… a polyphonic prostitute …

I don’t know why it surprises people that I am as passionate about ‘classical’ music as about rock, pop etc. Here, I shall gush about a 6-minute polyphonic motet written around 1682: Biber’s motet ‘Plaudite, tympana’ [~9MB].

Although it belongs to the same manuscript as the Missa Salisbergensis, and is usually performed at the end of the mass, the motet ‘Plaudite, tympana’ — for two double choruses in 16 parts, plus double orchestra and double continuo — is actually a separate composition. I discovered it on the Musica Antiqua Koln / Reinhard Goebl / Gabrieli Consort and Players / McCreesh recording, 1998, and offer this small sample to encourage everyone else.

The Mass itself has a chequered history: probably written in 1681/82, probably for the 1100th anniversary of Christianity in Salzburg, probably by Biber. Forgotten for centuries, rediscovered in the late 19th century by the choirmaster of Salzburg Cathedral, who prevented his grocer from using it to wrap up somebody’s shopping. There’s some fascinating historical analysis here. It’s been suggested (partly on the basis of the motet ‘Plaudite Tympana’, which celebrates St Rupert, the patron saint of Salzburg) that the Mass might have been written to celebrate the eleven-hundredth anniversary of Christianity in Salzburg. I am not sure which date this is calculated from.

There doesn’t seem to be any discussion online (or in the CD liner notes) of this little motet, so you’ll have to bear with my imprecise terminology, and a certain amount of gushy rapture.

This 6-minute Motet is glorious and jubilant and tremendously evocative, for me, of a sort of sanitised 17th-century performance, all flickering lamps and arching white stonework and improbably cherubic choirboys. (I’m also rather taken with the notion of celebrating eleven hundred years of anything).

It begins with soprano and alto voices, sweet and clear, and the rest of the choir comes in gradually on the first part of the motet, along with trumpet fanfares, repeating and echoing a simple, almost monotone theme. Applaude patria, Rupertum celebra (Acclaim your fatherland, celebrate [Saint] Rupert.)

Then a fugue for male voices, which always throws me because, to my ear, it starts a bar too early. It’s a a quiet, subdued passage, echoing with organ and woodwind, that brings to mind elaborate wooden scrollwork dark with age: the kind of music that makes me want to stare at something intricate, following each curve with my eyes as the music loops and curvets*. Rupert’s noble mind triumphs in the applause of the blessed.

And then — just over 3 minutes into the piece, for the impatient or (like me this morning on the way to work) merely rushed — the magnificent fanfare, the brassy Baroque polyphony. Vive Salisburgum, gaude. That ‘gaude’ is the jubilant fortissimo pivot of this piece: the moment that never fails to send a galvanic jolt through my mind and heart. This is music about joy, and in its very different way it’s as joyous as the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.

I wonder how many people in that first audience, lords and bishops and the great and good of Salzburg, burst into applause in the silent beats before the first part of the motet’s reprised?

*a word that apparently describes, specifically, the prance of a horse.