Palestrina Revealed

Program: #25-04   Air Date: Jan 20, 2025

NOTE: All of the music on this special program was performed by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, conducted by our guest, Graham Ross. It is on the Harmonia Mundi label and is HMM 905375.

Graham Ross and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge celebrate the 500th anniversary of Palestrina’s birth in style, recording for the very first time an album of outstanding works by the Roman master that are still little-known.  To add resonance to their programme, they pair settings of the same texts by three of Palestrina’s English contemporaries, William Byrd, Robert White, and William Mundy.

On 9 February 1594, the singers of the Cappella Sistina assembled in the papal apartments to perform a motet to entertain Pope Clement VIII (r. 1592–1605) and his guests. According to the chapel diarist, the pope complained that the chosen motet, Giovanni Maria Nanino’s double-choir In diademate capitis, set an obscure text and the words could not be understood. He inquired what had become of the unpublished works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–94), who had died exactly a week previously. On learning that the composer’s papers were in the care of his surviving son, Iginio Pierluigi, the pope expressed a wish that Palestrina’s published music be reprinted and unknown works brought to light.

Just three weeks later, the Roman printing house of Francesco Coattino published Palestrina’s Seventh Book of Masses (1594), which had been finalised and in production at the time of the composer’s death. Among the masses in this first posthumous collection is Palestrina’s four-voice Missa Emendemus in melius. The title of the mass is taken from a responsory sung during the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, and again at Matins on the First Sunday of Lent. The text, famously set by Byrd and published in the Cantiones Sacrae (1575), combines words from the Book of Baruch 3: 2 and Psalm 79: 9. Palestrina’s mass appears to be a freely-composed setting, loosely based on the Gregorian melody: it is cast in the same mode (II, hypodorian) and makes frequent and bold use of the opening motif.

Perhaps encouraged by Clement VIII’s interest in his father’s music, Iginio formed a partnership with the Venetian music printer Girolamo Scotto to issue five volumes of Palestrina’s masses between 1599 and 1601. Among those published in the Eighth Book of Masses (1599) is the five-voice Missa Memor esto verbi tui, a parody mass based on Palestrina’s own motet, a setting of Psalm 119: 49–56 (published in the Second Book of Motets, 1572). The mass is a comparatively concise setting and appears to fit with what we currently know about Palestrina’s missae breves composed in the 1570s. In the longer texts of the Gloria and Credo, for example, Palestrina creates momentum through contrasting textures and constantly-changing vocal groupings.

The earliest source for both William Mundy’s Memor esto verbi tui and Robert White’s Ad te levavi oculos meos (Psalm 123) is a set of partbooks copied by John Baldwin between c. 1575 and 1581, during his tenure in the choir at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. The Baldwin Partbooks are one of the most important sources for both pre-Reformation and Elizabethan church music.

From the early 1570s, Roman musicians began experimenting with writing for multiple choirs in a manner quite distinct from their Venetian counterparts. Palestrina composed some 54 motets, six litanies, four masses, and several other liturgical works for two or three choirs. The motet Ad te levavi oculos meos is one of Palestrina’s eight surviving triple-choir motets. It was transmitted in two sets of partbooks, both copied in the late 1570s or early 1580s: one for the Cappella Giulia and the other probably for the Chiesa Nuova, the headquarters of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Like many Roman polychoral motets, Ad te levavi begins with long paragraphs from each choir in turn, followed by faster exchanges and different vocal groupings; the full ensemble is employed only at the end.

The album opens with a five-voice setting of the Magnificat, the canticle sung daily at Vespers. This is one of sixteen alternatim settings transmitted in a manuscript choirbook copied for use by the Cappella Giulia, the choir of the Vatican basilica, probably in the 1580s during Palestrina’s long tenure as maestro di cappella. This exquisite setting demonstrates some of the finest qualities of Palestrina’s later period, combining the clarity and simplicity of the psalm-tone cantus firmus with extraordinarily rich and varied textures.

© THOMAS NEAL, Oxford, 2024

Composer Info

GIOVANNI PIERLUIGI DA PALESTRINA (ca. 1525-1594), WILLIAM BYRD (ca. 1539/40-1623), ROBERT WHITE (ca. 1538-1574), WILLIAM MUNDY (ca. 1529-1591).

CD Info

Harmonia Mundi label HMM 905375