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Goldberg Magazine # 26 (02/2004)
Goldberg a cessé de publier avec le # 54
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Goldberg is no longer available. # 54 was the last issue.

MUSIC AT COURT OF THE CATHOLIC KINGS

by: Michael Noone

On Wednesday, 26 November, 500 years ago, Queen Isabella I of Castile died at the age of 54. The thirty years of her reign (1474-1504) saw the conquest of Granada, the establishment of law and order in Castile and Aragon, the founding of the Inquisition, and the “discovery” of new worlds which was to impact so profoundly upon Spanish society and culture in the following 500 years. As patrons of the arts, Ferdinand and Isabella presided over a period of extraordinary creativity that witnessed the arts being harnessed as a powerful tool of propaganda and image building. The Catholic Monarchs became masters of communicating their political agenda through a vast army of architects, sculptors, painters, decorative artists and artisans who were capable of translating their ideas into magnificent works of art whose significance and importance speak to us today with a surprising directness and clarity. No one who has contemplated their tombs in the Royal Chapel in Granada, or who has wondered at the shields and coats of arms decorating the transept of the monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo, could doubt the sheer persuasive power of these impressive monuments.

By Michael Noone

The arts of sound

In the realm of music, the period of their rule has left us some of the greatest treasures of Spanish music. Yet the extraordinarily rich musical repertory bequeathed to us from the period of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella remains largely unexplored. How many recordings, for instance, are there of the works of Juan de Anchieta, Pedro de Escobar, Martín de Ribaflecha, Francisco Peñalosa, Francisco de la Torre, or Pere Joan Aldomar? And how often do we hear their music programmed in concerts? And then there is the music that is lost forever; much of the music heard during their reign in the court, chapels, cathedrals, and civic ceremonies was improvised. And most of the music heard in the taverns, streets, plazas and work places of the lowers classes is likewise lost forever. And while we may be amazed at the quantity and quality of music preserved in such monuments of Spanish music as the famous cancioneros and the manuscript polyphonic choirbooks, these represent but a tiny proportion of the music committed to paper and parchment by composers and scribes during this period.

In a recently-published study entitled Música y músicos en la corte de Fernando el Católico, 1474-1516, Tess Knighton presents us with a magnificent and fascinating examination of the soundscape that enveloped the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs with melody, harmony, rhythm, and poetry. For the arts of sound accompanied almost every aspect of the lives, both private and public, of these rulers. Indeed the court of the Catholic Monarchs became a focus for music making, attracting large numbers of instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Interestingly, the majority of these musicians were Spanish. This is remarkable and significant, because Ferdinand and Isabella modelled so much of their cultural patronage on the styles and magnificence of the Burgundian court, and in doing so employed a large number of foreign artists and artisans. The chief architect of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo, for example, was Juan Guas. Born in Lyons, he travelled to Spain with a group of Flemish artists whose work defined the Hispano-Flemish Gothic style. Yet the overwhelming majority of the musicians employed by Ferdinand and Isabella were native Spaniards.

Isabella was a wife, a mother, a Queen, and, of course, a devoted believer. She was also a warrior and a scholar. We find all these aspects of Isabella’s character in the songs, motets, masses, and other musical works that were played and sung in her court

Isabella was a wife, a mother, a Queen, and, of course, a devoted believer. She was also a warrior and a scholar. We find all these aspects of Isabella’s character in the songs, motets, masses, and other musical works that were played and sung in her court harp, lute, psaltery, and organ reminds us that no aspect of the Monarch’s lives went unattended by music. The illustration’s emphasis of Isabella’s personal devotion and piety legitimates her sovereignty and also underlines a feminine relationship with the Virgin that no male monarch or subject could achieve.

Like the Queen of Heaven herself, Isabella was a wife, a mother, a Queen, and, of course, a devoted believer. She was also a warrior and a scholar. We find all these aspects of Isabella’s character in the songs, motets, masses, and other musical works that were played and sung in her court. In particular, as if providing a sound track to the miniature in her Book of Hours, we find a strong emphasis on the Virgin Mary, as much in liturgical music, as in secular music. Related to this is a parallel emphasis on feminine experience, a perspective shared by the Queen of Castile and the Queen of Heaven. The simple peasant girl who pours out her heart to her mother in the arresting quintuple time of Juan de Anchieta’s Con amores mi madre invites us into the intimate world of confidences exchanged between mother and daughter. Its gentle undulating phrases breathe with the rising and falling consolations and disappointments of love. Far from an isolated example, however, this wonderfully rich musical vignette is but one of a group of pieces that we find scattered through the cancioneros of the period:

I fell asleep, mother,
with love in my heart.

Asleep I dreamt
of what my heart pondered
Love consoled me
more than I deserved.

Love’s favour
lulled me to sleep;
the loyalty I offered him
consoled my pain.

[Con amores, mi madre,
con amores m’adormí.

Assi dormida soñava
lo que’l coraçón velava,
que’l amor me consolava
con más bien que mereçi.
Adormeçiome el favor
qu’amor me dió con amor;
dió descanso a mi dolor
la fe con que le serví.]

The Song Books

The repertory of secular music from the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella is preserved in five cancioneros or song books. The earliest of these is the Cancionero de la Colombina, so-called after Fernando Colón, the second and illegitimate son of the explorer. As a traveller and passionate collector of music books, he left a collection of over 15,000 volumes to Seville Cathedral on his death. He purchased the cancionero in 1534, although many of its almost 100 compositions were composed before 1490. Most of its compositions are anonymous. There are villancicos, songs in the courtly love tradition, and a dozen Latin liturgical compositions. The texts of these, like many of the vernacular pieces, proclaim the Virgin’s praises. Others, like this innocent pastoral lyric, perfectly capture a recurrent pastoral theme through candid direct speech:

Why can’t I make him love me,
such a downhearted wretch am I?
The girl said to the shepherd:
‘Look shepherd, what breasts!’
The shepherd replied:
‘I’d rather two mushrooms,
my pouch, my sheepskin jacket,
my staff and my poniard,
my tinder and my steel.’

[¿Commo no le andaré yo,
mesquina, tan desmayda?
Dixo la niña al pastor:
‘Mira, pastor, qué tetas’.

Dixo el pastor a la niña:
‘Más me querría dos setas,
mi çurron, mi çamarrón,
mi cayada y mi almarada
y mi yesca y mi eslabón.’]

We may imagine that such pieces as these formed a regular part of courtly entertainment where nobles and royalty would come into contact with an idealized peasantry. If such pastoral themes provided rulers with some escape from the daily concerns of governance, others could me more overtly political. In celebration of Fernando’s marriage to Isabella, for instance, we find another anonymous song in the Cancionero de la Colombina:

In loud cruel voices,
the Catalonians blaspheme:
‘Begone, Duke Juan,
King Ferdinand is married.’

Return, Barcelona
to your true Lord,
Françia juega dedos val:
¡Sus, e mate por la dona!

Throughout the world,
courier come and go shouting
‘Begone, Duke Juan,
King Ferdinand is married.’

[Muy crüeles bozes dan
catalanes blasfemando:
¡Fuera, fuera, duque Juan,
que es casado el Rey Fernando!

Torna, torna, Barçelona,
a tu señor natural
Françia juega dedos val:
¡Sus, e mate por la dona!

Correos vienen, correos van
por todo’l mundo gritando:
¡Fuera, fuera, duque Juan,
que es casado el Rey Fernando!]

Of course such topical texts as these help us enormously in dating the pieces, even though we remain ignorant of the authors of either text or music. Obviously Muy crüeles bozes dan could not have been written before the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469. Like many of the pieces in the Cancionero de la Colombina, it survives additionally in a much larger and more recent collection of songs preserved in Madrid’s Royal Palace.

The surprisingly petite Cancionero de Palacio is in fact one of the towering monuments of Spanish music not only of its period, but of all time. Despite the loss of over 90 pieces, this elegant manuscript preserves over 450 works by more than fifty composers, among whom are numbered the most important names of the period: Johannes Cornago, Juan del Triana, Madrid, Juan del Encina, Francisco Milano, Pedro de Escobar and Juan Ponce among many others.

And if the music represents the finest of the age, so too do the texts. Indeed literary distinction is a hallmark of this anthology. The presence of works by the Count of Cifuentes, Jorge Manrique, the Marqués de Santillana, and Juan de Tapia must reflect, to some extent, the tastes of a monarch who at the age of 31 undertook to study Latin. Isabella demonstrated throughout her life a keen sense of the importance and value of humanistic learning not only through her friendship with the influential Mendoza family and her interest in the work of leading scholar and Latin philologist Antonio de Nebrija, but also her interest in and encouragement of the exploitation of such radical new technologies as the movable-type press.

One of the treasures of the British Library in London is a stunningly illustrated breviary that was presented to Isabella in or before 1497. The dedicatory opening of this superb manuscript shows the arms of Isabella herself alongside those of her son, the Infante Juan and his bride Margaret of Austria on the left side, and on the right the arms of her second daughter, the Infanta Juana and her spouse Philip of Austria, the Duke of Burgundy. Of the many remarkable aspects of this lavish manuscript copied in Flanders, one stands out in the present context: the number and variety of musical performances depicted in the illuminations. Psalm 80, for instance, is illustrated by King David surrounded by a dozen musicians playing a variety of plucked strings, wind, and percussion instruments. While Psalm 95 gives us a group of angels singing from a musical score together with players of organ, lute, harp, shawm and psaltery. Psalms 115 to 121 are similarly illustrated by a dazzling array of instrumentalists and singers. The point is not that these illustrate, or were ever intended to illustrate, actual performances or practices. Rather they show music and sound as essential and integral to daily life, whether for entertainment or integrated into every aspect of the daily liturgy.

Sacred music

Among the greatest musical treasures left to us from this period are a number of polyphonic manuscripts that preserve a repertory that was associated in one way or another with the court of the Catholic Monarchs. The most important are preserved in Seville, Tarazona, and Barcelona. Whether taken individually, or as a group, these manuscripts present scholars with some of Spanish musicology’s most intractable and complex puzzles. They also preserve some of the finest music ever composed. This area of Spanish musicology is a minefield of riddles, puzzles, and uncertainties.

To take but one example, the O bone Jesu made popular by David Munrow in his famous 1976 recording Art of the Netherlands is variously thought to be the work of Loyset Compère, Juan de Anchieta, Francisco de Peñalosa and/or Antonio de Ribera. Its appearance in no fewer than eleven different manuscripts and one Italian print testifies to its popularity in its own day. It is precisely in this piece that Tess Knighton isolates a stylistic gesture that seems to be one of the characteristics of liturgical music associated with the Catholic Monarchs. At the words “O mesias”, the composer (whoever he might be!) brings all four voices together in long slow notes that declaim the words emphatically and unmistakably. Knighton convincingly relates this kind of musical ‘genuflection’ to a predilection for devotional texts that, like the books of hours themselves, encourage the individual to identify with Christ’s suffering and death. Indeed, as Knighton explains, the personal devotion and piety that impregnates such passages in the music of Peñalosa and Anchieta was closely related to the Catholic Monarch’s political agenda. The unity of Spain under Catholicism depended on the expulsion or conversion of all heterodox elements. Slow sustained musical passages that highlighted key parts of devotional texts would advance this cause by appealing first to the sense and second to the intellect. Indeed, the passages were so powerful that they could be expected to indoctrinate the faithful and convert the heretic.

The repertory of sacred music associated with this period in Spain is unlike the music composed elsewhere in Europe in a number of other ways, too. Whereas cycles consisting of the five movements of the Mass ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus) were cultivated to a very sophisticated level in the Low Countries, they remained relatively neglected by Spanish composers. Two fascinating examples, however, of composite settings survive for our period. The famous Tarazona manuscript preserves two cycles that are the work of a number of different composers. We still cannot be sure, however, whether these Mass cycles represent a collaborative effort or whether they were composed separately and drawn together to form a cycle at a later date.

Neither was the motet cultivated in this period to the extent that it was elsewhere. Rather than seeking out their texts from the liturgy, our composers seem to have been attracted by devotional texts that emphasized Marian, eucharistic or penitential themes. Peñalosa’s Precor te seems perfectly to exemplify this fascination:

I entreat Thee, Lord Jesus Christ, on account of that inestimable love when Thou, King of Heaven, hanging upon the cross, with Divine love, with saddened spirit, with profoundest sorrow, with disturbed senses, with pierced heart, with bloody wounds, with outstretched hands, with distended veins, with clamorous mouth, with rasping voice, with pale countenance, with the pallor of death: that Thou shalt show mercy to me for my many sins.

[Te ruego, Señor Jesucristo, por aquella inestimable caridad, cuando tu. Rey celestial pedías en la cruz con divina caridad, con el alma afligida, con tristísimo gesto, turbados los sentidos, traspasado el corazón y magullado el cuerpo, con sangrientes llagas, las manos extendidas, las venas dilatadas, con la voz suplicante y enronquecida, con pálida faz, con mortal color: que me seas propicio por la multitud de mis pecados.]

If we compare Precor te with Anchieta’s Con amores, mi madre, certain similarities and differences emerge. The Latin text would only have been intelligible to an educated élite, whereas the vernacular setting would have been much more widely accessible and, with its simple rhyme scheme, more easily committed to memory. Yet both are intimate expressions of deep emotion expressed in the first person. Neither is concerned with abstract theology. Real human emotions, needs and desires form the subject matter. And those needs and desires are expressed in graphic images and very physical language. There are no elaborate metaphors or poetic conceits. And in each case, the composer has elaborated the text in a way that emphasizes these very qualities.

The 500th anniversary of Queen Isabella’s death provides us with an ideal opportunity to explore one of the most fascinating repertories of music, both sacred and secular, ever produced. It is a repertory that remains largely unexplored, and that deserves a great deal more attention from musicologists, musicians, and music lovers.

'I remain profoundly grateful to Dr Tess Knighton of Clare College, Cambridge for her assistance in preparing this article. Her Música y músicos en la corte de Fernando el Católico, 1474-1516, published by the Institución Fernando el Católico in Zaragoza in 2001 is the most recent and finest study of the period available. I am especially grateful to Ken Kreitner for allowing me to read, prior to publication, his forthcoming book The Church Music of Fifteenth-Century Spain.'