Claude Goudimel

Claude Goudimel was a French composer, editor and printers' proofreader, born in Besançon around 1514 or 1520 and died in Lyon in August 1572. His career belongs to sixteenth-century France, when secular and religious music was disseminated thanks to printers, and he is above all remembered for his psalms. The old hypothesis that presented him as Palestrina's teacher is now considered discredited.

Around 1549 he was studying at the University of Paris, the year in which his chansons first appeared in print. In 1551 he joined the publishing house of Nicolas Du Chemin as a proofreader and, from 1552 to 1555, he was its partner. Although he was still listed as a student of the University of Paris as late as 1555, his role as composer and editor during those years was significant. For example, the Moduli undecim festorum of 1554 includes a Latin poem by him in which he urges readers to buy the book, because they would find in it no work left uncorrected. Through Jean Brinon, to whom he dedicated his first book of psalms in 1551, he met Ronsard, and later he set to music several sonnets and odes from Les Amours. His most productive years were those between 1551 and 1558, when he published most of his chansons, psalms, motets, odes and masses.

From 1557 he lived in Metz, a Huguenot city, where he collaborated with the poet and playwright Louis des Masures on a complete psalter published in 1564. He must have left Metz before 1567. He maintained a correspondence with the humanist Paul Schede, known as Melissus, and his last letter, dated in Lyon on 23 August 1572, survives. A week later he was killed in the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which between 28 and 31 August decimated the city's Huguenot population. Right up to his last years he continued to work as an editor; in 1572 he prepared, for the printer Jean II de Tournes, an edition of Arcadelt's chansons with spiritual texts.

His legacy rests above all on his psalms, which take three forms: a free motet style using Genevan melodies as cantus firmus or as imitative motifs; strict settings in which only the first verse is sung to the traditional melody in one voice; and note-against-note harmonisations with the melody in the tenor. He also composed five masses, three magnificats and ten Latin motets, of imitative texture and clear melodic profiles, as well as more than sixty secular songs and chansons spirituelles. These works help us understand the continuity of counterpoint and of polyphonic elaboration on borrowed material in French music of the mid-sixteenth century.