II
The invention of printing meant, as we have said, that music was no longer centralized about the church. Yet it has to be granted that one of the greatest impulses music has ever received came to it in the early sixteenth century from a new religion; an impulse which, destined to be checked for a while, though not killed, by the horrors of religious warfare in the next century, was to gain thereafter ever more and more strength and lead at last to truly magnificent heights in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. The new religious movement to which we refer was the Protestant Reformation under the leadership of Martin Luther.
We have said consciously that music received thereby a new impulse. To hold that music was entirely reconstructed by Luther, that he discarded all the forms and technique of music that had been up to that time developed in the art, is quite as mistaken as to hold that he wholly discarded the Roman ritual and built up a new and independent service. The change which the Reformation brought to music was like the change it brought to the service, far more one of spirit than one of form. Luther’s reform was essentially to abolish the mediation of the priesthood, to clear from the service in so far as possible all that might stand between the worshipper and his God, to give freedom to the intimate personal communion between God and man which the northerner naturally feels and practises. In this respect Luther’s reform would theoretically restore all music in the service to the congregation. But Luther was dearly fond of music, of, so to speak, the best music. His favorite composers were Josquin des Prés and Ludwig Senfl, both contrapuntists of enormous skill. Their music was a worthy adornment of the service. ‘I am not of the opinion,’ he said, ‘that on account of the Gospel all the arts should be crushed out of existence as some over-religious people pretend; but I would willingly see all the arts, especially music, in the service of him who has created and given them.’ Congregational singing is anything but an art; often, indeed, is hardly music. Luther had no intention to dismiss trained choirs from the churches and give over all the music of the service to the untrained mass of worshippers. The trained choir therefore was retained in all the Lutheran churches, which could afford to pay for one, and music for these choirs—that is, artistic music, often music written by Catholic composers in complicated contrapuntal style—held an honored place in the Lutheran ritual.
The personal intimate spirit from which the reform drew life, however, found an expression in music. To the congregation was allotted a greater or less portion of song. It will be remembered that the early Christians sang together and that not until the seventh century was the privilege taken from them and restricted only to a trained choir. The German people, as a matter of fact, seem never to have quite given up their share in the musical part of the service. At some of the great festival services they joined in the Kyrie and in the Alleluia, and very early it became the custom to insert German verses in the liturgy at these places. Thus there developed a literature of German hymns, sometimes partly German and partly Latin, as the following old Easter hymn, obviously interpolated in the Kyrie:
‘Christ ist erstanden
Von der Marter alle.
Des sollen wir alle froh sein,
Christ soll unser Trost sein,
Kyrioleis.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah!
Des sollen wir alle froh sein,
Christ soll unser Trost sein,
Kyrioleis.’
In connection with the mystery plays other hymns were written, such as the following cradle-song, part German, part Latin and part nonsense:
‘In dulci jubilo
Nun singet und sei froh.
Unser’s Herzens Wonne
Liegt in præsipio,
Und leuchtet als die Sonne.
Matris in gremio.
Alpha et O. Alpha et O.’
About these hymns there was woven a sort of religious folk music. By the time of the Reformation there was a whole literature to draw from and Luther needed only to organize and standardize many of the hymns which had been familiar to the people for generations. To these he added others of his own writing. The music was drawn from all sources, practically none was especially composed. Luther had to aid him in compiling his hymn-book two famous musicians, Konrad Rupff and Johann Walther. In 1524 these two men were his guests for a period of three weeks. Köstlin[114] writes: ‘While Walther and Rupff sat at the table bending over the music sheets with pen in hand, Father Luther walked up and down the room, trying on his fife to ally the melodies that flowed from his memory and his imagination with the poems he had discovered, until he had made the verse melody a rhythmically finished, well-rounded, strong, and compact whole.’ Here we have a picture of the German hymn-tune, later called the chorale, in the process of crystallization.
‘The Devil does not need all the good tunes for himself,’ Luther wisely remarked, and he drew from all sources, secular and sacred, for his melodies. The same breadth of choice was likewise exercised by his followers throughout the century: a song sung by the footsoldiers at the battle of Pavia became the Durch Adam’s Fall ist ganz verderbt; the chorale melody Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, can be traced to an old love song, Einmal tät ich Spazieren; a love song, Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret von einer Jungfrau zart, by Hans Leo Hassler, became the choral melody to the funeral-hymn Herzlich thut mich verlangen, and later the same melody was set to Paul Gerhardt’s hymn, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, and in that form holds a leading part in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Nor were the chorale tunes taken from Germany alone. Favorite part-songs of Italy and France were appropriated and set to German words.
The hymn-book compiled by Luther with the help of Rupff and Walther was published in Wittenburg in 1524. It was intended for church use, and that the compilers had the choir, not the congregation, in mind is proved by the fact that all the tunes are contrapuntally set, with the melody as cantus firmus in the tenor, that is to say, in the middle of the music, not soaring triumphantly aloft majestically to guide the congregation. We have, therefore, in these chorales of Luther not a new form but a new spirit. How great a part the congregation ever actually took in them is open to discussion. Doubtless in those churches where there was no skilled choir, congregational singing played an important rôle; but it seems likely that in those churches where there was such a choir, congregational singing was kept as much in the background as possible. In 1586 Lukas Osiander published a set of fifty chorales, ‘set contrapuntally in such a way that the whole Christian congregation can always join in them.’ This was obviously a kind attempt to bring the more or less neglected congregation into the musical part of the service. In Osiander’s arrangements the melody is in the soprano. But the setting is still too intricate for general use and the same rather condescending, yet still lofty, attitude toward the congregation is characteristic of all composers down to the time of Bach.
The question of just how the congregation sang those chorales allotted to them is also in doubt. It is hardly possible that in the first half of the sixteenth century the organ accompanied them. The organ was still far too imperfect to attempt polyphonic playing such as would afford a harmonic support to the singers, who, we may presume, sang only in unison. It is more likely that the organ and the congregation alternated, or that the choir and the congregation sang in turn. Toward the end of the century attempts were made to have the choir lead the congregation, and then later, in the course of time, the organ was perfected and was used for accompaniment, coming soon to drown out the choir, which had little chance to maintain a leadership over the mass of singers on the one hand and the organ on the other. Thus the organ finally took the leadership. In its new position it no longer alternated with the congregation, and the skill which organists had had an opportunity to show in the solo passages, alternating, in the old days, with the congregation, was now concentrated upon the prelude. In this way the foundation for a characteristically German art-form in organ music, the chorale-prelude, was laid.
Though Luther was too much of a musician to be willing to give over the music of the service to be mishandled by a crowd of untrained singers, he none the less intended his chorale melodies to enter into the lives of the German Protestants. Thus, while, on the one hand, we have Luther’s own book and subsequent books in the same contrapuntal style, on the other, we have hymn-books in which only the melody was written and which carried the noble old tunes to every hearth and home throughout Protestant Germany. The first ‘house’ hymn-book appeared a short while before Luther’s church book. It was compiled by Luther’s friend, Justus Jonas, and was called the Erfurt Enchiridion. Among the hymns contained in it were two old Latin hymns, already mentioned in Chapter V, the Veni redemptor gentium, by St. Ambrose, and the Media in vita, by Notker Balbulus, both, of course, done into German. An interesting collection was published in Frankfurt in 1571 with the preface: ‘Street songs, cavalier songs, and mountain songs transformed into Christian and moral songs, for the abolishing, in the course of time, of the bad and vexatious practice of singing idle and shameful songs in the streets, in fields, and at home, by substituting for them good sacred and honest words.’ The chorale melodies, indeed, became the property of the Germans. They were colored with the sentiment of a whole race; they took on a nobility and a dignity, they seemed to germinate new life, and, finally, they became the glory of a lofty art, based on the skill of the Netherlanders, modified and adorned according to a new style soon to be perfected by the Italians, and infused with rich, warm life flowing from the very hearts of the German people.
The Protestant Reformation did not, then, at once alter the form of church music in Germany. Other influences, sprung from Catholic Italy, were to be far more powerful in that respect. Even the tendency toward harmonic writing, toward emphasizing the progression of chords rather than the interweaving of melodies, which the chorale melodies undoubtedly furthered, was a tendency very evident in Italian church music of the time, notably at Venice, was indeed a mark of the time. The true significance of the Lutheran reform in the history of music is that it laid music open to a flood of genuine strong feeling, personal, intimate, intensely human feeling, which little by little during the next two centuries, in spite of the horror and agony of persecution and warfare, permeated every vein and artery of music, and filled them with vital warmth and glowing color. During the Thirty Years’ War only the hymn and the chorale melody escaped destruction in Germany, and these survived because they were actually a part of the people and could cease to exist only when the race had been stamped out.
In France and in England the Protestant movement had far less influence upon music than in Germany. In France this seems to be explained by the fact that the French had not, like the Germans, a literature of native hymns, but had to construct their hymn-book from the Psalter, and that they had a more slender stock of genuine folk-song to draw upon. Zwingli, the leader of the Swiss Reformation, which was to win the support of the Frenchman Calvin, was not in favor of music, and his followers were ruthless in their destruction of organs and collections of music. Calvin, on the other hand, had in regard to music more the point of view of Luther. He drew freely from the Lutheran hymn-books both melodies and words, but especially in favor of metrical versions of the Psalms. These were set to music often excellent and finely harmonized. Among the Calvinistic psalm writers Clement Marot is most famous. It was he who, as court poet to Francis I, made several versions of the Psalms into the style of ballads, which won great popularity by their novelty and were set to gay tunes and sung by the people at court. Subsequently, in forced exile at Geneva, he added nineteen more to the collection of thirty he had already written, and these were later supplemented and arranged in final form by Theodore de Beza. Most conspicuous among the musicians connected with the movement in France were Loys Bourgeois and Claude Goudimel. The latter may have been a Netherlander and a pupil of Josquin. He was killed in the massacre of St. Bartholomew in Lyons (1572). Bourgeois composed many melodies himself to the Calvinistic hymns and set them more or less simply in four parts. Goudimel, on the other hand, composed elaborate settings in the style of motets with the melody, seldom his own, in the tenor.
The English, like the French, relied upon metrical versions of the Psalms for their hymn-books. Furthermore, the beginning of the Reformation in England was complicated with political motives and the movement was, for a long time, simply a break from the Church of Rome rather than an outburst of religious convictions. Yet after the suppression of monasteries between 1536 and 1540 there was something of the same destruction of organs and music which had wrought such havoc in Switzerland, and a general condemnation of elaborate church service. The first attempt at hymn tunes was the Goostlie Psalmes of Coverdale, drawn largely from Lutheran sources. Under Edward VI (1547-1553) began the organization of the Anglican Church and the drafting of liturgies in English. The movement was checked by the reign of Mary, but under Elizabeth resulted in a standard ritual which called forth the best musical genius of the country. An elaborate setting of the canticles, etc., used in morning and evening prayer was encouraged and a new art-form, the musical flower of the English Reformation, the anthem, resulted from the setting of the variable portions of these services.