Once again, we are very grateful to Mr Thomas Neal for sharing his work with us, some historical notes on motets which use the same words as one of the Offertory prayers which Dr Foley has been examining in his Lost in Translation series.
In the 119th installment of his Lost in Translation series, Michael Foley offered a close reading and explanation of the priest’s prayer at the Offertory, In spiritu humilitatis:
In spíritu humilitátis et in ánimo contríto suscipiámur a te, Dómine: et sic fiat sacrificium nostrum in conspectu tuo hodie, ut pláceat tibi, Dómine Deus.
In a spirit of humility, and in contrite heart, may we be received by Thee, O Lord; and may our sacrifice take place in Thy sight this day, that it may please Thee, O Lord God.
It is a particularly beautiful prayer which, along with the Suscipe, sancta Trinitas, occurs in the majority of medieval uses.
As Foley discussed in a follow-up post, one of the central subjects of this short prayer is the contrite heart, reflected in the priest’s posture: he recites the prayer in a low voice, as he prostrates himself before the altar. It is unsurprising, then, to find the text also used as the fourth psalm antiphon at Lauds on the First Sunday in Lent. It is set to a particularly beautiful chant in the second mode, found in both the Roman and Dominican Rites. The rising melisma on “fiat” underlines the speaker’s supplication, and is echoed on “tibi” in the penultimate quarter-measure.
This beautiful prayer was set to polyphony by the priest-composer Giovanni Croce (ca. 1557-1609). Born in the coastal town of Chioggia, on the southern side of the Venetian lagoon, in or around 1557, Croce studied with the great theorist Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-90) and sang in the choir of the Basilica di San Marco, Venice. He took holy orders in or before 1585 and spent the remainder of his life attached to the church of Santa Maria Formosa. By the early 1590s, Croce was vicemaestro at San Marco and taught singing at the seminary. In 1603 he succeeded Baldassare Donato (1525-1603) as maestro di cappella at the basilica, dying in post only six years later. While Croce is mostly remembered for his canzonette and madrigal comedies, he also composed a substantial body of liturgical music including masses (1596) and volumes of motets (1591, 1594, 1595) for double-choir or cori spezzati.
Croce’s polychoral setting of In spiritu humilitatis is not known to survive in any sources from his lifetime, but it was published posthumously, appended to Alessandro Grandi’s Motetti a cinque voci […] (Venice: Alessandro Vincenti, 1620). Is it too romantic to imagine Croce conceiving of a setting of this text one day while he celebrated Mass at Santa Maria Formosa? Here is the front cover from the Quintus partbook. A modern edition is available on the Polyphony Database.
While several commercial recordings of this motet have appeared in recent years, arguably none has matched that by the Choir of Westminster Cathedral under Martin Baker:
The Perugian composer Lorenzo Ratti (c.1589-1630), who made a career as a singer and composer in various churches and colleges at Rome and later at the Basilica della Santa Casa at Loreto, also composed a setting of In spiritu humilitatis. Ratti’s motet was published in the third part of his three-volume series Sacrae modulationes […] (Venice: Alessandro Vincenti, 1628), in which he sought to provide polyphonic settings (from two up to nine voices) of the Gradual and Offertory texts, as well as motets for the Elevation, for every Sunday of the liturgical year. Ratti’s setting is scored for two voices and continuo, and was intended as an Elevation motet for the First Sunday after Pentecost. To my knowledge, little of Ratti’s music has been transcribed into modern editions, let alone performed or recorded.
