Mateo Flecha

The Ensaladas of Mateo Flecha are quite remarkable if not unique in the legacy of Renaissance vocal ensemble works. They mostly seem to portray a secular calamity in excited exclamations until the final ponderous phrases warn that in order to avoid calamity one must have Faith. The variety of mood changes throughout the rather lengthy body of these pieces threatens to render them as disjointed and disparate, but Flecha always manages to produce a work that sounds unified and consequential.
Robert Stevenson claims that Flecha was born in Prades in 1481, which, being north of the Pyrenees, would make him French. Other sources place his birth in the Kingdom of Aragon; his surviving work and places of employment are distinctly Spanish. About 1520 Flecha is listed as a singer at Lérida Cathedral, then in 1523 he is made maestro there for two years. The remainder of his employment is found in the household of Spanish nobility and royalty, his final position being in 1543 at Arévalo as Chapelmaster to Princesses Maria and Juana (younger sisters of Philip II). His last years were spent in the Royal Cistercian monastery in Poblet, where in 1553, he died.
Oddly, the Ensaladas of Mateo Flecha were published in Prague in 1581 by his nephew, of the same name, also a musician of note. In 1564 the nephew had become a Chaplain to Maria, now the wife of Emperor, Maximilian II, whose Court was located in Vienna and Prague. No doubt Maria would remember the works of Flecha, the elder, when he was Chapelmaster to the two Princesses at Arévalo in the 1540s. They are quite memorable.