In a context of division and disunity of the Catholic Church (on pope in Rome, one in Avignon), St. Vicente Ferrer settled with great fame as a preacher of God’s Judgment. Dubbed by locals as” The Angel of the Apocalypse”, his ominous preaching through European territory was addressed to avoid bad habits, continually reminding that the Final Judgment awaits to all of us, touching deeply the souls of most believers, but also the most skeptical.
In the Middle Ages it retains a large number of compositions of eschatological theme. There were also in the Middle Ages compositions relating to the funeral ritual. It is significant that most of the few musical pieces recoverable of ancient Hispanic liturgy are belonging to the Officium Defunctorum. A varied repertoire of macabre thematic consists of laments, dances of death, responsories and other forms of poetic-musical expressions as antiphons and tropes, are the reflection of the questions that humans have ever made about the afterlife, about the meaning of life and death, and behind of them is opened a gap of fear or hope.
A void that provides a fertile ground for the thought and the arts, and is the axis in which all religions revolve around. A void in which preachers always built their speech, with arguments that summarizes one of the favorite phrases of St. Vicente Ferrer, from the Apocalypse: “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of the judgment has come ” [14:7]
