Jacob Obrecht

Jacob Obrecht was born in Ghent, Flanders, around 1457–58. He was the son of Willem Obrecht, the city trumpeter, who played at festivals, processions and official ceremonies. Young Jacob thus grew up with instrumental and civic music before turning to church music. He may have studied at the University of Leuven, and he became a priest, like most composers of his time.

His career unfolded in the great churches of the Low Countries, where he often changed posts. Around 1480 he was choirmaster at Bergen op Zoom. In 1484 he was hired as master of the choirboys at Cambrai Cathedral, Du Fay’s city, but stayed only briefly: the canons complained that he kept poor accounts and neglected the boys’ upkeep. In 1485 he became succentor, in charge of music, at the church of St Donatian in Bruges, one of the richest in Flanders.

His reputation reached Italy. In 1487 he obtained leave to travel to Ferrara, to Duke Ercole I d’Este, a great music lover who had heard his masses and wished to meet him. He spent several months there and made a strong impression. Back in Flanders he again held posts in Bruges, then in 1492 became choirmaster at Our Lady’s in Antwerp, before returning to Bergen op Zoom and Bruges.

Obrecht was above all a composer of masses: some thirty are attributed to him, a remarkable number. He took the cantus firmus technique — building a mass on a pre-existing sacred or secular melody — very far. In the Missa Caput and the Missa Fortuna desperata he cut the borrowed melody into fragments, passed it from voice to voice, slowed it down or sped it up, and sometimes turned it upside down. Some masses are built on popular Flemish songs, such as Tsat een meskin, “A girl was sitting”.

His masterpiece is the Missa Maria zart, one of the longest polyphonic masses of its time: almost an hour of music, built on a German devotional song. Musicologists have also noticed, in some of his masses, structures based on symbolic numbers that organise the number of bars or notes. Obrecht also loved bright sonorities, energetic rhythms and sequences, motifs repeated at different pitches, which give his music a very recognisable drive.

He also wrote motets, such as Salve crux and Salve Regina, and secular songs in Dutch, French and Italian. Several of his pieces, lacking complete texts in the sources, were probably played on instruments, a reminder of his origins as a trumpeter’s son. In 1503 the Venetian publisher Ottaviano Petrucci printed a collection of his masses, proof of his international fame, just after the one devoted to Josquin.

In 1504 Obrecht returned to Ferrara to become the duke’s choirmaster. But Duke Ercole died in January 1505 and plague struck the city soon after. Obrecht fell victim to it and died in Ferrara in late summer 1505. Less known today than Josquin, he is nonetheless regarded as one of the greatest mass composers of the Renaissance, and the modern edition of his works has revealed music full of brilliance and invention.