Mozart was one of the most influential composers during the Classical period. He wrote over musical works, and excelled in composing all of the major genres of music popular during his era such as opera, orchestral music, chamber and solo instrumental music, songs and sacred vocal music.
Mozart was born in in Salzburg, and was taught music by his father, Leopold, a violinist and composer. Wolfgang was a musical prodigy, and began composing and performing publicly from the age of six. Mozart did not choose to follow the traditional, patronage system career path taken by most musicians during this era, thus he did not seek an appointment as a composer to a wealthy patron.
Although he worked for a number of years for the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart felt the patronage system was too restrictive, and he moved to Vienna in to pursue a musical career on his own. In , he married Constanze Weber, a singer, and they had six children. Mozart was well-received as a musician in Vienna, and he earned a living by teaching, giving concerts, procuring commissions for his music, publishing his music, and later in his career, as a court musician to the Hapsburg court.
For those of you who are wondering what the words actually mean, I have even worked out a translation. Mozart's original manuscript lacks any specific interpretive or dynamic instructions other than the words "Sotto voce" at the beginning of the score. The dynamics in this edition are commonly used, but as with all music, should only be treated as guidelines. Here are midi computer music files for you to download and listen to If you're using Microsoft Windows, simply click on the link and they should play automatically.
Byrd chose his texts freely without consideration for the liturgy: it has often been remarked that a number of them can be construed as laments for the plight of the English Catholics. It is tempting, but fanciful, to suppose that Byrd published his Latin church music in readiness for the day the Catholic faith might return to England; more likely, he wanted to codify and set down in print his achievement, so that the musical styles it represented and the liturgy it was intended to adorn should not be completely forgotten.
For us today, this music is a treasure house that, thanks to the work of such as Fellowes, Kerman and Brett has been explored and examined; it now cries out for wider public exposure.
Sing joyfully This concise and delightfully festive anthem was never published by Byrd himself, but it gained very widespread popularity in his lifetime, appearing in about a hundred early seventeenth-century manuscript and printed sources.
The style of the music shows the influence of the madrigals and consort music of the time—appropriately enough, since the collection seems to have been intended for home rather than church performance. Byrd uses the six-voiced texture with resourceful economy, frequently contrasting groups of high and low voices and only rarely using all six at once.
Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles Also from the publication, this magnificent anthem seems to belong more in a great cathedral than in a music room; perhaps Byrd wrote it for the Chapel Royal and later put it in Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets rather than let it be forgotten. Emendemus in melius This was the piece Tallis and Byrd chose to open their joint collection of Cantiones Sacrae. Byrd was no doubt rightly proud of it, and must have remembered it in later years when writing his very similar Miserere mei and the final section also to the Miserere text of his monumental Infelix ego Yet it is easy to overlook how novel the deceptively simple, hymn-like texture of Emendemus would have seemed in ; nothing quite like it had been written in England, though there is a clear model in a motet by the Italian Ferrabosco, whose work Byrd studied and admired.
The experiment consisted in following the metre of a hymn text in music whose note values matched the long and short syllables of the poetry rather exactly. Byrd, aware of the risk of monotony inherent in the rather insistent Sapphic metre of Siderum rector , wisely set only two stanzas, and provided variety by swapping the melody between soprano and tenor and adding a little polyphonic elaboration to the plain texture.
The sombre character of this text is reflected in its vocal layout, with only one soprano line but divided altos. Apart from a half-close in its thirty-sixth bar, the eighty-six-bar piece sweeps forward from beginning to end as if in one intense flood of grief, controlled only by the discipline of its tightly-knit polyphony.
Visita, quaesumus Domine This inexplicably neglected little piece must be one of the loveliest and most affecting Byrd ever wrote. It comes from the Gradualia , and presents an unexpectedly serene, gentle aspect of his musical personality.
In a texture of magical transparency, without basses, he paints a sound-picture of guardian angels hovering overhead, akin in atmosphere to the peace and radiance of a Raphael Nativity. The office of Compline, itself a jewel of liturgy, can seldom have been so sensitively and evocatively adorned.
As in Turn our captivity , Byrd uses a six-voiced texture not only for intricate imitative polyphony but also for echo effects between high and low voices. Laudibus in sanctis This joyful and quite extended setting of an anonymous poetic paraphrase of Psalm opens the Cantiones Sacrae. It is interesting that Byrd wrote very few madrigals but was willing, here and elsewhere in his sacred works, to adopt madrigal techniques—word-painting, dance rhythms and clear sectional construction—if he so chose.
We tried it that way. But singers and producer rebelled; the dancing feet referred to in the text obstinately plodded. Proportional notation was confusing and sometimes ambiguous even to sixteenth-century musicians. Gaudeamus omnes This brightly-voiced motet, published in the Gradualia , celebrates the Feast of All Saints with spirited merriment; the rejoicing of the angels is delightfully depicted in a passage calling for vocal and verbal agility.
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