Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Biography#

Palestrina was born in the town of Palestrina, near Rome, then part of the Papal States, to Neapolitan parents, Santo and Palma Pierluigi, in 1525, possibly on 3 February. His mother died on 16 January 1536, when Palestrina was 10. Documents suggest that he first visited Rome in 1537, when he was listed as a chorister at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the papal basilicas of the Diocese of Rome, which allowed him to learn literature and music. From 1544 to 1551, Palestrina was the organist of the Cathedral of St. Agapito, the principal church of his native city. In 1551 Pope Julius III (previously the Bishop of Palestrina) appointed Palestrina maestro di cappella or musical director of the Cappella Giulia, (Julian Chapel, in the sense of choir), the choir of the chapter of canons at St. Peter’s Basilica. Palestrina dedicated to Julius III his first published compositions (1554), a book of Masses. It was the first book of Masses by a native composer, since in the Italian states of Palestrina’s day, most composers of sacred music were from the Low Countries, France, or Spain. In fact the book was modelled on one by Cristóbal de Morales: the woodcut in the front is almost an exact copy of the one from the book by the Spanish composer. In 1555, Pope Paul IV ordered that all papal choristers should be clerical. As Palestrina married early in life and had four children, he was unable to continue in the chapel as a layman. A five-part Libera me Domine psalm for three choirs was sung at the funeral. Palestrina’s funeral was held at St. Peter’s, and he was buried beneath the floor of the basilica. His tomb was later covered by new construction and attempts to locate his grave have been unsuccessful. Italian composers Giovanni Maria Nanino and Gregorio Allegri, both of them disciples of his school, continued his works.

Church music#

Palestrina left a vast oeuvre in the field of church music, including 105 masses, over 300 motets, 35 magnificats, a cycle of lamentations, 11 litanies, more than 70 hymns and 68 offertories. His early works were strongly influenced by the Franco-Flemish school, reflecting the trainings of his masters. However, his aesthetic evolution soon shifted toward a progressive simplification of polyphony. This did not, however, imply a reduction in technical complexity, but rather a desire to discipline the excess of freedom that characterized much of the Flemish generation in their interpretation of text, favoring expressive clarity and the transparency of musical textures, while simultaneously emphasizing specific meanings through musical devices. The text in his works takes on such importance that it often defines the entire structure of the composition. The main tool of Palestrina’s music is the melodic line, and was always conceived as polyphonic within the ancient modal system. Gregorian chant remained a central reference, offering him an enormous repertoire of melodies that he adapted and enriched according to his own criteria, often turning the sources to an almost unrecognizable point. At the time, it was common practice to borrow melodies from others as a starting point for composing new works, and in addition to Gregorian chant, he adapted ideas from several other composers, both past and contemporaries. However, a significant corpus of pieces has survived, especially motets, in which he gave full freedom to his imagination. There is no proof of him composing purely instrumental works, but according to the custom of the time, the vocal parts could often be doubled by the organ or by a variable combination of wind and string instruments. According to Knud Jeppesen, “proportion and serenity are the main tendencies in Palestrina’s music, and perhaps in no other style the passionate impulse, understood as violent and extreme excitement, is so disciplined and even so deliberately left out.” This control is highlighted by the extremely careful management of elements that could attract too much attention within the musical phrases, such as syllabic and metrical accentuation, rhythm, melodic leaps, and dissonance. Overall, his work is both conservative and progressive. Conservative because he abandoned the habit of florid ornamentation, remained faithful to the foundations of Gregorian chant, rejected Mannerist artificiality, and disciplined freedom in polyphony, moving toward a synthetic standard that can be called classical, due to its economy of means, its great formal balance and its great clarity of texture and proportion: a model of order, discipline, and reverence for the past and tradition, a symbol of everything the Church sought to establish in a time of disorder and conflict. On the other hand, his attention to text intelligibility, his use of homophonic passages in a polyphonic context, his empirical understanding of harmonic connections, his care for sonority and color, his control of dissonance, his extensive use of polychoralism, sound groupings and contrasts, as well as a distinctly classical aesthetic at a time when classicism was in decline, make him an innovator, a forerunner of the tonal system and the founder of a highly influential school that endures nowadays.

Secular music#

Palestrina is of the highest importance in the history of music, especially for the great influence he had on church music, but his secular work, of notable quality, has been largely overlooked by critics. It focuses on madrigals, with at least 140 pieces that have come down to us. This is a lesser-known group of pieces, generally overlooked compared to his sacred works, but they remain compositions generally characterized by great skills in illustrating the content of the text with pure musical tools, generally nature, but sometimes also incorporating love or erotic poetry. He is best remembered for being one of the first to set sonnets to music and for the exceptional quality of the pieces with texts by Petrarch. However, these works did not make a significant contribution to the evolution of the genre in the 16th century, mainly due to their lack of experimental character and their tendency to control the most extreme emotional expressions, limitations that were not observed by the leading madrigalists of the time, with the consequence that this collection is smaller and less expressively varied. A notable exception is Vestiva i colli (1566), which was extremely popular at the time, spawning hundreds of imitations in the fifty years following its publication. Despite the limitations imposed on expressiveness, some critics believe that the intrinsic quality of the pieces is equal to that of the best compositions of the period. The “Palestrina Style” One of the hallmarks of Palestrina’s music is that dissonances are typically relegated to the “weak” beats in a measure. This produced a smoother and more consonant type of polyphony which is now considered to be definitive of late Renaissance music, given Palestrina’s position as Europe’s leading composer in the wake of Josquin des Prez (d. 1521). The “Palestrina style” taught in college courses covering Renaissance counterpoint is often based on the codification by the 18th-century composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux, published as Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus, 1725). Citing Palestrina as his model, Fux divided counterpoint into five species (hence the term “species counterpoint”), designed as exercises for the student, which deployed progressively more elaborate rhythmic combinations of voices while adhering to strict harmonic and melodic requirements. The method was widely adopted and was the main basis of contrapuntal training in the 19th century, but Fux had introduced a number of simplifications to the Palestrina style, notably the obligatory use of a cantus firmus in semibreves, which were corrected by later authors such as Knud Jeppesen and R. O. Morris. Palestrina’s music conforms in many ways to Fux’s rules, particularly in the fifth species but does not fit his pedagogical format. The main insight, that the “pure” style of polyphony achieved by Palestrina followed an invariable set of stylistic and combinational requirements, was justified. Fux’s manual was endorsed by his contemporary J.S. Bach, who himself arranged two of Palestrina’s masses for performance. According to Fux, Palestrina had established and followed these basic guidelines: * The flow of music is dynamic, not rigid or static. * Melody should contain few leaps between notes. (Jeppesen: “The line is the starting point of Palestrina’s style”.)

Reputation#

Palestrina was extremely famous in his day, and if anything, his reputation and influence increased after his death. J.S. Bach studied and hand-copied Palestrina’s first book of Masses, and in 1742 wrote his own adaptation of the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa sine nomine. Felix Mendelssohn placed him in the pantheon of the greatest musicians, writing, “I always get upset when some praise only Beethoven, others only Palestrina and still others only Mozart or Bach. All four of them, I say, or none at all.” Conservative music of the Roman school continued to be written in Palestrina’s style (which in the 17th century came to be known as the prima prattica) by such students of his as Giovanni Maria Nanino, Ruggiero Giovanelli, Arcangelo Crivelli, Teofilo Gargari, Francesco Soriano, and Gregorio Allegri. The opera Palestrina by Hans Pfitzner depicts Palestrina working to preserve polyphony during the Council of Trent. The Cagliari music conservatory in Cagliari, Italy is named in his honor. In 2009 a film about the composer was produced by German television ZDF/Arte. Title: Palestrina - Prince of Music, directed by Georg Brintrup.

Sources#

;Books and chapters * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Rice, John A. Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance: The Emergence of a Musical Icon (Chicago, 2022), 169–76 * * * * * ;Journal and encyclopedia articles * * *

External links#

• Palestrina Foundation
• : a 1971 concert performance by Guildford Cathedral Choir, directed by Barry Rose
• recording of Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus from Coro Nostro, a mixed chamber choir based in Leicester, UK. Accessed 2010-04-17