Chapter II: The Polyphonic Period (2)

The second half of the sixteenth century has been aptly called ‘The Golden Age of Ecclesiastical Music.’ Further progress was impossible along the line of vocal counterpoint brought to such astounding perfection by Palestrina, yet the Palestrina style found zealous imitators for a half-century at least after the passing of the great Roman master. But the spirit of the Renaissance, now rampant in every field of human thought, refused to be held in check by church doors, and the glories of the ‘Golden Age,’ the products of an art rejoicing in the full maturity of its power, were almost immediately followed by a period of decadence, in which secular sentimentality was mingled in strange fellowship with what remained of the majestic devotional style of the old masters. The triumphant progress of secular music, instrumental as well as operatic, soon broke down the opposition of the ecclesiastical purists, and after Allegri the Palestrina style practically disappeared. Gregorio Allegri (about 1580-1652) is remembered now almost wholly by his celebrated _Miserere_ for nine voices in two choirs, which is considered to be one of the finest compositions ever conceived for the Roman service. Until recently at least, it has been sung annually during Holy Week at the Sistine Chapel, where it was prized as so rare a treasure that to copy it was punishable with excommunication.[37] Up to the year 1770 only three copies are known to have been legally made. In that year, it will be recalled, the fourteen-year-old Mozart wrote it down with marvellous accuracy from the memory of a single performance. Much of the ineffable sadness of this piece, which, as it is performed in the Sistine Chapel, has always aroused the unbounded enthusiasm of musicians, is said to be due to certain traditional embellishments or florid passages which were introduced in the form of elaborate four-part cadenzas to take the place of the simple endings of some of the verses. Mendelssohn, in a letter to Zelter during his Italian journey in 1831, described in great detail the music of these beautiful _abbellimenti_. Of one of these he says: ‘It is often repeated, and makes so deep an impression that when it begins an evident excitement pervades all present.... The soprano intones the high C in a pure, soft voice, allowing it to vibrate for a time, and slowly gliding down, while the alto holds its C steadily, so that at first I was under the delusion that the high C was still held by the soprano. The skill, too, with which the harmony is gradually developed is truly marvellous.’

It must not be supposed that Palestrina was the only great church composer of his period. There were others during his lifetime and immediately following, whose genius would have been proclaimed of the first magnitude had it not been for the greater effulgence of Palestrina’s. Giovanni Maria Nanino (about 1545-1607) ranks as second only to Palestrina among the Italian church composers, as witness his motet for six voices, _Hodie nobis cœlorum rex_, annually sung in the Sistine Chapel on Christmas morning; his mass, _Vestiva i colli_, for five voices; and particularly his Lamentations set in simple melodious style for four male voices. His brother, Giovanni Bernardino Nanino (about 1560-about 1618), wrote a remarkable _Salve Regina_ for twelve voices in which the new spirit of striving for unusual effects is noticeable. Viadana (about 1564-1645) introduced into church music the _concerti ecclesiastici_, which were a kind of monodic chant or song for from one to four voices with organ accompaniment indicated by a _basso continuo_, or figured bass. Most of his church music, however, was written in the old contrapuntal style. Following the trend of the times, Francesco Soriano or Suriano (1549-about 1621) permitted the dramatic style of the monodists to enter very perceptibly into his ‘Passions for Holy Week,’ probably his best work. Among the greatest of Palestrina’s contemporaries was Tomasso da Vittoria (about 1540-about 1613), sometimes called ‘the Spanish Palestrina.’ His greatest masterpiece is the elaborate six-part Requiem Mass, composed for the obsequies of the Empress Maria, widow of Maximilian II. Next to Palestrina’s Mass for the Dead, this is the most important and profoundly moving among the many settings of this office as pure ritual-music. Its subjects are all taken from plain-song melodies, yet it has an astonishingly modern quality, due to Vittoria’s employment of powerful, sonorous chords and especially to a warmer and more direct and personal mode of expressing his religious emotions than composers of the polyphonic school were wont to assume. Palestrina’s religious music is the music of a soul of immaculate purity, as though, to use Ambros’ figure, his strains were messengers from a higher world; Vittoria’s music was the responsive utterance of a saintly soul on earth, struggling amid poignantly human emotions for a heavenly estate. Among his other works, the _Improperia_ gained great renown for their purity of church style and warmth and tenderness of expression.

Before leaving the field of church music of this period, something must be said of the worthy rival to the Roman school that had sprung up and flourished mightily in Venice. Here in the midst of the prosperity, luxury, and splendor of this cultured ‘Queen of the Seas’ was a group of earnest musicians who did not fear to loosen the bands of tradition or to accept new ideals and venture on untrodden paths that led in new directions; so that the products of the Venetian school, rather than the Roman, formed the natural bridge between the mediæval and modern conceptions of religious music. The masters of Venetian music, Willaert and the two Gabrielis, seemed to borrow for their music something of the brilliant coloring of the Venetian painters. Luxuriant harmonies, massive and bold chord-effects, the employment of numerous chromatic tones which assisted powerfully in changing the old modal system into the modern key system, a desire for greater sonority and contrast in color and expression--all these qualities, with their emphasis upon individual characterization, opposed themselves strikingly to the calmness, the delicacy, and the impersonality of the Palestrina style. All the great Venetian masters occupied the post of chapel-master at St. Mark’s, then one of the most important musical appointments in Europe. The use of several choirs, which was introduced by Adrian Willaert (about 1480-1562) and became a characteristic feature of Venetian church music, owed its origin to the architectural structure of this church, which contains two opposing choir lofts, each with its own organ. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli added a third choir and with this elaborate mechanism produced unprecedented choral effects by ingenious groupings of voices, heard now as separate choirs, now in answering alternation, now as selected voices from each choir, and now in magnificent masses of tone. A twelve-part psalm, _Deus misereatur nostri_, written by G. Gabrieli (1557-1612) for three choirs--one consisting of deep voices, one of higher, and the third of the usual four parts--is one of the most imposing examples of this type of grandiose many-choired music. He is one of the few church composers who have left no masses. His most famous work, two volumes of _Sacræ Symphoniæ_, consisted of motets for from six to sixteen voices, to which he added free accompaniments written for various combinations of orchestral instruments with organ. In thus broadening the scope of church music to include instrumental groupings and effects in combination with voices, he stands as the pioneer of a dawning movement fraught with greatest possibilities for the future development of both ecclesiastical music and independent instrumental music. The chief work of Andrea Gabrieli (1510-1586), uncle of Giovanni, was, according to his own testimony, the six-part ‘Penitential Psalms,’ though this was outdone in magnificence and tonal beauty by his many compositions for several choirs. One of the most notable and popular of the Venetian composers was Giovanni Croce (about 1560-1609), whose masses, written in a style of noble simplicity, are still favorites with Catholic church choirs.

VI

The century which culminated in the ‘Golden Age of Ecclesiastical Music’ was also the period of greatest glory for the madrigal. In the first half of the century its leading exponents were Jacques Arcadelt (about 1514-about 1555), Philippe Verdelot (dates of birth and death unknown), Huberto Waelrant (about 1518-1595), and especially Adrian Willaert (about 1480-1562), in the madrigals of all of whom there are revealed a lucidity of style, a graceful melodic flow, and, when the character of the words demanded, a simplicity of treatment, which together constituted the true sixteenth-century madrigalian style. Arcadelt, a Netherlander by birth and education, lived for many years in Italy, where his madrigals became so popular that his First Book, published in Venice in 1538, passed through sixteen editions in eighty years, the first to win marked success. Though he wrote much church music, his fame rests on his charming madrigals, only a few of which, unfortunately, are accessible in modern form. Waelrant’s _Vorrei morire_ (published with English words ‘Hard by a fountain,’ which, however, have no relation to the Italian text) is a beautiful example of this type. Orlandus Lassus was the last of the great Netherland madrigalists and he left many books of splendid compositions in this style.

In art-loving Venice an especially brilliant group of madrigalists appeared who brought added renown and honor to this centre of culture and learning. Adrian Willaert, one of the many gifted migratory Netherlanders, was the first to make the Venetians acquainted with this form, of distinctly northern origin, and its popularity quickly spread all over Italy. Under Italian influences the severity of its melodic outlines softened and it readily responded to the national love of color and warmth. While Willaert can no longer be called the ‘Father of the Madrigal,’ he was one of the first strong writers in the madrigal-form, and his transplantation of it from Flanders to sunny Italy gave to it just the genial quality needed to bring it to full maturity. He was especially influential in developing a freer style and a taste for chromaticism. This tendency found strongest accentuation in the ‘Chromatic Madrigals’[38] of Ciprian de Rore (1516-1565). He published five books of these and, while many were in the nature of experiments, they served to prepare the way for the mastery of chromatic elements so conspicuous in later composers. His madrigals, written in an original and genial style of great richness, enjoyed enormous popularity. Giovanni Croce paid homage to the spirit of the times in a notable collection of humorous part-songs (_Triaca musicale_, _Capricci_) for from four to seven voices. The Gabrielis were also generous contributors to the development of the madrigal, which, in its adopted home in Italy, attained its fairest and most luxuriant flowering.

The earliest of the Italians to achieve notable success in madrigal-writing was the Roman, Constanzo Festa (died 1545). One of his madrigals, ‘Down in a flowery vale’ (_Quando ritrovo la mia pastorella_), attained the distinction of being for a long time the most widely-known piece of its class in England. Palestrina showed his supreme command over all styles by freeing the madrigal from Flemish influences and contributing in goodly measure to the literature of this fascinating form. Among them are many _madrigali spirituali_--compositions midway in seriousness between the motet and the light _chanson_, which aimed to bring into church music more of the warmth and grace of the best secular music. In the new style of madrigal-writing Palestrina was followed with splendid results by his successor in office as ‘composer to the Papal Choir,’ Felice Anerio, by Francesco Anerio, brother of the preceding, by the Naninis, and, in particular, by Luca Marenzio (about 1560-1599), who devoted himself especially to the advancement of secular art and whose madrigals were of such captivating beauty and expressive power that he earned for himself the title of ‘the sweetest swan of Italy.’ His reputation was far-extended and his popularity[39] in England was so great that Dr. Burney not only places him among the greatest of all madrigal writers, but traces the passion for this form of secular music that spread over England beginning about 1590, directly to the wide appreciation of his highly-perfected madrigal style.

The madrigal was carried to Germany by Netherlanders and German students of the Venetians, but it never succeeded in making much headway against the national fondness for the folk-song (_Volkslied_), from which it radically differed. Neither was it seriously valued in France, although here the _chanson_ had long enjoyed great popularity and had furnished the type from which the early Flemish madrigals were evolved. English soil, however, was especially favorable to its development, and it was no sooner transplanted thither from Italy and Flanders than it took deep root and flourished with a luxuriance that did not lose its splendor beside the best works of Rome or Venice. Richard Edwards (1523-1566) and William Byrd (1543-1623), the latter the greatest English composer of the sixteenth century, had both written polyphonic secular songs of the madrigal type that had achieved wide fame, but the national love of part-songs received an extraordinary stimulus from the publication in 1588 of _Musica Transalpina_,[40] a collection of over fifty madrigals selected from the best Flemish and Italian composers of the time and adapted to English words. These were received with such astonishing favor that the madrigal at once leaped into the importance almost of a national institution, fostered by a numerous school of composers who devoted themselves almost wholly to perfecting it. All the best English composers delighted in producing madrigals in countless profusion. Between the years of 1590 and 1630 no less than 2,000 pieces in this form were published, so that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the madrigal stands out as the clearest expression of the contemporary English national taste, the favorite of composers and public alike. The flowering period of the English madrigal was the first two decades of the seventeenth century, when a truly brilliant galaxy of native composers developed characteristics that distinguish it quite clearly from its continental relatives and place it on a secure vantage-ground where it need fear no rival. In delicacy, simplicity, and a delicious naïveté, some of the English madrigals of this period are unapproachable. During the Elizabethan era English church-music reached a high standard, but it sounds restrained and almost perfunctory beside the joyous, fresh, spontaneous flow of these madrigals.

Chief in importance among the English madrigalists was Thomas Morley (1557-about 1602), whose music revels in irrepressible cheerfulness and sweet tunefulness. He showed an especial fondness for the light canzonets and ballets, or fa-las, in which latter form, introduced by him into England, he is unrivalled. His contemporary, John Dowland (1563-1626), was equally successful in his canzonets and ‘Songes or Ayres of foure parts.’ But the inspired pieces of John Wilbye (dates of birth and death unknown) are universally considered to be the best representatives of the English madrigal in its purest and most characteristic and comprehensive form. Other great masters of this form were George Kirbye (died 1634), Thomas Weelkes (about 1575-1623), John Bennet (dates unknown), Michael Este (dates unknown), Thomas Ravenscroft (about 1582-about 1635), and Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). There can be no doubt that the splendor of this era of madrigal-writing was made more lustrous by the sympathetic interest taken in this popular form by many of the best poets of the brilliant Elizabethan period. The works of many of the inspired makers of these sweet old melodies are still sung with delight and dearly prized by the numerous choral societies and clubs that zealously cultivate unaccompanied vocal part-music. Since madrigal-writing has experienced somewhat of a revival in recent years, it will be of interest to enumerate some of the most beautiful and most famous of these old compositions which still retain an imperishable charm and undying appeal. Among such will be found the following: Dowland’s ‘Awake, sweet Love,’ ‘Come again,’ and ‘Now, oh! now, I needs must part’; Weelkes’ ‘In pride of May,’ ‘The Nightingale,’ and the bold ‘Like two proud armies’; Wilbye’s ‘The Lady Oriana’ (in praise of Queen Elizabeth), ‘Flora gave me fairest flowers,’ ‘Lady, when I behold,’ ‘Down in a valley,’ ‘Draw on, sweet Night,’ and ‘But Sweet take heed’; and Bateson’s ‘In Heaven lives Oriana.’

Some of the English madrigalists of this period, as Edwards and Gibbons, were close kin to the Netherlanders in style and feeling. Many of the madrigals of Byrd, Weelkes, Wilbye, and Kirbye are elaborate in design and display ingenious and delightful imitation, but in general there is discoverable a clear tendency to discard the burdensome rules of ecclesiastical writing. With the development of this tendency the passing of the madrigal proper began, for the prime essentials of a true madrigal, no matter what it may be called, are that it must conform to the general feeling of some ecclesiastical mode and must be written in accordance with contrapuntal procedure. Without these qualities the madrigal flavor is lost. After 1620 it began to merge into the simpler and lighter glee and part-song, which forms will be considered in Chapter IV.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Dickinson, ‘Music in the History of the Western Church,’ p. 83.

[15] The largest contributions to the mass were made by the Eastern Church during the first four centuries and were translated into Latin by the Church of Rome.

[16] From the Latin _missa_ in the sentence, _Ite, missa est_ (‘Depart, the assembly is dismissed’), sung by the deacon immediately before the close of the service.

[17] The practice of thus displacing the authorized Gregorian chants with folk-songs was inaugurated by Dufay. In three of his four-part masses, preserved in the archives of the Papal Choir, the subjects are all borrowed from popular songs, with the secular words accompanying them--among them being _L’homme armé_.

[18] Weinmann, ‘History of Church Music,’ p. 85.

[19] Parry, ‘The Evolution of the Art of Music,’ p. 103.

[20] Tournay was one of the chief musical centres of the Gallo-Belgic period and its cathedral possessed a body of choristers trained to the highest point of efficiency then known to the vocal art.

[21] Naumann, ‘The History of Music’ (Eng. trans.), Vol. I, p. 325.

[22] Kiesewetter, ‘The History of Music,’ p. 131.

[23] Mendelssohn wrote a similar part for Hensel in his ‘Son and Stranger.’

[24] The origin of the word is veiled in much obscurity, which has been increased in large measure by the varied spellings adopted by early writers (_motetum_, _motectum_, _motellus_, _motulus_, _mutetus_).

[25] These three classes comprised (1) those forms in which all voice-parts had the same words, as the _Cantilena_, the _Rondel_ or _Rota_, the _Organum communiter sumptum_; (2) those in which each part had its own special words, as the _Motet_; and (3) those in which some parts had words and others merely vocalized, as _Hoquet_ or _Ochetus_, the _Conductus_, and _Organum purum vel proprie sumptum_. _Organum purum_ was the oldest form and was held in great reverence by the earliest writers.

[26] Thus in _Salvatoris mater_, an old three-part Latin motet, probably of the first half of the fifteenth century, by the Englishman, Thomas Damett, quoted in the ‘Oxford History of Music,’ Vol. II, p. 149, the texts of the two upper parts are prayers to the Virgin and to St. George in behalf of King Henry VI, while the lowest part sings the _Benedictus_.

[27] His _Ars compositionis de Motetis_, preserved in the Paris library, is supposed to have been written between 1290 and 1310.

[28] _Geschichte der Musik_, Vol. III, p. 353.

[29] All of these were part-songs of the _chanson_ and madrigal type.

[30] So called from the name of his birthplace, a small town southeast of Rome, the ancient Præneste.

[31] Waldo S. Pratt, ‘History of Music,’ p. 124.

[32] Arthur Mees, ‘Choirs and Choral Music,’ p. 62.

[33] Edward Dickinson, ‘Music in the History of the Western Church,’ p. 167.

[34] He was then _Maestro di Cappella_ of Santa Maria Maggiore.

[35] A full and authoritative discussion of the facts and fables associated with this mass, based on researches in the archives, will be found in F. X. Haberl’s _Die Kardinal-Kommission von 1564 und Palestrina’s Missa Papæ Marcelli_.

[36] _Missa Brevis_ was a name given to a mass of moderate length and not intended for festival occasions of great solemnity.

[37] It was published for the first time with the Pope’s permission by Dr. Burney. It is given in almost complete form in Grove’s ‘Dictionary of Music and Musicians,’ Art. ‘Miserere.’

[38] The most famous of these, set to Petrarch’s _Vergini_, have in recent years been published by Breitkopf and Haertel.

[39] Of the 57 madrigals in _Musica Transalpina_, published in London in 1588, ten were by him, and of the twenty-eight numbers in Watson’s ‘Italian Madrigals Englished,’ published in 1590, twenty-three were from his pen.

[40] Rockstro avers that the word ‘madrigal’ appears for the first time in England in the preface to this volume.