Chapter IV (1)

THE EARLY ITALIAN SECULAR CANTATA, THE GERMAN CLASSICAL CANTATA, THE
ENGLISH ANTHEM, AND OTHER SHORT CHORAL FORMS

The entrance of dramatic tendencies into music--Carissimi
and the early cantata; Rossi, Cesti, and Legrenzi--A.
Scarlatti, the culminating point in cantata-writing in
Italy; later developments of the Italian cantata--The German
church cantata and its relation to the Lutheran service;
cantata-texts of Neumeister and others--Bach in the service
of the church; his church cantatas--G. F. Handel; Joseph
Haydn; W. A. Mozart--English church music in the eighteenth
century; the anthem; Croft, Greene, Boyce, and others--Later
history of the motet in England, Italy, and Germany;
decadence of the madrigal; the glee, the part-song, the
masque and the ode.

The year 1600 is probably the most significant milestone in all the long history of the development of the art of music. By a strange coincidence this year witnessed the performance of the first oratorio, Cavalieri’s ‘The Representation of Body and Soul,’ in Rome and the first public performance[49] of opera, Peri’s _Euridice_, in Florence. These events were of tremendous import in that they not only emphasized and gave direction to the newly-developed dramatic tendencies, but made necessary the further and more complete development of two closely-related but subordinate activities--independent instrumental music and pure vocal art. The entrance of a consciously dramatic element into musical composition meant a comprehensive widening of the area of musical expression. Heretofore music had served its chief purpose and had found its justification in the service of the church. Though there are portions of the Roman Catholic liturgy that are essentially dramatic in their spiritual significance, the avowedly impersonal character of the whole liturgy had excluded the possibility of utilizing these situations for dramatic treatment, even in those parts specifically given over to elaborate musical settings. Had such a dramatic treatment been in consonance with the spirit of this liturgy, some of the many opportunities would certainly have been seized upon by such a genius as Palestrina, for there are many striking examples in his masses and motets of his wonderful ability to delineate the sentiment and mood of the text and reinforce the meaning and significance of a word by some expressive chord or dissonance. These instances serve to suggest how deeply he sensed the genius of the Roman liturgy and under what admirable artistic restraint he must have labored in not exploiting the dramatic possibilities which lay even in the limited musical vocabulary of his period. But this restraint was no longer necessary in the new secular fields of composition opened up by the disciples of ‘the new music’ (_nuove musiche_).

The first results of the infusion of this consciously new factor into musical speech was an intense activity in all fields of composition that offered opportunity for the employment of the _musica parlante_ or _stilo rappresentativo_, as the new form of musical declamation or recitative was called that formed the distinguishing characteristic of the works of Peri, Cavalieri and other early composers of the new movement. This new form of musical speech was not intended by the Florentine reformers as an invention, but merely as a revival of the ancient manner of declaiming tragedy, using varying degrees of vocal inflection in accordance with the demands of the rhetorical utterance of the text, with no reference whatever to melodic structure or design.

While the use of the recitative was at first confined to the opera,[50] it was only natural that experiments should be made in other forms, less pretentious, in which it was desired to clothe a poetic text with the expressive strength and beauty of musical tones.

The term ‘cantata’ came to be used by composers in the early part of the seventeenth century (first probably not far from 1650) to designate some of these short secular compositions for the chamber, usually dramatic in character, which were written for a single voice with a simple accompaniment for one instrument, generally a lute. These secular compositions were called _cantate da camera_. They were given without action and at first were sung in unbroken recitative, imitating the style employed with such success in the operas of Caccini, Peri, and Monteverdi. But the monotony of this style soon led to the introduction of the air or sustained melody, which recurred several times during the progress of the recitative, but with a different text each time.

I

The cantata as a distinct musical form was assiduously cultivated by nearly all of the important Italian composers during the seventeenth century and its form soon began to crystallize along the lines which, for the following century, characterized it. In this work of definition and crystallization, Giacomo Carissimi (born probably 1604, died 1674) had a most distinguished part. He also transferred the cantata from the chamber to the church and wrote prolifically in both secular and sacred forms. A more detailed analysis of Carissimi’s influence on choral writing will be reserved for the discussion of early oratorio, but it may be said here that, though he cannot be credited with the invention of the sacred cantata, he was the first musician of large calibre to adopt this form and to lavish on it his best thought and most profound skill. He is generally admitted to have exerted more influence on the perfecting of the recitative than any of his contemporaries and he firmly established in sacred music those elements of pathos and dramatic fervor which had proved to be so effective in the opera and for which the public had acquired so keen an appetite. This enrichment of the purely musical means of expression in church music in the interest of greater dramatic realism was by no means a healthy accretion from the standpoint of pure ecclesiastical music, for, with the introduction of the dramatic element and the employment of the solo voice with all the possibilities for virtuosity and the temptations for display, the period of decadence in the music of the Roman Church began.

All of Carissimi’s cantatas were for one voice or at most for two and all were written with accompaniment for a single instrument--lute, harpsichord, ‘cello, etc. His accompaniments were simple, but displayed unusual lightness and variety for his period. He left a vast amount of completed work behind him, but little of it is now available. Dr. Charles Burney,[51] writing near the close of the eighteenth century, when actual performances of Carissimi’s works were not such a matter of ancient history as now, gives warm praise to the beauty and musical effectiveness of his cantatas and liberally reproduces musical extracts. In speaking of a collection of twenty-two of his cantatas, preserved in Christ Church, Oxford, Burney says: ‘There is not one which does not offer something that is still new, curious, and pleasing; but most particularly in the recitatives, many of which seem the most expressive, affecting, and perfect that I have seen. In the airs there are frequently sweet and graceful passages, which more than a hundred years have not impaired.’ His secular cantatas were both lyric and dramatic. Only one was suggested by a special event, the death of Mary Queen of Scots.

The cantata of the seventeenth century was evidently as diverse in style and character as were its descendants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It dealt with subjects that were sacred, profane, heroic, comic, and sometimes ludicrous. The wider range of subjects available for the secular or chamber cantata made this form especially appealing to composers. Then, too, the voice was the most perfectly developed medium of musical expression that the age provided--the heritage of centuries of training in the service of the church. While the violins of the last half of the century approached the most perfect specimens that the great Cremona violin-makers produced, this instrument was at a disadvantage as compared with the voice, because instrumental forms were still very crude and in the making, and the instruments on which the violin depends for accompanying harmonic background (the harpsichord and the clavichord) were inadequate, unsatisfactory, and very limited in their range of musical expression. Avoidance of a set or arbitrary form was one of the characteristics of the seventeenth-century chamber cantata as a whole. This freedom in form (that is, in the order and kind of arias, etc.) offered greatest scope for the imagination and intellectual capacities of the composer. The period of vocal virtuosity and degeneracy had not yet set in and the singers themselves were not only the best trained in everything pertaining to musical science, but were the most intellectual of musicians and represented the best phases of musical art and culture. The intimacy of the chamber and the absence of scenery and action in performance gave the highest incentive and best opportunity to both composer and singer to subordinate everything to the higher demands of artistic expression. Hence the composers of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries regarded the chamber cantata much in the same light that Beethoven and Brahms in the nineteenth century regarded the pianoforte sonata and the violin sonata--the most intimate and intellectual form of music that the age could produce. All the great composers up to and including Handel practised in this form as Bach did in fugue, and in its exploitation they worked out many a problem of thematic development, of contrast in melodic forms, and of interesting harmonic structure and key-relationships, thereby enriching the vocabulary of the art for succeeding generations. Mention will here be made of the more important of Carissimi’s contemporaries and immediate successors who gained distinction as writers of cantata and who aided in its further development.

The elaborate cantatas of Luigi Rossi (born near the end of the sixteenth century, died about 1650) for a single voice--_a voce sola_--are among the very earliest examples of this form and are noteworthy illustrations of how quickly the vague and indefinite recitative of the Florentine monodies began to show tendencies to formal organization and a pleasing, fluent style for the solo voices. A fine example of the newly-awakened tendency toward definite form in secular music is found in his cantata _Gelosia_, which Burney quotes in full in his History and in which Parry[52] finds the following definite formal scheme, which had evidently been carefully thought out by the composer:

A^1. 4/4, declamatory recitative of 23 measures and close.

B^1. 3/4, tuneful--nine measures.

C^1. 4/4, declamatory recitative of 19 measures.

A^2. Same bass as A^1, but different words and varied
voice-part.

B^2. 3/4, same bass as B^1, but different words and different
voice-part.

C^2. 4/4, recitative. Same bass as C^1, but different words
and different voice-part.

A^3. Same music as A^1, but different words.

B^3. 3/4, same as B^1, with different words.

C^3. Same bass and almost the same voice-part as C^1 till
last three measures, which are varied to give effect to the
conclusion.

Marc’ Antonio Cesti (about 1620-1669) was a pupil of Carissimi and went far beyond the efforts of his teacher in the formal construction of his melodies. His great popularity attests the increasing fondness of Italian taste for tuneful formality. One of his cantatas, _O cara libertà_, is said to have been one of the most famous of the century. Many of his melodies approximate the characteristic forms in which later vocal arias were cast, including the forms consisting of two contrasted parts (A B) and of three parts with the contrasted section in the middle (A B A). In the latter form the third part is a varied or free repetition of the first part.

Giovanni Legrenzi (about 1625-1690), though only five years younger than Cesti, made a much larger contribution to the development of his art, especially on the instrumental side of vocal music. He is credited with being one of the first composers to display a real instinct for instrumental music, and he is said to have reorganized the orchestra used to supplement the organ at St. Mark’s, Venice, increasing it to 34 performers--8 violins, 11 violette (small viola), 2 viole da braccia, 2 viole da gamba, 1 violone (bass viol), 4 theorbos, 2 cornets, 1 bassoon, and 3 trombones. His accompaniments show great vivacity and in general a variety of style in strong contrast to those of most of his co-workers. He published many cantatas in which the music runs along uninterruptedly from beginning to end. The succession of recitatives, melodious passages, and what might be called arias varies in each cantata according to the demands of the texts. A great variety is also noticeable in the form of the arias, which are remarkably free in rhythm and declamatory flow. His cantatas are among the best types of this seventeenth-century form.

II

Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) undoubtedly looms largest among the figures in Italian music of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, with especially marked influence in the fields of opera and cantata. One of the most prolific composers of all ages, he completed 115 operas, many masses (at least 10 survive), 8 oratorios, and a vast number of cantatas[53] (500 have come down to us), besides quantities of music in other forms. The extraordinary number of his chamber cantatas that survive him is strong evidence of his estimate of and affection for this form, examples of which cover every period of his life and reflect as faithfully as do Beethoven’s sonatas the various phases and stages of the composer’s artistic unfolding. Scarlatti was the greatest of the writers of chamber-cantatas and only a few of his successors approached him in excellence in this field. Indeed, the popularity of this form seems to have spent its force in Italy soon after the middle of the eighteenth century. Many of his cantatas bear internal evidence that he regarded them as ‘carefully designed studies in composition,’[54] in the working out of which he brought to bear his best musicianship. One of the finest examples of this careful and beautiful workmanship is the cantata _Andata a miei sospiri_, two settings of which he wrote for and sent to his composer-friend, Gasparini, in 1712.

But the very fertility of his invention and the ease and rapidity with which his musical thoughts flowed from his pen generated a tendency toward the adoption of a stereotyped style, influenced as he was by the growing inclination of his pleasure-loving Neapolitan audiences to demand triviality more than dramatic seriousness, tuneful melody and vocal display more than sincerity of expression. He did not possess the rugged tenacity of artistic purpose that drove Gluck, a half-century later, to insist on the primacy of the dramatic intent and the complete subordination of the musical element to the dramatic. So we find that under his hand the cantata, as well as the opera, became conventionalized in form. The vocal element, on which he lavished greatest care, became predominant and the aria, as the chief means of vocal utterance, fell under the same spell of conventionality. But in the cantatas, especially in the essentially musical parts, there are comparatively few evidences of the spirit of triviality that he so freely admitted into his operas. It is not true, as is frequently asserted, that Scarlatti invented the stereotyped forms of the aria that were the chief stock in trade of his successors in Italian opera until the middle of the nineteenth century. Nearly all of these aria-forms, including the commonest and most banal operatic form, the one with the indispensable _da capo_, may be found in the cantatas and operas of the composers already mentioned, among whom the inclination toward definite organization in melodic form was already well developed before Scarlatti had more than begun his career as composer. The incredible number of arias that he wrote and their easy classification as to form certainly made this common error of statement a very pardonable one. From his position as the greatest composer of his period, however, he gave to their use an authority and an impetus whose force was not fully spent for a century and a quarter after his death.

But if Scarlatti’s contributions to the cantata and opera were mainly along the line of the glorification of the purely musical and vocal elements, in one direction certainly he contributed richly to the permanent progress of musical art. In Carissimi’s cantatas the accompaniments were very simple, written usually with figured bass only, which was left to the performers to fill in at their discretion. After Carissimi the accompaniment began to assume a more elaborate character, but many of Scarlatti’s show utmost care in working out. Most of these were for violin or ‘cello. Some of those for ‘cello required such large technical equipment that ability to play them was looked upon as a mark of distinguished musicianship. Indeed, it was not uncommon in that age, which was far more superstitious than our own, for audiences, deeply impressed with the beauty of tone and marvellous skill of the performers, to believe and declare that angels had assumed the form of men.

Cantata-writing in Italy reached its highest point in A. Scarlatti and seems to have been, for a period extending, roughly speaking, from 1650 to 1750, almost the only form of vocal music used for private or chamber purposes. As Parry points out, ‘it is certainly creditable to the taste of the prosperous classes that a branch of art which had such distinguished qualities should have been so much in demand; for the standard of style, notwithstanding obvious defects, is always high.’[55] But the decline in the standards of opera had an inevitable effect on the character of its closely allied form, the chamber-cantata. Though composers continued industriously to employ it, the finest examples are to be found among the composers already mentioned. In addition to the above, Giovanni Battista Bassani (about 1657-1716) published numerous cantatas on love themes for one, two, or three voices with instruments and maintained a noble style in both vocal and instrumental parts, his handling of the instrumental parts being distinctly an advance over previous composers.

It is to be noted that few, if any, distinguishing or personal marks can be discovered in the works of the various Italian composers of this period, particularly those whose names follow. All say the same elegant, suave things in much the same elegant, suave manner. Francesco Gasparini (1668-1727) had such a high reputation in his time that Alessandro Scarlatti sent his son, Domenico, to study with him. Later a curious rivalry sprang up between Gasparini and the elder Scarlatti, which took the strange guise of a cantata-correspondence in which each sought to puzzle and outdo the other. Gasparini’s fame, however, rested on a treatise upon accompaniment, published in 1708, which remained a standard work in Italy until well along in the nineteenth century. Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739), celebrated for his settings of 50 psalms for one, two, three, and four voices with accompaniment, published 26 cantatas for different voices with accompaniment for various instruments. The Royal Library at Dresden contains copies of two of his cantatas--_Timotheus_, to his own Italian translation of Dryden’s poem, and _Cassandra_--both of which were famous in their time. Emanuele Astorga (1681-1736) is remembered now almost entirely by his beautiful cantatas for solo voices (soprano or contralto), of which about 100 are extant, and for two voices, all with accompaniment in figured bass for the harpsichord. Ten of these duets (for soprano and contralto) are published in Peters’ Edition and also by Leuckhart with accompaniment arranged for pianoforte.

Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), son of Alessandro Scarlatti and especially famous as a harpsichord player and composer for this instrument, wrote many cantatas in which the form became more extended, comprising various movements. In this extension of form Scarlatti was followed by Pergolesi (1710-1736), whose cantata _Orfeo ed Euridice_, written in the composer’s last illness, was the most famous of the period. Giovanni Battista Bononcini (about 1660-about 1750), remembered now as the defeated rival of the great Handel in the famous London opera-writing duel, was one of the most prolific of all cantata writers, though the music was quite mediocre. Other well-known Italian composers of the eighteenth century who employed the extended cantata-form were Antonio Caldara (1678-1763) and Niccola Porpora (1686-1766 or 1767). The great Handel himself wrote many cantatas for single voice in the prevalent fashion and in many of them used for his accompaniment such combinations of instruments as strings and oboes. After Handel’s time the cantata of the Italian type described above lost favor and was gradually superseded by the concert aria, a form which Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn have used with fine results.[56] Mozart gave the name cantata to a composition for three solo voices, chorus, and orchestra in three movements, written about 1783 (Koëchel No. 429). The distinction of having used the chorus in the cantata for the first time, however, probably rests with Giovanni Paësiello (1741-1816), who, in an attempt to revive the waning interest in this form, sought to give greater vocal effectiveness by contrasting choral with solo effects. In this formal respect at least, several of his cantatas (as _Dafne ed Alceo_ and _Retour de Persée_) are prototypes of the present-day form.

Thus far in the consideration of the cantata we have been concerned mainly with its secular form and with its development in Italy. The secular cantata in Italian style does not seem to have gained any permanent popularity outside the land of its birth, certainly not enough to attract the attention of the best composers either in France, which had developed a dramatic style of its own along different principles from those of the Italians, or in Germany and England, in both of which countries the influence of Italian opera predominated. In France only unimportant composers cared to employ it. In England native composers of the seventeenth century found two worthy substitutes for the cantata in the masque and the ode.

In the very beginning of its career the cantata was successfully placed within the domain of church music by Carissimi, and during his lifetime and later the church-cantata in Italy had much the same form as that of the oratorio, to which it was so closely allied in spirit and function. But in Germany, under the influence of the intense religious feeling engendered by the stormy days of the Reformation, it took on the character almost of a national religious institution. Here it developed into a form of such magnificent proportions and significant influence that an extended exposition of some of the contributing causes and accompanying conditions may be pertinent.

III

German choral music, which in its early history means German church music, cannot be considered apart from certain fundamental national traits which are present in some degree even in the earliest folk-music of this nation and in the effusions of the mediæval minnesingers--traits which instinctively turned their artistic attention toward sincerity of poetic thought and utterance rather than sensuous beauty of melodic expression. An instinct for grasping fundamentals, a fervid devotion, and a rugged tenacity in following accepted ideals--these were qualities that made Germany a fit cradle for the Reformation and the German people the foremost defenders and stoutest preachers of the religious emancipation of the individual which Luther proclaimed with such far-sounding tones. The contrapuntal skill that German musicians had learned, along with the rest of Europe, from the Netherland masters, they did not use so much for the glorification of music or for æsthetic and formal considerations as for the enrichment and elucidation of the ideas and sentiments of the words. When the rest of Europe had capitulated to the ravishing sweetness and allurements of Italian melody, Germany listened somewhat incredulously, and even when this charmer was finally admitted into the inner courts of its musical household, it was compelled to assume a purified and chastened form.

The essential characteristics of German musical art are well illustrated by the condition of music in Germany in the seventeenth century as compared with that of Italy. The secular impulse that had wrought such a revolution in Italian music and musical methods had made itself felt in Germany at an even earlier period, but in a very different manner. In the southern country it brought about an intense development of the dramatic element. This almost immediately reacted upon church music and left upon it an indelible impression, sadly weakening the Palestrina ideal of impersonality with the impingement of the strong personal, human element which the introduction of the solo inevitably emphasized, and which led, as has been pointed out, to a period of deterioration in Catholic church music.

The change in German music can also be traced to a secular source, but not only were the immediate results of this change, in terms of actual music, vastly different from those in Italy, but the controlling motive which molded its varied manifestations was alike different. The German Protestants were at once summoned to test the strength and sincerity of their new-found faith in the crucible of physical combat, and they were stirred as was possibly no other nation engaged in the complicated succession of religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As it was religious fervor that led them to take up the sword in defence, so it was religious sentiment and devotion that furnished the motive that lies back of the entire scheme of German musical art of the seventeenth century. To the rather austere German composers of this period music seemed to be too lovely and pure a thing to be used for histrionic tricks and trappings. So the most sincere and important utterances of German musical art of the seventeenth century are to be found in the field of religious music. It has been pointed out (page 79) that the chorale was the basis of the music which sprang into being as the natural expression of the Protestant movement in Germany. Since the rich mass of folk-song supplied such abundant material for the chorales used in the Lutheran service, the secular element through this channel entered into the very warp and woof of German music, and carried into it the quality of simple and fervid sincerity that in a marked degree has always characterized the German folk-song and the art-music that sprang from it.

The secular element had wrought a complete change in Italian music within the short space of a half century and the impetuous Italians had given themselves over to the new tendency so whole-heartedly that the boundaries of the old ecclesiastical art were almost wholly obliterated. An unexpected caution and conservatism, however, manifested itself among the Germans and an entire century elapsed before a definite and distinctive art-fabric was evolved from the material at hand. Composers, now almost wholly forgotten, but who might have won more frequent historic mention had they chosen to tread the more brilliant path of histrionic art, worked contentedly and with pious enthusiasm to make chorales for the church service or to construct motets by using the chorale tunes as subjects and weaving voice-parts around them in expressive counterpoint or in imitative figures, with all the polyphonic skill they possessed.

Out of this religious zeal finally emerged the German church cantata, which found its culminating point, as did so many other musical forms associated with German church music, in Johann Sebastian Bach. In Italy and elsewhere in connection with Roman Catholic music, the church cantata never possessed any liturgical significance, though it was freely employed for purposes of religious entertainment and instruction. But almost immediately after its introduction into Germany through the gifted German students who had studied in Italian art-centres, notably in Venice, the church cantata became a part of the regular order of the German Protestant church worship and thus became the object of solicitous attention on the part of Protestant German composers. Encouraged by the church and firmly imbedded in its liturgy, it needed only the touch of Bach’s genius to cause it to grow into full artistic stature and stand as the most precious musical gift of German Protestantism to the world. In the seventeenth century it was frequently called ‘spiritual concerto’ or ‘spiritual dialogue,’[57] and consisted of Biblical passages and church or devotional hymns. During this period its rather crude musical form usually followed this order--an instrumental introduction, a ‘spiritual aria’ (a simple strophic song for one or more voices), one or two vocal solos, and a chorale or two.

While German religious music was cautiously feeling its way toward individual self-expression, there were not wanting among German musicians those who felt that the forms of Italian dramatic music, such as the recitative and aria with their obvious possibilities for the expression of impassioned human feeling, should be fully utilized in the structure of their new religious art, and who argued that the qualities of brilliance, variety, and personal utterance should be present in ecclesiastical art as well as in secular. On the other hand were those who were in favor of banishing from the church service all vocal music except that based on the austere chorale and motet (analogous to the Latin motet of the sixteenth century), and who would restrict all church music to the more abstract, objective, and liturgic conception derived from ecclesiastical traditions. Standing on middle ground between these two extreme ideals, Bach, with the insight born of genius, retained all that was best and most serviceable in each--the simple strength and sturdy devotion of the chorale, together with the contrapuntal chorus, as the collective expression of exalted religious sentiment, and the recitative and Italian aria, chastened and stripped of its histrionic shallowness and insincerity, as the individual personal utterance of the more subjective moods of meditation and introspection.

The Lutheran Church retained in its liturgy many of the prominent features of the Roman liturgy. Among them were portions of the mass, the custom of chanting certain parts of the service, the singing of ancient hymns and traditional tunes, and the observance of special church days and festivals. The calendar of the church year was largely the same in the two faiths, and in the Lutheran Church, as in the Roman, the order and character of the different portions of the service were carefully prescribed by church law. Each Sunday and special day had its own appropriate Bible lesson, versicles and prayers, and its own chorales, the words of which would illustrate the Bible texts of the day, commenting upon them and applying their lessons to the common experience of the devout worshippers. This intimate relation of chorales to a definite church-day was of obvious advantage to composers in that it enabled them to construct, around the chorales as central points, compositions which would amplify the sentiment of the stanzas of the chorales and serve as musical commentaries on the religious significance of the various days of the church calendar. The cantata thus became the chief musical feature of the Lutheran liturgy, and the words brought to the attention of the congregation some particular feature of the religious thought that received special emphasis in the order of the day.

The great popularity of the cantata with both church authorities and congregation in Germany was undoubtedly due in part to the many opportunities it offered for satisfying the universal craving for greater individualization, for freer utterance of individual emotion and sentiment. The opera of the period, which consisted largely of solo-singing, gave free rein to the expression of personal feeling, as the spirit of the times demanded. Yet nothing that was really permanent or artistic could arise from this foundation, since the subjects of opera were drawn almost exclusively from far-removed classical and mythological sources. These subjects held little or no real interest for the masses, and the singers who impersonated the legendary characters were actuated almost solely by professional vanity. The opera was thus inevitably surrounded with an atmosphere of insincerity and moral indifference. While the people applauded, they remained untouched except on the surface, and only partly satisfied. When the element of personal expression was transferred to church performances, the situation was radically changed. Their religious experiences were real and vital and tangible. The important part that the congregation was encouraged to take in the singing of hymns and chorales gave to the zealous worshippers a feeling of individual responsibility in the services. Even in those more elaborate musical portions assigned to the choir, they could follow, in fancied participation, the religious emotions set forth in a language that they could readily understand and that was intensified by the expressive power of appropriate music. The intensely subjective, sometimes even sentimental, nature of the texts made a deep appeal to the warm Protestant piety of the German people.

Poetical texts of a semi-dramatic character, suited in more or less definite way to the different church days, soon came to be in great demand. The first to supply such cantata texts of real literary merit was Erdmann Neumeister (1671-1756), a preacher-poet of Sorau and Hamburg, who wrote no less than five complete cycles of texts for the church calendar. Though a host of other poets followed him in writing similar cantata texts, Neumeister seems to have been unexcelled and to have had a large influence by the sheer literary excellence of his poetry and the moving power of his pious eloquence. Both Telemann and Mattheson were appreciative collaborators with him, and among the cantatas which Bach wrote with such incredible industry for his choir at St. Thomas’ Church are several with Neumeister’s fine texts.

Neumeister’s cycles of cantatas were published between the years 1704 and 1716. In the preface to the first of these cycles he frankly stated that ‘a cantata has the appearance of a piece taken out of an opera.’ The publication of these cycles of cantata texts brought on a fierce controversy between his adherents among churchmen and musicians on the one side and the Pietists and those who were swayed by an instinctive antipathy to theatrical music of any kind on the other. Even the older and more severe cantatas had been accused of worldliness, but the very idea of using in the worship of God the recitative and aria, which were the chief vehicles of musical expression in the profane opera, was repugnant to the pietistic mind. The innovators were charged with bringing into the church all sorts of ‘singable stuff’ and gay and dance-like tunes. To this Mattheson, who was chief among the musicians of his period who could wield a pen in defence of their art-theories, replied that of course a distinction must be made between a sacred and an operatic recitative, and that intelligent musicians knew well enough how to treat it in the spirit of the church service and thus preserve a true church style which would be at the same time an independent style.[58] And so the question as to what constitutes the true church style, as to what is pure church music, has been hotly discussed, with greater or less absence of brotherly love, in every generation for the last two centuries, and, it is to be observed, with much the same arguments as weapons in each succeeding generation.

IV

In simplest definition church music, as Spitta has concisely said, is music ‘that has grown up within the bosom of the church’[59] and, he might have added, that best expresses the essence and spirit of its distinctive creedal beliefs. It took centuries for Roman Catholicism to produce a Palestrina. But, when he did appear, he acted as genius has always acted; while the learned theologians of the Council of Trent were speculating on the true character of church music and fulminating against abuses, he was quietly creating those wonderful masses and motets that have ever since been regarded as the loftiest musical embodiment of the spirit of the Roman Catholic liturgy and which, therefore, needed no edict of council or pontiff to establish their supremacy. And so, while lesser musicians were busily engaged in defending the new ideas, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), with all the quiet confidence of genius, was steadily producing works for the church service that stand in the same relation to the Lutheran liturgy and to the spirit of the Lutheran Church of his period that Palestrina’s music stands to the Roman liturgy.

The whole creative energy of Bach’s genius seemed to centre around his deeply religious nature. The great majority of his works were written either expressly for the Lutheran Church service or in forms appropriate to the spirit of this service. He consciously set himself the task not only to regenerate church music, which even in his time had fallen into melancholy ways, but especially to take the forms which he found already technically developed and to apply them to the utterance of the exalted ideas of religious life and experience as interpreted through the German Protestant faith. Bach was the only one of the eighteenth-century German composers who was completely equipped for so worthy a task. Springing from sturdy peasant stock, bred and educated entirely in his own beloved Thuringia and wholly in accordance with German traditions and Protestant ideals, and never deeming it necessary to go abroad for those superficial refinements which his nation lacked, Bach was essentially and peculiarly the product of a culture that was purely German Protestant. He was endowed with an intellectual force of truly gigantic proportions and with a catholicity wide and wise enough to assimilate whatever was vital and vigorous in the various musical forms and styles with which the air was filled. He was absolute master of organ music, which throughout the seventeenth century was the only branch of art to develop real splendor as an indigenous product of the Lutheran Church. Although in thought and feeling a thoroughgoing churchman, he had the wit to discern that even the opera, the worldly antipode of the churchly ideal, contained elements that could be rendered valuable in reverent service to purely religious purposes. In Bach’s hands these operatic elements lost their emotional sensuality, washed clean in the pure impersonal flow of his organ music. Thus he reconciled the two seemingly dissimilar styles and fused them into one, which so perfectly expressed the essential being of the Church he so deeply loved and so loyally served that, as Spitta asserts, he ‘has remained to this day the last church composer.’[60]

During all his years of musical activity Bach was a church organist and choir director. In these positions it was a part of his official duties to compose music for the various services of the church calendar. The zeal and fidelity with which he performed this part of his task is clearly evidenced by the following list of his more important church works, vocal and instrumental: about 20 large fantasias, preludes and fugues, a passacaglia, several toccatas, and a large number of chorale-preludes and elaborations, about 300 cantatas, 5 Passions, 3 oratorios for Christmas, Easter, and Ascension, 5 large masses and several shorter ones, many motets, 2 Magnificats, 5 Sanctuses, etc.

By far the largest single group of his compositions consists of church cantatas. Of these he wrote five series for the Sundays and festivals of the church year, 295 cantatas in all, of which 266 were written while he was director of music at the Thomas and Nicolai Churches in Leipzig, which post he held from 1723 until his death in 1750. They easily take rank among the master’s best works, and, notwithstanding the rather astounding fact that for over four years he wrote a cantata each week for the following Sunday’s service in addition to other compositions, they contain many of the finest and loftiest examples of accompanied church music of his own or any other period, and give unmistakable evidence of the scholarly care and loving thought he bestowed upon them. As a group they are excelled only by the Passions and the great B minor Mass, and some of their choruses are not surpassed even by these wonderful creations. Not one of them was published during his life and many have been lost. The manuscripts remained almost forgotten for nearly a century after his death, but the Bach-Gesellschaft has published about two hundred of them in its authoritative edition of the master’s works (1851-1899), comprising over fifty volumes and forming an enduring monument to the master’s genius.

An interesting and illuminating light is thrown upon Bach’s attitude toward the composition of his church music, especially the cantatas, when we remember that they were all written, not for universal fame or popular acclaim, but for the use of his own choir and for the edification of that particular congregation for whom it was his business to write music. He wrote them, exactly as the minister wrote his sermons, as personal contributions to the effectiveness and completeness of individual church services and occasions. There is little evidence to show that the congregation looked upon these masterly compositions in any other light than as regular and necessary parts of the ordinary routine of service, little dreaming that a future century would give them such lofty valuation.

The church cantatas[61] reveal an astonishing versatility and range of expression which show how completely he surrendered his merely technical musicianship to the guidance of the sentiment and mood of the texts, and the needs of their liturgic environment. In these cantatas he has bequeathed to his church and nation ‘a treasury of religious song compared with which, for magnitude, diversity, and power, the creative work of any other church composer that may be named--Palestrina, Gabrieli, or whoever he may be--sinks into insignificance.’[62]

In length they vary from four to seven movements, frequently with an instrumental prelude or overture. The shortest consume about twenty minutes in performance and the longest an hour or so. They are all written with accompaniment for organ and, usually, some solo instrument or group of instruments. The vocal numbers consist of recitatives, arias, duets, and choruses. In no other eighteenth-century composer does the recitative assume such qualities of expressive and fluent melody as in Bach. The arias vary greatly in form, ranging from the use of the _da capo_, which in his hands loses its Italian superficiality and conventionality, to the utmost freedom of melodic design. In the choruses he found full opportunity for indulging his characteristic fondness for elaborate and complex polyphonic structures. His conception of the relation of the voice-parts to the whole tonal scheme differed radically from contemporary usage. To him the solo part was not a thing complete in and of itself, but rather a contrapuntal detail of a larger tonal unit. Hence the accompaniment usually rises to melodic importance coordinate with the voice-part. Sometimes, indeed, the voice-part sinks to secondary consideration, and merely concertizes with a more significant theme assigned to the organ or some solo instrument. Bach’s whole mode of thought was so essentially instrumental in its coloring and expressional devices that he frequently produces results that are hardly consonant with what might be called vocal idiom. Such a mode of treatment easily lapses into monotony and over-austerity, of which there are occasional instances in all of his vocal works. But there are more than enough counterbalancing examples of arias in his cantatas to show how plastic this form could become in his hands for the expression of the deepest and tenderest sentiments and for the musical delineation of the subtlest details in the changing thought of the texts.

The chorale, as already mentioned, played a most important rôle in the constructional plan of Bach’s cantatas. Since each church day had its especially appointed chorale (_Hauptlied_), he made it an almost universal practice to introduce this, either in whole or in modified form, as material for contrapuntal treatment in the voice-parts or in the accompaniments of at least several of the movements. In some of the cantatas, such as _Wer nur den lieben Gott_ and especially the famous _Ein’ feste Burg_, chorales appear in some guise or other in every movement, whether recitative, aria, or chorus. There are but very few of the cantatas, among them the well-known _Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss_, in which no chorale-melody appears. The Bach cantata regularly closed with a chorale in a plain and unornamented four-part form, but richly harmonized.

It is a real misfortune that the profound beauties of these rare examples of ecclesiastical art are now practically unknown to any except the occasional student. But there are at least three things that have conspired to keep them away from the general knowledge and appreciation of the present-day public--(1) the Lutheran service, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries usually lasted for four hours at least, has been much shortened and the cantata is no longer a necessary component, hence at present it is rarely heard even in its original home, the Lutheran service; (2) the organ was such a central and dominating part of Bach’s whole scheme of musical utterance that the cantata cannot be performed with any other accompaniment without a large shrinkage in artistic effectiveness; (3) these works are so completely saturated with the spirit and meaning of the particular type of church worship for which they were created that when performed in the concert room, even with the organ, they lose in large measure, merely from the changed perspective and environment. Many of the cantatas are available for study in Peters’ Edition and, in English translation, in the Novello Edition.

Bach’s vocal polyphony, as illustrated by the intricate choruses of his cantatas, was built squarely on his conception of instrumental polyphony as applied to the church service. All the finest qualities of his organ style--the inexhaustible wealth of invention, the masterful use of every contrapuntal device for exploiting the thematic material, the majestic sweep of massive bodies of closely knit melodies--all are found in these choruses in a profusion and affluence that show at once the marvellous fecundity of his genius and the reverent love and patient care with which his task was wrought. Of the nearly fifty cantatas that are published with German and English texts, many might justly be chosen for analysis that would closely approach in excellence the few here presented. These few, however, are recognized as among the greatest and are thoroughly representative of Bach’s cantata style. In addition to these there may also be enumerated _Wer nur den lieben Gott_ (‘If Thou but Sufferest God to Guide Thee’), _Jesu, meine Freude_ (‘Jesu, Priceless Treasure’), _Aus tiefer Noth schrei’ ich zu Dir_ (‘From Depths of Woe I Call on Thee’), and the Ascension cantata _Wer da glaubet und getauft wird_ (‘Whoso Believeth and Is Baptized’).

_Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss_ (‘My Heart was Full of Heaviness’).--This work was Bach’s first sacred cantata. He composed it in 1714 at Weimar while still depressed over his difficulties with the elders of the _Liebfrauenkirche_ at Halle about an organ position; the music is strongly colored by this mental condition. It was written for the third Sunday after Trinity and contains eleven numbers. The first part, which is mournful in character, consists of a quiet opening chorus, a beautiful aria for soprano accompanied by oboe and strings, a tender recitative and aria full of intense sorrow, and a closing chorus tinged with deep pathos, ‘Why, my Soul, art thou vexed?’ Part II is more cheerful. A duet for soprano and bass, who represent the soul and Christ, is followed by a richly harmonized chorus introducing a chorale melody. Then comes a pleasing tenor aria with graceful accompaniment, ‘Rejoice, O my Soul, change weeping to smiling,’ leading to a final chorus. The words ‘The Lamb that for us is slain, to Him will we render power and glory,’ are uttered majestically by the full choir; the solo bass gives out the words ‘Power and glory and praise be unto Him forevermore,’ leading to the final ‘Hallelujah,’ poured forth with tremendous effect by the combined choir and orchestra.

_Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit_ (‘God’s time is the best of all’) is usually called the _Actus Tragicus_, and occasionally the ‘Mourning Cantata,’ as it was evidently written to commemorate the death of some aged man. This work, too, was composed at Weimar in Bach’s younger days. The introduction is quiet and tender, introducing some themes used later in the body of the cantata. The opening chorus (‘God’s own time is the best of all. In Him we live, move, and have our being, as long as He wills. And in Him we die at His good time’) is at first slow and solemn, but changes to a quick fugue and ends in a strain of mournful beauty, befitting the last part of the text. Next comes a tenor solo, ‘O Lord, incline us to consider that our days are numbered,’ the text being continued in a mournful aria for bass, ‘Set in order thine house, for thou shalt die and not live.’ The choir then sings ‘It is the old decree, Man, thou art mortal,’ the lower voices forming a double fugue, while the soprano repeats the words ‘Yea, come, Lord Jesus,’ and the orchestra intones the melody of an old hymn, ‘I have cast all my care on God.’ The words spoken on the cross, ‘Into Thy hands my spirit I commend,’ are rendered by the alto, the bass answering ‘Thou shalt be with Me to-day in Paradise.’ A chorale sung by the alto mingles with the last of the bass arioso. The work closes with a chorus, using the so-called Fifth Gloria,

‘All glory, praise, and majesty
To Father, Son, and Spirit be,
The holy, blessed Trinity,’ etc.

_Ein’ feste Burg._--This cantata, one of the strongest of the remarkable series of church works composed by Bach, is constructed on Luther’s immortal hymn, the battle-hymn of the Reformation. Historians differ as to the exact time of its composition, but all agree that it was when Bach was at the height of his creative power, the occasion probably being either the Reformation Festival of 1730 or the bicentenary of Protestantism in Saxony, May 17, 1739. It is laid out in truly grand proportions and is permeated from first to last with the bold spirit of triumphant confidence that made the old Reformation days such a stirring memory in every German heart. The cantata opens with a stupendous fugue based on Luther’s melody and using the first stanza of the hymn, than which Bach never wrote anything grander. Following this comes a duet for soprano and bass, the text including the second stanza. A bass recitative and a soprano aria lead to the second great chorus, in which the chorale is sung in unison and with mighty effect, amid a whirl of wildly leaping figures in the orchestra, to the third stanza of the hymn, ‘And were the world all devils o’er And watching to devour us.’ The sixth number, a tenor recitative, leads to a duet for alto and tenor, ‘How blessed then are they who still on God are calling.’ The chorale is heard again in the final chorus, this time sung without accompaniment to the last stanza of the hymn--a thrilling ending to a colossal work.

V

Handel (1685-1759), one of the few great masters of choral writing, was a man in whose life strange contrasts jostled each other. He was born a German, but died a naturalized Englishman and was buried in Westminster Abbey among England’s most illustrious sons; he was intended by his parents to be a lawyer, but by nature to be a musician; the greater part of his life was spent in writing operas, popular in his day but now forgotten, while his fame now rests almost entirely on the great oratorios that he wrote after he was fifty years old and had been practically driven from the operatic stage by intrigues and cabals. He towers above all his contemporaries except Bach; while his greatest masterpieces are his oratorios, his smaller choral works in secular cantata-form display his fine instinct for gracious melody, dramatic coloring, and characteristic choral effects.

‘Acis and Galatea.’--This cantata or pastoral (the composer calls it a serenata, under which title it had its first London performance in 1732) was composed by Handel in 1720, while he was chapel-master to the Duke of Chandos, and was performed at Cannons the following year. In writing it, following a custom very much in vogue among composers of his time, he drew upon an earlier work composed in 1708 during his sojourn in Italy. Most of the text was written by the poet John Gay, though certain fragments were borrowed from Dryden, Hughes, and Pope.

The nymph Galatea deeply loved the shepherd Acis, but in turn was adored by Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops of Ætna. One day, while she was reclining in Acis’ embrace, the giant, believing himself alone, poured out his story of hopeless love, ending in a burst of jealousy against his rival, when, spying the lovers, he hurled an immense rock at Acis and crushed him. His blood, gushing forth, became a purling stream.