TheMissa Pange lingua is a musical setting of theOrdinary of the Mass byFranco-Flemish composerJosquin des Prez, probably dating from around 1515, near the end of his life. Most likely his last mass, it is an extendedfantasia on thePange Lingua hymn, and is one of Josquin's most famous mass settings.
TheMissa Pange lingua is considered to be Josquin's last mass.[1] It was not available toOttaviano Petrucci for his 1514 collection of Josquin's masses, the third and last of the set; additionally, the mass contains references to other late works such as theMissa de Beata Virgine and theMissa Sine nomine. It was not formally published until 1539 byHans Ott inNuremberg, although manuscript sources dating from Josquin's lifetime contain the work.[2] Famous copyistPierre Alamire included it at the beginning of one of his two compilations of masses by Josquin.[3]
The hymn on which the mass is based is the famousPange Lingua Gloriosi, byThomas Aquinas, which is used for theVespers ofCorpus Christi, and which is also sung during the veneration of theBlessed Sacrament.[4] The mass is the last of only four that Josquin based on plainsong (the others are theMissa Gaudeamus, a relatively early work, theMissa Ave maris stella, and theMissa de Beata Virgine; all of them involve, in some way, praise of the Virgin Mary).[5] The hymn, in thePhrygian mode, is in six musical phrases, of 10, 10, 8, 8, 8, and 9 notes respectively, corresponding to the six lines of the hymn. The work is tightly organized, with almost all of the melodic material drawn from the source hymn, and from a few subsidiarymotifs which appear near the beginning of the mass. As such, theMissa Pange lingua is considered to be one of the finest examples of aparaphrase mass.[6]
Like most musical settings of the mass Ordinary, it is in six parts:
Most of the movements begin with literal quotations from thePange lingua hymn, but the entire tune does not appear until near the end, in the last section of the Agnus Dei, when thesuperius (the highest voice) sings it in its entirety, in long notes, as though Josquin were switching back to thecantus-firmus style of the middle 15th century. The 1539 publisher even added the hymn's text under the notes at this point.[7]
Josquin uses imitation frequently in the mass, and also pairs voices; indeed there are many passages with only two voices singing, providing contrast to the fuller textures surrounding them. While the movements begin with quotations from the original, as the movements progress Josquin treats thePange lingua tune so freely that only hints of it are heard.[8] Several passages inhomophony are striking, and no more so than the setting of "et incarnatus est" in the Credo: here the text, "...he became incarnate by the Holy Ghost from the Virgin Mary..." is set to the complete melody from the original hymn which contains the words "Sing, O my tongue, of the mystery of the divine body."[9]
Rather than being a summation of his previous techniques, as can be seen in the last works ofGuillaume Dufay, Josquin's mass synthesizes severalcontrapuntal trends from the late 15th and early 16th centuries into a new kind of style, one which was to become the predominant compositional manner of the Franco-Flemish composers in the first half of the 16th century.[3][10]
Building on Josquin'sfugal treatment of thePange Lingua hymn's third line in theKyrie of theMissa Pange Lingua, the "Do-Re-Fa-Mi-Re-Do"-theme became one of the most famous in music history.Simon Lohet,[11]Michelangelo Rossi,[12]François Roberday,[13]Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer,[14]Johann Jakob Froberger,[15][16]Johann Caspar Kerll,[17]Johann Sebastian Bach,[18] andJohann Fux wrote fugues on it, and the latter's extensive elaborations in theGradus ad Parnassum[19] made it known to every aspiring composer—among themWolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who used its first four notes as the fugal subject for the last movement of his Symphony No. 41, theJupiter Symphony.[20]
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