With the exception of motets and madrigals of his own authorship, all but one of the works that Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina used as models for his many parody masses were in existence before 1552. The sole mass based on a work composed after this pivotal date is the six-voice Missa nasce la gioia mia, for which Palestrina borrowed polyphonic material from Giovanni Leonardo Primavera dell' Arpa's 1565 madrigal Nasce la gioia mia.

The Missa nasce la gioia mia itself first appeared in 1590 as a part of the volume published in Rome under the title Missarum liber quintus (Masses, volume 5). The work is one of Palestrina's most substantial, in terms of both length and intricacy of musical design. Each of the five basic sections of the Mass Ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) is given a fully polyphonic treatment; as the work is cyclic, each major section of music takes the same segment of dense counterpoint (lifted straight from Primavera's opening) as its starting point.

The Kyrie text is set in the normal three-part fashion, Kyrie I/Christe/Kyrie II. The skillful use of two contrasting forms of the same subject during the opening point of imitation is fascinating-only the first cantus and second tenor sing the subject in the varied (melodically inverted) guise, while the other four voices all present the melody in its original, ascending shape. During the Christe-portion of the movement Palestrina reduces the texture to just four voices. Kyrie II takes off on another transposed- Dorian melodic imitation, this time using a subject marked by a very striking leap of a perfect fourth.

Palestrina, following his standard practice, divides the Gloria text into two segments-the first ending at "Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris", the second beginning at "Qui tollis peccata mundi". As per tradition, the opening line of text is not set in the polyphony, as it would normally be given in plainchant as a kind of introduction to the body of the music.

The Credo, like the Gloria before it, makes frequent and very stunning use of homophony (always perfectly timed to produce the maximum effect). Here the text is set as three individual sections of music, the first and third of which use the full six-voice texture, the middle just four voices.

The Sanctus-Benedictus-Hosanna text combination follows, on the surface at least, a plan nearly identical to that of the Credo (namely a succession of six-, four, and six-voice textures). While the Sanctus begins with a modified version of the same point of imitation that began the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, the following four-voice Benedictus takes its melody from Kyrie II (an interesting parallel with the four-voice middle portion of the Credo, whose subject also begins with an upward leap of a fourth but then unfolds in a very different manner, can be made). After a somewhat staid beginning, the Hosanna blossoms into appropriately joyous melismas.

The first of the two Agnus Dei sections (Agnus Dei I) offers a new twist to the characteristic polyphonic that by now we know so well, while Agnus Dei fulfills in very dramatic fashion the potential of the upward-fourth idea discussed above. The florid eighth-note runs that crop up during the final "dona nobis pacem" are of an overtly passionate expressiveness (one such run in the second tenor part covers the span of a minor tenth in just five beats of modern four-four meter!) not often found in Palestrina's work.



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