The Gallus enigma

If, however, one continues to ask: “Who was Gallus?”, it is precisely that it seems easy to reply to the question, “What is his work?”, in view of the number of publications which contain it. His singular brilliance arises from the quantity of trouvailles collected there, exactly, we have said, like the cabinets of precious craftsmanship thus prized at Rudolf’s court. The bizarre, even the grotesque, also have their place there, but above all, also, a remarkable sincerity of accent. < p/> This music of Gallus’s does not have the stability of treatment nor the brilliance of Palestrina’s. It is, likewise, less touching than that of Lassus, with which it nevertheless shares a taste for intense subjectivity. Its style pays ample tribute to the procedures of the “international” (i.e. French-Flemish) counterpoint of the period, but is confirmed as very independent in the formulation of its harmonic language. Significant of this Prague climate where illusionist treatment seeks to conceal its procedures, the music of Gallus often appears to the ear as disconcertingly simple. The impact of this apparent simplicity is that, very often, these works are heard with an astonishing freshness in our time and make it possible to understand why certain motets have maintained themselves in the repertoire of choirs and choir-schools virtually without interruption since the time of their composition. Gallus wrote at a period when the common language of composers, the perfected fine art carried by the French-Flemish to the four corners of Europe, was beginning to diversify dialects difficult to reconcile among themselves. Between the north and the south, between Catholics and Protestants, between ancient and modern, the end of the 16th century saw a fragmentation of musical styles that only the advance of the baroque would resolve. In its diversity, Gallus’s work bears witness to this stylistic fragmentation and at the same time displays a fine variety of attempts to succeed in overcoming it. < p/> Ten printed collections allow us access to the work, of which not one can be defined by formulas that are too general or too conveniently summarised. Here first of all are the Masses, 18 masterpieces conceived according to the parody-Mass technique. Where did Gallus find the model of these Masses? In his own motets, but also in German, French,Flemish, Italian sources... This diversity is characteristic, no less astonishing for the frequent antiquity of the models than for the fact that sometimes profane sources are concerned, at a period (1580) when composers were gradually abandoning this type of inspiration so as to conform to the new rules of propriety in composition advocated at the conclusion of the Council of Trent. Gallus is not content to quote models, even profane ones. He deconstructs them and transforms them into illustrations in sound of the liturgical text, utilising effects of polyphonic declamation of a melodious decorum. None of these Masses allows the artifices of construction concealed in each movement to be guessed at, not even the most complex (the so-called Missa canonica, which can be sung by four voices or by eight by employing canon with the preceding four!)

Here too are the 374 motets of the Opus Musicum, which, in four books (1586-1590), forms Gallus’s great work. It would be difficult to find together anything which is at the same time more coherent in its conception, more carefully organised in its printed presentation (motets for the whole liturgical year arranged according to the time order) and more diverse in its realisation. When judging the mannerist author while listening to the chromatic motet Mirabile mysterium, numerous motets for two, three or four choirs lead one to suspect an adept of the Venetian polychoral style... But the list grows longer: to plunge further into the forest of this Opus Musicum is sufficient to avoid locating the unica too quickly. Does not Scio enim reveal a perfect mastery of an archaic style, close to Josquin’s penitential motets? Contrariwise, is not Hodie Simon Petrus the herald of the clear language of the Baroque? And the recourse to the direct style of declamation in Fratres, hospites non estis? And the audacious figuration of Dum aurora (whose first part evokes the march rhythm dragging Saint Cecilia to the scaffold)? One could multiply the examples of this singular musical polyglossia, which is used in the fashion of a palette of singular effects in the service of the text. < p/> Here finally are two collections of Moralia (1589, and the second published posthumously in Nuremberg in 1596, thanks to the composer’s brother) that prematurely terminated the cantor’s career in highly unorthodox fashion, in secular accents. Here too, nothing in these Latin madrigals allows formulations to be discovered that had already been heard elsewhere. The collection resembles those humanistic albums such as were loved in Erasmus’s time: venerable texts from antiquity (Virgil, Ovid) cheek by jowl with Latin proverbs borrowed from widely known contemporary books on courtesy. Latin acquires the robustness of a dialect in these couplets, feeling their soil, even their college benches. Animal cries, domestic scenes, counsels to avoid flatterers, melancholy reflections on passing time, Latin variants of La Bataille or of Petrarchian poetry: in these Moralia are found the condensation of a whole epoch. In his preface, Gallus indeed devotes some familiar words to protest the fact that, all the same, he had wished to write nothing contrary to good manners: it is truly a wind of characteristic liberty that blows on his work, a liberty so characteristic of the Prague in which he lived. < p/> The flowery Latin of Gallus’s prefaces is that of the most ornate prose of Renaissance scholars. Appearing there are named persons, who certainly help in retracing the outline of a biography, and notably three stages apparently having preceded his arrival in Prague: Melk in Austria, Zabrdovice (near Brno) in Moravia, finally Olomouc. It is known that in this last town Gallus was in the service of bishop Stanislav Pavlovsky, by whom he was much appreciated, and who was to show himself his principal supporter outside Prague once the composer was installed in that town in 1585. It is also known that he was bound in friendship with Caspar Schönhauer, the superior of the Premonstratensian monastery of Zabrdovice, to whom he refers several times in his work. It can equally be deduced that a stay in Melk, the powerful Benedictine abbey celebrated today for its Baroque architecture, must have taken place in the course of the 1570s. But nothing allows us to trace a precise itinerary of Gallus’s activities in the course of these long years, and particularly not a musical itinerary. The Gallus enigma doubtless lies in this curious proximity of an apparently brilliant reputation, envied in the circles closest to the Prague court, and the absence of all documents mentioning his name. Were there links with the French-Flemish composers of Prague, Jacob Regnard and Philippe de Monte? The numerous friends whose presence the composer and his brother evoke in the two prefaces of the Moralia have certainly left a tangible trace in the various prefatory texts surrounding the publications or in the poetic tombeau published by Nigrin in 1591 to the memory of the composer. But despite this numerous and attentive presence, Gallus seems to have kept himself completely apart from all court life. The inventory of his belongings after his death even suggests a relative material penury: some books of music, worn furniture.

Gallus, Handl, Petelin

The composer’s patronymic also is ambiguous: should one say “Gallus” or “Handl”? “Gallus”, on the majority of title-pages, seems to have been only a Latin surname of the kind humanists of the time liked to don. “Handl” is the current form that the composer himself utilised whenever he signed a document. Should one then take into account distorted handwritings of this last patronymic? Until a recent date it was in fact thought that a document in the archives of the Imperial chapel in Vienna mentioning a choirboy named Jacob Hahn (or Hann) in 1574 designated the composer. A growing number of researchers seems since to have abandoned this hypothesis on the grounds of too great a disparity of writing between Handl and Hahn. < p/> It is, finally, on a celebrated portrait, engraved in 1590, that most of the studies on Gallus converge. This document is perhaps the sole stable point of departure of all the studies devoted to the composer, and notably by reason of the inscription that specifies his age and his geographic origin: in 1590 Gallus was aged 40, and declared “Carniolian”, that isto say coming from the province of Carniola, in the south-east of the Empire. < p/> This simple fact has perhaps generated more dynamism in the bibliography than any of the documents so far mentioned.

A repertoire in the public domain

That the music of Gallus immediately met with very great success is attested by the number of mentions of his work throughout the 17th century. Publications in anthologies, manuscript dissemination of the work, references to the composer in treatises on composition: it seems that in Bohemia, but above all in Saxony and Silesia, for nearly half a century Gallus’s compositions continued to be sung. One has only to glance through the anthologies of Bodenschatz, Schade, Calvisius, Grimm or Praetorius to be convinced of it. Gallus was one of the virtually obligatory references in places in Central and North Germany where there was an attempt to define the conditions of a “well composed” piece of music, that is to say conforming to the rules of counterpoint while being expressive as to the perception of the text’s meaning. The evidence of the manuscripts is no less eloquent: numerous motets and unpublished Masses were copied and preserved in Wroclaw, Legnica, Zwickau or Görlitz, which indicates the importance of this region of Europe for the diffusion of Gallus’s work. Some few works then cross into the 1650s, seeming no longer to quit the polyphonic repertoire, and among these is the motet for Good Friday, Ecce quomodo moritur justus, of which more than fifteen or so sources have been preserved. At the end of the 17th century Gallus is still mentioned by the French composer and theoretician Sébastien de Brossard, whose immense collection of musical manuscripts and prints was to form the core of King Louis XIV’s musical library: in the margin of his catalogue Brossard notes, in reference to the Moralia, that the music of it is “among the most excellent of that time”... After a relative eclipse in the 18th century (except for some manuscripts of the motet Ecce quomodo still being re-copied), Gallus’s compositions returned in force in the following century, where they followed the renewal of interest in the old polyphonists caused by the various musical societies in Europe in favour of religious music for unaccompanied choir. Principally from 1840, numerous anthologies spread his music to choral societies and church choirs, principally in Germany (Musica Sacra in Berlin, 1839-1865; Musica Divina in Ratisbon, 1853-1865; Musica Sacra of Crommer, 1860-1876...), but also in Paris, thanks to the publications of the Niedermeyer school in the 1850s. The growing interest in Gallus’s music, which coincided with the beginnings of musicology and was concerned with all the old polyphonists, culminated with the publication of the complete Opus Musicum, from 1899 to 1919, in an edition by the musicologist Josip Mantuani in the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. < p/> The interest of Mantuani’s publication arises from its documentary and editorial quality: this edition is the fruit of patient work researching the sources, which still today makes the vast introduction edited by Mantuani by way of preface to the whole the point of departure for all study of Gallus. Interest also comes from Mantuani’s own path. A Slovene, he for the first time drew the attention of the musical world to the historical and geographical peculiarities of Gallus’s place origin, underlining how much this milieu could, perhaps, help in understanding his originality.

The Slovene trail

Another aspect of the bibliographic tradition concerning Gallus is in fact provided by the abundant literature devoted to the composer in his homeland itself, Carniola. A Germanic province of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, then between 1918 and 1991 being succeeded as one of the constituents of the various Yugoslav states, Carniola today is one of the regions (Kranjska) constituting the Republic of Slovenia. It would not be surprising to find in Gallus’ own country a somewhat different reading of the composer’s path. < p/> In Gallus’s time the Slovene countries were situated at the south-east borders of the Empire. Exposed to the Turkish menace more closely than the rich regions of the interior, they were also situated on the paths crossing between Italy and Central Europe, between Austria and for a long time the Duchy of Carniola would be the privileged meeting-place of Slav, Germanic and Italian influences, whose often harmonious synthesis or juxtaposition fashioned the Slovene landscape, notably architecturally, in a way still visible today. < p/> But was Gallus a Slovene? Neither the Germanic patronymic of Handl he used, nor the indication of his geographical origin as Carniola, seems to imply that in an absolute fashion, and one must go back to an extract from the preface he wrote to his Harmoniæ Morales (the title of the first book of Moralia) to get an indication of it, perhaps: “The Italians amuse themselves with madrigals, they are carried away by Neapolitan songs, they feed and almost swim in villanelles. Our compatriots cling to, and sparkle at, what is written in their language; in accord with the Germanic, the Gallic is transported with joy by it, gorges himself on it and satisfies himself with it.”

Whatever Gallus’s nationality may have been (for that matter, a very anachronistic question for the period in question), his “Carniolian” origin however makes him contemporary, in his youth, with the spread of Protestant ideas in Carniola. These in fact found an important impetus thanks to the efforts of the pastor Primoz Trubar, who ingeniously conceived turning to advantage an association between the new ideas and the written Slovene language, then little prevalent in documents. In publishing the first catechism in Slovene (1550), he assured a wide spread of Protestantism among the population. The studies made in Slovenia are greatly interested in recalling this particular context, which could help to grasp the originality of Gallus’s path. It also explains why at first it is essentially in the monasteries that Gallus’s activity can be situated, for it is from an abbey, the powerful Cistercian institution of Sticna in Lower Carniola, that it has been possible to place the probable setting of his musical formation, in any case the only one in the province able to supply the basis for such tuition.

From legend to history, and vice versa

From the mid-19th century, local scholars have underlined Gallus’s Carniolian origin in articles based on short accounts available in anthologies of choral music. Interest in his music grew significantly under the united action of the Slovene Cecilian movement, represented by the composer Anton Foerster, and of the 1891 celebrations marking the tricentenary of the composer’s death. It was not, however, until the valuable efforts of Josip Mantuani that the first systematic account of all the documents concerning Gallus was accomplished. As a Slovene, Mantuani could not ignore the questions asked in Carniola about Gallus’s origin: hisintroduction is precisely invested with great value, still today, for to some extent it establishes the link between the researches carried out on Gallus at local level and the international diffusion of these same ideas. Not content with establishing an exact schedule of the documentary sources, Mantuani for the first time launched the idea that Gallus could have been a native of the town of Ribnica in Lower Carniola: isn’t the town one of the principal ones of the province? And in addition close to the abbey of Sticna? < p/> A number of further studies will adopt Mantuani’s supposition without lingering on the absence of any proof of such an assertion. It seems to be supported in its origin only through an oral legend testifying to the existence of a family called Petelin (“cock” in Slovene, i.e. equivalent to the Latin “gallus”), of whom the ancients could still mention the memory of someone who many generations earlier left for Upper Carniola, then abroad, to die there as a celebrated musician... Once this name of Petelin was thrown into the discussion, it seems that a veritable fever seized Slovene musicologists to succeed in detecting under this name possible traces of the musician, even although it was nowhere authenticated that Gallus ever called himself in this way... In general, the international musicological community received only considerably reduced echoes of the debate. It was seen to reappear in Carniola in all the phases of rising nationalism, that is to say at the end of the 19th century and in the 1940s. Around the name of Petelin the references are in conflict: it is soon no longer one legend but two that is being proposed to readers’ sagacity. The second legend adopts the same ingredients as the first, but this time centres on the town of Idrija, on the western edge of the Duchy of Carniola. The hypothesis is even older than that of Mantuani and appeared in print in 1888 in an account going back to the years around 1847. An old man of Idrija, aged 90, is described there recounting the famous fate of the two Petelin brothers, of whom the younger, Jakob, who left to go abroad so as not to embrace the Lutheran faith, was to die a celebrated musician.

In the articles of the ‘40s, this same legendary basis is this time furnished with archival and genealogical researches on the name of Petelin. The partisans of Ribnica and Idrija respectively as Gallus’s presumed birthplace face each other with the aid of reconstituted genealogical trees. People have even specified where the house of his birth, at the sign of the cock, was: either in Ribnica or in the borough of Sentviska Gora, near Idrija... All these discussions were summarised after the war and submitted to a critical account in a long article by Rafael Ajlec, but since then they have not been taken up again owing to the lack of sufficient proof. There was no lack of local scholars to re-launch the debate, notably at Sentviska Gora, in the ‘70s, but apparently without any success. Gallus took the mystery of his name and his birthplace with him.

Today?

Even when the epoch of “musical travels” which delighted the 18th century seems definitely over, there is no doubt that a journey in Slovenia, on the traces of Jacobus Gallus, presents the attraction of unforeseen exoticism. How can one not understand the attachment of a country to “its” composer? Anyone seeking Gallus in these regions is assured of finding him, at least of coming across his name mentioned in an almost insistent way. Gallus is certainly present, like a figure of the national pantheon, and yet with the decorum suitable to this noble responsibility. Streets, quays, statues, medallions reactivate the memory in uniform fashion. Also present on a banknote, the face of Gallus has its place—and one of the highest—in the Slovene ideal, beside the pastor Trubar, the learned Valvasor, author of the first encyclopaedic description of Carniola in the 17th century, and even the poet France Preseren, one of the actors in the national awakening to the Romantic era. A mummified, stiff-set figure this, that of Gallus in the act of national representation? Doubtless, but happily it is not the only one. The country overflows with choirs of all kinds, retaining one of the highest levels of practice in ensemble singing in Europe: it is not only the smaller village associations who, one way or another, take the occasion to revive the memory of Gallus the Carniolian by performing one or other of his works. More interesting is the fact that the legends concerning his birthplace do not seem completely to have disappeared. At Ribnica the plaque affixed in 1933 to the place where the Petelins’ family house once stood is still to be seen. In the town park, also, a bust is found where a severe visage, matched by an edifying inscription, contemplates the passers-by. More curious appears the case of Sentviska Gora, the composer’s other presumed birthplace. This large village, situated at the summit of a plateau dominating the Idrija valley, occupies so poetic a site that it is easy to understand its inhabitants’ tenacity in defending the idea that Gallus can be counted among their ancestors! The most recent researches undertaken from Sentviska Gora to try to find written proof in neighbouring archives were concluded scarcely twenty years ago now, without apparently having come across any echo or success. As that is without result, it seems that it has been decided to bypass these impediments to reasonable justification. A fine wooden signboard now surmounts the entry indication to the village, and proudly announces: “Birthplace of Jacobus Gallus” beside a reproduction of the composer’s portrait engraved in 1590. The inhabitants are not unaware of the long series of assumptions that have, for at least a century, led enquiries to be turned to their village. At Sentviska Gora they can still recount the story of the “cock” house, even indeed that of the Petelin family and the child of the country who went off into the wide world to become a well-known musician. The author of these lines has had the signal honour of being able to converse with several families of the place, and moreover to see the spot where the Petelin house once stood, at the sign of the cock, today entirely destroyed. Much remains to be cleared up about the Gallus mystery, which nowhere seems more dense, more palpable and more fascinating than in this magnificent and singular place. A historian’s guardedness, however, should have dissuaded us from succumbing to too poetic a mood: no more than today, Sentviska Gora was yesterday not part of Carniola, but well in the eastern spurs of the bishopric of Tolmin, even of the county of Gorizia. The legend was too beautiful... < p/> One would, however, be greatly mistaken to imagine that the name of Gallus is associated with Slovenia only by the deceptive charms of autosuggestion or by reverence towards an established national patrimony. It should even be known that thanks to the Slovenes, and virtually to them alone, decisive efforts have been made, since after the war, to disengage reality from legend by harnessing together a whole series of lengthy scientific studies so as to recapture in detail all the available documents allowing one to focus on the composer’s historical environment. After the searching article by Rafael Ajlec giving a synthesis of the critical material on Gallus in 1950, the numerous pieces of work by Dragotin Cvetko have come to provide an illumination more severely selective in examining the historical sources on the figure of Gallus. Following this, today it is Edo Skulj who tirelessly defends the composer’s cause by numerous articles as well as by a monograph which is about to appear. These authors, without any doubt, have taken up the torch previously lit by Mantuani: in forcing a passage for themselves between the narrowness of ideological reasoning and the emotional empiricism of legends; they have promoted a whole series of remarkable realisations whose success has considerably advanced the knowledge of the composer. Let me quote, in 1985, the conference Gallus and his Time, then, in 1991, two important international conferences: Gallus and the European Renaissance on the one hand, Gallus and Us on the other. The first of these two manifestations was held under the aegis of the Slovene Institute of Musicology, to whom is also due the most recent edition of Gallus’s complete works, in a transcription by Edo Skulj. In twenty carefully prepared volumes published from 1985, and the last of which, devoted to the manuscript works, was issued only a few months ago, it is at present all the music by Gallus that is available to interpreters and musicologists, in a presentation considerably updated and modernised in comparison with the old Mantuani edition. Conditions thus seem to be combined, so that the chief chapter devoted to Jacobus Gallus, that of a better knowledge of his music, may finally be tackled. This chapter will doubtless bring much to the perception of a rich and complex sensibility of the end of the 16th century, but let us recognise that there still remains a large amount to write.

Friendly thanks to Metoda Kokole, Natasa Krstulovic-Cigoj, Ana Vilfan, Tomaz Faganel, Simon Kenda, Ivan Klemencic, Zoran Krstulovic and Pavle Merku.