Sounds a semitone higher than score
Missa Missa Maria zart
Composer: Jacob Obrecht (ca. 1457/58 - 1505)
Performers: The Tallis Scholars, dir. Peter Phillips
Score editor: Charles Young
Kyrie: 0:00
Gloria: 7:12
Credo: 23:13
Sanctus: 39:00
Benedictus: 47:50
Agnus Dei: 55:07
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"To describe Obrecht’s Missa Maria zart (‘Mass for gentle Mary’) as a ‘great work’ is true in two respects. It is a masterpiece of sustained and largely abstract musical thought; and it is possibly the longest polyphonic setting of the Mass Ordinary ever written [...]. How it was possible for Obrecht to conceive something so completely outside the normal experience of his time is one of the most fascinating riddles in Renaissance music.
Jacob Obrecht was born in Ghent and died in Ferrara [...] as the leading representative of Northern polyphonic style, an idiom which his Missa Maria zart explores to the full.
[...]
The special sound world of Maria zart was not in fact created by anything unusual in its choice of voices. Many four-part Masses of the later fifteenth century were written for a similar grouping: low soprano, as here, or high alto as the top part; two roughly equal tenor lines, one of them normally carrying the chant when it is quoted in long notes; and bass. The unusual element is to a certain extent the range of the voices - they are all required to sing at extremes of their registers and to make very wide leaps - but more importantly the actual detail of the writing: the protracted sequences against the long chant notes, the instrumental-like repetitions and imitations.
It is this detail which explains the sheer length of this Mass. At thirty-two bars the melody of Maria zart is already quite long as a paraphrase model [...] and it duly becomes longer when it is stated in very protracted note-lengths. This happens repeatedly in all the movements, the most substantial augmentation being times twelve. But what ultimately makes the setting so extremely elaborate is Obrecht’s technique of tirelessly playing with the many short phrases of this melody, quoting snippets of it in different voices against each other, constantly varying the extent of the augmentation even within a single statement, taking motifs from it which can then be turned into other melodies and sequences, stating the phrases in antiphony between different voices. By making a kaleidoscope of the melody in these ways he literally saturated all the voice-parts in all the sections with references to it. To identify them all would be a near impossible task. The only time that Maria zart is quoted in full from beginning to end without interruption, fittingly, is at the conclusion of the Mass, in the soprano part of the third Agnus Dei [...].
At the same time as constantly quoting from the Maria zart melody Obrecht developed some idiosyncratic ways of adorning it. Perhaps the first thing to strike the ear is that the texture of the music is remarkably homogeneous. [...] This sound is partly achieved by use of motifs, often derived from the tune, which keep the rhythmic stability of the original but go on to acquire a life of their own. Most famously these motifs become sequences [...] some of them with a dazzling number of repetitions [...]. Perhaps this method is at its most beautiful at the beginning of the Sanctus. In addition the motifs are used in imitation between the voices, [...]. It is the impression which Obrecht gives of having had an inexhaustible supply of these motifs and melodic ideas, free or derived, that gives this piece so much of its vitality. The mesmerizing effect of these musical snippets unceasingly passing back and forth around the long notes of the central melody is at the heart of the particular sound world of this great work.
When Obrecht wrote his Missa Maria zart is not certain. [...] The idea that this Mass, stylistically at odds with much of Obrecht’s other known late works and anyway set apart from all his other compositions, was something of a swansong is particularly appealing. We shall never know exactly what Obrecht was hoping to prove in it, but by going to the extremes he did he set his contemporaries a challenge in a certain kind of technique which they proved unable or unwilling to rival."
~Peter Phillips
Source: www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc...
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2 авг 2024
