Alessandro Striggio's Mass in Forty and Sixty Parts

Abstract

Abstract It has been known for twenty-five years that Alessandro Striggio the elder, the most important composer at the Medici court in Florence in the 1560s and 1570s, wrote a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in forty parts, with an Agnus Dei in sixty parts, but the piece has always been thought lost. This major artwork from the high Florentine Renaissance does in fact survive (F-Pn, Rés. Vmd. ms 52). Entitled Missa sopra Ecco sìì beato giorno, it is Striggio's most imposing composition, and underlines the early eminence of Florence in the art of massive polychoral writing. The last movement is indeed in sixty real parts. The Mass also appears to have been used by the Medici as a political tool in the art of cultural diplomacy. Offered in January 1567 to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II at exactly the moment when Cosimo de' Medici was seeking approval from Maximilian of a royal title (granted finally as “Grand Duke” by Pope Pius V in 1569), the Mass was also performed by Lassus's colleagues in Munich and under Striggio's direction at court in France, a few weeks before he visited the court of Queen Elizabeth I in London in June 1567. The links with Striggio's forty-part motet Ecce beatam lucem and with Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, are discussed, as are the reasons why the source of the Mass remained unknown throughout the twentieth century.