Following our explorations of the works of two English Renaissance composers, Byrd and Tallis, Res Facta turns now to their Italian contemporary, born 500 years ago, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. While the music of those two English masters enjoyed a revival in the twentieth century and have entered certain segments of the choral mainstream, they and their compositions, less ubiquitous, having lain in obscurity for several centuries, could not garner a similar program title as Palestrina @ 500: the composer and his influence.
The subtitle is not meant to give undue credit or abet the now debunked legend of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli rescuing Catholic church music. While some scholars suggest that Palestrina was, to an extent, aware of his place in history during his lifetime, it’s not as though he could ever have a notion of the influence his music might exert on composers outside of Italy two and three centuries hence. But various circumstances ensured his music would, in fact, reach the musical minds of some of the most prominent composers of later centuries, received as the paragon of the so-called stile antico of the sixteenth century. In addition to having the favor of several popes and, in general, the Counter-Reformation-era Catholic Church, Palestrina was prolific just as the industry of music publishing was hitting its stride. His 104 masses appeared among six published collections between 1554 and 1594, and an additional six collections published after his death. Of his more than 300 motets, many were published during his lifetime.
Given the sheer size of the oeuvre, it would be impossible, in a single concert, to capture the essence of the composer, much less do so while also presenting later works of other composers. And so, we present but a fraction of Palestrina’s output, visiting his arguably most legendary work, the Missa Papae Marcelli, one other distinctive mass movement, and a selection of motets that either celebrate music making itself or its patron saint, or convey highly charged, emotive texts. To complement them, we’ve selected beloved works of the choral repertoire wherein the essence of his influential compositional style is reflected by other composers.
Of the composers on today’s program other than Palestrina himself, Giovanni Maria Nanino was the closest physically and temporally, as he was Palestrina’s student and his successor upon his death. The Spaniard Tomás Luis de Victoria, too, is believed to have interacted with Palestrina when he studied in Rome. Several generations of Roman composers following Nanino would continue to write liturgical music in the style of Palestrina.
While Victoria took the Palestrina style to the Iberian peninsula, other visitors to Italy took the style back to German-speaking lands, both Catholic and Protestant. Heinrich Schütz studied in Venice, learning both the stile antico of Palestrina and the new splendid Baroque style in fashion in the seventeenth century. When it came time, in 1670, for him to engage a former student to compose a funeral motet for his own passing, he asked that it be composed “in the style of Palestrina.” In the preface to his 1648 Geistliches Chormusik, a collection of exquisitely crafted polyphonic motets, Schütz suggests all composers learn ‘an orderly management of the modes, the mechanics of fugue and double counterpoint, and (especially) mastery of polyphonic writing for voices.” A century later, in 1742, J.S. Bach would copy out a mass by Palestrina and prepare his own instrumental and vocal parts for performance. In the very same year, certain hallmarks of Palestrina’s style were codified and published by the Austrian theorist and composer Johann Fux, in his 1742 Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Perfection)–a treatise on counterpoint studied by innumerable composers and music students from the 18th century to the present day.
Johannes Brahms revered Palestrina’s counterpoint. He wrote several pieces for women’s chorus in a strict stile antico style, and, of course, that same style guides sections of some of his most well-known sacred motets, such as Schaffe in mir Gott, and his masterpiece, Ein Deutsches Requiem. Brahms studied the works of Palestrina not just as a composer but also as a choral conductor. He led the Detmold court’s choral society in the 1850s. And though we’re not certain he ever performed it, he copied out and then thoroughly marked and prepared a score of the Missa Papae Marcelli, with dynamics, tempo indications, fermatas, and other signs of his having parsed the structure and flow of the work.
A more direct line of influence pops up within the Catholic church itself. In the 1860s, a group of reformers in Catholic German-speaking Europe initiated the Cecilian Movement, which sought to “restore” “true” liturgical music free of the excesses of the opera house, and exalted Palestrina as liturgical composer par excellence. Though Bruckner and Rheinberger didn’t self-designate as Cecilians, and their use of richer, more Romantic harmony and broader vocal textures of a more symphonic scope didn’t align with the aims of the movement, it nevertheless claimed them, as their masses and motets exemplified some of its ideals, namely use of strict counterpoint and modal melodic nods to Gregorian chant. (The dedicatee of Os Justi was an avid supporter of the movement).
Across the English Channel, Charles Hubert Parry, both a composer and an influential teacher living in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote: “Palestrina’s music is like Greek statuary, or the painting of the greatest Italian masters, or the architecture of the finest English cathedrals; its beauty is so genuine and real that the passage of time makes no difference to it. As long as religion and religious emotions last, Palestrina’s music will be the purest and loftiest form in which it has been expressed.”
What, then, is the essence of this vaunted style? Sixteenth-century theorists deemed Josquin des Prez’s composition representative of an Ars Perfecta–a perfected art–a consummation of several centuries’ worth of composition for voices. Later commentators lifted up the music of Palestrina as the apotheosis of this perfected art. The polyphonic music of the century and a half preceding Palestrina’s includes music of exceeding complexity–some brimming with surface activity or combining multiple languages at once, others pulling off brilliant mathematical feats of ingenuity, with different voices reading the same music but in different time signatures, singing at twice or four times the speed. Where the Ars Subtilior delighted in complexity and play, and the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century compositions wove chant tunes in long tones against dense, somewhat freewheeling polyphony, leading to turgid, unintelligible (but beautiful) textures, the Ars Perfecta, as exemplified by Palestrina, centered rhetorical clarity.
Technically speaking, Palestrina’s polyphony bears certain traits that contribute to its strong sense of rhetoric, its appealingly varied surface, and its singability: He brilliantly balances notes of longer and shorter durations in a way that emphasizes natural text stresses; the lines rise and fall in a natural way, free from awkward leaps; upward leaps are immediately rounded off by a gentle descent; and all phrases can be sung in one breath. Palestrina paces the harmonic rhythm, aligning its push and pull of dissonance and consonance with the wave crests and troughs of the tactus–the pulse of the piece. The resulting polyphony delivers clear “points of imitation,” i.e. sentence fragments set to music, equally among four to eight voice parts, but within a bigger fabric that is at once diamond-clear and alive with movement and pulse. “Glide,” “flow,” “unfurl:” words don’t suffice to describe the four dimensional unfolding in time of Palestrina’s music.
His compositions were some of the last exemplars of non-hierarchical musical textures. While equal-voiced polyphony would continue to be written for use in liturgical settings, the vanguard soon shifted away from polyphony to monody–decorous individualistic melodies, supported by a bass and harmony. But its influence persisted. In one sense, his music lived only on paper (outside of some Italian churches). Composers and theorists from the eighteenth century onward were likely to encounter his music in a textbook. And yet something about hearing this music in living voices inspired later composers, and extended passages in this stile antico style appear in works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Verdi. He has also inspired composers–from writers of liturgical motets to bel canto operas, and beyond–to simultaneously respect and honor the capabilities and limitations of the human voice. While opera lovers revel in the high wire act of the high note, so many of the greatest tunes live, as Palestrina’s lines do, in the sweet spot, a natural tessitura.
Above all, Palestrina’s music is vocal, written at the end of a centuries-long heyday of composition for unaccompanied voices, long before the wood and metal technologies of the instruments of the symphony orchestra (much less electric amplification and synthesizers) were in the mainstream or even invented. It is human.
But it is also humanity. Putting aside debates about the qualities of liturgical music and experiencing it not in worship but in the concert hall, we’re perhaps more attuned to the way Palestrina’s polyphony celebrates how beautifully different human voices–high, low, light, dark–can interweave cooperatively without losing independence, can each shine in turn, none subordinate to the other. For me, at least, there is no more perfect a paragon of human interaction than this: voices undisguised by the costumed personae of the opera house, unamped by mics, unfiltered by computers emitting their most beautiful utterances, not for their own sakes, but to be combined with others, in a whole vastly more complete, and more beautiful, than the sum of its parts.
Res Facta exists to create these comminglings of voices. In so doing, we aim to honor the craft of composition by giving performances of these res factae that dare to connect across centuries our own musical passions with those that led composers to make permanent the fruits of their own imaginations. Music’s ephemerality, paradoxically, its strength. Unlike the other great works of art and architecture–paintings and sculpture, structures of stone and steel, which exist as physical realities but are subject to fading, erosion, and decay, musical works are sound objects whose splendor is experienced only when rebuilt in the moment by communities of musicians and listeners. By connecting us to each other in our present while engaging in a rich musical past, such treasured res facta prove to be the most durable and valuable of all.