Lasso, Palestrina, Victoria, and Byrd were four giants of Renaissance music. There was almost half a century – between 1548 and 1594 – when all four of them were alive at the same time. Unfortunately they never managed to meet together in one place, which would have been an unforgettable session of music-making and probably an unforgettable dinner afterwards. These four composers spoke a common musical language, the intricate polyphony of the late Renaissance, but they spoke it with four very different voices.
There was no musician of Byrd’s generation who had not at least heard of Orlando di Lasso. He even makes a cameo appearance in the preface to Byrd’s very first book of music in 1575: “Orlando,” first-name-only like the international superstar he was, at the head of the list of competitors to whom this young English upstart was offering some new motets. Lasso was fluent in a vast range of styles, from the sacred to the profane. His colleague Adrien Le Roy described his music as “compressed and polished,” in the Renaissance tradition of mannerist art, densely packed with meaning and sometimes swerving toward the unexpected. This was not music that came easily to the composer (according to the testimony of his wife Regina, he lurched between manic productivity and threatening to quit) but the results were splendid, as we will hear in all three of our concerts.
Palestrina was (and still is) the real classic of high Renaissance church music. He never left Italy and never had to, although in some ways he was an outsider as a professional lay musician in the secretive and cliquish world of the Roman clergy. He considered becoming a priest, got as far as being tonsured, changed his mind at the last minute, and married a rich widow who worked in the fashion industry. He knew how to compose a good madrigal and he was happy to use the same techniques on spiritual texts, as in his settings of the sonnets of Petrarch and the biblical Song of Songs. Some of his music has been sung more or less without interruption since the day it was composed. He once assured a patron that he could write a mass every ten days if necessary. He was not boasting, just secure in his gift of creating great beauty in an almost effortless way.
Victoria was a favorite among discerning musicians in many countries. One of Byrd’s English contemporaries called him “Ludovico de Victoria, a most judicious and a sweete Composer.” Another admirer wrote that “his music is cheerful… because it is in keeping with his nature.” Even his most serious works have an underlying sweetness and radiance to them. Victoria was utterly devoted to sacred music, and he was also very skilled in marketing it and promoting it, sending copies as far afield as Mexico. There is no hint that Victoria knew any of the music of Byrd – just as there is no hint that Cervantes knew anything by Shakespeare – and that is a shame, because he would have loved it. (A handful of Byrd’s works found their way into European collections during his own lifetime, but these were all in the northern half of Europe: Frankfurt, Prague, Wrocław, Copenhagen, Stockholm, well north of the 45th parallel. When a flood of Elizabethan Catholic refugees made their way to the sunny part of the continent, they brought along almost everything except the music of their most famous composer.)
People in the sixteenth century often thought about the human personality by turning to the ancient theory of the four temperaments: melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine. These were not four pigeonholes to sort the human race into; they were four primary colors that combined to make an infinite variety of hues and shades. Our four composers certainly showed some bright flashes of those primary colors. Lassus fell into what his family called “serious melancholy” near the end of his life, as he was writing the anguished and intense Lagrime di San Pietro; Byrd enjoyed reading bilious political screeds and pursuing lawsuits against his rivals; Palestrina had an unusual talent for equanimity and steady work even in difficult circumstances; and Victoria was a happy man in a way that very few other great composers have been. We can only imagine the conversations that might have taken place if the four of them had met in the organ loft or at the dinner table, so we have given their voices an opportunity to sound together during this year’s festival.
- KERRY McCARTHY