- Date: ca. 1506
- Composer: Pierre de la Rue
- Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
Review
Late Medieval Europeans, to cheat the pains of death and lessen their time in Purgatory, built themselves lavish funerary monuments, endowed memorial chapels, and commissioned huge numbers of Requiem Masses. In the late fifteenth century, a tradition of Requiem polyphony began with the (lost) Requiem Dufay wrote and requested for his own burial and with Johannes Ockeghem's Requiem, perhaps for the death of King Charles VII of France. The Hapsburg court's star composer Pierre de la Rue also left a Requiem Mass; its occasion may have been the 1506 death of his patron Duke Philip the Fair. La Rue's Requiem, like that of Ockeghem, sets a distinctively French liturgy from before the Council of Trent: with the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus of the Mass Ordinary, La Rue sets the Introit "Requiem aeternam," the Tract "Sicut cervus" (Psalm 42:1-3), the Offertory "Domine Jesu Christe," and "Lux aeterna" during the Communion.In accordance with the somber nature of the Mass for the Dead (also sung on All Souls' Day), La Rue's music creates a bleak and passionate soundscape by means of very low voices, rich harmonic shifts, and kaleidoscopic rhythms. The low vocal ranges, reminiscent of Ockeghem and Tinctoris, set the tone from the opening movement "Requiem aeternam": of the four low male parts, the tenor sings the chant melody in the bass range and the contrabassus descends to an astounding low B flat. La Rue even adds a second contrabassus part (a Renaissance subwoofer!) in the second Kyrie and the Agnus Dei. The rhythmic character of his melodies also seems to directly echo Ockeghem's "mystical" lines, especially in sudden single-voice rhythmic shifts and long concluding melismas. He delights in richly inflected "crossings" of the harmony in different voices from one chord to the next (especially vivid in the "Christe" and Agnus Dei).
Yet as the Mass for the Dead uses candlelight to signify the hope of the resurrection, La Rue balances these dark gestures with moments of lucid texture: the upper voice pair in the Introit that sings alone the prayer "Light eternal shine upon them," the higher vocal scoring for the aspirant Psalm text "As the hart pants for the waters," the cascading imitative echo-effects highlighting the "Requiem" prayer in the Offertory and evoking the angelic choirs singing the first Sanctus, the airy simplicity of higher chordal textures for the final "Light eternal" movement. These dramatic shifts in texture (as in Ockeghem's Missa Fors seulement and Josquin's Missa De beata Virgine) suggest that contrasting choirs may have performed this Requiem, adding a spatial element to its drama. Another performance clue survives in one of its manuscript sources' illumination: the opening pages contain a painting of a vested choir singing the Requiem with organ accompaniment. ~ All Music Guide
