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Giovanni Gabrieli, Music for Christmas. Giovanni Gabrieli Music for Christmas in Saint Mark Basilicaof Venice, Jean Tubery. Giovanni Gabrieli's Christmas Motets Thomas Coryate, writing in his …More
Giovanni Gabrieli, Music for Christmas.

Giovanni Gabrieli Music for Christmas in Saint Mark Basilicaof Venice, Jean Tubery.

Giovanni Gabrieli's Christmas Motets

Thomas Coryate, writing in his Crudities hastily globbed up in five Moneth’s Travels was transported almost beyond all words by his discovery at the Venetian Church of San Rocco in 1608 of

“... the best musicke that ever I did in all my life both in the morning and the afternoon, so good that I would willingly goe an hundred miles a foote at any time to hear the like... this feast consisted principally of Musicke, which was both vocall and instrumentall, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so superexcellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like. But how others were affected with it I knew not: for mine own part I can say this, that I was for the time even rapt up with Saint Paul into the third heaven...”

Of the singers too he was equally enthused, for ‘there were three or foure so excellent that I think few or none in Christendome do excel them, especially one, who had such a peerelesse and (as I might in a manner say) such a supernaturall voice for sweetnesses, that I think there was, never a better singer in all the world...’.

We do not know for sure whose music it was that received such praise, but it could easily have been that of Giovanni Gabrieli. He was the most influential Venetian musical figure of his time, famed both as a composer and as a teacher of a number of distinguished pupils, including Heinrich Schütz, and his music was circulated widely through the publication of major collections of works in 1597 and posthumously in 1615. From 1585 to his death Gabrieli was organist at both the religious confraternity of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and at St Mark’s, Venice (where he was responsible not only for the music but also for procuring extra instrumentalists and singers for the more important festivals and feast days). In addition, after his uncle Andrea’s death in 1586 he took over the role as principal composer at St Mark’s.

Music in Venice was inextricably bound up with civic life, for state processions, civic ceremonies and some forty main religious festivals each year demanded music to match the splendour of the occasion. The Feast of Christmas demanded some of the grandest and most spectacular music of all. In 1607 Jean-Baptiste Duval of the French Embassy reported that at St Mark’s there were more than one thousand candles, sixty huge torches and silver lamps, together with eight choirs of voices and instruments ‘filling the church with a grand harmony’. Even allowing for enthusiastic exaggeration, it must have been a spectacular occasion. Little wonder that some of Gabrieli’s most magnificent music was composed for Christmas in St Mark’s.

Most of Gabrieli’s motets were printed in two large collections, one published posthumously. Many are settings of texts sung on the major Venetian state festivals and are for two or more choirs in the tradition of cori spezzati. Although it is hard to date works exactly, there is a clear change of style in his later works, confirmed by the type of music that his pupils were writing. In all his works, but especially in those for more than two choirs, Gabrieli’s flair for sonorities is particularly evident, showing the ultimate development of the old motet style.

Quem vidistis pastores is one of Gabrieli’s finest works. Scored in sixteen parts it comes from the posthumous volume Sacrae Symphoniae... liber secundus of 1615. After the opening orchestral sinfonia, scored for two choirs of instruments and showing Gabrieli’s love of lower sonorities, the work shows elements of the later chamber style as the six singers introduce themselves one by one, accompanied by the newly introduced basso continuo. This small-scale texture continues until the full ensemble unites with awestruck majesty at “O magnum mysterium”. Here there are marvellous sonorities and a whole variety of textures, with grand flourishes for the word ‘iacentem’, a cutting down of the texture for ‘in praesepio’, magnificent block chords at ‘et admirabile’ and a sumptuous ending.

Audite principles, too, dates from the later collection, and is scored for two five-part choirs, one six-part choir and continuo. From the opening declamatory statement, heard three times as an introduction to each choir, to the colossal block of sound as all seventeen parts unite at the midpoint before launching into the dancing triple-time ‘gaudeamus’, here is music of considerable complexity and great splendour. The final ‘Alleluia’, back in duple metre after another dance-like section, ends the work with due solemnity.

O magnum mysterium comes from an earlier source, the 1587 collection Concerti per voci e stromenti musicali, and has a mood of subdued reverence, fitting for its subject matter, until syncopation breaks out for the closing ‘Alleluia’. In keeping with the relatively simple setting, the first choir is scored …
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