Unser neuer Gesamtkatalog

Numerous contemporary composers have been strongly influenced by medieval and renaissance music. Singer Pur, the prize-winning vocal ensemble, traces such manifold relationships in its fifth CD. This results in fascinating new sound-universes and entirely new impressions. Three motets composed in 2005/06 by Wolfgang Rihm, as well as Arvo Pärt’s Memento, enter into a shimmering dialog with works by Orlando di Lasso and George de La Hèle, a Flemish composer who died in 1586 at the age of 39. The connection between Lasso and de La Hèle is shown as well. De La Hèle used various elements and motives from the eponymous Lasso motet in his mass “Quare tristis es” – a common technique not only in that age. De La Hele’s homage shows just how much fame Lasso’s works enjoyed. Both works are found on this recording.

George de La Hèle:
Missa “Quare tristis es”

The essential facts of George de La Hèle’s short but dramatic life are amazingly well documented. Born in Antwerp in 1547, he obtained his first musical training at the Antwerp cathedral of Notre Dame. We find him next in 1560 in the Madrid court of King Philip II (considered a very artistically inclined ruler) as one of a group of choirboys that had probably been enlisted by a Spanish emissary in the “Nether Lands”. During the following years, he was engaged as a court chapel singer. This marks the begin of a career that was not atypical for ambitious Franco-Flemish musicians of that time. As is well known, Orlando di Lasso was discovered by an Italian talent-seeker at a young age in his home city of Mons and brought to Sicily, where he grew up in aristocratic circles and served as a choirboy. In 1570, de La Hèle returned to his home country to study theology at the university in Louvain. He finally entered the clergy with minor orders. In following years he was active as a choir director, first in Malines, and from 1574 on at the cathedral of Tournai. His renown in Madrid was apparently still quite high, because King Philip appointed him to lead the Spanish royal chapel in 1580, although de La Hèle first took up his duties one-and-a-half years later at the earliest. As a clergyman, de La Hèle had benefited from various clerical sources of income. He lost all of these, however, when he openly committed himself to a woman in 1585, even marrying her. The couple’s new happiness did not last long, though, because de La Hèle died in August 1586 at approximately 39 years of age.

The composer’s most important work is the just as artistic as lavish collection “Octo Missae”, which was published in Antwerp in 1578. It contains eight masses (for five, six and seven voices), each of which is based on a different motet that de La Hèle used as a compositional model. This type of use, called “parody technique”, was extraordinarily popular in the 16th century and a sign of homage and esteem for the composer of the model (an odd concept in today’s age of “copyright”?). In his mass Quare tristis es, de La Hèle used the eponymous motet by Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594), whose fame must already have been unparalleled throughout Europe at the time. In a manner of speaking, parody technique is a way of reinterpreting the model, which then appears in a new musical light. Purposeful selection of a specific model – e.g. an Easter motet – could help a composer create a new mass with the corresponding liturgical orientation (i.e. an Easter mass). It was also very popular to take secular compositions (madrigals, chansons etc.) and place them in a sacred context through the use of parody. But it is easy to imagine how unhappy the clergy was when these sometimes quite bawdy songs – now underlaid with a sacred text – suddenly turned up in the church service (with the original text known by everyone, however). The reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), however, attempted to stop such musical fooling about.

Some considerations – which cannot be more than speculation – should pursue the question of what may have moved a composer to use a specific work as the model for a new creation. We mentioned earlier the idea of “homage” to the composer of the model. There was also certainly a sort of competition among composers to see who could come up with the most original arrangements of melodies (one need think only of the numerous masses based on the well known Burgundian melody L’homme armé). That the parody procedure could save a composer a certain amount of time – which is often mentioned in this regard – does not seem to be a suitable explanation because it seems easier to compose a completely new work than to apply one’s musical mastery and the corresponding wealth of ideas to develop a parody mass; to challenge oneself with finding ever new variants and perspectives on that which already exists. It speaks for a highly developed understanding and taste when one views the motets that de La Hèle used as musical material for his “Octo Missae”. The composers are Orlando di Lasso, Josquin des Préz, Cypriano de Rore and Thomas Crequillon – all Franco-Flemish like himself, all among the most famous and influential composers of their time.

How does de La Hèle treat the model? In his mass Quare tristis es, he has retained the essential compositional structures of Lasso’s motet. The six-voice mass is notated up a fourth in different clefs, the church mode staying the same. In this recording, however, the mass was sung in the same key as the motet. The dark sound (with one bass, two tenor, two alto and only one soprano) is characteristic for the motet and gives it insistent solemnity. The hopeful text of Quare tristis es (What ails thee, my poor soul?) is taken from Psalm 41 and is part of the Lenten liturgy. But a more specific liturgical assignment within the church year is not completely necessary. The shape of the beginning of the five mass movements is always derived from the beginning of the motet, but always in a different fashion, showing the great possibilities extant in the musical material of the Lasso motet. Following certain conventions, de La Hèle sets specific lines of text with fewer voices in order to distinguish these in sound from the surrounding sections (four voiced in “Et resurrexit” and “Benedictus” and three voices in “Domine Deus”). It is interesting to observe how and where the three-voice phrase “misericordiam tuam” from the motet (purposely written in an ‘antique’ style with parallel sixthree motion) is later used in the mass. It is found, for example in the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” in the Gloria, or in central statements like “Et homo factus est” in the Credo and in the section “Pleni sunt coeli et terra” (Sanctus). De La Hèle seems to embrace his own Catholicism when he unexpectedly clothes the text “Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam” (I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church) in a gentle triple meter (not found anywhere in Lasso’s motet). The perfect meter (three beats per “measure”) has symbolized the holy number three from time immemorial. Many other compositional subtleties can be discovered by comparing the motet to the mass. Most conspicuous are the two distinctive motives from the very beginning of the motet (each with a characteristic half-tone step at the words “tristis es”) that can be heard throughout the entire mass as well as in numerous wonderful variations. Other themes and melodies, on the other hand, which might seem to us to be just as suitable, apparently did not interest the composer – or at least much less. Except for two motets (one printed at the beginning of the “Octo missae” collection) and a single French chanson, no other works of George de La Hèle have come down to us. But that there must have been many other pieces by the master is clear from a repertoire list of the Spanish royal chapel dated 1585. A fire in the chapel in 1734, however, destroyed these compositions forever. (kw)

Arvo Pärt: Memento

The music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (*1935) holds great fascination for listeners; its stylistic means are absolutely unmistakable. Although his early compositions used serial techniques, Pärt went through a radical transformation in the mid-70s, creating a new style that from then on used essentially simple scale excerpts and arpeggios. Quiet and reserve go hand in hand with a posture of inner reflection. The Kanon Pokajanen (and its seventh part, Memento, which was composed in 1994 prior to the entire work) is essentially shaped by this idea. The text is from a Penitential Psalm found in an old 7th or 8th-century Slavic liturgical manuscript: a Psalm used in the morning service of the Greek-Orthodox liturgy. The Psalm contrasts praise for the Lord with lamentations about human sins, while the refrain (“Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me”) unites these two thoughts. Penance becomes an indispensable necessity, without which the soul cannot attain heavenly grace. About the events that led to the work’s composition, Pärt says, “In this composition – as in some of my other vocal works – I tried to use language as my starting point. I wanted to give the word the possibility to choose its own sound, to shape its melodic line by itself. And so – surprising for me as well – a music developed that was imbued through and through with the unique character of this special Slavic language that is only used in liturgical texts.”

Epilogs to the Passion of Christ
Wolfgang Rihm’s Motets 5–7 The texts of the three motets Caligaverunt, Recessit and Aestimatus sum are taken from the Roman Catholic Easter Saturday liturgy. After Christ’s sudden silence on the cross, Old Testament verses are quoted and freely reflected upon – as a sort of mental refuge.

Caligaverunt comes from the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. Rihm translates this lament into a musical dissolving, trembling and buzzing. Using all six voices, the interesting confrontation between vital, urgent melodic motives and their sheer unconscious summation becomes a harmony that is open to chance: sometimes breathing a sigh of relief, sometimes caving in on itself for lack of resistance. At the words “si est dolor similis”, a type of canon on descending sevenths begins in the soprano voice; it subsequently evolves into free polyphony. Corresponding to the question of which sorrow equals Christ’s own sorrow, the music runs and runs through its history, searching for a true expression of lament and making an ostentatious crescendo. “Videte” – See! – A Major with a loud B-flat: dirt in a wound that burns quickly and intensely until someone washes the dissonance away. But the question is only rephrased once again: no longer rhetorically, but simply helplessly – its words disintegrate between General Pauses. The possessive form of sorrow is divided into its syllables (“me… us…”) and expressed as an organ might play the music: the upper and lower voices correspond to the right and left hands, and play contrary arpeggios.

Recessit is a dreamy memory of the good shepherd spoken about in the Psalms. Grief becomes yearning following luminous harmonies, innocent thoughts of pain and relief as well as tension and resolution that don’t hesitate to go into a gently rocking triple meter at the words “qui captivum”. Meanwhile, the soprano voice winds higher and higher. Its bell-like sound now has an imploringness about it; the soul’s peace is threatened by a fear which must be catapulted away, banished by the words “disrupit… destruxit… subvertit…”. A short spotlight on the enemy, the adversary: a threefold tritone-crossfade – and then blackout.

Aestimatus sum is permeated by chromatically winding themes. Words from Psalm 88 (Psalm 87 in the Vulgate) are insistently repeated; long melismas awaken the impression of a dark timelessness. The voices enter independently and in varying combinations. At the words “sum sicut homo”, the two upper, then the two lowest voices grate against each other to form particularly harsh two-voice dissonances. A homophonic new start prepares the central image with which the ideas grapple. Nervous, desperate and reproachful, we hear the words “umbra mortis”. The last word – after fading tenor tones and archaic fifths in the baritone and bass – carries beyond the psalm text: a still, small plea for mercy.



Wolfgang Rihm’s three Passion motets, which are first recorded on this CD, complete a sevenpart cycle, whose first four parts have already been released on CD in 2004 (OehmsClassics OC 354). The “Seven Passion Texts” are dedicated to Singer Pur and were first performed in complete, as part of a work titled “Vigilia” (including instrumental interludes and a concluding “Miserere”), at the Berliner Musikfestspiele in September 2006.