| Series |
Music in context
Music in context. ^A1130438
|
| Contents |
Introduction: "Requiem for an age?" -- Chaplain of the Empress -- María's exequies in context -- Publishing the Officium defunctorum -- Fashioning the Requiem -- "The crowning work of a great genius" -- Epilogue: Requiem for our age? -- Appendix 1: Officium defunctorum: Texts and translations of the paratextual material / translations by Leofranc Holford-Strevens -- Appendix 2: Requiem masses by Italian composers printed between 1560 and 1650. |
| Abstract |
The work is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. The author's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the the work itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. The composer composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of Maria of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events, and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies, to be reconstructed vividly. The author then locates the composer's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-252), discography (pages 253-254) and index. |
| LCCN | 2018041953 |
| ISBN | 9781107054424 (hardback alkaline paper) |
| ISBN | 1107054427 (hardback alkaline paper) |
