Jean de Castro

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean de Castro (* around 1540 in Liège , † after 1600 probably in Cologne ) was a Franco-Flemish composer and conductor of the Renaissance .

Live and act

In the sheet music edition “Novae cantiones sacrae” from 1588, Jean de Castro is referred to as Eburone , a name often used in the 16th and 17th centuries for people who were born in Liège and Evreux . Because the name Castro occurs frequently in the Liège archives, music historians today believe that the composer comes from this city. In the late 1560s Castro went to Antwerp , where his first publications appeared. Here he apparently worked temporarily as a musical advisor to the publisher Pierre Phalèse and may have prepared his own music editions, which were published by this publisher in the 1570s. During this time Castro also received an important commission from the merchant Justinien Pense from Lyon to create luxuriously illustrated choir books; these consisted of three books of Castro's secular music and were copied in 1571 by Jean Pollet from Lille . Castro later included many of these pieces in revised form in prints from the 1580s and 1590s.

In November 1576, insurgent Spanish soldiers partially destroyed the city of Antwerp, and Castro fled to France via Germany. In Germany he may have had contact with his future employer, Johann Wilhelm , Prince of Jülich and Kleve , before he went to Lyon for a few years. In the foreword to his Second Livre de chansons, madrigals et motets (published Paris 1580) he described the reasons for his stay there. Castro returned to Antwerp in 1586 at the latest, when relative peace had returned to Antwerp, and on June 27 of this year he signed the dedication of his work Livre de chansons à cinq parties , a dedication to the aforementioned Prince Johann Wilhelm. In the preface to this work it is noted that the first piece in this collection was sung on the occasion of the wedding of the prince with Jakobe von Baden on July 15, 1585. Around 1588 the composer entered the prince's service at his court in Düsseldorf because the title pages of the collections he published between 1588 and 1591 identify him as the conductor of Johann Wilhelm. With the increasing illness of Johann Wilhelm from 1591 Jean de Castro apparently left Düsseldorf and turned to Cologne, where he spent the rest of his life. In the event that the Belgian musicologist A. Goovaerts (1880) correctly dated Castro's Sonets du seigneur Pierre de la Meschinière to the year 1600, no further works by the composer have appeared after that year, and music historians assume that Castro died in the first few years afterwards.

meaning

The reputation of Jean de Castro in his time results from the wide distribution of his works, which were not only printed in the Netherlands, France and Germany, but also in Venice and Geneva . The number of volumes of his compositions attest to both his popularity and productivity. Prints of his works sold in numbers only exceeded by the works of Orlando di Lasso , and his compositions continued to circulate until 30 years after his death.

The compositional basis of Castro's music was imitative counterpoint , but in keeping with the growing importance of text declamation in the later sixteenth century, his counterpoint creates space for a more homophonic style. There is no evidence that he ever worked in Italy, but he also used composition techniques that are typical of the Italian music of his time, such as word painting, moderate chromatics and clear contrasts in the vocal range and the structure of the pieces; He used this not only in the music for Italian texts, but also in the motets and chansons . He mastered the dialogue techniques of the divided choirs ( cori Spezzati ) with particular mastery , which comes into play in his seven and eight-part chansons and motets. In handling the texts, he closely follows the rhythm of the language ( syllabic ). The wide range of his texts ranges from older models to more recent poems by the group of Pléiade ; works by Francesco Petrarca and Torquato Tasso are set to music in his madrigals .

Works (summary)

  • Spiritual works
    • "Il primo libro di madrigali, canzoni & motetti" with three voices (Antwerp 1569)
    • 6 motets for three parts (from Il primo libro , Löwen 1569)
    • 1 further motet for three voices (Löwen 1569)
    • "Sacrarum cantionum" with five to eight voices (Antwerp / Leuven 1571)
    • "Triciniorum sacrorum", part 1 (Antwerp / Leuven 1574)
    • 4 motets for three parts (Geneva 1577)
    • 8 motets for three parts (Geneva 1577)
    • "Second Livre de chansons, madrigalz et motetz" with three voices (Paris 1580)
    • 1 further motet (Geneva 1580)
    • "Chansons, madrigaux et motetz" with three voices (Antwerp 1582)
    • "Novae cantiones sacrae" with five to eight voices (Douai 1588)
    • "Cantiones sacrae" with five voices (Frankfurt am Main 1591)
    • "Tricinium sacrorum" for three voices, part 2 (Antwerp 1592)
    • "Cantiones aliquot sacrae" with three voices (Cologne 1593)
    • "Bicinia [...] cantiones aliquot sacrae" with two voices (Cologne 1593, 1598)
    • "Missa tres" with three voices (Cologne 1599)
    • 1 further motet in an anthology (Strasbourg 1623)
    • 2 further motets with five to eight voices
    • 1 English counterfactor
    • 1 further motet in an English manuscript
    • various other works in manuscripts
  • Secular works
    • 6 chansons with three voices (Löwen 1569)
    • 2 more chansons with three voices (Löwen 1569)
    • "Chansons et madrigales" for four voices (Löwen 1570)
    • 1 further chanson with four voices (Paris 1570)
    • 40 chansons with three voices (Löwen 1574)
    • 19 chansons for four voices (Antwerp 1575)
    • "Livre de chansons nouvellement" to three voices (Paris 1575, Antwerp 1582)
    • "Chansons, odes, et sonetz de Pierre Ronsard" with four, five and eight voices (Löwen / Antwerp 1576)
    • "Livre de chansons" for three voices (Antwerp 1582)
    • "Livre de chansons" for five voices (Antwerp 1586)
    • "Madrigali [...] con doi canzoni francese" with three to six voices (Antwerp 1588)
    • "Rose fresche. Madrigali novi "for three voices (Venice 1591)
    • "Recueil des chansons" for three voices (Antwerp 1591, 1609)
    • "Trois Odes contenant chascune d'elles douze parties" with four votes (Douai 1592)
    • "Sonets, avec une chanson" for two voices (Antwerp 1592, 1610, 1634)
    • "Chansons, stanses, sonets, et epigrammes" for two voices (Antwerp 1592, reprints 1610 and 1634)
    • "Quintines, sextines, sonets" with five voices (Cologne 1594)
    • "Scielta de più vaghi madrigali" to five voices (Venice 1594)
    • "Harmonie joyeuse et délectable" for four voices (Antwerp 1595)
    • "Chant musicale sur les nopces du [...] Prince Don Philippe" with five voices (Cologne 1597)
    • "Madrigali" for three voices (Antwerp 1607, 1620)
    • "Sonets, chansons" for two voices, part 1 (Antwerp 1610, 1634)
    • "Chansons, sonets, stanses et epigrammes" for two voices, part 2 (Antwerp 1610)
    • "Sonets du Seigneur Pierre de la Meschinière" with three voices (Douai 1600, lost, 1610)
    • "Recueil de chansons" for three voices (Douai 1604)
    • "Sonnets" for three voices (Douai 1604)
    • "Tricinia" for three voices (Douai 1604)
    • 1 more chanson with 5 to 6 voices (Munich 1609)
    • 1 more chanson (Paris 1611, 1614)
    • 1 madrigal and 18 chansons (handwritten)
    • 1 more chanson in English handwriting
    • various other works in manuscripts

Literature (selection)

  • A. Goovaerts: Histoire de bibliographie de la typographie musicale das les Pays-Bas , Brussels / Antwerp 1880, 2nd edition 1963
  • M. Oebel, contribution to a monograph on Jean de Castro , Regensburg 1928
  • W. Kirsch: ›Musica Dei donum optimi‹: On a secular motet from the 16th century. In: Festschrift H. Osthoff, edited by W. Stauder / U. Aarburg / P. Cahn, Tutzing 1969
  • I. Bossuyt: Jean de Castro: Chansons, odes et sonets de Pierre Ronsard. In: Rivista musicale italiana No. 74, 1988, issue 2, pages 173-188
  • J. Brooks: Jean de Castro, the Pense Partbooks, and Musical Culture in Sixteenth-Century Lyon. In: Early Music History No. 11, 1992, pp. 91-149
  • J. Brooks: Music by Jean de Castro in the Parisian Library of Justinien Pense. In: Revue belge de musicologie No. 50, 1996, pages 25-34
  • I. Bossuyt: Orlando di Lasso as a Model for Composition as Seen in the Tree-Voice Motets of Jean de Castro. In: P. Bergquist (editor), Orlando di Lasso Studies, Cambridge 1999, pages 158-182

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ The music in past and present (MGG), person part Volume 4, Bärenreiter and Metzler, Kassel and Basel 2000, ISBN 3-7618-1114-4
  2. ↑ Marc Honegger, Günther Massenkeil (ed.): The great lexicon of music. Volume 2: C - Elmendorff. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau a. a. 1979, ISBN 3-451-18052-9 .
  3. ^ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , edited by Stanley Sadie, 2nd Edition, Volume 5, McMillan, London 2001, ISBN 0-333-60800-3
personal data
SURNAME Castro, Jean de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Castro, Iehan de; Castro, Giovan de; Castro, Ioanne de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Flemish composer and bandmaster of the Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH around 1540
PLACE OF BIRTH Liege
DATE OF DEATH after 1600
Place of death Cologne