The Pope, the Emperor and the Grand Duke: the Rediscovery of a Musical Masterpiece from Renaissance Florence Transcript
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The Pope, the Emperor and the Grand Duke: The Rediscovery of a Musical Masterpiece from Renaissance Florence Transcript Date: Monday, 18 June 2007 - 12:00AM THE POPE, THE EMPEROR AND THE GRAND DUKE: THE REDISCOVERY OF A MUSICAL MASTERPIECE FROM THE RENAISSANCE FLORENCE Professor Davitt Moroney It's a great pleasure and a privilege to be giving a musical lecture at Gresham College. I remember when I was an undergraduate down the road at King's College London, one of my professors there, the eminent musicologist Thurston Dart, who is a great specialist on the music of the English Elizabethan composer John Bull, told me about Gresham College. John Bull had been appointed the first ever Professor of Music at Gresham College. So it feels rather significant to be giving a lecture today about music that I do not think John Bull himself could never have heard, since he was born about the time the mass was composed. But nevertheless, the legend of the visit to London, which I will be talking about, of the composer of this piece was still alive and well in England in John Bull's time, so he might have known about this piece. 'The Pope, the Emperor, and the Grand Duke: the Rediscovery of a Musical Masterpiece from Renaissance Florence' - alright, it is a rather fancy title, one of those standard titles in two-parts with the standard colon in the middle, but it does indeed say very precisely what it is that I am going to talk about: I am going to tell you a grand story, or rather, a grand ducal one. It is about a particularly spectacular manifestation of musical culture in 16th Century Florence, under the rule of the Medici family. The music is by the composer Alessandro Striggio the Elder, the highest paid composer at the Medici court, by which I mean that his salary was about twice as much as anybody else's, and it took 100 years before any other musician was paid as well. No story about the Medici and about Florence would be complete without its share of popes and emperors, and this one is no exception. In 1569, Pope Pius V granted the Medici ruler, Cosimo de' Medici, whose then title was Duke of Florence and Sienna, a new title, a royal one. In Rome, a few months later, in March 1570, ignoring opposition from the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, the Pope crowned Cosimo, making him the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. In honour of the event, Alessandro Striggio wrote an impressive piece of music in twelve voices. Now, since most choirs usually only use four lines of music - soprano, alto, tenor and base - twelve different voices is a lot - three times the normal complement. I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page here: if you hear Handel's Hallelujah, for example, from the end of Messiah, you may have 300 singers singing there on stage, but they're singing music in four parts - the soprano line, the alto line, the tenor line, and the base line. So what I am talking about is not the number of singers, but the number of lines of music, and most music for a choir is for four lines. A particularly big choir would have maybe five or six lines of music, or a really big choir will have a double chorus with eight lines of music - two soprano lines, two alto lines, two tenor lines, and two base lines. So Striggio's piece in honour of the Grand Duke of Tuscany was twelve lines of music - three soprano lines, three alto lines, three tenor lines, and three base lines. This is especially impressive. My subject today is a vastly grander and vastly more grand ducal work, Striggio's great mass in forty parts - ten times the normal arrangement for a choir. I will also be talking about its links with Cosimo's campaign in 1569 to obtain his royal title. This work, as some of you may have already read, since there has been some publicity already with an article in the Observer and so on, was lost for centuries. Its rediscovery is of major importance in several ways, and if you are in London on July 17th, you will have a chance to hear it when I will be conducting the first modern performance, and no doubt the first one since the 16th Century, at the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. The best place to begin this story, however, is not in the 1560s, but much later. In 1724, the French baroque composer, Sebastien de Brossard, finished cataloguing his huge music library. He says, in his letters to Louis XV at the time when he was trying to obtain a pension in return for the donation of his library, he says that it is over 10,000 volumes. In fact, since the library survives, we can now count it rather more precisely than Brossard himself, and it comes out to just over 1,000 volumes. But it has to be said that some of them do break down into about ten little sub-volumes, so if you actually count the fascicles that were on his shelf, 10,000 is not far from it, but if you look in the catalogue, it comes up to about 1,000 titles. Either way, if we had bookshelves across the whole wall, it would fill it. So in 1725, Brossard finished cataloguing his own huge music library. That handwritten catalogue is now in Paris, in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. It contains a description, in French, of one of the most extraordinary items - mass for five choirs of eight parts each, or forty different parts, and a basso continuo by Senor Alessandro Strusco, if I am not mistaken, for this name is very badly written at the start of the basso continuo. Brossard wrongly noted in his annotation that the work dated from the 17th Century. I first came across this reference in his catalogue twenty years ago, in 1987, and I have been hunting on and off for this work ever since. The difficulty of course is that Brossard's catalogue, when you open it, it says that this work is in the fourth cabinet, third shelf down. That is not much help in trying to find it today, because it was integrated into the Royal Library into the 1720s, then it was re-catalogued when Napoleon took over and it became the Imperial Library, and then it became the Royal Library again when there was the French restoration of the monarchy, and then it became the Bibliotheque Nationale again in the 1880s, and then it has now changed its name once again to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. It kept moving place during these different changes until it settled down in the 1960s into its present building, but theoretically it is the same collection that has never moved or changed, and certainly nothing ever been sold from it. So I have been hunting for it for about twenty years, and I finally held it in my hands for the first time in January 2005. It was a magical moment that I will never forget. The difficulty in tracing it had been partly due to the fact that Brossard, as he half suspected, had indeed been mistaken about the name of the composer. But he was not only mistaken about that, he was also wrong about the date. I confess it took me some time to link Brossard's 17thCentury Strusco, whose name I promptly forgot because he does not exist, with the 16th Century composer Alessandro Striggio. Striggio's mass was first alluded to in modern times in 1980 by Professor Iain Fenlon of King's College Cambridge, who had discovered an Italian reference to it dating from 1567. Two years later, an Oxford scholar, David Butchart, published two newly identified letters by Striggio, also dating from 1567, that refer repeatedly to this same great work. Both Fenlon and Butchart concluded that the work was lost, so the trace for Striggio's 16th Century mass in forty parts ended there. On the other hand, since Brossard donated his whole music collection to Louis XV in 1726, the complete source for his so- called 17th Century mass in forty parts should logically never have moved from the national collections in France. Of course that is, therefore, where I found it in 2005, and the mysterious, non-existent Strusco turned out to be Striggio. So this mass has been sitting all these years in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The call number used to be VM1947, but as soon as I pointed out to the music librarian what it actually is, it was immediately reclassified, and it has now been transferred into the Grand Reserve, where you have to sit at a special table and wear white gloves to consult it. That was my fault - I am sorry! The paper and the copyists for this source are French, and it probably dates from about 1620 to 1625. Maybe that was what Brossard was thinking of when he said it was 17th Century. He was right in that the handwriting is 17th Century and the paper is 17th Century. However, it was a copy of music that dates from some fifty or sixty years earlier. Rather than being a large single manuscript of music in score, with all the parts together, it is a series of 42 small booklets, each bound at one end with a little bit of sewing, and each of about eight pages per book.