Here I go again. Graduate school has tried its best to extinguish the doing of anything "frivolous," that is, anything not directly related to my dissertation. This is supposed to be a great boon: just think how much time I can give to my research! I will never again have so much time, free as I am from the tedious requirements of teaching or department meetings or leading ensembles or working a second job to make ends meet or what have you. The end result, however, is rather that I take all that extra time and spend it on other things entirely, and most recently this has resulted in a number of rabbit-holes about music, which I shall lay out here so that at least they benefit somebody other than myself.
To wit. Last Sunday the choir at church performed a 4 voice mass by Monteverdi (more on that later), which prompted me to sort out which of Monteverdi's three masses was which and when they were published. "Three masses?" said J, observing, "But I thought there were four!" I said I could only find people listing three: one from 1610 (in the same publication as his famous Vespers), one from 1641 (part of Selva Morale e Spirituale) and one published posthumously, in 1650. "Well, the choir library has four, I'm sure of it. It's four part, it's in G, it's based on an In illo tempore motet..." So I did some looking. A little research showed that Monteverdi almost certainly wrote more masses, as part of his work in Mantua; and in fact we have some record of his having written a mass in 1731, in thanksgiving for the end of a recent bout of plague. Perhaps this was the mass J remembered? For a moment I thought I had even found a recording of it, but as it turned out, this was a pastiche: a recording of the sort of music Claudio might have programmed then, as reconstructed from later publications and assorted other contemporary items. Interesting, to be sure, but what was the piece J recalled with such certainty?
By this point J had unearthed the catalog entry for the piece in the choir library, and informed me it was published by the (otherwise reputable) Universal Editions. And indeed, one can find an SATB Monteverdi mass by Monteverdi on Universal's website, whose preface says it is edited from a Mantuan collection now in Milan, and that the mass as a whole is based on a motet by Cristobal de Morales (whose score you may find here). At this, I turned to the Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, a book I had gotten as far as the give-away heap but never quite gotten around to giving away, and which now saved itself temporarily from its fate; for there I found a footnote which mentioned, in passing, that although there was a collection of Mantuan music to be found in Milan, none of it was by Monteverdi.
Clearly a case of misattribution, then. But whose music was it? I spent some time attempting to uncover another discussion of this mass, learning along the way that yet another famous Mantuan, Jacquet de Berchem, had *also* composed a mass on an In illo tempore motet, and frequently parodied Morales--but that mass was five parts, and not the one in question. So I tracked down the more extended editorial preface to the Monteverdi mass, and expended considerable time attempting to read it in Italian before realizing it had a perfectly useful English translation some pages later. The editor's argument was more or less as follows:
1) We know that Monteverdi must have written some other masses.
2) These are some other masses, and they were probably printed in Mantua (the printing resembles other Mantuan publications), but we have lost the title page and most of the first mass in the collection.
3) They are, variously, too long to be by Monteverdi's more succinct predecessors, and too short to be by somebody long-winded; too polyphonic to be somebody like Viadana, too good to be by somebody minor, and so on.
4) There are some aspects that recall Ingegnieri, who taught Monteverdi, and a few places that remind one of Monteverdi's madrigals. (I have a proof of this which is too long to fit in the margin.)
5) Therefore they must be by Monteverdi.
6) Also there are some parallel fifths and such, but that was probably Monteverdi deliberately messing with his critics. (What??)
The logic of this argument leaves something to be desired, and it is no wonder that more recent scholarship (the Cambridge Companion is from 2007) doesn't even bother to mention it. In fact reviewers didn't take it terribly seriously in 1975, either, with one (in Music and Letters) going on for several paragraphs in an attempt to find something in it (could it have been written while he was in Venice? but then why publish in Mantua?) and another (in Early Music) suggesting it should not only be titled "attributed to Monteverdi" but "att. Monteverdi by [editor]." Both seem a bit surprised that it was published with the appearance of being part of the Monteverdi Complete Works. But it's a nice enough little mass, and sings nicely. Presumably Universal discovered, as many a printer did in Monteverdi's day, or indeed Josquin's, that a piece sells better with a famous name on it.
As for the masses known to be by Monteverdi, they are good examples of why the editorial approach of attribution-by-style is dangerous to begin with, since none of them sounds particularly Monteverdian in the way we have come to know and love. The 1610 mass is based on a motet by the Franco-Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert, who by that point had been dead for 50 years already; and while one probably wouldn't mistake it for Gombert himself, it is certainly antiquated in style, and rather dense. Even the fact that it is in six parts is somewhat old-fashioned, and it has a fairly academic approach to the source material, picking individual themes from the motet and using them for each movement.
I have it on record that I sang this mass in a Collegium concert in 2013, along with the motet, but I only remember the motet, not the Monteverdi. This may be because, as I have heard it opined, it is so dense and academic and not terribly rewarding to sing. It certainly can be great music, though; here it is being sung in Cleveland, with a great deal of excitement and just on the edge of too fast:
(I might add, too, that the conductor, Ross Duffin, quite literally wrote the book on "just" intonation, and it shows--his choir is well-tuned, and that helps Monteverdi a lot.)
There's a Herreweghe recording floating around too, and it's excellent:
One tricky aspect of the mass is also the key in which one sings it. It is written in chiavette, or "high clefs" (the bass part is not in the bass clef, for example), which usually suggests one should transpose it down in order to avoid a totally stratospheric soprano line. Unfortunately for the modern choir, this puts it in a range for the upper line to be some by some well-ranged alti, a high tenor, two baritones, and a serious bass, which will leave one's sopranos without a line to sing. Leaving it as is, though, means everybody is at the top of their ranges, except the alti, who are in the basement. One also wonders if there should be accompaniment of some kind, which might also be kinder on the voices.
As for the other two masses: they are shorter, and in four parts, and both are in F, which tends to make them somewhat confusing to tell apart. They are also not really (in my opinion) great masterpieces, and one has to do a certain amount of work in order to really figure them out and make music out of them. On Sunday the 1650 mass had an endless stream of sequences that felt a bit like getting on a road without knowing when to turn: many notes, one after the other, without a sense of where the line was headed. (I might add that one has to listen to the Kyrie and Gloria of every mass at our church while standing, which frequently brings out my most critical opinions.) Perhaps, I thought, it was too slow? But Herreweghe came to the rescue, proving the issue was not one of speed, but one of making some notes matter more than others. Otherwise it risks sounding a bit like a junior violinist whose up and down bows sound identical. Herreweghe makes the mass sound sprightly, rather like an instrumental sonata, and it breathes life, or maybe sprezzatura, into the whole thing. Anyway, here it is:
To wit. Last Sunday the choir at church performed a 4 voice mass by Monteverdi (more on that later), which prompted me to sort out which of Monteverdi's three masses was which and when they were published. "Three masses?" said J, observing, "But I thought there were four!" I said I could only find people listing three: one from 1610 (in the same publication as his famous Vespers), one from 1641 (part of Selva Morale e Spirituale) and one published posthumously, in 1650. "Well, the choir library has four, I'm sure of it. It's four part, it's in G, it's based on an In illo tempore motet..." So I did some looking. A little research showed that Monteverdi almost certainly wrote more masses, as part of his work in Mantua; and in fact we have some record of his having written a mass in 1731, in thanksgiving for the end of a recent bout of plague. Perhaps this was the mass J remembered? For a moment I thought I had even found a recording of it, but as it turned out, this was a pastiche: a recording of the sort of music Claudio might have programmed then, as reconstructed from later publications and assorted other contemporary items. Interesting, to be sure, but what was the piece J recalled with such certainty?
By this point J had unearthed the catalog entry for the piece in the choir library, and informed me it was published by the (otherwise reputable) Universal Editions. And indeed, one can find an SATB Monteverdi mass by Monteverdi on Universal's website, whose preface says it is edited from a Mantuan collection now in Milan, and that the mass as a whole is based on a motet by Cristobal de Morales (whose score you may find here). At this, I turned to the Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, a book I had gotten as far as the give-away heap but never quite gotten around to giving away, and which now saved itself temporarily from its fate; for there I found a footnote which mentioned, in passing, that although there was a collection of Mantuan music to be found in Milan, none of it was by Monteverdi.
Clearly a case of misattribution, then. But whose music was it? I spent some time attempting to uncover another discussion of this mass, learning along the way that yet another famous Mantuan, Jacquet de Berchem, had *also* composed a mass on an In illo tempore motet, and frequently parodied Morales--but that mass was five parts, and not the one in question. So I tracked down the more extended editorial preface to the Monteverdi mass, and expended considerable time attempting to read it in Italian before realizing it had a perfectly useful English translation some pages later. The editor's argument was more or less as follows:
1) We know that Monteverdi must have written some other masses.
2) These are some other masses, and they were probably printed in Mantua (the printing resembles other Mantuan publications), but we have lost the title page and most of the first mass in the collection.
3) They are, variously, too long to be by Monteverdi's more succinct predecessors, and too short to be by somebody long-winded; too polyphonic to be somebody like Viadana, too good to be by somebody minor, and so on.
4) There are some aspects that recall Ingegnieri, who taught Monteverdi, and a few places that remind one of Monteverdi's madrigals. (I have a proof of this which is too long to fit in the margin.)
5) Therefore they must be by Monteverdi.
6) Also there are some parallel fifths and such, but that was probably Monteverdi deliberately messing with his critics. (What??)
The logic of this argument leaves something to be desired, and it is no wonder that more recent scholarship (the Cambridge Companion is from 2007) doesn't even bother to mention it. In fact reviewers didn't take it terribly seriously in 1975, either, with one (in Music and Letters) going on for several paragraphs in an attempt to find something in it (could it have been written while he was in Venice? but then why publish in Mantua?) and another (in Early Music) suggesting it should not only be titled "attributed to Monteverdi" but "att. Monteverdi by [editor]." Both seem a bit surprised that it was published with the appearance of being part of the Monteverdi Complete Works. But it's a nice enough little mass, and sings nicely. Presumably Universal discovered, as many a printer did in Monteverdi's day, or indeed Josquin's, that a piece sells better with a famous name on it.
As for the masses known to be by Monteverdi, they are good examples of why the editorial approach of attribution-by-style is dangerous to begin with, since none of them sounds particularly Monteverdian in the way we have come to know and love. The 1610 mass is based on a motet by the Franco-Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert, who by that point had been dead for 50 years already; and while one probably wouldn't mistake it for Gombert himself, it is certainly antiquated in style, and rather dense. Even the fact that it is in six parts is somewhat old-fashioned, and it has a fairly academic approach to the source material, picking individual themes from the motet and using them for each movement.
I have it on record that I sang this mass in a Collegium concert in 2013, along with the motet, but I only remember the motet, not the Monteverdi. This may be because, as I have heard it opined, it is so dense and academic and not terribly rewarding to sing. It certainly can be great music, though; here it is being sung in Cleveland, with a great deal of excitement and just on the edge of too fast:
There's a Herreweghe recording floating around too, and it's excellent:
As for the other two masses: they are shorter, and in four parts, and both are in F, which tends to make them somewhat confusing to tell apart. They are also not really (in my opinion) great masterpieces, and one has to do a certain amount of work in order to really figure them out and make music out of them. On Sunday the 1650 mass had an endless stream of sequences that felt a bit like getting on a road without knowing when to turn: many notes, one after the other, without a sense of where the line was headed. (I might add that one has to listen to the Kyrie and Gloria of every mass at our church while standing, which frequently brings out my most critical opinions.) Perhaps, I thought, it was too slow? But Herreweghe came to the rescue, proving the issue was not one of speed, but one of making some notes matter more than others. Otherwise it risks sounding a bit like a junior violinist whose up and down bows sound identical. Herreweghe makes the mass sound sprightly, rather like an instrumental sonata, and it breathes life, or maybe sprezzatura, into the whole thing. Anyway, here it is:
