Antonio de Cabezon, organist of Philip II
The keyboard player of Charles V and Philip II, heard at Genoa as "otro Orfeo de nuestros tiempos" and buried under a monument the king paid for. This entry reports what the nineteenth-century Spanish record holds: a compiler who searched two Madrid parishes for his birth and burial and found neither, two printings of the lost epitaph that disagree word for word, an unverified priority claim, and a Spanish historian who called his doctrine Flemish.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of Cabezon is a short paragraph of repeated assertions - blind from childhood, father of Iberian keyboard music, teacher of the English virginalists - with no document behind any of them, and the Spanish popular account adds a claim that he wrote the first string quartet in Europe. This entry does the thing nobody does: it opens the two nineteenth-century Spanish compilations that are the source of most of it and reports what they actually say, including what they say against themselves. Saldoni's team searched the two oldest parishes of Madrid for the birth and burial of the man they place there and found neither. The string-quartet claim is traced to Hilarion Eslava, and Saldoni's own footnote records that Berlin answered on 2 December 1868 that the piece could not be found. The epitaph Philip II paid for is printed twice, in two texts that differ word by word, because the monument had vanished with the old church of San Francisco el Grande before either man wrote. And the strongest deflation is quoted in full from a Spanish patriot historian: that Cabezon's doctrines "fueron puramente flamencas" and that his works never had abroad the celebrity of composers trained in the Spanish schools. Achievement, motive and counterpoint are all taken from the same two shelves.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The office and the date of death are the firm part of the record and both nineteenth-century compilers agree on them. Baltasar Saldoni's dictionary of the efemerides of Spanish musicians enters him under 26 March 1566 - "Muere en Madrid, en donde habia nacido en 1510, el celebre organista Felix Antonio Cabezon, cuando contaba cincuenta y seis anos de edad" - and its own index lists "Cabezon, D. Felix Antonio: dia 26" at page 152. Mariano Soriano Fuertes calls him "celebre organista de la real capilla y clavicordista de la camara de Felipe II" and closes his note "Este insigne profesor murio en 1566, a la edad de 56 anos". Both compilers name him Felix Antonio; the form by which he is known today, Antonio de Cabezon, is the one used in the sources they quote.
The birthplace is asserted by both and documented by neither, and Saldoni prints the failure in a footnote rather than concealing it. Having found that Fetis dated the death to 21 March and a Madrid Diccionario tecnico to 24 March, he explains: "Por esta divergencia de dias hemos registrado los archivos de las dos parroquias mas antiguas de Madrid en busca de la partida de nacimiento y defuncion de este afamado musico; pero los libros de ambas parroquias en que constan tales documentos originales no se remonta el de defunciones mas que uno de la parroquia de Santa Maria de la Almudena, que principia en 1565; pero en este libro no se halla la partida de defuncion de Cabezon." A compiler who went to the registers to settle a three-day discrepancy came back with nothing, which leaves the Madrid birth of 1510 standing on repetition alone in the sources read here.
The one contemporary witness reproduced in these pages is an eyewitness of the prince's journey of 1548-1551, and it is the source of the phrase by which Cabezon is still known. Saldoni quotes El felicisimo viaje del principe D. Felipe by Juan Calvete de Estrella, printed at Antwerp in 1552, page 18, on the arrival at Genoa: the pontifical mass was sung by the prince's cantores and chapel, "con gran admiracion de todo el pueblo de ver la solemnidad con que se hacia, y con tan divina musica y de tan escogidas voces, y de oir la suavidad y estraneza con que tocaba el organo, el unico en este genero de musica, Antonio Cabezon; otro Orfeo de nuestros tiempos." This corpus has read that sentence only as Saldoni reprints it, crediting Hilarion Eslava, and has not opened the 1552 imprint, so the confidence here is in the transmission and not in the leaf.
Both compilers describe two works published at Madrid in 1578 by his sons after his death, and this entry cannot confirm the second of them. Soriano Fuertes writes of "las dos obras publicadas en Madrid por sus hijos en 1578 despues de su muerte, la una bajo el titulo de Musica teorico-practica y la otra con el de Musica para tecla, arpa y vihuela"; Saldoni's excerpt names the same pair, adds that the first is mentioned in the Bibliografia of Nicolas Antonio, and reports that the writer could not find them in Spain and examined them in the royal music library of Berlin, shown them by its custos. No imprint of either has been opened here, and no catalogue entry for either has been read here, so this entry cannot say whether the two titles are two books or two descriptions of one. The two-work account is reported as what these compilers say, not as a bibliographical finding.
A large priority claim travels with those works in both sources, and this entry declines to repeat it. Soriano Fuertes states that in them "se encuentra la primera pieza escrita en Europa para cuarteto de cuerda, y cuyo hecho, segun don Hilarion Eslava, se habia atribuido a autores estrangeros mucho mas modernos", and Saldoni reproduces the same sentence. Saldoni then adds, in his own footnote, that he wrote to Berlin for the piece and that on 2 December 1868 he was answered "que no se encontraba", a circumstance he regrets and ascribes to the little interest of whoever was asked. The claim is therefore made twice and verified never, by the compiler's own account; this entry records that it was made, and makes no finding on it.
The sharpest counterpoint to the eulogy comes from a Spanish national historian of music writing to celebrate Spanish music. In the same paragraph, Soriano Fuertes holds that "las doctrinas de Cabezon fueron puramente flamencas, y sus obras no han tenido en el estrangero la celebridad de aquellos autores salidos de las escuelas espanolas". His argument is that Cabezon's treatise inserted "un no pequeno numero de canones y cangrizantes, asegurando que habia pocos compositores en Espana que los hicieran bien", and that this confirms that the Spanish masters "abandonando sus antiguas doctrinas, cifraron su saber y la brillantez del arte, en combinaciones estravagantes importadas de Flandes", holding Cabezon in high prestige for his canons and enigmas while "haciendose poco aprecio de las obras de Morales, Guerrero, Escobedo, Victoria y otros compositores, por carecer de este requisito". The verdict is polemical and serves a thesis about decline, but it is on the record, from the Spanish side, and it names the cost of the reputation.
His standing at court is attested by an expenditure and by an epitaph, and the epitaph is a lesson in what these sources are. Saldoni notes that the Real Capilla of the time held "varios profesores flamencos de gran reputacion, y entre ellos el maestro Felipe Rogier", and that nonetheless "a expensas del Sr. D. Felipe II se le erigio un monumento sepulcral en la iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, donde fue enterrado" - possibly, he remarks, the only monument raised in Spain to the merit of a musician - and that it disappeared when the old church of that convent was rebuilt. Soriano Fuertes reports the same foundation in a footnote. Both then print the Latin inscription, and their texts differ line by line: Saldoni has "Hoc situs est Felix Antonius ille sepulchro, / Organice quomdam gloria primi chori ... Fama ejus terras, spiritus astra colit", Soriano Fuertes "Hic situs est Felix Autonius ille sepulchre / Organici quondan gloria prima chori ... Fama ejus terras spiritus Astra tollit". Neither could have read the stone, because by their own account it no longer existed.
He was a fixed point for the next generation of Spanish writers on music. Saldoni prints an octava from the poem Casa de la memoria by the poet and musician he calls Vicente Gomez Martin, known as the maestro Espinel, born 28 December 1551: "De un sujeto vi alli la efigie pura / Que aquel gran Cabezon va donde caza, / En el orden de tecla y compostura / Sin exceder un punto de su traza, / El termino, caudal, desenvoltura, / Y las divinas manos de Peraza, / Y el divino Salinas alli estaba, / A quien todo el Colegio respetaba." Cabezon is named there in one breath with Peraza and Salinas and placed at the head of keyboard playing and composition. Saldoni's excerpt from the Gaceta Musical de Madrid of 15 April 1855 makes the same point in prose: "el es el primer eslabon de la no interrumpida cadena de nuestros grandes organistas."
The limits of this entry are worth stating exactly. No note of Cabezon's music has been examined here and no imprint of his has been opened; the account rests on two nineteenth-century Spanish compilations, one of them quoting a periodical of 1855 and a book of 1552 at second hand. The pages read here say nothing about his sight, and nothing about any influence on keyboard music outside Spain, so this entry asserts neither. What it does establish is narrower and firmer: that he held the organ and chamber keyboard posts of Charles V and Philip II, that a member of the 1548 travelling household called him the only man in his kind of music, that the king paid for his tomb, that his sons printed him in 1578, and that the two best-known Spanish compilations of the nineteenth century could neither find his parish record, nor agree on his epitaph, nor produce the piece on which their largest claim for him rested.