Todosantos in Viceregal Peru

Historical Background

That the Italian-born Domenico Zipoli, student of Domenico Scarlatti, should renounce his worldly achievements and travel to the remotest stretches of the Spanish Empire can be explained by the intense religious fervour that swept over Europe during the Counterreformation.  Zipoli had attained the immensely prestigious post as organist at the Church of the Gesù in Rome, but in 1716 he abruptly left for Spain to join the Society of Jesus with the desire to be sent to the Reductions of Paraguay as a missionary.

To understand the spirit of that age, we can read about the zeal that the Bishop of Buenos Aires, Fray Joseph de Peralta, observes in the recent converts at the Reductions in 1743 : “To see churches, the service of the Divine Worship, the piety in prayers, the dexterity in singing, the tidiness and ornateness of the altars, the respect and magnificence with which the Blessed Sacrament is distributed, caused in me on the one hand an inexplicable tenderness, but on the other hand shameful confusion, noticing such a disparity between the villages that have just left pagan barbarity, and the other ones…lukewarm Christians, who should go and learn how to venerate and to serve from these neophytes.”

The musical archives of these Reductions reflects the sophistication of contemporary cathedral chapters, which include works by Bassani, Palestrina, Guerrero, Victoria, Lassus, and even Michael Haydn :  we have opted to include works by these latter two Old World masters in addition to the works of composers working in Latin America during the seventeenth century.

In this programme, we have sought to recreate a Mass as it would have been celebrated in Peru at the turn of the eighteenth century.  The Iberian polychorality of the Lima cathedral chapel masters Juan de Araujo and his successor, Thomás de Torrejón y Velasco, was slowly being displaced by the galant Italian style that composers like Zipoli and Roque Ceruti imported into the South American musical establishment in the early eighteenth century.  Unfortunately, the grand polychoral masses that would have been associated with important festivals at Cathedrals like Lima and Cuzco have not survived to the present due to overuse and an earthquake in 1746, but a single manuscript copy of Torrejón’s Missa à seis voces en el octavo tono preserved in the metropolitan cathedral of La Plata in present-day Sucre, Bolivia, offers us a glimpse of the glory that was the liturgical music of the Peruvian baroque.

We open our programme with a suite of keyboard works copied under the guidance of the Swiss-born Jesuit Martin Schmid, who would have had the printed works of Zipoli on hand.  We follow with the Introit Gaudeamus, which would have been the most familiar Office of the Mass to viceregal-era Christians due to the multitude of saints’ days observed in the Tridentine calendar.  In addition to Torrejón’s charming Mass setting, we are including an elevation motet by his hand that would have figured prominently in the Corpus Christi observances at Lima, one of the most important holidays in colonial Peru. We conclude with the royal anthem Elegit eum Dominus that the Portuguese-born Gaspar Fernándes of Guatemala composed for the arrival of the new viceroy Don Diego Fernández de Córdoba at Oaxaca in 1612, who would variously govern Mexico and Peru during his assignment.

Many thanks to Alan Barrera for graciously making this performance possible.