Jakob Arcadelt

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Jakob Arcadelt (French Jacques Arcadelt ; born August 10, 1507 in Namur , † October 14, 1568 in Paris ) was a Franco-Flemish composer , singer and conductor of the Renaissance .

Live and act

The ancestry of Jakob Arcadelt was for a long time in the dark and was the subject of many contradicting speculative assumptions, until the following clear entry was found in the baptismal registers of the Church of St. Jean-Baptiste in Namur in 1993: “Die festo Sti Laurentii, Vi 0 a e Idus Augusto - Iacobus Henricus filius Gerardi Fayl arca Eltinensis ”(published by the French music historian Paul Moret 1993). Jakob was the son of the foundry owner Gérard Fayl del Arche d'Elt; the family comes from the village of Helt or Haltinne, southeast of Namur. Jacob's younger brother Charles (* 1511) became a poet and had a book with odes published by the publisher Plantin in Antwerp in 1560 .

Jakob Arcadelt received his first lessons from 1515 with Alexandre de Clèves , who was magister parvorum ("teacher of the little ones") at the collegiate church of St.-Pierre-au-Château in Namur . Arcadelt's classmate at the time was “Petrus Certo”, probably Pierre Certon . In the following years from 1516 to 1524 he was at the collegiate church of St. Aubain in his hometown choirboy ("vicariot") under the choirmasters Lambert Masson and Charles de Niquet . After Jehan de Berghes , governor of the county of Namur, had won a victory over the Duke of Geldern and Robert de la Marck in 1526, Arcadelt took part in the victory ceremony in honor of the governor on December 28, 1526, together with Thomas Crécquillon and Cornelius Canis .

Shortly thereafter, Arcadelt apparently left his hometown, possibly because Namur was besieged by the troops of Emperor Charles V from 1527 onwards . Perhaps his stay in Florence dates from this year , because the author Cosimo Bartoli in his Ragionamenti Accademici describes him as the composer who followed in the footsteps of his friend Philippe Verdelot in Florence . After the Florentine plague epidemic in 1527, Verdelot either left the city or died there. The two composers had probably never met, although as masters of the early madrigal they were always mentioned together. A member of the educated upper class of Florence, Lionardo Strozzi , wrote in a letter of November 19, 1534 to a relative that he had a Florentine friend who could see all of Arcadelt's works shortly after the composition: “perché ho uno amico a Firenze che come Archadelt fa niente semper è il primo ha quelle e me le manda ”(in modernized orthography). The composer does not seem to have held a position at any of the leading orchestras in Florence, but there is a receipt from July 1535 in which "Arcadelte franzese" is referred to as a member of the private band of Alessandro de 'Medici (1511–1537); he was the first ruler of the Principality of Florence from 1532 to 1537. During this Florentine period, Arcadelt created a number of motets , but mainly over 70 madrigals in various collections, some of them on the occasion of the wedding of Alessandro de 'Medici with Margaret of Parma in June 1536.

After the allegedly violent and dissolute ruler Alessandro was murdered on January 5, 1537 by his distant cousin Lorenzino de 'Medici, riots broke out in Florence for months. Lorenzino and the Strozzi family, leaders in the party of the republican rebellion, were unable to take power in Florence and withdrew to Venice in 1537 . This means that Arcadelt, who was friends with these people, could at least stay briefly in this city. In the Capella Giulia of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome , a Jacobus Flandrus is performed as a singer from January 1539 (with very high probability Arcadelt); but because the singers' lists of this band for 1537 and 1538 have been lost, this membership could have existed before 1539. In the madrigal books published during the Florentine period, his works were mixed with those of Francesco Corteccia , Francesco de Layolle and Jacquet de Berchem (Florentine and northern Italian repertoire), while in the third and fourth madrigal books from autumn 1539 Arcadelt's pieces were mainly together with compositions by Costanzo Festa (Roman repertoire) have appeared. This is also a support for the assumption that Arcadelt was in Rome from 1539 at the latest.

The humanist- oriented and art-loving Pope Paul III, elected in October 1534, resided in Rome . (Term of office until 1549), under which Michelangelo worked and St. Peter's Basilica was built. There were two papal chapels here, the Capella Giulia and the Capella Sistina ; in the former, the pay was lower and the workload significantly higher; for the members it was generally regarded as a preliminary stage to the second band. Arcadelt switched to Capella Sistina on December 30, 1540, where he stayed (with interruptions) until June 1551. For the year 1544 he was elected the regular director of the chapel ("Abbas"); The Pope awarded him two benefices on April 22, 1545 in the city of Liège , the seat of his home diocese, to St. Barthélemy and St. Pierre. In his Roman times he composed fewer madrigals than before; the fifth book of madrigals only contains half of his own pieces; other such compositions appeared in collections published in Venice in the 1540s. In contrast, the composition of sacred works increased noticeably, especially two Marian masses and ten motets, almost all of which appeared there for the first time. Due to illness, Arcadelt was not on duty between November 10, 1545 and April 16, 1546, and from May 6, 1546 he took a year-long home leave, which also served to take possession of the benefices; he did not return to Rome until May 28, 1547. His sickness apologies on December 24, 1547 and August 1549 suggest poor health; The creation of compositions also came to a standstill during this time. After Palestrina assumed the first post of Magister capellae in September 1551 , Arcadelt's departure from the papal chapel can be assumed at that time.

After he left Rome, Arcadelt's whereabouts are initially unknown; it was not until 1554 that he was a singer at the court of the later French King Charles IX. occupied in Paris , where he stayed until his death. At the same time he was in the service of the humanist- oriented Cardinal of Lorraine , Charles de Guise (1524–1574), who also resided in Paris; Arcadelt is referred to as the Cardinal's Kapellmeister in the foreword to his Missa tres from 1557. The composer was in his Paris period livings at Notre Dame and St. Germain l'Auxerrois and at the cathedral of Reims . After he wrote chansons occasionally in earlier times, between 1537 and 1551, 21 of which were published by the publishers Pierre Attaignant , Jacques Moderne and Nicolas du Chemin , the number of compositions of this genre increased by leaps and bounds from 1552 and it appeared about 100 such pieces up to 1569 in the anthologies of the royally privileged publisher Le Roy & Ballard . The eight madrigals made during this period can be described as stragglers, and no new motets have survived. In 1557, the publisher Le Roy & Ballard published a third mass for the two masses from the Roman period. He also published a Magnificat and six psalm settings ; however, the latter have been lost. Jakob Arcadelt, recognized during his lifetime as one of the most important composers of his time, died on October 14, 1568 in Paris.

meaning

Jakob Arcadelt can be described as one of the most versatile composers of the 16th century, and because of the number and quality of his compositions he is a central figure between the generations of Josquin Desprez , Heinrich Isaac and Jacob Obrecht on the one hand, and the late Franco-Flemings Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso on the other hand. A particularly important part of his oeuvre in terms of music history are the more than 200 madrigals that have been handed down under his name. After the madrigal had emerged as a genre just a decade earlier in the works of Bernardo Pisano (1490–1548), Philippe Verdelot and Costanzo Festa, Arcadelt was in the historically favorable position to take up this type of music, to develop it further and to perfect it in particular because he was staying in the two main centers of this genre at the crucial time, namely in Florence in the 1530s and in Rome in the 1540s. As an individual achievement, Arcadelt also has considerable creative power and a special feeling for the rhythm and linguistic melody of Italian poetry, which is unparalleled even among native-speaking madrigal composers in the first half of the 16th century.

His work can be divided into three phases. The first relatively small group consists of works from the late 1520s and early 1530s. The second particularly large group includes the compositions of the mid and late 1530s, most of which appeared in the first four madrigal books; this group was particularly popular in the 16th century: the first madrigal book was reprinted at least 56 times in various versions by the middle of the 17th century. The third, very heterogeneous group of works is again smaller in scope and comprises the later works from the 1540s and 1550s. The special mastery of his mature madrigal compositions lies in the almost perfect fusion of speech melody and musical line; this not only often continues beyond the scale limits, but also translates the variable Italian meter into musical rhythm as a matter of course and creates a special correspondence between melodic and linguistic highs and lows.

His chansons from the earlier phase, the 1530s and 1540s, with their clearly delimited, upper voice-oriented and largely homophonic phrases, have a character that is described with the somewhat crude general term "Parisian chanson". From the late 1540s, but especially from 1550, his chansons are more and more purely homophonic, often only three-part, in three-time or alternating between three- and four-time, and with popular or pseudo-popular melodies in the upper part. Another part of his later chansons is more oriented towards the more recent literary-humanist movement of the Pléiade (mainly represented by the French poet Pierre de Ronsard ), in which the music, as in antiquity, should be reduced in form and meter to pure text representation, to achieve the legendary ethical impact of ancient music. It is well known that Arcadelt's last employer, Cardinal Charles de Guise, was a lively advocate of such humanistic endeavors, which later developed into the direction of the musique mésurée . Such influences can naturally be found most clearly in Arcadelt's chansons with Latin texts based on poems by Virgil , Horace and Martial . The three-part chanson "Nous voyons que les hommes" was reworked in the 19th century by the French composer and conductor Pierre-Louis Dietsch into a four-part Ave Maria and is occasionally performed in this form under Arcadelt's name; Franz Liszt composed an organ fantasy based on this version , presumably on the assumption that he was using an original work by the composer.

The sacred compositions by Jakob Arcadelt do not have the rank of his madrigal oeuvre in their entirety, but are evenly distributed over his creative time, with a certain focus on his time at the papal chapel. Here, too, a development can be observed from a neutral or schematic text setting of the earlier works to a text treatment from the late 1530s onwards, in which the melody nestles closely against the words. As with the chansons, Arcadelt follows in Philippe Verdelot's footsteps in the motets; his three masses, in turn, are quite similar in style to his motets. His Lamentations and the Magnificat are written in the simple, declamatory style of the common liturgical music of the time ; it can be assumed that his psalms from 1559, which have not survived, are written in the same style. Just like his masses, Arcadelt's other sacred works have hardly spread beyond the place of their origin or first publication. After all, his motets in particular found approval in the German-speaking world, where individual pieces, especially the extremely popular “Dum complerentur dies pentecostes”, were handed down into the 17th century. Even more than in the madrigal and chanson, Jakob Arcadelt's historical merit in the field of sacred music lies in assimilation and adaptation, but especially in perfecting existing styles (Thomas Schmidt-Beste in the MGG source).

Works (summary)

Complete edition: Jacobi Arcadelt. Opera Omnia , edited by Albert Seay (1916–1989), 10 volumes, without location, 1965–1970 (= Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae No. 31; Part I: Masses, Part II – VII: Madrigals, Part VIII – IX: Chansons, Part X: Motets). However, the editor of the complete edition did not take into account the handwritten works in the sacred compositions sufficiently and not at all in the secular ones.

  • Masses: 3 titles with five or six voices (details: MGG person part volume 1, column 858)
  • Motets, lamentations and Magnificat with guaranteed authorship by Arcadelt: 31 titles with four to eight voices (details: MGG personal section, volume 1, column 858)
  • Motets with dubious authorship, partly attributed to Arcadelt: 2 titles with five voices (Details: MGG Person Part Volume 1, Column 858)
  • Lost and lost spiritual works: 1 collection with motets (published Paris 1556) and 6 psalms (published Paris 1559)
  • Secular madrigals with guaranteed authorship by Arcadelt: 9 anthologies and 216 individual titles with three to six voices (details: MGG personal section, volume 1, columns 859 to 864)
  • Madrigals with dubious authorship, partly attributed to Arcadelt: 48 titles with four voices (details: MGG personal section, volume 1, columns 863 to 864)
  • Sacred and secular chansons with guaranteed authorship by Arcadelt: 11 anthologies and 132 individual titles with three to six voices (details: MGG personal section, volume 1, columns 864 to 867)
  • Chansons with dubious authorship, partly attributed to Arcadelt: 2 titles with four voices (details: MGG Person Part Volume 1, Column 866)

Literature (selection)

  • Franz Xaver Haberl: The Roman »schola cantorum« and the papal band singers up to the middle of the 16th century , Leipzig 1888 (= building blocks for music history No. 3)
  • Alberto Cametti: Enciclopedia italiana , 1925
  • W. Klefisch: Arcadelt as a madrigalist , Cologne 1938
  • EB Helm: The Beginnings of the Italian Madrigal and the Works of Arcadelt , dissertation at Harvard University, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1939
  • Alfred Einstein : The Italian Madrigal , 3 volumes, Princeton 1949
  • EE Lowinsky: A Newly Discovered Sixteenth-Century Manuscript at the Bibliotheca Vallicelliana in Rome. In: Journal of the American Musicological Society No. 3, 1950, pp. 173-232
  • A. Ducrot: Histoire de la Capella Giulia au XVIe siècle depuis sa fondation par Jules II (1513) jusqu'à sa restoration par Grégoire VIII. In: Meslanges d'archéologie e d'histoire No. 75, 1963, pages 179-240 and 467-559
  • Jeremy (?) Haar: Maniera and Mannerism in Italian Music of the Sixteenth Century. In: Essays on Mannerism in Art and Music, edited by SE Murray / RI Weidner, West Chester / Pennsylvania 1980, pp. 34-62
  • TW Bridges: The Publishing of Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals , 2 volumes, dissertation at Harvard University, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1982
  • Jeremy Haar: Towards a Chronology of the Madrigals of Arcadelt. In: Journal of Musicology No. 5, 1987, pp. 28-54
  • I. Fenlon / Jeremy Haar: The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century. Sources and Interpretation , Cambridge et al. 1988
  • L. Lera: Jacob Arcadelt: Orizzonte culturale e modelli stilistici di un padre del madrigale. In: Le origini del madrigale, edited by L. Zoppelli, Asolo 1990, pages 83-90
  • Paul Moret: Jacobus Arcadelt musicien namurois (1507–1568). In: Bulletin de la Société liégeoise de musicologie No. 83, Issue 10, 1993, pages 12-16
  • MA Balsano: Solo e penoso: D'Arcadelt inizia felice, intensa, secolare vita. In: Festschrift for N. Pirrotta, edited by the same and G. Collisani, Palermo 1994, pages 31-58 (= Puncta: Studi musicologici No. 12)
  • K. van Orden: Les Vers lascifs d'Horace: Arcadelt's Latin chansons. In: Journal of Musicology No. 14, 1996, pp. 338-369
  • Jeremy Haar: The Florentine Madrigal, 1540–60. In: Festschrift for L. Lockwood, edited by JA Owens / AM Cummings, Warren / Michigan 1997, pp. 141–151

Web links

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  1. ^ Thomas Schmidt-Beste:  Arcadelt, Jacques. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 1 (Aagard - Baez). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1999, ISBN 3-7618-1111-X  ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
  2. ↑ Marc Honegger, Günther Massenkeil (ed.): The great lexicon of music. Volume 1: A - Byzantine chant. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau a. a. 1978, ISBN 3-451-18051-0 .
personal data
SURNAME Arcadelt, Jakob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arkadelt, Jachet; Archadelt, Jacobus; Hercadelt, Jakob; Arcadet, Jacob; Arcadente, Jacob; Flandrus, Jacobus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Flemish composer, singer and bandmaster of the Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1507
PLACE OF BIRTH Namur
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1568
Place of death Paris