Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (review)

This attractively produced book is one of a new series of biographies of composers of early music, published in Italian by the Palermo-based publisher L’EPOS. These books are something of an Italian equivalent of the English Master Musicians series from Dent/Oxford University Press, or the German Grosse Komponisten und ihre Zeit series from Laaber-Verlag. The L’EPOS series is a welcome initiative, particularly in allowing younger scholars such as Della Sciucca the opportunity to revisit and reinterpret the life and works of some significant composers. Volumes are reasonably priced and are written for a general but well-informed audience.

It is salutary to realize that Palestrina has not had a life and works study in English since Henry Coates’s Palestrina (London, 1938), a volume in the Master Musician series, though there were two shorter monographs published in the 1970s: Jerome Roche’s Palestrina (Oxford, 1971) and Malcolm Boyd’s Palestrina’s Style: A Practical Introduction (Oxford, 1973). Michael Heinemann’s Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina und seiner Zeit (Laaber, 1994), for the German Laaber-Verlag series, and Lino Bianchi’s monumental study in Italian, Palestrina nella vita, nelle opere, nel suo tempo (Palestrina, 1995), were both published in response to the quatercentenary of Palestrina’s death in 1994. Books apart, there has been considerable publishing activity on Palestrina (too numerous to list here) both before, but especially around, that anniversary. This includes various volumes of conference proceedings and studies, as well as a volume of the journal Early Music (22 (1994)).Two significant studies have been published by the Fondazione Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina as a result of a competition organized in connection with the 1994 celebrations: Reinhold Schloötterer, Palestrina compositore (Palestrina, 2001) and Veronica Franke, Palestrina’s Imitation Masses: A Study of Compositional Procedures (Palestrina, 2007). All of this has made a lot of new material available to any subsequent writer on the composer, and Della Sciucca has clearly been assiduous in keeping up to date with such developments.

Unlike the Master Musicians series, which divided the life from the works in two clearly defined sections, Della Sciucca deliberately seeks to bring the two aspects closer together, alternating biographical chapters and those dealing with the music, or blending the two. His stated aim is to seek connections between Palestrina’s life and his compositions, not in any simplistic one-to-one relationship, but trying to give a rounded picture of the composer in the context of the culture of his time, in which employment conditions or the exigencies of patrons might have called forth particular works or groups of works. This can be a fine line and just occasionally he strays over it, suggesting, for example, that the setting of the Good Friday Improperia in the largely autograph Codex 59 of the Lateran Basilica Archive might have been a personal response to the deaths of his son Rodolfo, his brother Silla, and his patron Cardinal Ippolito d’Este in the months leading up to Easter 1573. We know that this setting was performed in the Cappella Giulia in that year because the names of the singers were written on the piece by Palestrina and this is the only year that matches that list of singers. Della Sciucca does in fact say that there is no evidence for his deterministic suggestion of a link with personal loss. Composing a setting of the Improperia would have been a professional duty for Palestrina in this, as in any other year.

What particularly distinguishes this book from earlier accounts of Palestrina is the level of attention given to his madrigals. Indeed, if anything, it is the madrigals that dominate the discussion of the music here, rather than the sacred music. The masses, which have traditionally been the main focus of discussion, receive relatively little attention. That this is deliberate is clear from Della Sciucca’s introduction, where he states his strong belief that ‘it is precisely in the secular forms, and...