The roots of polychoral music, with two or more choirs having distinct but complementary roles, may stretch back to the Psalms, since many of them use a form of call and response. Not coincidentally, the Psalms often provide the texts for compositions that feature “mirrored voices,” whether they answer each other antiphonally, imitate each other’s lines in sequence, or seem to approach the same musical questions from completely different angles. The complexity of additional vocal lines poses many challenges, technical as well as aesthetic. So, it should come as no surprise that the Italian Renaissance, with its experimental mindset, saw the first great age of polychoral music or cori spezzati (broken or split choirs). The tradition continued through the Baroque period and well into the twentieth century.
Renaissance composers’ eagerness to explore the amazing acoustics of San Marco’s Basilica in Venice yielded much polychoral music, but it thrived in other religious settings as well, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. Giovanni Croce (1558-1609) became a boy chorister at San Marco’s by age eight and maintained a connection there for the rest of his life, as an adult singer and eventually as music director. He took holy orders in 1585 and simultaneously served as priest at the Venetian church of Santa Maria Formosa. He is best known for his madrigals and influenced their development in England and the Netherlands. He turned out dozens of lighthearted canzonettas and “madrigal comedies,” but also composed numerous sacred works, including a grand mass for four choirs and three masses for double choirs. His “Buccinate” has two choirs calling in turn for the sound of the shofar to welcome the new moon, as called for in the Psalms.
Born in Venice, Antonio Caldara (1671-1736) served the Duke of Mantua as a cellist, singer, and composer of operas and chamber music, as well as choral works. He traveled throughout Europe, to Rome, Barcelona, and the imperial Habsburg court in Vienna. His striking setting of the Crucifixus for sixteen voices (four distinct lines each for sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses) apparently comes from his Credo in C, written in Venice in 1707. The haunting suspensions slowly move through the separated but overlapping vocal parts, like a pearl drifting down through liquid. Curiously, in the autograph manuscript of the Credo, this version of the Crucifixus – in Caldara’s handwriting but on different paper – was bound in with the rest of the score. Did it replace a different Crucifixus or come from another Credo? And what inspired this unusual scoring? No one has yet found the answer.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) needs no introduction to music lovers, but his motets just might. In addition to his vast output of keyboard and instrumental music, Bach composed three complete cycles of cantatas for every Sunday of the church year as part of his job as music director at Thomaskirche, the main Lutheran church in Leipzig. These cantatas usually drew on the scripture assigned for the day, though not verbatim, and often included a chorale based on a familiar Lutheran hymn. Similarly, he composed the St. Matthew and St John Passions for inclusion in Good Friday services and his Christmas Oratorio for the Sundays of the Advent and Christmas seasons.
Like his sacred cantatas, the motets draw on scripture, often verses from the Psalms. Unlike the cantatas, however, they do not form part of the regular church calendar. Instead, Bach composed them for specific occasions, such as funerals, where faith in Jesus put death in a Christian perspective. Crucially, they follow no set pattern in terms of text or musical form, offering free rein to Bach’s musical and theological ideas.
Scholars disagree on why Bach composed Singet dem Herrn, but it may have celebrated the life of an exiled Polish queen who refused to renounce her Lutheran faith for Catholicism. The two outer movements set verses from Psalms 149 and 150 that exhort worshipers to praise God with singing, dancing, and musical instruments. These movements surround a chorale based on a Lutheran hymn setting, from 1530, of Psalm 103. The whole motet takes full advantage of the double choirs. Right from the start, the first movement has one choir command the other to sing, and the latter promptly responds by bursting into song. Soon both choirs are trading long intricate runs back and forth in a whirling dance. While most chorales use simple four-part harmony, here one choir lays out the basic hymn text, while the other offers commentary, in two distinct vocal styles, almost like a call and response. Chorales often conclude cantatas, but this one lies at the heart of the motet, which concludes with a dancelike fugue, the two choirs at last joining powerfully into one. Among its many admirers, Mozart first heard this motet at Thomaskirche in 1789 and was so excited by it that he actually interrupted the church service. Afterwards, he asked to examine the score, except no unified score existed, just the separate parts. The choir director permitted him to study the parts, whereupon Mozart combined them into a complete score, which he kept for the rest of his life.
Our featured work, the Mass for double choirs by Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974), comes from a third religious tradition. Born in Geneva, Martin grew up the son of a Calvinist pastor. At twelve, he heard Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, a work for double choirs that affected him deeply, and, by his teens, he knew he wanted to pursue a musical career. He had some success as a performer, teacher, and composer, and Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet began programming his compositions after 1917. And yet, although Martin composed this mass in the mid-1920s, he never shared it with Ansermet or anyone else for decades. He considered his faith intensely personal, between himself and God, and not to be displayed in public.
Following the Allied landing in France on D-Day in 1944, he began to reconsider this position when the director of Radio Geneva asked him to compose a work to celebrate the end of World War II, whenever that might come. Martin felt that only a religious work could do justice to such an occasion, so he compiled a text from Biblical passages for a work he titled In Terra Pax. Composing it seemed to unlock something in him, opening the way for him to write his own Passion oratorio, titled Golgotha, a Requiem, and other spiritual works. Even so, he did not allow the Mass its first full public performance until 1963, which he did not attend. It has since become his most popular work.
Martin’s Mass sounds like no other. It never needed to, because Martin originally intended no one but God to hear it. This left him free to explore his own faith experience and draw on whatever styles allowed him to express it. Different parts sound as dreamy as Debussy or as vigorous as Bach, especially in the Gloria and the Credo, complete with fugues; in places, it recalls the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg. Perhaps most striking is the Agnus Dei, which he composed two years after the other movements. At a steady tempo, both choirs invoke the Lamb of God and ask for mercy, with one choir singing a medieval-sounding unison line while the other hypnotically murmurs the same words in even quarter notes. Beneath the melody, shifting harmonies subtly move through the second choir’s meditative chanting, suggesting gradual insights growing within everyday life. By the last repetition, the first choir finally abandons unison, and rich harmonies pervade both choirs in a prayer for peace.
We close with a joyous Gloria for three choirs by Giovanni Gabrieli (1555-1612), whom many consider the epitome of Venetian polychoral composing. In 1584, he took over as principal organist at San Marco’s from his uncle and teacher Andrea, later becoming its music director, but he was hardly the first to experiment with the building’s unique acoustics. Flemish composer Adriaan Willaert (1490-1562) had become the music director there in 1527, establishing Venice as one of the most influential centers for music in the 16th century and training a generation of students, including Andrea Gabrieli. But Giovanni Gabrieli explored the Basilica’s possibilities more creatively than anyone else, coming up with unexpected combinations of instruments and voices, as well as specifying exactly where they should sing or play from in that vast space. He quickly became the leading composer of the Venetian School. Students from all over Europe flocked there to work with him, ensuring centuries of fascination with music for mirrored voices.
Susan Wladaver-Morgan