Epiphany

Epiphany, from the Greek epiphaneia, means manifestation or appearance. The Feast of the Epiphany traditionally falls on January 6, or the twelfth night of Christmastide. For western Christians it signifies the arrival and adoration of the Magi, and therefore the physical revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. The earliest reference to the Epiphany as a Christian feast is in A.D. 361, by Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth-century Roman soldier and historian. He also asserts that the first miracle which Jesus performed (the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, Galilee, as told in the second chapter of St John’s Gospel, and the first manifestation of Christ’s public life) occurred on the same calendar day. In the eastern church the Epiphany is also celebrated on January 6th. Rather than marking the arrival and adoration of the Magi, however, the focus is the baptism of the young adult Christ by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. In both traditions, the essence of the feast is the same, namely, the manifestation of Christ to the world, whether as an infant or as a young adult, and the mystery of the Incarnation. The liturgical colour used at Epiphany is white.

The words of this magnificent double choir, antiphonal motet, written in 1575, are taken from Isaiah, chapter 60, verses 1-2.

Like Lassus and Byrd, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was one of the towering musical giants of the sixteenth century. He was named after the town of Palestrina in the Sabine Hills near Rome, where he was born in 1525 or 1526, and his early life centred on the church of S Maria Maggiore in Palestrina, where he sang and was taught music. It is not known how long he remained in the choir at S Maria, but in 1544 he was appointed as organist to the town’s cathedral – S Agapito. In 1550 the Bishop of Palestrina was elected Pope, taking the name of Julius III, and, recognising genius when he heard it, took Palestrina with him to Rome. He became Palestrina’s patron and was responsible for the publication of the first book of masses in 1554 and Palestrina’s appointment as maestro at the Capella Giulia, the musical establishment of St Peter’s which had been named after Julius II. A year later, in 1555, Palestrina was promoted to the Capella Sistina – the Pope’s official musical chapel. This, despite his being married, was on the strict orders of his Holiness, and without consultation with any of the existing musicians in the Vatican, which caused much upset. Three months later Julius III died, and within a further month Palestrina had been removed from his position for contravening the Sistine Chapel’s strict rules on celibacy. By the end of 1544 he had been appointed as Maestro di Capello at the great church of St John’s Lateran, a post previously held by Lassus. Palestrina combined this post with the supervision of music during the summer months at the summer palace of the wealthy Cardinal Ippolito II at Tivoli. Further publications of books of masses, motets and madrigals increased Palestrina’s profile steadily, and in 1568 Emperor Maximillian II tried unsuccessfully to tempt him to the post of Imperial Choirmaster in Vienna. In 1593, and close to the end of his life, Palestrina was planning to return to his native town and the cathedral there, but died before he could take up the post. The musicologist and Palestrina scholar Lewis Lockwood, writing in Grove, says: “Among the native Italian musicians of the 16^th century who sought to assimilate the richly developed polyphonic techniques of their French and Flemish predecessors, and there were many, none mastered these techniques more completely or subordinated them more effectively to the requirements of musical cogency than Palestrina; and no contemporary laboured more successfully to realise the functional and aesthetic aims of Catholic church music in the age of the Counter-Reformation.”