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About the year 1350 church music had cast off its swaddling bands and had entered upon the stage that was soon to lead up to maturity. With the opening of the fifteenth century compositions worthy to be called artistic were produced. These were hardly yet beautiful according to modern standards, certainly they had little or no characteristic expression, but they had begun to be pliable and smooth sounding, showing that the notes had come under the composer’s control, and that he was no longer an awkward apprentice. From the early part of the fifteenth century we date the epoch of artistic polyphony, which advanced in purity and dignity until it culminated in the perfected art of the sixteenth century. So large a proportion of the fathers and high priests of mediaeval counterpoint belonged to the districts now included in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland that the period bounded by the years 1400 and 1550 is known in music history as “the age of the Netherlanders.” With limitless patience and cunning, the French and Netherland musical artificers applied themselves to the problems of counterpoint, producing works enormous in quantity and often of bewildering intricacy. Great numbers of pupils were trained in the convents and chapel schools, becoming masters in their turn, and exercising commanding influence in the churches and cloisters of all Europe. Complexity in part writing steadily increased, not only in combinations of notes, but also in the means of indicating their employment. It often happened that each voice must sing to a measure sign that was different from that provided for the other voices. Double and triple rhythm alternated, the value of notes of the same character varied in different circumstances; [150] a highly sophisticated symbolism was invented, known as “riddle canons,” by which adepts were enabled to improvise accompanying parts to the cantus firmus; and counterpoint, single and double, augmented and diminished, direct, inverted, and retrograde, became at once the end and the means of musical endeavor. Rhythm was obscured and the words almost hopelessly lost in the web of crossing parts. The cantus firmus, often extended into notes of portentous length, lost all expressive quality, and was treated only as a thread upon which this closely woven fabric was strung. Composers occupied themselves by preference with the mechanical side of music; quite unimaginative, they were absorbed in solving technical problems; and so they went on piling up difficulties for their fellow-craftsmen to match, making music for the eye rather than for the ear, for the logical faculty rather than for the fancy or the emotion.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that such labored artifice was the sole characteristic of the scientific music of the fifteenth century. The same composers who revelled in the exercise of this kind of scholastic subtlety also furnished their choirs with a vast amount of music in four, five, and six parts, complex and difficult indeed from the present point of view, but for the choristers as then trained perfectly available, in which there was a striving for solemn devotional effect, a melodious leading of the voices, and the adjustment of phrases into bolder and more symmetrical patterns. Even among the master fabricators of musical labyrinths we find glimpses of a recognition of the true [151] final aim of music, a soul dwelling in the tangled skeins of their polyphony, a grace and inwardness of expression comparable to the poetic suggestiveness which shines through the naïve and often rude forms of Gothic sculpture. The growing fondness on the part of the austere church musicians for the setting of secular poems—madrigals, chansons, villanellas, and the like—in polyphonic style gradually brought in a simpler construction, more obvious melody, and a more characteristic and pertinent expression, which reacted upon the mass and motet in the promotion of a more direct and flexible manner of treatment The stile famigliare, in which the song moves note against note, syllable against syllable, suggesting modern chord progression, is no invention of Palestrina, with whose name it is commonly associated, but appears in many episodes in the works of his Netherland masters.
The contrapuntal chorus music of the Middle Age reached its maturity in the middle of the sixteenth century. For five hundred years this art had been growing, constantly putting forth new tendrils, which interlaced in luxuriant and ever-extending forms until they overspread all Western Christendom. It was now given to one man, Giovanni Pierluigi, called Palestrina from the place of his birth, to put the finishing touches upon this wonder of mediaeval genius, and to impart to it all of which its peculiar nature was capable in respect to technical completeness, tonal purity and majesty, and elevated devotional expression. Palestrina was more than a flawless artist, more than an Andrea del Sarto; he was so representative of that inner spirit which has uttered itself in the most sincere works of Catholic art that the very heart of the institution to which he devoted his life may be said to find a voice in his music.
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Palestrina was born probably in 1526 (authority of Haberl) and died in 1594. He spent almost the whole of his art life as director of music at Rome in the service of the popes, being at one time also a singer in the papal chapel. He enriched every portion of the ritual with compositions, the catalogue of his works including ninety-five masses. Among his contemporaries at Rome were men such as Vittoria, Marenzio, the Anerios, and the Naninis, who worked in the same style as Palestrina. Together they compose the “Roman school” or the “Palestrina school,” and all that may be said of Palestrina’s style would apply in somewhat diminished degree to the writings of this whole group.
Palestrina has been enshrined in history as the “savior of church music” by virtue of a myth which has until recent years been universally regarded as a historic fact. The first form of the legend was to the effect that the reforming Council of Trent (1545-1563) had serious thoughts of abolishing the chorus music of the Church everywhere, and reducing all liturgic music to the plain unison chant; that judgment was suspended at the request of Pope Marcellus II. until Palestrina could produce a work that should be free from all objectionable features; that a mass of his composition—the Mass of Pope Marcellus—was performed before a commission of cardinals, and that its beauty and refinement so impressed the judges that polyphonic music was saved and Palestrina’s style proclaimed [153] as the most perfect model of artistic music. This tale has undergone gradual reduction until it has been found that the Council of Trent contented itself with simply recommending to the bishops that they exclude from the churches “all musical compositions in which anything impure or lascivious is mingled,” yet not attempting to define what was meant by “impure” and “lascivious.” The commission of cardinals had jurisdiction only over some minor questions of discipline in the papal choir, and if Palestrina had the mass in question sung before them (which is doubtful) it had certainly been composed a number of years earlier.
Certain abuses that called for correction there doubtless were in church music in this period. The prevalent practice of borrowing themes from secular songs for the cantus firmus, with sometimes the first few words of the original song at the beginning—as in the mass of “The Armed Man,” the “Adieu, my Love” mass, etc.—was certainly objectionable from the standpoint of propriety, although the intention was never profane, and the impression received was not sacrilegious. Moreover, the song of the Church had at times become so artificial and sophisticated as to belie the true purpose of worship music. But among all the records of complaint we find only one at all frequent, and that was that the sacred words could not be understood in the elaborate contrapuntal interweaving of the voices. In the history of every church, in all periods, down even to the present time, there has always been a party that discountenances everything that looks like art for the sake of art, satisfied only with the simplest and rudest [154] form of music, setting the reception of the sacred text so far above the pleasure of the sense that all artistic embellishment seems to them profanation. This class was represented at the Council of Trent, but it was never in the majority, and never strenuous for the total abolition of figured music. No reform was instituted but such as would have come about inevitably from the ever-increasing refinement of the art and the assertion of the nobler traditions of the Church in the Counter-Reformation. An elevation of the ideal of church music there doubtless was at this time, and the genius of Palestrina was one of the most potent factors in its promotion; but it was a natural growth, not a violent turning of direction.
The dissipation of the halo of special beatification which certain early worshipers of Palestrina have attempted to throw about the Mass of Pope Marcellus has in no wise dimmed its glory. It is not unworthy of the renown which it has so dubiously acquired. Although many times equalled by its author, he never surpassed it, and few will be inclined to dispute the distinction it has always claimed as the most perfect product of mediaeval musical art. Its style was not new; it does not mark the beginning of a new era, as certain writers but slightly versed in music history have supposed, but the culmination of an old one. It is essentially in the manner of the Netherland school, which the myth-makers would represent as condemned by the Council of Trent. Josquin des Prés, Orlandus Lassus, Goudimel, and many others had written music in the same style, just as chaste and subdued, with the [155] same ideal in mind, and almost as perfectly beautiful. It is not a simple work, letting the text stand forth in clear and obvious relief, as the legend would require. It is a masterpiece of construction, abounding in technical subtleties, differing from the purest work of the Netherlanders only in being even more delicately tinted and sweet in melody than the best of them could attain. It was in the quality of melodious grace that Palestrina soared above his Netherland masters. Melody, as we know, is the peculiar endowment of the Italians, and Palestrina, a typical son of Italy, crowned the Netherland science with an ethereal grace of movement which completed once for all the four hundred years’ striving of contrapuntal art, and made it stand forth among the artistic creations of the Middle Age perhaps the most divinely radiant of them all.
It may seem strange at first thought that a form which embodied the deepest and sincerest religious feeling that has ever been projected in tones should have been perfected in an age when all other art had become to a large degree sensuous and worldly, and when the Catholic Church was under condemnation, not only by its enemies, but also by many of its grieving friends, for its political ambition, avarice, and corruption. The papacy was at that moment reaping the inevitable harvest of spiritual indifference and moral decline, and had fallen upon days of struggle, confusion, and humiliation. The Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican revolt had rent from the Holy See some of the fairest of its dominions, and those that remained were in a condition of political and intellectual turmoil. That a reform “in head and members” [156] was indeed needed is established not by the accusations of hostile witnesses alone, but by the demands of many of the staunchest prelates of the time and the admissions of unimpeachable Catholic historians. But, as the sequel proved, it was the head far more than the members that required surgery. The lust for sensual enjoyments, personal and family aggrandizement, and the pomp and luxury of worldly power, which had made the papacy of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries a byword in Europe, the decline of faith in the early ideals of the Church, the excesses of physical and emotional indulgence which came in with the Renaissance as a natural reaction against mediaeval repression,—all this had produced a moral degeneracy in Rome and its dependencies which can hardly be exaggerated. But the assertion that the Catholic Church at large, or even in Rome, was wholly given over to corruption and formalism is sufficiently refuted by the sublime manifestation of moral force which issued in the Catholic Reaction and the Counter-Reformation, the decrees of the Council of Trent, and the deeds of such moral heroes as Carlo Borromeo, Phillip Neri, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Theresa of Jesus, Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, and the founders and leaders of the Capuchins, Theatines, Ursulines, and other beneficent religious orders, whose lives and achievements are the glory not only of Catholicism, but of the human race.