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
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Life is but an empty dream!—
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And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
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“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)