PALESTRINA
By permission of E. H. Schroeder, Berlin
Although most of Italy's early music, like that of the Netherlands, was written for the Church, Palestrina was the first composer to strike a clear ecclesiastical tone. The tendency had been towards brilliancy, with a seasoning of unbecoming sentimentality, and Pope Marcelli, realizing the inappropriateness of such musical settings, conferred with this rising genius, and commissioned him, in 1563, to write a mass consistent with the spirit of worship. Palestrina's third attempt resulted in the great "Pope Marcelli Mass," which is to-day as acceptable a model for church music as it was in the sixteenth century.
I have chosen Palestrina as the first high-priest because he, like his successors, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner, was a creator, and because his works, like theirs, exhale the incense of the holiest of holies; an incense which, unlike all others, gains power with the passage of time.
Palestrina's works are characterized by lofty purpose and by logically audacious methods. His voice leading was so smooth and melodic as to prompt one of the most erudite of living musicians, who was at first an anti-Wagnerite, to say that "Wagner began with Meyerbeer and ended with Palestrina;" meaning in the latter comparison to pay the highest possible tribute to the contrapuntal skill and musical methods of the writer of "Die Meistersinger."
Besides Palestrina, Scarlatti and Pergolesi were the only early Italian composers whose music outlived the generation in which it was written. Scarlatti wrote operas, but it is through his piano-forte music that his name has been kept alive. Pergolesi, who appeared on the scene nearly two hundred years later than Palestrina, wrote operas which were received with wild enthusiasm.
During the period of Italy's supremacy (1500-1700) many forms of composition were originated, and many mechanical devices for recording and performing music were invented or perfected. Among the former were the fugue, the oratorio, the latter of which was at first responsive (alternating music and reading), but soon assumed its present character, the mass, and the opera. (It is astonishing that Monteverde's operas "Arianna" and "Orfeo," produced in 1607-8, embody to some degree Wagner's idea of consistent musical drama.) The organ, violin, and piano-forte were improved, the flageolet, clarionet, bassoon, music type, punches, and metal plates were invented, the first opera-house was built (in Venice), and the elements of modern orchestra (wind, stringed, and percussion instruments) were formally combined.
Flanders' light had shone into France and England, had awakened the people of those lands to a sense of music's latent possibilities, and we find them working intelligently and with good results; but our present aim is to follow the main stream of musical development, guided by the successive "beacon-lights" of achievement, along its course. We will later trace these lesser tributaries.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century two lights of dazzling brilliancy draw our gaze from Italy to Germany. The direct influence of the Netherlands, which made a deep and lasting impression on the slow, but earnest, intellectual, and song-loving Germans, had quickened their susceptibilities, and had made them responsive to the riper musical development of Italy.