The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · a Mass for six unaccompanied voices on the Ordinary of the Roman rite · Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus with Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, scored as one work with its Latin text · about half an hour in performance
Mode
Sacred polyphony for unaccompanied voices; a free Mass, on no chant and no model, alternating imitation and declamation
Mythos
The Creed’s story set whole: creation, incarnation, sacrifice, resurrection, judgment and the life to come, sung by the church as one body
Phase
Five movements in the order of the rite; the long prayers slow and melismatic, the Gloria and Credo swift and syllabic; the voices widening to seven at the close
Presentation
Concert and liturgical music; the Ordinary of the Roman Mass in Latin, for soprano, alto, two tenors and two basses, without instruments
Register
The sublime of order and stillness: luminous imitation, clear declamation, governed consonance; no dread and no display
Scale
One rite, one choir, the Creed’s cosmos; 287 words set in polyphony in about half an hour
Governing Proposition
Six voices, each singable alone, set the Ordinary of the Mass so that the short prayers are spun out in long imitation and the Creed is spoken clause by clause, handed from group to group and heard. The wager of the work is that many voices can say one word together without any of them ceasing to be a voice, and that polyphony and clarity are not opposed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Mass begins with its shortest text: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. Six words, counted once each, and the setting gives them four or five minutes. The voices enter one after another in imitation, each taking up the figure the last has begun, and the music rises through the six of them, soprano, alto, two tenors and two basses, into a texture that is full and luminous before any of the words has been finished.
The rate is the first thing the Kyrie says. It sets about one and a third words a minute, and it holds the prayer still rather than stating it: mercy asked for is drawn out until the asking is the whole of the act. The Credo, three movements on, will set its words about thirteen times as fast. The same six voices do both, and the difference between the two rates is the plan of the work, decided before a word of doctrine has been sung.
Nothing here is borrowed. The Mass is freely composed: no plainchant runs through it as a cantus firmus, and no motet or chanson stands behind it as its acknowledged model. The Kyrie’s imitation is the standard design of its age, the one a motet would use, and it is filled with great beauty rather than rethought. What it lays down is the material and the sound: six singable lines, consonance governed strictly, and no voice ever reduced to filling.
Movement II
The Gloria opens with a single voice: the celebrant intones Gloria in excelsis Deo, and the choir begins at Et in terra pax, and on earth peace. From there the manner changes. The text is set largely syllabically and in chords, a syllable to a note, the voices moving together, and each phrase is handed to a different group of the six, so that each new phrase arrives in a new colour.
The Gloria sets eighty words in five or six minutes, about fifteen a minute against the Kyrie’s one and a third. Each phrase is said once and passed on. Nothing is repeated for its own sake, and nothing is lost: the words fall one at a time and are heard, though six independent lines are carrying them. The full six are kept back for the points of weight, and the brightness of the movement comes from the changing of its groups rather than from their size.
This is the work’s answer to the question of its decade: whether polyphony could carry words intelligibly. The inherited Mass of the northern masters, Josquin and Gombert and Clemens, wove its voices into a pervasive imitation in which the words were often lost. Chordal declamation was already in the practice of the age, and the answer here is a synthesis of what was known, carried further and more beautifully. The declamation sets the stress of the Latin with exactness, and every line remains a line.
Movement III
The celebrant intones Credo in unum Deum, and the choir takes up the rest: 159 words, more than half of all the words the Mass sets, in nine or ten minutes. The Gloria and Credo together carry five sixths of the text in less than half the time. The Creed is a list, and the setting speaks it clause by clause, changing its groups with the clauses, so that the order of the text is heard in the order of the voices.
Through it the work holds the orders the Creed names: heaven and earth, caeli et terrae; all things seen and unseen; history, sub Pontio Pilato; the judgment of vivos et mortuos, the living and the dead; and the life to come. The story is the largest the West carries, from creation through incarnation, sacrifice and resurrection to the last things. The setting builds it into sound: the full choir held for the points of weight, the groups changing with the turns of the story, the clauses of Et incarnatus est and Et resurrexit where the movement gathers itself.
The story is not the work’s own. Every Mass of the century set it, in the same order and the same words, and no person or place in it belongs to this setting. What belongs to it is the tact of the articulation: the Credo is the longest movement and the swiftest, and it never hurries, never blurs, never lets a voice become accompaniment. The orders it names are held as the Creed holds them, in a sequence the music makes audible rather than one structure it makes new.
Movement IV
The Sanctus returns to the manner of the Kyrie: imitative, melismatic and slow. Twenty-five words, with the Benedictus and the Hosanna, take six and a half to eight and a half minutes, about three a minute. The Hosanna comes round again after the Benedictus, as the rite requires. This is the most separable stretch of the work, spacious by convention rather than by argument, and the form here is the standard imitative design of its age.
The craft is at its plainest and its finest here. Every line moves by step, balanced by leap and return. Every dissonance is prepared and resolved within the rules this style later taught. Six voices, three of them low, never thicken into mud, because the spacing is managed chord by chord. Some of the imitation is fine routine for its maker, and the means are narrow by choice, with no chromatic or harmonic adventure; within them, nothing is out of place.
The one law of the work holds across its whole width. The Kyrie’s long melisma and the Credo’s swift declamation obey the same voice-leading, the same governed consonance and dissonance, the same principle of the singable line, whether the lines move together in chords or apart in imitation. There is no passage in another style. The range governed is narrow, one register of feeling and one sound of unaccompanied voices, and the distance between the extremes, real in rate and texture, is small in character.
Movement V
The Agnus Dei is in two sections, seventeen words in six or seven minutes. The second widens the choir to seven voices, the work’s one structural addition to its forces, and it is the close: the last petition of the Mass, dona nobis pacem, grant us peace, sung in the widest and most radiant sound of the work. The added voice is carried without strain. The Mass ends where its scoring is fullest, on the words of peace.
The title names Marcellus II, pope for about three weeks in 1555. The Mass was printed in Rome in 1567, in Palestrina’s second book of masses, and when it was composed is not known. A legend grew around it: that it persuaded the Council of Trent not to ban polyphony from the church. The legend is not history. The clarity it praises is in the score, and others were solving the same problem in the same decade.
The reach is real nonetheless. The Mass became the name of the solution and the emblem of church music saved. Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum of 1725 set Palestrina’s style as the basis for teaching counterpoint, and it was taught for three centuries; the Cecilian reform of the nineteenth century took it as its banner; Hans Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina, of 1917, turns on the making of this Mass. Its presence has been continuous since the sixteenth century, and it has never had to be revived. The rite it sets has lost its universal use, and the work now lives mostly in concert and on record, its words still heard.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan is the rite’s: the Ordinary fixes the five movements and every clause, so the subtractive test must ask what the setting adds. In the Gloria and Credo it adds almost nothing idle. At about fifteen words a minute each phrase is said once and handed to the next group of voices, and the full six are held back until the text needs them. The widening to seven voices in the second Agnus Dei is the work’s one structural addition, and it is the close. The give lies in the melismatic movements: the Kyrie’s three sections and the Sanctus with its repeated Hosanna are spacious by convention, not by argument, and the Sanctus is the most separable stretch.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: many voices can speak one word together without any of them ceasing to be a voice. The Gloria and Credo show it as fact. Six independent lines, each singable alone, are cut so that the words, Et incarnatus est among them, reach every listener at once. That is a disclosure of the church as a body, made through sound, and it is credited in full. A second lies in the contrast of rates: the Kyrie spends four or five minutes on six words, and shows prayer as duration rather than statement. Held down by the line between mood and meaning: much of what the Mass gives is order and calm, the doctrine is the rite’s, and what it discloses is a communal stance before God more than a human condition.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Height is reached often, in one register: the sublime of order and stillness, never of terror. The Kyrie’s opening imitation rises through the six voices into a full and luminous texture. In the Credo the clauses of incarnation and resurrection are where the setting gathers its weight. The second Agnus Dei, with its seventh voice, is the widest sound in the work, and its last dona nobis pacem, grant us peace, is the close. No movement lacks an elevation. Held below the top because the register is single, the warm sublime of consonance: there is no dread, no grief pressed to breaking, no contrast of sublimes such as Winterreise reaches, and the Gloria’s declamation is clarity more than transport.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The archetype is the largest the West carries: creation, incarnation, sacrifice, resurrection, the judgment of vivos et mortuos, the living and the dead, and the life to come. In the Credo the setting makes it bear weight. The six voices are not all used at once; the groups change with the clauses and the full choir is held for the points of weight, so that the story is articulated in the number of voices singing it. That is myth built in sound, not only allusion. But the story is the rite’s, set by every Mass of the century in the same order, and the particular is thin: no person or place belongs to this work except through its title. Winterreise made a myth of a man and the weather; this work receives its myth and articulates it with great tact.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the Franco-Flemish Mass: Josquin, Gombert, Clemens, Morales and Palestrina’s own earlier masses, dense pervasive imitation in which the words are often lost. The departures: a free Mass, on no chant and no model; the Gloria and Credo turned to chordal declamation passed among groups, so that the text is audible in six parts; a texture brightened and thinned at will; dissonance governed more strictly than in the northern masters. The stake was the question of its decade, whether polyphony could carry words intelligibly. What holds the axis here is that the turn refines a proven path. Chordal declamation was already in the practice of the age, and the art is a synthesis, not a break. The risk was small: a papal singer refining the style of his own chapel.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that clarity and polyphony are not opposed. Declamation passed among shifting groups of voices is the instrument: no line is reduced to accompaniment, yet the words fall one at a time and are heard. Make the Gloria and Credo full imitation and the words go; make them plain chords throughout and the six voices stop being six. The form also knows time: the melismatic movements are slow because they set prayer as duration, the wordy ones swift because they set statement. The voice count is form too, widening to seven for the last petition for peace. Held below the top because the five-movement frame is the rite’s, and in the Kyrie and Sanctus the form is the standard imitative design of its age, filled supremely, not rethought.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and of four and a half centuries: the Mass was copied, arranged and cited by theorists, and it became the model of the stile antico. Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) set Palestrina’s style as the basis for teaching counterpoint, and Knud Jeppesen’s study of Palestrina’s dissonance read this music closely. Questions stay open: the work’s date; whether it answers its pope or the Council of Trent at all; how far its clarity is policy and how far art; how it should sound, in pitch, tempo and choir. Held below Winterreise and the Goldberg Variations because much of the yield concerns the work’s history and style rather than new meaning found in it on return, and much of the literature reads Palestrina’s style as a whole, of which this Mass is the emblem.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Scored in its field, the sacred polyphony of the 1560s and its line. The intrinsic force is real: the Mass showed, in the most ambitious scoring of its kind, that six-part polyphony could keep its text audible without giving up the independence of its lines. But that reorganisation was shared with others solving the same problem in the same decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide and very long. The Mass became the name of the solution; the legend made it the emblem of church music saved; Palestrina’s style, this work first, was codified by Fux and taught for three centuries; the Cecilian reform of the nineteenth century took it as its banner; Pfitzner built an opera on its making. The reach is discounted because much of it belongs to the legend and to the style, not to this score alone.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the 1567 print survives complete, and nothing in the work is lost or in doubt. Presence has been continuous since the sixteenth century, which few works of any medium can claim; the Mass has never had to be revived. The charge on the fabric is small and lies in sound, not text. The original pitch, the tempo and the kind of voices are uncertain, and nineteenth-century performances were heavy and large. The surface fixed to its moment is the rite, and the Latin rite has lost its universal use since the 1960s; the Mass now lives mostly in concert and on record. The figure stands near the top of what centuries of unbroken presence earn.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Command of six-voice unaccompanied polyphony, and the making bears weight throughout. Every line is singable, stepwise, balanced by leap and return. Every dissonance is prepared and resolved within the rules this style later taught. Six voices, three of them low, never thicken into mud, because the spacing is managed chord by chord. The groups in the Gloria and Credo are chosen so that each new phrase changes colour, and the declamation sets Latin stress with exactness. The seventh voice of the last Agnus is added without strain. The medium is commanded so fully that the style became the textbook. Held a tenth or two below the ceiling because the means are narrow by choice, with no chromatic or harmonic adventure, and some imitation in the Kyrie and Sanctus is fine routine for its maker.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Kyrie’s long melisma on six words and the Credo’s swift declamation on 159. One law governs both: the same voice-leading, the same governed consonance and dissonance, the same principle of the independent singable line, whether the lines move together in chords or apart in imitation. The voice count obeys a law too, thinning and widening with the text. Nothing in the work breaks its physics, and there is no passage in another style. Held below Winterreise and the Goldberg Variations because the range governed is narrow: one register of feeling, one liturgical function, one sound of unaccompanied voices. Narrowness is not coherence, and the figure charges it: the distance between the work’s extremes is real in rate and texture, and small in character.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Through the Credo the work holds several orders: the sacred above all; the natural order, in caeli et terrae, heaven and earth, and visibilium omnium et invisibilium, of all things seen and unseen; history, in sub Pontio Pilato, under Pontius Pilate; mortality and the last things; and the community of the church, built into the texture itself. What holds the axis here is how they are held: as the Creed holds them, in a list the setting articulates, not integrated by the music into one structure that knows them apart. Consciousness, the family, labour and the state do not appear, and there is no individual voice in the work at all, by design. The figure credits the scope the text brings, sung as one communal act, and charges that the music holds it as one order seen from many angles.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, then The Imperishable at 9.5 and The Inner Law at 9.1. A command of six unaccompanied voices so complete that its style became the textbook; a print whole since 1567 and a presence never broken in four and a half centuries; and one law of voice-leading and governed dissonance holding the Kyrie’s melisma and the Credo’s declamation alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 7.8: a turn that refines a proven path, a synthesis of known practice at small risk; and a scope lent by the Creed, held as the Creed lists it, with consciousness, the family, labour and the state absent. Then The Unconcealment at 8.0, where the disclosure, many voices as one body and prayer as duration, stays close to a stance and a calm, and the doctrine is the rite’s.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.5 clears the bar of 8.5 with room and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clears it by a tenth, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.0 and The Swerve at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it, at 8.6, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the Missa Papae Marcelli as printed in Rome in 1567 in Palestrina’s Missarum liber secundus, with its Latin text, the Ordinary of the Roman rite, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand. Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus with Benedictus and Hosanna, and Agnus Dei in two sections are scored as one work; the text set is part of the work and is read in Latin; no single performance, arrangement or recording is the object, and later arrangements by other hands bear on reach and survival only. Latin is quoted only from the Ordinary, in fragments of four words or fewer; the English glosses are the desk’s own plain renderings, and no published translation is quoted. The words set in polyphony were counted by script on the standard Roman Ordinary, once each, without repetitions and without the celebrant’s two intonations; the counts were not checked against the 1567 print. The durations are approximate figures across the recorded tradition, not measurements. Figures and facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dedication and the printer of the 1567 book, the earliest manuscript copy and any date of composition, the mode and final, the voicing of the seven-voice Agnus and any canon in it, the number of voices in the reduced sections, the setting of particular clauses of the Credo, any borrowing from a secular tune, the first teller of the legend, the wording of the Council’s decree, the circumstances of Marcellus’s reign, and the later arrangements by name. The sound of the work as heard, its pitch, tempo and kind of choir, is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.