Juan Esquivel: A Master of Sacred Music during the Spanish Golden Age (review)

Robert Stevenson's Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961) turns fifty in 2011, and I know I am not the only one who still tends to treat it as though it were published last year. It is an astonishing book, and we are lucky to have it; but it is also the kind of book that subtly, invisibly shapes to its own ends our perception of the reality it describes. It is very hard, even now, to think of sixteenth-century Spanish music without immediately conjuring the triumvirate Morales-Guerrero-Victoria, and only then adding a little asterisk for "Other Church Masters," whom Stevenson tucked between the last two. Here now is a full-length monograph on the music of one such Other Church Master, Juan Esquivel, and it is worth reading.

Clive Walkley has written, on the face of it, a traditional life-and-works, although, as is also traditional for minor early composers, we have a lot more works than life. Esquivel's life, at least so far as it can be reconstructed today, was relatively uncomplicated. He was born around 1560 in Ciudad Rodrigo, a small city near the Portuguese border, and educated at the cathedral there; in 1581 he became the chapelmaster at Oviedo cathedral; in 1585 he took a similar position at Calahorra; and in 1591 or thereabouts he returned to Ciudad Rodrigo and his home church, where he served till his death, sometime after 1623. Essentially, then, he had a provincial education; he made a modest reputation in his twenties at other small cathedrals; and he returned, for whatever reason, to spend his whole mature career right where he began.

The reason we care about Esquivel today is his three books of music: six masses published in 1608, seventy-two motets also from 1608, and a collection of mostly office music plus seven more masses from 1613. Not all of it, alas, survives complete, but even so, it is a remarkable amount of sacred music, of a gratifying variety. Walkley's approach to it all is eminently clear and sensible: we get a chapter of background, a chapter of biography, a chapter outlining the publications, three chapters devoted to the individual volumes, and a chapter of conclusions. And he writes well, with a palpable (and gratefully accepted, at least by me) effort to keep his mind open and his central message clear in the midst of what could be a welter of bibliographic information and analytical terminology. He divides the works up by type, chooses some representative examples of each type, and says what he thinks is important. Particularly welcome is his willingness to admit, as he does several times over the course of the book, that this composition has flaws, or that that one, when compared to parallel works by Guerrero (p. 97) or Palestrina (p. 102) or Victoria (p. 191), is no masterpiece. None of this, I should add, makes me any less eager to hear more Esquivel; quite the opposite. The book, for me, gains considerable authority, for its author and its subject both, by establishing itself as a labor of love but not a hagiography.

There is, however, a paradox here which I hope I can explain without seeming to patronize. Walkley is obviously writing with the non-specialist in mind: he assumes very little knowledge about Renaissance music and church practices. So we get fairly detailed explanations of the Counter-Reformation and its effects on music; of the forces available in a Spanish church and the duties of a chapelmaster; of the liturgy and the extraliturgical situations for music; of the nature of the parody mass; of the symbolism of cantus firmus and canon; of Burmeister's rhetorical analysis; and so on. He is not too proud to refer us to the standard textbooks...