Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]



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Navarro, Juan (i)


(b Seville or Marchena, c1530; d Palencia, 25 Sept 1580). Spanish composer and singer. In 1549 he was a tenor in the choir of the Duke of Arcos at Marchena, which was directed by Cristóbal de Morales; he later sang at Jaén Cathedral. He joined the choir of Málaga Cathedral on 14 July 1553. This brought him once more under the direction of Morales, who, however, died suddenly some two months later. Navarro was a candidate for the vacant post of maestro de capilla, but he failed the tests on 9 February 1554. He continued to sing in the choir until 2 October 1555, when he resigned. On 28 September 1562 the chapter of the collegiate church at Valladolid appointed him maestro de capilla without the usual public competition; he held this post until 6 March 1564. On 7 February 1564 the chapter of Avila Cathedral decided to invite him to succeed Bernardino de Ribera as maestro de capilla and on 26 February seated him in a chaplaincy. At Avila he won the support and friendship of the bishop, Alvaro de Mendoza, a noted connoisseur of music. On 7 January 1566 Navarro was paid for a manuscript of 33 hymns. While at Avila he probably also taught Victoria just before he left for Rome. Navarro's reputation was soon such that on 27 September 1566 he was invited to become maestro de capilla of Salamanca Cathedral without the usual public trial of skill. The chapter of Avila Cathedral was anxious to keep him, but on 7 November 1566 he left for his new post. During his seven years at Salamanca, Francisco de Salinas was professor of music at the university. The two musicians experimented together with the enharmonic genus, and according to Espinel (1618) Navarro's choir served as a testing-ground for Salinas's theories. Navarro was constantly on the lookout for singers of high quality, but he also had considerable difficulties with certain recalcitrant members of the cathedral establishment, for example with the drunken organist Pedro Ricardo. To lessen his worries the chapter relieved him of the responsibility of instructing the choirboys. Continuing tension, however, made him increasingly difficult to handle, and matters came to a head on New Year's Eve 1573, when he struck the succentor Juan Sánchez ‘a violent blow on the face, thereby causing a grave scandal’. He was promptly dismissed, and from 1574 to 1578 he directed the choir of the cathedral at Ciudad Rodrigo, a comparatively poor foundation, where the young Juan Esquivel Barahona was among his pupils. On 10 September 1578 he was appointed maestro de capilla of Palencia Cathedral, where the bishop was Alvaro de Mendoza, his friend from his time at Avila, who now secured for him the right to wear a canon's brocade, to occupy an important position in the choir and to receive substantial financial benefits, privileges that had not been granted to his predecessor, Pedro Ordóñez, and in consequence the cathedral prebendaries composed a written protest, dated 20 October 1578. On 22 May 1579 he and others petitioned the chapter to found a brotherhood devoted to the Virgin Mary and St Antoninus, the cathedral's patron saint. Though he was at Palencia for only two years, the chapter voted that he be buried in a privileged crypt of the cathedral.

Alone among Spanish Renaissance composers, Navarro was honoured by a posthumous publication, the Psalmi, hymni ac Magnificat (1590); it was paid for by Francisco Reinoso, a wealthy official of Palencia Cathedral who had been chief administrator to Pope Pius V in Rome. He chose as editor Francisco Soto de Langa (whom Navarro had unsuccessfully attempted to attract to Salamanca Cathedral as a singer in 1572). The publication was one of the two most popular collections of vespers music in Spain, Portugal and Mexico; the extant copies all show signs of considerable use, and many manuscript copies were made up to the 18th century. The volume includes settings of many of the texts found in Guerrero's Liber vesperarum (1584), and also contains revised versions of some of the hymns that Navarro presented to Avila Cathedral in 1565; comparisons of the two collections reveal more refined part-writing in the later reworkings, so that the inner parts in particular are more active and melodically attractive. Nearly all the pieces in both collections involve the alternation of plainsong and four-part polyphony. Navarro's polyphonic textures invariably quote a plainsong in at least one voice, always in a skilful and subtle manner. Canons are to be found in ten of the 28 hymns, in the final ‘Gloria Patri’ of each of the first eight Magnificat settings (where the interval of the canon corresponds to the number of the tone) and occasionally elsewhere; they are always unobtrusively introduced. In the preface Soto praised Navarro for supreme erudition blended with ‘incredible sweetness’. Aguilera de Heredia, in his Canticum Beatissimae Virginis deiparae Mariae (1618), may have outdone Navarro in the ingenuity of his tone-number canons, but no later Spanish composer of vesper music excelled him in appealing, as Soto put it, to ‘that larger general public which will in the future have an opportunity of hearing these works sung’.


WORKS

sacred vocal


Psalmi, hymni ac Magnificat totius anni, 4vv (Rome, 1590); ed. S. Rubio (Madrid, 1978)

Sacred contrafactum, 4vv, 158811 [pubd as villanesca, 15768]

12 motets, 4–6vv, E-V; 3 ed. J.B. de Elústiza and G. Castrillo Hernández, Antologia musical (Barcelona, 1933)

Magnificat, psalms, hymns, GU, MA, Tc, V, VAc, Zvp, Puebla Cathedral, Mexico (see StevensonRB)

3 Magnificats, 2 psalms, 4vv, ed. H. Eslava y Elizondo, Lira sacro-hispana, siglo XVI, 1st ser., ii (Madrid, 1869); sources not identified, possibly spurious

secular


2 villanescas, villancico, 15768 [intabulations]

6 secular songs, 4vv, Mmc [incl. 2 pieces also in 15768]; ed. M. Querol Gavaldá, MME, viii–ix (1949–50)

BIBLIOGRAPHY


LaborD

StevensonRB

StevensonSCM

V. Espinel: La casa de la memoria (Madrid, 1591), f.46v

V. Espinel: Vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (Madrid, 1618); ed. S. Carrasco Urgoiti (Madrid, 1972), ii, 146

R. Mitjana: La capilla de música de la catedral de Málaga, año de 1543 al año de [1569] (MS, S-Skma), 45, 54

J.B. Trend: ‘Catalogue of the Music in the Biblioteca Medinaceli, Madrid’, Revue hispanique, lxxi (1927), 489–554

R. Casimiri: ‘Melchior Robledo, maestro a Saragozza; Juan Navarro, maestro ad Avila nel 1574’, NA, xi (1934), 203–6

H. Anglès: ‘El archivo musical de la catedral de Valladolid’, AnM, iii (1948), 59–108, esp. 61, 83

D. Crawford: ‘Two Choirbooks of Renaissance Polyphony at the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora of Guadalupe’, FAM, xxiv (1977), 145–74

S. Rubio: : Introduction to Juan Navarro (Madrid, 1978); see also review by R. Stevenson, Inter-American Music Review, iii (1980–81), 105–7

J. Lopéz-Calo: La música en la catedral de Palencia (Palencia, 1980–81), i, 496–501, ii, 589–90

T.H. Thomas: The Music of Juan Navarro Based on Pre-Existent Musical Materials (diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1990)

R.M. Stevenson: ‘Spanish Polyphonists in the Age of the Armada’, Inter-American Music Review, xii/2 (1991–2), 17–114, esp. 68–82

ROBERT STEVENSON



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