Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594): Missa Aeterna Christi munera / Missa Lauda Sion

Missa ¨Aeterna Christi munera¨ (for the Feasts of Apostles) 00:00 Kyrie 02:23 Gloria 05:58 Credo 11:56 Sanctus 13:43 Benedictus 16:53 Agnus Dei Missa ¨Lauda Sion¨ (for the Feast of Corpus Christi) 23:44 Kyrie 26:12 Gloria 30:24 Credo 37:35 Sanctus 39:21 Benedictus 43:02 Agnus Dei Les Chanteurs de Saint-Eustache, conducted by R. P. Emile Martin Recorded in the Church of St. Eustache, Paris The biographies of Giovanni Pierluigi give very few details of his life. Born in 1525 into a humble family of Palestrina, the old Roman city from which he took his name, at an early age he learned to keep time with the enthusiasm of a peasant, for a story handed down by Casimiri tells of the small boy vigorously beating time to the music he heard. This innate sense of rhythm pervades his music. In turn Master of the Chapel at St. John Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Roman Seminary, he devoted himself to the very day of his death in 1594 to the veritable manufacturing of music: ninety-three masses and some six hundred motets (to mention only religious music) bear witness to this steady concentration, to a methodical way of working. Palestrina’s logical mind and his taste for the music of earlier times made him a restorer rather than an innovator, and in 1557 he undertook, with the help of his son Hyginus, the revision and reform of the Gradual, a work of such scope that it was still unfinished at the time of his death. Writers have often expounded on Palestrina’s “impersonal genius”, more concerned with constructing music than with moving the listener, a clever translator looking for images to put into music, more inclined to fit words to sounds than to express the feelings in his soul. ¨The feeling of the artist“, [Palestrina] if one believes a certain music critic, ¨is obliterated by the concern of the architect... His work, like that of Bach, is the result of careful computation and moves us only through the excellence of its workmanship“. And to refer to the writing of J. Samson, “Palestrina or the poetry of accuracy“. These critical remarks fail to consider the sonority of Palestrina’s music, and the instinctive reactions of the unprejudiced listener are no less valid than these pedantic claims to the omniscience of Apollo. Palestrina the artist who composes does not stifle Palestrina the artist who sings; how can one doubt the feeling and tendernessof this devout servant of the Virgin when one hears the mass Assumpta est or the great Stabat for two choruses, as architectural as these works may seem to one who examines the score? If this capacity for lyricism, in which the piety of the composer plays a large part, does not always shine forth, it is no less present in such works of lesser scope as these two masses Lauda Sion and Aeterna Christi Munera. The former is taken from the fourth book of Masses (1582), the latter from the fifth book (1590). The theme of the Sequence Lauda Sion serves as the foundation for the one, while the other uses the hymn from Matins of the Common of Apostles and Evangelists. Both are strictly liturgical masses, destined for the Office of the Day, and both use the same text. The rhythmic changes, and even the melodic, show constant care to adapt the musical phrases to the Latin text. The liturgical tradition of the Kyriale is rigorously respected, and the usual means of portraying the principal images of the text are landmarks of both scores. The counterpoint reveals great mastery; if the eye sees divisions in the score, the ear hears only the natural freshness of the melody and the simplicity of the rhythm. Adapted from the French of R. P. EMILE MARTIN Westminster / Erato (XWN 18693) 1959 Art: The Last Supper (), by Jacopo Comin (¨Tintoretto¨, 1518-1594)