Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 49

The composers, to advance another step in the a.n.a.lysis of this strange medley, took particular delight in combining different sets of words, melodies of widely diverse character, antagonistic rhythms and divergent systems of accentuation in a single piece. They a.s.signed these several ingredients to several parts; and for the further exhibition of their perverse skill, went even to the length of coupling themes in the major and the minor.

The most obvious result of such practice was that it became impossible to understand what words were being sung, and that instead of concord and order in the choir, a confused discord and anarchy of dinning sounds prevailed. What made the matter from an ecclesiastical point of view still worse, was that these scholastically artificial compositions were frequently based on trivial and vulgar tunes, suggesting the tavern, the dancing-room, or even worse places, to wors.h.i.+pers a.s.sembled for the celebration of a Sacrament. Ma.s.ses bore t.i.tles adopted from the popular melodies on which they were founded: such, for example, as 'Adieu mes amours,' 'A l'ombre d'un buissonnet,' 'Baise-moi,' 'L'ami baudichon madame,' 'Le vilain jaloux.' Even the words of love-ditties and obscene ballads in French, Flemish, and Italian, were being squalled out by the tenor while the ba.s.s gave utterance to an _Agnus_ or a _Benedictus_, and the soprano was engaged upon the verses of a Latin hymn. Baini, who examined hundreds of these Ma.s.ses and motetts in MS., says that the words imported into them from vulgar sources 'make one's flesh creep and one's hair stand on end.' He does not venture to do more than indicate a few of the more decent of these interloping verses; but mentions one _Kyrie_, in which the tenor sang _Je ne vis oncques la pareille_; a _Sanctus_, in which he had to utter _gracieuse gente mounyere_; and a _Benedictus_, where the same offender was employed on _Madame, faites moy scavoir_. As an augmentation of this indecency, numbers from a Ma.s.s or motett which started with the grave rhythm of a Gregorian tone, were brought to their conclusion on the dance measure of a popular _ballata_, so that _Incarnatus est_ or _Kyrie eleison_ went jigging off into suggestions of Masetto and Zerlina at a village ball.

To describe all the impertinences to which the customs of vocal execution then in vogue gave rise, by means of flourishes, improvisations, accelerations of time and mult.i.tudinous artifices derived from the _ad libitum_ abuses of the fugal machinery, would serve no purpose. But it may be profitably mentioned that the mischief was not confined to the vocal parts. Organ and orchestra of divers instruments were allowed the same liberty of improvising on the given theme, embroidering these with fanciful _capricci_, and indulging their own taste in symphonies connected with the main structure by slight and artificial links. Instrumental music had not yet taken an independent place in art. The lute, the trumpet, or the stops of the organ, followed and imitated the voice; and thus in this confusion a choir of stringed and wind instruments was placed in compet.i.tion with the singing choir.[205] It would appear that the composer frequently gave but a ground-sketch of his plan, without troubling himself to distribute written parts to the executants. The efflorescences, excursuses and episodes to which I have alluded, were supplied by artists whom long training in this kind of music enabled to perform their separate sallies and to execute their several antics within certain limits of recognized license. But since each vied with the other to produce striking effects, the choir rivaling the orchestra, the tenor competing with the ba.s.s, the organ with the viol, it followed that the din of their acc.u.mulated efforts was not unjustly compared to that made by a 'sty of grunting pigs,' the builders of the Tower of Babel, or the 'squalling of cats in January.'[206] 'All their happiness,' writes a contemporary critic, 'consisted in keeping the ba.s.s singer to the fugue, while at the same time one voice was shouting out _Sanctus_, another _Sabaoth_, a third _gloria tua_, with howlings, bellowings and squealings that cannot be described.'

[Footnote 205: While the choir was singing, the orchestra was playing concerted pieces called _ricercari_, in which the vocal parts were reproduced.]

[Footnote 206: See the original pa.s.sages from contemporary writers quoted by Baini, vol. i. pp. 102-104. Savonarola went so far as to affirm: 'Che questo canto figurato l'ha trovato Satana.s.so,' a phrase quite in the style of a Puritan abusing choirs and organs.]

It must not be thought that this almost unimaginable state of things indicated a defect either of intellectual capacity or of artistic skill.

It was due rather to the abuse of science and of virtuosity, both of which had attained to a high degree of development. It manifested the decadence of music in its immaturity, through over-confident employment of exuberant resources on an end inadequate for the fulfillment of the art. Music, it must be remembered, unlike literature and plastic art, had no antique tradition to a.s.similate, no masterpieces of accomplished form to study. In the modern world it was an art without connecting links to bind it to the past. And this circ.u.mstance rendered it liable to negligent treatment by a society that prided itself upon the recovery of the cla.s.sics. The cultivated cla.s.ses abandoned it in practice to popular creators of melody upon the one hand, and to grotesque scholastic pedants on the other. And from the blending of those ill-accorded elements arose the chaos which I have attempted to describe.

Learned composers in the style developed by the Flemish masters had grown tired of writing simple music for four voices and a single choir.

They reveled in the opportunity of combining eight vocal parts and bringing three choirs with accompanying orchestras into play at the same time. They were proud of proving how by counterpoint the most dissimilar and mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public. In the neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the presentation of incongruous complexities.

The singers were expert in rendering difficult pa.s.sages, in developing unpromising motives, and in embroidering the arras-work of the composer with fanciful extravagances of vocal execution. The instrumentalists were trained in the art of copying effects of fugue or madrigal by lutes and viols in concerted pieces. The people were used to dance and sing and touch the mandoline together; in every house were found amateurs who could with voice and string produce the studied compositions of the masters.

What was really lacking, amid this exuberance of musical resources, in this thick jungle of technical facilities, was a controlling element of correct taste, a right sense of the proper function of music as an interpretative art. On the very threshold of its modern development, music had fallen into early decay owing to the misapplication of the means so copiously provided by nature and by exercise. A man of genius and of substantial intuition into the real ends of vocal music was demanded at this moment, who should guide the art into its destined channel. And in order to elicit such a creator of new impulses, such a Nomothetes of the disordered state, it was requisite that external pressure should be brought to bear upon the art. An initiator of the right caliber was found in Palestrina. The pressure from without was supplied by the Council of Trent.

It may here be parenthetically remarked that music, all through modern history, has needed such legislators and initiators of new methods.

Considered as an art of expression, she has always tended to elude control, to create for herself a domain extraneous to her proper function, and to erect her resources of mere sound into self-sufficingness. What Palestrina effected in the sixteenth century, was afterwards accomplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted by Wagner. The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to a.s.sert an independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders her subservient to merely technical dexterities.

Giovanni Pier Luigi, called Palestrina from his birthplace in one of the Colonna fiefs near Rome, the ancient Praeneste, was born of poor parents, in the year 1524, He went to Rome about 1540, and began his musical career probably as a choir-boy in one of the Basilicas. Claude Goudimel, the Besancon composer, who subsequently met a tragic death at Lyons in a ma.s.sacre of Huguenots, had opened a school of harmony in Rome, where Palestrina learned the first rudiments of that science. What Palestrina owed to Goudimel, is not clear. But we have the right to a.s.sume that the Protestant part-songs of the French people which Goudimel transferred to the hymn-books of the Huguenots, had a potent influence upon the formation of his style. They may have been for him what the Chorales of Germany were for the school of Bach.[207]

Externally, Palestrina's life was a very uneventful one, and the records collected with indefatigable diligence by his biographer have only brought to light changes from one post to another in several Basilicas, and unceasing industry in composition. The vast number of works published by Palestrina in his lifetime, or left in MS. at his death, or known to have been written and now lost, would be truly astonis.h.i.+ng were it not a fact that very eminent creative genius is always copious, and in no province of the arts more fertile than in that of music.

Palestrina lived and died a poor man. In his dedications he occasionally remarks with sober pathos on the difficulty of pursuing scientific studies in the midst of domestic anxiety. His pay was very small, and the expense of publis.h.i.+ng his works, which does not seem to have been defrayed by patrons, was at that time very great. Yet he enjoyed an uncontested reputation as the first of living composers, the saviour of Church music, the creator of a new style; and on his tomb, in 1594, was inscribed this t.i.tle: _Princeps Musicae_.

[Footnote 207: See Michelet, _Histoire de France_, vol. xi. pp. 76, 101, vol. xii. p. 383 (Paris: Lacroix, 1877).]

The state of confusion into which ecclesiastical music had fallen, rendered it inevitable that some notice of so grave a scandal should be taken by the Fathers of the Tridentine Council in their deliberations on reform of ritual. It appears, therefore, that in their twenty-second session (September 17, 1562) they enjoined upon the Ordinaries to 'exclude from churches all such music as, whether through the organ or the singing, introduces anything of impure or lascivious, in order that the house of G.o.d may truly be seen to be and may be called the house of prayer.'[208] In order to give effect to this decree of the Tridentine Council, Pius IV. appointed a congregation of eight Cardinals upon August 2, 1564, among whom three deserve especial mention--Michele Ghislieri, the Inquisitor, who was afterwards Pope Pius V.; Carlo Borromeo, the sainted Archbishop of Milan; and Vitellozzo Vitellozzi. It was their business, among other matters of reform, to see that the Church music of Rome was instantly reduced to proper order in accordance with the decree of the Council. Carlo Borromeo was nephew and chief minister of the reigning Pope. Vitellozzo Vitellozzi was a young man of thirty-three years, who possessed a singular pa.s.sion for music.

[Footnote 208: Baini, i. p. 196.]

To these two members of the congregation, as a sub-committee, was deputed the special task of settling the question of ecclesiastical music, it being stipulated that they should by all means see that sufficient clearness was introduced into the enunciation of the liturgical words by the singers.

I will here interrupt the thread of the narration, in order to touch upon the legendary story which connects Palestrina incorrectly with what subsequently happened. It was well known that on the decisions of the sub-committee of the congregation hung the fate of Church music. For some while it seemed as though music might be altogether expelled from the rites of the Catholic Ecclesia. And it soon became matter of history that Palestrina had won the cause of his art, had maintained it in its eminent position in the ritual of Rome, and at the same time had opened a new period in the development of modern music by the production of his Ma.s.s called the _Ma.s.s of Pope Marcellus_ at this critical moment. These things were true; and when the peril had been overpa.s.sed, and the actual circ.u.mstances of the salvation and revolution of Church music had been forgotten, the memory of the crisis and the t.i.tle of the victorious Ma.s.s remained to form a mythus. The story ran that the good Pope Marcellus, who occupied the Holy See for only twenty-two days, in the year 1555, determined on the abolition of all music but Plain Song in the Church; hearing of which resolve, Palestrina besought him to suspend his decree until he had himself produced and presented a Ma.s.s conformable to ecclesiastical propriety. Marcello granted the chapel-master this request; and on Easter Day, the Ma.s.s, which saved Church music from destruction, was performed with the papal approval and the applause of Rome. It is not necessary to point out the many impossibilities and contradictions involved in this legend, since the real history of the Ma.s.s which wrought salvation for Church music, lies before us plainly written in the prolix pages of Baini. Yet it would have vexed me to pa.s.s by in silence so interesting and instructive an example of the mode by which the truth of history is veiled in legend.

Truth is always more interesting than fiction, and the facts of this important episode in musical history are not without their element of romance. There is no doubt that there was a powerful party in the Catholic Church imbued with a stern ascetic or puritanical spirit, who would gladly have excluded all but Plain Song from her services. Had Michele Ghislieri instead of the somewhat worldly Angelo de'Medici been on the Papal throne, or had the decision of the musical difficulty been delegated to him by the congregation of eight Cardinals in 1564, Palestrina might not have obtained that opportunity of which he so triumphantly availed himself. But it happened that the reigning Pope was a lover of the art, and had a special reason for being almost superst.i.tiously indulgent to its professors. While he was yet a Cardinal, in the easy-going days of Julius III., Angelo de'Medici had been invited with other princes of the Church to hear the marvelous performances upon the lute and the incomparable improvisations of a boy called Silvio Antoniano. The meeting took place at a banquet in the palace of the Venetian Cardinal Pisani. When the guests were a.s.sembled, the Cardinal Rannuccio Farnese put together a bouquet of flowers, and presenting these to the musician, bade him give them to that one of the Cardinals who should one day be chosen Pope. Silvio without hesitation handed the flowers to Angelo de'Medici, and taking up his lute began to sing his praises in impa.s.sioned extempore verse. After his election to the Papacy, with the t.i.tle of Pius IV., Angelo de'Medici took Silvio into his service, and employed him in such honorable offices that the fortunate youth was finally advanced to the dignity of Cardinal under the reign of Clement VIII., in 1598.[209]

[Footnote 209: It will be remembered that this Silvio Antoniano was one of the revisers of Ta.s.so's poem, and the one who gave him most trouble.]

It was therefore necessary for the congregation of musical reform to take the Pope's partiality for this art into consideration; and they showed their good will by choosing his own nephew, together with a notorious amateur of music, for their sub-committee. The two Cardinals applied to the College of Pontifical Singers for advice; and these deputed eight of their number--three Spaniards, one Fleming, and four Italians--to act as a.s.sistants in the coming deliberations. It was soon agreed that Ma.s.ses and motetts in which different verbal themes were jumbled, should be prohibited; that musical motives taken from profane songs should be abandoned; and that no countenance should be given to compositions or words invented by contemporary poets. These three conditions were probably laid down as indispensable by the Cardinals in office before proceeding to the more difficult question of securing a plain and intelligible enunciation of the sacred text. When the Cardinals demanded this as the essential point in the proposed reform, the singers replied that it would be impossible in practice. They were so used to the complicated structure of figured music, with its canons, fugal intricacies, imitations and inversions, that they could not even imagine a music that should be simple and straightforward, retaining the essential features of vocal harmony, and yet allowing the words on which it was composed to be distinctly heard. The Cardinals reb.u.t.ted these objections by pointing to the Te Deum of Costanzo Festa (a piece which has been always sung on the election of a new Pope from that day to our own times) and to the Improperia of Palestrina, which also holds its own in the service of the Sistine. But the singers answered that these were exceptional pieces, which, though they might fulfill the requirements of the Congregation of Reform, could not be taken as the sole models for compositions involving such variety and length of execution as the Ma.s.s.

Their answer proved conclusively to what extent the contrapuntal style had dissociated itself from the right object of all vocal music, that of interpreting, enforcing, and transfiguring the words with which it deals, and how it had become a mere art for the scientific development of irrelevant and often impertinent melodic themes.

In order to avoid an absolute deadlock, which might have resulted in the sacrifice of ecclesiastical harmony, and have inflicted a death-blow on modern music, the committee agreed to refer their difficulties to Palestrina. On the principle of _solvitur ambulando_, he was invited to study the problem, and to produce a trial piece which should satisfy the conditions exacted by the Congregation as well as the requirements of the artists. Literally, he received commission to write a Ma.s.s in sober ecclesiastical style, free from all impure and light suggestions in the themes, the melodies and the rhythms, which should allow the sacred words in their full sense to be distinctly heard, without sacrificing vocal harmony and the customary interlacing of fugued pa.s.sages. If he succeeded, the Cardinals promised to make no further innovation; but if he failed, Carlo Borromeo warned him that the Congregation of Reform would disband the choral establishments of the Pontifical Chapel and the Roman churches, and prohibit the figured style in vogue, in pursuance of the clear decision of the Tridentine Council.

This was a task of Hercules imposed on Palestrina. The art to which he had devoted his lifetime, the fame which he had acquired as a composer, the profession by which he and all his colleagues gained their daily bread, depended on his working out the problem. He was practically commanded to discover a new species of Church music, or to behold the ruin of himself and his companions, the extinction of the art and science he so pa.s.sionately loved. Truly may his biographer remark: 'I am deliberately of opinion that no artist either before or since has ever found himself in a parallel strait.'

We have no exact record of the spirit in which he approached this labor.[210] But he was a man of sincere piety, a great and enthusiastic servant of art. The command he had received came from a quarter which at that period and in Rome had almost divine authority. He knew that music hung trembling in the balance upon his failure or success.

[Footnote 210: In the Dedication of the _Ma.s.s of Pope Marcello_ to Philip II. in 1567 Palestrina only says that he had been constrained by the order of men of the highest gravity and most approved piety to apply himself _ad sanctissimum Missae sacrificium novo modorum genere decorandum_, and that he had performed his task with indefatigable pains and industry (Baini, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 280). But it is noteworthy that of the three Ma.s.ses furnished for the approval of the congregation, the first was ent.i.tled _Illumina oculos meos_, and that an anecdote referring to this t.i.tle relates Palestrina's earnest prayers for grace and inspiration during the execution of the work (_ibid._ p. 223, note.)]

And these two motives, the motive of religious zeal and the motive of devotion to art, inspired him for the creation of a new musical world.

a.n.a.lysis of his work and comparison of it with the style which he was called on to supersede, show pretty clearly what were the principles that governed him. With a view to securing the main object of rendering the text intelligible to the faithful, he had to dispense with the complicated Flemish system of combined melodies in counterpoint, and to employ his scientific resources of fugue and canon with parsimony, so that in future they should subserve and not tyrannize over expression.

He determined to write for six voices, two of which should be ba.s.s, in order that the fundamental themes should be sustained with dignity and continuity. But what he had princ.i.p.ally in view, what in fact he had been called on to initiate, was that novel adaptation of melody and science to verbal phrase and sense, whereby music should be made an art interpretative of religious sentiment, powerful to clothe each shade of meaning in the text with appropriate and beautiful sound, instead of remaining a merely artificial and mechanical structure of sounds disconnected from the words employed in giving them vocal utterance.

Palestrina set to work, and composed three Ma.s.ses, which were performed upon April 28, 1565, before the eight Cardinals of the congregation in the palace of Cardinal Vitellozzi. All three were approved of; but the first two still left something to be desired. Baini reports that they preserved somewhat too much of the c.u.mbrous Flemish manner; and that though the words were more intelligible, the fugal artifices overlaid their clear enunciation. In the third, however, it was unanimously agreed that Palestrina had solved the problem satisfactorily. 'Its style is always equal, always n.o.ble, always alive, always full of thought and sincere feeling, rising and ascending to the climax; not to understand the words would be impossible; the melodies combine to stimulate devotion; the harmonies touch the heart; it delights without distracting; satisfies desire without tickling the senses; it is beautiful in all the beauties of the sanctuary.' So writes Palestrina's enthusiastic biographer; so apparently thought the Cardinals of the congregation; and when this Ma.s.s (called the _Ma.s.s of Pope Marcellus_, out of grateful tribute to the Pontiff, whose untimely death had extinguished many sanguine expectations) was given to the world, the whole of Italy welcomed it with a burst of pa.s.sionate applause. Church music had been saved. Modern music had been created. A new and lovely-form of art had arisen like a star.

It was not enough that the _Ma.s.s of Pope Marcellus_ should have satisfied the congregation. It had next to receive the approval of the Pope, who heard it on June 19. On this occasion, if the Court Chronicle be correct, Pius made a pretty speech, declaring that 'of such nature must have been the harmonies of the new song heard by John the Apostle in the heavenly Jerusalem, and that another John had given us a taste of them in the Jerusalem of the Church Militant.' He seems, indeed, to have been convinced that the main problem of preserving clearness of enunciation in the uttered words had been solved, and that there was now no reason to deprive the faithful of the artistic and devotional value of melodious music. He consequently appointed Palestrina to the post of composer for the Papal Chapel, and created a monopoly for the performance of his works. This measure, which roused considerable jealousy among musicians at the moment, had the salutary effect of rendering the new style permanent in usage.

Of Palestrina's voluminous compositions this is not the place to speak.

It is enough to have indicated the decisive part which he took in the reformation of Church music at a moment when its very existence was imperiled, and to have described the principles upon which he laid down new laws for the art. I must not, however, omit to dwell upon his subsequent connection with S. Filippo Neri, since the music he composed for the Oratory of that saint contributed much toward the creation of a semi-lyrical and semi-dramatic style to which we may refer the origins of the modern Oratorio. Filippo Neri was the spiritual director of Palestrina, and appointed him composer to his devout confraternity. For the use of that society the master wrote a series of _Arie Divote_ on Italian words. They were meant to be sung by the members, and to supersede the old usages of Laud-music, which had chiefly consisted in adapting popular street-tunes to sacred words.[211]

[Footnote 211: See _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. iv. pp. 263, 305.]

To the same connection with the Oratory we owe one of the most remarkable series of Palestrina's compositions. These were written upon the words of an Italian Canzone in thirty octave stanzas, addressed as a prayer to the Virgin. Palestrina set each stanza, after the fas.h.i.+on of a Madrigal, to different melodies; and the whole work proved a manual of devotional music, in the purest artistic taste, and the most delicately sentimental key of feeling. Together with this collection of spiritual songs should be mentioned Palestrina's setting of pa.s.sages from the Song of Solomon in a series of motetts; which were dedicated to Gregory XIII., in 1584. They had an enormous success. Ten editions between that date and 1650 were poured out from the presses of Rome and Venice, to satisfy the impatience of thousands who desired to feed upon 'the nectar of their sweetness.' Palestrina chose for the motives of his compositions such voluptuous phrases of the Vulgate as the following: _Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi._ _Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo._ _Vulnerasti cor meum, soror, sponsa mea._ This was the period when Italy was ringing with the secular sweetnesses of Ta.s.so's _Aminta_ and of Guarini's _Pastor fido_; when the devotion of the cloister was becoming languorous and soft; when the cult of the Virgin was a.s.suming the extravagant proportions satirized by Pascal; finally, when manners were affecting a tone of swooning piety blent with sensuous luxuriousness. Palestrina's setting of the Canticle and of the Hymn to Mary provided the public with music which, according to the taste of that epoch, transferred terrestrial emotions into the regions of paradisal bliss, and justified the definition of music as the _Lamento dell'amore o la preghiera agli dei_. The great creator of a new ecclesiastical style, the 'imitator of nature,' as Vincenzo Galilei styled him, the 'prince of music,' as his epitaph proclaimed him, lent his genius to an art, vacillating between mundane sensuality and celestial rapture, which, however innocently developed by him in the sphere of music, was symptomatic of the most unhealthy tendencies of his race and age. While singing these madrigals and these motetts the youth of either s.e.x were no longer reminded, it is true, of tavern ditties or dance measures. But the emotions of luxurious delight or pa.s.sionate ecstasy deep in their own natures were drawn forth, and sanctified by application to the language of effeminate devotion.

I have dwelt upon these two sets of compositions, rather than upon the ma.s.ses of strictly and severely ecclesiastical music which Palestrina produced with inexhaustible industry, partly because they appear to have been extraordinarily popular, and partly because they ill.u.s.trate those tendencies in art and manners which the sentimental school of Bolognese painters attempted to embody. They belong to that religious sphere which the Jesuit Order occupied, governed, and administered upon the lines of their prescribed discipline. These considerations are not merely irrelevant. The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch. What Palestrina effected was to subst.i.tute in Church music the clear and melodious manner of the secular madrigal for the heavy and scholastic science of the Flemish school, and to produce masterpieces of religious art in his motetts on the Canticles which confounded the lines of demarcation between pious and profane expression. He taught music to utter the emotions of the heart; but those emotions in his land and race were already tending in religion toward the sentimental and voluptuous.

There is no doubt that the peril to which music was exposed at the time of the Tridentine Council was a serious and real one. When we remember how intimate was the connection between the higher kinds of music and the ritual of the Church, this will be apparent. Nor is it too much to affirm that the art at that crisis, but for the favor shown to it by Pius IV. and for Palestrina's intervention, might have been well-nigh extinguished in Italy. How fatal the results would then have been for the development of modern music, can be estimated by considering the decisive part played by the Italians in the formation of musical style from the end of the sixteenth century onwards to the age of Gluck, Handel, Haydn and Mozart. Had the music of the Church in Italy been confined at that epoch to Plain Song, as the Congregation of Reform threatened, the great Italian school of vocalization would not have been founded, the Conservatories of Naples and the Scuole of Venice would have been silent, and the style upon which, dating from Palestrina's inventions, the evolution of all species of the art proceeded, would have pa.s.sed into oblivion.

That this proposition is not extravagant, the history of music in England will suffice to prove. Before the victory of Puritan principles in Church and State, the English were well abreast of other races in this art. During the sixteenth century, Tallis, Byrd, Morland, Wilbye, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons could hold their own against Italian masters. The musical establishments of cathedrals, royal and collegiate chapels, and n.o.ble houses were nurseries for artists. Every English home, in that age, like every German home in the eighteenth century, abounded in amateurs who were capable of performing part-songs and concerted pieces on the lute and viol with correctness. Under the _regime_ of the Commonwealth this national growth of music received a check from which it never afterwards recovered. Though the seventeenth century witnessed the rising of one eminent composer, Purcell; though the eighteenth was adorned with meritorious writers of the stamp of Blow and Boyce; yet it is obvious that the art remained among us unprogressive, at a time when it was making gigantic strides in Italy and Germany. It is always dangerous to attribute the decline of art in a nation to any one cause. Yet I think it can scarcely be contested that the change of manners and of temperament wrought in England by the prevalence of Puritan opinion, had much to answer for in this premature decay of music. We may therefore fairly argue that if the gloomy pa.s.sion of intolerant fanaticism which burned in men like Caraffa and Ghislieri had prevailed in Italy--a pa.s.sion a.n.a.logous in its exclusiveness to Puritanism--or if no composer, in the place of Palestrina, had satisfied the requirements of the Council and the congregation, the history of music in Italy and Europe to us-wards would have been far different.

These considerations are adduced to justify the importance attached by me to the episode of which Palestrina was the hero. Yet it should not be forgotten that other influences were at work at the same time in Italy, which greatly stimulated the advance of music. If s.p.a.ce permitted, it would be interesting to enlarge upon the work of Luca Marenzio, the prince of madrigal-writers, and on the services rendered by Vincenzo Galileo, father of the greatest man of science in his age, in placing the practice of stringed instruments on a sound basis. It should also be remembered that in the society of Filippo Neri at Rome, the Oratorio was taking shape, and emerging from the simple elements of the Spiritual Laud and _Aria Divota_. This form, however, would certainly have perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.

There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence, which deserves some detailed mention. A private academy of amateurs and artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical declamation of the Greeks. As the new ecclesiastical style created by Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the Cla.s.sical Revival. The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces. It was now, much later in the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt. Their quest was vague and visionary. Nothing remained of Greek or Roman music.

To guide these explorers, there was only a dim instinct that the ancients had declaimed dramatic verse with musical intonation. But, as the alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, and founded modern chemistry; as, according to an ancient proverb, they who search for silver find gold; so it happened that, from the pedantic and ill-directed attempts of this academy proceeded the system on which the modern Oratorio and Opera were based. What is noticeable in these experiments is, that a new form of musical expression, declamatory and continuous, therefore dramatic, as opposed to the lyrical and fugal methods of the contrapuntists, was in process of elaboration. Claudio Monteverde, who may be termed the pioneer of _recitativo_, in his opera of _Orfeo_; Giacomo Carissimi, in whose _Jephtha_ the form of the Oratorio it already outlined, were the most eminent masters of the school which took its origin in the Florentine Academy of the Palazzo Vernio.

To pursue the subject further, would be to transgress the chronological limits of my subject. It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species determined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. How that art at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be read in an English work of singular ability and originality.[212]

[Footnote 212: _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_, by Vernon Lee.]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BOLOGNESE SCHOOL OF PAINTERS.

Decline of Plastic Art--Dates of the Eclectic Masters--The Mannerists--Baroccio--Reaction started by Lodovico Caracci--His Cousins Annibale and Agostino--Their Studies--Their Academy at Bologna--Their Artistic Aims--Dionysius Calvaert--Guido Reni--The Man and His Art--Domenichino--Ruskin's Criticism--Relation of Domenichino to the Piety of His Age--Caravaggio and the Realists--Ribera--Lo Spagna--Guercino--His qualities as Colorist--His Terribleness--Private Life--Digression upon Criticism--Reasons why the Bolognese Painters are justly now neglected.

After tracing the origin of modern music at its fountain head in Palestrina, it requires some courage to approach the plastic arts at this same epoch.

Music was the last real manifestation of the creative genius in Italy.

Rarefied to evanescent currents of emotional and sensuous out-breathings, the spirit of the race exhaled itself in song from human throats, in melody on lute and viol, until the whole of Europe thrilled with the marvel and the mystery of this new language of the soul. Music was the fittest utterance for the Italians of the Counter-Reformation period. Debarred from political activity, denied the liberty of thought and speech, that gifted people found an inarticulate vehicle of expression in tone; tone which conveys all meanings to the nerves that feel, advances nothing to the mind that reasons, says everything without formulating a proposition.

Only a sense of duty to my subject, which demands completion, makes me treat of painting in the last years of the sixteenth century. The great Italian cycle, rounded by Lionardo, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Correggio and Tiziano, was being closed at Venice by Tintoretto. After him invention ceased. But there arose at Bologna a school, bent on resuscitating the traditions of an art which had already done its utmost to interpret mind to mind through mediums of lovely form and color. The founders of the Bolognese Academy, like Medea operating on decrepit Aeson, chopped up the limbs of painting which had ceased to throb with organic life, recombined them by an act of intellect and will, and having pieced them together, set the composite machine in motion on the path of studied method. Their aim was a.n.a.logous to that of the Church in its reconst.i.tution of Catholicism; and they succeeded, in so far as they achieved a partial success, through the inspiration which the Catholic Revival gave them. These painters are known as the Eclectics and this t.i.tle sufficiently indicates their effort to revive art by recomposing what lay before them in disintegrated fragments. They did not explore new territory or invent fresh vehicles of expression. They sought to select the best points of Graeco-Roman and Italian style, unconscious that the physical type of the Niobids, the voluptuous charm of Correggio, the luminous color of t.i.tian, the terribleness of Michelangelo, and the serenity of Raphael, being the ultimate expressions of distinct artistic qualities, were incompatible. A still deeper truth escaped their notice--namely, that art is valueless unless the artist has something intensely felt to say, and that where this intensity of feeling exists, it finds for itself its own specific and inevitable form.

'Poems distilled from other poems pa.s.s away, The swarms of reflectors and the polite pa.s.s, and leave ashes; Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature.'