Sheppard's 'Media Vita'

Synopsis

In December of 2020, during the first, bleak winter of the worldwide Covid pandemic, The New York Times ran a story about the English Renaissance composer John Sheppard, who, as a member of the Chapel Royal, the household choir of the English monarchs, was buried in London on today’s date in 1558.

Shepard lived during the turbulent English Reformation, and as a church musician composed liturgical works in both English and Latin, probably reflecting whether the Protestant king Edward VI or the Catholic Queen Mary I was seated on the throne.

We know little about Sheppard’s life and nothing about his own religious inclinations. His most famous work, an elaborately polyphonic compline setting of a Latin text, “Media vita in morte sumus” (In the midst of life we are in death), might have been written for the funeral for a fellow composer who died from what was called the “new ague,” a pandemic that swept England in 1557, and returned the following year in a devasting second wave, killing one in ten Londoners.

One of them was John Sheppard. He died just after the strain claimed Reginald Pole, the archbishop of Canterbury, and probably Queen Mary as well.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Sheppard (1515-1558): Media Vita; Tallis Scholars; Peter Phillips, conductor; Gimell 16

On This Day

Births

• 1837 - Russian composer Mily Balakirev (Gregorian date: Jan. 2)

• 1850 - Bohemian composer Zdenek Fibich, in Vseborice

• 1940 - American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa, in Baltimore, Maryland

Deaths

• 1864 - American composer and journalist William Henry Fry, 51, in Santa Cruz, West Indies

• 1890 - Danish composer Niels W. Gade, in Copenhagen, 73

• 1957 - British light-music composer Eric Coates, 71, in Chichester

Premieres

• 1890 - Bruckner: Symphony No. 3 (final version), in Vienna, Hans Richter conducting

• 1900 - Frederick Converse: The Festival of Pan for orchestra, by the Boston Symphony, Wilhelm Gericke conducting

• 1903 - Glazunov: Symphony No. 7, in St. Petersburg (Gregorian date: Jan. 3)

• 1908 - Schoenberg: Quartet No. 2 for strings and soprano, in Vienna, by the Rosé Quartet with soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder

• 1934 - Prokofiev: Lieutenant Kijé Suite (from the film), on a Moscow radio broadcast

• 1934 - Toch: Big Ben (Variation Fantasy on the Westminster Chimes) for orchestra, by the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky conducting

• 1939 - Prokofiev: cantata Zdravitza (A Toast), in Moscow, to celebrate the 60th birthday of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin