This album, the second in a series of twelve that will encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats, takes as its centrepiece his Requiem, or Missa pro defunctis, in five voices, published in his second book of Masses of 1544 and thus surely written during his time in Rome.

Programme notes

Cristóbal de Morales may have been the most famous composer of sacred music in all western Europe in the period between the death of Josquin in 1521 and the rise of Palestrina and Lassus in the 1550s. But at the same time, he remains a mysterious and tragic figure in the history of Renaissance music.

Morales was born in Seville around 1500 or a little before, and if he was educated in the cathedral school there, as seems most likely, he certainly had talented teachers: Pedro de Escobar was master of the choirboys at Seville from 1507 to 1513/14, and Francisco de Peñalosa, who was officially employed by the royal chapel, spent a good deal of his time in Seville and considered the city his home. In 1534, after chapelmaster jobs in Ávila and Plasencia, Morales joined the papal choir in Rome, and during the ten years he spent either there or on travels with the Pope’s retinue he found lasting international success, appearing in printed anthologies (his name given prominence in their titles) as early as 1540, and publishing two large books of Masses under his own name in 1544. But by the time he left Rome to become chapelmaster at Toledo Cathedral in 1545, something had gone very wrong.

Morales’s absences seem to have begun early in his time at the Vatican, and, as the years went on, they became more frequent and longer, and were more carefully specified as being the result of illness. The exact nature of his ailment is never explained; recurrent malaria has been suggested, as well as rheumatoid arthritis, and here in the twenty-first century it is easy to wonder about, say, bipolar disorder. For whatever its effects on Morales’s life as a singer, the illness did not seem to slow down his productivity as a composer. Even in the Toledo period, when he was plagued with further illness, serious financial problems, musical dissatisfactions and difficulties in managing the choirboys under his care, he remained at the top of his artistic game, as revealed in the glorious service music recently recovered by Michael Noone from the water-damaged manuscript Toledo 25.

In any case, Morales lasted less than two years in Toledo before resigning in August 1547 and moving on to lowlier employment—and continued illness and unhappiness—in Marchena and Málaga. In the summer of 1552 the chapelmastership at Toledo came open again; Morales applied and, in a move that suggests that he was not remembered warmly, was required to compete for the position with the other candidates. But before the competition could be held, he died, somewhere in his early fifties.

It’s a sad story of frustration, disappointment and misery, told in short prosaic documents that individually conceal much but accumulate their melancholy weight as Morales’s life goes on. And it is a story made all the more poignant by the beauty of the music he has left behind which, at its best—and it is often at its best—combines the elegance and the imitative virtuosity of the so-called post-Josquin generation (the ‘perfected style’ in Richard Taruskin’s perceptive words) with a clarity and a human intensity not often seen in his Northern contemporaries.

This album, the second in a series of twelve that will encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats, takes as its centrepiece his Requiem, or Missa pro defunctis, in five voices, published in his second book of Masses of 1544 and thus surely written during his time in Rome.

The great nineteenth-century music historian August Wilhelm Ambros memorably described this Mass as ‘unique in its terrible magnificence, gloomy and bleak, as if one were walking among dark tombs under heavy vaults supported by massive pillars—this is the Missa pro defunctis. Here everything is as simple, as austere as possible: in the sight of death, the colours of life grow pale, its vibrant adornment fades. This Spaniard grasps death in all its terrible seriousness.’ And while musicologists (unfortunately) no longer write this way, it is not hard even at this distance to feel what he meant. Right from the start, the Introit and Kyrie, which in the service are performed together, show a disarming simplicity and directness, with the chant for the Mass for the Dead paraphrased very lightly in the top voice, mostly in plain breves, and the lower voices supporting it with equal dignity: there are only a few bars in these movements without at least one breve in the lower voices. It is a texture that can pall in lesser hands, but Morales, through unexpected chords and bits of activity here and there in the lower voices, never lets the dark intensity slip—a musical feat that is anything but simple to pull off.

Morales is intense, but he is not relentless. After the first two movements, the chant continues to be always there, but not always predominantly in breves and not always in the top voice: it migrates to the third voice in the Gradual and to the second in the Offertory; in the Communion it goes mostly in semibreves; and in the Offertory it tends to move at nearly the same speed as the other voices and to blend inconspicuously into the generally active sound. (The sequence Dies irae, normally one of the most conspicuous movements of the Requiem, is omitted here as it was not included in the funeral liturgy in either Rome or Spain during Morales’s time.) And for the Sanctus and Agnus Dei he returns to the slow-moving, breve-dominated stillness of the opening, lending the whole Mass a most satisfactory emotional unity.

Between the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, as the elevation motet in the Mass, De Profundis here performs a setting of Ave verum corpus from the generation before Morales. It was attributed in the tabla of Tarazona 2/3, its only source, to Peñalosa, Morales’s possible teacher and the most eminent Spanish composer of that time. But it is suspiciously anonymous on the page, and the name in the tabla was crossed out by an evidently contemporary hand—possibly, some now think, the hand of Peñalosa himself. Its chordal style is certainly very different from that of Peñalosa’s other motets, and whoever crossed his name out was probably right. All the same, it is a fine piece of music, and its plain-spoken, patient simplicity makes a satisfying match for the Missa pro defunctis.

The first part of this album is devoted to Morales’s music for the Office for the Dead—specifically, the invitatory Circumdederunt me and the first three lessons for Matins for the Dead: Parce mihi, Domine, Taedet animam meam and Manus tuae, Domine, fecerunt me. Unlike the Requiem, none of these three settings was ever published, but they circulated widely and for a long time within the Iberian sphere: they survive, often together, in a number of manuscripts in Spain, Portugal and Mexico, some of them copied well into the seventeenth century. Robert Stevenson and more recently Grayson Wagstaff have suggested that they may date from Morales’s first job, at the cathedral of Ávila in 1526–28, which would make them possibly the earliest works we still have from him.

Circumdederunt me seems to have travelled separately from the rest—it is a unicum in the manuscript Toledo 21—and is in a style reminiscent of the Missa pro defunctis, with the cantus mostly in steady breves and the other voices supporting it slowly but warmly below. The other pieces are in a more spare recitational style, closer to a polyphonic psalm or Lamentation, with the words sung on quick-moving monotonic chords, paraphrasing the chant tones only minimally, and the chief musical interest (to modern ears, at least) coming from the choices of sonority and a number of unexpected, even startling cadential patterns at the ends of phrases. Remember, Matins was sung around two or three in the morning, and this is music best imagined in the dark, in the cold, a collective heart-cry of misery.

Some listeners may remember Parce mihi from Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble’s best-selling album Officium of 1994; the sound of that lesson paired with Garbarek’s soaring, flitting soprano saxophone does not leave the memory easily. Others, hearing Morales’s version of Taedet animam meam, will turn their thoughts inevitably to Tomás Luis de Victoria’s famous setting, published with his six-voice Missa pro defunctis in 1605, with a similar word-oriented approach but a much quicker, more active harmonic movement; surely Victoria, educated in Ávila, knew Morales’s setting well, and it is not hard to hear his own as a response to it.

Something about Requiems connects with modern listeners. We want to hear them as personal in a way that Mass ordinaries and Magnificats maybe aren’t always; and the calm, dignified pace of the Missa pro defunctis a 5, together with its transparent structure, so different from the intricate imitative polyphony of so much sacred music of this generation, seems to show it as an honest, humble, heartfelt response to something deeply private. Was it? Was it written for someone in particular? No one knows: Pope Paul III, who had recruited Morales to Rome, was still alive when the Liber secundus was printed, still there when Morales returned to Spain; and no other persuasive suggestion has ever risen in the scholarship. The Requiem is, perhaps significantly, the final Mass in the Liber secundus, the last of the sixteen Masses he published with Dorico in 1544, and it may simply be that Morales produced a Requiem to put a kind of symbolic or rhetorical full stop on this ambitious project. But whatever its purpose, there is no doubt that it still packs a tremendous punch today, just as it must have done in the mid-sixteenth century, just as it did for Ambros in the mid-nineteenth. In the end, this is one of the best things that music can do for us—to transmute grief into beauty and leave the beauty there for ever.

Author Bio

Kenneth Kreitner, Benjamin W. Rawlins Professor of Musicology, received his PhD in musicology from Duke University in 1990 and joined the faculty at Memphis State that fall. A scholar of Spanish Renaissance music, historical performance, and nineteenth-century American amateur bands, he is the author of Robert Ward: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1989), Discoursing Sweet Music: Town Bands and Community Life in Turn-of-the-Century Pennsylvania (University of Illinois Press, 1990), and The Church Music of Fifteenth-Century Spain (Boydell Press, 2004). He has also published articles in Early Music, Early Music History, Musica Disciplina, the Revista de Musicología, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Dr. Kreitner is an active performer on early brass and woodwind instruments and directs the University’s Collegium Musicum. He received the University of Memphis Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award in 2000; the Robert M. Stevenson Award, for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music, from the American Musicological Society in 2007; and the Christopher Monk Award, for life-long contributions to study and/or performance in the field of brass history, in 2012.