CHAPTER XII PALESTRINA AND THE ORIGINS OF MODERN MUSIC

Italy in Renaissance produces no National School of Music—Flemish Composers in Rome—Singers and Orchestra—The Chaotic Indecency of this Contrapuntal Style—Palestrina's Birth and Early History—Decrees of the Tridentine Council upon Church Music—The Mass of Pope Marcello—Palestrina Satisfies the Cardinals with his New Style of Sacred Music—Pius IV. and his Partiality for Music—Palestrina and Filippo Neri—His Motetts—The Song of Solomon set to Melody—Palestrina, the Saviour of Music—The Founder of the Modern Style—Florentine Essays in the Oratorio.

It is a singular fact that while Italy led all the European races in scholarship and literature, in the arts of sculpture and painting, in commerce and the sciences of life, she had developed no national school of music in the middle of the sixteenth century. Native melody might indeed be heard in abundance along her shores and hillsides, in city streets and on the squares where men and girls danced together at evening. But such melody was popular; it could not be called artistic or scientific. The music which resounded through the Sistine Chapel, beneath the Prophets of Michel Angelo, on high days and festivals, was not Italian. The composers of it came for the most part from Flemish or French provinces, bearing the names of Josquin Deprès, of Andrew Willaert, of Eleazar Genet, of James Arkadelt, of Claude Gondimel; and the performers were in like manner chiefly ultramontanes. Julius II. in 1513 founded a chapel in the Vatican Basilica called the Cappella Giulia for the maintenance of twelve male singers, twelve boys, and two masters of the choristers. In doing so it was his object to encourage a Roman school of music and to free the Chapter of S. Peter's from the inconvenience of being forced to engage foreign choir-men. His scheme, however, had been only partially successful. As late as 1540, we find that the principal composers and musicians in Rome were still foreigners. To three Italians of repute, there were five Flemings, three Frenchmen, three Spaniards, one German, and one Portuguese.[204]

The Flemish style of contrapuntal or figured harmony, which had enchanted Europe by its novelty and grace when Josquin Deprès, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, brought it into universal vogue, was still dominant in Italy. But this style already showed unmistakable signs of decadence and dissolution. It had become unfit for ecclesiastical uses, and by the exaggeration of its qualities it was tending to anarchy. The grand defect of Flemish music, considered as an art of expression, was that it ignored propriety and neglected the libretto. Instead of exercising original invention, instead of suiting melodies to words by appropriate combinations of sound and sense, the composers chose any musical themes that came to hand, and wrought them up into elaborate contrapuntal structures without regard for their book. The first words of a passage from the Creed, for instance, were briefly indicated at the outset of the number: what followed was but a reiteration of the same syllables, and divided in the most arbitrary manner to suit the complicated descant which they had to serve. The singers could not adapt their melodic phrases to the liturgical text, since sometimes passages of considerable length fell upon a couple of syllables, while on the contrary a long sentence might have no more than a bar or even less assigned to it. They were consequently in the habit of drawling out or gabbling over the words, regardless of both sense and sentiment. Nor was this all. The composers of the Flemish school prided themselves on overloading their work with every kind of intricate and difficult ornament, exhibiting their dexterity by canons of many types, inversions, imitations, contrapuntal devices of divers ingenious and distracting species. The verbal theme became a mere basis for the utterance of scientific artifices and the display of vocal gymnastics. The singers, for their part, were allowed innumerable licenses. While the bass sustained the melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant (composizione alla mente) and in extravagances of technical execution (rifiorimenti), regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even the fundamental tone at defiance.

The composers, to advance another step in the analysis of this strange medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words, melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms and divergent systems of accentuation in a single piece. They assigned these several ingredients to several parts; and for the further exhibition of their perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major and the minor.

The most obvious result of such practice was that it became impossible to understand what words were being sung, and that instead of concord and order in the choir, a confused discord and anarchy of dinning sounds prevailed. What made the matter from an ecclesiastical point of view still worse, was that these scholastically artificial compositions were frequently based on trivial and vulgar tunes, suggesting the tavern, the dancing-room, or even worse places, to worshipers assembled for the celebration of a Sacrament. Masses bore titles adopted from the popular melodies on which they were founded: such, for example, as 'Adieu mes amours,' 'A l'ombre d'un buissonnet,' 'Baise-moi,' 'L'ami baudichon madame,' 'Le vilain jaloux.' Even the words of love-ditties and obscene ballads in French, Flemish, and Italian, were being squalled out by the tenor while the bass gave utterance to an Agnus or a Benedictus, and the soprano was engaged upon the verses of a Latin hymn. Baini, who examined hundreds of these Masses and motetts in MS., says that the words imported into them from vulgar sources 'make one's flesh creep and one's hair stand on end.' He does not venture to do more than indicate a few of the more decent of these interloping verses; but mentions one Kyrie, in which the tenor sang Je ne vis oncques la pareille; a Sanctus, in which he had to utter gracieuse gente mounyere; and a Benedictus, where the same offender was employed on Madame, faites moy sçavoir. As an augmentation of this indecency, numbers from a Mass or motett which started with the grave rhythm of a Gregorian tone, were brought to their conclusion on the dance measure of a popular ballata, so that Incarnatus est or Kyrie eleison went jigging off into suggestions of Masetto and Zerlina at a village ball.

To describe all the impertinences to which the customs of vocal execution then in vogue gave rise, by means of flourishes, improvisations, accelerations of time and multitudinous artifices derived from the ad libitum abuses of the fugal machinery, would serve no purpose. But it may be profitably mentioned that the mischief was not confined to the vocal parts. Organ and orchestra of divers instruments were allowed the same liberty of improvising on the given theme, embroidering these with fanciful capricci, and indulging their own taste in symphonies connected with the main structure by slight and artificial links. Instrumental music had not yet taken an independent place in art. The lute, the trumpet, or the stops of the organ, followed and imitated the voice; and thus in this confusion a choir of stringed and wind instruments was placed in competition with the singing choir.[205] It would appear that the composer frequently gave but a ground-sketch of his plan, without troubling himself to distribute written parts to the executants. The efflorescences, excursuses and episodes to which I have alluded, were supplied by artists whom long training in this kind of music enabled to perform their separate sallies and to execute their several antics within certain limits of recognized license. But since each vied with the other to produce striking effects, the choir rivaling the orchestra, the tenor competing with the bass, the organ with the viol, it followed that the din of their accumulated efforts was not unjustly compared to that made by a 'sty of grunting pigs,' the builders of the Tower of Babel, or the 'squalling of cats in January.'[206] 'All their happiness,' writes a contemporary critic, 'consisted in keeping the bass singer to the fugue, while at the same time one voice was shouting out Sanctus, another Sabaoth, a third gloria tua, with howlings, bellowings and squealings that cannot be described.'

It must not be thought that this almost unimaginable state of things indicated a defect either of intellectual capacity or of artistic skill. It was due rather to the abuse of science and of virtuosity, both of which had attained to a high degree of development. It manifested the decadence of music in its immaturity, through over-confident employment of exuberant resources on an end inadequate for the fulfillment of the art. Music, it must be remembered, unlike literature and plastic art, had no antique tradition to assimilate, no masterpieces of accomplished form to study. In the modern world it was an art without connecting links to bind it to the past. And this circumstance rendered it liable to negligent treatment by a society that prided itself upon the recovery of the classics. The cultivated classes abandoned it in practice to popular creators of melody upon the one hand, and to grotesque scholastic pedants on the other. And from the blending of those ill-accorded elements arose the chaos which I have attempted to describe.

Learned composers in the style developed by the Flemish masters had grown tired of writing simple music for four voices and a single choir. They reveled in the opportunity of combining eight vocal parts and bringing three choirs with accompanying orchestras into play at the same time. They were proud of proving how by counterpoint the most dissimilar and mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public. In the neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the presentation of incongruous complexities.

The singers were expert in rendering difficult passages, in developing unpromising motives, and in embroidering the arras-work of the composer with fanciful extravagances of vocal execution. The instrumentalists were trained in the art of copying effects of fugue or madrigal by lutes and viols in concerted pieces. The people were used to dance and sing and touch the mandoline together; in every house were found amateurs who could with voice and string produce the studied compositions of the masters.

What was really lacking, amid this exuberance of musical resources, in this thick jungle of technical facilities, was a controlling element of correct taste, a right sense of the proper function of music as an interpretative art. On the very threshold of its modern development, music had fallen into early decay owing to the misapplication of the means so copiously provided by nature and by exercise. A man of genius and of substantial intuition into the real ends of vocal music was demanded at this moment, who should guide the art into its destined channel. And in order to elicit such a creator of new impulses, such a Nomothetes of the disordered state, it was requisite that external pressure should be brought to bear upon the art. An initiator of the right caliber was found in Palestrina. The pressure from without was supplied by the Council of Trent.

It may here be parenthetically remarked that music, all through modern history, has needed such legislators and initiators of new methods. Considered as an art of expression, she has always tended to elude control, to create for herself a domain extraneous to her proper function, and to erect her resources of mere sound into self-sufficingness. What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century, was afterwards accomplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted by Wagner. The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to assert an independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders her subservient to merely technical dexterities.

Giovanni Pier Luigi, called Palestrina from his birthplace in one of the Colonna fiefs near Rome, the ancient Praeneste, was born of poor parents, in the year 1524, He went to Rome about 1540, and began his musical career probably as a choir-boy in one of the Basilicas. Claude Goudimel, the Besançon composer, who subsequently met a tragic death at Lyons in a massacre of Huguenots, had opened a school of harmony in Rome, where Palestrina learned the first rudiments of that science. What Palestrina owed to Goudimel, is not clear. But we have the right to assume that the Protestant part-songs of the French people which Goudimel transferred to the hymn-books of the Huguenots, had a potent influence upon the formation of his style. They may have been for him what the Chorales of Germany were for the school of Bach.[207] Externally, Palestrina's life was a very uneventful one, and the records collected with indefatigable diligence by his biographer have only brought to light changes from one post to another in several Basilicas, and unceasing industry in composition. The vast number of works published by Palestrina in his lifetime, or left in MS. at his death, or known to have been written and now lost, would be truly astonishing were it not a fact that very eminent creative genius is always copious, and in no province of the arts more fertile than in that of music. Palestrina lived and died a poor man. In his dedications he occasionally remarks with sober pathos on the difficulty of pursuing scientific studies in the midst of domestic anxiety. His pay was very small, and the expense of publishing his works, which does not seem to have been defrayed by patrons, was at that time very great. Yet he enjoyed an uncontested reputa tion as the first of living composers, the saviour of Church music, the creator of a new style; and on his tomb, in 1594, was inscribed this title: Princeps Musicae.

The state of confusion into which ecclesiastical music had fallen, rendered it inevitable that some notice of so grave a scandal should be taken by the Fathers of the Tridentine Council in their deliberations on reform of ritual. It appears, therefore, that in their twenty-second session (September 17, 1562) they enjoined upon the Ordinaries to 'exclude from churches all such music as, whether through the organ or the singing, introduces anything of impure or lascivious, in order that the house of God may truly be seen to be and may be called the house of prayer.'[208] In order to give effect to this decree of the Tridentine Council, Pius IV. appointed a congregation of eight Cardinals upon August 2, 1564, among whom three deserve especial mention—Michele Ghislieri, the Inquisitor, who was afterwards Pope Pius V.; Carlo Borromeo, the sainted Archbishop of Milan; and Vitellozzo Vitellozzi. It was their business, among other matters of reform, to see that the Church music of Rome was instantly reduced to proper order in accordance with the decree of the Council. Carlo Borromeo was nephew and chief minister of the reigning Pope. Vitellozzo Vitellozzi was a young man of thirty-three years, who possessed a singular passion for music.

To these two members of the congregation, as a sub-committee, was deputed the special task of settling the question of ecclesiastical music, it being stipulated that they should by all means see that sufficient clearness was introduced into the enunciation of the liturgical words by the singers.

I will here interrupt the thread of the narration, in order to touch upon the legendary story which connects Palestrina incorrectly with what subsequently happened. It was well known that on the decisions of the sub-committee of the congregation hung the fate of Church music. For some while it seemed as though music might be altogether expelled from the rites of the Catholic Ecclesia. And it soon became matter of history that Palestrina had won the cause of his art, had maintained it in its eminent position in the ritual of Rome, and at the same time had opened a new period in the development of modern music by the production of his Mass called the Mass of Pope Marcellus at this critical moment. These things were true; and when the peril had been overpassed, and the actual circumstances of the salvation and revolution of Church music had been forgotten, the memory of the crisis and the title of the victorious Mass remained to form a mythus. The story ran that the good Pope Marcellus, who occupied the Holy See for only twenty-two days, in the year 1555, determined on the abolition of all music but Plain Song in the Church; hearing of which resolve, Palestrina besought him to suspend his decree until he had himself produced and presented a Mass conformable to ecclesiastical propriety. Marcello granted the chapel-master this request; and on Easter Day, the Mass, which saved Church music from destruction, was performed with the papal approval and the applause of Rome. It is not necessary to point out the many impossibilities and contradictions involved in this legend, since the real history of the Mass which wrought salvation for Church music, lies before us plainly written in the prolix pages of Baini. Yet it would have vexed me to pass by in silence so interesting and instructive an example of the mode by which the truth of history is veiled in legend.

Truth is always more interesting than fiction, and the facts of this important episode in musical history are not without their element of romance. There is no doubt that there was a powerful party in the Catholic Church imbued with a stern ascetic or puritanical spirit, who would gladly have excluded all but Plain Song from her services. Had Michele Ghislieri instead of the somewhat worldly Angelo de'Medici been on the Papal throne, or had the decision of the musical difficulty been delegated to him by the congregation of eight Cardinals in 1564, Palestrina might not have obtained that opportunity of which he so triumphantly availed himself. But it happened that the reigning Pope was a lover of the art, and had a special reason for being almost superstitiously indulgent to its professors. While he was yet a Cardinal, in the easy-going days of Julius III., Angelo de'Medici had been invited with other princes of the Church to hear the marvelous performances upon the lute and the incomparable improvisations of a boy called Silvio Antoniano. The meeting took place at a banquet in the palace of the Venetian Cardinal Pisani. When the guests were assembled, the Cardinal Rannuccio Farnese put together a bouquet of flowers, and presenting these to the musician, bade him give them to that one of the Cardinals who should one day be chosen Pope. Silvio without hesitation handed the flowers to Angelo de'Medici, and taking up his lute began to sing his praises in impassioned extempore verse. After his election to the Papacy, with the title of Pius IV., Angelo de'Medici took Silvio into his service, and employed him in such honorable offices that the fortunate youth was finally advanced to the dignity of Cardinal under the reign of Clement VIII., in 1598.[209]

It was therefore necessary for the congregation of musical reform to take the Pope's partiality for this art into consideration; and they showed their good will by choosing his own nephew, together with a notorious amateur of music, for their sub-committee. The two Cardinals applied to the College of Pontifical Singers for advice; and these deputed eight of their number—three Spaniards, one Fleming, and four Italians—to act as assistants in the coming deliberations. It was soon agreed that Masses and motetts in which different verbal themes were jumbled, should be prohibited; that musical motives taken from profane songs should be abandoned; and that no countenance should be given to compositions or words invented by contemporary poets. These three conditions were probably laid down as indispensable by the Cardinals in office before proceeding to the more difficult question of securing a plain and intelligible enunciation of the sacred text. When the Cardinals demanded this as the essential point in the proposed reform, the singers replied that it would be impossible in practice. They were so used to the complicated structure of figured music, with its canons, fugal intricacies, imitations and inversions, that they could not even imagine a music that should be simple and straightforward, retaining the essential features of vocal harmony, and yet allowing the words on which it was composed to be distinctly heard. The Cardinals rebutted these objections by pointing to the Te Deum of Costanzo Festa (a piece which has been always sung on the election of a new Pope from that day to our own times) and to the Improperia of Palestrina, which also holds its own in the service of the Sistine. But the singers answered that these were exceptional pieces, which, though they might fulfill the requirements of the Congregation of Reform, could not be taken as the sole models for compositions involving such variety and length of execution as the Mass. Their answer proved conclusively to what extent the contrapuntal style had dissociated itself from the right object of all vocal music, that of interpreting, enforcing, and transfiguring the words with which it deals, and how it had become a mere art for the scientific development of irrelevant and often impertinent melodic themes.

In order to avoid an absolute deadlock, which might have resulted in the sacrifice of ecclesiastical harmony, and have inflicted a death-blow on modern music, the committee agreed to refer their difficulties to Palestrina. On the principle of solvitur ambulando, he was invited to study the problem, and to produce a trial piece which should satisfy the conditions exacted by the Congregation as well as the requirements of the artists. Literally, he received commission to write a Mass in sober ecclesiastical style, free from all impure and light suggestions in the themes, the melodies and the rhythms, which should allow the sacred words in their full sense to be distinctly heard, without sacrificing vocal harmony and the customary interlacing of fugued passages. If he succeeded, the Cardinals promised to make no further innovation; but if he failed, Carlo Borromeo warned him that the Congregation of Reform would disband the choral establishments of the Pontifical Chapel and the Ro man churches, and prohibit the figured style in vogue, in pursuance of the clear decision of the Tridentine Council.

This was a task of Hercules imposed on Palestrina. The art to which he had devoted his lifetime, the fame which he had acquired as a composer, the profession by which he and all his colleagues gained their daily bread, depended on his working out the problem. He was practically commanded to discover a new species of Church music, or to behold the ruin of himself and his companions, the extinction of the art and science he so passionately loved. Truly may his biographer remark: 'I am deliberately of opinion that no artist either before or since has ever found himself in a parallel strait.'

We have no exact record of the spirit in which he approached this labor.[210] But he was a man of sincere piety, a great and enthusiastic servant of art. The command he had received came from a quarter which at that period and in Rome had almost divine authority. He knew that music hung trembling in the balance upon his failure or success.

And these two motives, the motive of religious zeal and the motive of devotion to art, inspired him for the creation of a new musical world. Analysis of his work and comparison of it with the style which he was called on to supersede, show pretty clearly what were the principles that governed him. With a view to securing the main object of rendering the text intelligible to the faithful, he had to dispense with the complicated Flemish system of combined melodies in counterpoint, and to employ his scientific resources of fugue and canon with parsimony, so that in future they should subserve and not tyrannize over expression. He determined to write for six voices, two of which should be bass, in order that the fundamental themes should be sustained with dignity and continuity. But what he had principally in view, what in fact he had been called on to initiate, was that novel adaptation of melody and science to verbal phrase and sense, whereby music should be made an art interpretative of religious sentiment, powerful to clothe each shade of meaning in the text with appropriate and beautiful sound, instead of remaining a merely artificial and mechanical structure of sounds disconnected from the words employed in giving them vocal utterance.

Palestrina set to work, and composed three Masses, which were performed upon April 28, 1565, before the eight Cardinals of the congregation in the palace of Cardinal Vitellozzi. All three were approved of; but the first two still left something to be desired. Baini reports that they preserved somewhat too much of the cumbrous Flemish manner; and that though the words were more intelligible, the fugal artifices overlaid their clear enunciation. In the third, however, it was unanimously agreed that Palestrina had solved the problem satisfactorily. 'Its style is always equal, always noble, always alive, always full of thought and sincere feeling, rising and ascending to the climax; not to understand the words would be impossible; the melodies combine to stimulate devotion; the harmonies touch the heart; it delights without distracting; satisfies desire without tickling the senses; it is beautiful in all the beauties of the sanctuary.' So writes Palestrina's enthusiastic biographer; so apparently thought the Cardinals of the congregation; and when this Mass (called the Mass of Pope Marcellus, out of grateful tribute to the Pontiff, whose untimely death had extinguished many sanguine expectations) was given to the world, the whole of Italy welcomed it with a burst of passionate applause. Church music had been saved. Modern music had been created. A new and lovely-form of art had arisen like a star.

It was not enough that the Mass of Pope Marcellus should have satisfied the congregation. It had next to receive the approval of the Pope, who heard it on June 19. On this occasion, if the Court Chronicle be correct, Pius made a pretty speech, declaring that 'of such nature must have been the harmonies of the new song heard by John the Apostle in the heavenly Jerusalem, and that another John had given us a taste of them in the Jerusalem of the Church Militant.' He seems, indeed, to have been convinced that the main problem of preserving clearness of enunciation in the uttered words had been solved, and that there was now no reason to deprive the faithful of the artistic and devotional value of melodious music. He consequently appointed Palestrina to the post of composer for the Papal Chapel, and created a monopoly for the performance of his works. This measure, which roused considerable jealousy among musicians at the moment, had the salutary effect of rendering the new style permanent in usage.

Of Palestrina's voluminous compositions this is not the place to speak. It is enough to have indicated the decisive part which he took in the reformation of Church music at a moment when its very existence was imperiled, and to have described the principles upon which he laid down new laws for the art. I must not, however, omit to dwell upon his subsequent connection with S. Filippo Neri, since the music he composed for the Oratory of that saint contributed much toward the creation of a semi-lyrical and semi-dramatic style to which we may refer the origins of the modern Oratorio. Filippo Neri was the spiritual director of Palestrina, and appointed him composer to his devout confraternity. For the use of that society the master wrote a series of Arie Divote on Italian words. They were meant to be sung by the members, and to supersede the old usages of Laud-music, which had chiefly consisted in adapting popular street-tunes to sacred words.[211]

To the same connection with the Oratory we owe one of the most remarkable series of Palestrina's compositions. These were written upon the words of an Italian Canzone in thirty octave stanzas, addressed as a prayer to the Virgin. Palestrina set each stanza, after the fashion of a Madrigal, to different melodies; and the whole work proved a manual of devotional music, in the purest artistic taste, and the most delicately sentimental key of feeling. Together with this collection of spiritual songs should be mentioned Palestrina's setting of passages from the Song of Solomon in a series of motetts; which were dedicated to Gregory XIII., in 1584. They had an enormous success. Ten editions between that date and 1650 were poured out from the presses of Rome and Venice, to satisfy the impatience of thousands who desired to feed upon 'the nectar of their sweetness.' Palestrina chose for the motives of his compositions such voluptuous phrases of the Vulgate as the following: Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi. Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo. Vulnerasti cor meum, soror, sponsa mea. This was the period when Italy was ringing with the secular sweetnesses of Tasso's Aminta and of Guarini's Pastor fido; when the devotion of the cloister was becoming languorous and soft; when the cult of the Virgin was assuming the extravagant proportions satirized by Pascal; finally, when manners were affecting a tone of swooning piety blent with sensuous luxuriousness. Palestrina's setting of the Canticle and of the Hymn to Mary provided the public with music which, according to the taste of that epoch, transferred terrestrial emotions into the regions of paradisal bliss, and justified the definition of music as the Lamento dell'amore o la preghiera agli dei. The great creator of a new ecclesiastical style, the 'imitator of nature,' as Vincenzo Galilei styled him, the 'prince of music,' as his epitaph proclaimed him, lent his genius to an art, vacillating between mundane sensuality and celestial rapture, which, however innocently developed by him in the sphere of music, was symptomatic of the most unhealthy tendencies of his race and age. While singing these madrigals and these motetts the youth of either sex were no longer reminded, it is true, of tavern ditties or dance measures. But the emotions of luxurious delight or passionate ecstasy deep in their own natures were drawn forth, and sanctified by application to the language of effeminate devotion.

I have dwelt upon these two sets of compositions, rather than upon the masses of strictly and severely ecclesiastical music which Palestrina produced with inexhaustible industry, partly because they appear to have been extraordinarily popular, and partly because they illustrate those tendencies in art and manners which the sentimental school of Bolognese painters attempted to embody. They belong to that religious sphere which the Jesuit Order occupied, governed, and administered upon the lines of their prescribed discipline. These considerations are not merely irrelevant. The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch. What Palestrina effected was to substitute in Church music the clear and melodious manner of the secular madrigal for the heavy and scholastic science of the Flemish school, and to produce masterpieces of religious art in his motetts on the Canticles which confounded the lines of demarcation between pious and profane expression. He taught music to utter the emotions of the heart; but those emotions in his land and race were already tending in religion toward the sentimental and voluptuous.

There is no doubt that the peril to which music was exposed at the time of the Tridentine Council was a serious and real one. When we remember how intimate was the connection between the higher kinds of music and the ritual of the Church, this will be apparent. Nor is it too much to affirm that the art at that crisis, but for the favor shown to it by Pius IV. and for Palestrina's intervention, might have been well-nigh extinguished in Italy. How fatal the results would then have been for the development of modern music, can be estimated by considering the decisive part played by the Italians in the formation of musical style from the end of the sixteenth century onwards to the age of Gluck, Handel, Haydn and Mozart. Had the music of the Church in Italy been confined at that epoch to Plain Song, as the Congregation of Reform threatened, the great Italian school of vocalization would not have been founded, the Conservatories of Naples and the Scuole of Venice would have been silent, and the style upon which, dating from Palestrina's inventions, the evolution of all species of the art proceeded, would have passed into oblivion.

That this proposition is not extravagant, the history of music in England will suffice to prove. Before the victory of Puritan principles in Church and State, the English were well abreast of other races in this art. During the sixteenth century, Tallis, Byrd, Morland, Wilbye, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons could hold their own against Italian masters. The musical establishments of cathedrals, royal and collegiate chapels, and noble houses were nurseries for artists. Every English home, in that age, like every German home in the eighteenth century, abounded in amateurs who were capable of performing part-songs and concerted pieces on the lute and viol with correctness. Under the régime of the Commonwealth this national growth of music received a check from which it never afterwards recovered. Though the seventeenth century witnessed the rising of one eminent composer, Purcell; though the eighteenth was adorned with meritorious writers of the stamp of Blow and Boyce; yet it is obvious that the art remained among us unprogressive, at a time when it was making gigantic strides in Italy and Germany. It is always dangerous to attribute the decline of art in a nation to any one cause. Yet I think it can scarcely be contested that the change of manners and of temperament wrought in England by the prevalence of Puritan opinion, had much to answer for in this premature decay of music. We may therefore fairly argue that if the gloomy passion of intolerant fanaticism which burned in men like Caraffa and Ghislieri had prevailed in Italy—a passion analogous in its exclusiveness to Puritanism—or if no composer, in the place of Palestrina, had satisfied the requirements of the Council and the congregation, the history of music in Italy and Europe to us-wards would have been far different.

These considerations are adduced to justify the importance attached by me to the episode of which Palestrina was the hero. Yet it should not be forgotten that other influences were at work at the same time in Italy, which greatly stimulated the advance of music. If space permitted, it would be interesting to enlarge upon the work of Luca Marenzio, the prince of madrigal-writers, and on the services rendered by Vincenzo Galileo, father of the greatest man of science in his age, in placing the practice of stringed instruments on a sound basis. It should also be remembered that in the society of Filippo Neri at Rome, the Oratorio was taking shape, and emerging from the simple elements of the Spiritual Laud and Aria Divota. This form, however, would certainly have perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.

There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence, which deserves some detailed mention. A private academy of amateurs and artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical declamation of the Greeks. As the new ecclesiastical style created by Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the Classical Revival. The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces. It was now, much later in the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt. Their quest was vague and visionary. Nothing remained of Greek or Roman music. To guide these explorers, there was only a dim instinct that the ancients had declaimed dramatic verse with musical intonation. But, as the alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, and founded modern chemistry; as, according to an ancient proverb, they who search for silver find gold; so it happened that, from the pedantic and ill-directed attempts of this academy proceeded the system on which the modern Oratorio and Opera were based. What is noticeable in these experiments is, that a new form of musical expression, declamatory and continuous, therefore dramatic, as opposed to the lyrical and fugal methods of the contrapuntists, was in process of elaboration. Claudio Monteverde, who may be termed the pioneer of recitativo, in his opera of Orfeo; Giacomo Carissimi, in whose Jephtha the form of the Oratorio it already outlined, were the most eminent masters of the school which took its origin in the Florentine Academy of the Palazzo Vernio.

To pursue the subject further, would be to transgress the chronological limits of my subject. It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species determined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. How that art at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be read in an English work of singular ability and originality.[212]