Music Notes: Candlemas, Presentation of Christ in the Temple – 2nd February 2020
The mass setting at the Solemn Eucharist this Sunday is Missa Bell’ Amfitrit’ altera by Orlande de Lassus (1532–1594), a member of the great triumvirate of Renaissance composers alongside Palestrina and Victoria, born in what is today Flemish Belgium. His real name was probably Roland Delattre. This is more than slightly confusing, because “Delattre” most probably means from Lattre, a place in Picardy. So Lassus was Roland from Lattre in Picardy (although he wasn’t) but known for reasons that are not clear as “from Lassus”, although the best associations of this name are with Bologna – from whence he also did not come. Roland in fact came from Mons in Hainaut. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…
Lassus was widely travelled, and thereby came to know just about everybody important in church music at the time. He could be said to have been the first real superstar composer, leaving his competition a long way behind as far as popular knowledge of his music is concerned. Not that everyone agreed with this assessment. Charles Burney, the eighteenth-century music historian, probably only knew the early works, but on the basis of these was of the firm opinion that Lassus was a dwarf on stilts compared with Palestrina. The view among his contemporaries, both courtly and general, was far more laudatory. His music is characterized by a particularly dramatic approach to word painting – illustrating the text with dramatic musical effects – and with an especially vigorous and exciting approach to rhythm. The later the works, the more compressed they become, as though the more Lassus refined his technique, the more he was able to say with less.
As a boy, Lassus had been something of a singing prodigy – the Paul Phoenix or Aled Jones of his day, although understanding both of those references will somewhat date you – and his abilities led to his leaving home at the age of 12 and working in Mantua, then Milano, then Napoli, and finally Rome, before he eventually went back home to the Netherlands. Then, in 1556, he joined the Court of Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, settling in Munich. The Duke’s goal was to create a musical establishment to rival any in Italy. Two years later, he married a Maid of Honour to the Duchess. The couple then served the Duke and Duchess and their son and heir Wilhelm V for the rest of their lives. Just as today, Munich was a Catholic stronghold of the area which we now think of as Germany (it wouldn’t be recognisably a country until some 300 years after Lassus settled there).
Today’s mass setting is something of a puzzle, because it appears to be based on a madrigal of some kind. Unfortunately, the exact source is lost. It wasn’t very “Counter-Reformation” to use a secular source of this kind – those in tune with that movement were rather strict about excluding such merging of the sacred and secular, and preferred motets or plainchant to provide the inspiration – and Lassus was, broadly speaking, very much a Counter Reformation composer. There is a suggestion about that the madrigal may in fact have had a Venetian origin, the perhaps slightly skimpy basis for this being that the Amfitrite of the title was a sea nymph – goodness, it gets worse! Nevertheless, even if this faintly spurious connection were true, Lassus signally fails to pick up on Venetian references or patterns of choral music, which typically involved antiphonal effects. He does divide up his choir into contrasting sounds, but they are used not to create antiphony, but rather to provide colouring and effect in response to the words. It is a very attractive setting, and, rather surprisingly, was not published in the composer’s lifetime. Its source is a manuscript dated 1583 from the Munich court. Of course, with so astonishingly prolific a composer, some works were bound to be overlooked. It is a very good thing that so excellent and attractive a work was eventually published and so preserved for posterity.
The motet at the Communion is Maria wallt zum Heiligtum (Mary made a pilgrimage to the Temple) by Johannes Eccard (1553–1611). Born in Mühlhausen, he went aged eighteen to München, where, as noted above, Orlande de Lassus was in post at the court of Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria. Eccard studied there with Lassus, and his mastery of choral and contrapuntal style clearly owes much to his illustrious teacher and his rich inventiveness. Coming originally from the Netherlands, Lassus would have known and sung the music of that area before his sojourn in what is now Italy began. Here is the thread that joins him and Eccard into today’s story: in 1562, Andrea Gabrieli (1532–1585), a predecessor of Monteverdi in Venice, had gone to München to study with Lassus, followed almost certainly later by his nephew Giovanni (1554–1612). Eccard was only 9 years old at the time, so there is no direct connection there, but we can at least say that Eccard and the Gabrielis learnt from the same master and that Venice was the beneficiary.
Eccard wrote Maria wallt zum Heiligtum as a six-voice motet for the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, otherwise known to us as Candlemas, which we are celebrating this Sunday. If you have decorated your home for the Epiphany with gold in honour of the season, it is time either to return it to the bank vault, or if your approach is more purely symbolic, just put it away wherever you keep it until next year. Lent will soon be breathing down our necks…
The canticles at Evensong are the Fourth Service by Adrian Batten (1591–1637), whose mature career was mostly spent at Westminster Abbey and then St Paul’s Cathedral where he worked both as singer and organist. We know from contemporary texts that he was a prolific composer, but, alas, much of his music is now lost to us. Charles Burney (1726–1814), the eighteenth-century proto-music historian, composer and musician who had a great deal to say about everybody – generally expressed from quite a personal perspective – commented in his A general history of music, from the earliest ages to the present period, produced in four volumes between 1776 and 1789: He was a good harmonist of the old school, without adding anything to the common stock of ideas in melody or modulation with which the art was furnished long before he was born. Nor did he correct any of the errors in accent with which former times abounded. So that his imitations of anterior composers were entire. He seems to have jogged on in the plain, safe, and beaten track, without looking much about him, nor if he had, does he seem likely to have penetrated far into the musical terra incognita. Apart from being slightly surprised that the use of the word “jogged” was common in the eighteenth century, this really doesn’t seem fair to Batten, whose works may well have trod safe territory, but which nevertheless are charming and elegant, this setting being a good example. Of course, we only have a few pieces, so perhaps Burney’s swipes were directed at a large number of works that we are now mercifully spared from hearing. Nevertheless, you won’t be disappointed by this one if you come to hear it. The setting alternates between accompanied solo sections and choral textures. While straightforward, it is effective and elegant writing, with a slight hint of melancholy lurking under the surface of the music.
This anthem is Laudibus in sanctis Dominum by William Byrd (1539–1623). This comes from his second book of Cantiones Sacrae (Sacred Choral Works) from 1591. This was produced by Thomas East, a renowned London music printer, retailer and publisher whose premises were, as it so happens, in Aldersgate Street, near the Priory Church. Byrd and Thomas Tallis (1505–1585), were granted exclusivity as music publishers by Elizabeth I, and, until 1596, when Byrd’s patent expired, this represented quite a limitation on East’s work. While he could engrave and print – and Byrd used him exclusively to do this with his works between 1588 and 1596 – he could not act as the actual publisher, except by licence. Nevertheless, he engraved, printed and sold a great deal of music in what cannot have been ideal circumstances. “Engraving”, as the word suggests, was a manual process (taken over in more recent years by computers, but often still known by the same – now inappropriate – word) of incising notes into stone or metal plates. But even by Byrd’s time, music was capable of being set in ‘type’, where the different notes were assembled together from individual note ‘units’ that were clamped together to form the musical ‘text’. This was how East produced nearly all of Byrd’s music, an example of the industrialization of the production of music as mechanization progressively took over from the artistry of the human hand.
Byrd’s monopoly actually began in 1575, but for whatever reason, he took minimal advantage of this until 1588, when, quite suddenly, he began to make the most of it, and East was deeply involved. This was an important relationship: East distinguished himself from other printers partly by being willing both to print and distribute music, and by making English composers a focus of his attention. Importantly for Byrd and for Catholic worship in Britain, East was also willing to bring out uncompromisingly Catholic works in print.
Laudibus in sanctis is a motet in three sections and its text is a paraphrase of Psalm 150. Although a sacred work, Byrd cheerfully incorporates secular madrigal-style word painting within the music. In fact, he seems almost to relish doing this, as if he was determined to ensure that the secular world doesn’t have all the best music. The psalm invites the listener to praise God in various ways: with the sound of the trumpet, lute and harp, with strings and pipe, and with cymbals and dances. Such a text is a gift to a composer with an imagination, and Byrd goes for it, most obviously when it comes to praising God in the dances, when he switches into triple time, and gives us a boisterous courtly dance.
It would be interesting to know when this work was first performed in the Priory Church, and at the hands of which Director of Music it premiered. It is, of course, most likely that its first appearance within our walls was with an English text acceptable to the Protestant world, something known as a “contrafactum” (the substitution of one text with another without substantial changes to the music), which might or might not have some connection with the original text (usually not). But somebody must have been the first to have this piece sung within our walls to the original text, with the word painting doing the job Byrd intended, and so completing what was a rather protracted journey from Aldersgate Street to St Bartholomew the Great.
The final piece of music at Evensong, sung in the Lady Chapel, to which we will have processed with hand-held candles, is a setting of Alma Redemptoris Mater, the Marian Antiphon that has accompanied us at the end of Evensong since Advent Sunday. This is a setting by the Italian composer, Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676), who was a chorister and pupil under Monteverdi at San Marco in Venice. In fact, Cavalli wasn’t his name at all. He was actually born Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni. In the early parts of the TV series, Downton Abbey, the viewing audience was introduced to the old below-stairs tradition of referring to the personal servants of visiting house guests by the name of the house guest, not the servant’s own name. “Cavalli” is an example of this, because the name by which we know this composer is actually the name of his employer, Federico Cavalli.
Apart from his progressive ascent through the many hierarchical layers of the music department of San Marco in Venice until he achieved Maestro di Capella (although not Monteverdi’s immediate successor), “Cavalli’s” main claim to fame is as one of the first composers of opera, a new art form that was about to explode across the whole of Europe, and in which Monteverdi was also much implicated. In the end, he wrote more than forty operas, although about a third of these are lost to us. However, his role at San Marco also led to his writing a significant number of church works. These included settings of the Marian Antiphons, scored for choir and continuo. This one is delightful, with the text split up into contrasting sections unified by a repeating harmonic pattern. This involves a falling bass line that comes back again and again and becomes a kind of fingerprint in the piece. This is a wonderful way to conclude Candlemas, and with it, alas, Christmas. It’s the first of the “Gesima” Sundays – Septuagesima, in fact – next week. You have been warned!