8:00 pm, Saturday, October 20, 2018
Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch
522 West End Avenue at West 87th Street
New York, NY 10025

Strange and Wonderful Motets of the Renaissance


By Lassus, Wert, Gallus, Gesualdo, Monteverdi


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Program

RACHEL WEEPING FOR HER CHILDREN

Vox in Rama Giaches de Wert (1535-1596)
RACHEL WEEPING FOR HER CHILDREN

Vox in Rama Giaches de Wert (1535-1596)


THE MIRACLE OF CHRISTMAS

Mirabile mysterium Jacobus Gallus (1550-1591)


A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

Vox clamantis in deserto Giahces de Wert


THE MIRACLE OF ASCENSION

Omnis pulchritudo Domini Andreas de Silva (1475-1530)


CALLING TO THE LORD IN DISTRESS (Ps. 119: 1-2)

Ad Dominum cum tribularer Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1643)


CHRIST AND THE CANAANITE WOMAN

Egressus Jesus Giaches de Wert


CHRIST’S WARNING

Tu vis a me Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)


CHRIST ON THE SEA OF GALILEE

Ascendente Jesu Giaches de Wert


CHRIST ON THE CROSS

O vos omnes Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613)


THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL

Saule, Saule Giaches de Wert



 

Pomerium

Kristina Boerger, Amber Evans, Sarah Hawkey, Chloe Holgate, Dominique Surh – sopranos
Peter Gruett – countertenor
Nathaniel Adams, Patrick Fennig, Christopher Preston Thompson – tenors
Thomas McCargar – baritone
Kurt-Owen Richards, Peter Stewart – basses

Commentary on the Program

by Alexander Blachly

    The composers on today’s program represent a group of sixteenth-century creators of sacred music who remain under-recognized to this day. They experimented with effects intended to capture the attention of listeners, perhaps to puzzle them, certainly to surprise them, even to shock them. The practice was not widespread. With notable exceptions, such as Andreas de Silva’s Omnis pulchridudo Domini, the fourth work heard in today’s program, such music was rarely copied into Roman manuscripts, at least until after Palestrina’s death. Similarly, it is only after the sixteenth century that we find it in England, Germany, or Spain. It seems to have bypassed France altogether. Our strange and wonderful pieces, however, represent one facet of a larger, more widespread artistic phenomenon known as “Mannerism.” In painting, Mannerism first arose in Florence and Rome. In music its origins are found in non-Roman Italian cities, especially Mantua and Ferrara, whose courts cultivated the avant garde.

    The most famous painting in the early phase of Mannerism, Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck of 1534, presents the viewer with multiple curiosities (see image above). The Madonna herself sits in a strangely unstable way, appearing to be sliding off her seat. Her entire body is oddly elongated. If she were standing she might be over seven feet tall. The baby on her lap seems too large for a normal infant and has blue-ish forehead skin the color of a corpse. A tiny figure in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas holds a scroll and seems to be proclaiming something. The Madonna’s neck is, as the painting’s name would suggest, too long, as are her fingers. What could be the meaning of the ivory pillars, which hold up nothing? Why is the setting indoors on the left and outdoors on the right?

    An explanation for some of the strangeness might to be that Parmigianino has superimosed the Pietà topos onto the Madonna and Child topos, with the Virgin holding both the crucified Jesus and the baby Jesus. The small figure may be Isaiah prophesying Jesus’ birth, the standard “meaning” of Madonna and Child images across many centuries. In this interpretation, Isaiah is small to represent how far in the past he existed. The ivory pillars may be intended to reinforce our focus on the neck of the Madonna, whom Christians had long identified with the Beloved in the Song of Songs. The Old Testament poem describes the Beloved’s neck as “sicut turris eburnea” (“like an ivory tower”). Still to be explained are the nearly naked figures on the left bearing a silver vase. Are they angels? Probably, because part of one wing is visible. If angels, though, why the provocatively naked leg in the foreground? Perhaps this is an allusion to the eroticism of the Song of Songs itself.

    Seven years prior to the Madonna of the Long Neck, Parmigianino painted his Conversion of St. Paul of 1527. Here the painter emphasized the violence of the event by depicting St. Paul’s gigantic horse rearing dangerously above its rider, who lies sprawled on the ground facing the viewer, his right leg thrust in the foreground. We realize that he has been blown off his mount by the mighty voice of Jesus calling out from heaven. Presaging effects to be perfected in the seventeenth century, Parmigianino uses foreshortening perspective to fool our eyes into seeing St. Paul as almost three-dimensional. In a pen-and-ink study for the same scene, Parmigianino again emphasized the powerful horse, terrified and wild-eyed (see below). This study also includes Jesus in a cloud, calling out to Saul.

    Clear parallels exist between Mannerist painting and Mannerist music. The Mannerist composer Giaches de Wert chose texts that recount miraculous events or ones of extreme emotion as his preferred words to set to music. Inspired, perhaps, by Parmigianino’s depictions of the Conversion of St. Paul, in Saule, Saule (published in 1581) Wert has Saul hear a distant voice from heaven coming closer and louder. In a frightened voice Saul asks, “Who are you?” As an evocation of the full force of Jesus’ voice thundering down “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting!” a wave of sound from eight separate voice-parts calls out the words in close repetition. Then comes Jesus’ powerful command: “Arise and go to the city!” To express sorrow (Vox in Rama), Wert drew on the technique, established earlier in the sixteenth century for this purpose, of descending chromatic scales. To express extreme emotion, he favored large melodic leaps and unstable harmonies (Vox in Rama and Vox clamantis in deserto). To express the churning waves of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus and his disciples are caught in a violent windstorm (Ascendente Jesu), he has all six voices collide in rapid, out-of-phase syncopations.

    Where Wert specialized in theatrical effects, Gesualdo explored the psychological realms of despair, sorrow, and guilt. Daring chromatic effects and searing dissonances are his trademark, especially prominent in the twenty-seven large-scale responsories he wrote for Holy Week. Tonight we hear one of the shortest but most powerful of these, O vos omnes. In a truly Mannerist move, Gesualdo begins his setting on the most unstable of bass notes: B-natural, a ninth below middle C. (Wert’s Vox in Rama begins on the same bass note.) The excruciating chromaticism of “si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus” (“if there is any sorrow like my sorrow”) combines both pain and sweetness, emotions the murderous but guilt-ridden Gesualdo well understood and which he had a particular aptitude for expressing in the largely imitative polyphonic idiom of the Renaissance. In that style, high, low, and middle voices echo each other throughout the texture, in effects that at times are juxtaposed to chordal passages, as at “o vos omnes, qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte.” No matter how far they depart from stability, Gesualdo’s chromatically tangled lines of polyphony always cadence in pure major triads.

    Slovene composer Jacobus Gallus, who lived and worked in Moravia and Bohemia at the end of his life, created in his Christmas motet Mirabile mysterium one of the most unusual works of the Renaissance. The words proclaim that “on this day a miraculous mystery is declared, with [divine and human] natures having been altered. God is made man, and that which he was [i.e., divine] he remains; that which he was not [i.e., human] he assumes, suffering neither commixture nor division.” Each phrase in this text provides a rationale for Gallus to introduce ever more unstable and conflicting chromatic effects, with the overthrow of the normal rules of musical composition representing the overthrow of the normal rules of nature.

    The great scholar of Renaissance music, Edward Lowinsky, was so impressed by the chromatic effects of Andreas de Silva’s Omnis pulchritudo Domini, expressive of the miracle of Ascension, that he thought the composer must have been Spanish. It appears now that Silva was probably Flemish, but writing in an idiom ahead of his time. (Omnis pulchritudo Domini is preserved in the Medici Codex of 1519.) The slow-moving cantus firmus enters late and in the middle of the texture. Once having entered, its long notes, which guide and control the four other voices, allow Silva to generate unexpected, strange harmonies—harmonies evocative of the miracle of Ascension that is being declaimed in two texts simultaneously. The musical evocation of the meaning of the words being sung, heard here in a striking way, would soon become the nearly universal goal of composers of Mannerist music.

    A word, finally, on the single work by Monteverdi heard here. Originally a madrigal written to an Italian text, Tu vis à me abire shows Monteverdi’s skill in representing the emotions of the abandoned lover of Guarini’s Rime, madrigal 83. Six years after Monteverdi’s setting appeared in print in his Book IV of 1603, Aquilino Coppini, a skilled rhetorician from Milan, replaced Guarini’s Italian “You are abandoning me, hard soul! What harshness to be the soul of someone’s heart and to separate oneself while feeling no sorrow!” with sacred Latin words spoken by Jesus: “You wish to leave me, hard soul! What extreme duress to cleave to fallen ones and to be separated from eternal glory!” Most notable in both versions is how Monteverdi depicts “separation,” with voices that begin a phrase in unison slowly pulling apart. Monteverdi’s music has a dramatic and operatic feel, presaging effects in the actual operas that soon would win the composer his greatest acclaim, beginning with L’Orfeo of 1607.

 Posted by at 5:50 pm