Josquin des Prez

Josquin des Prez was born around 1450–55 in what is now northern France, probably in Picardy or Hainaut, near Saint-Quentin or Condé-sur-l’Escaut. His real name may have been Josse Lebloitte, known as des Prez. His beginnings are obscure: he was probably a choirboy, perhaps at Saint-Quentin. Yet he became the most famous composer of his age, admired in his lifetime as no musician before him.

The first certain record of his career shows him in 1477 at Aix-en-Provence, a singer in the chapel of René of Anjou, “Good King René”. When René died in 1480 the chapel passed to King Louis XI, and Josquin may have served at the French court. Around 1484 he was in Italy in the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, whom he followed to Rome. In 1489 he joined the chapel of Pope Innocent VIII. His name, carved by himself into the wall of the singers’ gallery in the Sistine Chapel, was found during its restoration.

By the 1490s his works were already circulating throughout Europe. His motet Ave Maria… virgo serena, of exemplary clarity, became one of the most copied of the time. In 1503 Duke Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara hired him as choirmaster. One of the duke’s agents, hesitating between him and Heinrich Isaac, noted that Josquin composed better but wrote “when he wanted to and not when one wanted him to”, and asked for a higher salary. The duke nevertheless chose Josquin, who composed for him the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae, whose theme is drawn from the vowels of the duke’s name, and the great Miserere mei, Deus.

In 1503 plague struck Ferrara. Josquin left the city in 1504 and settled in Condé-sur-l’Escaut, where he became provost of the collegiate church of Notre-Dame. He spent his last years there at the head of a large choir, while keeping links with the Habsburg court and with Margaret of Austria, governor of the Netherlands. He died at Condé on 27 August 1521, leaving his property to the church so that his motet Pater noster / Ave Maria would be sung in his memory.

His art achieved a perfect synthesis of northern polyphonic science and the Italian taste for clarity. Josquin developed imitation: each voice enters in turn with the same motif, giving the music a new transparency. He was also very attentive to words, seeking to convey the meaning and emotion of the text through painful harmonies for lament or lively rhythms for joy. The reformer Martin Luther, a great music lover, said of him: “Josquin is master of the notes; they must do as he wills, whereas other composers must do as the notes will.”

He left some eighteen masses, more than fifty motets and many songs. The Missa Pange lingua, one of his last, freely paraphrases a Gregorian hymn. His French songs, such as Mille regretz and Petite camusette, were arranged for lute, organ and other voices for decades. His Lament on the death of Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois, is one of the summits of funeral music.

Josquin also benefited from the birth of music printing: in 1502 the Venetian publisher Ottaviano Petrucci issued the first printed book devoted entirely to the masses of a single composer, and it was his. This circulation made him a true European celebrity. After his death so many works were wrongly attributed to him that it was joked he composed more dead than alive. For sixteenth-century humanists he was the Michelangelo of music.