The man couldn’t help setting an example, it seemed. His staggering output is not only in itself
exemplary (of industry, the opposite of one of the deadly sins) but implies commitment to what has
already been identified as the “classical” ideal, that of conformity with established excellence—or, better
yet, the refinement of existing standards. To do best what everybody does is the aim of a classicist. One
does not question aims, one strives to improve one’s performance. Practice makes perfect. Continual
striving after the same goal is the kind of practice that results, at the very least, in facility. That is how one
becomes prolific, and why certain historical periods (the “classical” ones) are so full of prolific
composers. The sixteenth century was the first of them.
Palestrina exemplified that aim and that facility, perfected his style to a legendary degree, and in so
doing brought the ars perfecta to its final pitch. But no matter how you explain it, that output of Masses
remains a fairly mind-boggling—and a very telling—achievement. The idea of setting the same text to
music a hundred times is on one level the ultimate stylistic exercise, the supreme expression not only of
the ars perfecta but of the religious and cultural attitudes that undergirded it. It bespeaks a ritualized and
impersonal attitude toward composing—a “catholic” attitude. The aim is not to express or illuminate the
text, as one might seek to illustrate the unique text of a votive motet, but rather to provide an ideal medium
for it. A body of work produced under such ritualized conditions and with such transcendent aims will
constitute a summa—an encyclopedic summation of the state of the perfected art.
And that seems only just, because no composer ever harbored a more demanding sense of heritage
than Palestrina. He practiced the branch of Western musical art that had the longest written tradition, and
that had just begun to monumentalize its great figures. Hence Palestrina was easily the most historically
minded composer we have as yet encountered. He was the first to do what so many have later done in his
name (in counterpoint class, if no longer in church schools)—that is, deliberately master archaic styles as
a basis for contemporary composition.
BESTING THE FLEMINGS; OR, THE LAST OF THE
TENORISTAS
All but six of Palestrina’s hundred-odd Masses are based on preexisting music. That in itself is not
remarkable; the polyphonic Mass Ordinary cycle was from the very beginning a cannibalistic genre. But
Palestrina was the only late sixteenth-century composer who retained an active interest in the techniques
of the early fifteenth-century composers whose work he discovered in the manuscripts of the Sistine
Chapel, where he worked in the years immediately preceding the publication of his first volume of
Masses in 1554. (He was pensioned out of the Sistine Chapel choir in 1555 owing to Pope Paul IV’s
decision to enforce the long-dormant rule of celibacy there; Palestrina was one of the three married
members who had to be let go.)
That first volume (Fig. 16-1) was dedicated to Palestrina’s protector, the recently elected Pope Julius
III, and opened with a Mass based on the Gregorian antiphon Ecce sacerdos magnus—“Behold the great
priest”—presumably composed in celebration of Julius’s investiture. It was an old-fashioned tenor
cantus-firmus Mass, written in imitation of the oldest music preserved in the Vatican manuscripts and
possibly still performed there on occasion in Palestrina’s day. The final Agnus Dei even has some old
“poly-mensural” tricks such as we have not seen since Josquin’s early days.
Palestrina demonstrated his intimate familiarity with the work of Josquin (dead before Palestrina was
born) and also his lively, somewhat jealous admiration for it, in the most explicit and traditional way: by
basing a Mass on Josquin’s celebrated sequence motet Benedicta es. He was the latest composer to pay