Josquin des Prez – An Appreciation
Josquin des Prez – An Appreciation. A new chapter in an occasional series about important composers.
Not many opera singers are particularly well-versed in the intricacies of pre-Baroque music, but I was lucky in my formative years to sing quite a lot of Renaissance music as part of the St Andrews University Renaissance Group in the mid 1970’s. As we are in the 70th Anniversary Year of that splendid institution, and having just turned 70 myself, I thought our readers of the Edinburgh Music Review might be interested in an article about one of my favourite Renaissance composers, Josquin des Prez.
Born probably around the early 1450’s, almost certainly in what is now a French speaking part of Belgium, we do know that he died quite a famous person on 27th August 1521 in Condé, between Mons and Tournai, after a life of astonishing achievement as both a singer and a composer, having travelled around most of the major musical centres of Europe, serving kings and potentates alike. There is a lot which is known about his life and career, and also a vast amount of speculation, as a small army of historians and musicologists has spent decades trying to prove various theories about the bits we don’t know. I shall try to make sense of some of it and will offer a flavour of the controversy without getting bogged down in details. No-one needs a bogged down blog!
What is not in doubt is his enormous legacy as a mould breaking composer, whose music changed the world of vocal music for ever. Primarily a composer of sacred vocal music, he also wrote some deeply moving secular music, and his lament on the death of his mentor, Johannes Ockeghem, ‘Nymphes des Bois’, is not only a masterpiece of vocal writing but is also full of riddles and enigmas wrapped up in the text and the music.
Ockeghem died in 1497, probably in Tours, after a long life of service to various royal masters, and his death was greeted by several ‘Déplorations’ in verse and music. Jean Molinet (1435-1507) wrote Nymphes des Bois to lament the death of Ockeghem, and Josquin’s motet seems to have been performed the following year. It is an exquisite blend of superb verse and deeply moving music, suggesting that the older master was much admired by his followers and friends.
The early part of Josquin’s life is shrouded in mystery, although there is a good chance that he was trained as a choir boy, possibly at Cambrai or St Quentin. His name first appears in 1477 as a singer in the chapel of Duke René of Anjou at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. How he came to be there is unknown, and what he did next is unclear, but in 1483, he returned to the north to Condé to claim his inheritance from his aunt and uncle, and he appears to have been treated as an honoured guest, testament to his possible employment by a duke and possibly a king, Louis XI of France.
A year later, in 1484, he was employed as a singer and composer in Milan Cathedral by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a member of the powerful Sforza family who ruled the Duchy of Milan, and the following year found him in Rome with the Cardinal.
A possible spell in Vienna in the court of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary (and lots of other countries!) – there is a mention of a musician called Josquin – was followed by more obscurity until in 1489 he appears as a member of the papal choir in Rome, under Innocent VIII and then Alexander VI. He was in Rome certainly from 1489-1494, and there is a scribbled signature on the wall of the choir gallery of the Sistine Chapel, spelling JOSQUINJ. Was it our man? He was certainly employed there at that time.
It’s fascinating to think of Josquin being in the famous chapel. When he was there Sandro Botticelli, among others, had recently been at work, painting in 1481-82, and the chapel must have looked magnificent, although completely different from what we see now, as Michelangelo was not engaged to decorate the walls and ceiling until 1508-1512. It is astonishing to think of the great composer being in Rome at that high point of European culture, when so many of the greatest artists of all time were working away in various parts of Italy, producing masterpieces almost weekly! It’s rather like the incredible coincidence of Handel and Bach being almost contemporaries, or the extraordinary flourishing of compositional genius at the beginning of the 19th century, with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Rossini and Schubert near contemporaries, and the late 19th century, with Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss all knowing each other or at least aware of each other’s work.
We don’t know exactly when Josquin composed most of his music, apart from the lament for Ockeghem, but he was aware, clearly, of his contemporaries, and is often mentioned in comparisons. After Rome, there is another blank period, when many scholars reckon he was working for King Louis XII, possibly in Cambrai, but in 1503, he appears in Ferrara serving the Duke, Ercole I, a keen patron of the arts. Documents of the time indicate that he was paid a salary of 200 ducats, a pretty impressive fee for a musician, clearly showing the value Ercole put on his engagement. It is thought that his superb motet, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’, was written while at Ferrara, an austere work perhaps reflecting Josquin’s admiration for the controversial figure of Girolamo Savonarola, a fanatical religious reformer who had been burnt at the stake in Florence in 1498. Contemporary accounts mention Josquin’s serious-minded character, and a preference for Savonarola’s grim austerity would fit with this assessment.
His time at Ferrara was brief, as an outbreak of plague saw the evacuation of the duke and his court in 1503/04, and his departure was timely, as his replacement, Jacob Obrecht, died of plague in 1505.
He seems to have returned to Condé in 1504, a huge change from the glittering court of Ferrara, reflecting perhaps a recognition of the passing of the years, and a desire to go back to his roots in his 50’s. He became Provost of the collegiate church of Notre Dame in May 1504, and it appears that he spent the rest of his life there, in charge of a fine choir and responsible for a large workforce.
It was probably in Condé that Josquin wrote the mass that first introduced me to this extraordinary composer, the ‘Missa Pange Lingua’. When an undergraduate at St Andrews University in the 1970s, in my second year, we tackled Pange Lingua, and performed it throughout the year. I remember being absolutely astonished by this amazing work, based on the plainchant, ‘Pange, Lingua, Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium’ (Sing, my Tongue, the Saviour’s Glory, Of His Flesh, the Mystery Sing), itself a hymn supposedly written by St Thomas Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi, and which was also sung on Maundy Thursday. It expresses the doctrine that the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist, a tricky concept for those of us of a sceptical nature but a mystery very much at the heart of the Catholic faith.
Josquin was at the height of his powers when he wrote this mass. It is thought to be one of his last compositions, and wasn’t in fact published until 1539, eighteen years after his death. It demonstrates his total mastery over the form and illustrates how his compositions had profound repercussions for all late Renaissance vocal music. His use of imitation, where all the voices are treated as being equal, of primary importance, was quite revolutionary. Most previous mass settings involved long florid evocations on single syllables of the text, such that the actual words were often lost in the dazzling musical shape. Josquin’s use of polyphonal blocks of text, often conveying the meaning by changes of speed and texture, was revolutionary, and the recurring use of the Pange Lingua chant became much more recognisable, even to non-experts. I remember a wonderful duet section, in the Benedictus, when it was just the bass and tenor parts, as solos, which kept the show on the road, as it were. It was one of the first occasions when I was given a solo line myself, and I recall many performances in varied churches throughout England duetting with my old friend, Roderick Somerville, later the foremost collector and seller of playing cards in Britain!
Josquin was just as prolific in secular composition, his masterpiece being the previously mentioned lament for Johannes Ockeghem, ‘Nymphes des Bois’, which uses the plainsong chant ‘Requiem Aeternam’ as its theme while beautifully lamenting the death of the famous older composer. It’s a great text, by Molinet, with almost surreal rhymes and repetitions: ‘Car d’Atropos, très terrible satrappe, a vostre Okgem, atrape en sa trape!’ It even fits names of composers into the song: ‘Put on your mourning clothes, Josquin, Brumel, La Rue, Compère, and weep heavy tears from your eyes, you have lost your good father.’
It is well worth exploring the extraordinary wealth of Josquin’s compositions, and there are now fantastic opportunities to listen to his entire oeuvre.
I can heartily recommend the Tallis Scholars’ many recordings of all the masses, a labour of love from Peter Phillips and his marvellous choir over several decades. The secular music was spectacularly recorded by the Ensemble Clément Janequin under the direction of Dominique Visse. I sang with Dominique in Cavalli’s ‘La Calisto’ in Lyon some years ago, and his extraordinary high falsetto voice combined with his long hair and biker gear marked him out as a true star and a genuine eccentric of epic proportions!
Another wonderful falsettist, Guy James, in the Gesualdo Six, is the modern successor to Dominique Visse, no less superb, and the Gesualdo’s recording, ‘Josquin’s Legacy,’ cannot be recommended highly enough.
Do search out this late Medieval master, and you won’t be disappointed.
