Nicolas Champion - Life

Life

Champion was born in or near Liège, where he probably received his early training. Little information survives regarding his early life, and the first record relating to his involvement with Philip's Grande chapelle, the Habsburg chapel choir, dates from 13 November 1501, prior to Philip's first trip to Spain. He was one of the few singers who remained with the chapel after Philip's death in 1506, maintained by his wife Joanna the Mad; for several years after Philip's death, Joanna traveled around Castile with his corpse in its coffin, having her chapel choir sing requiems to it each night, until her father Ferdinand I finally had her locked up in the fortress at Tordesillas.

After the dissolution of Joanna's chapel, Champion joined the chapel of Charles V. While there, he had a high status and was highly paid, according to court records, though he was always at a lower level than Pierre de La Rue. There is evidence that Champion may also have been associated with the court of Frederick the Wise, Duke of Saxony, such as the five-voice mass he wrote for them.

Read more about this topic:  Nicolas Champion

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience ... not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
    Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)

    What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
    Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

    There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)