Esquivel’s Secret Garden

Description

2020
Eamonn Dougan

Regina Caeli
Hortus Conclusus
Missa Hortus Conclusus
Veni, Domine
Ego sum panis vivus
Alma redemptoris mater
Magnificat quinti toni
Ave regina caelorum
Nunc dimittis
Sancta Maria
Te lucis ante terminum
Salve regina

When Robert Stevenson, the great Hispanist, published his Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age in 1961, he gave the major chapters to Cristóbal de Morales, Francisco Guerrero and Tomás Luis de Victoria. In 1993 the Spanish translation was then published in Madrid (Alianza Música) and the original was extensively updated. This was greatly to the benefit of the second trio of composers selected by Stevenson for special treatment. Alonso Lobo had emerged with his small repertoire of shining masterpieces. Sebastián de Vivanco had benefited from excellent research and publication in the 1970s and ’80s. Juan Esquivel’s reputation had been hugely enhanced by the discovery of a massive book, printed in 1613, containing Psalms, thirty hymns, sixteen Magnificats, Marian antiphons and a Te Deum, et al., together with his second book of Masses—six of them—plus a setting of the Missa pro defunctis and Responds for the dead. All these in one great volume of 598 pages constitute one of the largest music collections of the time. The discovery was made by Stevenson’s eminent contemporary Robert Snow, when he visited Ronda (in the hills beyond Málaga) in 1973. At the collegiate church of Santa Maria de la Encarnación, locally ‘la catedral’, he encountered the sacristan who as a boy had hidden the Esquivel volume and some old chant books at the time of the civil war’s destructive mobs. It is from that cornucopia that much of this recording’s music has been transcribed.

Esquivel had issued two other collections: a book of six Masses (Missarum … liber primus) printed in Salamanca in 1608, and a book of seventy motets, plus In paradisum, issued in the same year, both produced by the printer Artus Taberniel whose successor Francisco de Cea Tesa was responsible for the huge volume of 1613.

Juan Esquivel was a native of Ciudad Rodrigo, a city some sixty-five miles southwest of Salamanca, and not far from the Portuguese border. His year of birth is uncertain but may have been 1560, for he became enrolled at the cathedral in 1568 as a mozo de coro. This probably meant choirboy; the records often made no distinction between that and altar boy. As a chorister he would have been taught for a few years by the maestro de capilla Juan Navarro, who a decade earlier at Ávila had succeeded Ribera; both masters had been in charge of the boys Victoria and Vivanco.

We find nothing more of Esquivel until he is in his first post at Oviedo Cathedral. From there he moved to Calahorra (La Rioja) in 1585. He returned to his own city in 1591. He stayed there for the rest of his life, obviously a proud citizen, giving his name as Ioannis Esquivel Civitatensis (a citizen of Ciudad Rodrigo). He is sometimes found as Juan Esquivel [de] Barahona, it being the Spanish custom to add the mother’s family name. Throughout his career he was patronized by Don Pedro Ponce de León, Bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo and later of Zamora, a nobleman and Franciscan friar. Esquivel is unlikely to have lived beyond 1630, but once again we have no certainty; the cathedral archives remain lost up to the 1640s.

We begin this recording with Regina caeli, which became the official Marian antiphon for Paschal Time in the Roman Rite reforms in 1568. But in Spain this text had been sung as an entry processional using a local melody. Esquivel’s vigorous setting introduces the sequence of music for the Mass and Divine Office.

Esquivel’s final Mass in the 1613 book is based upon the motet Hortus conclusus by Rodrigo de Ceballos. This beautiful work was well known in its time, surviving in manuscripts now kept in Granada, Seville, Toledo and Valladolid. The words are honeyed with love: ‘Your lips distil nectar’ seems strangely far from the Catholic liturgy. It is a verse from the biblical Song of Songs, ‘Canticum Canticorum’ in the Latin Vulgate, yet it is not among those chosen by the Church to serve as antiphons on Marian feasts—though a rare medieval adaptation begins ‘Hortus conclusus est Dei genitrix’. Ceballos’s tender motet seems to stray into that borderline between the secular and the sacred. This gem is itself taken over by Esquivel in his Mass. Though often classified as a missa parodia, it might be better described as one of absorption, Ceballos’s melodic and contrapuntal material being swallowed and digested to reappear transformed in Esquivel’s compact creations: indeed a garden enclosed.

Esquivel keeps to the four voices of his model but reduces to three in the Benedictus, expands to five (with two tenors in canonic imitation) in the second Agnus Dei, and he jollies along the brief Osannas in bursts of triple time. Unusually, Esquivel added the response ‘Deo gratias’. This should follow the celebrant’s Dismissal: ‘Go, the Mass is ended’ (‘Ite, missa est’); this we have restored.

The Kyrie and Gloria are followed by a motet from the 1608 book, Veni, Domine: ‘Come, O Lord, and do not delay.’ A revision of this antiphon excised that admonition, but composers liked it so much that ‘noli tardare’ was retained by Morales, Guerrero, Tejeda and Esquivel, all of whom kept that first phrase as an ostinato to be sung alternately low and high by one voice throughout. Each composer contrived a distinct and concise melodic shape for the repeating motif. Esquivel’s is in the second of the twin top voices.

To follow the Credo, the choir sings a typically brief motet of quiet devotion. It celebrates the doctrine of transubstantiation, so dear to Catholic hearts. Ego sum panis vivus, Christ’s own words, is used as an antiphon at Lauds on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and entirely appropriate for general use at Mass. The Sanctus, Benedictus and the two settings of the Agnus Dei complete the Mass. In the second Agnus Dei Esquivel has the twin tenors in close canon. The Dismissal follows: ‘Deo gratias.’

After the Mass we turn to music for Vespers and Compline. The Roman liturgy was reformed after the Council of Trent, and thus every effort was made to restrict regional variations and to normalize the texts so that they conformed to Roman use. In Spain the evening Office of Compline ended with the singing of a Marian antiphon—usually Salve regina. Others, some of local provenance, were also used. Practices were variable from one diocese to another. Such localismo was curbed by the enforcement of a new Roman Breviary in 1568. By 1575 almost all Spanish cathedrals had accepted the full Roman Use. Thence there were four Marian antiphons to be sung seasonally: Alma redemptoris mater from Advent until the beginning of February; Ave regina caelorum from Purification to Holy Week; Regina caeli from Easter to Pentecost; and Salve regina, designated from Pentecost to Advent.

What the new Roman rules did not specify was the choice of plainchant melodies. Spain’s cathedrals kept their local variants. In some cases these were used right up to the late nineteenth century. The chant for Ave regina caelorum was distinctive, but the Spanish melody for Regina caeli was completely different from the Roman. From the 1570s many Iberian composers wrote settings of both the Spanish and the Roman (international) melodies. Alma redemptoris mater was new to most Spanish composers, though it had been a favourite of the very influential Franciscan Order and in the churches of Rome from late medieval times.

The Magnificat quinti toni is specified in the 1613 collection as a canticle for First Vespers; the odd verses are set in six-voiced polyphony alternating with the even verses in plainchant. Verse 5 (‘Et misericordia eius’) reduces to three voices; the eleventh verse (‘Gloria Patri’) has the first tenor repeat ‘saeculorum. Amen’ successively to the cadences of each of the eight recitation tones. This anticipates the final plainsong verse. It emulates a similar device to that used by Vivanco in his Salamanca print of 1609.

Ave regina caelorum is written as a continuous motet-like polyphonic web in a non-stop series of imitative points. In contrast, the Canticle of Simeon, the Nunc dimittis, is concise and declamatory, presented here with the Paschal Alleluia as its antiphon, before and after, as on Easter Sunday. The canticle itself is quite chordal in style, alternating with plainchant.

Sancta Maria is a Magnificat antiphon for Marian feasts for use throughout the year. Esquivel’s is exceptional in being one of his rare excursions into double-choir music. The eight voices produce rich harmony to accompany some very expressive phrases.

Te lucis ante terminum is a hymn of just three stanzas that is proper to Compline, sung after the Psalms but before the Nunc dimittis. It is composed to one of its many plainchant tunes, matched by simple polyphony for the middle verse.

Salve regina was the climax of the extra-liturgical ‘Salve service’ (now so-called), the most popular Marian devotion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was really a conclusion to Compline. In Spain composers made settings of the ‘Salve’ more than any other prayer to the virgin. Published without the chant sections, we have restored them from Villafranca’s Breve instruccion de canto llano (Seville, 1565).

Bruno Turner