Venetian Church Music

Polychoral music – music written for several groups of musicians separated spatially – was not peculiar to Venice, but it was particularly associated with the Basilica of San Marco and ceremonial events in the Venetian cultural calendar. The leading practitioner of the style was Giovanni Gabrieli, a composer of intense originality. He was born in Venice in the mid-1550s and was probably taught by his uncle Andrea. Like Andrea, he worked (and no doubt studied) for a while under Lassus at the court of Albrecht V of Bavaria; Later in his life he himself was famous as a teacher and many young German and Danish musicians travelled south to study with him, the most famous being Schütz. He became one of the two organists at San Marco in 1585, overlapping for a few months with his uncle, who died that year. His major publication was his Symphoniae Sacrae of 1597, but his most innovative works were unpublished at his death; the posthumous collections of 1615 are somewhat inaccurate and omit fine works like Dulcis Jesu, which only survives in manuscript in the court of Wolfenbüttel, where his work was admired.

San Marco lost its director of music as well as an organist in 1612. Conveniently for Venice, Monteverdi had just been dismissed by the new Duke in Mantua and came for his audition in August, the month Gabrieli died. There is an extraordinary lack of relationship between the music of the two composers. It is not just that their styles are utterly different, but they set different types of liturgical texts. The instrumentation changed, too: Gabrieli’s sound is based on cornets and trombones (16 in several works), whereas Monteverdi, in his Venetian music, never needs more than four. The works by Monteverdi all appear in anthologies of small-scale pieces, not in the official collections of liturgical music of 1640 and (posthumously) 1650.

Two subsequent directors of music can be added to this group: Legrenzi and Lotti. Both were primarily opera composers; as the seventeenth century progressed, the importance of music at San Marco declined. The most famous Venetian composer of the early eighteenth century, Vivaldi, had no connection with the basilica at all, though his father had been a violinist there. It was the ospedali (the orphanages for girls which turned their main Vespers services into concerts as a way of attracting visitors and donations that were the main centres of attention. Vivaldi worked at the Pietà and his motet Clarae stellae was written for Sig.ra Gertruda, who sang there for at least thirty years from 1705.

Clifford Bartlett
(2001)

Music for Philip of Spain

Geography, history and politics have conspired to give the music of Renaissance Spain curiously contradictory qualities. Situated on the edge of Europe, and barricaded from it by the Pyrenees, Spain has produced a distinctive, national style which reflects her mixed cultural traditions, Moorish, Jewish, and Catholic. This heritage colours her music, affecting its forms, its rhythms, its language, even its instrumentation. However, in the 16th century Spain was ruled by the Habsburgs, a dynasty which controlled half of Europe and intermarried ruthlessly to maintain its stranglehold on European politics. The Spanish court's international connections added a cosmopolitan element to its music, which resulted in a unique and intriguing mix with the indigenous traditions.

The court of Philip II was deeply influenced by his personal temperament. The archetypal dour, black-clad Habsburg, he himself was heavily involved in the administration of his unwieldy empire: vast quantities of his paperwork survive, copiously annotated in his own handwriting. Philip was also responsible for the construction of the most enduring monument to the Renaissance Spanish court, the great granite edifice which is San Lorenzo el Real de el Escorial. He personally selected its bleak and isolated site, perched on the edge of the Abantos mountains overlooking the Castilian plain. He also supervised its planning and construction, and the resultant complex is on a scale unequalled in Spain. It includes a huge church and its associated monastery, the palace and a vast library. The Escorial was also intended to serve as a shrine to both the Catholic faith and the Habsburg dynasty, and as soon as it was completed Philip began to scour Europe for holy relics, and to transfer family remains to the purpose-built pantheon deep within the bowels of the building. The Escorial became the true hub of his empire, spiritual and administrative, yet Philip's own chambers in the palace are tiny, and monastically stark. Of all the music, it is perhaps that of Antonio de Cabezón which is most representative of the age. Cabezón was a court organist from 1526 until his death in 1566, serving Philip's mother and sisters, and eventually the King himself, with whom he was a great favourite. His music vividly captures the austere grandeur of the court, whilst at the same time acknowledging the fashionably popular grounds and melodies such as 'Guardame las vacas'. Both Cabezón and his son Hernando (who succeeded his father as court organist) travelled widely with the court entourage, and it is probable that these trips provided the sources for pieces such as the variations on 'Susane un jur' and 'Doulce memoire'. Both pieces had long been part of the mainstream European musical heritage, and settings survive in countless collections, for most instruments. The Cabezón variations are among the most virtuosic and the most musically imaginative.

The intermarriage of dynasties was of course another means by which musical cultures met and, through his four wives, Philip had links with much of Europe. Two of his brides were fellow Habsburgs from Portugal and Austria, in keeping with the ancient Habsburg tradition of marrying within the family, whilst the remaining two, Mary Tudor of England and Elisabeth de Valois of France, came from quite different cultures. These two brief 'foreign' marriages appear to have made little impact on the courtly music of Spain, but there is no doubt that the diplomatic links forged during marriage negotiations and the movements of large courtly entourages accompanying such brides were a factor in the international transmission of music, instruments and musicians. Furthermore the Habsburgs' economic links with diverse areas of Europe spread their nets still wider; an example is provided by the pieces from the lute book of Octavius Fugger, a member of the great merchant and banking dynasty, which served as the Austrian Habsburgs' financiers for generations. Compiled in Bologna by an Augsburger on his travels, the manuscript includes an eclectic mixture of songs and dance pieces. In addition to keyboard players such as the Cabezón dynasty, the Spanish court employed a number of vihuelistas, whose distinguished repertory consists of solos, songs and a few duets, comparable to the lute repertory of the rest of Europe. Only a handful of vihuela sources survive but fortunately several of these are substantial prints; the earliest is 'El Maestro' of Luis Milán (1536). Milán's distinctive style has no parallel in the repertory, and his astonishing songs with their elaborate accompaniments are perhaps the only surviving fragments of a distinctively Spanish tradition. The virtuosic interjections from the vihuela, woven around a static, declamatory vocal line, produce a texture quite alien to the mainstream lutesong style. Several of Milán's songs are in Italian or Portuguese, reflecting the influence of Philip's possessions in Europe. The same is true of the songs of Diego Pisador, whose 'Libro de musica de vihuela' was published in Salamanca in 1552. Pisador clearly had access to considerable quantities of music by Flemish and Italian masters, as his book includes intabulations of motets, mass sections and madrigals by Gombert, Festa, Willaert and Arcadelt.

The vihuela is today considered to be an exclusively Iberian instrument in spite of the considerable overlap with the lute, the musical capabilities of the two instruments being virtually identical. The vihuela was the plucked cousin of the viol, another instrument developed in Spain, although its Spanish origins tend to be overlooked today because of the rich repertory of English, French and German viol music from later periods. As the 'viola d'arco', however, it was the result of cross-fertilization between the vihuela and the Moorish rebab. The works of Diego Ortiz, printed in a collection of ornamentation examples in 1553, are rare examples of Spanish solo works for viol, and include some fine ricercars and divisions on chansons. Ortiz served as 'maestro de capilla' to the Spanish viceregal chapel in Naples for many years, and his book was published in Rome, in both Italian and Spanish.

The practice of improvising variations or diferencias over a ground was central to most musical traditions in the 16th century and Spain was no exception, though she had her own popular tunes to use as the basis for such pieces. The 'Guardame las vacas' mentioned above was among the most frequently used. The extraordinary 'Descante sobre un punto' of Enríquez de Valderrábano illustrates a much simpler and probably older tradition, of extemporising over a drone, in this case a fifth. At the other end of the scale are the elaborate and beautifully structured variations of Thomas Robinson and Alfonso Ferrabosco upon the ground known in England as the 'Spanish Pavan', although in Spain the same sequence was known as the 'Italian ground'.

In spite of the political and religious differences between Spain and England-which led to the Armada-Spanish or Spanish-influenced music is quite often found in English sources. The 'Spanish Pavan' is one of the most frequently found grounds in both lute and keyboard collections. Robinson's variations were published in his 'Schoole of Musicke' in 1603, and in 1610 John Dowland's son Robert included the anonymous Spanish song 'Vuestros ojos' in his 'Musicall Banquet'. By this time the golden age of Spanish instrumental music had largely passed, though the keyboard tradition remained strong. It remains-like El Escorial-as a monument to an extraordinary period in the country's history.

Lynda Sayce

Miraculously Preserved: Berlioz’s Messe Solennelle

The Messe solennelle is the earliest large-scale work by Berlioz to have survived. It was composed in 1824 when he was twenty, and had been formally studying music for a little over a year, a year in which, according to his Memoirs, he composed a cantata, an opera, a Latin oratorio and a dramatic scene before embarking on the Mass. All these works, including the Mass, were soon destroyed by the composer when he realised that they were not worthy of his rapidly maturing craft.

But the difference between the Mass and the other rejected works is that the Mass was performed. It was heard in 1825 in the church of Saint-Roch, Paris (the church which had commissioned the work), and again in 1827 in the church of Saint-Eustache before Berlioz turned against it. There were thus many sheets of vocal and orchestral parts to feed the flames when he decided to burn it, but the autograph score itself survived. Of its miraculous preservation nobody had any idea until 1992, when Frans Moors, a school teacher living in Antwerp, reported his discovery of the manuscript among the small collection of miscellaneous music kept in the organ gallery at the church of Saint Charles Borromeus in Antwerp.

An inscription on the manuscript helped to explain how it got there: “The score of this Mass, entirely in Berlioz’s hand, was given to me as a souvenir of the long-standing friendship that binds me to him,” signed “A. Bessems, Paris 1835”. Bessems was a Belgian violinist, born in Antwerp, who went to Paris to study under Baillot at the Conservatoire in 1826 and thus enrolled at the same time as Berlioz. He probably played in the second performance of the Mass in 1827. He also played in Berlioz’s Paris concerts in 1835, at which point, we may surmise, Berlioz gave him the Mass manuscript, perhaps in lieu of a fee. After Bessems’ death in 1868 the manuscript passed to his brother Joseph, who was in charge of the music at Saint Joseph’s Borromeus in Antwerp, and after Joseph’s death in 1892 it remained in the old oak chest in the organ gallery where Moors found it one hundred years later.

The first performance of the Mass, on 10 July 1825, with Henri Valentino conducting an orchestra made up mostly of players from the Opéra, was critical event for Berlioz since it was the first opportunity to hear a large-scale work of his own and because it brought his name before the public and the press. Berlioz himself played the tam-tam, striking its two blows in the Resurrexit with such force that the whole church shook. The press was unanimously favourable, noting the young man’s ‘genius, verve, enthusiasm, and his fine sense of musical painting’. Berlioz0s teacher, Le Sueur, uttered the memorable words: ‘Come let me embrace you. You will be no doctor or apothecary, I swear, but a great composer; you have genius – I tell you because it’s true’.

The second performance followed in Saint-Eustache on 22 November 1827, when, to save money, Berlioz had an orchestra of students and of theatre players who did not have to be paid. To save Valentino’s fee he conducted the performance himself, the start of an illustrious career as a conductor that took him to most countries of Europe. At the depiction of the Last Judgement Berlioz was deeply moved:

I was gripped by a convulsive trembling which I managed to hold in check until the end of the movement, although I then had to sit down and let the orchestra take a few minutes’ rest. I couldn’t have stayed any longer on my feet and I feared the baton might slip from my hand.

Despite his fervour it was then that the work began to seem unacceptable, for the withdrew all but the Resurrexit. This movement was revised and performed twice more in Paris. The Resurrexit too was ‘burnt’, eventually finding its way into other works, especially Benvenuto Cellini in 1836 and the Requiem in 1837. The rest of the Mass had already supplied material for the Symphonie Fantastique in 1830 and was to remain at Berlioz’s disposal until 1849, when the Agnus Dei was adapted as a movement for the Te Deum.

The Mass is composed for three soloists – soprano, tenor, bass – and a full chorus and orchestra including three now rare or obsolete bass brass instruments: serpent, buccin and ophicleide, no more than two of which play together at any one time. The serpent was commonly used in French churches to support the singing, and the buccin was a military instruments of the trombone family. The ophicleide became Berlioz’s standard brass bass, later superseded by the tuba.

The Mass is modelled on those of Cherubini and Le Sueur, the two composers in charge of the music at the Chapelle Royale in the Tuileries in the 1820s. Like Cherubini, Berlioz inserts and offertory motet and the O salutaris and concludes with Domine salvum on the model of both the older masters.

Hugh Macdonald