Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

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(b ?Palestrina, ?3 Feb 1525-2 Feb 1526; d Rome, 2 Feb 1594). Italian composer. He was a pupil of Mallapert and Firmin Lebel at S Maria Maggiore, Rome, where he was a choirboy from at least 1537. He became organist of S Agapito, Palestrina, in 1544 and in 1547 married Lucrezia Gori there; they had three children. After the Bishop of Palestrina's election as pope (Julius III) he was appointed maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia in Rome (1551), where he issued his first works (masses, 1554); during 1555 he also sang in the Cappella Sistina. Two of Rome's greatest churches then procured him as maestro di cappella, St John Lateran (1555-60) and S Maria Maggiore (1561-6), and in 1564 Cardinal Ippolito d′Este engaged him to oversee the music at his Tivoli estate. From 1566 he also taught music at the Seminario Romano, before returning to the Cappella Giulia as maestro in 1571.

During the 1560s and 1570s Palestrina's fame and influence rapidly increased through the wide diffusion of his published works. So great was his reputation that in 1577 he was asked to rewrite the church's main plainchant books, following the Council of Trent's guidelines. His most famous mass, Missa Papae Marcelli, may have been composed to satisfy the council's requirements for musical cogency and textual intelligibility. He was always in tune with the Counter-Reformation spirit; after his wife's death in 1580 he considered taking holy orders, but instead he remarried (1581). His wife, Virginia Dormoli, was a wealthy fur merchant's widow; his investments in her business eased his financial strains, and his last years at St Peter's were among his most productive.

Palestrina ranks with Lassus and Byrd as one of the greatest Renaissance masters. A prolific composer of masses, motets and other sacred works, as well as madrigals, he was (unlike Lassus) basically conservative. In his sacred music he assimilated and refined his predecessors' polyphonic techniques to produce a ‘seamless’ texture, with all voices perfectly balanced. The nobility and restraint of his most expressive works established the almost legendary reverence that has long surrounded his name and helped set him up as the classic model of Renaissance polyphony.

• over 100 masses, 4-8vv
• c375 motets, 4-8vv
• 35 Magnificats, 4-8vv
• 68 offertories, 5vv
• Lamentations, 4-8vv
• 11 litanies, 3-8vv
• c80 hymns, 3-6, 12vv
• 49 sacred madrigals, 5vv

• over 90 madrigals, 3-6vv

The Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525-1594) was one of the greatest masters of Renaissance music and the foremost composer of the Roman school.

Born Giovanni Pierluigi, the composer is known as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina from the name of his birthplace, a hill town near Rome. It is assumed without historical evidence that Giovanni was a choir singer at the church of St. Agapit in 1532, when he was but 7 years old. When the bishop of Palestrina, Cardinal della Valle, was transferred to the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome in 1534, the 9-year-old chorister may have followed him, but the earliest cathedral record naming Giovanni carries the date 1537. Except for a brief return to his birthplace, Giovanni served at S. Maria Maggiore until his nineteenth birthday. During this formative period he probably trained with one of the Franco-Flemings in Rome: Robin Mallapert, Firmin Le Bel, or Jacques Arcadelt.

In 1544 Palestrina was summoned to his native town as organist and singing master of the local church. During the following half dozen years he married, fathered the first of his three sons, and began composing. Most important for his future career was the attention accorded his music by the new bishop of Palestrina, Cardinal del Monte. When he became Pope Julius III in 1550, one of his first acts of the following year was to appoint Palestrina choirmaster of the Julian Chapel of St. Peter's.

By 1554 Palestrina had published his first book of Masses and dedicated it to Pope Julius, who rewarded him with a coveted assignment to the Pontifical (Sistine) Choir at St. Peter's. By custom all singers of this choir were unmarried, and they were admitted only after rigorous examination. Since the Pontiff had ignored both traditions, Palestrina's designation was viewed with little enthusiasm. When Pope Julius died a few months later, Paul IV dismissed the composer but awarded him a small pension for his services. He also approved Palestrina's appointment as choirmaster at the church of St. John Lateran, where Roland de Lassus had been active only the year before.

Palestrina conducted the chorus at St. John Lateran from 1555 until 1560. But stringent economies and political intrigues made it difficult for him to achieve his artistic aims. After a particularly unpleasant incident about food and lodging for his choirboys, Palestrina left his post without notice. Such bold behavior did not seem to affect adversely his future career, for he became choirmaster at S. Maria Maggiore in 1561. Working conditions in this basilica were considerably better than at the Lateran, and Palestrina remained reasonably content for the next 5 years.

In 1566 Palestrina became music director of the newly formed Roman Seminary. Although he received a smaller salary than at S. Maria Maggiore, he was in part compensated by permission to enroll his sons Rodolfo and Angelo at the institution. What seems to have been initially a suitable arrangement did not, however, work out to his satisfaction, for he left the seminary very soon thereafter. For the next 4 years he was music director for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este II, an outstanding patron of the arts.

In March 1571 Palestrina was appointed choirmaster at the Julian Chapel, where he stayed for the rest of his life. On at least two occasions attempts were made to lure him from Rome. In 1568 Emperor Maximilian had invited him to the imperial court at Vienna. And in 1583 the Duke of Mantua, an amateur musician of talent and frequent correspondent of the composer, invited Palestrina to his court. To both invitations the master set such a high price on his services that it might be assumed that he never seriously considered leaving the Eternal City.

Reforms in Music

Intermittently from 1545 to 1565 the Council of Trent considered the reform of Church music, even contemplating the ban of all polyphony from the liturgy. According to one report, Palestrina saved the art of music by composing the Missa Papae Marcelli according to the requirements of the council. But the role alleged to have been played by this Mass is undoubtedly mythical. Palestrina's reputation makes it likely, however, that he was consulted on decisions about music. We do know that his works were performed before, and approved by, Cardinal Borromeo, who was charged with securing a liturgical music free of secular tunes and unintelligible texts.

Palestrina's influence with the Roman hierarchy is also witnessed by a papal order of 1577. He and a colleague, Annibale Zoilo, were directed to revise the Graduale Romanum by purging the old tunes of barbarisms and the excrescences of centuries. Palestrina never did complete this laborious task, and the Medicean Gradual of the early 17th century, sometimes thought to be his work, is actually the labor of others.

His Works

Palestrina's voluminous works encompass the most important categories cultivated in the late Renaissance: Masses, motets, and madrigals. Of these three the madrigals played a small role, for his orientation was overwhelmingly on the side of sacred music. His 250 motets include settings of psalms and canticles, as well as exclusively liturgical items such as 45 hymns, 68 offertories, 13 lamentations, 12 litanies, and 35 Magnificats. Most of these compositions reveal the so-called Palestinian style, in which stepwise melodic movement dominates expansive leaps, and diatonic tones in both horizontal and vertical combinations are preferred to their chromatic counterparts.

Important as are the motets, they are decidedly secondary to the 105 Masses for which Palestrina was justly admired. He essayed various types: the archaic tenor cantus firmus Mass; the paraphrase Mass; the Mass erected on hexachord and other contrived subject; and the "parody" Mass, which elaborates a preexistent polyphonic model. True to his preferences Palestrina avoided secular models, opting for the tunes of the Church or at least tunes associated with sacred texts. He was not modern in the same way as his Venetian colleagues with their polychoral pieces. His fuller identification with the older Franco-Flemish masters, however, made him the representative of that illustrious group best remembered by posterity.

Further Reading

The best comprehensive study in English of the life and works of the composer is Henry Coates, Palestrina (1938). His style and historical importance are treated in Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (1954; rev. ed. 1959), and Knud Jeppesen, The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance (1927; 2d rev. ed. 1946). For general historical background, Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music (1960), is recommended.

Additional Sources

Cametti, Alberto, Palestrina, New York: AMS Press, 1979.

Coates, Henry, Palestrina, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979.

Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi Da (1526–1594), Italian composer. Giovanni Palestrina was one of the most important composers of vocal music in sixteenth-century Italy. His name was synonymous with the Roman polyphonic style of composition that came to embody the musical goals and aesthetic ideals of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. The Palestrina style (stile del Palestrina) is characterized by a perfect sense of balance and equilibrium, a seamless marriage between intelligible text setting and rich vocal sonorities. Stress and accent follow the natural rhythms of the words, melodic motion and dissonance are carefully controlled, and his harmonic language is one of the finest expressions of the socalled old church modal system that would soon be superseded by modern tonality. As the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) serves as the model for the study of tonal counterpoint, the rules of counterpoint that have been gleaned from Palestrina's music have been used to teach modal counterpoint to the present day.

Although the name by which he is known comes from the town of his birth (Palestrina, near Rome), he almost always signed letters with his given name "Giovanni Petraloysio." His birthdate cannot be definitively documented, but since the eulogy written at the time of his death in 1594 gives his age as sixty-eight, it can be safely ascribed to 1526.

Palestrina's first appointment was as organist of San Agapito in his hometown, on 28 October 1544. On 1 September 1551 he became magister cantorum (leader of the boy choir school) of the Cappella Giulia at St. Peter's in Rome, and he assumed the position of magister cappellae (leader of the chapel) in 1553. A year later he published the first book of polyphonic masses ever printed in Rome.

Palestrina was hired by the Sistine Chapel on 13 January 1555, but shortly thereafter the new pope, Paul IV, decided to reinstate the rule of celibacy for anyone working there, and Palestrina and two other married singers were forced to leave. On 1 October 1555 we find Palestrina as maestro di cappella of San Giovanni in Laterano, but he resigned in 1560. He then returned to the place of his early training, San Maria Maggiori, and subsequently became director of the Seminario Romano.

During this period, the musical policies resulting from the Council of Trent—in particular the removal of "impure" or secular elements from the liturgy and the emphasis on intelligibility—proved to be both a challenge and a stimulus to Palestrina and his contemporaries. Palestrina's reputation as the savior of polyphonic church music is likely somewhat exaggerated; nonetheless, at least some of his compositions (perhaps the famous Missa Papae Marcelli or Pope Marcellus Mass) were performed for Cardinal Vitellozzi, one of the overseers of the reform, to see if the words could be easily understood. His music was also frequently sung in the papal chapel.

Palestina's reputation was such that Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II invited him to act as imperial choirmaster in Vienna in 1568, but he declined the offer. Palestrina returned to the Capella Giulia as choirmaster in April 1571 and remained there until his death. This was a time of personal upheaval for the composer; in addition to losing his two sons and a brother to the plague, his wife Lucrezia died in 1580, although he married Virginia Dormoli, the wealthy widow of a furrier, a year later. Nonetheless, the reign of Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585) was particularly rich for the production of sacred music. In 1577–1578, Palestrina became deeply involved in the revision of the plainsong repertoire from the Roman Gradual and Antiphoner, a project that he never completed. Palestrina also assumed an active role in his new wife's businesses, successfully investing in real estate and even selling altar wine out of his family vineyard.

Palestrina was among the most prolific composers of his age. His more than 300 motets, 140 madrigals, 104 masses, 72 hymns, 68 offertories, and 35 Magnificats far surpassed the output of his contemporaries. His followers included such masters as Tomás Luis de Victoria and Annibale Stabile, and his preeminence was well recognized during his lifetime. An anthology of vesper psalms composed by six notable composers was dedicated to him in 1592, complete with an effusive testimonial about his accomplishments. His compositions were often reprinted during his lifetime, and he was the first composer of the sixteenth century to appear in a complete nineteenth-century edition.

Palestrina remained in memory far more prominently and persistently than any of his contemporaries. His compositions became a permanent part of the repertoire of the Sistine Chapel, a most unusual practice at that time. His carefully wrought counterpoint became identified with stile antico (old style)—as opposed to the stile modern (modern style)—that came to be associated with notions of purity and spirituality. By the eighteenth century, Palestrina's reputation was based less on a detailed familiarity with his music than his mastery of counterpoint. The preface to Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), the most important eighteenth-century treatise on Renaissance counterpoint, exemplifies the awe and devotion that Palestrina's music inspired. Palestrina, the master of counterpoint, is "the celebrated light of music . . . to whom I owe everything I know of this art, and whose memory I shall never cease to cherish with feelings of deepest reverence" (Fux, The Steps to Parnassus, p. 16).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Fux, Johann Joseph. Steps to Parnassus: The Study of Counterpoint. Translated and edited by Alfred Mann with John St. Edmonds. New York, 1943. Translation of Gradus ad Parnassum. Vienna, 1725.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Pope Marcellus Mass. Norton Critical Score. Edited by Lewis Lockwood with introduction. New York, 1975. Authoritative edition of one of Palestrina's most celebrated masses, with informative introduction to the composer and works.

Secondary Sources

Boyd, Malcolm. Palestrina's Style. London, 1973.

O'Regan, Noel. Institutional Patronage in Post-Tridentine Rome: Music at SS. Trinità dei Pellegrini, 1559–1650. London, 1995.

——. "Palestrina, A Musician and Composer in the Market-Place." Early Music 22 (1994): 551–572.

Owens, Jessie Ann. Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition, 1450–1600. New York, 1997. Fascinating description of the working methods of Renaissance composers, including a discussion of Palestrina's letters and manuscripts.

—WENDY HELLER, MARK KROLL

Similar Artists:

Heinrich Schütz, Claudio Monteverdi, Orlandus Lassus

Influenced By:

Capriano de Rore, Josquin des Prez, Jacques Arcadelt

Followers:

Tomás Luis de Victoria, Peter Philips, Claudio Monteverdi, Orlandus Lassus, Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger, Giovanni Francesco Anerio

• Born: 1526
• Died: February 02, 1594
• Genres: Classical
• Instrument: Composer
• Representative Albums: "Renaissance Masterpieces, Vol. 4: Rome," "Chants Gregoriens Pour L'advent Et Noel"

Biography

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (between February 3 1525 and February 2 1526^[1] – 2 February 1594) was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous sixteenth-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. Palestrina had a vast influence on the development of Roman Catholic church music, and his work can be seen as a summation of Renaissance polyphony.

Contents 1 Life 2 Music and reputation 3 References 4 Sources 5 External links

Life

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Palestrina was born in Palestrina, a town near Rome, then part of the Papal States.

He spent most of his career in Rome. Documents suggest he first visited the city in 1537, when he is listed as a chorister at Santa Maria Maggiore basilica. He studied with Robin Mallapert and Firmin Lebel.

It was rumored Palestrina studied under Claude Goudimel; the story originated in the nineteenth century, but according to recent study, Goudimel was never in Rome.

From 1544 to 1551 Palestrina was organist of the principal church of his native city (St Agapito), and in the last year became maestro di cappella at the Cappella Giulia, the papal choir at St. Peter's Basilica. His first published compositions, a book of masses made so favorable an impression with Pope Julius III (previously the Bishop of Palestrina), that he was appointed musical director of the Julian Chapel. In addition, this was the first book of masses by a native composer: in the Italian states of his day, most composers of sacred music were from Netherlands, France, Portugal^[2] or Spain. In fact his book of masses was actually modeled on one by Morales, and the woodcut in the front is an almost exact copy of the one from the book by the Spaniard.

Palestrina held positions similar to his Julian Chapel appointment at other chapels and churches in Rome during the next decade (notably St John in Lateran, 1555–1560, and St Maria Maggiore, 1561–1566). In 1571 he returned to the Julian Chapel, and remained at St Peter's for the rest of his life. The decade of the 1570s was difficult for him personally; he lost his brother, two of his sons, and his wife in three separate outbreaks of the plague (1572, 1575, and 1580 respectively). He seems to have considered becoming a priest at this time, but instead he married again, this time to a wealthy widow; this finally gave him financial independence (he was not well paid as choirmaster) and he was able to compose prolifically until his death.

He died in Rome of pleurisy in 1594.

Music and reputation

See also: List of compositions by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Palestrina left hundreds of compositions, including 104 masses, 68 offertories, more than 300 motets, at least 72 hymns, 35 magnificats, 11 litanies, 4 or 5 sets of lamentations etc., at least 140 madrigals and 9 organ ricercari (however, recent scholarship has classed these ricercari as of doubtful authorship; Palestrina probably wrote no purely instrumental music). There are two comprehensive editions of Palestrina's works: one edited by Haberl and published in 33 volumes in 1862-94, the other edited by R. Casimiri and others and published in 34 volumes. His Missa sine nomine seems to have been particularly attractive to Johann Sebastian Bach, who studied and performed it while he was writing his own masterpiece, the Mass in B Minor. His compositions are typified as very clear, with voice parts well-balanced and beautifully harmonized. Among the works counted as his masterpieces is the Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass), which according to legend was composed to persuade the Council of Trent that a draconian ban on polyphonic treatment of text in sacred music was unnecessary. However, more recent scholarship shows that this mass was composed before the cardinals convened to discuss the ban (possibly as much as ten years before). It is probable, however, that Palestrina was quite conscious of the needs of intelligible text in conformity with the doctrine of the Counter-Reformation, and wrote his works towards this end from the 1560s until the end of his life.

The "Palestrina Style"—the smooth style of 16th century polyphony, derived and codified by Johann Joseph Fux from a careful study of his works—is the style usually taught as "Renaissance polyphony" in college counterpoint classes, although in a modified form, as Fux made a number of stylistic errors which have been corrected by later authors (notably Knud Jeppesen and Morris). As codified by Fux it follows the rules of what he defined as "species counterpoint." Palestrina established and followed these strict guidelines:

• The flow of music is dynamic, not rigid or static.
• Melody should contain few leaps between notes.
• If a leap occurs, it must be small and immediately countered by opposite stepwise motion.
• Dissonances are either passing note or off the beat. If it is on the beat, it is immediately resolved.

No composer of the sixteenth century has had such an edifice of myth and legend built around him as Palestrina. Much of the research on Palestrina was done in the nineteenth century by Giuseppe Baini, who published a monograph in 1828 which made Palestrina famous again, and reinforced the already existing legend that he was the "Saviour of Church Music" during the reforms of the Council of Trent. The nineteenth-century attitude of hero-worship is predominant in this monograph, however, and this has remained with the composer to some degree to the present day; Hans Pfitzner's opera Palestrina shows this attitude at its peak. Scholarship of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tends to retain the view that Palestrina was a strong and refined composer, representing a summit of technical perfection, but emphasizes that there were other composers working at the same time with equally individual voices and slightly different styles, even within the confines of smooth polyphony, such as Lassus and Victoria.

Palestrina was immensely famous in his day, and his reputation, if anything, increased following his death. Conservative music of the Roman School continued to be written in his style (known as the "prima pratica" in the seventeenth century), by such students of his as Giovanni Maria Nanino, Ruggiero Giovanelli, Arcangelo Crivelli, Teofilo Gargari, Francesco Soriano and Gregorio Allegri. It is also thought that Salvatore Sacco may have been a student of Palestrina. Palestrina's music continues to be performed and recorded, and provides models for the study of counterpoint.

References

1. ^ Lockwood/O'Regan/Owens, Grove online
2. ^ Manuel Mendes, António Carreira, Duarte Lobo, Filipe de Magalhães, Fr. Manuel Cardoso, João Lourenço and Pero do Porto, among many others

Sources

Article "Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da", in: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2 Benjamin, Thomas, The Craft of Modal Counterpoint, 2nd ed. Routledge, New York, 2005. ISBN 0-415-97172-1 (direct approach) Coates, Henry, Palestrina. J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1938. (An early entry in the Master Musicians series, and, like other books in that series, combines biographical data with musicological commentary.) Daniel, Thomas, Kontrapunkt, Eine Satzlehre zur Vokalpolyphonie des 16. Jahrhunderts. Verlag Dohr, 2002. ISBN 3-925366-96-2 Johann Joseph Fux, The Study of Counterpoint (Gradus ad Parnassum). Tr. Alfred Mann. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1965. ISBN 0-393-00277-2 Gauldin, Robert, A Practical Approach to Sixteenth-Century Counterpoint. Waveland Press, Inc., Long Grove, Illinois, 1995. ISBN 0-88133-852-4 (direct approach, no species; contains a large and detailed bibliography) Haigh, Andrew C. "Modal Harmony in the Music of Palestrina", in the festschrift Essays on Music: In Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison. Harvard University Press, 1957, pp. 111–120. Jeppesen, Knud, The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance. 2nd ed., London, 1946. (An exhaustive study of his contrapuntal technique.) Jeppesen, Knud; Haydon, Glen (Translator); Foreword by Mann, Alfred. Counterpoint. New York, 1939. Available through Dover Publications, 1992. ISBN 0-486-27036-X

Lewis Lockwood, Noel O'Regan, Jessie Ann Owens: "Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da". Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed July 7, 2007), (subscription access) Meier, Bernhard, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, Described According to the Sources. Broude Brothers Limited, 1988. ISBN 0-8450-7025-8 Morris, R.O., Contrapuntal Technique in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-19-321468-7 (out of print; one of the first attempts at "direct approach", meaning Morris does away with Fux' five species). Motte, Diether de la, Kontrapunkt. 1981 Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel. ISBN 3-423-30146-5 / 3-7618-4371-2 (this text is in German; great, though!) Pyne, Zoe Kendrick, Giovanni Pierluigi di Palestrina: His Life and Times, Bodley Head, London, 1922. Reese, Gustave, Music in the Renaissance. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4 Roche, Jerome, Palestrina. Oxford University Press, 1970. ISBN 0-19-314117-5 Stewart, Robert, An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Counterpoint and Palestrina's Musical Style. Ardsley House, Publishers, 1994. ISBN 1-880157-07-1 Stove, R. J., Prince of Music: Palestrina and His World, Quakers Hill Press, Sydney, 1990. ISBN 0-7316-8792-2 (biographical rather than musicological in nature; is wholly devoid of staff-notation extracts; but corrects some errors found in Z. K. Pyne and elsewhere). Swindale, Owen, Polyphonic Composition, Oxford University Press, 1962. (Out of print, no ISBN available.)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Giovanni Palestrina

• Free scores by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free scores by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
• Free scores by Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina in the International Music Score Library Project
• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's Foundation
• Listen to a free recording of Palestrina's Sicut Cervus from Coro Nostro, a mixed chamber choir based in Leicester, UK.
• Listen to free recordings of songs from Umeå Akademiska Kör
• Catholic Encyclopedia: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
• (Italian) Palestrina listen tracks on Magazzini-Sonori

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