This year is the 500th anniversary of the death of Tomás Luis de Victoria, whose work, as I have written before, I consider to be the most moving High Renaissance music there is.
This year is the 500th anniversary of the death of Tomás Luis de Victoria, whose work, as I have written before, I consider to be the most moving High Renaissance music there is. But we could have had little idea how the world’s tragedies would follow the Tallis Scholars around, making performances of his ineffable six-voice Requiem as useful as they have been appropriate.
From the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, through the disaster at Fukushima to the bombed restaurant in Marrakesh and the murderous performance recently in Oslo, my troupe and/or I have been there or thereabouts. To be more precise, my trip to Fukushima was cancelled, as readers of this column will know, but the Tallis Scholars went back on tour to Japan in June when, as in many other places, we sang Victoria’s Requiem every night in memory of the dead.
Norway has certainly been in the news these last weeks, adding polar bears to guns as a means of access to the hereafter. The Breivik massacre shocked Norwegians to an extent that seasoned observers of crime in the US would find hard to credit. When we sang in Trondheim — many hundreds of miles from where the shooting took place — just afterwards, everybody was close to tears, since everybody knew somebody who was related to one of the victims. Singing alongside the cathedral choir we broadcast a programme of music that had been chosen months earlier, but which almost inevitably seemed to suit the mood of the occasion — Allegri’s Miserere, Victoria’s eight-voice Salve regina and finally, as the encore, the funeral motet Versa est in luctum from Victoria’s Requiem. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife in the seconds which followed that encore, music as so often having said difficult things better than words can do.
This would have appealed to Victoria. In the other movements of his Requiem the message is one of hope through peace (‘requiem aeternam’) and light (‘lux perpetua’). Even the calamity of the ‘dies irae’ soon winds up in another statement of the ‘requiem aeternam’. The only exception in the whole composition to this positive view of death is Versa est, which starts with unrelieved mourning and ends with the words ‘nihil enim sunt dies mei’ (for my days are as nothing).
Familiar as the Spanish of the late-16th century were with shooting the people they believed to be heretics, I wonder how the priestly Victoria would have dealt with this 21st-century version of innocent slaughter. To our hosts in Trondheim, despite the time of year, there was no light.
And so we brought this music to the Proms, singing to a crowd of people that the Guardian critic Andrew Clements said was the largest he had ever seen at a late-night. I would love to know why they came. Presumably not because they had a premonition of what would break out on the streets of London within a few hours. Was it because of us? Or the music of Victoria? Or the fact that the Proms have programmed astonishingly little early music this year, and no other Victoria? Or the general effectiveness of the Proms publicity machine?
Proms director Roger Wright told me that the average attendance is already up on last year, which itself set a new record. He has even done away with the fountain in the middle of the arena. When I questioned him about this he started to say that recycled stagnant water is bad for the environment, but soon admitted that he can simply get more people into the space if the fountain isn’t there.
I find myself in a bind about the success of the Proms in its current guise. Attendance is up, but only for the least early music-friendly series since the 1950s. Nonetheless, when there is an early music concert, there is a record crowd. Where do the planners go from here, and what would a historian of musical taste make of it?
There is something joyful about the Proms putting such an emphasis on recent music, indeed on the work of living composers. Last week I read a leader in the Guardian ‘In praise of Steve Reich’. It seems that for the first time in 60 years contemporary classical music is of real interest to non-specialist people. But I have dedicated my career to establishing such a status for 16th-century music. Not long ago the Proms supported this kind of endeavour; and it is not part of my vision to be a lone voice. Nor do I wish to be confined to specialist early music festivals, which are anyway on the retreat.
I have always believed that renaissance music can be performed alongside the greatest music of any period, and in many cities that is exactly what is happening. I’m hoping that next year’s Proms — and the daily fare on Radio 3 in the coming months — will reflect this belief too. At the moment neither does.
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