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Contents:
DDD 63:08 Recorded: Chapel of The Queen’s College, Oxford, 19-21 April 2005 ‘The time of fasting has opened for us the gates of paradise.’ Why did the Portuguese composer Manuel Cardoso give the title ‘Paradisi portas’ (’The Gates of Paradise’) to the six-voice Mass which he placed at the beginning of his second book of Masses, published in 1636? These two words evoked for contemporary hearers the text of a responsory sung at Matins during the first week in Lent: ‘Paradisi portas aperuit nobis jejunii tempus…’ (translated above). But Cardoso cannot have intended his Mass to be sung on that day, or indeed during Lent at all, since he included within it a setting of the Gloria, a text omitted at Mass throughout Lent until Easter Day. Nor is his Mass based upon the plainchant melody for this Matins responsory. (The titles of Masses in the period typically reflect the musical source upon which the composer drew, whether a chant melody or a polyphonic piece such as a motet.) So we are left with a puzzle. The solution may lie with the political situation in Portugal at that time, and in particular the man who was Cardoso’s greatest patron (and indeed one of the greatest musical patrons and collectors of the seventeenth-century): João, Duke of Bragança, who—just four years after the publishing of Cardoso’s Mass—was to become King as João (John) IV of Portugal. Since 1580 Portugal had been ruled by the Spanish: Philip II of Spain (= Philip I of Portugal), his son and grandson (both also called Philip). By 1636 there was a considerable movement within Portugal pressing for the restoration of the native monarchy, and the figure on whom these hopes were centred was João, Duke of Bragança. While we should be cautious in ascribing political meaning to musical works, it seems clear that composers associated with the Duke chose to reflect this association, and the aspirations for a restored independent monarchy, in the titles of a significant number of their published Masses. In the case of Cardoso’s Missa Paradisi portas the connection with D. João is much more specific. Although the fact is hidden by the piece’s title, the composer drew material for his Mass from a six-voice motet composed by none other than João himself, Vivo ego dicit Dominus. Just two voice-parts of this motet have so far been located, but what survives is sufficient to demonstrate this close connection with Cardoso’s Mass. Cardoso acknowledged, in his dedication to D. João of the 1636 volume which contains the Missa Paradisi portas, that the Duke had provided him with the themes of all the Masses printed there. Cardoso took his head-motive (a scalic figure appearing in both ascending and descending forms) which opens movements of the Mass from the beginning of the motet Vivo ego, but at the very start of the piece he combines it with one of the motet’s motives, setting the word ‘vivat’, and indeed Cardoso makes extensive use of motives associated with ‘vivat’ during his Mass. ‘Vivat’ is of course a word which strongly evokes acclamations of royalty (‘Vivat rex!’). The same ‘vivat’ motive recurs in the ‘Benedictus’ of the Mass, the text of the Mass Ordinary most closely linked with royalty through the king’s status as the Lord’s annointed: ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (the words greeting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem). Cardoso’s Mass can thus be read as an affirmation of D. João’s lineage and claim to the throne. The responsory text ‘Paradisi portas’ which the Mass’s title evokes likewise clearly reflects the hopes for a restoration of the Portuguese monarchy (the opening of ‘the gates of paradise’: see the translation above) and liberation from the current Spanish yoke (‘the time of fasting’). In the Credo of his Mass Cardoso divides the text at an unusual point, bringing all six voices back in (after the ‘Crucifixus’ section for just four high voices) at ‘Et iterum venturus est cum gloria judicare vivos et mortuos, cujus regni non erit finis’: ‘And He will come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end’. Once again, it seems likely that Cardoso had his countrymen’s aspirations in mind. Cardoso’s Mass, one of his finest works, epitomizes the dignified sumptuousness and expressive intensity of much sacred polyphony in Portugal at the period. The approach may sound ‘conservative’, growing as it does from the traditions of imitative counterpoint by the great sixteenth-century composers of sacred polyphony (the stile antico), but the apparently traditional textures are build upon a striking harmonic base and a powerful exploitation of dissonance. Intense and vivid response to text is still more apparent in the six-voice motet Sitivit anima mea, published in Cardoso’s first book of Masses in 1625. The themes of its text—thirst for God, and the yearning to find rest in paradise—well accord with that of the ‘Paradisi portas’ text which inspired the Mass, and Cardoso paints in wonderfully poetic fashion the flight to paradise as on ‘the wings of a dove’ with which the piece ends. The four-voice motet Paradisi portas—setting part of the Matins responsory text already mentioned—once again poses a puzzle. It survives only (so far as we know) in an eighteenth-century Italian manuscript in Bergamo. The copyist’s inscription on the title page of the book indicates that the contents are by Cardoso, and indeed quite a few pieces therein are from Cardoso’s 1648 publication Livro de varios motetes. However, while the manuscript includes no attributions to other composers, we know that several of the works which it contains are not the Portuguese composer’s work, but belong to, for example, Palestrina and Victoria. The motet Paradisi portas itself does not suggest Cardoso’s style particularly strongly, although it is not impossible that the piece is his; nevertheless, it was certainly not the model for his Missa Paradisi portas. Cardoso, born in 1566, studied at the famous choir school of Évora Cathedral. In 1588 he entered the Carmelite Convent in Lisbon—where polyphonic music in the service of the liturgy was enthusiastically cultivated—and rose to the positions of mestre da capela (director of polyphonic music) and Sub-Prior. He was famed equally for his musical gifts and his religious virtue, and was held in high esteem by D. João, who kept a portrait of the composer in his music library. The musical contacts between Cardoso and João were already close when the former dedicated his first book of Masses to the latter (then Duke of Barcelos) in 1625, and Cardoso dedicated a further two publications to João: the second book of Masses containing the Missa Paradisi portas, and the Livro de varios motetes of 1648. The greatest of Cardoso’s Portuguese musical contemporaries, Duarte Lobo, was likewise in Lisbon during this period, as director of music at the Cathedral. While we have numerous Masses by Lobo, just two of his motets are known to survive, both of them recorded here. Audivi vocem de cælo, undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of seventeenth-century polyphony, enjoyed an extraordinary but deserved popularity among lovers of Renaissance music in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Pater peccavi is a companion work (the opening motives of the two motets are essentially the same, with just the first interval inverted), and in it Lobo pays homage to Josquin Desprez (the most famous European composer before Palestrina) by incorporating the famous soggetto ostinato (repeating theme) ‘miserere mei Deus’ from Josquin’s setting of that psalm text. The words of penitence declaimed by the other voices are those of the prodigal son returning to his father, from Luke’s Gospel. While this recording is certainly not a ‘liturgical reconstruction’, we do give some idea of the way motets and organ music were frequently employed at Mass in between the movements of the polyphonic Mass Ordinary, and we also include one of the plainchant Mass Propers (the Communion for Quinguesima, the last Sunday before Lent, fitting the Lenten theme of the Paradisi portas text). Likewise we sing Cardoso’s Kyrie of the Missa Paradisi portas as he clearly intended (since his Kyrie has four not three sections, with two settings of ‘Christe eleison’), with chant and polyphony alternating. Among the points in the Mass where motets and organ music were often heard were the Offertory, the Elevation of the Host, and during Communion. One of the Communion items here is an exquisite treatment of the famous verse Tantum ergo sacramentum from the hymn in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, Pange lingua gloriosi. This setting survives without composer attribution in a manuscript at Montserrat. The polyphonic setting of the Lenten Tract Adjuva nos is by one of the numerous Portuguese composers who worked in Spain during this period: Manuel Leitão de Aviles, who was maestro de capilla at the Capilla Real (Royal Chapel) in Granada from 1603 until his death in 1630. Estêvão de Brito was also in Andalucia, employed as maestro de capilla at Málaga Cathedral from 1613 until he died in 1641. His Heu, Domine is a powerful lament, which might have been composed for the liturgical funeral procession for the dead Christ on Good Friday, but which would also—given its text—have been highly appropriate to the exequies of a king. One wonders therefore whether it might have been written to mark the death of Philip II in 1598 (when the composer was maestro de capilla at Badajoz Cathedral) or Philip III in 1621. Another motet on this recording, Quomodo sedet sola, was almost certainly—I believe—associated with the death of King Philip II. The manuscript from the Capilla Real in Granada where it is preserved marks it with the inscription ‘1598’ (the year of Philip’s death, as just noted); this is certainly not the date of copying, and it is striking that no other work in the manuscript bears a date. The piece is by Luis de Aranda, maestro de capilla at Granada Cathedral, which abuts the Capilla Real. We know that Aranda was seeking the job of maestro at the Capilla Real and provided some music for that chapel, and furthermore that the Capilla Real had been unexpectedly left without a maestro at the time of Philip’s death in September 1598. We can presume that Aranda provided this imposing piece either for the Cathedral or for the Capilla Real, to form part of the lavish ceremonies of civic mourning in Granada for the King, centred upon a magnificent specially constructed catafalque. Such exequies would have been all the more important in Granada’s Cathedral and Capilla Real because they were royal foundations, the Capilla Real having been created as the pantheon of Philip’s great-grandparents, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, and containing the splendid tombs of both them and of Philip’s grandparents Philip the Fair and Joanna the Mad. The text of Aranda’s motet, which is perfectly fitted to such a civic occasion, is a fascinating adaptation and amalgamation of two well known liturgical texts for Tenebræ services in Holy Week: from the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the responsory O vos omnes. Thus ‘the city’ is not ‘full of people’ (‘plena populo’), as in the original Lamentation text, but ‘full of grief’ (‘plena tristitia’). The text adapted from Lamentations leads dramatically (at the word ‘dicens’—’saying’) into the famous words from the responsory: ‘behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow’, which Aranda sets with an agonized series of suspended dissonances. The transformation and relocation of these familiar texts would have been all the more striking to contemporary performers and the crowd of listeners precisely because of their familiarity. The piece, newly transcribed from the Granada manuscript (and with a missing alto part reconstructed), is recorded here for the first time, as are most of the choral items on this disc, including Cardoso’s Mass. While Estêvão de Brito and Manuel Leitão de Aviles were Portuguese musicians working in Spain, Estêvão Lopes Morago (c. 1573–after 1630) represents the other side of such interchange, being of Spanish birth but spending his career as mestre de capela at Viseu Cathedral in Portugal. The piece which we record here belongs to a distinctive Portuguese genre: we have dozens of settings of this text, Jesu redemptor, which is a litany for the dead (Morago and many others set just the refrain, as heard here), praying for Christ to accept the soul of the departed, and perhaps sung during the cortège, between the house of the deceased and the church. Morago’s setting is the grandest of the surviving Portugese pieces in this genre, using two choirs in alternation, and bringing them together for climactic points, including the imposing ending. The organ works on this recording include both Spanish and Portuguese items. The renowned blind organist Pablo Bruna worked at the collegiate church of Santa María in Daroca (in Aragon), where he held the posts of both organist and maestro de capilla. The tiento performed here is written for a solo line in the right hand (‘mano derecha’) which indulges in elaborate passagework in the outer sections of the piece, while the middle section plays with a jaunty syncopated figure. The Concertado preserved in a fascinating manuscript collection of contrapuntal exercises in Oporto is one of a group based upon the first phrase of the famous chant melody Ave Maria (and not Ave maris stella, as stated in the modern edition of the piece), made to sound more exotic here than the familiar version of the melody because the sharpening of its second note means that it opens with a falling diminished fourth rather than a perfect fourth. It might be the work of Gaspar dos Reis, who was mestre de capela at Portugal’s primatial cathedral, at Braga in the north of the country. The lovely Obra de falsas cromáticas de 1o tono is a study in chromatic progressions from the Flores de música, a vast collection of manuscript organ music compiled by the Madrid organist Antonio Martín y Coll (?1660–?1740). The brief verso in the first psalm tone by Frei Martinho García de Olague (again found in an Oporto manuscript) in an echo piece, alternating phrases with corneta and those on quieter stops. Page revised 25.04.06 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
