SCATTERED ASHES Josquin’S Miserere and the Savonarolan Legacy
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SCATTERED ASHES Josquin’s Miserere and the Savonarolan Legacy Directed by Philip Cave SCATTERED ASHES Josquin’s Miserere and the Savonarolan Legacy magnificat Directed by Philip Cave Josquin des Prez (c.1450–1521) q Miserere mei, Deus .......................................................................................... 17:33 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525–1594) w Tribularer, si nescirem ....................................................................................... 9:55 Claude Le Jeune (c.1528/30–1600) e Tristitia obsedit me ............................................................................................ 5:51 Orlande de Lassus (c.1530/2–1594) r Infelix ego ......................................................................................................... 8:44 Jean Lhéritier (c.1480–c.1552) t Miserere mei, Domine ....................................................................................... 9:20 Nicolas Gombert (c.1495–c.1560) y In te, Domine, speravi ........................................................................................ 9:29 Jacobus Clemens non Papa (1510/15–1555/6) u Tristitia obsedit me .......................................................................................... 10:15 William Byrd (c.1540–1623) i Infelix ego ....................................................................................................... 12:58 Total Running Time: 84 minutes 2 Recorded at St George’s Church, Summertown, Oxford, UK, 19–23 January 2015 Produced and recorded by Philip Hobbs Post-production by Julia Thomas Cover image Portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo By permission of Bridgeman Images Design by gmtoucari.com 3 Photograph by Ralph by Williamson Photograph 4 Josquin’s Miserere and the Savonarolan Legacy Dateline: Florence, 23 May 1498. The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who had been convicted of heresy, was hanged and burned this morning in front of a large crowd in the Piazza della Signoria. When the embers of the fire had cooled, the officials scattered his ashes into the River Arno in order to prevent the friar’s followers from collecting them and using them as relics to heal the sick and perform miracles. Luca Landucci, Florentine shopkeeper This brief summary of Landucci’s eyewitness account of Savonarola’s execution evokes an event that sparked a sensation across Europe. The friar, born and raised in Ferrara, joined the Dominican order in Bologna, and then experienced a few years of spectacular success in Florence with impassioned sermons that called for religious, political and social reform. Printers issued copies of his sermons, devotional writings and prophecies, and they disseminated them throughout the continent. Dukes and kings took note of his prophecies. The friar railed against the corruption of Pope Alexander VI (Borgia), and when the pope retaliated with excommunication, many Florentines abandoned Savonarola’s cause. While in prison awaiting execution, he wrote a lengthy meditation on Psalm 50 (Vulgate), Miserere mei, Deus, and began work on another on Psalm 30, In te, Domine, speravi. His followers smuggled these writings out of his prison cell, and had them printed all over Europe. Reformers such as Martin Luther read them with approval. The Latin motets on this recording span the decades from 1500 to about 1580, and several of them set the opening words of Savonarola’s prison 5 meditations. The motets titled Infelix ego (‘Unhappy I’) by Orlande de Lassus and William Byrd are settings of the opening of the friar’s meditation on Psalm 50. Motets titled Tristitia obsedit me (‘Sadness has besieged me’) by Jacobus Clemens non Papa and Claude Le Jeune provide music for the first part of the meditation on Psalm 30. Clemens also incorporates part of the meditation on Psalm 50 at the end of his motet. This is just a sampling of settings of Savonarola’s meditations: three composers associated with the Este court at Ferrara (Willaert, Rore and Vicentino) also set Infelix ego to music. Other lesser-known composers in France and Germany also made musical settings, including Simon Joly and Jacob Reiner. The 1490s ushered in more than half a century of wars and religious strife in Europe; duelling armies from France and the Holy Roman Empire marched across the Italian peninsula. Revolt against the Catholic Church broke out in northern Europe, and in 1527 the unpaid German mercenaries of the emperor mercilessly sacked Rome. In this time of extreme disorder, the meditations of Savonarola must have provided comfort and consolation. In the meditation on Psalm 50 the friar hovers on the brink of despair, then rejects it emphatically and calls on the mercy of God to deliver him. Military imagery comes to the fore in the meditation on Psalm 30: the allegorical figure of Sadness fights against the friar with banners of her armies flying, but the figure of Joy arrives and instructs him to cry out: ‘In you, Lord, have I put my trust; let me never be confounded’. In his sermons, Savonarola often lashed out against the worldly vanity of religious worship, including elaborate polyphonic music. He claimed that such music merely charmed the senses – the ears of listeners – and the overlapping melodies made it impossible to hear the words. Thus elaborate music prevented meditation on the meaning of the sacred texts. In one sermon he 6 excoriated polyphony: ‘These choirs create a roaring sound, because there stands a big-voiced singer who sounds like a calf and the others howl around him like dogs, and one can’t make out a word they are saying’. The friar promoted the performance of a simpler kind of music that made the words clearly audible: Latin hymns in Gregorian chant, as well as the sacred lauda in Italian (Savonarola himself wrote texts for several laude). But, in one of the ironies of history, many composers selected the friar’s own prison meditations for treatment in gloriously expressive polyphony. One can only imagine how the puritanical friar would have reacted to such complex musical settings of his words. And yet the words do emerge clearly in many of these motets: the composers highlight the texts with rhetorical emphasis through repetition and with clearly shaped melodies. By around 1500 the motet had eclipsed the polyphonic Mass as a focus of compositional energy: motets began to vastly outnumber Masses, and many of their texts shifted from corporate pleading (‘pray for us’) to the more immediate first person (‘have mercy on me’). The texts of the psalms provided perfect vehicles for this new personal emphasis, and Josquin des Prez was among the first to set complete psalms to music, as in his monumental motet Miserere mei, Deus. Josquin’s career oscillated between sojourns in France and the courts of Italy. After training in northern France and Provence in the 1460s and 1470s, he moved to Milan and then to Rome as a singer in the Sistine Chapel in the 1480s and 1490s. He returned to France around 1495. By 1503 his services were in high demand, and Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, negotiated a contract for one year – but only after offering an enormous salary. According to the poet Folengo, Josquin composed his setting of Psalm 50 at the duke’s request. The devoutly religious duke was a supporter of Savonarola, and in 7 1498 Ferrara witnessed the first printed edition of the friar’s meditation on this psalm. In his meditation, the desperate friar reiterates the opening words ‘Miserere mei, Deus’ several times; Josquin likewise turns these words into a refrain that returns at the end of each verse in a rhetorical manner hitherto unseen in the genre of the motet. The melodic subject at the opening is simple in the extreme: a single reiterated note leads to an upward inflection by just a semitone on the word ‘Deus’. The music proceeds in airy textures for two voices, and these alternating pairs of voices lead to powerful sections for all five parts, often in chordal homophony in which all the voices declaim the text together. Only at the refrain on ‘Miserere mei, Deus’ does the fifth voice (a second tenor) join the ensemble for added emphasis. This fifth voice provides an armature for the other voices by singing the monotone subject, at each entry, on successively lower steps of the scale: first on tenor E, then a tone lower on D, then on C, etc. In the second part of the motet, the direction reverses and the tenor ascends the scale. In the third part, the tenor again descends the pitches of the scale. The words are crystal clear, and the friar, had he lived, could hardly have found fault with the music. The Este court in Ferrara evinced particular interest in Savonarola’s meditation on Psalm 50 in the 1540s and 1550s. The composers Willaert, Rore and Vicentino were all associated with the court, and each provided a lengthy musical setting of the opening words of Savonarola’s meditation, Infelix ego. Furthermore, they incorporated the music of Josquin’s austere monotone subject, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’, as a recurring cry in an inner voice, with each entry on a different pitch of the scale. In this way, the three composers made explicit a connection between Savonarola’s meditation and Josquin’s Miserere, a link merely suggested by the circumstantial evidence of the commission in 1503 of Josquin’s motet by Duke Ercole. Further possible patronage of 8 Savonarolan motets by the duke’s grandson, Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, will be suggested below. The music theorist Heinrich Glarean esteemed the music of Josquin and his contemporaries as a ‘perfect