Primus liber missarum sex vocum

This volume of the Complete Works contains the four parody (or imitation) masses published in the Primus liber missarum sex vocum of 1572. 1572 was an important year for the almost forty-year-old Gabrieli and his public image as a composer. In close proximity to the new collection of masses, the same year brought reprints of all his earlier single-author anthologies. Gabrieli’s awareness of his position seems to emerge from his choice of dedicatee for the Primus liber missarum: archduke Karl II, governor of Inner Austria from 1564 until his death in 1590, and notable admirer of north Italian and, above all, Venetian musical culture; and it is also evident in his choice of ‘models’ for the four masses, by composers who together represent his idealized artistic pedigree and institutional affiliation. Adriano Willaert and Cipriano de Rore were maestri di cappella at the ducal church of St Mark’s respectively from 1527 to 1562 and from 1563 to 1564; and Gabrieli is known to have spent some years north of the Alps with Orlando di Lasso, himself a frequent visitor to Venice both before and after his nomination as maestro di cappella at the Munich court chapel in 1563. The fourth and final ‘model’ is a youthful motet by Gabrieli himself. Though the precise dates of composition of Gabrieli’s masses cannot be established, the inclusion of the Missa “Vexilla regis prodeunt” and Missa “Pater peccavi” in D-Mbs Mus. ms. 17, a manuscript compiled for the use of the Munich Hofkapelle in 1564-1565, demonstrates the retrospective nature of at least part of the printed collection. In particular, the two sources of the Missa “Pater peccavi” offer substantially different readings of two sections of the Credo (“Crucifixus etiam pro nobis [...]” and “Et resurrexit tertia die [...]”, both “a 3”) and a section of the Sanctus (“Benedictus qui venit [...]”, “a 4”), though based on the same motivic materials. Differences also occur in the final bars of the Agnus Dei, which employs an expanded seven-voice texture. The present edition is based primarily on the printed text of 1572, which brings together almost the entire corpus of Gabrieli’s six-voice masses. This collection undoubtedly originates in circles close to the composer, and Gabrieli himself was potentially on hand during the entire productive process; the divergent readings of D-Mbs Mus. ms. 17 are transcribed and briefly illustrated in the Appendix.