PALESTRINA, GIOVANNI PIERLUIGI da. - Musician, b. in Palestrina to Sante Pierluigi and Palma, of uncertain lineage; the majority of scholars, with well-founded arguments, have by now agreed to assign his birth to 1525. In his native town it is likely that he received his first musical instruction; having gone to Rome quite early, he continued his studies; he was received into the choir of S. Maria Maggiore, whose archpriest was Card. Andrea Della Valle, bishop of Palestrina, and whose maestro di cappella was Rubino Mallapert; the latter was succeeded in 1540 by Firmin le Bel, in whom we must recognize Palestrina's teacher.
After his voice broke he returned to Palestrina, where he assumed the office of organist and master of singing in the cathedral of S. Agapito, and on 12 July 1547 he married Lucrezia Gori, by whom he had three children, Rodolfo, Angelo, who died before their father without families, and Igino, some descendants of whom are still traced in the second half of the 17th century. Again there is a lack of information about this stay; it is nevertheless to be supposed that the musician became intimate with Card. Giovanni Maria Del Monte who, having been created pontiff in 1550, shortly afterward called him to the direction of the Cappella Giulia. Palestrina took up the post on 1 Sept. 1551; in the autumn of 1554 he published the first book of masses, dedicating them to his protector, by whom the following year he was named cantore pontificio. When Julius III died in March 1555, his successor Marcellus II Cervini preserved his favor, but died after three weeks; in memory of this Pontiff Palestrina wrote, at an unspecified time, the Missa Papae Marcelli. The new Pope, Paul IV Carafa, who immediately began his severe reforming work, revoked the lifetime appointment of the lay and married cantori pontifici; and so, together with Leonardo Barré and Domenico Ferabosco, Palestrina was dismissed. The musician had the good fortune to take up at once the then vacant office of maestro di cappella of S. Giovanni in Laterano, on 1 Oct. of that same 1555, and he held it, amid various difficulties, until the summer of 1560. The following year, again as maestro di cappella, he moved to S. Maria Maggiore. In 1559 Pius IV Medici ascended the pontificate, during whose reign the Council of Trent (1563) came to an end, whose importance for the decisions concerning the liturgy and church music is well known. What universally spread Palestrina's renown is closely connected with the reforms proposed by that Council; this participation was wrapped in a legendary halo: thus it was long said that the Mass of Pope Marcellus would have saved polyphonic music from the prohibition of the Council. That Mass, which in fact represents a new style of which Palestrina was deeply conscious, was written according to requirements to which the decisions of the Council were to give new force and effectiveness. Be that as it may, it is established that Cardd. Vitellozzo Vitelli and Carlo Borromeo saw from Jan. 1565 to giving effect to the deliberations of the Council of Trent, beginning precisely with the reorganization of the Pontifical Chapel. It appears in fact that in the house of Card. Vitelli some masses were performed for the approval of their style, especially in relation to the requirement of the comprehensibility of the text, according to the prescriptions of the Council. At that time, in 1564, Palestrina entered into relations with Card. Ippolito d'Este, particularly inclined to favor music as a composer for the celebrated Chapel at the court of Ferrara; these relations continued also in 1567 and in 1569. In 1566 Palestrina also became a teacher in the Roman Seminary, under the direction of the Jesuits; and the choice was an explicit homage to the great renown already attained by then by the composer. But he renounced the two offices when, succeeding Giovanni Animuccia, on 1 Apr. 1571, he assumed the office of master of the Cappella Giulia in S. Pietro. The fame of the artist, who continued tirelessly in the creation of his works, was by now very great; nevertheless, in order to improve his economic situation, the musician thought of returning to S. Maria Maggiore, enticed by the offers of that Chapter. But Palestrina was satisfied in his requests through the direct intervention of Pope Pius V Ghislieri (1566-72), who esteemed him highly and who precisely in those years entrusted him with the musical reform of the liturgical books, a task that absorbed the musician greatly, as the slowed pace of composition of those years clearly demonstrates, until 1581. In 1572 Palestrina lost his son Rodolfo, the following year his brother, in 1575 his second-born Angelo, in 1580 his wife Lucrezia: deeply shaken by so many misfortunes, he thought of withdrawing to religious life. Having obtained permission to enter the ecclesiastical state, by a brief of Nov. 1580, in Dec. he received a benefice of twenty-four ducats a year in the cathedral of Ferentino, but on 28 March 1581 he married the Roman Virginia Dormuli, rich widow of a fur merchant. This marriage not only freed Palestrina from financial worries but allowed him to devote himself to the very costly publication of his works, which in fact he resumed at a much more rapid pace. In 1583 Palestrina entered into negotiations with Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, who wanted him in Mantua as master of his chapel. For the failure of the negotiations because of his high demands the musician had to repent when, in the new reorganization of the Pontifical Chapel (1586), he saw G. Antonio Merlo preferred to him for the post of director and was named only composer of the Apostolic Chapel. Palestrina continued briskly in his musical creation when, after a brief illness, he died on the morning of 2 Febr. 1594; he was buried in S. Pietro, but the tomb was destroyed in the works of 1606.
Palestrina's music already seemed to his contemporaries an artistic culmination of almost absolute perfection: several elements contributed to this evaluation, not only of an artistic nature, but more broadly historical and cultural. But, a few decades after Palestrina's death, musical taste underwent so radical a change as to cause the direct knowledge of his works to decline rapidly.
A precise, conscious return toward the clarity and simplicity of Palestrinian polyphony came about with a movement ideally begun by a jurist of Heidelberg, A. F. J. Thibaut, who published in 1825 a little book, afterward reprinted several times, in which the purity of polyphonic music was precisely celebrated, chiefly recognized in Palestrinian art. In place of Palestrina as the symbol of technical-formal perfection, as he had persisted through the preceding centuries, there now came the symbol of Palestrina as the representative of the purest musical religiosity, depicted above all in an "ancient," if not indeed primitive, style: it is beyond doubt that the historical investigation of the 19th century continued to place Palestrina at the center of "ancient" music, by then considered as the highest point of arrival of a centuries-old, uninterrupted, progressive conquest of art and style. To the Italian contribution, mainly represented by Cametti and Casimiri, who reconstructed through patient archival research the life and historical environment of the musician (to Casimiri is still owed the launching of a new edition of Palestrina's work), was added the foreign contribution with the critical research founded on rigorous stylistic method by Jeppesen, simultaneously with other studies.
In the centuries-long historical development of polyphony, no one before Palestrina had succeeded in realizing such a pure, homogeneous, essential vocal style. The most evident qualities of this astonishing vocal writing are recognized first of all in the movement of the melody, woven on conjunct degrees and on intervals of the most natural intonation. The unfolding of the composition proves to be subtly regulated by a rhythmic flow that seems an alternating breathing of accents in the individual voices, and by an expressive sense of harmony in which triad chords dominate with the fullness of their sonority. By a natural and infallible gift, certainly not by any decision of deliberate calculation, Palestrina avoids everything that might disturb the harmonious disposition of the details within the clear architectonic power of the whole: thus the composition is freed from any contrast that might arise from a tension provoked by the failure of the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic factors to fuse. The result is a limpid atmosphere, without modulations of color: a triumph in full light of a musicality at once plastic and flexible, suited to reproducing as in a language of incomparable vividness the religious rapture of the imagination.
The Palestrinian texts reveal an immense variety of accents and inflections only to those who wish to make them their own with eager, attentive penetration. In the analysis of form one will be surprised, but even more filled with admiration, at the way in which Palestrina takes from the contrapuntal tradition, chiefly represented by the Flemish musicians, the technical and structural elements in most current use. There return in his masses the procedures of composition on the cantus firmus, now strict now free, on the canon of the strictest rigor, on liturgical or popular melodies, on themes drawn with greater freedom from motets and madrigals of his own or of other composers, on motifs invented by himself or on themes whose source it has not been possible to identify: but every element is transfigured by the artist in a manner that appears all the more prodigious the more natural and intense is the musical expression that results from it. The same may be said of the versatility with which Palestrina, in the motets and in the numerous similar forms, outlines pictures of less ample frame, but which gather in the most harmonious and sober connection the inflections of a penetrating lyricism capable of evoking images and states of mind subtly adhering to the spirit of the text that suggested them.
The fecundity of the Palestrinian genius is attested by the simple list of works: 39 masses for four voices, 29 for five, 21 for six, 4 for eight, for a total of 93 masses, to which are to be added those recently rediscovered in manuscript by Jeppesen in the Library of the Conservatory of Milan; more than 300 motets for four, five, six, seven, eight and twelve voices; hymns, lamentations, litanies, offertories, antiphons, psalms, canticles, responsories, sequences, four books of madrigals, two spiritual and two secular; eight ricercari are also attributed to Palestrina.
The complete works of Palestrina were published in 33 vols. by de Witt, Espagne, Commer, Haberl, ed. Leipzig 1862-1903. A new edition, begun by R. Casimiri, is in the course of publication in Rome, and up to now (1952) 17 vols. have appeared.
Bibliography14 works
Luigi Ronga