Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

FIGURE III.

Stabat mater dolorosa,

Here the first three chords, a modern musician would say, are in as many keys. The first is the triad of A-major, the second that of G-major, and the third that of F-major. The coherence of the passage depends, in fact, entirely on the melodies; the chords they form have no harmonic cohesiveness. For the old composers, in whose scores hundreds of such passages may be found, harmony was still a sensuous, not an intellectual or æsthetic agent.

Another peculiarity of their harmonic style resulted from their attitude toward dissonances, or chords containing harsh intervals. Dissonance, as we shall have frequent occasion to see, plays an important part in modern music, both as an indispensable element in design and as a means of peculiar emotional expressiveness. In the sixteenth century, on the contrary, dissonances were admitted in the harmonic fabric but sparingly, and when admitted were subject to stringent rules, the purpose of which was to mollify their harshness. The result was not only still further to preclude the sense of harmonic sequence and coherence so essential to modern ears, and produced largely by the skilful use of dissonance merging into consonance, but also to limit the expressive powers of music to that range of feeling which is aroused by the purest, clearest, and most mellifluous chords sounding continuously, without contrast or relief.

But if the music of the sixteenth century was lacking in harmonic cogency and intensity, it was not for that reason either incoherent or inexpressive. It had its own sort of coherence, its own type of eloquence, both depending on melodic rather than on harmonic qualities. Music was to Palestrina and his fellows entirely a matter of melody, not of harmony at all. The reader needs only to glance again at Figure III, attending not to the chords and their sequence, but to the individual voices, one after another, to see that in their own way the phrases hang together firmly, and say efficiently what they mean. Each of the four voices has an intelligible and expressive part, and if together they sound a little strange, singly they are eminently good. The more one studies this old music the more one realizes that it is all melody; from beginning to end, from top to bottom, the mediæval scores sing. They are not, like many modern works, full of inert, lifeless matter, tones put in to fill out the harmonies, and having no melodic excuse for being. In the modern monophonic style, in which but one melody sings, the remaining parts are almost inevitably treated by the composer as affording rather a logical sequence of harmonies than a subsidiary tissue of melodic strands. In the sixteenth century, on the other hand, harmony was the accident, melody the essence; any chord would do very well in any place, provided it were consonant enough not to offend the ear; but every tone must have a melodic reason for being; it must be a point in a line; all the lines must be conducted with draughtsman-like deftness and economy. Melodic life is accordingly the supreme trait of the style well named polyphonic.

And yet, here we encounter still another difficulty introduced by modern habits of thought. To us nowadays melody means, not merely a series of tones having that sort of elementary consecutiveness which we find in Palestrina, for example, but a series of tones divided up into several definite segments which in someway balance, complement, and complete one another. The first phrase of “Yankee Doodle” has “elementary consecutiveness,” but it does not satisfy our melodic sense. We must add the second phrase, equal to it in length, which echoes and reinforces it, and the third phrase, twice as long as either, which rounds out the whole tune to a complete period. In short, just as harmony involves for us chord structure and inter-relation, melody involves for us metrical balance, response, symmetry—that recognizable recurrence, to use the most general term possible, which we call “rhythm.” Mere eloquent intoning, without repetition and balance of phrases, is to us no more “tune” than prose is verse. Here again we are in danger of letting our own habits of thought confuse our understanding of an unfamiliar type of art. The truth is, Palestrina does not write “tunes,” in the modern sense of the word. He lived and wrote before musical evolution had given the world that principle of metrical structure so essential to modern music; and his style, therefore, lacks definite meter, lacks all rhythm save that vague one superposed upon it by his Latin prose text. His music, devoid of any regular segmental division, is indeed a sort of tonal prose, as massive and majestic as the “Religio Medici.”

One other technical peculiarity of the music of the polyphonic period deserves notice here, as it involved a principle destined to assume great importance in later stages of art. The polyphonic writers often introduced successive voices with an identical formula of notes, which by repetition came to have somewhat the virtue of a motif or subject in giving to the music rationality and sequence. They had not as yet, to be sure, enough experience in composing definite themes strictly measured in time to make these embryonic motifs either very long or very distinct, but they did make and utilize subjects striking enough to be remembered and recognized. In this way they introduced the important device of “Imitation.” This imitating of one part by another, even when crudely carried out, gave a certain air of intention and fore-thought to what without it would have been a haphazard utterance of tones, and in later times, when developed to a high pitch of perfection in the fugue and allied forms, became a powerful agent for securing intelligibility. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the intelligibility of the sixteenth-century music depended chiefly on the fine melodic cogency and expressiveness of its individual voice parts. Although time-measurement was well understood, melody was without metrical structure and rhythmic organization. Harmony was the art of making pleasant sounds by bringing the voices together, at prominent moments, on consonant chords; it took no heed of chord relation, of tonality, or of orderly modulation; and it used dissonance with extreme conservatism. Such, in sum, were the most notable technical peculiarities of that polyphonic period which Palestrina brought to its culmination.

Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, named Palestrina from the place of his birth, which was a small town in the Campagna not far from Rome, was born of humble parents about the year 1524. About 1550 he went to Rome as teacher of the boy-singers in the Capella Giulia of the Vatican. All the rest of his life was spent in Rome, in various posts in the service of the church, and in studious and uneventful labor at his great compositions. Although a married man, he was made in 1554 one of the singers in the Papal choir by Pope Julius III, to whom he had dedicated a set of masses; on the accession of Pope Paul IV a year later he was dismissed, and became ill with anxiety as to the support of his growing family; he was nevertheless almost immediately appointed music-director of the Lateran Church, and later he held successively the posts of music-director in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, “Composer to the Pontifical Choir,” leader of the choir of St. Peter’s, and music-director to Cardinal Aldobrandini. Aside from these meagre and arid details, unfortunately, little is known of the man Palestrina. His private life is almost a blank. The one story oftenest told of him, that his Mass of Pope Marcellus, produced in 1565, was written to convince the reforming Council of Trent of the possibility of purging church music of the trivialities and abuses which had crept into it, has been discredited by recent historians. Mythical also seems to be the story of Palestrina’s one great popular triumph, in 1575, a year of jubilee, when fifteen hundred residents of the composer’s native town are said to have entered Rome in three companies, singing his works, and led by himself. The story is a severe tax on the credulity of anyone whose ideas of chorus-singing are based on modern methods.

In character Palestrina was devout, pious, frugal, and industrious. Though so few records exist, we can guess his industry from the mass of the work he achieved, and his honor and sense of responsibility from his anxiety when the support of his family seemed in danger. As to his piety, all his music is one eloquent demonstration of it. Nor is it without verbal testimony in the dedications and inscriptions on his manuscripts. In dedicating his first book of motets to Cardinal d’Este he expressed his artistic convictions as follows: “Music exerts a great influence on the minds of mankind, and is intended not only to cheer these, but also to guide and control them, a statement which has not only been made by the ancients, but which is found equally true to-day. The sharper blame, therefore, do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing. As regards myself, I have from youth been affrighted at such misuse, and anxiously have I avoided giving forth anything which could lead anyone to become more wicked or godless. All the more should I, now that I have attained to riper years, and am not far removed from old age, place my entire thoughts on lofty, earnest things, such as are worthy of a Christian.” When, in 1594, Palestrina died, almost his last words, whispered to his son Igino, directed the publication of his latest manuscript works, “to the glory of the most high God, and the worship of his holy temple.”