Cappella Pratensis

his Virgo gloriosa Christi opens the manuscript.
After Ippolito’s death, Willaert transferred
his services to the duke of Ferrara; in
1527, he assumed leadership of the chapel
at San Marco in Venice, where he remained,
one of the most revered musicians of his day,
until his death in 1562.
Some commentators have wondered
if Willaert did not compose Virgo gloriosa
Christi for the very position it now occupies:
the text addresses the patron saint of childbirth,
and Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne
arrived in Italy several weeks pregnant. The
composer’s residence at the time in Hungary
effectively puts an end to such speculation;
but whatever its origin, the music, unusually
scored for four low voices, shows the mastery
that obviously won him such favour so quickly:
Willaert unobtrusively hides technical feats
like a penchant for inverting his imitative subjects
in a rich sonority notable for its shifts of
harmonic focus – note, for instance, how the
music progresses all but imperceptibly from
the minor-key sonorities with which it begins
to what we would hear as a luminous F major
at the prayer ‘Audi preces nostras’.
With Saluto te, sancta Virgo Maria, written
in a lucid F mode throughout, Willaert more
obviously shows his debt to Mouton, whose
example clearly stands behind the long sinuous
duos arrayed in complementary pairs.
But Willaert subtly undoes the predominantly
symmetrical layout of Mouton’s writing:
where the older master would usually have
one duo answer another in regular succession,
Willaert shuffles statement and answer
unpredictably; similarly, the repetition, to the
words ‘in illa hora’, of the music that begins
the second part introduces small changes in
the imitative disposition that shift the harmony
in new directions. For all its sophisticated
virtuosity, however, Willaert’s early music
exudes a fervour strikingly at odds with the
famous woodcut portrait of the wizened master
three years before his death – an image
that has too one-sidedly shaped our understanding
of the composer.
In or about June 1516, a Ferrarese emissary
in Rome wrote to tell Cardinal Ippolito
d’Este of ‘a contrabass, the best in Italy’, who
had recently arrived in Rome with a French
9