Davide Perez - Church Music

Church Music

The two long periods of employment Perez had during his life gave him enormous opportunities to write for the church, and religious music represents the largest and most elaborate part of his output. In his earliest career he is reported by Florimo to have ‘enriched with his compositions’ Palermo’s Cappella Palatina, but there are many pieces written for Naples as well. In Lisbon, the deep religiosity of his pupil, the Royal Princess Maria and his own, combined with the directions taken by the musical policy of the court, had himself concentrating in church music for the royal chapels for the last 23 years of his life. His first mass is dated February 1736, and most of his early works have very ample and careful use of orchestral and choral resources. For example, the mass dated 24 February 1740 is scored for two choirs (the final ‘cum Sancto Spiritu’ is a ten voice fugue), full strings divided, in some sections, in two orchestras, woodwinds (no clarinets), horns and trumpets in pairs. It displays a highly detailed orchestral writing: muted strings, seconda corda instructed in passages for the violins, plenty of orchestral crescendos and diminuendos, solo parts for the woodwinds and for the viola. In this period, Perez treated solo voices in a manner similar to operatic arias, most fugues or fugato sections have very symmetrical entries of themes, and the pieces in the so-called stile antico are conservative in harmony and notation.

Unlike the operas, there is no definite date when it is possible to see a change in the style of Perez’s late church music. However, the production in his later years at Lisbon is quite distinct from his earliest. The orchestral writing continued to be as detailed as before, but instruments like recorders and lutes are no longer to be found. There is less use of separated sections for solo voices. Most pieces are now concertate, that is, with one or more soloists emerging from the choir for short passages, thus creating numerous distinct vocal textures. A striking difference is the counterpoint technique, that, still being strict, became eloquent and sentimental. Now the pieces rarely show distinct sections in modern style and in archaistic counterpoint. In his later style, the musical presentation of the words acquired a pietist overtone. The sections alternate freely between polyphonic and chordal writing; the harmony is constantly elaborate; chromaticism is freely used. It is however a style that strongly favours variety over coherence, as there is not regular thematic recurrence throughout the pieces.

Eighteenth century critics often ranked Perez with Hasse and Jommelli. Charles Burney found ‘an original spirit and elegance in all his production’. Nineteenth and twentieth century commentary, based for the most part on very few earlier operas, has generally downgraded this judgement. A more complete examination of his works affirms the stature his contemporaries assigned to him. While he was essentially a transitional figure in eighteenth-century opera, he was nevertheless one of the great composers of opera seria. However it was in his later compositions for the church that Perez had the best possibility to develop his style. His is one of the finest corpuses of music for the Roman Catholic rituals in the eighteenth century.