Tess Knighton and Kenneth Kreitner
What, after all this, needs to be said about Juan de Anchieta?
A few points seem clear. Anchieta was a singer, a churchman, and a composer of what we today call the Josquin era. He died in 1523, just two years after Josquin, and he may actually have been near Josquin’s age, born perhaps in the early to mid-1450s. He was born and died in the Basque country, part of a large, locally powerful, and fractious family that included his younger relative and possible assailant, the future St. Ignatius of Loyola. And in between, he worked for the royal chapel of Castile, in its various forms and places and through its many vicissitudes. He joined Isabel’s court in 1489 and, over the years, would serve Prince Juan, Margaret of Austria (Juan’s bride) for a brief period in 1497, his sister Juana, Ferdinand, and finally Charles V, from whose service he retired in 1519. It was a remarkable life that would take him all over the Castilian and Aragonese realms, to the musical glories of Flanders and probably to England with Juana and her husband Philip the Fair of Burgundy, as well as into the quiet, dark melancholy of Juana’s seclusion in Tordesillas.
He was handsomely rewarded from the royal coffers and through presentation to ecclesiastical benefices, and eventually reached the position of abbot. His income was such that he could afford to build an impressive Moorish-style house in his home town of Azpeitia. The trajectory of his career was thus exceptional in its consistently high level of achievement and reward, although, in general terms, it followed a course that his colleagues in the royal chapels would have recognized and to which they would have aspired. His biography reveals much about patterns of royal patronage in the Spanish kingdoms around 1500 and about the social standing and opportunities for those in royal service. The extent to which members of the minor nobility, such as Anchieta or his colleague Francisco de Peñalosa, served in the royal chapels remains to be explored, but these musicians from relatively wealthy backgrounds were clearly quite well educated as well as being trained musically in the cathedral or collegiate church context.
As a composer, Anchieta, being from a slightly earlier generation than Peñalosa, can be seen as a pioneer in the ever-expanding process of polyphonization in the sacred and secular musical repertory performed in court circles, contributing to almost all the major genres. From the image-making ballad to the cyclic mass, he contributed to the forefront of musical developments in the Spanish kingdoms, although the few surviving sources of polyphony from before 1500 can only hint at the polyphonic tradition that was emerging in the second half of the fifteenth century.
He has left behind seventeen secure works—a mass cycle, three mass ordinary movements, two Magnificats, four other items of service music, three motets, and four Spanish songs. To them, in the previous chapters, we add one contested attribution (for the motet O bone Jesu) that we are inclined to believe, and identify a handful of anonymi that may be his as well. It is a very modest body of music in sheer size, but it seems to have had a long-lasting impact. Several of his works survive in multiple copies around the Iberian Peninsula; the Credo of the 1490s found its way into a mass in a Portuguese source some fifty years later; O bone Jesu—if it is indeed his—was copied in colonial Guatemala and was published by Petrucci under the name of Loyset Compère; and Libera me was still being sung, apparently from a sixteenth-century manuscript, to profound effect in Toledo cathedral in the 1920s.
His influence on his own time is harder to assess: this is not the sort of thing people wrote about back then, at least in Spain. (Alas, Spain has left us no composer-motets to give us an idea of who the composers themselves thought was important.) For what they be worth as signs, he is for practical purposes the only Spanish composer named in the manuscript Segovia s.s., copied c1498,1 and all but two of his works in Segovia found their way into Tarazona 2/3. So, his earlier compositions did not fall out of favor in a later, larger, more sophisticated world.
We can surely give Anchieta some credit for creating that world, or at least for establishing some of the institutions in which it grew—for overseeing the rise of the Castilian and Aragonese royal chapels as patrons of musical composition. When he arrived at the Castilian court in February 1489, there were only two other known composers there: Juan de Segovia, who has left one Magnificat, and Fernando Pérez de Medina, who has left a Salve Regina and two songs—and even they are not altogether certain, bearing common first names and toponymic last names.2 Throughout his time with Isabel, Anchieta functioned there as a kind of staff composer with no serious rival,3 and by May 1498, when Francisco de Peñalosa arrived at the Aragonese court to take a parallel role for Ferdinand, Anchieta had already written at least the music in Segovia s.s. and the ballad En memoria d’Alixandre.
The Segovia manuscript is a fascinating source, and with its astonishing variety of musical genres and styles, and its five languages, but carefully divided into sections for practical use, it is a hard manuscript to see clearly and whole: we all tend to look at the parts that interest us most and nod knowingly over the rest. But for those of us trying to comprehend the full situation of polyphony in Spain in the 1490s, Segovia has come to function as a sort of topographic map of our territory. On this map, Anchieta himself is by no means the tallest peak—some of the most brilliant and demanding music of the age by figures like Obrecht, Isaac, and Josquin is there too—but within the sections of Spanish music, Anchieta towers above the anonymi around him, which tend to register as one or two steps removed from improvisation. At least at its best, Anchieta’s sacred music in Segovia is the clear work of a genuine artist.
Perhaps the most striking of his works in Segovia are the motets Domine Jesu Christe qui hora and Virgo et mater. They do indeed represent the composer at his best; but more significantly for the future, they appear also to be the first of the great, dramatic Passion motets, often (as in both here) emphasizing the suffering of the Virgin at the foot of the cross, that would turn out to distinguish Spanish sacred music of this generation from its Northern models. Peñalosa would bring this subgenre to heart-rending perfection; but unless the sources and the documents play us very false indeed, it was Anchieta who started the tradition before Peñalosa even arrived at Ferdinand’s court. If there was such a thing as a Spanish school of sacred composition in the decades on either side of 1500, it is not too much to think of Anchieta as its founder.
At the same time, Anchieta worked on the fringes of the Franco-Netherlandish-Italian axis: in addition to some of his music being copied into the international Segovia manuscript, northern composers such as Pierre de La Rue, Marbriano de Orto, Alexander Agricola, and possibly Josquin himself numbered among his colleagues for a few years in the first decade of the sixteenth century. He included the famous L’homme armé tune in the Agnus Dei of his Missa sine nomine possibly as a result of this proximity. Anchieta’s works thus give us a unique insight into a documented moment of musical exchange, even if it was his younger colleague Peñalosa who apparently picked up the ball and ran farther with northern musical influences. Similarly, Anchieta’s works are key to understanding how polyphonic music developed in the Spanish kingdoms in the 1490s, a moment of paradigm shift from a largely improvised tradition to a more composerly and self-aware approach. Our sense is that Anchieta was a key figure in changes that occurred in the 1490s as Ferdinand and Isabel consolidated their ideological and political policies in their own kingdoms and sought to enhance their profile abroad as the Catholic Monarchs.
Something of that importance is reflected in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s description of life and etiquette in Prince Juan’s household and court at Almazán, an account commissioned by Charles V—who might just about have remembered Anchieta as his first music teacher in Flanders. Still later in the sixteenth century, the music theorist Francisco de Salinas acknowledged the royal composer’s prestige at court and attributed a mass to him, based on the song Ea judíos a enfardelar, that has not survived. The evidence for such a piece is slender, to say the least, but as we have seen, he did write at least one work—En memoria d’Alixandre—that related to political events of the time and which was surely the direct result of a royal commission.
Anchieta’s musical legacy today might have surprised even him. For many of us in a certain generation, especially in the English-speaking world, he came to us first in a recording of En memoria d’Alixandre on David Munrow’s classic and influential album Music from the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella of 1973,4 and three years later—though we did not know it because the motet was attributed then to Compère—by Munrow’s recording of O bone Jesu in the great Art of the Netherlands set.5 Forty-some years later, almost every concert program and recording relating to music of the time of the Catholic Monarchs includes at least one piece by him. Of particular note, over the years, has been the Catalan ensemble Capilla Peñaflorida, directed by Josep Cabré, who have thus far dedicated three CDs to Anchieta’s music: the Missa sine nomine, the Salve Regina, and other works were recorded for Naxos in 2000;6 the composite Missa de nuestra Señora from Tarazona 2/3 (Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo attributed to Anchieta, Sanctus and Agnus to Escobar) and motets for the label K617 in 2005;7 and the Missa de nostra Dona with the unattributed mass propers in Barcelona 454 and some of Anchieta’s songs for the NBMusica label in 2008.8 But non-specialists in Anchieta’s music have been attracted to it too: Con amores, mi madre in particular, with its unusual quintuple time signature, has been included in recitals and recorded anthologies by international singers of the caliber of Teresa Berganza and Gérard Souzay, and has become part of the cancionero canon.
Listening to Anchieta 500 years later, one is struck, perhaps above all, by the level of solid craftsmanship in there. Anchieta’s sacred music does not instantly dazzle and delight the ear the way Peñalosa and Escobar do, and his songs are not the irresistible zippy earworms that Encina’s are. Certainly he was not afraid to take risks: the two quintuple-meter songs, which register on modern ears as having no meter at all, and the almost fiendish concealment of the L’homme armé tune in the Agnus of the Missa sine nomine are like nothing else in their repertory. He shows quite a strong rhetorical hand in the motets, and a fine humanistic sense of mournful mood in Domine non secundum and Libera me. But most of Anchieta’s pleasures, in the end, are the quiet pleasures that come with repeated listening and contemplation, maybe especially of the late sacred music, which blooms in the mind only slowly and with patience—but bloom it does. By almost any standard, and especially among musicians, Juan de Anchieta led one of the most eventful lives of his day, but what has made and ensured his place in history is the brilliance of his art.
1 The exceptions are Marturià’s Conditor alme siderum, which is paired with Anchieta’s setting of the same hymn, and thus possibly attributed to distinguish the two versions, and two works attributed to Urrede and Mondéjar in a later layer added at the end of the manuscript.
2 Tess Knighton, Música y músicos en la corte de Fernando el Católico, 1474–1516 (Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico,” 2001), 193, 337, 344. All of Medina’s works are attributed simply to “Medina,” and Segovia’s to “Jo. Segovia.”
3 See Kenneth Kreitner, “Music for the Royal Chapels,” in Tess Knighton, ed., Companion to Music in the Age of the Catholic Monarchs (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 21–59, and the tables in Knighton, “Música y músicos,” 193– 95.
4 Early Music Consort of London, dir. David Munrow, Music from the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella, Angel S36926, 1973.
5 Early Music Consort of London, dir. David Munrow, The Art of the Netherlands, Seraphim SICQ-6104, 1976.
6 Capilla Peñaflorida, dir. Josep Cabré, Juan de Anchieta. Missa Sine Nomine /Salve Regina, Naxos 8.55572, 2004.
7 Capilla Peñaflorida, dir. Josep Cabré, Juan de Anchieta. Missa Rex virginum / Motecta, K617 178, 2008.
8 Capilla Peñaflorida, dir. Josep Cabré, Juan de Anchieta. Missa de Nostra Dona, NBMusica, NB012, 2008.