Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

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

Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina.

Life

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 Eternal City in 1537, when he is listed as a chorister at Santa Maria Maggiore basilica. He studied with Robin Mallapert and Firmin Lebel.

There was a persistent story that 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 Julian Chapel (Cappella Giulia) in Rome. With his first published compositions, a book of masses which he presented to Pope Julius III (previously the Bishop of Palestrina), he made so favorable an impression that he was appointed musical director of the Julian Chapel. In addition, this was the first book of masses by a native Italian composer: most composers of sacred music in Italy at that time were from the Netherlands, France, 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, from 1555 to 1560, and St Maria Maggiore, from 1561 to 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 in 1594.

Music and reputation

Palestrina left hundreds of compositions, including 104 masses, 68 offertories, 250 motets, 45 hymns, psalms, 33 magnificats, 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). 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 Jeppesen and Morris). As codified by Fux it follows the rules of what he defined as "species counterpoint." No composer of the sixteenth century was more consistent in following his own rules, and staying within the stylistic bounds he imposed on himself, than was Palestrina. Also, no composer of the sixteenth century has had such an edifice of myth and legend built around him. 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), for instance by Gregorio Allegri. Palestrina's music continues to be performed and recorded, and provides models for the study of counterpoint.

External links

• Free scores by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Template:IckingArchive

Sources and further reading

• 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 1561591742
• 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 0393002772
• 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 048627036X
• Meier, Bernhard, The Modes of Classical Vocal Polyphony, Described According to the Sources. Broude Borthers 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.
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1954. ISBN 0393095304
• Roche, Jerome, Palestrina. Oxford University Press, 1970. ISBN 0-193-14117-5
• 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.)