Palestrina for All by Jonathan Boswell

Author:Jonathan Boswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Boswell
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

‘The Quality of Mercy’: Kyrie Eleison

Palestrina’s record-breaking engagement with the Mass began in the 1550s. During this early phase in his career he was struggling and experimenting. He was able to pore over manuscripts of other composers’ works in the Sistine Chapel. Secular music took up much of his time. His Mass settings were heavily retrospective and derivative, strongly influenced by Franco-Flemish predecessors. They tended to be schematic, sometimes stilted, and relatively few have been recorded.

The early Masses Ecce Sacerdos Magnus and Benedicta es employed an old fashioned priority for a single voice part within the polyphony, the cantus fermus. Benedicta es used a work by the 15 th century master Josquin des Pres as a model. An unusually long setting, it features a sinuous, arguably over-elaborate melodic lead. One is tempted to hear it as a young man ‘trying too hard’. Another relatively early work, the Mass Ut re mi fa sol la, scored unusually for CCAATB, displays an almost nerdish virtuosity. Inspired by the hexachord or six note scale, it is full of scalic phrases of varying lengths and note values, upward climbing or descending like so many small ladders: a linear, rectangular format which allows little room for balancing curves or graceful interactions. Pursued through all six sections of the Mass, the result is intriguing, though angular, rather jagged and unduly repetititive, perhaps more interesting for singers and students than typical listeners.

By the mid-1560s, his status and prospects more secure, Palestrina was increasingly finding his own voice (chapter 2). Two Mass settings, the elaborate Missa Papae Marcelli and the more compact Missa Brevis, already display a compositional brilliance combined with fitness for worship that later Mass settings would hardly excel. Abandoning backward looking derivation and highly structured melodic formats, both fell into the category of largely free ranging, elastic counterpoint. This early middle period also brought a plethora of motets and other works containing rich material which he would plunder and elaborate in later Mass settings.

After 1570, which saw the publication of a third book of Masses, the timing of his Mass compositions becomes notoriously hard to pin down on account of long delays in publication due to shortages of funds. Many years could elapse before a completed Mass got published. Various factors suggest a relative downturn in output during the 1570s. The loss of his brother Silla and his sons Rodolfo and Angelo were major tragedies (chapter 2). By the late 1570s, at the request of Gregory X111, Palestrina was struggling with a formidable project to revise and simplify the huge legacy of plainchant inherited by the Church through the centuries. This proved to be a labyrinthine task he was unable to complete. He was also composing a special category of bespoke Masses, alternating plainchant and polyphony, for Duke Guglielmo of Mantua (see chapter 7). However, after the massive upheavals in 1580-81 – trauma following the death of Lucrezia, moves towards the priesthood, marriage to Virginia, greater financial security and new business activities – a new phase of renewed creativity opened up.

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