Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina

(1526-1594)

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born in 1525 and died in 1594. His
surname comes from the place of his birth--a small town twenty miles from
Rome. A choirboy at S. Maria Maggiore, Rome, in 1537, he was appointed
organist and maestro di cappella at Palestrina cathedral in 1544 under the Bishop
who later became Pope Julius III. After seven years his former summoned him
to Rome as chapelmaster of the Cappella Giulia at St Peter's, in which post he
served from 1551 to 1554 and again from 1571 until his death His choir here
consisted of Italians, being thus sharply distinguished from the choir of the
Sistine Chapel, which since Dufay’s days and before had been almost entirely
recruited from Flanders. Soon after Palestrina's appointment he brought out a
book of masses, which are the first ever dedicated to a Pope by an Italian
composer. The fact may be remembered as a symbol of the rising influence of
the native school.

A few years later Palestrina was appointed a member

of the Sistine Choir, but was subsequently dismissed
by Paul IV because of his unacceptable married status,
and was quickly retired with a pension. After other
appoint-ments, as choirmaster at St John Lateran in
1555-60, at S. Maria Maggiore in 1561-6, and at the
Roman Seminary in 1566-71. As earlier mentioned,
Palestrina returned to the Julian Chapel in 1571 as
chapelmaster, remaining there until he died in 1594. In
the 1560s he had also directed concerts at the Tivoli
villa of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, and had a Mass
commissioned by the Duke of Mantua, who tried to
persuade him to leave Rome for the Mantuan court.
Though he was hardly at all employed as a musician in
the Papal choir, much of Palestrina's music was destined
for performance by it. His output contains 105 Masses (a
remarkable number even for that period), some 250
motets, several volumes of specific liturgical works
(Offertories, Litanies, hymns, Magnificats and Lamenta-
tions), two books of madrigals and two of spiritual
madrigals. His preference for writing Masses and for
remaining in Rome within the orbit of the Papacy marks
him as a man of conservative inclinations, though his
style did develop away from the mainly contrapuntal towards more chordal
and harmonically orientated writing a fact often masked by the use of his music
today as a model for the discipline of counterpoint. He shunned the pressures
of his age towards the expression in music of moods or words, choosing to set
even quite highly-charged texts in an abstract, perhaps impersonal idiom
possessed of a beautiful equilibrium of melodic line and harmonic euphony.
Though he wrote parody Masses on his own and others' pieces, much of his
sacred music springs from plainsong, and many Masses are based on Gregorian
melodies or on motets themselves so based. His madrigals were, as might be
expected, conservative compared with progressive developments in that form.

One of Palestrina's closest friends was the saintly

Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorio, and for him
he acted as musical director so that whilst we look
upon this composer as representing the climax of
the school of unaccompanied contrapuntal choral
music, one must remember that he has his
associations with the new form of music which was
quickly to supplant the old.

Palestrina, was not a prophet without honour in his own country. In the year of
jubilee (1575), when pilgrims of all nations flocked to Rome to obtain the
indulgences offered them, a procession of fifteen thousand inhabitants of
Palestrina, divided into three great choirs, entered the sacred city singing their
townsman's music.

In any account of Palestrina's life will inevitably be found

some reference to his part in 'saving' church music from
destruction by the Council of Trent (1545-63). The incident
has in the past been somewhat exaggerated.

The facts seem to be as follows:

It had been decreed that church music should be purged

from secular influences and methods--as for instance the method of building up
a piece of church music upon some popular tune as cantus firmus. Advice was
taken with a sort of Committee of eight Papal singers, who demurred on one
point, the demand that the words of church music should always be intelligible
to the listener. Choral composition was in those days, of course, highly
contrapuntal, full of 'imitations' and other artistic devices necessarily in danger
of tending somewhat to obscurity; but the obscurity was not unavoidable, and
Palestrina's music appears to have been brought forward in refutation of the
singers' claim, which might have led to drastic action by the Council.
Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli has often been referred to in this connexion
with the argument before the Council, but its citation on this occasion is not
certainly known. The known facts are that Pope Marcellus II died after he had
been three weeks in office (1555). As a Cardinal he had been very active in
urging a reform of church music. Reform was 'in the air' just
then, for Holy Church had lost England, and this was looked
on by the devout as a warning. This Cardinal was 'the
virtuous prince of the Church whose person was the very
embodiment of the principle of reform.' During his brief
occupancy of the chair of St. Peter, Marcellus showed his
zeal for improvement in church music. Returning on Good
Friday from the service at which the Reproaches are sung, he
called for his choir and urged upon them the necessity of a
Palestrina and Pope
proper choice of music in future, with a view to the
Julius III character of the particular service in which it was to be sung,
and also that of letting the words stand out clearly. These
were ideals in consonance with Palestrina's spirit as a Church composer, and it
was probably with the memory of that Good Friday meeting in mind that,
when he printed this Mass (in 1567), he gave it the title Missa Papae Marcelli.