Nestling in the Sabine Mountains in the small rows of Palestrina, where - c. 1525 - the composer Giovanni Pierluigi "da Palestrina" was born, and whence his supreme derives. As a young man he went to Rome and was appointed to the recowned Sistine Chapel, thanks so the influence of his patron, the Cardinal Bishop of Palestrina, who in 1550 had become Pope Julius III and had moved to Rome. Although still only in his twenties Palestrina was appointed maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia   and in 1555, at the express with of the pope, he was admitted to the choir of the Papal Chapel, without the customary previous consultation with the existing members. Unfortunately Pope Julius III died only a few weeks later and Palestrina's rapid rise was brought to an end. The new Pope in keeping with the ordinances of the church, would tolerate no married singers, and Palestrina was consequantly dismissed. For the next years the composer was left searching for a worthy position. For six years he worked in the Lateran Church in Rome, transferring in 1561 to Santa Maria Maggiore, before moving to the Seminario Romano and the service of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este. Negotiations with the Duke of Mantua and even with the Imperial Court in Vienna came to nothing. It was not until 1571 that Palestrina was appointed maestro di cappella of the Julian Chapel at St. Peter's, Rome, a post which he held for over twenty years until his death in 1594.
The revival of interest in Palestrina's music that began in the early 19th century has been marked by the persistent misundestanding of it. Young musicians have  seen in is a compendium of perfected craftmanschip, the rules of which have to be learned is the acquisition of compositional facility, but not to be used is their own compositions. This is a peculiar gap in the training of musicians, and one that can be traced back as far as the treatise on counterpoint, Gradus ad Parnassus, published in 1725 by J. J. Fux. The resurgence of a "Palestrina style" in Roman Catholic church music circles in the 19th century (known as the "St. Cecilia Movement") was hardly more creative in its attitude. The followers of this movement saw in Palestrina's music the trascendental harmony of the spheres, such as they sought in vait in the world and music of the time. For them it demonstrated a genuine "Purity of Music", to quote the title (Revolves der Tonkunst) of a book written to the subject in 1824 by a Heidelberg lawyer by name of Thibaut. Not even Richard Wagner was left untouched by this kind of aestheticism, and in his arrangement of one of Palestrina's Stabat Mater called for unreal pianissimo effects at the final cadences. But with Wagner at feast Palestrina's music was performed outside the context of pioneering liturgical reform, albeit in the concert hall and with singers more at home with the repertoire and style of the local choral union.
Palestrina's music is, in fact, largely word-orientated, and as characterized by an almoste over-sensitive awareness of text. Thus as the moments of transition between one passage of initiative writing and the next, differing accentuatuins appear in the various vocal lines at the same time. This is especially true of the rightlyknit four-part motets, in which vertical uniformity of the vocal lines is a relative rarity. In his setting of Super flumina Babylonis and Sicut cervus Palestrina has followed closely the structure of the two liturgical texts. Each individual section of the text is imitatively set, the voices entering one after asonber with the same theme, and with each new section of text comes a new themes. After the entry of all four voices into the imitative texture, the next soggetto - as Gioseffo Zarlino, the foremost theoretician at the time of Palestrina, designated these imitative themes - is introduced by normally one voice, and a new section is cogged into the outgoing one.
Palestrina published the greater part of his output himself. His first collection of four-part motets, published in Rome in 1563, proved particularly successful and underwent 12 editions, the last being in 1622. Despite this success Palestrina allowed considerable time to elapse before publishing a second collection of four-part motets in 1581; of these Super flumina and Sicut cervus are beld in particularly high regard. Between these two publications, however, come three collections of motets in five, six and eight parts. In the six part and eight-part motets we find a different approach to that described above. A good example of this new type is the six-part motet, O bone Jesu, from the third set. Here the motet is not opened by one piece on its own, but Palestrina groups parts together, normally three or four at a time, and these groups appear in alternatim with each other. However, the groupings are flexible, and in the middle of a bar one part can transfer to another group. Only the lowest part of either group remains firmly allotted to its particular "choir", and these two parts appear together only when both "choirs" cease to alternate and join together in the final Amen which breaks inno dance-like triple time.
The most important musical genres of the 16th century were le Latin motet and the vernacular secular song. In contrast to his great contemporary, Orlando di Lasso, whose output is equally divided between sacred and secular music (including Italian madrigals, French chansons and German Lieder), Palestrina - apart from one early book of madrigals - wrote exclusively for the church. Music for the liturgy comprised two genres, the motet and the Mass. In the 16th century a Mass would normally be composed around an existing melody, either a plain-song or a quotation form a work for several voices. Of Palestrina's 105 Masses, 87 have some such basis. Of these, 36 are based on plain-song and 51 on quotations from works for several voices, including 28 from works by other composers, such as Josquin, de Rore, Hellinck and Morales.
The Mass, "Aeterna Christi munera", which appeared in 1590, derives its name from the opening of an Office hymn, the melody of which is used as the basis of the whole Mass. In the Gloria and the Credo the melody appears only is the upper part (discantus), whereas in the remaining sections of the Mass it permeates all parts as a recurrent theme in the imitative texture. This technique of binding all five sections of the Mass together by means of a common plain-song basis is one that goes back to the 15th century, to the era of the great Netherlandish composers, whose art is held by many to have reached its pinnacle in the works of Palestrina.
Forming a separate category of their own are the Lamentations. Palestrina wrote no fewer them five complete settings of the Holy Week Lessons from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. One of these has even survived in Palestrina's own hand, in the famous Codex 59 of the Lateran Church in Rome. to the Lamentations in the Codex Palestrina has appended a further setting, namely that of the 3rd Lesson for Easter Even, "Incipit Oratio...". This additional setting and the Lamentations of the Codex were composed in the early months of 1574. At the time Palestrina had to convey his apologies to the Duke of Mantua, who had commissioned other works of him, for their late arrival, explaining that by Papal Command he had had to compose settings of the Lamentations for Holy Week.
The Lamentations belong to those Lessons which traditionally are innonded to prescribed plain-song. A masterful setting is therefore highly unusual. In setting the Lamentations for several voices Palestrina has not adherend to the prescribed plain.song formulae, but has chosen a straightforward falsobordone technique, which is reminiscent of simple improvvisations based on Lessons and Psalms such as were customary in the 15th and 16th centuries on Holy Days and other special occasions.
The 3rd Lesson for Easter Even is taken from Lamentations 5, vv. 1-5, preceded by the traditional incipit: "Incipit Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae" (Hre begin the words of Jeremiah the prophet). The Lesson ends, as do all the Holy Week Lessons, with the exhortation to an amended way of life, "Jerusalem converter". The "incipit" and the exhortation are set by Palestrina is a fully polyphonic, six and eightpart imitative texture, whereas the text proper is moch less elaborately set. Here the vocal resources are variously deployed: in Vers 2 ("Haereditas") only the lower voices are used, and in Vers 3 ("Pupilli") only the higher voices, while in the opening Verse ("Recordare") and the two concluding Verses ("Aquam") the registers are linked together. It is this juxtaposition of simple homophonic writing with elaborately structured imitative polyphony and the constantly varied deployment of the vocal resources that give the Lamentations that expressive quality for which they have long been famed.