At eighteen years of age, the talented Francisco was appointed maestro at Jaén Cathedral. He stayed there until, during a visit to his parents in Seville, he was persuaded to stay in his native city and serve its cathedral once more. He remained there from 1549 until his death. Twice, in 1551 and again in 1554, he was close to being appointed to the chapelmastership of the cathedral at Málaga. He declined the first invitation, but won and accepted the appointment on the second occasion, only to resign two weeks later without moving to take the post. The Sevillian canons valued Guerrero’s services so greatly that their persuasion, including the formal promise of succession to the ageing Pedro Fernández, was decisive. He was not to know, in 1554, that Fernández (who had succeeded Escobar as maestro in 1514) would go on until 1574 when he died, probably in his nineties. How strange that the canons could not retire Fernández earlier!
|
Guerrero dominated Spanish cathedral music in the late sixteenth century and his works were diffused in print and in manuscript copies throughout Spain and Portugal, and in the New World from Mexico and Guatemala to Lima and Cuzco
|
Guerrero became noted for his devotion to his work, to his cathedral, to his religious calling and even to the poor, despite his getting into debt on several occasions. In 1591, he was imprisoned for debts incurred in getting his works printed; he still owed 280 ducats for the printing in Rome of his Liber Vesperarum (1584). The cathedral authorities had to bail him out.
In Pacheco’s biographical description, published only weeks after the composer’s death, we have a warm account of his personality: “He was a person of great understanding, … he was affable and patient with musicians. He had a grave and venerable appearance. Above all, he was charitable to the poor, giving them his clothes and shoes to the point of going barefoot himself.”
Pacheco goes on to remind readers of Guerrero’s desire to make a second visit to the Holy Land, but that God had rather chosen to reward him with “a most enviable death, his last words being from Psalm 121, In domum Domini ibimus … We shall go into the house of the Lord”. Earlier in that Book of True Portraits (Seville, 1599), Pacheco had described not only that there were several pages of music in the composer’s hand for each day of his life, but also that Guerrero “made the cathedral his habitation night and day”, even having meals brought to him there, served through an aperture cut in the iron grille of a window.
|
|
|
|