CHAPTER VII.


GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA

Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in
Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though
his own name has almost been lost to public recognition in the process.
That is the man whose name in English would be John Peter Lewis, or as
his father called him, Giovanni Pier Luigi, who was born at Palestrina,
at some date between 1514 and 1530, and who died in the fulness of his
fame February 2, 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty years old, and was,
it seems, just getting into print for the first time.

The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as
Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He
was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And
all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first
appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina
from 1544 to 1551.

Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he
married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought
him the greatest shock of his life. His wife's name was Lucrezia, "his
equal and an honest damsel" (_donzella onesta e sua para_), according to
the biographer Baini, who adds: