Published
Missa pro defunctis a 8 “Requiem”
Duarte Lôbo wrote two settings of the Requiem mass which survive – one for 6 voices and one for 8 voices.
Peter Phillips, director of the Tallis Scholars, wrote this about Lôbo:
Duarte Lôbo (whose name was Latinized as Eduardus Lupus and should not be confused with that of his Spanish near-contemporary Alonso Lôbo) was born about 1565 and died in 1646 in Lisbon.
Like Magalhães (c1571-1652), Cardoso (c1566-1650) and a number of other leading Portuguese musicians of the period, Lôbo studied at Évora Cathedral under Manuel Mendes (c1547-1605). It is possible that it was Mendes who introduced them all to the Victoria Requiem.
Lôbo later became mestre de capela at Évora before moving to Lisbon where he served in the same capacity at the Hospital Real and, by 1594, at the cathedral.
He kept the latter post for over forty years, much honoured by the Royal Court, and became the most esteemed and widely performed Portuguese composer of his time. A full picture of Lôbo as a composer is denied us because much of his music was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
From what survives he seems to have been relatively Renaissance-based, even by Portuguese standards, preferring single-choir polyphony to double-choir antiphony. Even his eight-voice Requiem (published in 1621), though originally printed for two separate choirs, in fact has few passages where all eight voices are not employed together.
This penchant for sonority is equally on display in the probably later six-voice Requiem (published in 1639).
In the three polyphonic statements of the Agnus Dei, for example, in which the soprano part effectively sings the same notes three times, Lôbo’s masterly control not only produces a succession of beautiful chords (especially in the second statement), but at the same time ensures that the music moves inevitably forward to the final ‘sempiternam’.
The Graduale is also remarkable for its expressive dissonances, always carefully prepared as was appropriate for a Requiem, yet never predictable.