Mass. Cathedral Service.
The mass, or missa (“missa est,” the congregation is dismissed), has been used, in part, at any rate, from the very earliest times, and has been sung to most impressive and solemn music. St. Ambrose and St. Gregory appear as the earliest compilators of the mass music. When counterpoint was invented, Church composers clothed the early plain-song tunes with its artistic embroideries, and polyphonic masses arose, gradually brought by the great schools of the sixteenth century to such a pitch of excellence that they have never since been equalled. The mass then consisted, as it does now, of six movements, viz., the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. The masses were named after the plain-song melody upon which they were developed; but occasionally the melody used was a profane one, so that a mass would be named after its secular melody, as, for instance, “L’homme armée,” an old French lovesong! and the masses founded upon an original theme were rare, and known as “Missa sine nomine.” The tenor Du Fay, already named in connection with the motett, wrote many of a very devotional but unmelodious character. At the end of the fifteenth century Josquin des Prés, also mentioned previously, wrote many masses, in which, strange to say, a great want of reverence is most evident from time to time. A purer style will be found later on in the masses of Goudimel, Morales, and notably in those of Festa. But about this period the abuse spoken of in treating of the motett had crept into the mass, and the device was to give different sets of words to each singer! Even Morales is guilty of this, mixing up, as he does, the text of the Liturgy and an Ave Maria. Devotional feeling was sacrificed to a desire to puzzle, and masses were esteemed according to the difficulty of the solution of the canons employed in them.
At the Council of Trent (1562) these abuses were condemned, and polyphonic music would have been forbidden a place in the Church, but for one great, earnest man, and that man was Palestrina. His now celebrated “Missa Papæ Marcelli” decided the fate and fixed the style of Church music. In it he demonstrated that these intricacies and learned forms might be well and devotionally used as a means to the highest end, but not as a substitute for that great end itself. He wrote nearly a hundred masses, and greatly influenced the future of Church music.
William Byrd wrote a mass for five voices of great interest. Vittoria, Orlando di Lasso, Gabrieli—each represented their different schools and advanced their Church music on Palestrina’s great model.
After Allegri, at the end of the seventeenth century, the old mediæval style died out, and Durante, Scarlatti, and others of that school appear as a link between the old and new. After them, with their strong tendencies towards elaboration of the instrumental accompaniment, comes Bach, whose mass in B minor, now familiar to us, thanks to Mr. Goldschmidt and the Bach Choir, stands alone. It is not only free from ancient ecclesiastical tradition, but it is actually prophetic in its marvellous harmonic changes and combinations. It is also in style almost an oratorio. Later on we have magnificent masses by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but more like sacred cantatas than masses. To quote Mr. Rockstro, he rightly says, “Their style has steadily kept pace, step by step, with the progress of modern music, borrowing elasticity from the freedom of its melodies, and richness from the variety of its instrumentation; clothing itself in new and unexpected forms of beauty at every turn; yet never aiming at the expression of a higher kind of beauty than that pertaining to earthly things, or venturing to utter the language of devotion in preference to that of passion.” The italics are my own, and I suppose that it is owing to the fact that this individuality and frequent dramatic realism of the composer usurped the abstract sense of the words used, and the devotional idealism of the old schools, that not one note of any of them has ever been heard within the Sistine Chapel at Rome.
The general distribution of the movements of the mass are, strange to say, the same to-day that it was in Palestrina’s time. A mass for the dead, called Requiem, is composed of different numbers, viz., “Requiem æternam dona eis,” “Kyrie,” the grand hymn, “Dies iræ,” “Domini Jesu Christo,” Sanctus and Benedictus, Agnus, and “Lux æterna.”
Of the more modern specimens, those of Cherubini and Mozart, and of the most modern, that by Verdi, are all fine examples, the work by Mozart standing high above all the others. It was, as you will remember, mostly written on his deathbed. At the Reformation the mass disappeared from the English Church, and from then until 1840 no choral communions were written. Since the latter date, however, the English versions of the Sanctus, Kyrie, Creed, and Gloria have been used and set to music by most of the writers of Church music already named in connection with the anthem.
A SERIOUS DISCUSSION.