Alonso Lobo: Lamentations

Alonso Lobo has gained modern fame as the composer of Versa est in luctum, an exquisite and moving funeral motet on the death of Philip II of Spain. But Lobo was not a ‘one hit’ composer. All his works deserve attention, finely wrought as indeed they are. Six Masses and seven motets were published in 1602 at the Royal Press in Madrid. Of an original print-run of one-hundred-and-thirty copies, twenty-one have been located in our time. These and other works (in manuscript) are presently conserved at Rome, Toledo, Seville, Segovia, Lerma (Burgos) and elsewhere in Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Central America.

Alonso Lobo was baptized on 25 February 1555 in Osuna, a town some fifty miles from Seville. His musical talents took him to Seville Cathedral as a choirboy under the tutelage of Francisco Guerrero. He progressed as a young man to holy orders and to a canonry at the Collegiate Church at Osuna. His reputation spread, and in his mid-thirties he was offered the post of assistant and probable successor to the ageing Guerrero. The Seville Chapter granted him the post without the usual formal tests of musicianship. He stayed there two full years from the autumn of 1591. In 1593 Lobo was elected maestro de capilla at Toledo, Primatial See of Spain, an appointment of great prestige. After ten successful years, he returned to take charge at Seville Cathedral in 1604, where he stayed until his death in 1617.

Lobo’s Masses contained in his sole printed collection are, all but one, based on motets by his mentor and hero, Francisco Guerrero. Three are for four voices (one is on Palestrina’s O Rex gloriae), and one for five (with clever canons, aptly, being upon Guerrero’s Prudentes virgines). The two most imposing Masses are for six voices: Beata Dei genitrix and Maria Magdalene. The latter is based on Guerrero’s extensive motet Maria Magdalene et altera Maria (published in 1570), which has a text that is a unique compilation and adaptation of Mark’s Gospel story (16: 1–2 & 5–6) and the liturgical spin-offs such as the Easter Matins Responsorium II with its added ‘Alleluias’. The six voices are twin trebles, alto, tenor and two bass parts, one really a baritone. When Lobo took this work as his model he kept the vocal scoring precisely. Modern choirmasters have rejoiced in this spread of vocal resources.

Guerrero’s motet is composed of series of melodic points that are worked in imitation, some plainly, some in inversion, others stretched or compressed, all frequently animated with ornamental running figures. These are the materials that Lobo transforms into a great edifice that is his own, but one that remains his homage to the older master. The opening phrases of the motet are striking, and it is to them that Lobo frequently returns. The process of reinvention is all-pervading, but we may pick out how Lobo adopts and adapts the ‘Alleluia’ ending of Guerrero’s first half and transforms it into the ‘Amen’ to close his Gloria. The repeated ‘Osanna’ section that completes both Sanctus and Benedictus is a transformation of the polyphonic web into what is now called compound triple time, spiced with syncopation as the voices clamour for attention, displacing their accents and misbehaving with the pulse.

Should we consider Alonso Lobo a master of great originality and innovation? The answer must be negative. Consider him one of the last exponents of the tradition that we admire as Renaissance Polyphony, and the answer must be strongly positive. All his music is finely made. Some of it rises above the conventions of beauty into a realm of great inspiration, on the level of his friend Victoria’s best. Beyond Lobo’s superb motets, his Lamentations have recently emerged from obscurity.

Alonso Lobo composed two sets of Holy Week Lamentations, Lessons I & II at Matins (Tenebrae) of Holy Saturday. The second of these survives in unperformable fragmentation in a severely water-damaged choirbook at Toledo Cathedral. Lobo’s music for the First Lesson survives in the archive of Seville Cathedral, in a choirbook written in 1772 by Juan Ossorio, singer and music scribe (apuntador). Late though this unique source is, there is no reason to doubt the attribution to Lobo. Ossorio gives the Latinized ‘Ildephonso Lupo’ on the title page, and ‘Alphonsi Lobo’ on the recto of the first opening. The music is consistent with Lobo’s personal style. That Ossorio made this copy demonstrates that these Lamentations were still in use in 1772. They show Lobo using his powers of expression in the long vocalizations of the Hebrew letters and in the short bursts of concise declamation in the verses. The letters Heth, Teth and Iod, bereft of their Hebrew acrostic purpose, serve, in the Latin liturgy, as section-markers, sung to a few notes in the plainchant formulae. Lobo uses these as moments of contemplation and repose. He is in a long tradition of elaborating these interludes, and his are among the finest. In this set, they get longer and more intense in expression as the work progresses. The melismas at the three settings of Iod seem like ritual weeping in music, akin to the Spanish tradition of funerary llantas. In contrast, Lobo collects his voices from their polyphonic web to deliver clear homophonic declamation, spiced with brief syncopation and verbal patter, in the verse ‘Sedebit solitarius’ … ‘He will sit in solitude’. Twice Lobo sets a verse for just four voices. This is especially effective when the penultimate section is followed by the full weight of grand sound in the final plea, added to Jeremiah by the Church: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God.’

There are nine motets attributed to Lobo existing in two manuscripts (at Lerma and Segovia) that were copied for instrumentalists, wind bands usually of cornetts, shawms, sackbuts and dulcians (cornetas, chirimias, sacabuches y bajones). Two of these exist in distinctly different versions. All the eleven motets were stripped of their texts, leaving only the first few words as titles. One of them had no identification at all until Douglas Kirk, editor of the Lerma Codices, spotted that it carried the Spanish plainchant melody for Regina caeli laetare paraphrased in the top voice. It can safely be attributed to Lobo. It is clearly one of his many tributes to his admired friend Francisco Guerrero, whose similar version was published four times between 1555 and 1597. It proved easy to restore the text of this Eastertide Marian Antiphon, with its recurrent bursts of ‘Alleluia’.

The summertime Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with great processions and lavish spectacles, very colourful and often noisy. But devout contemplation of the miraculous Eucharistic transubstantiation was central to the liturgical worship on that day. The words of Thomas Aquinas inspired many composers, not least William Byrd, and here, to complete this recording, we have Alonso Lobo at his best, weaving a kind of celestial tapestry with his six voices criss-crossing in a kind of angelic ecstasy. O quam suavis est, Domine is the first of the seven motets included in the Liber Primus Missarum of 1602; they follow the Masses in a section entitled Moteta ex devotione inter Missarum solemnia decantanda—‘Devotional motets for singing during Solemn Masses’.

Bruno Turner © 2016