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 powei's 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 Michel Angelo. Henceforth Italian music
was to be a vigorous, fruitful stock.
Giovanni Perluigui Aloisio da Palestrina was born at Palestrina, the
ancient Præneste, in 1524.*
* Our composer, as was common with artists and scholars in
those days, took the name of his natal town, and by this he
is known to fame. Old documents also give him the old Latin
name of the town with the personal ending.
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
afterward 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
honor. 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 labors.
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 realized in the heavenly Jerusalem in his
prophetic trance." This is now known as the "mass of Pope Marcel," in
honor 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 afterward, 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 idolized, 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 honorable 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
labors of his successors.