The melodious and fascinating style, soon to give birth to the
characteristic genius of the opera, was as yet unborn, though dormant.
In Rome, the chief seat of the Belgian art, the exclusive study of
technical skill had frozen music to a mere formula. The Gregorian
chant had become so overladen with mere embellishments as to make the
prescribed church-form difficult of recognition in its borrowed garb,
for it had become a mere jumble of sound. Musicians, indeed, carried
their profanation so far as to take secular melodies as the themes for
masses and motetts. These were often called by their profane titles.
So the name of a love-sonnet or a drinking-song would sometimes be
attached to a _miserere_. The Council of Trent, in 1562, cut at these
evils with sweeping axe, and the solemn anathemas of the church
fathers roused the creative powers of the subject of this sketch, who
raised his art to an independent national existence, and made it rank
with sculpture and painting, which had already reached their zenith in
Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michael Angelo.
Henceforth Italian music was to be a vigorous, fruitful stock.
GIOVANNI PERLUIGI ALOISIO DA PALESTRINA was born at Palestrina, the
ancient Præneste, in 1524.[D] The memorials of his childhood are
scanty. We know but little except that his parents were poor peasants,
and that he learned the rudiments of literature and music as a
choir-singer, a starting-point so common in the lives of great
composers. In 1540 he went to Rome and studied in the school of
Goudimel, a stern Huguenot Fleming, tolerated in the papal capital on
account of his superior science and method of teaching, and afterwards
murdered at Lyons on the day of the Paris massacre. Palestrina grasped
the essential doctrines of the school without adopting its
mannerisms. At the age of thirty he published his first compositions,
and dedicated them to the reigning pontiff, Julius III. In the
formation of his style, which moved with such easy, original grace
within the old prescribed rules, he learned much from the personal
influence and advice of Orlando di Lasso, his warm friend and constant
companion during these earlier days.
Several of his compositions, written at this time, are still performed
in Rome on Good Friday, and Goethe and Mendelssohn have left their
eloquent tributes to the impression made on them by music alike simple
and sublime. The pope was highly pleased with Palestrina's noble
music, and appointed him one of the papal choristers, then regarded as
a great honour. But beyond Rome the new light of music was but little
known. The Council of Trent, in their first indignation at the abuse
of church music, had resolved to abolish everything but the simple
Gregorian chants, but the remonstrances of the Emperor Ferdinand and
the Roman cardinals stayed the austere fiat. The final decision was
made to rest on a new composition of Palestrina, who was permitted to
demonstrate that the higher forms of musical art were consistent with
the solemnities of church worship.
All eyes were directed to the young musician, for the very existence
of his art was at stake. The motto of his first mass, "Illumina oculos
meos," shows the pious enthusiasm with which he undertook his labours.
Instead of one, he composed three six-part masses. The third of these
excited such admiration that the pope exclaimed in raptures, "It is
John who gives us here in this earthly Jerusalem a foretaste of that
new song which the holy Apostle John realised in the heavenly
Jerusalem in his prophetic trance." This is now known as the "mass of
Pope Marcel," in honour of a former patron of Palestrina.
A new pope, Paul IV., on ascending the pontifical throne, carried his
desire of reforming abuses to fanaticism. He insisted on all the papal
choristers being clerical. Palestrina had married early in life a
Roman lady, of whom all we know is that her name was Lucretia. Four
children had blessed the union, and the composer's domestic happiness
became a bar to his temporal preferment. With two others he was
dismissed from the chapel because he was a layman, and a trifling
pension allowed him. Two months afterwards, though, he was appointed
chapel-master of St. John Lateran. His works now succeeded each other
rapidly, and different collections of his masses were dedicated to the
crowned heads of Europe. In 1571 he was appointed chapel-master of the
Vatican, and Pope Gregory XIII. gave special charge of the reform of
sacred music to Palestrina.
The death of the composer's wife, whom he idolised, in 1580, was a
blow from which he never recovered. In his latter days he was
afflicted with great poverty, for the positions he held were always
more honourable than lucrative. Mental depression and physical
weakness burdened the last few years of his pious and gentle life, and
he died after a lingering and severe illness. The register of the
pontifical chapel contains this entry--"February 2, 1594. This morning
died the most excellent musician, Signor Giovanni Palestrina, our dear
companion and _maestro di capella_ of St. Peter's church, whither his
funeral was attended not only by all the musicians of Rome, but by an
infinite concourse of people, when his own 'Libera me, Domine' was
sung by the whole college."
Such are the simple and meagre records of the life of the composer who
carved and laid the foundation of the superstructure of Italian music;
who, viewed in connection with his times and their limitations, must
be regarded as one of the great creative minds in his art; who shares
with Sebastian Bach the glory of having built an imperishable base for
the labours of his successors.