John Taverner: Missa Mater Christi sanctissima & Western Wynde Mass

Early Tudor England was insular and the attitude of its people xenophobic. An Italian visitor of 1497 wrote that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them’, and moreover that ‘they have an antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into their island but to make themselves masters of it and to usurp their goods’. The composer John Taverner was not representative of this English stereotype, since he had great respect for foreign musicians and Continental methods of composition. Specifically, Taverner’s motet and Mass Mater Christi sanctissima showcase the imitative counterpoint and textural contrasts beloved of Josquin Des Prez, and the Western Wynde Mass shows a Lutheran dexterity in its use of a secular model for a piece of sacred music.

In early Tudor England the Church was an international organization ruled by the Pope. Rome received substantial sums of money from all of its dependents in recognition of the fact that the Pope had supreme jurisdiction over the state. England was a devout and orthodox nation; no expense was spared in the internal decoration of even the most humble of religious establishments. The Italian visitor of 1497 wrote that there was ‘not a parish church in the kingdom so mean as not to possess crucifixes, candlesticks, censers, patens, and cups of silver’. The ecclesiastical establishment encouraged a regime of superstitious religion in which the overriding concern of the laity was for the fate of their souls in the afterlife. Such concern was perpetuated by the sale of indulgences, by pilgrimage, and by the widespread veneration of relics. It was against this orthodoxy that John Taverner later rebelled, and it led the composer to ‘repent him very much that he had made songs to popish ditties in the time of his blindness’.

In October 1526, Oxford’s newest college—Cardinal College—opened for business. This was the ostentatious foundation of Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England, trusted advisor to King Henry VIII, and the most powerful man in England apart from the king himself. Wolsey approached his fiftieth birthday with a mission to dissolve those monasteries whose decadent administration fostered corruption. Wolsey had been at school and university in Oxford and later became Dean of Divinity at his alma mater, Magdalen College School. It was therefore natural for Wolsey to use some of the money that had accrued from the dissolution of thirty monasteries to found an educational establishment in Oxford. The eponymous Cardinal College (later Christ Church) was a spectacular foundation, not least musically. The choir of sixteen choristers and at least a dozen singing men was a large and thoroughly professional outfit. It required a superlative musician to run this impressive ensemble, and John Taverner was just such a person. When the Bishop of Oxford, John Longland, invited Taverner to take up the post of Director of Music at Cardinal College, Longland did so in the knowledge that Taverner was the greatest living English composer apart from Nicholas Ludford, and moreover one whose respect for his rich English musical heritage was augmented by a knowledge of (and respect for) the work of foreign composers.

The motet Mater Christi sanctissima was written while Taverner was working at Cardinal College. There was much call for Marian music in Wolsey’s foundation, especially when the text’s very opening emphasized Mary’s role as the mother of Christ. And Taverner’s Continental musical influences lent authentic Roman Catholic exoticism to Wolsey’s new establishment. From the outset, the alternation of the two upper voices and the three lower voices references a Continental soundworld, and carefully sets out its modern vocal space within Wolsey’s new architectural space. The effect is simple and direct, yet sophisticated. This Antiphon to the Virgin Mary has an appropriately feminine lilt, and its harmonies are carefully directed. While its five-voice texture is entirely English (with its high-lying arched treble lines and resonant bass), the antiphonal dialogue punctuated by passages of powerful homophony boasts Franco-Flemish influence. Yet the persistent harmonic cross-relations are integral to the piece’s English modality and more frequent than they would be in Continental church music of the time. The motet Mater Christi sanctissima survives in the ‘Peterhouse’ partbooks—a sacred anthology that reflects the repertory of the 1530s at Magdalen College. So this motet travelled east down Oxford’s High Street soon after its composition. Sadly, this set of partbooks is missing its tenor book (the second part up from the bass), although Mater Christi sanctissima is also contained in the ‘Sadler’ partbooks, which date from half a century later. So the piece survives intact, albeit not entirely contemporaneously. The same cannot be said for the Mass setting that Taverner based on the motet, since Missa Mater Christi sanctissima only survives in the ‘Peterhouse’ source. Francis Steele’s thrillingly competent reconstruction of the missing voice part of the Mass has been used for this recording, and the reliability of Steele’s edition is aided and abetted by the fact that the first part up from the bottom of the texture is the easiest part of the five to reconstruct, since its spacing above the bass line is acoustically straitjacketed when the other four parts are known. Moreover, since the Mass is modelled on the music of the motet, there are many sections where the music of the motet’s tenor part can be transferred directly from the model to the parody. What you hear on this recording is therefore as close to the original score as you could hope to get, at least until new sources are uncovered or new computational analytical techniques are developed.

Missa Mater Christi sanctissima—like most English cyclic Mass settings of the period—lacks a polyphonic Kyrie. The athletic opening of the Gloria brazenly references the Mass’s model, but bends the liltingly Marian figuration to its own ends. It is fascinating to observe how, in Taverner’s hands, a musical passage can transmit different meanings in different contexts. That isn’t the case with all composers of the period, and it takes a master craftsman like Taverner to reuse and re-stitch old material into a flattering new outfit. It is the fluency with which Taverner transforms his own music in a logically through-composed manner that is so impressive. And then, just as impressively, Taverner responds to the moment (for instance, ‘Jesu Christe’) by setting specific words in an arresting way: demonstrate special reverence here, the music says to the worshipper. Although the musical style of the Mass is predominantly expansive, the text is clearly audible in the decorated sections for a few well-considered reasons. First, the close imitation at the beginning of phrases helps to reinforce textual audibility. Secondly, melismas are reserved for the penultimate syllable of a phrase, by which time the final syllable’s identity is understood. Thirdly, the text of the Latin Mass would anyway have been thoroughly familiar to anyone hearing this music in Cardinal College in the late 1520s. On its second appearance in the Gloria, the name of Jesus is again given special chordal treatment, whereas this time the epithet ‘Christ’ is treated more expansively than before. And the ‘Amen’ at the end of the movement, though relatively brief, is one of the most ecstatic climaxes of any Mass movement of the early Tudor period. The use of the head-motif at the opening of the Credo engenders not so much the idea of motivic recycling, but rather it focuses the musical endeavour on the liturgical importance of the words of the Creed. It is Taverner’s strength that he simultaneously gives the impression of effortlessly spinning notes while taking care to lend emphasis to those aspects of the text that he deems appropriate—chordal treatment here, gentle imitation there; high voices here, a breathtaking musical arch there; insistent imitation here, low voices there; and so on. The view through Taverner’s musico-theological kaleidoscope is infinitely patterned and colourful. Missa Mater Christi sanctissima is thoroughly logical in the progression of its musical argument, and it means that the piece makes aural sense as a large-scale structure even when taken out of its liturgical context. Indeed, certain aspects of the composer’s genius become even more apparent when you divorce them from the liturgical action. And on a purely technical level, Taverner’s two- and three-voice writing is outstanding in this Mass. Indeed, there is more contrapuntal fluidity here than in Taverner’s more famous Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas. The metre is firmly simple-duple throughout but with two exceptions—the compound-duple ‘Osanna’ to the Benedictus and the third ‘Agnus Dei’ that ends the Mass. That the self-evident ebullience transmitted by the words ‘Hosanna in the highest’ should be musically matched by the closing words of the Mass (‘grant us peace’) might seem contradictory to twenty-first-century sensibilities, yet clearly the early sixteenth-century Northern European view of peace was more vivacious than that of today.

In 1528, two years after his arrival in Oxford, Taverner was deemed to be over-sympathetic towards Lutheran doctrine. Fortunately for Taverner, then as now, the Director of Music at an Oxford college is viewed as a person whose political opinions are of little concern to the powers that be. And so, because Taverner was ‘but a musician’, he escaped sentence. But Lutheran sympathies had a tangible influence on the composition of Taverner’s Western Wynde Mass. Unlike the parody Mass Missa Mater Christi sanctissima, the Western Wynde Mass is based not upon polyphony but on a single-line melody. Moreover, where the model for the Missa Mater Christi sanctissima is devoutly religious, the tune on which the Western Wynde Mass is based has a text which is overtly secular:

Western wind, when will thou blow:
The small rain down can rain;
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

It is easy to see how Roman Catholic dignity might have been offended by Taverner’s liturgical reliance on a tune whose well-known text was so indecorous. On the other hand, the famous Lutheran cry of ‘Why should the devil have all the best tunes?’ (although Luther himself never wrote those words) was never so apt as in the composition of the Western Wynde Mass. The song itself is rhythmically sprightly, its melody catchy, and its Dorian melody (with its bold minor third and taut minor seventh) compositionally fecund. That John Sheppard and Christopher Tye—two giants of the mid-Tudor period—should each follow Taverner’s lead in using ‘Western wind’ as a model for a four-voice polyphonic Mass setting says almost as much about the structural agility of the tune itself as about Taverner’s immense reputation as a composer. Taverner deploys the ‘Western wind’ tune twenty-one times in the treble voice, ten times in the tenor, five times in the bass, and never in the alto (Tye’s setting, by contrast, uses the tune exclusively in the alto voice—a clear homage to Taverner). The wonder of Taverner’s setting (as indeed of Sheppard’s and Tye’s later settings) is that the many repetitions of the tune are embedded so deeply within inspired polyphonic composition that the repetitive nature provides musical coherence rather than boredom or irritation. Indeed, the most inspired moment in the Mass occurs at the beginning of the Sanctus, where Taverner uses the same rising-scale motif five times over in the bass part while the ‘Western wind’ tune unfolds overhead. That this occurs at the heart of the Mass underlines just how confidently virtuosic a composer Taverner was. The more technical constraints Taverner placed on himself, the more effective his music became. In that sense Taverner mirrors the aesthetic achievement of composers such as Bach, Haydn and Stravinsky, and frequently proves himself to be much more than a clever writer of church music on demand.

Jeremy Summerly © 2016