Overview {{Listen|header=Agnus Dei from Missa in Festis Apostolorum {{Listen|image=none|help=no|header=Madrigal Vestiva i colli - Prima parte Palestrina left hundreds of compositions, including 105
masses, 68
offertories, at least 140
madrigals and more than 300
motets. In addition, there are at least 72
hymns, 35
magnificats, 11
litanies, and four or five sets of
lamentations. The
Gloria melody from Palestrina's
Magnificat Tertii Toni (1591) is widely used today in the resurrection hymn tune,
Victory (The Strife Is O'er). His attitude toward madrigals was somewhat enigmatic: whereas in the preface to his collection of
Canticum canticorum (Song of Songs) motets (1584) he renounced the setting of profane texts, only two years later he was back in print with Book II of his secular madrigals (some of these being among the finest compositions in the medium). He published just two collections of madrigals with profane texts, one in 1555 and another in 1586. The other two collections were spiritual madrigals, a genre beloved by the proponents of the Counter-Reformation. Palestrina's masses show how his compositional style developed over time. His
Missa sine nomine seems to have been particularly attractive to
Johann Sebastian Bach, who studied and performed it while writing the
Mass in B minor. Most of Palestrina's masses appeared in thirteen volumes printed between 1554 and 1601, the last seven published after his death. One of his most important works, the
Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass) has been historically associated with erroneous information involving the Council of Trent. According to this tale (which forms the basis of
Hans Pfitzner's opera
Palestrina), it was composed in order to persuade the
Council of Trent that a draconian ban on the
polyphonic treatment of text in sacred music (as opposed, that is, to a more directly intelligible homophonic treatment) was unnecessary. However, more recent scholarship shows that this mass was in fact composed before the cardinals convened to discuss the ban (possibly as much as 10 years before). His early works were strongly influenced by the
Franco-Flemish school, reflecting the trainings of his masters. However, his aesthetic evolution soon shifted toward a progressive simplification of polyphony. This did not, however, imply a reduction in technical complexity, but rather a desire to discipline the excess of freedom that characterized much of the Flemish generation in their interpretation of text, favoring expressive clarity and the transparency of musical textures, while simultaneously emphasizing specific meanings through musical devices. The text in his works takes on such importance that it often defines the entire structure of the composition. The main tool of Palestrina's music is the melodic line, and was always conceived as polyphonic within the ancient
modal system.
Gregorian chant remained a central reference, offering him an enormous repertoire of melodies that he adapted and enriched according to his own criteria, often turning the sources to an almost unrecognizable point. At the time, it was common practice to borrow melodies from others as a starting point for composing new works, and in addition to Gregorian chant, he adapted ideas from several other composers, both past and contemporaries. However, a significant corpus of pieces has survived, especially motets, in which he gave full freedom to his imagination. There is no proof of him composing purely instrumental works, but according to the custom of the time, the vocal parts could often be doubled by the organ or by a variable combination of wind and string instruments. According to Knud Jeppesen, "proportion and serenity are the main tendencies in Palestrina's music, and perhaps in no other style the passionate impulse, understood as violent and extreme excitement, is so disciplined and even so deliberately left out." This control is highlighted by the extremely careful management of elements that could attract too much attention within the musical phrases, such as syllabic and metrical accentuation, rhythm, melodic leaps, and dissonance. Overall, his work is both conservative and progressive. Conservative because he abandoned the habit of florid ornamentation, remained faithful to the foundations of Gregorian chant, rejected Mannerist artificiality, and disciplined freedom in polyphony, moving toward a synthetic standard that can be called classical, due to its economy of means, its great formal balance and its great clarity of texture and proportion: a model of order, discipline, and reverence for the past and tradition, a symbol of everything the Church sought to establish in a time of disorder and conflict. On the other hand, his attention to text intelligibility, his use of
homophonic passages in a polyphonic context, his empirical understanding of
harmonic connections, his care for sonority and color, his control of dissonance, his extensive use of
polychoralism, sound groupings and contrasts, as well as a distinctly classical aesthetic at a time when classicism was in decline, make him an innovator, a forerunner of the tonal system and the founder of a highly influential school that endures nowadays.
Secular music Palestrina is of the highest importance in the
history of music, especially for the great influence he had on church music, but his secular work, of notable quality, has been largely overlooked by critics. It focuses on madrigals, with at least 140 pieces that have come down to us. This is a lesser-known group of pieces, generally overlooked compared to his sacred works, but they remain compositions generally characterized by great skills in illustrating the content of the text with pure musical tools, generally nature, but sometimes also incorporating love or erotic poetry. He is best remembered for being one of the first to set
sonnets to music and for the exceptional quality of the pieces with texts by Petrarch. However, these works did not make a significant contribution to the evolution of the genre in the 16th century, mainly due to their lack of experimental character and their tendency to control the most extreme emotional expressions, limitations that were not observed by the leading madrigalists of the time, with the consequence that this collection is smaller and less expressively varied. A notable exception is
Vestiva i colli (1566), which was extremely popular at the time, spawning hundreds of imitations in the fifty years following its publication. Despite the limitations imposed on expressiveness, some critics believe that the intrinsic quality of the pieces is equal to that of the best compositions of the period.
The "Palestrina Style" One of the hallmarks of Palestrina's music is that
dissonances are typically relegated to the
"weak" beats in a measure. This produced a smoother and more
consonant type of
polyphony which is now considered to be definitive of late Renaissance music, given Palestrina's position as Europe's leading composer in the wake of
Josquin des Prez (d. 1521). The "Palestrina style" taught in college courses covering Renaissance
counterpoint is often based on the codification by the 18th-century composer and theorist
Johann Joseph Fux, published as
Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus, 1725). Citing Palestrina as his model, Fux divided counterpoint into five
species (hence the term "
species counterpoint"), designed as exercises for the student, which deployed progressively more elaborate rhythmic combinations of voices while adhering to strict harmonic and melodic requirements. The method was widely adopted and was the main basis of contrapuntal training in the 19th century, but Fux had introduced a number of simplifications to the Palestrina style, notably the obligatory use of a
cantus firmus in
semibreves, which were corrected by later authors such as
Knud Jeppesen and
R. O. Morris. Palestrina's music conforms in many ways to Fux's rules, particularly in the fifth species but does not fit his pedagogical format. The main insight, that the "pure" style of polyphony achieved by Palestrina followed an invariable set of stylistic and combinational requirements, was justified. Fux's manual was endorsed by his contemporary
J.S. Bach, who himself arranged two of Palestrina's masses for performance. According to Fux, Palestrina had established and followed these basic guidelines: • The flow of music is dynamic, not rigid or static. • Melody should contain few leaps between notes. (Jeppesen: "The line is the starting point of Palestrina's style".) ==Reputation==