Spotlight Palestrina: “Missa Papae Marcelli”

Karajan and Renaissance music – this was a rare combination but it did happen.

On the occasion of the 30^th anniversary of the “Concert Association of the Chorus of the Vienna Opera” he directed a spectacular concert (although there wasn’t very much to see) with Palestrina’s “Missa Papae Marcelli” right at the beginning of his era as managing director of the opera in December 1957. Richard Osborne reports:

“The singers […] were placed in groups at some distance from one another on the stage. Since they were dressed in black and only half lit, they appeared as distant shadowy presences. Karajan, too, was in the dark. Only his hands were lit. […] As for the music-making, it was by all accounts extremely beautiful: Palestrina’s Mass beckoned lovingly into Isolde’s realm of eternal night.”

Osborne assumes that Karajan’s scenic and lighting experiments also influenced his only opera production in ancient music, Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” – although there was a distinguished director, Günther Rennert, who didn’t agree with Karajan on every item.

It was not the first time Karajan interpreted a-cappella choir music. Over his career, he created three programmes in which he performed both Renaissance music and classical symphonic repertoire during the same concert – a combination you would hardly find in many contemporary concert halls. On 4 and 5 February 1950, he conducted two concerts with Renaissance motets in the first half. The Vienna Boys’ Choir sang “Canite tuba in Sion” by Jacobus Gallus, “Tenebrae factae sunt” and “Duo seraphim clamabant” by Thomas Ludovico da Vittoria, “O bone Jesu” by Marco Antonio Ingegneri and “Salvator mundi” by Palestrina. The second half was Bruckner’s fifth symphony.

On 31 October, 1 and 3 November 1953, he performed “All’ ora i pastori tutti” and “Ecco mormora l’onde” by Monteverdi, “Margot labourés les vignes” by Orlando di Lasso, “O sempre crudo amore” by Carlo Gesualdo and three songs by Debussy(!) with his beloved “Singverein der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde” and the soloists Hedwig Kräutler and Reinhold Schmid. After the interval, the Vienna Symphony played Bruckner’s Eighth.

His last experiment of this sort on 26 and 27 September 1965 in Berlin was even more unusual. He invited the “Coro dell’ Academica Philharmonica Romana” to sing two North-Italian folksongs by Filippo Azzaiolo, three madrigals by Gesualdo and two by Luca Marenzio. Then he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” and Beethoven’s Fourth.

—  P.R. Jenkins