Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

• 1. Introduction

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  Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was buried on the same day he died, in a plain coffin fitted with a lead plate. The inscription read Ioannes Petrus Aloysius Praenestinus Musicae Princeps. He was laid to rest beneath the floor of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, where he had worked. Later construction covered the spot, and every attempt to find his grave has failed. The man called the prince of music has no marked tomb.

  He took his name from a town. Born in the town of Palestrina in the Papal States, he became the central figure of what scholars call the Roman School. Alongside Orlande de Lassus and Tomas Luis de Victoria, he is considered the leading composer of late 16th-century Europe. Yet a strange thing happened to his fame. The compositions themselves mattered less, over the centuries, than something called the Palestrinian style.

  Why does a composer become a rulebook? How did a man who married twice and raised children end up the model of the ideal Catholic composer? What did he actually write, and what did people only imagine he wrote? Those questions wait in the music, in the legends, and in a textbook published more than a century after his death.

• 2. A Layman In Holy Spaces

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  In 1551, Pope Julius III appointed Palestrina maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, the choir at St. Peter's Basilica. Julius III had previously been the Bishop of Palestrina, the composer's native city. Palestrina dedicated his first published compositions, a 1554 book of Masses, to that pope. It was the first book of Masses by a native composer, since most composers of sacred music in the Italian states then came from the Low Countries, France, or Spain.

  In 1555, Pope Paul IV ordered that all papal choristers be clerical. Palestrina had married early in life and had four children. As a layman, he could not continue. The next decade scattered him across Rome. He held a post at the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran from 1555 to 1560, a position previously held by Lassus. He then served at Santa Maria Maggiore from 1561 to 1566.

  In 1571 he returned to the Julian Chapel and stayed at St Peter's for the rest of his life. The 1570s broke him personally. He lost his brother, two of his sons, and his wife, Lucrezia Gori, in three separate outbreaks of the plague, in 1572, 1575, and 1580. He seems to have considered becoming a priest. Instead he remarried, this time to a wealthy widow named Virginia Dormoli. That marriage finally gave him financial independence, since he had never been paid well as a choirmaster, and he composed prolifically until the end.

• 3. The Mass That Saved Nothing

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  The Missa Papae Marcelli, the Pope Marcellus Mass, carries one of the most durable false stories in music. According to the tale, Palestrina composed it to persuade the Council of Trent that a harsh ban on polyphonic treatment of sacred text was unnecessary. The fear was that intertwined voices made words impossible to follow, and that a more directly intelligible homophonic style was needed instead.

  Recent scholarship dismantles the legend. The mass was composed before the cardinals convened to discuss any ban, possibly as much as ten years before. The Council of Trent, as an official body, never actually banned any church music. It made no ruling and issued no official statement on the subject. The stories grew from the unofficial opinions of some attendees, who discussed their ideas with people outside the deliberations. Over centuries those rumors hardened into fictional accounts, were put into print, and were often taught as historical fact.

  Palestrina's own motivations remain unknown. He may have been conscious of the need for intelligible text, but not to satisfy any Counter-Reformation doctrine, because no such doctrine exists. This false history did not stay in the archives. It became the basis of Hans Pfitzner's opera Palestrina, which depicts the composer working to preserve polyphony during the council.

• 4. Order Against The Excess

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  Knud Jeppesen described it plainly: "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." That discipline shows in the careful handling of anything that might pull too much attention, including syllabic accent, rhythm, melodic leaps, and dissonance.

  His early works leaned on the Franco-Flemish school, the training of his masters. His aesthetic then shifted toward a progressive simplification of polyphony. This was not a reduction in technical difficulty. It was a deliberate move to discipline the freedom that marked the Flemish generation in their treatment of text, favoring clarity and transparent textures. The text became so important that it often defines the whole structure of a composition.

  Gregorian chant stayed a central reference, a vast store of melodies he adapted and enriched, sometimes turning the sources almost beyond recognition. Borrowing melodies as raw material was common practice then, and he drew on other composers, past and contemporary, as well as chant. There is no proof he wrote purely instrumental works. By the custom of the time, the vocal parts could be doubled by organ or by mixed wind and string instruments. His attention to color and sonority, his control of dissonance, and his extensive polychoralism make him a forerunner of the tonal system.

• 5. The Secular Shadow

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  Palestrina's secular work has been largely overlooked by critics, despite its quality. It centers on madrigals, with at least 140 that survive. His attitude toward the form was enigmatic. In the preface to his 1584 collection of Canticum canticorum motets, the Song of Songs, he renounced the setting of profane texts. Only two years later he returned to print with Book II of his secular madrigals.

  He published just two collections of madrigals with profane texts, one in 1555 and another in 1586. The other two collections were spiritual madrigals, a genre loved by proponents of the Counter-Reformation. He is remembered as one of the first to set sonnets to music, and for the exceptional quality of pieces using texts by Petrarch. These works tend to illustrate the content of the text with pure musical tools, often nature, sometimes love or erotic poetry.

  Vestiva i colli, from 1566, was the great exception. It was extremely popular at the time and spawned hundreds of imitations in the fifty years after its publication. Yet his madrigals as a whole did not push the genre forward in the 16th century. They lacked experimental character and held back the most extreme emotional expression, restraints the leading madrigalists of the day ignored. The same control that defined his sacred music limited his secular reach.

• 6. Codified By A Stranger

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  Johann Joseph Fux, an 18th-century composer and theorist, gave Palestrina's name to a method the composer never wrote. Fux published Gradus ad Parnassum, Steps to Parnassus, in 1725. Citing Palestrina as his model, he divided counterpoint into five species, hence the term species counterpoint. Each was an exercise that layered progressively more elaborate rhythmic combinations of voices under strict harmonic and melodic rules.

  Fux laid out guidelines he attributed to Palestrina. The flow of music should be dynamic, not rigid. Melody should contain few leaps. If a leap occurs it must be small and immediately answered by stepwise motion in the opposite direction. Dissonances must be confined to suspensions, passing notes, and weak beats, and a dissonance on a strong beat must resolve at once. This last point is a hallmark of the actual music. Dissonances typically fall on the weak beats of a measure, producing the smoother, more consonant polyphony now considered definitive of late Renaissance music.

  The method spread widely and became the main basis of contrapuntal training in the 19th century. But Fux had simplified things, notably requiring a cantus firmus in semibreves, a change later corrected by Knud Jeppesen and R. O. Morris. Fux also omitted how Palestrina's phrasing followed the syntax of the sentences he set, and ignored his tone painting, such as descending motion on the word descendit, descends. The manual won a powerful endorsement from J.S. Bach, who arranged two of Palestrina's masses for performance.

• 7. The Afterlife Of A Name

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  Felix Mendelssohn refused to rank him alone. "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." Palestrina was extremely famous in his own day, and his reputation only grew after his death. J.S. Bach studied and hand-copied his first book of Masses, and in 1742 wrote his own adaptation of the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa sine nomine. Bach had studied and performed that same mass while writing the Mass in B minor.

  His style was carried on directly. Students such as Giovanni Maria Nanino, Ruggiero Giovanelli, Arcangelo Crivelli, Teofilo Gargari, Francesco Soriano, and Gregorio Allegri kept writing in the manner that, by the 17th century, came to be known as the prima prattica. As late as around 1750, his style was still the reference for motet composers, seen in Francesco Barsanti's Sei Antifones in the style of Palestrina. In the 19th century, Giuseppe Baini published an 1828 monograph that made him famous again and reinforced the legend of the saviour of church music.

  The scattered traces of him continue to surface. The Gloria melody from his Magnificat Tertii Toni of 1591 lives on in the resurrection hymn tune Victory, also known as The Strife Is O'er. The Cagliari music conservatory in Italy bears his name. In 2009, German television produced a film about him, directed by Georg Brintrup, titled Palestrina - Prince of Music, the same princely title once stamped on the lead plate in his lost grave.