How do you play and record a lost Renaissance mass? I Fagiolini and I found out
Twenty or so years ago, the musicologist Davitt Moroney came across a reference in the Biblioth�que Nationale in Paris to a 40-part mass by a composer he had never heard of, someone called "Strusco". Forty vocal lines in one piece of music? It had been done ? in 1561, the Florentine court composer Alessandro Striggio had written a motet with 40 individual parts at the behest of his employer, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, to celebrate the visit of two Catholic dignitaries, en route from Rome to Paris. And in 1571 Thomas Tallis, inspired by a visit Striggio made to London in 1567, had written Spem in Alium, another work for 40 voices ? but it was still a strange thing to uncover. Most choral music is written for a few individual vocal lines. You can have as many singers as you like on each, but there are still only those few lines. In Verdi's Requiem, the choir may be 200-strong, but there are just four parts.
Who was this Strusco? A few years later, a French musicologist told Moroney about a "rather mad" 40-voice mass from the 17th century in the library, but that offered no greater clue, and got the century wrong. It was only when he met another scholar, who had spent decades cataloguing the collection, that Moroney realised what he had stumbled across: a mass by Striggio, which had been mislabelled 400 years before. He had in fact discovered one of the greatest lost works of the Renaissance.
It's important to understand the scale on which artists worked in 16th century Florence. Accounts of one reception for a Medici bride tell of singers and instrumentalists, masked and costumed, descending on cloud machines to present a spectacular tableau vivant. The repertoire is thought to have been Striggio's motet Ecce Beatam Lucem, though tantalisingly the piece is unnamed. The lavish presentation was a symbol of the Medici's strength: art-plus-music equalled power and prestige.
For a ceremonial occasion, eight parts was usual, but when the delegation from Rome came to Florence, Striggio resolved not to let the music be outdone by the staging: he would write a motet for an unparalleled 40 parts. It must have been a success, because he soon followed it with his entire mass, for five choirs of eight parts, each mixing high to low voices.
The mass is first mentioned in 1567, when Striggio travelled to Vienna to present the mass as a gift to the holy Roman emperor. Striggio continued to Munich, where the mass was performed for Duke Albrecht V and then to Paris, where Cosimo's cousin, the great Catherine des M�dicis, attended.
Some time later, a copy of the mass was made in 42 separate little books, each containing a single part (plus one for the general bass and a sort of short score). This was placed in the Biblioth�que Nationale de Paris where it was miscatalogued as having been written by Strusco and for only four voices ? a more usual number for a mass, the disbelief of the cataloger speaking volumes for the extraordinary scale of the work. And with that it disappeared for four centuries.
Now, at last, it has been recorded by I Fagiolini. In our planning, I was very focused on how the listener would actually hear the piece; many people's experience of Renaissance vocal music is just a lovely gooey noise. What this choral behemoth needed was colour, to differentiate the five groups. Listening now, post-recording, I hear an extraordinary collection of half-forgotten sounds, clearly presented in families: cornetts (the strange hybrid with a brass-like mouthpiece but a wooden body, considered perfect because it was so close to the human voice) with sackbuts (the mellow precursor of the trombone); soft viols and lutes; dulcians (an early bassoon) with whole choirs of recorders and even a shawm, the early oboe, whose strident sound is rarely heard in sacred music but which in this texture artfully carves its aural spoon through the rich tiramis� of sound.
But hang on ? isn't this meant to be a mass for 40 voices? To assume all of the lines were intended to be sung is to misunderstand the nature of 16th-century performance. Composers accepted their works would be adapted and performed according to local taste. Text helped instrumentalists phrase their parts correctly and as long as the text was sung by at least one voice, the piece was "correct" ? so whether to allocate voices or instruments to each of the 40 parts is a question for performers. At the Munich court, where the mass was performed in 1567, the taste was famously for instrumental involvement in sacred vocal music. It wasn't until the 17th century that composers started assigning parts separately to voices and instruments.
For this recording, I decided to leave choirs II and IV vocal, while colouring I with strings, III with brass and V with a "broken" or mixed consort of wind, brass and strings, allowing the listener more clearly to pick up the essential five groups of the texture, as they throw the phrases between each other. Rehearsing and recording in the same church over four days gradually allowed our ears to become accustomed to the space, allowing a sense of ensemble between the groups to develop. It also gave time for stylistic priorities to emerge: things such as putting your vowels on the beat (the Italian way) rather than consonants (the north European way), subtleties of tuning (in a Renaissance temperament because of the instruments), and above all, I Fagiolini's rather hotter approach to text than is usual with most British groups who do this repertoire.
The four days of rehearsal and recording at All Saints Tooting were an awe-inspiring experience. To revive for permanent memory one of the great musical finds of the last 50 years ? not just a tiny lost Mozart fragment or a short Purcell keyboard piece but an entire mass, the missing link of Renaissance music ? to be the first to mould it, colour it and to let it speak for the first time was invigorating beyond words. A good place to stop writing and let the music speak for itself.
Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini's recording of Striggio's Mass in 40 Parts, reviewed below, is released on Decca Classics on 7 March and includes a special 5.1 surround sound recording and a documentary DVD.
Ashley Olsen Danneel Harris Veronika Vaeková Eve Brittany Lee
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