PHILIP DE MONTE.
From Van der Straeten's "Musique aux pay bas," loaned by the Newberry Library, Chicago.
The music of the other composers of the fourth period is but a reflection of that of Lasso, who was fully as great a genius as Palestrina. He had a perfect mastery of the whole science of counterpoint as it had been developed by the masters of the first two periods. He was equally a master of the simpler style which had gradually been asserting itself. He used these styles and their combinations according to the character of the text to which he was writing music. Some of his masses are Gothic in their wonderful tracery of intertwining parts. His famous "Penitential Psalms" surprise, move and conquer us by their beautiful, pathetic simplicity. The notable fact about all his music, and about that of his contemporaries, is the plain manifestation through it all of an absolute mastery of contrapuntal science and a settled employment of it for their own purposes of expression. And here arises the question, what kind of expression?
The music of Lasso, and some of that written by other composers of this period, shows that musicians had at last begun to lay hold of the real purpose of their art. Their music shows that they aimed at expression of themselves. They began to praise God personally, and musical science became in truth what it had been only in appearance so far as the composers were concerned—a real, earnest Gloria Tibi. It is this which vitalizes Lasso's music and makes it acceptable to-day.
We have now reached the time after which the brilliancy of the Netherlands school speedily disappeared. The march of musical progress was transferred to Italy, where the seed sown by Willaert and De Rore in Venice was producing splendid fruit. Indeed the mission of the Netherlands school was at an end. It had given its life blood to the perfection of musical science and had completed its labors and achieved its loftiest glory by indicating the emotional power of music. We have seen that each of the four periods was marked by a step in the advancement of art, thus:
First period: Perfection of Contrapuntal Technics.
Second period: Attempts at Euphony.
Third period: Development of Tone-painting.
Fourth period: Counterpoint made subservient to emotional expression.
In those four steps you have the history of music up to the close of the sixteenth century. Away back in the twelfth century we saw as through a glass darkly a horde of students thronging the streets of Paris and swallowing, in wild eagerness, all kinds of learning in scraps and lumps, with little order and less system. The Cathedral of Notre Dame and the University of Paris, the former glorified throughout Europe as the rose of Christendom, the latter celebrated even by Pope Alexander I., as "a tree of life in an earthly paradise," were their cloister and their shrine. Out of this motley multitude there breaks upon our vision one sober, industrious musician, Jean Perotin, striving to find the secret of law and order for tones. Evidently a man of method, an orderly, peaceable, mechanical, plodding sort of person was this Perotin, and he left us "imitation." This his successors took up and in a few short years developed double counterpoint. Five more centuries rolled away and counterpoint had passed the period of mechanical development and reached the loftiest heights of ecclesiastical expression. Orlando Lasso and Palestrina built great Gothic temples of music that will stand longer than Westminster Abbey. But still counterpoint meant canon and fugue. Then came the birth of opera. The labors of the Netherlanders ended, and music saw that her mission was to sing not alone man's love of God, but his love of woman, his fear, his joy, his despair—in short the unspeakable emotions of his boundless soul.
So the old mathematical canon grew into a new kind of counterpoint, undreamed of by Ockeghem and Josquin, a free untrammeled counterpoint, which breaks upon us to-day in all varieties of works from the humblest to the greatest. Listen to Delibes' "Naila" waltz. There never was a truer piece of counterpoint written in the days of Josquin than that violoncello melody that glides in beneath the principal theme of the first strings, like a new dancer come upon the ball room floor. Turn to the wonderful prelude to "Die Meistersinger." Hear the melody that voices the love of Walter and Eva surging through the strings against the stiff and stately proclamation of the Masters' dignity by the bass. The two melodies proceed together. It is not canon, it is not fugue; but it is counterpoint—even Dr. Johannes de Muris, of the Paris University, would have passed it as contrapunctus a penna. But it is modern counterpoint, not for itself, but for an ulterior purpose, the one glorious purpose of modern music, to reveal the soul of man. The music of to-day could not sustain its existence through twenty consecutive measures had it not been for the labors of those cloistered scholiasts of the middle ages, building note against note, like ants heaping up sand. Like the artist that rounded St. Peter's dome, they builded better than they knew, and left an inheritance which grew to fabulous wealth in the hands of their giant heirs Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The very body of Wagner's music is counterpoint, free counterpoint, not canon and fugue. And it is counterpoint with a soul in it, for every time two or more themes sound simultaneously the orchestra becomes so eloquent with rich meanings that its utterance throbs through the air like the magnetism of love. It was a happy time for the tone art when in the Autumn days of the fifteenth century the folk-song wooed and won the fugue.
