The Catholic Church as Patron
The Roman Catholic church always remained the chief patron of music, as of the other arts. North of the Alps, Catholic music continued to advance along the paths laid down by the Flemish school. This same tradition was established in Austria by Isaac and in Bavaria by Orlando di Lasso. One of Luther's fairest letters, addressed to Ludwig Senfl in 1530, praised him for composing music in Munich and also applauded the Catholic dukes there, because "they cultivate music and keep its dignity."
The choir of the Sistine chapel was still the model that all kings and princes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries imitated when they set up private chapel choirs of their own. Even among Protestants the highest form of music was the singing proper to the Mass, and it received its crown of honor when it was performed by the pope's choir. The highest ambition of every singer was to join that choir, and so the best voices in western Europe gathered there. Around 1550 the Sistine choir began a cruel practice of preserving boys' high voices by physical means, and shortly afterward similar cases appeared at the Bavarian court; the practice was applied to boys who, persuaded beforehand, agreed that a high boyish voice would serve them better than the supply of ordinary manhood, a commodity always offered in excess of demand.
The Church's Distrust of Ornate Music
The church, like any old and complex organization, was conservative in principle, fearing that a badly timed and unsuccessful innovation might lose it everything, and it was stricter about the forms of worship than about belief in doctrine. Composers, on the other hand, as they showed in every age, grew tired of old molds and models and regarded every new experiment as the movement of their artistic life. Throughout these centuries the church tried to check the artificiality of the "new music" and the refinements of Flemish counterpoint, and for that purpose it constantly sought to reduce the importance of the "great mass." In 1322 Pope John XXII issued a strict decree forbidding all innovation and ornament in music, ordering that the music of the Mass remain in the old form of plain unison song, or Gregorian chant, with only a simple harmony that ordinary worshippers could understand, to concentrate their faith rather than scatter it.
The decree held for a century, but later some musicians found ways to evade it. It became the practice for part of the choir to sing the bass line an octave higher than written, and this "false bass" became a favorite refinement of French composers.
Complexity and Complaint
The complexity and busyness of the Mass again increased. In this form five, six or eight distinct parts were sung by different voices in fugue or counterpoint, and in the surging stream that resulted the sacred words trod on each other's heels, mingled in one sequence while keeping to technical rules, and sometimes disappeared among the twists of ornament and the free displays of the singers. The habit of borrowing folk tunes to build splendid masses naturally let irreverent words slip into religious texts as well. Some masses are known by the names of their secular sources, such as the Mass "Farewell, My Loves" and the Mass "In the Shade of the Thicket."
The freethinking Erasmus was so disgusted by the artificiality of elaborate masses that in one of his additional notes on his edited New Testament he protested:
Modern church music is arranged so that the worshippers in church cannot hear one clear word of its content. Even the singers themselves do not understand what they want. ... In the time of the apostle Paul there was no church music and the sacred words were spoken clearly. In our time the words no longer mean anything. ... People leave their work and go to church to hear a noise far greater than anything raised in Greek and Roman theaters. In church money must be collected to buy organs and train boys to scream.
Catholic reformers agreed with Erasmus. Giberti, bishop of Verona, forbade love songs and folk tunes in the churches of his diocese, and Morone, bishop of Modena, condemned the "ornate" kind of music, the kind in which themes and motifs are elaborated and embellished. At the Council of Trent, Catholic reformers insisted that polyphonic music be removed from church ceremony entirely and that single-voice Gregorian chant be used in its place.
Palestrina's Rise
Perhaps it was Pope Pius IV's fondness for the masses of Palestrina that saved the polyphonic music of the Catholic church from oblivion. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina took his name from a small town in the Campagna di Roma, which had entered history in ancient times under the name Praeneste. In 1537, at the age of eleven, we find him entering the ranks of the choirboys of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Before he was twenty-one he became choirmaster in his native Palestrina. Having achieved this position, he married a fairly well-off woman, Lucrezia Gori (1547). When the bishop of Palestrina, who took the name Julius III, became pope, he took his choirmaster with him to Rome and appointed him head of the "Julian Chapel" of St. Peter's to train singers for the Sistine chapel, as was customary.
The young composer dedicated his first book of masses to the new pope (1554). The structure of one of these masses combined three voices blended by counterpoint, accompanying a fourth voice that sang a Gregorian chant. Palestrina's works so pleased the pope that he appointed him a member of the Sistine choir. But among that body of tonsured clergy the figure of Palestrina, a married and worldly man, looked badly out of place, and objections were raised. Palestrina was preparing to present a new book of madrigals when Pope Julius III died (1555).
Marcellus II lived only three weeks after his elevation to the papacy. Our composer wrote in his name his famous Pope Marcellus Mass (1555), which was printed in 1567, and the title was given to it then. Pope Paul IV, strict and zealous in his principles, dismissed three married members of the Sistine choir, Palestrina among them, and set a meager pension for each. Soon Palestrina was appointed choirmaster of the chapel of St. John Lateran. The income of this post kept bread on his table but did not make him wealthy enough to pay for printing his music himself. With the accession of Pius IV (1559), Palestrina was again in favor, and his new work, the Improperia, won Pius IV's special notice, so that he ordered it performed every year in the Sistine chapel on Good Friday. Although having a wife still barred Palestrina from the Sistine choir, his position rose when he was appointed choirmaster of Santa Maria Maggiore (1561).
The Council of Trent and the Marcellus Legend
The next year the renewed Council of Trent examined how to bring church music into line with the new reforming spirit. The extreme proposal to ban all polyphonic music was strongly rejected, and it was finally agreed that church authorities should exclude from religious services any music ... of a sensual or profane character, so that it might be plainly seen ... that the house of God is truly a house of prayer. Pius IV appointed a commission of eight cardinals to carry out the decree in the diocese of Rome.
A pleasing story tells that when the commission was about to ban polyphonic music, one of its members, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, appealed to Palestrina to compose a work that would show complete harmony between polyphony and religious faith. Palestrina set to work, and the choir performed three masses for the cardinals, one of which was the Pope Marcellus Mass. In these compositions the union of lofty religious faith and the devout art of music was so deep that it saved polyphony from condemnation and extinction. It must be added that the Marcellus Mass had been written ten years earlier, and the only link between Palestrina and the commission was that through its members the payment of his pension was extended for a time. But what matters most is that Palestrina's music, as offered to the choirs of Rome, thanks to its fidelity to the meaning of the words, its avoidance of secular themes and its placing of musical art at the service of religious content, played a great part in the cardinals' decision to allow polyphonic music.
Another reason that favored acceptance of Palestrina's polyphony was that almost all his church compositions were free of instrumental ornament and were fundamentally composed in the "chapel style," that is, for singers' voices alone.
His Later Years and Legacy
In 1571 Palestrina was again appointed choirmaster of the Julian Chapel and kept the post until his death. In those years he composed with boundless fertility and left in all 93 masses, 486 antiphons, offertories, motets and psalms, and a great many madrigals. Some of these works were built on national tunes, but with years of experience Palestrina put even the form of such tunes to the service of religious themes. His first book of spiritual madrigals (1581) contained some of the loveliest songs he left behind. Perhaps the misfortunes of his private life had a strong effect on the mood and expression of his music. In 1576 his son Angelo died, leaving him to care for two beloved grandchildren, and these two children also died after a few years. Another son died around 1579, and in 1580 the death of his wife saddened him so deeply that he thought of renouncing the world and joining the monks. Yet less than a year had passed when he married again.
The abundance and marvelous quality of Palestrina's works raised him to the leadership of Italian music, if not of all European music. Works such as his collection of settings of the Song of Songs, with twenty-nine motets (1584), the Lamentations of Jeremiah (1588) and the Stabat Mater (1590) established his fame and showed the undying power of his genius. In one year, his Italian rivals joined together and dedicated to him a collection of evening psalms, honoring him as "the common father of all musicians." On 1 January 1594 he dedicated his second book of spiritual madrigals to Christina, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in which he again blended deep religious feeling with mastery. A month later, in the sixty-ninth year of his life, he died. On his tombstone, beneath his name, is carved the title he had earned through lifelong effort: "Prince of Music."
Judging Palestrina Today
We should not expect to enjoy the works of Palestrina fully today unless we are in deep prayer and hear his music in a fitting setting, as part of a splendid religious rite. Even then its technical aspects may astonish us more than they move us. But the truth is that such a setting is not beyond recovery, for that music belonged specifically to the Catholic reform movement, the sorrowful note of a sharp reaction against the sensual joy of the "common Renaissance." In other words, it was the period that put Michelangelo in place of Raphael, Paul IV in place of Leo X, Ignatius Loyola in place of Pietro Bembo, and Calvin in place of Luther.
It must be admitted that our present tastes are not a firm and valid standard, and that the individual taste of modern people, especially those lacking any grasp of mystical principles and any sense of religious responsibility and sin, is too weak a measure by which to judge music and theology. Even so, we can all agree that Palestrina brought the sacred polyphonic music of his time to the peak of perfection. Like most first-rank artists he stood at the top of the curve of development plotted on the two axes of artistic feeling and technical skill. He completed the tradition he inherited; he accepted discipline and order and with them made his musical structure firm, raising against the storms of change and revolution a stronghold founded on technical principles. One can foresee even now that in a not distant future, when ears tire of the harsh din of instruments and the slackness of operatic romances, human nature will again thirst for the sincerity of feeling in Palestrina's music and seek its deep, soothing flow of harmony, for this music is better than any other at expressing the state of a humanity whose soul has been cleansed of pride in its own reason and power and once more bows in humility and awe before the infinity of creation.