THE MODERN MUSICAL MASS
To one who is accustomed to study the history of art in the light of the
law of evolution, the contrast between the reigning modern style of
Catholic church music and that of the Middle Age seems at first sight
very difficult of explanation. The growth of the _a capella_ chorus,
which reached its perfection in the sixteenth century, may be traced
through a steady process of development, every step of which was a
logical consequence of some prior invention. But as we pass onward into
the succeeding age and look for a form of Catholic music which may be
taken as the natural offspring and successor of the venerable mediaeval
style, we find what appears to be a break in the line of continuity. The
ancient form maintains its existence throughout the seventeenth century
and a portion of the eighteenth, but it is slowly crowded to one side and
at last driven from the field altogether by a style which, if we search
in the field of church art alone, appears to have no antecedent. The new
style is opposed to the old in every particular. Instead of forms that
are polyphonic in structure, vague and indefinite in plan, based on an
antique key system, the new compositions are homophonic, definite, and
sectional in plan, revealing an entirely novel principle of tonality,
containing vocal solos as well as choruses, and supported by a free
instrumental accompaniment. These two contrasted phases of religious
music seem to have nothing in common so far as technical organization is
concerned, and it is perfectly evident that the younger style could not
have been evolved out of the elder. Hardly less divergent are they in
respect to ideal of expression, the ancient style never departing from a
moderate, unimpassioned uniformity, the modern abounding in variety and
contrast, and continually striving after a sort of dramatic portrayal of
moods. To a representative of the old school, this florid accompanied
style would seem like an intruder from quite an alien sphere of
experience, and the wonder grows when we discover that it sprung from the
same national soil as that in which its predecessor ripened, and was
likewise cherished by an institution that has made immutability in all
essentials a cardinal principle. Whence came the impulse that effected so
sweeping a change in a great historic form of art, where we might expect
that liturgic necessities and ecclesiastical tradition would decree a
tenacious conservatism? What new conception had seized upon the human
mind so powerful that it could even revolutionize a large share of the
musical system of the Catholic Church? Had there been a long preparation
for a change that seems so sudden? Were there causes working under the
surface, antecedent stages, such that the violation of the law of
continuity is apparent only, and not real? These questions are easily
answered if we abandon the useless attempt to find the parentage of the
modern church style in the ritual music of the previous period; and by
surveying all the musical conditions of the age we shall quickly discover
that it was an intrusion into the Church of musical methods that were
fostered under purely secular auspices. The Gregorian chant and the
mediaeval _a capella_ chorus were born and nurtured within the fold of
the Church, growing directly out of the necessity of adapting musical
cadences to the rhythmical phrases of the liturgy. The modern sectional
and florid style, on the contrary, was an addition from without, and was
not introduced in response to any liturgic demands whatever. In origin
and affiliations it was a secular style, adopted by the Church under a
necessity which she eventually strove to turn into a virtue.
This violent reversal of the traditions of Catholic music was simply a
detail of that universal revolution in musical practice and ideal which
marked the passage from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth. The
learned music of Europe had been for centuries almost exclusively in the
care of ecclesiastical and princely chapels, and its practitioners held
offices that were primarily clerical. The professional musicians,
absorbed in churchly functions, had gone on adding masses to masses,
motets to motets, and hymns to hymns, until the Church had accumulated a
store of sacred song so vast that it remains the admiration and despair
of modern scholars. These works, although exhibiting every stage of
construction from the simplest to the most intricate, were all framed in
accordance with principles derived from the mediaeval conception of
melodic combination. The secular songs which these same composers
produced in great numbers, notwithstanding their greater flexibility and
lightness of touch, were also written for chorus, usually unaccompanied,
and were theoretically constructed according to the same system as the
church pieces. Nothing like operas or symphonies existed; there were no
orchestras worthy of the name; pianoforte, violin, and organ playing, in
the modern sense, had not been dreamed of; solo singing was in its
helpless infancy. When we consider, in the light of our present
experience, how large a range of emotion that naturally utters itself in
tone was left unrepresented through this lack of a proper secular art of
music, we can understand the urgency of the demand which, at the close of
the sixteenth century, broke down the barriers that hemmed in the
currents of musical production and swept music out into the vast area of
universal human interests. The spirit of the Renaissance had led forth
all other art forms to share in the multifarious activities and joys of
modern life at a time when music was still the satisfied inmate of the
cloister. But it was impossible that music also should not sooner or
later feel the transfiguring touch of the new human impulse. The placid,
austere expression of the clerical style, the indefinite forms, the
Gregorian modes precluding free dissonance and regulated chromatic
change, were incapable of rendering more than one order of ideas. A
completely novel system must be forthcoming, or music must confess its
impotence to enter into the fuller emotional life which had lately been
revealed to mankind.
The genius of Italy was equal to the demand. Usually when any form of art
becomes complete a period of degeneracy follows; artists become mere
imitators, inspiration and creative power die out, the art becomes a
handicraft; new growth appears only in another period or another nation,
and under altogether different auspices. Such would perhaps have been the
case with church music in Italy if a method diametrically opposed to that
which had so long prevailed in the Church had not inaugurated a new
school and finally extended its conquest into the venerable precincts of
the Church itself. The opera and instrumental music--the two currents
into which secular music divided--sprang up, as from hidden fountains,
right beside the old forms which were even then just attaining their full
glory, as if to show that the Italian musical genius so abounded in
energy that it could never undergo decay, but when it had gone to its
utmost limits in one direction could instantly strike out in another
still more brilliant and productive.
The invention of the opera about the year 1600 is usually looked upon as
the event of paramount importance in the transition period of modern
music history, yet it was only the most striking symptom of a radical,
sweeping tendency. Throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century a
search had been in progress after a style of music suited to the solo
voice, which could lend itself to the portrayal of the change and
development of emotion involved in dramatic representation. The
folk-song, which is only suited to the expression of a single simple
frame of mind, was of course inadequate. The old church music was
admirably adapted to the expression of the consciousness of man in his
relations to the divine--what was wanted was a means of expressing the
emotions of man in his relations to his fellow-men. Lyric and dramatic
poetry flourished, but no proper lyric or dramatic music. The Renaissance
had done its mighty work in all other fields of art, but so far as music
was concerned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a Renaissance did
not exist. Many reasons might be given why the spirit of the Renaissance
had no appreciable effect in the musical world until late in the
sixteenth century. Musical forms are purely subjective in their
conception; they find no models or even suggestions in the natural world,
and the difficulty of choosing the most satisfactory arrangements of
tones out of an almost endless number of possible combinations, together
with the necessity of constantly new adjustments of the mind in order to
appreciate the value of the very forms which itself creates, makes
musical development a matter of peculiar slowness and difficulty. The
enthusiasm for the antique, which gave a definite direction to the
revival of learning and the new ambitions in painting and sculpture,
could have little practical value in musical invention, since the ancient
music, which would otherwise have been chosen as a guide, had been
completely lost. The craving for a style of solo singing suited to
dramatic purposes tried to find satisfaction by means that were
childishly insufficient. Imitations of folk-songs, the device of singing
one part in a madrigal, while the other parts were played by instruments,
were some of the futile efforts to solve the problem. The sense of
disappointment broke forth in bitter wrath against the church
counterpoint, and a violent conflict raged between the bewildered
experimenters and the adherents of the scholastic methods.
The discovery that was to satisfy the longings of a century and create a
new art was made in Florence. About the year 1580 a circle of scholars,
musicians, and amateurs began to hold meetings at the house of a certain
Count Bardi, where they discussed, among other learned questions, the
nature of the music of the Greeks, and the possibility of its
restoration. Theorizing was supplemented by experiment, and at last
Vincenzo Galilei, followed by Giulio Caccini, hit upon a mode of musical
declamation, half speech and half song, which was enthusiastically hailed
as the long-lost style employed in the Athenian drama. A somewhat freer
and more melodious manner was also admitted in alternation with the dry,
formless recitation, and these two related methods were employed in the
performance of short lyric, half-dramatic monologues. Such were the
Monodies of Galilei and the Nuove Musiche of Caccini. More ambitious
schemes followed. Mythological masquerades and pastoral comedies, which
had held a prominent place in the gorgeous spectacles and pageants of the
Italian court festivals ever since the thirteenth century, were provided
with settings of the new declamatory music, or _stile recitativo_, and
behold, the opera was born.
The Florentine inventors of dramatic music builded better than they knew.
They had no thought of setting music free upon a new and higher flight;
they never dreamed of the consequences of releasing melody from the
fetters of counterpoint. Their sole intention was to make poetry more
expressive and emphatic by the employment of tones that would heighten
the natural inflections of speech, and in which there should be no
repetition or extension of words (as in the contrapuntal style) involving
a subordination of text to musical form. The ideal of recitative was the
expression of feeling by a method that permits the text to follow the
natural accent of declamatory speech, unrestrained by a particular
musical form or tonality, and dependent only upon the support of the
simplest kind of instrumental accompaniment. In this style of music, said
Caccini, speech is of the first importance, rhythm second, and tone last
of all. These pioneers of dramatic music, as they declared over and over
again, simply desired a form of music that should allow the words to be
distinctly understood. They condemned counterpoint, not on musical
grounds, but because it allowed the text to be obscured and the natural
rhythm broken. There was no promise of a new musical era in such an
anti-musical pronunciamento as this. But a relation between music and
poetry in which melody renounces all its inherent rights could not long
be maintained. The genius of Italy in the seventeenth century was
musical, not poetic. Just so soon as the infinite possibilities of charm
that lie in free melody were once perceived, no theories of Platonizing
pedants could check its progress. The demands of the new age, reinforced
by the special Italian gift of melody, created an art form in which
absolute music triumphed over the feebler claims of poetry and rhetoric.
The cold, calculated Florentine music-drama gave way to the vivacious,
impassioned opera of Venice and Naples. Although the primitive dry
recitative survived, the far more expressive accompanied recitative was
evolved from it, and the grand aria burst into radiant life out of the
brief lyrical sections which the Florentines had allowed to creep into
their tedious declamatory scenes. Vocal colorature, which had already
appeared in the dramatic pieces of Caccini, became the most beloved means
of effect. The little group of simple instruments employed in the first
Florentine music-dramas was gradually merged in the modern full
orchestra. The original notion of making the poetic and scenic intention
paramount was forgotten, and the opera became cultivated solely as a
means for the display of all the fascinations of vocalism.
Thus a new motive took complete possession of the art of music. By virtue
of the new powers revealed to them, composers would now strive to enter
all the secret precincts of the soul and give a voice to every emotion,
simple or complex, called forth by solitary meditation or by situations
of dramatic stress and conflict. Music, like painting and poetry, should
now occupy the whole world of human experience. The stupendous
achievements of the tonal art of the past two centuries are the outcome
of this revolutionary impulse. But not at once could music administer the
whole of her new possession. She must pass through a course of training
in technic, to a certain extent as she had done in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, but under far more favorable conditions and quite
different circumstances. The shallowness of the greater part of the music
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is partly due to the
difficulty that composers found in mastering the new forms. A facility in
handling the material must be acquired before there could be any clear
consciousness of the possibilities of expression which the new forms
contained. The first problem in vocal music was the development of a
method of technic; and musical taste, fascinated by the new sensation,
ran into an extravagant worship of the human voice. There appeared in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the most brilliant group of singers,
of both sexes, that the world has ever seen. The full extent of the
morbid, we might almost say the insane, passion for sensuous,
nerve-exciting tone is sufficiently indicated by the encouragement in
theatre and church of those outrages upon nature, the male soprano and
alto. A school of composers of brilliant melodic genius appeared in
Italy, France, and Germany, who supplied these singers with showy and
pathetic music precisely suited to their peculiar powers. Italian melody
and Italian vocalism became the reigning sensation in European society,
and the opera easily took the primacy among fashionable amusements. The
Italian grand opera, with its solemn travesty of antique characters and
scenes, its mock heroics, its stilted conventionalities, its dramatic
feebleness and vocal glitter, was a lively reflection of the taste of
this age of "gallant" poetry, rococo decoration, and social
artificiality. The musical element consisted of a succession of arias and
duets stitched together by a loose thread of _secco_ recitative. The
costumes were those of contemporary fashion, although the characters were
named after worthies of ancient Greece and Rome. The plots were in no
sense historic, but consisted of love tales and conspiracies concocted by
the playwright. Truth to human nature and to locality was left to the
despised comic opera. Yet we must not suppose that the devotees of this
music were conscious of its real superficiality. They adored it not
wholly because it was sensational, but because they believed it true in
expression; and indeed it was true to those light and transient
sentiments which the voluptuaries of the theatre mistook for the throbs
of nature. Tender and pathetic these airs often were, but it was the
affected tenderness and pathos of fashionable eighteenth-century
literature which they represented. To the profounder insight of the
present they seem to express nothing deeper than the make-believe
emotions of children at their play.
Under such sanctions the Italian grand aria became the dominant form of
melody. Not the appeal to the intellect and the genuine experiences of
the heart was required of the musical performer, but rather brilliancy of
technic and seductiveness of tone. Ephemeral nerve excitement, incessant
novelty within certain conventional bounds, were the demands laid by the
public upon composer and singer. The office of the poet became hardly
less mechanical than that of the costumer or the decorator. Composers,
with a few exceptions, yielded to the prevailing fashion, and musical
dramatic art lent itself chiefly to the portrayal of stereotyped
sentiments and the gratification of the sense. I would not be understood
as denying the germ of truth that lay in this art element contributed by
Italy to the modern world. Its later results were sublime and beneficent,
for Italian melody has given direction to well-nigh all the magnificent
achievements of secular music in the past two centuries. I am speaking
here of the first outcome of the infatuation it produced, in the breaking
down of the taste for the severe and elevated, and the production of a
transient, often demoralizing intoxication.
It was not long before the charming Italian melody undertook the conquest
of the Church. The popular demand for melody and solo singing overcame
the austere traditions of ecclesiastical song. The dramatic and concert
style invaded the choir gallery. The personnel of the choirs was altered,
and women, sometimes male sopranos and altos, took the place of boys. The
prima donna, with her trills and runs, made the choir gallery the parade
ground for her arts of fascination. The chorus declined in favor of the
solo, and the church aria vied with the opera aria in bravura and
languishing pathos. Where the chorus was retained in mass, motet, or
hymn, it abandoned the close-knit contrapuntal texture in favor of a
simple homophonic structure, with strongly marked rhythmical movement.
The orchestral accompaniment also lent to the composition a vivid
dramatic coloring, and brilliant solos for violins and flutes seemed
often to convert the sanctuary into a concert hall. All this was
inevitable, for the Catholic musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were artists as well as churchmen; they shared the aesthetic
convictions of their time, and could not be expected to forego the
opportunities for effect which the new methods put into their hands. They
were no longer dependent upon the Church for commissions; the opera house
and the salon gave them sure means of subsistence and fame. The functions
of church and theatre composers were often united in a single man. The
convents and cathedral chapels were made training-schools for the choir
and the opera stage on equal terms. It was in a monk's cell that
Bernacchi and other world-famous opera singers of the eighteenth century
were educated. Ecclesiastics united with aristocratic laymen in the
patronage of the opera; cardinals and archbishops owned theatre boxes,
and it was not considered in the least out of character for monks and
priests to write operas and superintend their performance. Under such
conditions it is not strange that church and theatre reacted upon each
other, and that the sentimental style, beloved in opera house and salon,
should at last be accepted as the proper vehicle of devotional feeling.
In this adornment of the liturgy in theatrical costume we find a singular
parallel between the history of church music in the transition period and
that of religious painting in the period of the Renaissance. Pictorial
art had first to give concrete expression to the conceptions evolved
under the influence of Christianity, and since the whole intent of the
pious discipline was to turn the thought away from actual mundane
experience, art avoided the representation of ideal physical loveliness
on the one hand and a scientific historical correctness on the other.
Hence arose the naive, emblematic pictures of the fourteenth century,
whose main endeavor was to attract and indoctrinate with delineations
that were symbolic and intended mainly for edification. Painting was one
of the chief means employed by the Church to impart instruction to a
constituency to whom writing was almost inaccessible. Art, therefore,
even when emancipated from Byzantine formalism, was still essentially
hieratic, and the painter willingly assumed a semi-sacerdotal office as
the efficient coadjutor of the preacher and the confessor. With the
fifteenth century came the inrush of the antique culture, uniting with
native Italian tendencies to sweep art away into a passionate quest of
beauty wherever it might be found. The conventional religious subjects
and the traditional modes of treatment could no longer satisfy those
whose eyes had been opened to the magnificent materials for artistic
treatment that lay in the human form, draped and undraped, in landscape,
atmosphere, color, and light and shade, and who had been taught by the
individualistic trend of the age that the painter is true to his genius
only as be frees himself from formulas and follows the leadings of his
own instincts. But art could not wholly renounce its original pious
mission. The age was at least nominally Christian, sincerely so in many
of its elements, and the patronage of the arts was still to a very large
extent in the hands of the clergy. And here the Church prudently
consented to a modification of the established ideals of treatment of
sacred themes. The native Italian love of elegance of outline, harmony of
form, and splendor of color, directed by the study of the antique,
overcame the earlier austerity and effected a combination of Christian
tradition and pagan sensuousness which, in such work as that of Correggio
and the great Venetians, and even at times in the pure Raphael and the
stern Michael Angelo, quite belied the purpose of ecclesiastical art,
aiming not to fortify dogma and elevate the spirit, but to gratify the
desire of the eye and the delight in the display of technical skill.
Painting no longer conformed to a traditional religious type; it followed
its genius, and that genius was really inspired by the splendors of
earth, however much it might persuade itself that it ministered to
holiness.
A noted example of this self-deception, although an extreme one, is the
picture entitled "The Marriage at Cana," by Paolo Veronese. Christ is the
central figure, but his presence has no vital significance. He is simply
an imposing Venetian grandee, and the enormous canvas, with its crowd of
figures elegantly attired in fashionable sixteenth-century costume, its
profusion of sumptuous dishes and gorgeous tapestries, is nothing more or
less than a representation of a Venetian state banquet. Signorelli and
Michael Angelo introduced naked young men into pictures of the Madonna
and infant Christ. Others, such as Titian, lavished all the resources of
their art with apparently equal enthusiasm upon Madonnas and nude
Venuses. The other direction which was followed by painting, aiming at
historical verity and rigid accuracy in anatomy and expression, may be
illustrated by comparing Rubens's "Crucifixion" in the Antwerp Museum
with a crucifixion, for example, by Fra Angelico. Each motive was
sincere, but the harsh realism of the Fleming shows how far art, even in
reverent treatment of religious themes, had departed from the unhistoric
symbolism formerly imposed by the Church. In all this there was no
disloyal intention; art had simply issued its declaration of
independence; its sole aim was henceforth beauty and reality; the body as
well as the soul seemed worthy of study and adoration; and the Church
adopted the new skill into its service, not seeing that the world was
destined to be the gainer, and not religion.
The same impulse produced analogous results in the music of the Catholic
Church. The liturgic texts that were appropriated to choral setting
remained, as they had been, the place and theoretic function of the
musical offices in the ceremonial were not altered, but the music, in
imitating the characteristics of the opera and exerting a somewhat
similar effect upon the mind, became animated by an ideal of devotion
quite apart from that of the liturgy, and belied that unimpassioned,
absorbed and universalized mood of worship of which the older forms of
liturgic art are the most complete and consistent embodiment. Herein is
to be found the effect of the spirit of the Renaissance upon church
music. It is not simply that it created new musical forms, new styles of
performance, and a more definite expression; the significance of the
change lies rather in the fact that it transformed the whole spirit of
devotional music by endowing religious themes with sensuous charm, and
with a treatment inspired by the arbitrary will of the composer and not
by the traditions of the Church.
At this point we reach the real underlying motive, however unconscious of
it individual composers may have been, which compelled the revolution in
liturgic music. A new ideal of devotional expression made inevitable the
abandonment of the formal, academic style of the Palestrina school. The
spirit of the age which required a more subjective expression in music,
involved a demand for a more definite characterization in the setting of
the sacred texts. The composer could no longer be satisfied with a humble
imitation of the forms which the Church had sealed as the proper
expression of her attitude toward the divine mysteries, but claimed the
privilege of coloring the text according to the dictates of his own
feeling as a man and his peculiar method as an artist. The mediaeval
music was that of the cloister and the chapel. It was elevated, vague,
abstract; it was as though it took up into itself all the particular and
temporary emotions that might be called forth by the sacred history and
articles of belief, and sifted and refined them into a generalized type,
special individual experience being dissolved in the more diffused sense
of awe and rapture which fills the hearts of an assembly in the attitude
of worship. It was the mood of prayer which this music uttered, and that
not the prayer of an individual agitated by his own personal hopes and
fears, but the prayer of the Church, which embraces all the needs which
the believers share in common, and offers them at the Mercy Seat with the
calmness that comes of reverent confidence. Thus in the old masses the
Kyrie eleison and the Miserere nobis are never agonizing; the Crucifixus
does not attempt to portray the grief of an imaginary spectator of the
scene on Calvary; the Gloria in excelsis and the Sanctus never force the
jubilant tone into a frenzied excitement; the setting of the Dies Irae in
the Requiem mass makes no attempt to paint a realistic picture of the
terrors of the day of judgment.
Now compare a typical mass of the modern dramatic school and see how
different is the conception. The music of Gloria and Credo revels in all
the opportunities for change and contrast which the varied text supplies;
the Dona nobis pacem dies away in strains of tender longing. Consider the
mournful undertone that throbs through the Crucifixus of Schubert's Mass
in A flat, the terrifying crash that breaks into the Miserere nobis in
the Gloria of Beethoven's Mass in D, the tide of ecstasy that surges
through the Sanctus of Gounod's St. Cecilia Mass and the almost cloying
sweetness of the Agnus Dei, the uproar of brass instruments in the Tuba
mirum of Berlioz's Requiem. Observe the strong similarity of style at
many points between Verdi's Requiem and his opera "Aida." In such works
as these, which are fairly typical of the modern school, the composer
writes under an independent impulse, with no thought of subordinating
himself to ecclesiastical canons or liturgic usage. He attempts not only
to depict his own state of mind as affected by the ideas of the text, but
he also often aims to make his music picturesque according to dramatic
methods. He does not seem to be aware that there is a distinction between
religious concert music and church music. The classic example of this
confusion is in the Dona nobis pacem of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, where
the composer introduces a train of military music in order to suggest the
contrasted horrors of war. This device, as Beethoven employs it, is
exceedingly striking and beautiful, but it is precisely antagonistic to
the meaning of the text and the whole spirit of the liturgy. The
conception of a large amount of modern mass music seems to be, not that
the ritual to which it belongs is prayer, but rather a splendid spectacle
intended to excite the imagination and fascinate the sense. It is this
altered conception, lying at the very basis of the larger part of modern
church music, that leads such writers as Jakob to refuse even to notice
the modern school in his sketch of the history of Catholic church music,
just as Rio condemns Titian as the painter who mainly contributed to the
decay of religious painting.
In the Middle Age artists were grouped in schools or in guilds, each
renouncing his right of initiative and shaping his productions in
accordance with the legalized formulas of his craft. The modern artist is
a separatist, his glory lies in the degree to which he rises above
hereditary technic, and throws into his work a personal quality which
becomes his own creative gift to the world. The church music of the
sixteenth century was that of a school; the composers, although not
actually members of a guild, worked on exactly the same technical
foundations, and produced masses and motets of a uniformity that often
becomes academic and monotonous. The modern composer carries into church
pieces his distinct personal style. The grandeur and violent contrasts of
Beethoven's symphonies, the elegiac tone of Schubert's songs, the
enchantments of melody and the luxuries of color in the operas of Verdi
and Gounod, are also characteristic marks of the masses of these
composers. The older music could follow the text submissively, for there
was no prescribed musical form to be worked out, and cadences could occur
whenever a sentence came to an end. The modern forms, on the other hand,
consisting of consecutive and proportional sections, imply the necessity
of contrast, development, and climax--an arrangement that is not
necessitated by any corresponding system in the text. This alone would
often result in a lack of congruence between text and music, and the
composer would easily fall into the way of paying more heed to the sheer
musical working out than to the meaning of the words. Moreover, in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was no radical conflict between
the church musical style and the secular; so far as secular music was
cultivated by the professional composers it was no more than a slight
variation from the ecclesiastical model. Profane music may be said to
have been a branch of religious music. In the modern period this
relationship is reversed; secular music in opera and instrumental forms
has remoulded church music, and the latter is in a sense a branch of the
former.
Besides the development of the sectional form, another technical change
acted to break down the old obstacles to characteristic expression. An
essential feature of the mediaeval music, consequent upon the very nature
of the Gregorian modes, was the very slight employment of chromatic
alteration of notes, and the absence of free dissonances. Modulation in
the modern sense cannot exist in a purely diatonic scheme. The breaking
up of the modal system was foreshadowed when composers became impatient
with the placidity and colorlessness of the modal harmonies and began to
introduce unexpected dissonances for the sake of variety. The chromatic
changes that occasionally appear in the old music are scattered about in
a hap-hazard fashion; they give an impression of helplessness to the
modern ear when the composer seems about to make a modulation and at once
falls back again into the former tonality. It was a necessity, therefore,
as well as a virtue, that the church music of the old regime should
maintain the calm, equable flow that seems to us so pertinent to its
liturgic intention. For these reasons it may perhaps be replied to what
has been said concerning the devotional ideal embodied in the calm,
severe strains of the old masters, that they had no choice in the matter.
Does it follow, it may be asked, that these men would not have written in
the modern style if they had had the means? Some of them probably would
have done so, others almost certainly would not. Many writers who carried
the old form into the seventeenth century did have the choice and
resisted it; they stanchly defended the traditional principles and
condemned the new methods as destructive of pure church music. The laws
that work in the development of ecclesiastical art also seem to require
that music should pass through the same stages as those that sculpture
and painting traversed,--first, the stage of symbolism, restraint within
certain conventions in accordance with ecclesiastical prescription;
afterwards, the deliverance from the trammels of school formulas,
emancipation from all laws but those of the free determination of
individual genius. At this point authority ceases, dictation gives way to
persuasion, and art still ministers to the higher ends of the Church, not
through fear, but through reverence for the teachings and appeals which
the Church sends forth as her contribution to the nobler influences of
the age.
The writer who would trace the history of the modern musical mass has a
task very different from that which meets the historian of the mediaeval
period. In the latter case, as has already been shown, generalization is
comparatively easy, for we deal with music in which differences of
nationality and individual style hardly appear. The modern Catholic
music, on the other hand, follows the currents that shape the course of
secular music. Where secular music becomes formalized, as in the early
Italian opera, religious music tends to sink into a similar routine.
When, on the other hand, men of commanding genius, such as Beethoven,
Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, contribute works of a purely individual stamp to
the general development of musical art, their church compositions form no
exception, but are likewise sharply differentiated from others of the
same class. The influence of nationality makes itself felt--there is a
style characteristic of Italy, another of South Germany and Austria,
another of Paris, although these distinctions tend to disappear under the
solvent of modern cosmopolitanism. The Church does not positively dictate
any particular norm or method, and hence local tendencies have run their
course almost unchecked.
Catholic music has shared all the fluctuations of European taste. The
levity of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries was
as apparent in the mass as in the opera. The uplift in musical culture
during the last one hundred years has carried church composition along
with it, so that almost all the works produced since Palestrina, of which
the Church has most reason to be proud, belong to the nineteenth century.
One of the ultimate results of the modern license in style and the
tendency toward individual expression is the custom of writing masses as
free compositions rather than for liturgic uses, and of performing them
in public halls or theatres in the same manner as oratorios. Mozart wrote
his Requiem to the order of a private patron. Beethoven's Missa Solemnis,
not being ready when wanted for a consecration ceremony, outgrew the
dimensions of a service mass altogether, and was finished without any
liturgic purpose in view. Cherubini's mass in D minor and Liszt's Gran
Mass were each composed for a single occasion, and both of them, like the
Requiems of Berlioz and Dvorak, although often heard in concerts, have
but very rarely been performed in church worship. Masses have even been
written by Protestants, such as Bach, Schumann, Hauptmann, Richter, and
Becker. Masses that are written under the same impulse as ordinary
concert and dramatic works easily violate the ecclesiastical spirit, and
pass into the category of religious works that are non-churchly, and it
may often seem necessary to class them with cantatas on account of their
semi-dramatic tone. In such productions as Bach's B minor Mass,
Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and Berlioz's Requiem we have works that
constitute a separate phase of art, not masses in the proper sense, for
they do not properly blend with the church ceremonial nor contribute to
the special devotional mood which the Church aims to promote, while yet
in their general conception they are held by a loose band to the altar.
So apart do these mighty creations stand that they may almost be said to
glorify religion in the abstract rather than the confession of the
Catholic Church.
The changed conditions in respect to patronage have had the same effect
upon the mass as upon other departments of musical composition. In former
periods down to the close of the eighteenth century, the professional
composer was almost invariably a salaried officer, attached as a personal
retainer to a court, lay or clerical, and bound to conform his style of
composition in a greater or less degree to the tastes of his employer. A
Sixtus V. could reprove Palestrina for failing to please with a certain
mass and admonish him to do better work in the future. Haydn could hardly
venture to introduce any innovation into the style of religious music
sanctioned by his august masters, the Esterhazys. Mozart wrote all his
masses, with the exception of the Requiem, for the chapel of the prince
archbishop of Salzburg. In this establishment the length of the mass was
prescribed, the mode of writing and performance, which had become
traditional, hindered freedom of development, and therefore Mozart's
works of this class everywhere give evidence of constraint. On the other
hand, the leading composers of the present century that have occupied
themselves with the mass have been free from such arbitrary compulsions.
They have written masses, not as a part of routine duty, but as they were
inspired by the holy words and by the desire to offer the free gift of
their genius at the altar of the Church. They have been, as a rule,
devoted churchmen, but they have felt that they had the sympathy of the
Church in asserting the rights of the artist as against prelatical
conservatism and local usage. The outcome is seen in a group of works
which, whatever the strict censors may deem their defects in edifying
quality, at least indicate that in the field of musical art there is no
necessary conflict between Catholicism and the free spirit of the age.
Under these conditions the mass in the modern musical era has taken a
variety of directions and assumed distinct national and individual
complexions. The Neapolitan school, which gave the law to Italian opera
in the eighteenth century, endowed the mass with the same soft
sensuousness of melody and sentimental pathos of expression, together
with a dry, calculated kind of harmony in the chorus portions, the work
never touching deep chords of feeling, and yet preserving a tone of
sobriety and dignity. As cultivated in Italy and France the mass
afterward degenerated into rivalry on equal terms with the shallow,
captivating, cloying melody of the later Neapolitans and their
successors, Rossini and Bellini. In this school of so-called religious
music all sense of appropriateness was often lost, and a florid, profane
treatment was not only permitted but encouraged. Perversions which can
hardly be called less than blasphemous had free rein in the ritual music.
Franz Liszt, in a letter to a Paris journal, written in 1835, bitterly
attacks the music that flaunted itself in the Catholic churches of the
city. He complains of the sacrilegious virtuoso displays of the prima
donna, the wretched choruses, the vulgar antics of the organist playing
galops and variations from comic operas in the most solemn moments of the
holy ceremony. Similar testimony has from time to time come from Italy,
and it would appear that the most lamentable lapses from the pure church
tradition have occurred in some of the very places where one would expect
that the strictest principles would be loyally maintained. The most
celebrated surviving example of the consequences to which the virtuoso
tendencies in church music must inevitably lead when unchecked by a truly
pious criticism is Rossini's Stabat Mater. This frivolous work is
frequently performed with great _eclat_ in Catholic places of worship, as
though the clergy were indifferent to the almost incredible levity which
could clothe the heart-breaking pathos of Jacopone's immortal hymn--a
hymn properly honored by the Church with a place among the five great
Sequences--with strains better suited to the sprightly abandon of opera
buffa.
Another branch of the mass was sent by the Neapolitan school into
Austria, and here the results, although unsatisfactory to the better
taste of the present time, were far nobler and more fruitful than in
Italy and France. The group of Austrian church composers, represented by
the two Haydns, Mozart, Eybler, Neukomm, Sechter and others of the
period, created a form of church music which partook of much of the dry,
formal, pedantic spirit of the day, in which regularity of form,
scientific correctness, and a conscious propriety of manner were often
more considered than emotional fervor. Certain conventions, such as a
florid contrapuntal treatment of the Kyrie with its slow introduction
followed by an Allegro, the fugues at the Cum Sanctu Spiritu and the Et
Vitam, the regular alternation of solo and chorus numbers, give the
typical Austrian mass a somewhat rigid, perfunctory air, and in practice
produce the effect which always results when expression becomes
stereotyped and form is exalted over substance. Mozart's masses, with the
exception of the beautiful Requiem (which was his last work and belongs
in a different category), were the production of his boyhood, written
before his genius became self-assertive and under conditions distinctly
unfavorable to the free exercise of the imagination.
The masses of Joseph Haydn stand somewhat apart from the strict Austrian
school, for although as a rule they conform externally to the local
conventions, they are far more individual and possess a freedom and
buoyancy that are decidedly personal. It has become the fashion among the
sterner critics of church music to condemn Haydn's masses without
qualification, as conspicuous examples of the degradation of taste in
religious art which is one of the depressing legacies of the eighteenth
century. Much of this censure is deserved, for Haydn too often loses
sight of the law which demands that music should reinforce, and not
contradict, the meaning and purpose of the text. Haydn's mass style is
often indistinguishable from his oratorio style. His colorature arias are
flippant, often introduced at such solemn moments as to be offensive.
Even where the voice part is subdued to an appropriate solemnity, the
desired impression is frequently destroyed by some tawdry flourish in the
orchestra. The brilliancy of the choruses is often pompous and hollow.
Haydn's genius was primarily instrumental; he was the virtual creator of
the modern symphony and string quartet; his musical forms and modes of
expression were drawn from two diverse sources which it was his great
mission to conciliate and idealize, _viz._, the Italian aristocratic
opera, and the dance and song of the common people. An extraordinary
sense of form and an instinctive sympathy with whatever is spontaneous,
genial, and racy made him what he was. The joviality of his nature was
irrepressible. To write music of a sombre cast was out of his power.
There is not a melancholy strain in all his works; pensiveness was as
deep a note as he could strike. He tried to defend the gay tone of his
church music by saying that he had such a sense of the goodness of God
that he could not be otherwise than joyful in thinking of him. This
explanation was perfectly sincere, but Haydn was not enough of a
philosopher to see the weak spot in this sort of aesthetics. Yet in spite
of the obvious faults of Haydn's mass style, looking at it from a
historic point of view, it was a promise of advance, and not a sign of
degeneracy. For it marked the introduction of genuine, even if
misdirected feeling into worship music, in the place of dull conformity
to routine. Haydn was far indeed from solving the problem of church
music, but he helped to give new life to a form that showed danger of
becoming atrophied.
Two masses of world importance rise above the mediocrity of the Austrian
school, like the towers of some Gothic cathedral above the monotonous
tiled roofs of a mediaeval city,--the Requiem of Mozart and the Missa
Solemnis of Beethoven. The unfinished masterpiece of Mozart outsoars all
comparison with the religious works of his youth, and as his farewell to
the world he could impart to it a tone of pathos and exaltation which had
hardly been known in the cold, objective treatment of the usual
eighteenth-century mass. The hand of death was upon Mozart as he penned
the immortal pages of the Requiem, and in this crisis he could feel that
he was free from the dictation of fashion and precedent. This work is
perhaps not all that we might look for in these solemn circumstances.
Mozart's exquisite genius was suited rather to the task, in which lies
his true glory, of raising the old Italian opera to its highest
possibilities of grace and truth to nature. He had not that depth of
feeling and sweep of imagination which make the works of Bach, Haendel,
and Beethoven the sublimest expression of awe in view of the mysteries of
life and death. Yet it is wholly free from the fripperies which disfigure
the masses of Haydn, as well as from the dry scholasticism of much of
Mozart's own early religious work. Such movements as the Confutatis, the
Recordare, and the Lacrimosa--movements inexpressibly earnest, consoling,
and pathetic--gave evidence that a new and loftier spirit had entered the
music of the Church.
The Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, composed 1818-1822, can hardly be
considered from the liturgic point of view. In the vastness of its
dimensions it is quite disproportioned to the ceremony to which it
theoretically belongs, and its almost unparalleled difficulty of
execution and the grandeur of its choral climaxes remove it beyond the
reach of all but the most exceptional choirs. It is, therefore, performed
only as a concert work by choral societies with a full orchestral
equipment. For these reasons it is not to be classed with the service
masses of the Catholic Church, but may be placed beside the B minor Mass
of Sebastian Bach, both holding a position outside all ordinary
comparisons. Each of these colossal creations stands on its own solitary
eminence, the projection in tones of the religious conceptions of two
gigantic, all-comprehending intellects. For neither of these two works is
the Catholic Church strictly responsible. They do not proceed from within
the Church. Bach was a strict Protestant; Beethoven, although nominally a
disciple of the Catholic Church, had almost no share in her communion,
and his religious belief, so far as the testimony goes, was a sort of
pantheistic mysticism. Both these supreme artists in the later periods of
their careers gave free rein to their imaginations and not only well-nigh
exceeded all available means of performance, but also seemed to strive to
force musical forms and the powers of instruments and voices beyond their
limits in the efforts to realize that which is unrealizable through any
human medium. In this endeavor they went to the very verge of the
sublime, and produced achievements which excite wonder and awe. These two
masses defy all imitation, and represent no school. The spirit of
individualism in religious music can go no further.
The last masses of international importance produced on Austrian soil are
those of Franz Schubert. Of his six Latin masses four are youthful works,
pure and graceful, but not especially significant. In his E flat and A
flat masses, however, he takes a place in the upper rank of mass
composers of this century. The E flat Mass is weakened by the diffuseness
which was Schubert's besetting sin; the A flat is more terse and
sustained in excellence, and thoroughly available for practical use. Both
of them contain movements of purest ideal beauty and sincere worshipful
spirit, and often rise to a grandeur that is unmarred by sensationalism
and wholly in keeping with the tone of awe which pervades even the most
exultant moments of the liturgy.
The lofty idealism exemplified in such works as Mozart's Requiem,
Beethoven's Mass in D, Schubert's last two masses, and in a less degree
in Weber's Mass in E flat has never since been lost from the German mass,
in spite of local and temporary reactions. Such composers as Kiel,
Havert, Grell, and Rheinberger have done noble service in holding German
Catholic music fast to the tradition of seriousness and truth which has
been taking form all through this century in German secular music. It
must be said, however, that the German Catholic Church at large,
especially in the country districts, has been too often dull to the
righteous claims of the profounder expression of devotional feeling, and
has maintained the vogue of the Italian mass and the shallower products
of the Austrian school. Against this indifference the St. Cecilia Society
has directed its noble missionary labors, with as yet but partial
success.
If we turn our observation to Italy and France we find that the music of
the Church is at every period sympathetically responsive to the
fluctuations in secular music. Elevated and dignified, if somewhat cold
and constrained, in the writings of the nobler spirits of the Neapolitan
school such as Durante and Jomelli, sweet and graceful even to effeminacy
in Pergolesi, sensuous and saccharine in Rossini, imposing and massive,
rising at times to epic grandeur, in Cherubini, by turns ecstatic and
voluptuous in Gounod, ardent and impassioned in Verdi--the ecclesiastical
music of the Latin nations offers works of adorable beauty, sometimes
true to the pure devotional ideal, sometimes perverse, and by their
isolation serving to illustrate the dependence of the church composer's
inspiration upon the general conditions of musical taste and progress.
Not only were those musicians of France and Italy who were prominent as
church composers also among the leaders in opera, but their ideals and
methods in opera were closely paralleled by those displayed in their
religious productions. It is impossible to separate the powerful masses
of Cherubini, with their pomp and majesty of movement, their reserved and
pathetic melody, their grandiose dimensions and their sumptuous
orchestration, from those contemporary tendencies in dramatic art which
issued in the "historic school" of grand opera as exemplified in the
pretentious works of Spontini and Meyerbeer. They may be said to be the
reflection in church art of the hollow splendor of French imperialism.
Such an expression, however, may be accused of failing in justice to the
undeniable merits of Cherubini's masses. As a man and as a musician
Cherubini commands unbounded respect for his unswerving sincerity in an
age of sham, his uncompromising assertion of his dignity as an artist in
an age of sycophancy, and the solid worth of his achievement in the midst
of shallow aims and mediocre results. As a church composer he towers so
high above his predecessors of the eighteenth century in respect to
learning and imagination that his masses are not unworthy to stand beside
Beethoven's Missa Solemnis as auguries of the loftier aims that were soon
to prevail in the realm of religious music. His Requiem in C minor,
particularly, by reason of its exquisite tenderness, breadth of thought,
nobility of expression, and avoidance of all excess either of agitation
or of gloom, must be ranked among the most admirable modern examples of
pure Catholic art.
The effort of Lesueur (1763-1837) to introduce into church music a
picturesque and imitative style--which, in spite of much that was
striking and attractive in result, must be pronounced a false direction
in church music--was characteristically French and was continued in such
works as Berlioz's Requiem and to a certain extent in the masses and
psalms of Liszt. The genius of Liszt, notwithstanding his Hungarian
birth, was closely akin to the French in his tendency to connect every
musical impulse with a picture or with some mental conception which could
be grasped in distinct concrete outline. In his youth Liszt, in his
despair over the degeneracy of liturgic music in France and its complete
separation from the real life of the people, proclaimed the necessity of
a _rapprochement_ between church music and popular music. In an article
written for a Paris journal in 1834, which remains a fragment, he
imagined a new style of religious music which should "unite in colossal
relations theatre and church, which should be at the same time dramatic
and solemn, imposing and simple, festive and earnest, fiery and
unconstrained, stormy and reposeful, clear and fervent." These
expressions are too vague to serve as a program for a new art movement.
They imply, however, a protest against the one-sided operatic tendency of
the day, at the same time indicating the conviction that the problem is
not to be solved in a pedantic reaction toward the ancient austere ideal,
and yet that the old and new endeavors, liturgic appropriateness and
characteristic expression, reverence of mood and recognition of the
claims of contemporary taste, should in some way be made to harmonize.
The man who all his life conceived the theatre as a means of popular
education, and who strove to realize that conception as court music
director at Weimar, would also lament any alienation between the church
ceremony and the intellectual and emotional habitudes and inclinations of
the people. A devoted churchman reverencing the ancient ecclesiastical
tradition, and at the same time a musical artist of the advanced modern
type, Liszt's instincts yearned more or less blindly towards an alliance
between the sacerdotal conception of religious art and the general
artistic spirit of the age. Some such vision evidently floated before his
mind in the masses, psalms, and oratorios of his later years, as shown in
their frequent striving after the picturesque, together with an
inclination toward the older ecclesiastical forms. These two ideals are
probably incompatible; at any rate Liszt did not possess the genius to
unite them in a convincing manner.
Among the later ecclesiastical composers of France, Gounod shines out
conspicuously by virtue of those fascinating melodic gifts which have
made the fame of the St. Cecilia mass almost conterminous with that of
the opera "Faust." Indeed, there is hardly a better example of the modern
propensity of the dramatic and religious styles to reflect each other's
lineaments than is found in the close parallelism which appears in
Gounod's secular and church productions. So liable, or perhaps we might
say, so neutral is his art, that a similar quality of melting cadence is
made to portray the mutual avowals of love-lorn souls and the raptures of
heavenly aspiration. Those who condemn Gounod's religious music on this
account as sensuous have some reason on their side, yet no one has ever
ventured to accuse Gounod of insincerity, and it may well be that his
wide human sympathy saw enough correspondence between the worship of an
earthly ideal and that of a heavenly--each implying the abandonment of
self-consciousness in the yearning for a happiness which is at the moment
the highest conceivable--as to make the musical expression of both
essentially similar. This is to say that the composer forgets liturgic
claims in behalf of the purely human. This principle no doubt involves
the destruction of church music as a distinctive form of art, but it is
certain that the world at large, as evinced by the immense popularity of
Gounod's religious works, sees no incongruity and does not feel that such
usage is profane. Criticism on the part of all but the most austere is
disarmed by the pure, seraphic beauty which this complacent art of Gounod
often reveals. The intoxicating sweetness of his melody and harmony never
sinks to a Rossinian flippancy. Of Gounod's reverence for the Church and
for its art ideals, there can be no question. A man's views of the proper
tone of church music will be controlled largely by his temperament, and
Gounod's temperament was as warm as an Oriental's. He offered to the
Church his best, and as the Magi brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to
a babe born among cattle in a stable, so Gounod, with a consecration
equally sincere, clothed his prayers in strains so ecstatic that compared
with them the most impassioned accents of "Faust" and "Romeo and Juliet"
are tame. He was a profound student of Palestrina, Mozart, and Cherubini,
and strong traces of the styles of these masters are apparent in his
works.
Somewhat similar qualities, although far less sensational, are found in
the productions of that admirable band of organists and church composers
that now lends such lustre to the art life of the French capital. The
culture of such representatives of this school as Guilmant, Widor,
Saint-Saens, Dubois, Gigout is so solidly based, and their views of
religious music so judicious, that the methods and traditions which they
are conscientiously engaged in establishing need only the reinforcement
of still higher genius to bring forth works which will confer even
greater honor upon Catholicism than she has yet received from the
devotion of her musical sons in France. No purer or nobler type of
religious music has appeared in these latter days than is to be found in
the compositions of Cesar Franck (1822-1890). For the greater part of his
life overlooked or disdained by all save a devoted band of disciples, in
spirit and in learning he was allied to the Palestrinas and the Bachs,
and there are many who place him in respect to genius among the foremost
of the French musicians of the nineteenth century.
The religious works of Verdi might be characterized in much the same
terms as those of Gounod. In Verdi also we have a truly filial devotion
to the Catholic Church, united with a temperament easily excited to a
white heat when submitted to his musical inspiration, and a genius for
melody and seductive harmonic combinations in which he is hardly equalled
among modern composers. In his Manzoni Requiem, Stabat Mater, and Te Deum
these qualities are no less in evidence than in "Aida" and "Otello," and
it would be idle to deny their devotional sincerity on account of their
lavish profusion of nerve-exciting effects. The controversy between the
contemners and the defenders of the Manzoni Requiem is now somewhat stale
and need not be revived here. Any who may wish to resuscitate it,
however, on account of the perennial importance of the question of what
constitutes purity and appropriateness in church art, must in justice put
themselves into imaginative sympathy with the racial religious feeling of
an Italian, and make allowance also for the undeniable suggestion of the
dramatic in the Catholic ritual, and for the natural effect of the
Catholic ceremonial and its peculiar atmosphere upon the more ardent,
enthusiastic order of minds.
The most imposing contributions that have been made to Catholic liturgic
music since Verdi's Requiem are undoubtedly the Requiem Mass and the
Stabat Mater of Dvorak. All the wealth of tone color which is contained
upon the palette of this master of harmony and instrumentation has been
laid upon these two magnificent scores. Inferior to Verdi in variety and
gorgeousness of melody, the Bohemian composer surpasses the great Italian
in massiveness, dignity, and in unfailing good taste. There can be no
question that Dvorak's Stabat Mater is supreme over all other
settings--the only one, except Verdi's much shorter work, that is worthy
of the pathos and tenderness of this immortal Sequence. The Requiem of
Dvorak in spite of a tendency to monotony, is a work of exceeding beauty,
rising often to grandeur, and is notable, apart from its sheer musical
qualities, as the most precious gift to Catholic art that has come from
the often rebellious land of Bohemia.
It would be profitless to attempt to predict the future of Catholic
church music. In the hasty survey which we have made of the Catholic mass
in the past three centuries we have been able to discover no law of
development except the almost unanimous agreement of the chief composers
to reject law and employ the sacred text of Scripture and liturgy as the
basis of works in which not the common consciousness of the Church shall
be expressed, but the emotions aroused by the action of sacred ideas upon
different temperaments and divergent artistic methods. There is no sign
that this principle of individual liberty will be renounced.
Nevertheless, the increasing deference that is paid to authority, the
growing study of the works and ideals of the past which is so apparent in
the culture of the present day, will here and there issue in partial
reactions. The mind of the present, having seen the successful working
out of certain modern problems and the barrenness of others, is turning
eclectic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of musical
culture, both religious and secular. We see that in many influential
circles the question becomes more and more insistent, what is truth and
appropriateness?--whereas formerly the demand was for novelty and
"effect." Under this better inspiration many beautiful works are produced
which are marked by dignity, moderation, and an almost austere reserve,
drawing a sharp distinction between the proper ecclesiastical tone and
that suited to concert and dramatic music, restoring once more the idea
of impersonality, expressing in song the conception of the fathers that
the Church is a refuge, a retreat from the tempests of the world, a place
of penitence and restoration to confidence in the near presence of
heaven.
Such masses as the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, the D minor of Cherubini,
the Messe Solennelle of Rossini, the St. Cecilia of Gounod, the Requiems
of Berlioz and Verdi, sublime and unspeakably beautiful as they are from
the broadly human standpoint, are yet in a certain sense sceptical. They
reveal a mood of agitation which is not that intended by the
ministrations of the Church in her organized acts of worship. And yet
such works will continue to be produced, and the Church will accept them,
in grateful recognition of the sincere homage which their creation
implies. It is of the nature of the highest artistic genius that it
cannot restrain its own fierce impulses out of conformity to a type or
external tradition. It will express its own individual emotion or it will
become paralyzed and mute. The religious compositions that will humbly
yield to a strict liturgic standard in form and expression will be those
of writers of the third or fourth grade, just as the church hymns have
been, with few exceptions, the production, not of the great poets, but of
men of lesser artistic endowment, and who were primarily churchmen, and
poets only by second intention. This will doubtless be the law for all
time. The Michael Angelos, the Dantes, the Beethovens will forever break
over rules, even though they be the rules of a beloved mother Church.
The time is past, however, when we may fear any degeneracy like to that
which overtook church music one hundred or more years ago. The principles
of such consecrated church musicians as Witt, Tinel, and the leaders of
the St. Cecilia Society and the Paris Schola Cantorum, the influence of
the will of the Church implied in all her admonitions on the subject of
liturgic song, the growing interest in the study of the masters of the
past, and, more than all, the growth of sound views of art as a detail of
the higher and the popular education, must inevitably promote an
increasing conviction among clergy, choir leaders, and people of the
importance of purity and appropriateness in the music of the Church. The
need of reform in many of the Catholic churches of this and other
countries is known to every one. Doubtless one cause of the frequent
indifference, of priests to the condition of the choir music in their
churches is the knowledge that the chorus and organ are after all but
accessories; that the Church possesses in the Gregorian chant a form of
song that is the legal, universal, and unchangeable foundation of the
musical ceremony, and that any corruption in the gallery music can never
by any possibility extend to the heart of the system. The Church is
indeed fortunate in the possession of this altar song, the unifying chain
which can never be loosened. All the more reason, therefore, why this
consciousness of unity should pervade all portions of the ceremony, and
the spirit of the liturgic chant should blend even with the large freedom
of modern musical experiment.