Two Polyphonic Settings of the Mass for the Dead from Late Sixteenth-Century Portugal: Bridging Pre- and Post-Tridentine Traditions

Abstract

This article focuses on the four-voice Requiem masses by the Portuguese composers Manuel Mendes (d. Évora, 1605) and Lourenço Ribeiro (d. Braga, ca. 1606). These relatively unknown works, which chronologically can roughly be placed between the two Victoria Requiem masses printed in 1583 and 1605, prove to be important links between pre- and post-Tridentine Iberian traditions of polyphonic music for the dead, as they absorbed and channelled the influence of Cristóbal de Morales’s 1544 five-voice Requiem mass and of other early Iberian Requiem mass settings into the early seventeenth century. The article offers a brief account of the manuscript source of each of the Requiem masses and the relevant biographical circumstances of Mendes and Ribeiro. Such unusual features as variants in the text of the Offertory in Mendes’s mass, issues of authorship of certain movements and the presence of alternative settings of the Gradual in both masses are also considered. In addition, chants that have not so far been recognised as characteristically Iberian, different structural patterns for setting the Gradual Requiem aeternam, and instances of intertextuality and musical symbolism are examined. Finally, detailed analyses of the Offertory settings in both masses show how each of the composers manage in different ways to integrate the chant into a full polyphonic texture without it losing its fullness and melodic identity.