Psallite!  A Candlelight Christmas

Many of our aficionados have come to expect a Christmas concert featuring a variety of different musical genres and styles. Today’s concert includes works by Jacobus Gallus (to whom our May concert will be dedicated), the Renaissance Flemish master Josquin Desprez, the German masters Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz, and some carols for good measure.

Jacob Handl, also known as Jacobus Gallus (1550–1591), was a Catholic Slovenian composer who lived most of his life in Austria and Bohemia. The ambiguity in his surname may be due to his translating the original name Petelin (‘rooster’) into the German diminutive “Handl” and the Latin equivalent “Gallus” at different times in his life. Gallus worked as Kantor (chapel master) for several courts and churches in Austria and Bohemia until his untimely death. Most of Gallus’s output comprises settings of sacred Latin texts. His polychoral works display the influence of Dutch composer Orlando di Lasso and exploit the possibilities of a cappella polychoral idioms as fully as any Venetian. During his lifetime Gallus was faulted by some of his contemporaries who didn't understand his use of many parts and choirs; however, like many other famous composers, his reputation has grown since his death. It is now clear, and has been for centuries, that he was a pioneer in the polychoral idiom. It is interesting to note that Michael Praetorius singled out one of his motets as a notable example of the subtleties that arise from Gallus’s handling of rhythmic notation. Furthermore, Praetorius also noted that he had attended a concert of Gallus’s music and that he was extremely surprised (pleasantly, it seems) that the composer slowed down at the end of his pieces!

On today’s program you will hear four of Gallus’s complex motets—for six, eight, and twelve voices. The two six-part pieces, “Illuminare Jerusalem,” and “Jerusalem gaude gaudio magno,” are for SSATBB. Both motets use the women’s and men’s voices in combination, and antiphonally, as if they were two choirs. The other two motets, “Tribus miraculis,” and “O admirabile commercium,” are scored for unequal four-part choirs; both have a treble choir (SSAA) and a lower choir (TTBB), but the former adds a standard four-part choir (SATB) in the middle. These pieces are in the Venetian style the Germans had come to appreciate, and treat the text in a similar way, ensuring the comprehensibility of each word.

 Michael Praetorius (?1571–1621) was born in Thuringia as Michael Schultheiss (Latinized as Praetorius), the son of a Lutheran pastor. At 24 he entered the service of Duke Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel as an organist, and in 1604 he also assumed the duties of court Kapellmeister. Upon the death of his patron in 1613, Praetorius entered the service of the Elector Johann Georg of Saxony at the Dresden court, and also served as Kapellmeister to the administrator of the Magdeburg bishopric and prior of the monastery at Ringelheim. He remained in Dresden until 1616, at which time he returned to his old position in Wolfenbüttel. Due to regular travel and failing health, he was not reappointed in 1620. He died a wealthy man the following year, and directed that the greater portion of his fortune go to organizing a foundation for the poor.

 Praetorius’s musical style was strongly influenced by the Germans Schütz and Scheidt, and by the latest Italian music, which he came into contact with in Dresden in the 1610s. His creative power was impressive and his output is astonishing (the list of works he had already written as well as those he still planned to write consumed 28 pages of his treatise Syntagma musicum of 1614–15). His work clearly represents the climax of alternatim (the practice of alternating the performance of sections of works for different forces) in the history of Protestant church music. Most of Praetorius’s sacred music is based on Protestant hymns (chorales). The work on today’s program, “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” is indeed based on a chorale, and is scored for two unequal choirs (SSAA TTBB) and instruments. The piece, which he describes in Syntagma musicum, is part of his collection Polyhymnia caduceatrix but is in the style of one of his other collections, the Puericinium, whose pieces favor the treble voices and were often intended to be performed with the four treble parts in the four corners of the church, rotating for each verse.

 The piece by Heinrich Schütz (alias Henricus Sagittarius, 1585–1672) on the program is actually a contrafactum, a piece originally written by someone else whose text is changed, often to another language. The original piece was written by Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1532–1585), a Venetian master who, together with his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli, fathered the typical polychoral style heard in the late 16^th century in St. Mark’s in Venice. The Italian master published this seven-part motet in the seminal 1587 collection Concerti di Andrea, e di Gio[vanni] Gabrieli… , which contained concerti (pieces for voices and instruments together) composed by both uncle and nephew. In both the Latin version (“Angelus ad pastores ait”) and the German translation (“Der Engel sprach”), this motet presents a series of successive points of imitation and ends with a lively alleluia, which always constitutes a rousing finale.

 The Renaissance motet we sing this year is one of the most celebrated motets (“Ave Maria gratia plena”) by the most famous of the early Renaissance composers, the Flemish Josquin Desprez (c.1450/55–1521). Researchers are constantly discovering new details about Desprez: his real name, as discovered just a couple of years ago, was Lebloitte, but he was known also as Josse, Gosse, Joskin, Jossequin, Josquinus, Jodocus, Judocus, Juschino; Desprez, des Près, des Prés, de Prés, a Prato, de Prato, Pratensis. Desprez’s pieces embody the Renaissance polyphonic style where each new phrase of text gets a new musical idea, which is in turn passed from voice to voice in imitation. At crucial textual points the voices come together for more declamatory passages. The “Ave Maria” becomes almost hypnotic when sung in the resonant acoustics of St. Ignatius.

 Most of the rest of our program centers on carols from various traditions—French, Dutch, Spanish, German, and English. What is a carol? Everyone will tell you that it is a Christmas piece, but few people actually know its long and complex history. During the Middle Ages, a carol was an English or Latin song with several stanzas of the same form, beginning with a refrain (a burden) which was repeated after each stanza. These carols could be on any subject, though most were about the Virgin or the saints of Christmas. Some were even secular. Nowadays the word mostly refers to strophic songs, with or without refrain, that are associated with Christmas. Many of these have texts derived from medieval carols.

 The medieval carol—whether the courtly or popular dance-song, popular religious or processional song, or ecclesiastical polyphony (music with multiple independent parts)—was associated with several social functions. There is evidence that carols were used as processional hymns, and some may also have been used to replace the second Benedicamus at the Offices on the three days after Christmas, on the Circumcision and on Epiphany. Carols may also have been used as banquet music.

 The English carol takes its name and nature from the medieval French carole, a courtly or popular dance-song with various choreographic forms that was popular from the mid-twelfth to mid-fourteenth century. The earliest carols were not necessarily Christian. In fact, people belonging to pre-Celtic and Celtic matrilineal societies wrote many carols. The form of the earliest polyphonic carols is straightforward—an alternation of burden and verse reflecting the division of the medieval carole (the dance-song) into chorus and leader. In the next developmental stage, we find two distinct burdens (one for the soloists and one for the chorus).

 On today’s program, you will hear a famous French carol, “Noël nouvelet”; a sixteenth-century Spanish carol, “E la don don,” which is actually in Catalan, not Spanish; two German tunes (including an arrangement of “Good King Wensislaus”); and a Dutch carol. The Dutch carol was written by Guilielmus van Messaus, a Flemish composer who spent his entire life (bapt. 1589–1640) in Antwerp. He was a fairly colorful character, a schoolmaster and sacristan who was dismissed from his teaching job for bad behavior and also suspended from his choirmaster duties temporarily for refusing to perform a plainchant mass rather than a polyphonic one for the burial of a child. As a composer he wrote mostly masses and motets, plus a sizeable number of Flemish and Latin carols.

 This program, from the Early German baroque as well as more modern times, includes something for everybody, and heralds a festive, polychoral holiday season. It also includes a few pieces by a seldom-performed composer (Handl-Gallus) as a musical appetizer of sorts, a teaser for the full program dedicated to him at the close of our season.