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DDD Total time = 73.43 - Recorded at St. james, Clerkenwell, Green, London 1998 Programme Notes:The poem known as the Stabat Mater ("Sorrowfully his mother stood") is thought to be of 13th-century Franciscan origin and for a long time was attributed to Jacopo de Benedetti - also known as Jacopone da Todi - who died in 1306. It was first used as a 'sequence' (that is, a type of hymn interpolated into the liturgy) in the 15th century and it was at about this time that it acquired the plainchant melody with which it is usually associated.. It did not find favour, however, with the Council of Trent, which sat periodically between 1543 and 1563, and was not admitted to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church until 1727 when Pope Benedict XIII allowed it to be used at the Feast of the Seven Dolours on 15 September. Later it became the practice to use it on the Friday following Passion Sunday. Palestrina is a mediaeval hill town some twenty-five miles east of Rome and it was there, in about 1525, that Giovanni Pierluigi was born. As his family had lived there for several generations it is not surprising that he later added to his name the words 'da Palestrina' thus associating himself forever with the town of his birth. After studying for some years at the choir school attached to Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, he returned to Palestrina in the autumn of 1544 to take up the appointment of organist and choir master at the town's cathedral. Later he was to return to Rome as maestro of the Cappella Giulia, the musical establishment that had been set up by Pope Julius II to train singers for the papal choir. Much of the rest of Palestrina's life was spent in the service of a series of short-lived popes, but for a time he was also occupied in running the lucrative fur business that his second wife had inherited and which subsequently helped to subsidise the publication of his own music. It is not known when he composed his setting of the Stabat Mater for double choir, but, since there is a copy of it dated 1592, it is likely to be a work of his later years; it is certainly one of Palstrina's most important compositions. One of the many musicians to appreciate its greatness was Richard Wagner who conducted it in 1848 while Kapellmeister in Dresden, subsequently publishing his own edition of it. Antonio Lotti spent most of his life in Venice but he too spent some time in Dresden. From childhood he was associated with the famous Venetian church of St Mark's and as an adult was to become its organist and, eventually, its maestro di cappella. It was in 1717 that he was given leave of absence to visit Dresden and in that city he wrote three operas and much other music including, it is thought, his best-known composition, the eight-part Crucifixus - (Lotti was to set the 'Crucifxus' section from the Nicene Creed several times and for a varying number a of voices.) Although he was allowed to stay in Germany a year or so longer than originally agreed, he had to return home in 1719 or else forfeit his current position at St Mark's. As a memento of a period of his life that he had obviously enjoyed very much, he kept the carriage in which he travelled home and, in his will, bequeathed it to his wife. He died in Venice of dropsy in January 1740. When Palestrina died in 1594 he was succeeded as composer of the papal choir by Felice Anerio. Born in Rome in about 1560, Anerio joined the choir at the church of S. Maria Maggiore as a boy and there sang under the direction of Giovonni Maria Nanino who had recently become maestro di cappella there, in succession to Palestrina. From May 1575 until April 1579 Anerio was a member of the Cappella Giulia, first as a treble then as an alto. In common with many other Roman composers of his time, Anerio trained to be a priest, receiving the tonsure (the traditional shaven head) in the summer of 1584 and being admitted to the priesthood in 1607. He died in Rome seven years later. The Holy Week gradual, Christus factus est ('For us, Christ became obedient unto death, even death on the cross') is intended for performance on Maundy Thursday and would have been sung during the Mass between the readings of the lessons. Like Felice Anerio, Gregorio Allegri was born in Rome, spent much of his childhood as a choirboy, studied with Giovanni Maria Nanino and went on to become a priest. In the early 1630s, during the time of Pope Urban VIII, he became a singer in the papal choir and it was for this body that he composed his famous Miserere mei. It soon became traditional to sing this setting of Psalm 51 ('Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness') during Holy Week at the close of the tenebrae services. For many years the Vatican guarded the score of this piece very securely (as it did that of Palestrina's Stabat Mater) and allowed very few people to see it. Legend has it that it was the fourteen-year-old Mozart who breached this security by copying down the Miserere mei from memory after having heard it performed in the Sistine Chapel during April 1770. Carlo Gesualdo is another 16th-century composer to take his name from his family home, Gesualdo being a village sixty miles or so east of Naples. This, however , was not the only place to which he could claim attachment for, in addition to his Dukedom, Gesualdo was also Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza. His family was a well-connected one and boasted at least one pope, several cardinals, not to mention a saint. In 1586 Gesualdo married his beautiful cousin Maria d'Avalos who, although only twenty-five, was already a widow. All went well for a while until Gesualdo discovered that his wife was having an affair with a young nobleman, Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria. Incensed by this, Gesualdo tricked the lovers into thinking that he had gone away then returned with a group of armed henchmen, caught them in bed together and had them murdered where they lay. Although Gesualdo found it prudent to keep out of the way of his late wife's family for a year or so, it seems that the forces of law showed no particular interest in this crime. Gesualdo, however, became more than usually melancholy and turned to music for some kind of solace, often setting texts that were especially germane to his situation, words such as O vos omnes ('All ye that pass by, attend and see if there is any sorrow, like unto my sorrow') which come from the office of Matins for Holy Saturday. Antonio Caldara was born in Venice in about 1670 and was thus an almost exact contemporary of Lotti. It is also likely that, while a chorister at St Mark's, he was taught by Lotti's own teacher, Giovanni Legrenzi, who was at that time the basilica's maestro di cappella. As well as being a singer, Caldara soon became a skilful performer on the viol and the cello and at the keyboard. By 1708 he was in Rome and while there probably met the Scarlattis, Alessandro and his son Domenico. From there he went to Barcelona where an opera of his was performed as part of the celebrations surrounding the wedding of Charles III, the claimant to the Spanish throne. After a further period in Rome, Caldara moved to Vienna, having been appointed imperial vice-Kapellmeister and therefore assistant to the Austrian composer Johann Fux. Caldara was an extremely prolific composer with well over three thousand works to his name. The Crucifixus recorded here is for sixteen voices, six more than Lotti ever used in setting this text. "It may be difficult to imagine Domenico of the harpsichord sonatas conducting the music of the Cappella Giulia or officiating at the organ behind the enormous altar of Bernini in the basilica of St Peter's. Yet during his employment at the Vatican, Domenico was composing music quite as stately as his surroundings, though less overwhelming than the Last Judgement of Michelangelo and considerably more churchly than the swooping saints of Bernini." Having written that in his definitive biography of Domenico Scarlatti, the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick goes on to claim that the Stabat Mater, "which was probably written when Domenico was still at the Vatican" is "a genuine masterpiece, perhaps the first really great work we have seen from Domenico's hand. Large in scope, rich in imagination, and of a lordly ease in the conduct of the counterpoint, it does justice in every way to the eloquence of the text." Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, the son of the composer Alessandro Scarlatti and his wife Antonia Anzalone. In 1705 he went to Venice and then four years later to Rome where initially he entered the service of the Queen of Poland. Once she had left the city, he became maestro di cappella of the same choir in the Vatican that Palestrina had directed one hundred and fifty years before. For the last thirty-eight years of his life Scarlatti was employed by the royal families of Portugal and Spain as music master to Marie Barbara of Braganza, later to become Queen of Spain, and it was during this period that he composed his five hundred and fifty keyboard sonatas. © Peter Avis, 1998 Miserere mei (Track 5): Crucifixus (à 16) (Track 8): Stabat Mater (à 10) (Track 9): Page revised 26.06.03 |
Sound Clip