Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

One of the great names of the Italian Renaissance and a master of counterpoint, Palestrina's output is impressive in terms of both quantity and influence. Born in the town of the same name east of Rome, in the Papal States, between February 3, 1525 and February 2, 1526, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina lost his mother in January 1536 and grew up in Rome, where he studied chant and music at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Trained in Gregorian chant and polyphony, he deepened his knowledge of counterpoint, composition and organ playing with successive masters Claude Goudimel, Robin Mallapert and Firmin Lebel, before being appointed organist and instructor at Palestrina's Cathedral of Saint Agapit on October 25, 1544 by Cardinal-Bishop Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte. In 1550, Pope Julius III appointed him to the Giulia Chapel in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, succeeding Mallapert. This high position, the most important after that of directing the papal choir, reserved for the pope, led him to work with top-quality professional singers of various nationalities, such as the soprano Alessandro Mero, known as "La Viole". It was to the pope that Palestrina reserved his first work, published late in 1554, a collection of masses known by the diminutive Liber Primus. This was the first book of its kind composed by an Italian, at a time when Flemish and Spanish influence was still dominant. Rewarded with a position as singer in the pontifical chapel, without consultation or examination, Palestrina was disillusioned after the death of Julius III, not because of the successor Marcel II, whose pontificate lasted 22 days and for whom he composed the Missa papae Marcelli (1562), but because of the next Paul IV, who excluded him from the chapel on the grounds that "Giannetto" (his nickname) had been married to Lucrezia Gori since 1547. The eventful year of 1555 also saw the publication of his First Book of Madrigals. At the end of the year, he was appointed Chapel Master at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, where he was in charge of redesigning the choir at a time when Philip II's war was hitting the Papal States. His madrigal Pace non trovó e non ho da fare guerra is included with thirteen others in Cyprien de Rore's second collection. In August 1560, Palestrina resigned his post following the appointment of a new prefect, and returned to his hometown after the death of his father. In financial difficulty despite the publication of a new collection of madrigals, he returned to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, becoming its choirmaster in 1561, twenty years after having studied there. The following year, he was commissioned by Cardinal Othon Truchsess de Waldbourg to write a six-part Mass, Benedicta es, prior to the publication in 1563 of his First Book of Motets, covering a year's worth of church services. After leaving his post in 1566, Palestrina returned to the Giulia Chapel in St. Peter's during a dark decade in which he lost his brother, two of his children and his wife in three successive waves of the plague, in 1572, 1575 and 1580. He considered becoming a priest, but eventually remarried to a wealthy widow, Virginia Dormoli. The last years of his life were devoted to composition, until his death from pleurisy on February 2, 1594, at the age of 68. His plethoric corpus includes 105 Masses, 68 offertories, over 300 motets, more than 140 secular and spiritual madrigals and at least 72 hymns, 35 Magnificats, 11 litanies and 15 Lamentations of Jeremiah. Taken from the Magnificat Tertii Toni of 1591, the Gloria is often used in the hymn Victory (The Strife Is O'er). His Missa sine nomine inspired Johann Sebastian Bach to write his Mass in B minor, and composer Hans Pfitzner dedicated an opera to his name, premiered in 1917. His fame, already a reality during his lifetime, grew after his death, giving rise to "Palestrina-stil", the study of his art of counterpoint in 18th-century university classes, as codified by theorist Johann Joseph Fux in his treatise Gradus ad Parnassum (1725). Mendelssohn ranked him among the four greatest composers, alongside Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. In the 19th century, a "Palestinamania" followed the publication of Giuseppe Baini's biography, as he was considered by Romantic writers, led by Victor Hugo, to be the "father of Catholic sacred music". The twentieth and twenty-first centuries would bring out other aspects of his musical perfection through research into color, sonority, the use of blocks on large-scale scores and the balance of forms.

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