forward directly into the agonised (threefold) plea for intercession on mankind’s behalf, entrusted to oboe and soprano soloists in the Qui tollis.

This aria and all that follows in the rest of the piece can be safely identified as earlier music recomposed. In the Quoniam it seems that Bach intends to borrow what had been the false self-confidence of the Pharisee in the parable – BWV 102’s ‘allzu sich’re Seele’ (all too certain soul), fiddling unconcernedly while the fires of hell are stoked – and recycle it with extra swagger as fitting accompaniment for the final address to Christ enthroned, altissimus, but enthroned, tu solus sanctus notwithstanding, as one of the Trinity – and the horns and oboes return – cum Sancto Spiritu. Once again the borrowing is not wholesale but an expanded version of the central fugal section of the opening chorus of a Christmas piece, BWV 40.

So, Bach’s ‘Lutheran masses’: misnomer, like ‘church cantatas’? And does it matter? Is it merely pedantry to hold a torch for Bach’s own distinctions: a handful of single-voice pieces labelled cantata, a few dialogi and motetti, otherwise almost anything with a title is called concerto? If we call everything cantata does it become an unexamined commonplace that Bach’s church pieces are aping opera – precisely the criticism flung at them by some of Bach’s unsympathetic contemporaries – when in fact they might only be borrowing techniques and pressing them into devout theological service? Maybe considerations of purpose sometimes get lost in the current debate about ‘correct’ forces for the performance of these works. It may be that Bach would be less concerned about soli/tutti/ripieni distinctions than about sacred versus profane.

Similarly, the ‘Lutheran’ masses use almost no Lutheran raw material, barring the cantus firmus in the F major Kyrie. Formally they could just as easily be classed as ‘Neapolitan’ masses, and they are only masses in a technical sense of Missa, not complete settings of the Ordinary. They are, however, deeply Lutheran and Bachian in spirit, music in which it is hard not to be moved by the sense of a big and complex resolution of dissonance. How dispiriting, then, to be released from their grip back into a world where people still kill one another, ostensibly over religious differences. And yet, it is true that Bach too, when younger, produced music to set these words from the Litany (and continued to hear them intoned at certain times of the year throughout his life):

Und uns für des Türken und des Papsts grausamen Mond und Lästerungen, Wuten und Toben väterlich behüten (‘And from the horrible murder and blasphemy, fury and madness of the Turk and the Pope, Good Lord, preserve us’, - or as Cornish children once prayed at bedtime: ‘ From Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long-leggedy Beasties, and things that go bump in the night... Good Lord, preserve us’).

Richard Campbell

(2000)

Johann Sebastian Bach's Masses BWV 234 and BWV 235

Although Bach’s functions in Leipzig were completely associated with Lutheranism in both its theological and its evangelical aspects, neither Luther himself nor His closest associates ever seem to have considered the use of Latin texts as undesirable ‘for those who love and understand them’. Parts of the approved liturgies were regularly sounded in Latin or in Greek (Kyrie and Christe eleison), ando n feasts and other significant Sundays, wholesale Latin texts were sung in just-composed occasional elaborations with soloists, chorus and instruments in the internationally current stile misto. Bach’s preserved examples, all of which include substantial re-workings of incorporated earlier cantata movements, seem to date from the late 1730s, when also he began to copy such compositions by others, and to contemplate both earlier and new settings of the full Latin Sanctus.

That Latin settings of the first two large portions of the Missa itself (the Kyrie and Gloria) were by no means seen as undesirable, but probably as especially appropriate, has recently been demonstrated by scholarly research considering the music of Johann Theodor Römhild (1684-1756), who may be considered as a contemporary foil to Bach. Römhild worked near Leipzig in Merseburg. From him we have four Lutheran masses comparable to those of Bach; one has no evidence of origin, but of the other three, one was composed for Whitsunday 1734, the second was used of the feastdays of Trinity and Christmas 1734, on Trinity and the First Sunday in Advent 1735, at Trinity 1736, and the third was performed on the Witsundays of 1745, 1747 and 1751.

None of Bach’s ‘Lutheran’ masses or elaborated Sanctus setting is designated for a particular Feast, although there is some internal evidence that the Mass in F, BWV 233 was for Easter, possibly in 1736, and that the Mass in A, BWV 234 was especially designed for Christmas.

Bach’s ‘Lutheran’ masses and most of his Sanctus settings seem to have been composed, then quite regularly performed, from about 1736 onwards. The Mass in A was composed around 1738, then performed again between c.1743 and c.1746; if its last performance was at Christmas, it must have been in 1748, during the very period when the composer was assembling the last sections of the B minor Mass. The Mass in G, BWV 236 comes from c.1738/39, and was quite likely performed a number of times afterwards, though there is no specific evidence as to exactly when.

During the period from 1736 to 1737 Bach did re-perform his Sanctus in D, BWV 238, first composed for Christmas 1723 – his first in Leipzig. His Christmas Sanctus from 1725, also in D, was eventually incorporated into the B minor Mass. Anonymous short Masses in C and G were prepared ‘between c.31.05.1740 and c. 1742’ and ‘c.1738/39’ respectively, and a distantly derived Sanctus by Johann Kaspar Kerll (1627-1693!) was also at least contemplated ‘between c.1747 and August 1748’ (All the quotations above come from Dr Yoshitake Kobayashi’s highly important script and watermarks-based study of the chronology of Bach’s late works in the 1988 Bach-Jahrbuch). There are furthermore Bach’s own short Mass setting in F (BWV 233, revised as 233a), possibly composed for Easter 1736, and in G minor (BWV 235). Both of these today have as their principal source copies made by Bach’s son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnikol around 1747/48, but those copies were part of a repertoire-building collection made by Altnikol for use in his own position in Naumburg. This collection certainly included Bach compositions composed earlier, so it is usually assumed that Bach had composed them about ten years before this.

All of this activity leads to a new conclusion, which is that, far from being an isolated figure, studying the works of older contrapuntists and incorporating Latin texts into his Leipzig music as a reflection and Sancti for use in Leipzig’s main churches, keeping abreast with a developing fashion, which continued until after his own death. It seems likely that the revised Mass in F, BWV 233a was actually undertaken after then, by his sons and their associates. The whole fashion had probably been inspired by the crowning of August II/III as King of Poland at Warsaw in 1733, a Catholic heir and the Catholic Elector of Lutheran Saxony; perhaps the development of traditional Latin move-ments in orthodox Lutheran festivals had been recommended by theologians, commanded by senior State Musicians or simply exemplified in the quite elaborate setting of the King’s official composer of Church music, Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745).

Bach has been severely criticized by ill-considering critics because his short masses, like his grandiose B minor Mass, draw heavily upon music he had already composed for earlier German texts. However, as the distinguished American commentator Alfred Mann wrote as early as 1981, in the hands of Bach, the parody processes apparent in both the German oratorios and the Latin mass setting reveal ‘the supreme art’ of the master. More recent studies remind us that, in the case of Bach, revision and adaptation were seen as equal to composition in rigour, in challenge and in reward. So it is here.

Stephen Daw
(1999)

Motes by Fr. Manuel Cardoso

Sitivit Anima Mea (Liber Primus Missarum, 1625)
Non Mortui (Liber Primus Missarum, 1625)
Mulier Quae Erat (Livro de Varios Motetes, 1648)
Nos Autem Gloriari (Livro de Varios Motetes, 1648)

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Mozart’s Concerto K 622 and Quintet K 581 for Clarinet

From His early ‘teens’, the wind instrument which most deeply engaged Mozart’s enthusiasm was the clarinet. But this enthusiasm was not to be completely fulfilled until the last seven years or so of his life, the time when he enjoyed the inspiring friendship of Anton Stadler, a clarinettist of genius for whom he composed some superb music, culminating in the Quintet, K581, and Concerto, K622, which stand high among the masterpieces of his last years. Besides their intrinsic qualities, these two works have a peculiar historical significance in that Stadler made a notable contribution to the instrument’s technical development which in turn had some influence on the style of the music.

Stadler, who was born in 1753, arrived in Vienna in 1773 and probably first met Mozart in the early 1780s, and like him became active freemason. Besides the clarinet, his other chosen instrument was the basset horn. Among Mozart’s instrumental music with prominent parts for the former are the Clarinet Trio, K498, and the piano-and-wind Quinto, K452; vocal music includes a fine obbligato part in Sextu’s aria ‘Parto, parto’ i La Clemenza di Tito. In his opera Mozart also gave Stadler a star part in the basset horn Concerto in G, K621a, which he broke off at the 199th bar but ultimately reworked and completed as the first movement of the Clarinet Concerto. By all accounts, Stadler’s mastery of both instruments, especially the clarinet, was deeply appreciated by his contemporaries. One author wrote in 1785:

I have never heard the like of what you contrive with your instrument. Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating a human voice so deceptively as it was imitated by you. Indeed your instrument has so soft and so lovely a tone that nobody can resist it who has a heart.

By the later 1780s Stadler had come to realize that he could enhance the richness and romantic sonority of his clarinet by extending its compass downwards.

Assisted perhaps by Theodor Lotz, another Freemason, who was all-round musician and an instrument-maker at the court, he seems to have achieved this extension gradually. By February 1788 Stadler had added two notes, down to the bottom written note D (sounding B), and in due course he added two more, taking the compass to written C (sounding A) – four additional semitones in all. It was indubitably for this extended instrument – now generally designated the basset clarinet – that Mozart composed his Concerto and probably also his Quintet. Had the autograph scores survived, the musico-historical facts would long have been known and accepted, but Mozart probably gave both to Stadler, and they soon vanished. The instrument too became obsolete, probably because the use of the extra keys was difficult. No contemporary specimen has come to light.

Mozart entered the Quintet in his thematic catalogue on 29 September 1789, and Stadler probably first played it at a concert given on 22 December in the Burgtheater by the Society of Musicians for the benefit of its widows and orphans. The catalogue entry for the Concerto is undated, but Mozart wrote to his wife on 7 October 1791 that he was scoring the finale. So it seems very likely that the performance which Stadler gave in Prague on 16 October was the first. Neither work was published until the turn of the century. In 1802, André of Offenbach brought out the first edition of the Quintet, and about a year earlier three firms – André, Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig, and Sieber of Paris – all issued the Concerto in parts. Though no precise dates can be established, it seems possible that André’s was the first, because some errors in it are corrected by Breitkopf and by Sieber. It was in one of these houses that some forty passages of the solo part which had lain in, or impinged upon, the lowest range of the basset clarinet, were revised upwards to suit the limits of the conventional instrumental. (The same, to a lesser extent, applies to the Quintet.)

Such, in outline, is the complex early history of the basset clarinet, its relation to Stadler and the origin of Mozart’s two compositions. For almost a century-and-a-half after their first publication, all performances used material derived solely from the very early editions. But from the 1940s onwards, scholars and performers in various countries began to suspect that the accepted Concerto part, in particular, was corrupt. Documentary proof, however, was not forthcoming until 1967 when Ernst Hess, a Swiss composer and musicologist, discovered an anonymous review of the Breitkopf parts in the Algemeine Musikalische Zeitung for March 1802. It was clear that the reviewer must have had to hand a manuscript score of Mozart’s basset clarinet text because he quoted from it and remarked how radically the parts had been altered in the Breitkopf edition.

Although Mozart wrote the Concerto nearly two years after the Quintet, the similarities are greater than the differences, which are of degree and form rather than spirit. The two works may perhaps be likened to the observe and reverse of a perfectly designed and finely minted coin, each harmoniously reflecting complementary but subtly contrasting aspects of its creator’s imagination. Much of the melodic line is notable for its distinctive, smooth, flowing limpidity, especially in the first movements of each work and the Rondo of the Concerto. As this is a feature of other Mozart works in A major – the two Piano Concertos K414 and K488, for instance, and the String Quartet K464 – it cannot be due solely to the clarinet’s pitch but rather to some emotional association of the key itself. Both slow movements are instinct with the rapturous serenity and purity which mark Mozart’s style at this time. They are cast in the same mould as the music of the Three Boys in Die Zauberflöte and the slow movement of the last String Quartet (K614a), to give only two instances.

In the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet Mozart sometimes treats the clarinet and its supporters in a concertante manner, while in the Concerto, particularly in the development sections of the outer movements, it has a more integrated role. Despite the disparity of the forces – four strings compared with an orchestra of strings, two flutes, two bassoons and two horns – Mozart contrives to write passages in both compositions which share the same sinewy texture and urgent rhythmical momentum: great strength underlies the mellow lyrical warmth. The two works show clearly the contrast in Mozart’s style of writing for this new clarinet. In the Quintet he uses more of its higher register, while in the Concerto he exploits the diversity of its full range and timbre. Indeed, the lower extension of the notes in the basset register enriches and darkens much of the tonal spectrum.

Alec Hyatt King
(1985)

Batalhas

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Reges Terrae: Music from the Time of Charles V

In the sixteenth century, as at many other times, the Great courts of Europe drew artist of all kinds to them. The opportunities for employment, preferment and reward to be found amongst the rich and powerful made the courts a target for the ambitious, whilst they themselves sought the most skilled to maintain and enhance their prestige. Music, above all the other arts, was central to the display that was expected of rulers, the ‘reges terrae’, and the patronage of composers and maintenance of private chapels were of considerable importance. During the first half of the sixteenth century, there was no greater or more devout a ruler than the Emperor Charles V, whose court was lavishly supplied with music by composers of high talent and singers of rare quality. This was not for form’s sake only: Charles had a personal enthusiasm for music and some skill – singing, and even composing a little – and his chapel was in more or less constant attendance on his almost interminable travels. It is small wonder, then, that a number of the greatest composers of the age had some connection with him.

Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500-1553) is a case in point. He had little apparent contact with the Imperial court, working in his native Spain and in the Papal chapel, yet two of his masses are based on the ‘L’Homme armé’ tune, closely associated with the Emperor and the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, whilst a third was modelled on the chanson Mille regretz, possibly by Josquin des Prez, and a favourite of Charles’s. The first printed editions of these works made the Imperial references even clearer, by the inclusion of Charles’s motto and the Habsburg double-headed eagle, for instance. Morales may have been employed by the Imperial ambassador in Rome, but his efforts seem to have gone beyond what that might have entailed, to speak of personal hopes for advancement.

The Emperor Charles would certainly have encountered Morales’s music. The Pope and Emperor met several times whilst Morales was a member of the Papal chapel, Morales writing a motet for one such occasion, a Peace Conference at Nice in 1538 with Charles and Francis I of France. However, Charles’s acquaintance with his music would have been broader than that. Some of Morales’s motets seem to have been in the repertoire of the Imperial chapel, and the chapel probably did much to make them available to the music printers of the Low Countries and Germany. It is not know whether Morales’s Exaltata est sancta Dei Genitrix, for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, and the six-voice setting of the Marian antiphon Regina caeli were in the Imperial choir books, but their writing, which is especially rich, would have made them suitable for such a renowned ensemble; they mark Morales’s particular emphasis on the veneration of the Virgin.

O Virgo virginum, by Pierre de Manchicourt (c.1510-1564), is also addressed to the Virgin. Little evidence of the composer’s early career remains. The Parisian printer Attaingnant may well have supported Manchicourt with commissions – his music is prominent in several of Attaingnant’s early prints, surprisingly so in view of Manchicourt’s youth and lack of established reputation. O Virgo virginum comes from a book of motets of 1534 containing music for the season before Christmas. It is the last in a cycle of antiphons known as the ‘O’ antiphons. These were sung at the service of Vespers, their performance marking a period of ritual importance and social rejoicing – feasts, drinking, and additional payments to the singers. It appears that Attaignant was trying to recreate what may once have been a localised custom by providing polyphonic settings for all eight of the antiphons usually sung in the cycle, although no further sets of these antiphons are known.

The Christmas theme is continued in Clement’s O magnum mysterium, which tells of the infant Jesus in the stable, Jacobus Clemens (c.1510/15-1555/56) may, like Manchicourt, have been in Paris as a young man, but that is uncertain. He worked in Bruges Cathedral, leaving in 1545. It seems probable that he became chapel master to Philippe II de Croy, Duke of Aarschot, one of Charles’s most trusted generals, serving until the Duke’s death in 1549. He may well have continued in the Croy family’s employ, for the Emperor’s nephew Maximilian tried to poach Clemens for his own newly formed chapel from the next Duke, but that was resisted on the grounds that Clemens was both a drunkard and immoral. His personal failings may well have been exaggerated to keep hold of such a gifted composer, whose music was immensely popular. Moreover, Clemens, by the early 1550s, helped fill the gap left by the retirement of the Imperial composer Thomas Crecquillon: there is a curious motet by Clemens in a manuscript from the court which tells of the parlous state of the Imperial navy – tactfully rewritten to suggest the complete opposite when it was published a few years later, although Clemens himself is unlikely to have been personally responsible for the text in either version. O magnum mysterium appears in the same printed collection, along with other motets from the Imperial circle, and therefore may well have been sung by Charles’s chapel.

By 1545 Manchicourt was also in the Low Countries. He, too, had by this time come within the Habsburg orbit: one of his motets was apparently written, along with works by established composers of the Habsburg courts, for the first marriage of Philip of Spain in 1543, and other ‘political’ motets, one in praise of Charles V, confirm his closeness to the Imperial circle. He later dedicated a volume of motets (1554) to Charles’s counsellor and confidant Cardinal Granvelle, and ended his life as Philip of Spain’s chapel master. Many of his masses and his motet Reges terrae appear in manuscripts associated with the Habsburg courts. This motet is for the Feast of the Epiphany, at the end of the Christmas season, when the three kings came to worship the infant Jesus and to offer gifts. Manchicourt based a mass upon this motet. The Epiphany, besides being a major Feast of the Church, was particularly honoured by rulers in imitation of the Magi. The Emperor Charles himself followed the custom of making an offering of gold on that day each year, and the paired motet and mass may well have been intended for such an occasion.

Of these composers only Nicolas Gombert (c.1495-c.1560) is known to have worked in the Imperial chapel. He is first recorded in 1526 as a singer, but by 1529 he had risen to be master of the choirboys, and de facto court composer. He remained until about 1537, when he was sentenced to the galleys for abusing one of the choirboys in his care. Despite the rigours of the punishment, Gombert continued to composed, and was eventually pardoned and given a benefice that allowed him to live out the rest of his days in some dignity. Nevertheless, the motet Ego sum qui sum comes from his earlier Imperial service, and is an Easter text celebrating the Resurrection. Manchicourt’s Laudate Dominum also has an Easter text. It appeared in 1539 whilst the composer was still in France, at Tours. The collection was the last in a large series of publications by Attaingnant and is the only one to be dedicated to the music of a single composer, a mark of Manchicourt’s growing reputation. This motet opens the collection, and Manchicourt must have regarded it highly in placing it there, although he substituted another motet, possibly to demonstrate his skill at writing for eight voices as well as six, when the print reappeared in 1544, with some changes to its contents presumably made by Manchicourt himself.

Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599) worked exclusively in Spain. Most of his service was at Seville Cathedral, but whilst he was still in his teens he was appointed choirmaster at Jaén. In this, Guerrero had the strong support of Morales, who had given the young composer lessons. Guerrero repaid his debt to Morales in musical homage in several of his works. Whether Morales’s lessons had included the value of self-publicity we cannot say, but Guerrero evidently learned the potential value of promoting his music, and was keen to ensure its wide distribution. Over a period of years he arranged the publication of his works in several of the major centres of the music printing trade: Venice, Rome, Paris and Louvain, as well as Seville, sometimes travelling to do so. He also presented manuscript copies of his works to potential patrons, among them the Emperor Charles. Charles had retired to Spain, to Yuste, and it was while he was there, in 1557 or 1558, that Guerrero gave to the Emperor a collection of his music. Charles had one of the masses performed for him, possibly either the mass on ‘L’Homme armé’ or on Congratulamini mihi, the latter based on a motet by Charles’s former chapel master Thomas Crecquillon, but whether any reward came Guerrero’s way is not known. Guerrero’s Hei mihi, Domine is a setting of a responsory from Matins for the Dead, and was inserted into a setting of the Mass for the Dead, published in 1582. Whilst the Mass relies heavily, as was traditional, on the plainchant of this service, the motet is much freer in its material. The relative austerity of the four-voice setting of the Mass is contrasted with the much fuller textures of this piece. Guerrero himself seems to have valued the work as an example of his skill, as he published it twice more in collections of his motets.

Martin Ham
(2007)

Giovanni Croce and the Venetian Carnival

In sixteenth-century Venice entertainment music was a source of delight to all inhabitants of the city. During the carnival season Venetian nobility, merchants, and citizens enjoyed lively and often raucous entertainment at palaces, academies and civic pageants. Masqueraders performed for bystanders in the streets, and foreign visitors remarked upon the excellence and vitality of musical life. Lavish theatrical spectacles and banquers, enlivened with music, were mounted in patrician palaces. The nobility hired local professional musicians for these events but it was unusual for the talented amateurs among them to take part in the performances.

Giovanni Croce (1557-1609) served as a singer at the basilica of St Mark, the private chapel of the Duke of Venice. The basilica adjoins the ducal palace at the edge of the glittering Venetian lagoon, and an appointment there was one of the most prestigious in Europe. The musicians of St Mark’s formed a pool of expert composers, singers and instrumentalists who actively participated in local theatrical and entertainment enterprises in order to supplement their incomes. In the 1590s Croce was leader of a singing company at St Mark’s that was for hire. Since he enjoyed a lively reputation as a popular entertainer, it is likely that he and his company were the original performers of comic carnival masquerades.

Mascarate piacevoli et ridicolose per il carnevale (1590) and Triaca Musicale (1595) were both published in Venice by Giacomo Vincenti. These pieces were performed in costumes and masks, probably as banquet entertainment or insertations into theatrical productions. In his dedication to Mascarate piacevoli Vincenti implies that Croce’s masquerades had become well known and were being printed at the insistence of ‘many curious people’. Since occasional music such as this was only rarely preserved or published, these collections serve as important documents of sixteenth-century Venetian social and musical practices.

The masquerades are novelties, laden with musical wit and satire. As his musical foundation Croce draws upon the Venetian courtly madrigal style. Simultaneously he mingles or appropriates music from popular traditions: the quodlibet, villotta, moresca and street tune. His masquerades are liberally sprinkled with musical clichés and gestures that cry out for imaginative interpretation, such as echo effects, stuttering, shouts and over-the-top repetition.

Croce’s works are peopled with stock Italian masquerade characters, including the beloved, pompous Pantalone il magnifico and his sideckick Dr Graziano, a bumbling old Bolognese professor whose mispronounced words result in coarse gaffes. Shrill women, oafish foreigners, quarrelling birds, and men disguised as little boys join the cast, providing opportunities for horseplay among the singers. Comic dialects enhance the merriment of this mixture. The anonymous poets who wrote Croce’s masquerade texts contrived a wide range of accents and dialects for their characters in order to invite parody in performance. For example, the German who appears in Mascarata da Lenguazi grunts grossly mispronounces his Italian words. Foreigners with stereotypically thick accents bid at the Incanto della Schiava, a parlour game in which female guests are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The utterances of Pantalone and Graziano are deliberately low-life in quality.

Triaca Musicale was named for the drug theriaca, well known in Venice as a preventive for the plague, and antidote for poison and a medicine for ailments. In this ‘musical cure-all’ Graziano’s references to being ‘in Paradise’ call attention to a Venetian neighbourhood called Paradiso, where several noble families lived. Among them were the Grimanis, Croce’s sometime patrons. These masquerades suggest an aristocratic party in that neighbourhood, with Pantalone and Graziano introducing the evening’s entertainment. A singing contest between a nightingale and a squawking cuckoo is judge by a parrot – bribed, if the result is to be believed. Ribald farmers from Padua appear, bringing gifts of turnips, parsnips and sausages. Party guests are depicted playing Incanto della Schiava and Il gioco dell’Occa, a popular board game.

In the Mascarate piacevolli puns and witticisms suggest that its characters are parodies of well-known Venetian types. Croce’s beggars may portray noble women complaining about their wardrobes and fool supplies, restricted by Venetian sumptuary laws, while the women of Burano represent high-born nuns lamenting their lack of male companionship and hawking the fine lace for which that island’s women were famous. The ensemble of aged, stuttering magnifici probably derives from the fact that the government of Venice was controlled by the very oldest patrician males. In the final masquerade the Venetian Knights of St John of Malta are shown banqueting on their city square and consuming outlandish quantities of wine. The emblematic conclusion suggests that the Mascarate piacevoli were conceived for the entertainment of the knights, who had a theatre in their monastery.

DonnaMae J. Gustafson
(2001)

Missa "Maria Magdalene" and Motets by Alonso Lobo

The Spanish school of renaissance composers, eventually to become one of the most splendid in Europe, was something of a late developer. Although there were significant figures working in Spain in the first half of the 16th century, it was really only with the ebbing of the tide of Franco-Flemish musicians at court that the astonishing depth of talent being trained in the local choirschools came to the fore. Amongst the most impressive of these men were Francisco Guerrero (1528-99) and Alonso Lobo (1555-1617), almost certainly master and pupil. Lobo, who should not be confused with his Portuguese namesake and near-contemporary Duarte Lobo, is perhaps best known now for his consummate motet Versa est in luctum, though in his lifetime he was respected as the equal of the great Victoria himself.

Lobo's connection with Guerrero was entirely sustained at Seville Cathedral, where originally Lobo was a choirboy and Guerrero maestro de capilla. Presumably Guerrero taught him. It would have been natural for Lobo to go to school in Seville, since he was born (as recent evidence has shown) on the 25th February 1555 in the nearby town of Osuna. In fact, after taking a degree at Osuna University and becoming a canon at the collegiate church there, he returned to Seville Cathedral in August 1591 to help the ageing Guerrero. Such was his reputation by then that the chapter gave him his post without the usual formal tests of musicianship. In 1593 Lobo went to be maestro at Toledo Cathedral; however in 1604 he returned to Seville, where he remained until his death.

Lobo's musical language is detectably of a later generation than that of Victoria, even though Lobo was only seven years younger. The difference between them was probably the training Victoria received in Rome, where he studied Palestrina's compositional method, learning how to control long spans of music without relying on constant changes of texture and harmonic speed. The rhapsodic calmness of this style has led many commentators to attribute an intensity and mysticism to Victoria's music which is equated with the essence of Spanish Catholicism. In fact Lobo also had a style which it is possible to say was typically Spanish, since the compositions of several of his contemporaries, including Vivanco and Esquivel, resembled his; yet it relies on different ingredients. Beauty of contrapuntal line is certainly there (Versa est in luctum is pre-eminent in this respect), but sometimes, where expressiveness seems to require it, it is coupled to quite angular lines. And the relative lack of Palestrinian smoothness carries through to the separate sections in Lobo's music, which are often built on contrast, fast then slow, not usually to paint the superficial meaning of each word but rather to induce in the listener's mind the conflicting emotions behind them. Lobo's style was never purely madrigalian, but a halfway point between it and the calm order of strictly imitative counterpoint.

Lobo repeatedly paid musical homage to Guerrero: of his six published mass-settings (1602), no less than five use motets by the older master as their models - Maria Magdalene, Beata Dei genitrix, Prudentes virgines, Petre ego pro te regavi and Simile est regnum caelorum. The sixth mass, O Rex gloriae, is based on a motet by Palestrina. Guerrero's style, is more stately, more sonorous than Lobo's. His textures seem constantly to glow from the expert spacing of the chords, while his control over the section which runs to the words "Iesum quem quaeritis Nazarenum, crucifixum: surrexit" is as masterly as anything in the mid-century European repertory, sustained yet intensely dramatic, unexpected counterpoints and harmonies all making their contribution.

Under the influence of this model Lobo's Missa 'Maria Magdalene' is, at times, just as purely sonorous. Every major section begins with the opening notes of the Guerrero (in the Sanctus, in double counterpoint; in the Agnus, in stretto) which immediately establish a mood of unhurried grandeur. Rarely did Lobo feel inclined to break this up, and even in sub-sections which do not initially refer to the Guerrero the textures are spacious, as in the "Christe". The main exceptions are the second Kyrie and the "Osanna", which come closer to some of the sections in his motets - the phrases shorter, the texture lighter and the "Osanna", in particular, relying on cross-rhythms.

The seven motets published in 1602 (in manuscript there are many more) were seen through the press by Lobo himself. This print was uncommonly successful - copies of it are still to be found in such important centres as the Sistine Chapel in Rome and Coimbra in Portugal. Furthermore there are five extant copies in Mexico, suggesting that Lobo was a seminal figure in the development of compositional style in the New World.

The motets were published after the masses and appear under the general title of Moteta ex devotione inter missarum solemnia decantanda, in other words they are devotional works which may be sung during solemn masses extra-liturgically. They make a sequence, beginning with the two six-voice motets, scoring down in the middle ones, finally to culminate in the only eight-part composition, Ave Maria, which outshines the others as a technical tour-de-force.

The two six-part motets which open the set - O quam suavis est and Quam pulchri sunt - both begin with through-composed polyphony in an almost rhapsodic vein before the texture quite abruptly breaks up to describe a contrasting mood in the words (quite madrigalian in the latter, at "ideo gaudentes", more generalised in the former at "Esurientes reples bonis"). O quam suavis est was written for Corpus Christi; Quam pulchri sunt has a more obscure genesis which seems to celebrate the legend of the Blessed Virgin Mary visiting Toledo Cathedral in 666AD, when she appeared to Bishop St. Ildefonso (see the frontispiece of the 1602 print). At any rate the text is unique: the first sentence comes from the Song of Songs, the second from the Feast of the Descent as it was presented locally in Toledo up to the end of the 19th century.

The five-part Ave regina caelorum, with its strict canon between the two soprano parts (eight beats apart), pays homage again to a work by Guerrero, in this case his motet Ave virgo sanctissima which deploys the same canon. It was intended for the service of Compline between Christmas and the Purification. The six-part Versa est in luctum has a text associated with the liturgy of the Requiem Mass, though Lobo is not known to have set the Requiem complete. In the 1602 print he described it as having been written for a memorial service in honour of Philip II of Spain, which was held some time in September or October 1598. Lobo followed the fluctuating mood of the text with exquisite sensitivity.

Credo quod redemptor and Vivo ego, both for four voices, respectively have funeral and Lenten references. The former is taken from the service of Matins of the Dead; the latter is a more general text. Vivo ego, having maintained an appropriately contemplative mood throughout, suddenly breaks free of it in the final bars to depict the words "Et vivat". Lobo's Ave Maria is a masterpiece of a rather different kind from the other motets, being based on a complex canon 8 in 4 at the upper fifth. Although the eight voices are divided into two choirs and the bottom part of each choir sings the same music, the other three voices are rearranged: the top part of the choir which begins becomes the third part in the choir which responds, the second part of choir I becomes the top part of choir II and the third part of choir I becomes the second part of choir II. Yet despite the mathematical intricacies the resulting music seems artlessly serene, as befits the text. It culminates in the most perfect "Amen", where the beauty inherent in these canons is particularly telling.

Peter Phillips
(1997)

Alessandro Striggio's 40-Part Music

With a comment by musicologist Davitt Maroney

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