The Catholic Monarchs liked to present their military and political victories as successes of faith. «God wants it this way», they synthesized in their messianic conception of a kingdom rich in conquests. In the repertoire of religious symbols and festivities with which they covered their triumphs, a Hispanic adaptation of the religious hymn shone with its own light ‘Put the lingua’, whose musical value, rather unmemorable, does not explain the massive presence it had throughout the reign of Fernando and Isabel.
As Eva Esteve explains in her article ‘The creation of a hymn for the new Hispania’, contained in a choral work ‘Juana I in Tordesillas: her world, her surroundings’ (University of Valladolid), «Isabel and Fernando’s efforts to fuse the successes of the Crown and the Church, using the ceremonial of which this piece forms part, were successful enough to perpetuate a musical work for more than three hundred years in the sound panorama of the allegory of the Catholic triumph».
An adaptation of a medieval hymn
The Pange Lingua is a Eucharistic hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas for the feast of Body of Christ (Solemnity of the Holy Body and Blood of Christ) and with a traditionally religious historical weight. However, during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, this musical piece was versioned in four voices by the Flemish musician Johannes Wreede, cited in Hispanic sources as John of Urredawho worked in the Aragonese royal chapel as singer and chapel master until at least 1482. The rest of his work had hardly any musical or political significance, but this ‘Spanish’ adaptation of the hymn managed to exceed thirty copies, traveled to the New World and survived in force in public acts until well into the nineteenth century.
The Corpus Christi Procession in Peru. Painting by Teofilo Castillo Guas
«It seems that the secret of its success is not due to its execution, nothing exceptional for the time, and that its stylistic transformations do not respect the original composition too much either. Its identification at an auditory level is more than unlikely, so an extraordinary musical quality, worthy of perpetuating itself over time, could be ruled out”, points out Eva Esteve, doctor cum laude in Sciences of Music by the UCM of Madrid. The real reason for his popularity was political issues.
This hymn was played on Corpus Christi, a festivity of the Catholic Church destined to celebrate the Eucharist and that for the Hispanic Monarchy would end up becoming the central act of its religious and political celebrations. What was celebrated, exalted and defended in the Corpus was the dogma of transubstantiation, that is, the real presence of Christ himself in the Eucharist, which questioned religious heterodoxy.
In times of The Catholic kings It did not yet have that proclamation reading of Catholicism, but they built the imagery and symbology for a central festivity during the Habsburg period that commemorated the Spanish successes. The triumphal arches, inherited from Imperial Romethe armed battalions and an entire iconography were incorporated into this religious festivity where music could not be missing either.
The Pange lingua was played both with the trades that accompanied these processions and with the passage of the kings through the city. The polyphonic music added solemnity and magnificence to the royal entrances, which used to contain in the processions specific references to the military triumphs over the Muslims and, in the American sphere, over the pre-Columbian peoples. The hymn was very present, without going any further, in the Office of the commemoration of the capture of Granada (1492).
Politics and religion were mixing more and more strongly and with it the anthem became more political. “The monarchs build a parallelism in which both the Sacrament and themselves are the physical representatives of the Divinity,” recalls Esteve in his exceptional text. Composing polyphonies on this Hispanic melody, whether in vocal or instrumental arrangements, rose as a crucial custom in all kinds of public festivities. The Habsburgs reserved a leading role for it and, from 1581, it was called for more details Page lingua “more Spanish”.