Cristóbal de Morales (ca. 1500-1553), the most widely published and arranged Spanish composer of the Renaissance, grew up in Seville Cathedral just at the time when the greatest Peninsular musicians were members of the cathedral establishment - Francisco de Peñalosa, Pedro de Escobar, Alonso de Alva, Francisco de la Torre, and Pedro Fernández de Castilleja. He also profited from early contact with Charles V’s chapelmaster, Nicolas Gombert, whose Aspice Domine motet served as the basis for Morales’s first Mass in Book I of his Masses published at Rome in 1544.
From 1526 to 1529 Morales directed the music in Avila Cathedral and from 1529 to 1531 in Plasencia Cathedral. While in Rome as a singer in the papal choir from 1535 to 1545 he built a reputation that caused his works to be published in Antwerp, Augsburg, Lyons, Milan, Nuremberg, Salamanca, Valladolid, Venice, and Wittenberg, not to mention Rome itself where he enjoyed the highest marks of distinction from Pope Paul III.
Yearning for his homeland, Morales returned to Spain to direct the music in the then enormously wealthy primatial Cathedral of Toledo, 1545-1547. The cold climate not suiting his health, he next took employment in Marchena as the Duke of Arcos’s private chapelmaster. He ended his career in sunny Malaga Cathedral, where he directed the music from 1551 to 1553. By foreigners as well as nationals, he was in his lifetime and later regarded as the “light of Spain” in music, the unique, the ineffable, and the incomparable Peninsular genius. It was his rare ability to combine Spanish passion with Flemish learning that endeared him to his century.
His motets chosen for this album reveal him at his most plangent in Lamentabatur Jacob, and at his most exuberant in Jubilate Deo omnis terra, and the brilliant and bravura Andreas Christi famulus. They merely hint at Gregorian melodic contours in the incipits of Emendemus in melius and Andreas Christi famulus, or they repeat outright with absolute fidelity the notes of a Gregorian motto theme, as in Jubilate Deo omnis terra.
The earliest datable motet recorded in this album is the festal six-voice Jubilate Deo omnis terra in two movements composed for a peace parley held at Nice in June, 1538. It was at this Riviera haven that Pope Paul III persuaded Charles V and Francis I to meet. Convinced that music might somehow soothe the principals to a peace treaty, the pope brought along twenty of his own singers: all richly garbed in new velvet cassocks and silk surplices. En route to the conference he added several instrumentalists -- trombonists from Bologna, violinists from Milan, and trumpeters, drummers, and bomhard players from Genoa. (To recreate something of the originally intended instrumental panoply Bruno Turner in the present recording doubles the male voices with the following instruments (in descending order): cornetto, alto sackbut, alto cornetto, shawm, tenor sackbut, bass sackbut.)
Morales’s motet commissioned for the parley made so deep and lasting an impression that a generation later Victoria borrowed extensively from it for his six-voice Gaudeamus Mass published in 1576. In the intervening decades it had moreover been published at Lyons in 1542, at Venice in 1549, in Valderrabano’s arrangement for two vihuelas at Valladolid in 1547, and in Fuenllana’s transcription for solo vihuela at Seville in 1554.
The two movements are welded together by the continuous repetition 18 times throughout both movements, of a six-note motto plainsong incipit, Gaudeamus (with rests separating the repetitions sung by an inner voice). Meanwhile the other voices discourse on the merits of pope, emperor, and king; and exhort the whole earth to sing praises to God because the two princes, Charles and Francis, have ushered in a new and happy age by concluding a most Christian peace. Freely translated, the text sung by the counterpointing voices in pars 1 reads: “Rejoice in the Lord, all ye lands; sing joyfully; rejoice and tell his praises. For through the meditation of Paul, Charles and Francis, kings of vast domains, have agreed to unite; and peace descends from Heaven.”
The constructive plan of this motet was obviously a favorite with Morales. He used the same unifying device of a motto theme repeated throughout in his six-voice Veni Domine et noli tardare of 1536, his six-voice Gaude et laetare Ferrariensis civitas of 1539, and his undated five-voice motets Tu es Petrus and Emendemus in melius. This unifying device was not Morales’s invention. In Spain it had already been used with conspicuous success in a secular song A los baños del amor (“To the baths of love”) included in the Palace Songbook, throughout which an inner voice incessantly repeats a fournote motto G-A-E-D = sol-la-mi-re = Sola m’iré (“Alone I shall go”). The Spanish tinge, so far as all learned devices of this sort is concerned, consisted in turning them to expressive account.
Emendemus in melius classed by Willi Apel as “one of the greatest works in all music history”, aptly illustrates this same national trait. “In this work Morales’s dramatic temperament erupted in full view. Despite the learned device, he freely expressed himself from the depths of his heart.” Based on a responsory text for Ash Wednesday, Emendemus in melius makes its effect largely because of the dramatic conflict between two opposite sentiments. One sentiment is that of entreaty. Four voices surrounding the motto theme implore forgiveness from sins ignorantly committed. The other sentiment is of menace, Tenor II bursts in with a motto theme, six times repeated, sternly warning the sinner: ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return’ (Genesis 3:19). Morales has here turned to highly expressive account a device that other composers used only to show their technique - a motto theme various times exactly repeated. His counterpoints swirling around this inexorable Fate motto symbolize the anguish of the penitent soul seeking forgiveness. So far as proportions go, Morales has also thought out an extremely symmetrical scheme, 6 semibreves always elapsing between mottoes lasting 24 semibreves each. The dovetailing of the texts is equally well thought out. In the following free translation, the action words (in italics) mark the moment when Tenor II breaks in with his warning cry: “Let us amend our lives, for we have ignorantly sinned; lest suddenly the day of death overtake us; and when we seek space for penitence are not able to obtain it. Incline Thine ear O Lord and be merciful because we have sinned against Thee.”
Concerning the five-voice Lamentabatur Jacob, a work first published at Milan in 1543, and until 1711 traditionally sung in the Sistine Chapel at the Offertory every Third Sunday in Lent, Bruno Turner writes as follows: “I found Lamentabatur Jacob to be a profoundly moving experience. There is a wonderful shape and form to this piece, yet it is suffused with a dark glow of personal warmth in perfect equipoise with a sense of universal tragedy.” The text expresses the sorrow of Jacob as he contemplates losing his last and best loved son to Egypt. In the second par; of the motet, the aged patriarch bathes the ground with his tears. The sense of personal grief and desolation is nowhere more poignantly captured in the Renaissance motet repertory. Such a motet gave Turner his impetus for devoting the whole of the present album to Morales; he asks, with such evidence as this, why should not “musicology and historical surveys bow their heads to greatness?”
Lamentabatur Jacob is for low voices in hypophrygian mode. For him, both this mode and the phrygian had highly expressive connotations. His six-voice Mass Si bona suscepimus (“If we have received good from the Lord, why not ill also?”) also in phrygian, is the most somber in his Book I. Verbum iniquum, by the same token, ranks among his most somber motets.
On the other hand the iridescent eight-voice Andreas Christi famulus for the beginning of the Church Year glows with confidence in the Disciple who was the first called to be a “fisher of men” (Matthew 4:19). Originally published at Nuremberg in 1564, this is one of two “Andrew” motets by Morales. The other for five voices survives only in Spanish sources and uses a different text for the second section. But both are in Mode VIII, Morales’s victory mode. The virtuosity with which he moves his voices about in eight real parts is no less than staggering. Pastores, dicite, qaidnam vidistis? (“Shepherds, tell us, what have you seen?”), published in 1546 and again in 1556, is in Mode I transposed, the mode associated by Spanish theorists from Gil and Ramis de Pareja to Bermudo with the Sun. “All joyous, uplifted, and gracious texts may properly be set in Mode I”, wrote Bermudo - Morales’s favorite theorist (Declaración de instrumentos, 1555, folio 122 v). What more joyous text than the question and reply of the shepherds, “We have seen the Child wrapped in swaddling clothes, and [have heard] choirs of Angels praising the Saviour, [singing] Noe, Noe, Noe!”
Morales’s Magnificats have always, from 1542 when they first began being published, been his works most widely reprinted, copied, and arranged. No one in his century more intimately penetrated the soul of the Gregorian intonations for the Song of Mary than he. The Magnificat secundi toni ends with a glorious six-voice verse Sicut erat, involving a canon at the octave between Tenor II and Cantus II. The notes of the canon are identical with the Tone II intonation. But it is not such displays of learning as this that endeared Morales’s Magnificats to his century and beyond. Rather, it was their supreme expressivity.