The third volume of the Morales Project, conducted by Robert Hollingworth, was released on 1st May on the CORO label, and features Morales’s two masses based on the L’homme armé tune, one for four voices and one for five. Reviewers have been very positive: “precise and sonorous performances” (The Guardian); “a beautiful recording… really perfect” (Radio 3, Record Review); “the singers are in excellent voice throughout” (Gramophone).

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, though officially employed by the royal chapel, spent a good deal of his time in Seville and considered the city his home. In 1535, 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 (but with his name prominent 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 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 third of a planned series of twelve intended to encompass all of Morales’s Masses and Magnificats, features his two Masses based on the L’homme armé tune, which was by a strong margin the most popular bit of music to base a polyphonic Mass on from the late fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth. The tune’s origins remain mysterious; the origins of the Mass tradition have been much debated in recent dec-ades, but there seems to be a strong early connection to the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, whose meet-ings (of at least metaphorically armed men) featured polyphonic Masses every day. Morales’s contributions to the repertory likely originated at the Sistine Chapel, where he would doubtless have seen and sung a good many L’homme armé Masses by others and would have known the tradition well; his Mass in five voices first appeared in an anthology of 1540, and the one in four in his Missarum liber secundus of 1544. But the connection of at least the four-voice mass to the order and its Grand Master, Emperor Charles V, is made clear in the print by the ornamental K at the beginning of the cantus which features a portrait of Charles as a warrior wearing the imperial crown, plus his motto, “Plus ultra,” in a banner wound around the pillars of Hercules.

The masses are, beyond their scoring, very different pieces of music. The Missa L’homme armé à4 is in some ways a conservative Mass, especially at the beginning, where the tune is presented quite systematically, in long note values, in the tenor, just as one would expect – but in the Phrygian mode on E rather than on G as usual, giving it a recognizable profile (if you know the tune already) but a very different general sound. There is also some Vorimitation, with the tune suggested in other voices before it comes in for real in the tenor, at the beginning of all movements but the Credo. And the distinctive zippy dotted/short rising scale in the altus voice at the very beginning comes back again and again, functioning as a clear head-motive at the beginning of the Agnus I to tie the beginning and end of the Mass together. As the movements go on, Morales begins to take liberties with the rhythm of the L’homme armé tune, sometimes repeating bits of it over and over for a while and occasionally letting it migrate out of the tenor and into the altus, bassus, and cantus voices, but always keeping it in at least oblique view.