Acclaimed as one of the greatest composers of Renaissance church music, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born in 1525 (exact date disputed), and he died in 1594. His surname comes from the place of his birth: a village, about twenty miles from Rome (ancient Praeneste). Following his early training as a choirboy at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome from 1537 onward, where he was a pupil of Mallapert and Firmin Lebel, Palestrina was appointed organist and maestro di cappella at Saint Agapito, in the village of Palestrina in 1544, and in 1547 he married Lucrezia Gori there. The marriage later produced three children.
The Bishop of Palestrina later became Pope Julius III, and after seven years, his former Bishop summoned the composer to Rome as chapelmaster of the Cappella Giulia, a boy’s choir at Saint Peter’s, where he served from 1551 to 1554 and again from 1571 until his death. His choir consisted entirely of Italian boys, being sharply contrasted with the choir of the Sistine Chapel, which since the early Renaissance had consisted almost entirely of Flemish male singers, who were highly skilled in the “Netherlander art” of unaccompanied polyphonic choral music. Soon after Palestrina’s appointment at Saint Peter’s, he published his first book of Mass Ordinaries, which he gratefully dedicated to Pope Julius III.
Palestrina was later appointed a member of the Sistine Chapel Choir by Pope Julius. However, he was subsequently dismissed from his duties in the Sistine Choir by the next pope, Paul IV, because he was not a member of a Holy Order and due to his “unacceptable married status.” He was quickly retired with a small pension. However, Palestrina’s music became the mainstay of the same choir from which he was excluded as a member. Following this setback, Palestrina gained other appointments in Rome as choirmaster at Saint John Lateran in 1555-1560, at Santa Maria Maggiore in 1561-1566, and at the Seminario Romano from 1566 until 1571. As previously mentioned, Palestrina returned to the Julian Chapel in 1571 as chapelmaster, remaining there until he died in 1594. In the 1560s he had also directed concerts at the Tivoli villa of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, and he had a Mass commissioned by the Duke of Mantua, who tried to persuade him to leave Rome for the Mantuan court. During the 1560s and 1570s, Palestrina’s fame and influence rapidly increased through the wide diffusion of his published compositions. So great was his reputation that in 1577 he was asked to rewrite the church’s main plainchant books, following the Council of Trent’s guidelines.
Palestrina’s music was destined for performance by the most elite cathedral choirs within the Roman Catholic sphere of influence, and his creative output contains 105 Masses, some 250 motets, several volumes of specific liturgical works (Offertories, Litanies, hymns, Magnificats and Lamentations), two books of secular madrigals and two of spiritual madrigals. His preference for writing Masses and for remaining in Rome within the orbit of the papacy marks him as a man of conservative inclinations, though his style did develop away from the mainly contrapuntal towards more chordal and harmonically orientated part writing. This is a fact that is often overlooked today, since his music is widely used as a model of perfection for the discipline of counterpoint.
Palestrina shunned the common practices of his time towards the musical expression of moods and tone-painting of words, choosing instead to set even quite highly-charged texts in an abstract, perhaps impersonal idiom, possessed of a beautiful equilibrium of melodic line and consonant harmonic structures. Though he based his parody Masses on his own and others’ works, much of his sacred music springs directly from plainsong, and many of his Mass settings are based on Gregorian melodies or on early Renaissance motets, which themselves are based on ancient chants. Both his sacred and secular madrigals were quite conservative in style, compared with the progressive developments in that genre by his contemporaries.
One of Palestrina’s closest friends was the saintly Philip Neri, the founder of the oratorio, and for him Palestrina acted as musical director. Therefore, while Palestrina is most often viewed as representing the climax of the school of unaccompanied contrapuntal choral music, he also had associations with the new form of homophonic music, which eventually overtook the prima prattica of the Renaissance and brought about the Baroque style of the Seventeenth Century known as the seconda prattica.
Palestrina was not a prophet without honor in his own country. In the Year of Jubilee (1575), when many pilgrims of all nations flocked to Rome to obtain the indulgences offered them, a procession of fifteen thousand inhabitants of Palestrina divided into three great choirs and entered Rome singing their townsman’s music. This is evidence that he was greatly admired by the people who knew him best.
In any account of Palestrina’s life there will inevitably be found some reference to his part in ‘saving’ polyphonic church music from destruction by the Council of Trent (1545-63). The incident has in the past been somewhat exaggerated over the centuries. But the facts seem to be as follows:
It was decreed that church music should be purged from secular influences and methods– for instance, the method of building up a piece of church music upon some popular tune as a cantus firmus. Advice was taken from a sort of committee of eight Papal singers, who demurred on one point, the demand that the words of church music should always be intelligible to the listener. Choral composition was in those days, of course, highly contrapuntal, full of ‘imitations’ and other artistic devices necessarily in danger of tending somewhat to obscurity; but the obscurity was not unavoidable, and Palestrina’s music appears to have been brought forward in refutation of the singers’ claim, which might have led to drastic action by the Council of Trent were it not for Palestrina’s works.
Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli has often been referred to in this connection with the argument before the Council, but its citation on this occasion is not certainly known. The facts are that Pope Marcellus II died after he had been in office for only three weeks in 1555. As a Cardinal he had been very active in urging a reform of church music. Reform was ‘in the air’ just then, for the Holy Church had lost England, and this was looked on by the devout as a warning. This Cardinal was “the virtuous prince of the Church whose person was the very embodiment of the principle of reform.”
During his brief occupancy of the chair of St. Peter, Pope Marcellus showed his zeal for improvement in church music. Returning on Good Friday from the service at which the Reproaches are sung, he called for his choir and urged upon them the necessity of a proper choice of music in future, with a view to the character of the particular service in which it was to be sung, and also that of letting the words stand out clearly. These were ideals in consonance with Palestrina’s spirit as a Church composer, and it was probably with the memory of that Good Friday meeting in mind that, when he printed this Mass in 1567, he gave it the title Missa Papae Marcelli.
Palestrina was always in tune with the Counter-Reformation spirit. After his wife’s death in 1580, he seriously considered taking holy orders, but instead he remarried a wealthy widow in 1581. His wife, Virginia Dormoli, was a fur merchant’s widow, and Palestrina’s investments in her business eased his financial strains, and his last years at St. Peter’s were among his most productive.
In his sacred music he assimilated and refined his predecessors’ polyphonic techniques to produce a ‘seamless’ texture, with all voices perfectly balanced. The nobility and restraint of his most expressive works established the almost legendary reverence that has long surrounded his name and helped set him up as the classic model of Renaissance polyphony.