The Funeral Mass for El Greco – Performed as it might have been soon after the artist’s death on April 7, 1614
(Toledo, Castilla–La Mancha, April 7, 2014) Today at noon, commemorating the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, thousands of people gathered at Spain’s Primatial Cathedral in Toledo to celebrate a Requiem Mass as it might have been performed in the early 17th century. Here to perform the music of Cristóbal de Morales—one of the Cathedral’s greatest composers—were more than twenty musicians including the Ensemble Plus Ultra and Spain’s Schola Antiqua. Under the direction of Michael Noone, Chair of the Music Department at Boston College, they sang from a copy of Morales’s Missarum liber primus (1546), an original volume acquired by Boston College’s Burns Library in 2011.
Toledo reminds us how brief 400 years of human history can be. At its zenith, the city was home to both El Greco and Morales, among many other luminaries. The map El Greco places in the hands of his son Jorge in his View and Plan of Toledo (c. 1610) is so accurate that it is still used as a reference by contemporary cartographers. And the mitre worn by Auxiliary Bishop (and Toledo Cathedral archivist) Ángel Fernández Collado in today’s funeral mass is the very same mitre that El Greco placed on the head of St Augustine in his spectacular Burial of the Count of Orgaz (c. 1588).