Missa Papae Marcelli

Roman Catholic propagandists, writing against the tide of early 19th-century secularisation, raised Palestrina to hallowed status as the “saviour of church music”. The composer’s reputation had been established long before his death in 1594, thanks above all to the great strength and beauty of his Missa Papae Marcelli (“Mass for Pope Marcellus”), which emerged as the ideal model for polyphonic settings of the Latin Mass. The neat melodic lines and clarity of Palestrina’s counterpoint, with its emphasis on projecting the sacred text, conformed to an edict issued in the early 1560s by the bishops and church authorities of the reforming Council of Trent that musical settings of the sacred words of the Mass should “reach tranquillity into the ears and hearts of those who hear them”. The work, far from being austere, conveys genuine spiritual fervour with its many changes of vocal texture and sudden shifts of mood, miraculously so within the compact “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei” and “Deum de Deo” and the sublime closing “Agnus Dei”. It is possible that Palestrina wrote the most famous of his 103 surviving masses soon after he became a singer in the Sistine Chapel Choir in 1555, perhaps in response to a request from the recently elected Pope Marcellus II that music written for Good Friday and the preceding days of Holy Week should intensify the sombre contemplation of Christ’s betrayal, trial and crucifixion. Although Marcellus’ death just three weeks later would have called for a new memorial mass, it appears more likely that Palestrina composed the Missa Papae Marcelli in 1562 while the Council of Trent was debating the true and proper form of church music.