“After the ceremony Stradella and his wife having a desire to visit the port of Genoa, went thither with a resolution to return to Turin:  the assassins having intelligence of their departure, followed them close at their heels.  Stradella and his wife, it is true, reached Genoa, but the morning after their arrival these three execrable villains rushed into their chamber, and stabbed each to the heart.  The murderers had taken care to secure a bark which lay in the port; to this they retreated, and made their escape from justice, and were never heard of more.

“Mr. Berenclow says that when the report of Stradella’s assassination reached the ears of Purcell, and he was informed jealousy was the motive to it, he lamented his fate exceedingly; and, in regard of his great merit as a musician, said he could have forgiven him any injury in that kind; which, adds the relater, ’those who remember how lovingly Mr. Purcell lived with his wife, or rather what a loving wife she proved to him, may understand without farther explication.’”

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: 

“With her, Giovanni divided the pleasure of seeing himself elected the first Maestro of the Vatican; with her he suffered the most strait penuries of his life; with her he sustained the most cruel afflictions of his spirit, and with her also he ate the hard crust of sorrow:  yet with her again he rested in the sunlight that beamed from time to time to his glory and to his gain.  And so they passed together, these two faithful consorts, nearly thirty years.”