Josquin Desprez
Admired across Europe in his lifetime, the French composer combined genius with a popular touch, says Kate Bolton-porciatti
One of the few certainties about Josquin Desprez’s life is that he died 500 years ago, on 27 August 1521. After a lifetime of travel, he had retired to Condé in the county of Hainault – a much-disputed territory (straddling the modern-day borders of northern France and Belgium) that had been passed like a parcel in the political games of medieval Europe. He was buried before the high altar of Notre Dame de Condé, an honour that bears witness to his status not only as provost of the church but as ‘princeps musicorum’ – ‘the prince of music’. Baldassare Castiglione, François Rabelais and Martin Luther all lauded him in their writings; the humanist Cosimo Bartoli declared him the Michelangelo of music; and the influential theorists Heinrich Glarean and Gioseffo Zarlino cited his works as paradigms. He became, in short, the first star of the music industry, thanks to the 15th-century equivalent of the internet: the printing press.
So what was so special about Josquin? Certainly, his music spans the gamut from sacred to secular, spiritual to playful. He wrote Masses, motets, French chansons, Italian frottole. His music is by turns mellifluous, austere, sensual, intellectual and – as Glarean suggests in his treatise Dodecachordon – he could be virtuosic, he could be satirical.
Some his most beguiling melodies are to be found in his chansons, sung around Europe like the greatest hits of The Beatles five centuries later. Adieu mes amours was a favourite, judging from the 25 sources in which it survives. It is based on a popular song that Josquin plaits into a canon between the lowest two voices, over which he floats a pair of freely composed upper lines. The chanson encapsulates many of the qualities of Josquin’s grander works in its fusion of rigour and freedom, and in its appropriation of a popular melody to create an art work of high sophistication.
The elegiac tone of Adieu mes amours infuses many of Josquin’s other songs, including Plus nulz regretz and Mille regretz. The liquid melodies of the former pour out in paired canonic voices – one of Josquin’s preferred devices, which exploits the
Josquin’s chansons were sung around Europe like The Beatles’ greatest hits 500 years later
effects of anticipation and memory: hence the wistful air. The four-part Mille regretz, both poignant and fleeting, tinged with the dark-hued Phrygian mode painting the poem’s ‘thousand regrets’, was said to have been the emperor Charles V’s favourite song. Yet recent scholarship has written a question mark over its authorship, so it may turn out to be one of those curious musical enigmas when a composer’s most famous work is in fact by someone else.
These chansons, with their pervasive themes of love, loss and regret, share the same melancholy world as Josquin’s laments. The ravishing six-voice Nimphes, nappés, for example, conjures a haunting image of nymphs and nereids draped in mourning. Consoling voices envelop the cantus firmus (fixed melody) which hovers like a spectre through the piece, slowly but obsessively uttering the words
‘Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis’ – ‘Encircling me are the sighs of death’. When Martin Luther sang the work with a group of friends, he proclaimed Josquin ‘the master of the notes’.
The grief-laden Nymphes des bois (again, the image of the bereaved nymph) is a funerary lament on the death of Josquin’s distinguished older friend Johannes Ockeghem. The poem depicts a tableau of mourners who have lost their ‘good father’; among them are the composers Antoine Brumel, Loyset Compère and Josquin himself. Fusing the lyricism of the chanson with the sobriety of the motet, Josquin weaves a sombre five-voice shroud around a cantus firmus from the Mass for the Dead. Even the notes of the score are dressed in black: visual symbols of the text’s ‘mourning weeds’.
Leonardo da Vinci and Josquin were colleagues at the Sforza court in Milan
It is speculated that Josquin was a pupil of Ockeghem but, like most of the details of his life, there is little solid evidence. Even his name shapeshifts into myriad forms. The shadowy picture of him gains a little clarity in a woodcut portrait from Petrus Opmeer’s historical anthology of celebrated men published in 1611: Josquin, lauded as one of the greatest musicians since Pythagoras, gazes out of the page along with kings and popes and emperors. In 1972, musicologist Suzanne Clercx-lejeune saw a likeness between the woodcut of Josquin and the Portrait of a Musician attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, now in Milan’s Ambrosiana.
Da Vinci and Josquin were both at the Sforza court in Milan in the early 1480s – they were colleagues, almost exact contemporaries, and both were musicians. Adding to the seductive theory that Leonardo painted the ‘prince of music’, Clercx-lejeune pointed to other clues: the descending hexachord written on the manuscript is a motif Josquin frequently uses – most insistently in his motet Illibata
Dei virgo nutrix, a work that has been described as the composer’s self-portrait since an acrostic in the poem spells out IOSQUIN Des PREZ in the first letters of each line. Josquin’s setting of this Marian text celebrating the ‘Unblemished Virgin, nurse of God’ revolves around a simple three-note cantus firmus: La-mi-la, perhaps derived from the vowels of ‘Maria’, which appears in sustained notes in the middle of the texture. Alternating duets with the full five voices (a device Josquin often uses for textural variety), the music is by turns aptly intimate and refulgent.
After Milan, we know that Josquin became a singer in the Sistine Chapel in 1489. It is strange to think that the celebrated chapel was a relatively new building – not yet frescoed by Michelangelo – when he arrived. Among the works in the Vatican choirbooks is Josquin’s Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales,a Mass setting based on a popular song called ‘The Armed Man’. This lilting ditty, possibly linked to the Crusades and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, struts its way through some 40-plus Mass settings of the period by composers from Dufay to Palestrina. Josquin takes the popular song as the starting point from which he builds a work of great sophistication. Some scholars propose the setting exploits ‘gematria’ – a code that assigns a number to a letter or a word – by which system, Josquin’s 64-note adaptation of the L’homme armé melody spells out ‘OCKEGHEM’ (to whom the work is dedicated) and the contra part spells out ‘JOSQUIN DESPREZ’.
The setting also includes several ‘mensuration canons’, meaning the canonic voices sing the ‘Armed Man’ melody at different speeds and in different metres. In the opening of the Kyrie, you can hear the L’homme armé melody first in the top voice of the texture and then, proportionally augmented, in the tenor. Other mensuration canons follow in the Benedictus and, memorably, in the second Agnus Dei where Josquin writes a mind-bending canon which combines three voices in the tempo relationship 1:2:3, in addition to which the voices simultaneously sing in ‘imperfect time’ (‘earthly’ duple time) and ‘perfect time’ (‘divine’ triple time); it’s a little like combining a waltz, a march and a tango in one. The result is a work of sublime rhythmic complexity – a ‘three-in-one’ canon that serves as an allegory for the Holy Trinity. The artist Dosso Dossi depicted this piece of Josquin’s in the far right of his Allegory of Music, where the music is written in a triangular staff, consolidating the connection with the Trinity.
From 1514, Dossi had been the court painter to the Este Dukes in Ferrara where, a decade earlier, the pious, music-loving Duke Ercole I had procured Josquin (at a high price!) as a singer in his illustrious chapel choir. Josquin dedicated to Ercole (Italian for Hercules) one of his most fascinating and original Mass settings. Taking the vowels from Ercole’s Latin name and title, Hercules Dux Ferrarie, Josquin associates them with Re-ut-reut-re-fa-mi-re (using solmization, by which each note of the scale is associated with a particular syllable) – in modern notation D-C-D-C-D-F-E-D. This becomes the ‘soggetto cavato’ – the ‘subject carved’ into the musical monument. Most remarkable is how Josquin, from this unpromising little melody, forges such a magisterial work. Here, too, he reserves his most arcane yet sumptuous writing for the Agnus Dei whose final, ‘divine’, three-voice canon resonated long into the 16th century.
Also associated with Ferrara is Josquin’s celebrated five-voice setting of the psalm Miserere mei, Deus. His austere treatment of the penitential text, with its insistent repetitions of the words ‘Have mercy upon me, O God’, was modelled on the desolate reflection on the same psalm written by Ferrarese friar-reformer Savonarola just before his execution in 1498. Ercole d’este had been an ardent supporter of Savonarola, whose apocalyptic sermons and brutal death cast a long shadow. Perhaps Savonarola’s words rang in Josquin’s ears as he fled Ferrara during a devastating outbreak of the Plague in 1504. Taking quiet retirement in the cool and misty flatlands of his homeland, the provost-composer thus closed the circle of his canonical life.