Polyphonic Masses for the Dead from earliest to the first 17th‑century decade

The same period that brought a steady relegation of Gregorian chant also gave birth to one of the most important genres of church music, the polyphonic Ordinary of the Mass.

Foremost in creating these in 1400–1570 were French and Franco-Flemish composers.

Foreigners were in a majority among composers working in Italy, even in the 1550s, but they were steadily replaced by Italians, who took the lead in composing examples of the polyphonic Ordinary as well. This can be demonstrated best by the fact that only 200 masses appeared in print in Italy before 1570, but over 750, mainly by Italians, in the period 1570–1610.¹¹ However, polyphonic masses for the dead account for only a small proportion of Renaissance mass composition: to our knowledge only 138 poly-phonic Requiems were composed in the two-and-a-half centuries between 1400 and 1650. One reason was the pre-Tridentine lack of uniformity in the Proper of the Mass for the Dead, another that polyphonic renderings of the Requiem were still not thought

9 It contains a two-verse offertory: Missal del Cardenal Mendoza. Toledo, c. 1482–1495. Madrid, Bib-lio teca Nacional, MS 18-5^va, fol. dvi–dvi^v; Missale toletanum, c.1499, fol. cccxx–cccxxv; Missale Gien nen sis [Jaen] 1499, fol. clxxxiii.

10 Claude Gay, “Formulaires anciens pour la messe des défunts”, Études gregoriennes, II. (1957), 99.

Gay found four such communions: Aquitania, 12th century; Bazas, 13th century; San Millán, a Be-ne dic tiBe-ne monastery Be-near Burgos, 12th century; Burgos MS 274, 13th century.

11 Philip T. Jackson, “Mass polyphony”, in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. by

Tess Knighton and David Fallows (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 120–122.

appropriate in some places, even in the 16th century.¹² On the other hand the number can be considered high by comparison with later periods, due primarily to the multitude of said or sung votive masses (Monday: Requiem, Tuesday: Angels, Wednesday: St.

And rew, Thursday: the Holy Spirit, Friday: the Holy Cross, Saturday: the Virgin Mary, and Sunday: the Holy Trinity), and secondarily to foundations set up by individuals or confraternities, tied to the celebration of Mass on a specific day in the year. These were most frequently for Mary, but also for Trinity, the Holy Cross, the Sacrament, or some local patron, because such a Mass would become a Requiem Mass after the benefactor’s death, which may account for the relatively large number of polyphonic masses for the dead and (with the gradual cessation of this system of institutions) for the later decline.¹³ Another theory is that the composition of Requiems may have been connected with the foundation in 1429 of the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose meet-ings always included a Mass for the Dead alongside those in honor of Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the Order’s patron saint, St. Andrew. At the same time, the composer from the Franco-Burgundian region of polyphonic Requiems that thrived there and later in the Habsburg lands, also composed masses to the melody “l’Homme armé”, which led to suspicions that these two were connected with the Order of the Golden Fleece.¹⁴ A polyphonic mass for the dead consisted of introit, gradual, tract, sequence, of-fertory and communion movements, alongside the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. In the period examined, only one Requiem appeared that included polyphonic treatment of all the nine movements: a modest work by Giovanni Matteo, singled out only as the one known complete, three-part Renaissance Requiem. It was not unusual for a poly-phonic mass for the dead to include movements that did not belong to the Eucharist, but to the ensuing burial service or the Office for the Dead. One movement especially dear to the Renaissance composers was the responsory Libera me to the Absolution.

Others they occasionally used in polyphonic Requiems were antiphons for the invita-tory, Matins, and the Benedictus, and lessons from the Office for the Dead, obviously with the intention that these should be sung as part of the Office, not of the Mass.

The responsories most frequently given a polyphonic treatment were Peccantem me quotidie, Credo quod Redemptor, and Heu mihi Domine. Also found in this period are separate Office series, contained most frequently at certain junctures in Matins, mainly lessons and responsories, worked up into polyphonic movements. Alternatively, the whole Matins and Lauds were treated, as was the case with the 1556 Agenda defunc-torum of Juan Vásquez. The composition by Giacomo Moro and Estęvâo de Brito,

12 Charles Warren Fox, “The Polyphonic Requiem before about 1615”, Bulletin of the American

Musicological Society 7/6 (October 1943), 6.

13 Barbara Haggh, “The Meeting of Sacred Ritual and Secular Piety: Endowments for Music”, in

Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, 60–68.

14 Haggh, “The Meeting”, 64 and 66. William Prizer, “Music and Ceremonial in the Low Countries:

Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece”, Early Music History 5 (1985), 113–153.

in which the movements of the Office and of the Mass of the Dead appear, counts as exceptional.

The surviving texts of the Proper found in Renaissance Requiems are not uniform.

Just as there was no generally accepted version of the texts of the Gregorian Mass for the Dead before the Council of Trent, so similar variations appear in the polyphonic Requiems, especially the gradual and the tract. Three underlying traditions are out-lined: the Italian, the Spanish, and the French. In general all three chose the same introit (Requiem aeternam), offertory (Domine Jesu Christe), and communion (Lux aeterna).

The main distinguishing marks between the traditions appear in the chants of the lesson.

The Italian tradition usually chose the gradual Si ambulem in medio, the tract Absolve, Domine or Sicut cervus, and almost always the sequence Dies irae. The Spanish trad-ition preferred the gradual Requiem aeternam and the tract Sicut cervus, but left out the sequence. The last was omitted from the polyphonic Mass for the Dead in France as well, but the chosen gradual was Si ambulem in medio and the tract Sicut cervus.

The earliest polyphonic Requiem was probably a lost work by Guillaume Dufay, but there are reliable references to its existence. In his prescriptions for the music to be played at the death bed, at the burial, and on the day after the burial, Dufay requests that after the Sacrament, where the signs of the death throes are noticed, there be sung first the hymn beginning Magno salutis gaudio, then Ave regina caelorum, and on the day after the burial the Requiem. He also ordered the hymn to be sung submissa voce (falsetto) by eight church choristers, the motet by the server boys with their master and two more men, and the Requiem by twelve choristers.

The earliest surviving Requiem is by Johannes Ockeghem, probably composed after 1470. Those of Antoine Brumel, Pierre de La Rue, and Johannes Prioris seem to be from the 15th century, although in view of the prime of their composers, they may be from the 16th century, as that of Antoine Févin almost certainly is.

The art of the next two generations (c. 1515 – c. 1550) is marked by an upsurge of profane music and neglect of mass composition. Apart from the work of Prioris, only three others are known, by Jean Richafort, Claudin de Sermisy and Cristóbal de Morales.

Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Pierre Cléreau, Simon de Bonnefond, Pierre Certon, and the Spaniard Juan García de Basurto may also have composed their Requiems in mid-century. Pierre de Manchicourt’s piece is somewhat later (1560).

The Requiem of Philippe de Monte – an outstanding figure in the late polyphonic tra di tion of the Low Countries, contemporary with Lassus and Palestrina – fits in with the work of a somewhat earlier period than his own. Two other composers from the Low Countries to compose remarkable Masses for the Dead were Jacobus de Kerle and Ja co-bus Vaet. Their Spanish contemporary Francisco Guerrero brought out two (1566 and 1582). Juan Vásquez, also Spanish, produced his Agenda defunctorum in Seville in 1556.

Polyphonic Masses for the Dead became far more common, especially in Italy, after Pope Pius V had standardized the Missal in 1570. The first to appear, in that year, was by Vincenzo Ruffo. Giovanni Matteo Asola, a Venetian pupil of Ruffo who played a

big part in implementing the ideas of St. Charles Borromeo in a new musical style, pro-duced seven Masses for the Dead. Another Italian musician whose Requiem coincided with Asola’s, was Costanzo Porta. Palestrina’s Mass for the Dead incorporated the of-fertory alongside the items of the Ordinary. (There has survived in manuscript in Spain a four-part Requiem that includes all the movements of a Mass for the Dead except the gradual, and is very likely to be by Palestrina.)¹⁵ Lassus, Palestrina’s great contempo-rary, composed two Requiems. The last great composer to figure in the history of the Renaissance Mass for the Dead was the Spaniard Tomás Luis da Victoria, from whom seven have survived.

Several lesser composers dealt with the Requiem form in the last 15 years of the 16th century and the first ten of the 17th century. First among them was the Franco-Spanish Joan Brudieu. His Franco-Spanish and Portuguese contempories were Manuel Cardoso, Gabriel Díaz Bessón, Duarte Lobo, Filipe de Magalhães, Joan Pau Pujol, and Mateo Romero.

The most active in composing Masses for the Dead in the late 16th century were the Italians. Apart from Asola, Giulio Belli was the only 16th-century composer to com-pose several (three). That of Cesare Tudino was published in Venice in 1589 in a small-format booklet of five-part masses. Jacopo Moro in his Requiem used the technique of a double choir. Felice Anerio published his in Rome in 1614. Other Italian Re quiem composers of the period were Giovanni Francesco Anerio, Domenico Belli, Giu sep pe Belloni, Stefano Bernardi, Giovanni Cavaccio, Giovanni Croce, Lorenzo Vecchi, Ora-zio Vecchi, Orfeo Vecchi, and Lodovico Grossi da Viadana.

The less well-known German composer Blasius Amon may have been the only one of his countrymen to produce a polyphonic version of the Mass for the Dead. Not until much later, in 1641, was his example followed in Innsbruck by the German Johann Stadlmayr. The French school, which had been paramount in the early part of the 16th century had vanished by the end of the century. Only two French Requiem composers can be found in the final decade: Jacques Mauduit, of whose work only an excerpt sur-vives, and Eustache du Caurroy, whose work was sung up to the end of the 18th century at the funerals of French kings in the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Alongside them there exist several anonymous 16th-century Requiems that each appear in only one source.

The Renaissance Requiem composers, even after the liturgical texts had been stan-dardized, could still decide for themselves which movements to set in several parts and which to provide with Gregorian melodies. The proportions between the two were also a personal choice or a matter of local tradition. Perhaps the Spanish composers went

15 Robert J. Snow, “An Unknown Missa pro defunctis by Palestrina”, in De musica hispana et

ali-is: Miscelánea en honor al Prof. Dr. José López-Calo, S. J., en su 65 cumpleaños, ed. by Emilio Casares and Carlos Villanueva (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1990), 387–428.

furthest in standardizing this. Despite many formal differences, they developed in the 15th–16th-century Masses for the Dead several common traits, of which undoubtedly the most important was broad, general acceptance of Gregorian chant as a composing basis. Some Renaissance Requiems omit the liturgical cantus firmus for an item or a passage, but this is unusual and lasts a noticeably short time. The cantus firmus features in a polyphonic Mass for the Dead 1) in long note values, 2) in falsobordone, 3) para-phrased, or 4) by introducing a head-motif or motto.

During the 15th–16th century, the Requiem Gregorian chants appeared in various versions, not just in the gradual, but in the polyphonic movements as well. Despite the differences, the Masses for the Dead in that period rest basically on the same Gregorian models. Spain is exceptional in its treatment of the Ordinary: the Kyrie is heard to a different melody than the usual one, which was long associated in the region spe-cifically with the Mass for the Dead. This was employed in his Requiem by Basurto, in the Agenda defunctorum by Vásquez (Seville, 1556), and by Guerrero in the mass he included in Liber primus missarum (Paris, 1566, Example 1). All the Andalusian composers adopted the Sanctus chant printed in Processionarium Vallesoletani (1571, Example 2). The Sanctus of Morales brings a variant of the D-mode melody of Mass XV, which appears in modern publications (Example 3). The Agnus Dei melody with its broken triads appears primarily in the Andalusian Requiems, but sporadically in other Iberian Masses for the Dead as well (Example 4).

The Mass for the Dead by Richafort is unique in several respects. For one thing it is, to our knowledge, the only requiem written in canon. For another, while the Gregorian chant for each movement is heard from a treble in paraphrased cantus firmus, all move-ments but the graduale versus have the invitatory Circumdederunt me entering from two tenor parts singing in canon. This musical material is joined in the graduale ver-sus and the offertory by musical material quite unknown in the genre: a fragment of a Josquin’s song “Faulte d’argent”, likewise sung in canon.

The outward means of a cyclic structure are not usually present in a traditional requiem, as each movement brings a different Gregorian chant. So unity has to be achieved by other means: the essential unity of Gregorian, and the distinct stylistic tradition enshrined in the movements of a Mass for the Dead.

The one movement that features in every Renaissance Requiem is the Kyrie. It generally has three sections of medium length, although the sections were considerably shortened toward the end of the 16th century. One of the shortest of all occurs in Belli’s four-part Requiem. At the other extreme is a solution employed at the end of the cen-tury, where the three main sections may be divided into several smaller passages. The best examples are Masses by Prioris and Ockeghem. The latter divides each into three typical sub-sections, while Prioris organizes his Kyrie in a less usual way. The first sec-tion, like Ockeghem’s, is the three-part unit of Kyrie eleison. The second has only one part: a twice-heard Christe eleison. The third is in two parts: first the closing Christe eleison, then the first of the last Kyries. The final section again falls into two parts: the

Example 1: The Kyrie of the Spanish Mass for the Dead

Example 2: The Sanctus melody of Processionarium Vallesoletani

Example 3: The Sanctus melody employed by Morales

Example 4: The Agnus Dei melody of the Andalusian Masses of the Dead

last two Kyries of the second Kyrie group. Other departures from traditional practice in the Requiems of Brumel and Sermisy, where the second Kyrie group is divided into two sub-groups. From the second half of the 16th century onward, division of the Kyrie into three parts became standard in requiems, as it was in Ordinaries of the Mass, and with few exceptions there is no change of mensural sign or change (reduction) in the number of parts in any section of the movement.

Use of Gregorian intonation was general Renaissance practice in most Requiem movements, but not in the Kyrie. This was never preceded or broken into by a Gregorian chant. The commonest key signature for Kyrie movements was one flat, found in all Requiems but three. La Rue’s remarkable Funeral Mass for four or five low parts trans-poses the cantus firmus a fifth down and uses a two-flat key signature. The Kyrie of Févin’s Solemn Requiem gives two kinds of key signature: the upper parts have one flat, but the bass has flats except at the beginning, where he leaves the one flat. The four-part Mass of Lassus is the only one with no key signature.

Did the Renaissance composers use the same procedures for setting Ordinary move-ments of the Funeral Mass as for corresponding texts in the Mass cycles? Fundamental differences are found if the Kyrie of the polyphonic Masses for the Dead by three 16th-century composers working in Rome, Morales, Palestrina, and Victoria, are compared with the first movement of their polyphonic Ordinaries of the Mass. Except in the case of Palestrina (where it occurs in only six Masses of the 86 cycles), it is quite common to have a change of signature between adjacent sections of a movement. It is harder to make general statements about the number of parts. Palestrina only reduces the number in the middle section of the Kyrie (Christe eleison) in his masses for five to eight parts (21 masses), while this never occurs at all in works by Morales. Victoria, however, does so much more often, not only in masses for five to twelve parts, but in both Funeral Masses in his four-part Missa Quarti toni.

The other Ordinary movements of the Requiem, the Sanctus and Agnus Dei, occur in all the works examined except Ockeghem’s Mass for the Dead, which includes no polyphonic movements at all in any part after the offertory. Typically the Sanctus has a similar part number and time signature to the Kyrie, but only four Sanctus move-ments use the key signature of one flat (by Lassus, Porta, Tudino, and Amon). There are major differences in the structure of the movement. Many composers handle the section beginning Pleni sunt caeli as a unit, i. e. + Pleni sunt caeli with Hosanna, while others divide it in two (Pleni sunt caeli + Hosanna) or two and an opening intonation.

If the first Hosanna is set as an integral part of Pleni sunt caeli, then similarly the second is often linked to the Benedictus. Where, as was often the case, the latter was a separate item, the second Hosanna did not usually repeat the first musical material, but brought partly or wholly new music in. With the Sanctus movements, four works em-phasize Benedictus by reducing the number of parts. Certon and the four-part Requiem of Lassus leave out the bass, while the five-part Lassus Mass and the six-part Ruffo omit the bass and the second tenor.

The keys of the Sanctus were not handled uniformly. Most composers set a Gre-go rian chant only for the first word, using a tenor or a treble. Lassus preferred a bass, and Ruffo set the passage in all six parts. Of all the Masses for the Dead, only seven do not set the Sanctus for a single part,¹⁶ which works to spotlight the appearance in some cases of other intonations in longer sections of the movement. Victoria in his four and six-part Requiems has the treble or the second treble sing the text Pleni sunt. It is more

The keys of the Sanctus were not handled uniformly. Most composers set a Gre-go rian chant only for the first word, using a tenor or a treble. Lassus preferred a bass, and Ruffo set the passage in all six parts. Of all the Masses for the Dead, only seven do not set the Sanctus for a single part,¹⁶ which works to spotlight the appearance in some cases of other intonations in longer sections of the movement. Victoria in his four and six-part Requiems has the treble or the second treble sing the text Pleni sunt. It is more