NOTAS AL PROGRAMA
MariCarmen Gómez Muntané, professor at Universidad Autónoma of Barcelona and musicological advisor.
Mateo Flecha (c. 1481-1553), Las ensaladas
Among the Spanish composers of non-sacred music of the Renaissance, Mateo Flecha the Elder is today the best known internationally, thanks to a genre which, even if he did not invent it, he perfected and helped reach its peak: the ensalada. A native of Prades (Tarragona), in 1523 he was first found working as a chapel master in the cathedral of Lérida and three years later in Valencia, a post he held until the end of 1530. After six years he reappeared in Sigüenza as chapel master of its cathedral, returning to Valencia at the beginning of 1539.
After the death, in May of that same year, of Isabella of Portugal, the wife of Emperor Charles V, his two daughters, the infantas María and Juana, took up residence in the palace of Arévalo (Ávila) and later in the ducal palace of Guadalajara, accompanied by the former empress's chapel. Flecha went on to direct it not long afterwards, probably until the end of 1548, after the marriage of the infanta Maria to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. About five years later he is believed to have died in the Cistercian monastery of Poblet (Tarragona).
Like all the chapel masters of his time, Mateo Flecha must have written a significant repertoire of sacred music, of which only a Miserere has come to light. He also wrote the typical vilancicos which from the end of the 15th century chapel masters used to compose as Christmas carols. However, only one Christmas-themed carol by Flecha remains, Gloria in excelsis Deo, in which the influence of Juan del Encina, one of the pioneers of the genre, is evident.
A few more of Flecha's non-sacred vilancicos have been preserved: eight in total, half of them in the Cancionero de Barcelona, which also includes the Gloria in excelsis (Bibl. de Cataluña, Ms 454), and the other half in the Cancionero de Uppsala, a printed volume published in Venice in 1556, whose repertoire is related to the court of the Dukes of Calabria, in Valencia. The adaptations written by famous vihuela players from the Spanish court, such as Miguel de Fuenllana and Enríquez de Valderrábano, bear witness to the fame of a composer who at a certain point in his career decided to tackle a new musical genre as an alternative to the Christmas vilancico.
The first time the term "ensalada" is recorded in its poetic-musical sense is in the Auto da Fe by the Portuguese Gil Vicente, which was performed at Christmas matins in 1510 at the Portuguese court. Instead of the traditional vilancico with which this type of performance usually concluded, the Auto ends with "hûa ensalada que veio de França", which the author did not write and which required a vocal quartet to perform. Two years later, Vicente concluded another of his plays with an ensalada, the Farça dos Físicos, for which this time he wrote the lyrics. Los Chistes, the oldest of Flecha's ensaladas, dates from around 1525. Its pattern and that of Vicente's ensalada (except for the music, which is lost) conforms to that defined by Díaz Rengifo in his Arte Poética Española (Salamanca, 1592), namely: "a composition of round couplets, among which are mixed all the differences of metres, not only Spanish, but of other languages without order from one to the other at the poet's discretion; and according to the variety of the lyrics, the music changes". If Vicente took as a model some early examples of fricassée, a kind of quodlibet that was fashionable in France throughout the 16th century, then he must have renamed the genre.
Eleven ensaladas for 4 or 5 voices are preserved by Mateo Flecha, seven of which are in the 1581 volume Las Ensaladas, printed in Prague, in the house of Jorge Negrino, two by his nephew Mateo Flecha the Younger, then chaplain to the Empress Maria, whom he accompanied on her return journey to Spain that same year, where she was to spend her last days after being widowed. The others are preserved in manuscript. At the head of the print are the ensaladas El Fuego (The Fire) and La Bomba (The Pump), for no particular reason. They are followed, a few pages further on, by La Guerra (The War) and La Justa (The Joust), which together with the two previous ones belong to a group of ensaladas that highlight the author's assimilation of certain resources typical of Clément Janequin's language.
La Guerra is probably the first of Mateo Flecha's mature ensaladas. Written on the pattern of Janequin's La Guerre, although its plot is sacred, it deals with man's struggle against sin, embodied in the figures of Christ and Luzbel, probably symbols of the Emperor Charles V and Suleiman the Magnificent respectively. If so, it would date from shortly after the siege of Vienna by Turkish troops (October 1529), which preceded the coronation of the Spanish monarch as emperor.
A few years later the Turks returned to the gates of Vienna and were forced to retreat by the Emperor's troops, who entered the city in September 1532. It was an event of unquestionable impact on the political future of Europe, to which The Joust alludes allegorically. It is about a tournament pitting Lucifer (Suleiman) against Adam (Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, brother of Charles V), whom he defeats before he is in turn defeated by Christ. The ensalada, which begins by recalling the lyrics of the first verse of La Guerre, includes no less than thirteen quotations from the Spanish profane and liturgical repertoire, among them the tune of the romance that in 1529 was responsible for spreading the news of the uprising of the siege of Vienna, "Que tocan alarma, Juana!"
This ditty reappears in El Toro, which again contrasts the figure of Christ with that of Lucifer, the only copy of which is preserved in manuscript (Palma de Mallorca, Fundación B. March, Ms 6832). In its composition, a certain haste is evident in the large number of solo passages and the predominance of other homophonic passages, as opposed to those with an imitative texture. Charles V's stay at the residence of the Duke and Duchess of Infantado in January 1534, on his return from Vienna in search of reinforcements to fight the Turkish armada, may have been a motive for the composition of this ensalada, never recorded until now. Years earlier, King Francis I of France, taken prisoner by the Emperor at the Battle of Pavia (24 February 1525), had spent the night in the same residence on his way to Madrid. The Jubilate, another of Flecha's ensaladas in the above-mentioned manuscript, ironically alludes to the surrender of the monarch in the first of the two barzellette it quotes, "Poltrón François", literally "cowardly Francis".
If El Fuego is linked both by its style and its plot, which revolves around sin and the figure of the Virgin, to ensaladas of an earlier period than the trilogy formed by La Guerra, La Justa and El Toro, La Bomba marks a departure from that model. It begins with some agile verses that seek to reflect the behaviour of the crew of a ship about to capsize, a symbol of humanity, who end up being rescued by another ship that symbolises the new-born Christ. The plot of one of its passages revolves around a certain Gil Pizarra, who could be a mocking allusion, like Hieronymus Bosch's distorted characters, to Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru, visiting the court of Charles V in July 1529. Throughout this small masterpiece, Mateo Flecha displays an absolute mastery of the musical and literary language that was to be his hallmark and which others would later try to imitate. Its echoes reached the New World through the literary production of González de Eslava, with his ensalada "de la flota", or the Misa de Bomba by Pedro Bermúdez.
Maricarmen Gómez
Among the Spanish composers of non-sacred music of the Renaissance, Mateo Flecha the Elder is today the best known internationally, thanks to a genre which, even if he did not invent it, he perfected and helped reach its peak: the ensalada. A native of Prades (Tarragona), in 1523 he was first found working as a chapel master in the cathedral of Lérida and three years later in Valencia, a post he held until the end of 1530. After six years he reappeared in Sigüenza as chapel master of its cathedral, returning to Valencia at the beginning of 1539.
After the death, in May of that same year, of Isabella of Portugal, the wife of Emperor Charles V, his two daughters, the infantas María and Juana, took up residence in the palace of Arévalo (Ávila) and later in the ducal palace of Guadalajara, accompanied by the former empress's chapel. Flecha went on to direct it not long afterwards, probably until the end of 1548, after the marriage of the infanta Maria to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. About five years later he is believed to have died in the Cistercian monastery of Poblet (Tarragona).
Like all the chapel masters of his time, Mateo Flecha must have written a significant repertoire of sacred music, of which only a Miserere has come to light. He also wrote the typical vilancicos which from the end of the 15th century chapel masters used to compose as Christmas carols. However, only one Christmas-themed carol by Flecha remains, Gloria in excelsis Deo, in which the influence of Juan del Encina, one of the pioneers of the genre, is evident.
A few more of Flecha's non-sacred vilancicos have been preserved: eight in total, half of them in the Cancionero de Barcelona, which also includes the Gloria in excelsis (Bibl. de Cataluña, Ms 454), and the other half in the Cancionero de Uppsala, a printed volume published in Venice in 1556, whose repertoire is related to the court of the Dukes of Calabria, in Valencia. The adaptations written by famous vihuela players from the Spanish court, such as Miguel de Fuenllana and Enríquez de Valderrábano, bear witness to the fame of a composer who at a certain point in his career decided to tackle a new musical genre as an alternative to the Christmas vilancico.
The first time the term "ensalada" is recorded in its poetic-musical sense is in the Auto da Fe by the Portuguese Gil Vicente, which was performed at Christmas matins in 1510 at the Portuguese court. Instead of the traditional vilancico with which this type of performance usually concluded, the Auto ends with "hûa ensalada que veio de França", which the author did not write and which required a vocal quartet to perform. Two years later, Vicente concluded another of his plays with an ensalada, the Farça dos Físicos, for which this time he wrote the lyrics. Los Chistes, the oldest of Flecha's ensaladas, dates from around 1525. Its pattern and that of Vicente's ensalada (except for the music, which is lost) conforms to that defined by Díaz Rengifo in his Arte Poética Española (Salamanca, 1592), namely: "a composition of round couplets, among which are mixed all the differences of metres, not only Spanish, but of other languages without order from one to the other at the poet's discretion; and according to the variety of the lyrics, the music changes". If Vicente took as a model some early examples of fricassée, a kind of quodlibet that was fashionable in France throughout the 16th century, then he must have renamed the genre.
Eleven ensaladas for 4 or 5 voices are preserved by Mateo Flecha, seven of which are in the 1581 volume Las Ensaladas, printed in Prague, in the house of Jorge Negrino, two by his nephew Mateo Flecha the Younger, then chaplain to the Empress Maria, whom he accompanied on her return journey to Spain that same year, where she was to spend her last days after being widowed. The others are preserved in manuscript. At the head of the print are the ensaladas El Fuego (The Fire) and La Bomba (The Pump), for no particular reason. They are followed, a few pages further on, by La Guerra (The War) and La Justa (The Joust), which together with the two previous ones belong to a group of ensaladas that highlight the author's assimilation of certain resources typical of Clément Janequin's language.
La Guerra is probably the first of Mateo Flecha's mature ensaladas. Written on the pattern of Janequin's La Guerre, although its plot is sacred, it deals with man's struggle against sin, embodied in the figures of Christ and Luzbel, probably symbols of the Emperor Charles V and Suleiman the Magnificent respectively. If so, it would date from shortly after the siege of Vienna by Turkish troops (October 1529), which preceded the coronation of the Spanish monarch as emperor.
A few years later the Turks returned to the gates of Vienna and were forced to retreat by the Emperor's troops, who entered the city in September 1532. It was an event of unquestionable impact on the political future of Europe, to which The Joust alludes allegorically. It is about a tournament pitting Lucifer (Suleiman) against Adam (Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, brother of Charles V), whom he defeats before he is in turn defeated by Christ. The ensalada, which begins by recalling the lyrics of the first verse of La Guerre, includes no less than thirteen quotations from the Spanish profane and liturgical repertoire, among them the tune of the romance that in 1529 was responsible for spreading the news of the uprising of the siege of Vienna, "Que tocan alarma, Juana!"
This ditty reappears in El Toro, which again contrasts the figure of Christ with that of Lucifer, the only copy of which is preserved in manuscript (Palma de Mallorca, Fundación B. March, Ms 6832). In its composition, a certain haste is evident in the large number of solo passages and the predominance of other homophonic passages, as opposed to those with an imitative texture. Charles V's stay at the residence of the Duke and Duchess of Infantado in January 1534, on his return from Vienna in search of reinforcements to fight the Turkish armada, may have been a motive for the composition of this ensalada, never recorded until now. Years earlier, King Francis I of France, taken prisoner by the Emperor at the Battle of Pavia (24 February 1525), had spent the night in the same residence on his way to Madrid. The Jubilate, another of Flecha's ensaladas in the above-mentioned manuscript, ironically alludes to the surrender of the monarch in the first of the two barzellette it quotes, "Poltrón François", literally "cowardly Francis".
If El Fuego is linked both by its style and its plot, which revolves around sin and the figure of the Virgin, to ensaladas of an earlier period than the trilogy formed by La Guerra, La Justa and El Toro, La Bomba marks a departure from that model. It begins with some agile verses that seek to reflect the behaviour of the crew of a ship about to capsize, a symbol of humanity, who end up being rescued by another ship that symbolises the new-born Christ. The plot of one of its passages revolves around a certain Gil Pizarra, who could be a mocking allusion, like Hieronymus Bosch's distorted characters, to Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru, visiting the court of Charles V in July 1529. Throughout this small masterpiece, Mateo Flecha displays an absolute mastery of the musical and literary language that was to be his hallmark and which others would later try to imitate. Its echoes reached the New World through the literary production of González de Eslava, with his ensalada "de la flota", or the Misa de Bomba by Pedro Bermúdez.
Maricarmen Gómez