The Missa pro defunctis (Requiem Mass) composed by Johannes Ockeghem in the second half of the fifteenth century stands as a monument to the dying Middle Ages, a masterpiece of its era and certainly one of the most extraordinary musical works of the time. It is extraordinary because it is the earliest setting of the Requiem Mass to have survived to our day (Dufay’s is lost); it is extraordinary in its variety of mood, musical texture, style and technique, and it is extraordinary in its power to capture the imagination and to move the listener after five centuries of obscurity. The poet Guillaume Cretin, called it “la messe ... exquise et tres parfaicte”. The nineteenth century musicologist Ambros hoped for the discovery of the music and now, along with many other works by Ockeghem, we have it in a beautiful Flemish manuscript written, just a few years after the composer’s death, by the scribe Martin Bourgeois of Ghent. This fine choirbooik was used in Spain in the early sixteenth century and is now in the Chigi Collection in the Vatican Library, Rome. It is the only source of Ockeghem’s Requiem that has been preserved.
In his own time, Ockeghem’s music was greatly admired, and, as a man, he was honoured and indeed loved by his colleagues and contemporaries. Whilst he was alive he was complimented in music by the composer Antoine de Busnois (the motet “In hydraulis”) and by Loyset Compère (“Omnium bonorum plena”).  The theorist and writer Johannes Tinctoris praised Ockeghem as “optimus compositor ac dulcedinis accuratus exquisitor”. When Ockeghem died in 1495, Cretin wrote a lament in which he called on the living composers (including Josquin and Brumel) to weep for their “maistre et bon père”. Erasmus of Rotterdam did likewise in his elegy “Ergo ne conticuit”, and made a gentle pun when he referred to the “aurea vox Okegi” (the golden voice of Ockeghem), complimenting the dead master’s wealth (as Treasurer of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours), his great bass voice, and of course, the beauty of his music.
In 1477, Tinctoris praised Ockeghem as one of the greatest of the “moderns”, and thought that in his time music had virtually been recreated as a new art. Yet, within a few years, the humanistic revolution of the Renaissance swept away the late mediaeval style. The soaring assymetric melodies, the almost wordless linear counterpoint of Ockeghem was replaced by the mature style of Josquin, in which verbal clarity and clear-cut design served a new expressive purpose. Glimpses of a Renaissance dawn are to be found in the music of Dufay and of Ockeghem, but Ockeghem belongs to the twilight of the Gothic Era, spiritually and technically. Josquin, for us, is Renaissance Man; Ockeghem belongs to that “Waning of the Middle Ages” of which the historian Huizinga wrote so eloquently. The Ockeghem style was already somewhat out of fashion by the end of his life, and by 1547, two generations later, Glareanus, the great admirer of Josquin, could only refer to Ockeghem as a shadowy, almost mythical figure from the past.
In our own century, musicologists and practical musicians have been increasingly attracted to this remote Flemish master. Now that his music is becoming known in print and in performances, the true nature of Ockeghem’s genius is becoming apparent. Far from being the writer of a few extraordinary puzzle-canons, the supposed perpetrator of a “twittering for 36 voices”, Ockeghem emerges as the master of extremely free and expansive melody, assymetric in contour, unpredictable and imaginative in design, full of intricate detail, almost never repetitive and making very little use of melodic imitation or sequence. His polyphony is utterly linear and his harmony, beautiful as it is at times, is almost always the result of the confluence of his very independent melodic lines. The music seems to grow organically like the tendrils of a plant. They are part of one real organism but they take their own shape and direction. Perhaps in Ockeghem’s style we have the ideal linear polyphony.
Johannes Ockeghem (Jean d’Okeghem, Okegus, Ockenheim, Hoquegan, Obghuen - his name is found in thirty-nine different spellings) was born in East Flanders, probably at Termonde, possibly as early as 1420 and not later than 1430. Young man or boy, he was a singer at Antwerp Cathedral for a year in 1443-44. Two years later he joined the chapel singers of Duke Charles of Bourbon at Moulins. It is possible that Ockeghem visited Cambrai in about 1450 and may have met Dufay. He is also reported as having been a pupil of Binchois, and, when that composer died in 1460, Ockeghem wrote a touching lament “Mort, tu as navré”.
In 1453 Ockeghem joined the Royal Chapel of Charles VII of France, who, despite his defeat of the English, continued to hold his court at Bourges or at Tours rather than in Paris. Ockeghem must have been favoured with intelligence and personality as well as ability as a musician, for soon he was “premier chapelain”, and then in 1459 he was given the remunerative appointment of Treasurer of the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours. This was a great and Royal honour, for the Kings of France were the Abbots of St. Martin. In 1465 Ockeghem had the title of “Maistre de la chapelle de chant du roy”. In 1470 he went to Spain, and he paid certainly one visit to his native Flanders in 1484. He spent his life as composer and chapel master to three Kings of France, Charles VII (died 1461), Louis XI (died 1483) and Louis XII in whose service he died at Tours in 1495.
His surviving Works consist of eleven complete masses, three masses consisting of two or three movements, nine or ten motets and some twenty chansons. He wrote some masses in a free style, others are based on liturgical or chanson “tenors” (cantus firmus); he wrote his Missa Cuiusvis toni without clefs to test his singers’ knowledge of the four authentic church modes. His Missa Prolationum is a tour de force, a cycle of metrical double canons. He contrived to spell out by numerology the name Egidius de Binche in the proportions of his scheme of the cantus firmus in his Mass on Gilles Binchois’ chanson “De plus en plus”. By the same means he hid the words Ave Maria, gratia plena in his Mass on the plainsong Ecce ancilla Domini, which celebrates the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. Yet, to the listener, Ockeghem’s music never suffers from this mediaeval obsession with numbers, symbols and canonic devices.
Above all, Ockeghem left for posterity his austere and beautiful Requiem Mass. It is steeped in the ancient plainsong of the Mass for the Dead. In each movement the topmost voice paraphrases and elaborates the hallowed chant. Fragments of the old melodies serve as springboards for Ockeghem’s lyrical imagination. Constantly changing his textures, he uses every combination of the basic four parts in duos, trios and full four-voice tutti sections. The Kyrie is remarkable in its full ninefold scheme.
In the Graduale and Tractus Ockeghem uses texts that are unfamiliar now as part of the Requiem Mass, but in his day the standardisation of the Council of Trent (in 1570) had not come. In the Graduale, the verse Virga tua takes the form of an immense duet almost to the end, but Ockeghem introduces, with deliberate expressive intent, all the voices with splendid and solemn calm at the words “consolata sunt”. In the Tractus there is another moment of deliberate expression when the tenor, below a duo for high voices, comes in with short “weeping” phrases in the verse “Fuerunt michi lacrimae meae panis die ac nocte”.
In the Offertorium there is a shattering moment of vivid imagination at the words “de manu inferni et de profundo lacu”. This is an outburst, highly decorated and syncopated, demanding virtuoso singing. It is as startling and as vivid as anything in the visions of hell in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
We do not know when or for what occasion Ockeghem wrote his Requiem, but it is more than likely that he wrote it with his royal master, Louis XI, in mind. Louis might well have commissioned it, for he was obsessed with death and gathered round him not only relics by the cartload, but established at his court all manner of “holy men”, mystics and saints including the filthy hermit of Calabria, St. Francis of Paula. Surely, such a King would have seen to it that his choirmaster was ready for the day. It may well be that Ockeghem’s masterpiece was sung when Louis XI died in 1483.
When Ockeghem, himself, died in 1495 he was lamented in music by Josquin Desprez who set a “déploration” by the poet Molinet. In the first section, Josquin writes in a style that is a deliberate compliment to Ockeghem’s own continuous and seamless musical texture, and in it Josquin has embedded the plainsong melody and words of the Introitus “Requiem aetemam”, but although it is notated in the normal way, Josquin directs that this cantus firmus shall be sung “ung demiton plus bas”, thus turning the ancient chant into the wailing Phrygian Mode. In the concluding short section, Josquin set, in his own expressive style, the words which implore the living composers, Brumel, Pierre de la Rue, Compère and Josquin himself to weep for the “bon père”. A solemn “Requiescat in pace” ends one of the most moving laments ever composed.