Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/651

PALESTRINA. in 1580 his wife died; and his remaining son, Igino, was a wild and worthless man. Yet neither poverty nor sorrow could quench the fire of his genius, nor check the march of his industry. The years between 1571 and 1594, when he died, were to the full as fruitful as those which had preceded them. And though he himself had little to gain in renown, the world has profited by a productiveness which continued unabated down to the very month of his death.

No sooner was he reinstated at the Vatican than he sent a present of two masses, one for five and the other for six voices, to the Papal Choir. The subject of the first of these was taken from one of the motetti in his first volume, 'Magnum Mysterium'; that of the other from the old hymn, 'Veni Creator Spiritus,' of the Libri Corali. They are in his finest and most matured manner, and were probably composed in the year of their presentation. They have never been printed, but they may be seen in the Collection of the Vatican. In the following year, 1572, he published at Rome, probably with Alessandro Gardano, his second volume of motetti. It is not certain that any copies of this edition exist, but reprints of it are extant, by Scoto, of Venice, in 1580 and 1588, and by Gardano, of Venice, in 1594. It was in this volume that he included four motetti written by his three sons. It was dedicated to one of the most persistent of his friends, the Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, who died that same year. Among the finest contents of this volume are 'Derelinquat impius viam suam,' and 'Canite tubâ in Sion,' for five voices, and 'Jerusalem, cito veniat salus tua,' 'Veni Domine,' 'Sancta et immaculata Virginitas,' and 'Tu es Petrus,' each for six voices. But beyond them all for sweetness and tenderness of feeling is 'Peccantem me quotidie et non me poenitentem timor meus conturbat me, quia in inferno nulla est redemptio; miserere mei Domine, et salva me.'

Inferior, on the whole, to its predecessors, was the third volume of motetti, which he printed in 1575, with a dedication to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, and cousin to his lost friend the Cardinal Ippolito. There are, however, certain brilliant exceptions to the low level of the book; notably the motetti for eight voices, which are finer than any which he had yet written for the same number of singers, and include the well-known and magnificent compositions, 'Surge illuminare Jerusalem,' and 'Hodie Christus natus est.' Besides the original edition of this work, by Gardano of Rome, there are no less than four reprints by Scoto and Gardano of Venice, dated 1575, 1581, 1589, and 1594 respectively. It forms vol. 3 of the complete edition of Messrs. Breitkopf & Härtel, now in course of publication.

In this year, 1575, the year of the Jubilee, an incident occurred which must have made one of the brightest passages in the cloudy life of Palestrina. Fifteen hundred singers from his native town, belonging to the two confraternities of the Crucifix and the Sacrament, came to Rome. They had divided themselves into three choruses. Priests, laymen, boys and ladies went to form their companies; and they made a solemn entry into the city, singing the music of their townsman, with its great creator conducting it at their head.

In the following year, Gregory XIII commissioned Palestrina to revise the 'Graduale' and the 'Antifonario' of the Latin Church. This was a work of great and somewhat thankless labour. It involved little more than compilation and rearrangement, and on it all the finer qualities of his genius were altogether thrown away. Uncongenial however as it was, Palestrina, with unwavering devotion to his art, and to the Church to which he had so absolutely devoted both himself and it, undertook the task. Well aware of its extent, he called to his aid his favourite pupil, Guidetti, and entrusted to him the correction of the 'Antifonario.' Guidetti carried this part of the work through under the supervision of his master, and it was published at Rome in 1582 under the title 'Directorium Chori.' [See ; vol. i. p. 639a.] The 'Graduale,' which Palestrina had reserved to himself, he never completed. There is a limit to the perseverance of the most persevering; and the most loving of churchmen and the most faithful of artists fell back here. He seems to have finished a first instalment, but the rest he left less than half done, and the whole was found after his death among his abandoned manuscripts. His mean son, Igino, who survived him, on finding it among his papers, got some inferior musician to finish it, and then contracted to sell it to a careless printer for 2500 scudi, as the sole and genuine work of his father. The purchaser had just caution enough to send the MS. for the revision and approval of the Vatican Chapter. The fraud was thus discovered, and the result was a lawsuit, which terminated in the abrogation of the contract, and the consignment of the manuscript to a convenient oblivion.

The loss of his patron Ippolito d'Este was to some extent made up to Palestrina by the kindness of Giacomo Buoncompagni, nephew of Gregory XIII, who came to Rome in 1580, to receive nobility at the hands of his relative. He was a great lover of music, and proceeded at once to organise a series of concerts, under the direction of Palestrina. To him Palestrina dedicated a volume of twenty-six madrigals for five voices. Eight of these were composed upon Petrarch's 'Canzoni' to the Virgin Mary; the rest were set to miscellaneous sacred words. The publication of these was followed by that of another volume of motetti for four voices only. Several editions of both works are extant. The madrigals call for no comment; but the volume of motetti is unusually beautiful. They were probably composed in the year of their publication, during the first force of his grief for the loss of Lucrezia; and to this the intensity of their pathos and the choice of the words to which they are written may be ascribed. 'Supra flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus, dum