Beethoven and His Forerunners — Reading Companion

r another, to see that in their own way the phrases hang together firmly, and say efficiently what they mean. Each of the four voices has an intelligible and expressive part, and if together they sound a little strange, singly they are eminently good. The more one studies this old music the more one realizes that it is all melody; from beginning to end, from top to bottom, the mediæval scores _sing_. They are not, like many modern works, full of inert, lifeless matter, tones put in to fill out the harmonies, and having no melodic excuse for being. In the modern monophonic style, in which but one melody sings, the remaining parts are almost inevitably treated by the composer as affording rather a logical sequence of harmonies than a subsidiary tissue of melodic strands. In the sixteenth century, on the other hand, harmony was the accident, melody the essence; any chord would do very well in any place, provided it were consonant enough not to offend the ear; but every tone must have a melodic reason for being; it must be a point in a line; all the lines must be conducted with draughtsman-like deftness and economy. Melodic life is accordingly the supreme trait of the style well named polyphonic.

And yet, here we encounter still another difficulty introduced by modern habits of thought. To us nowadays melody means, not merely a series of tones having that sort of elementary consecutiveness which we find in Palestrina, for example, but a series of tones divided up into several definite segments which in someway balance, complement, and complete one another. The first phrase of “Yankee Doodle” has “elementary consecutiveness,” but it does not satisfy our melodic sense. We must add the second phrase, equal to it in length, which echoes and reinforces it, and the third phrase, twice as long as either, which rounds out the whole tune to a complete period. In short, just as harmony involves for us chord structure and inter-relation, melody involves for us metrical balance, response, symmetry--that recognizable recurrence, to use the most general term possible, which we call “rhythm.” Mere eloquent intoning, without repetition and balance of phrases, is to us no more “tune” than prose is verse. Here again we are in danger of letting our own habits of thought confuse our understanding of an unfamiliar type of art. The truth is, Palestrina does not write “tunes,” in the modern sense of the word. He lived and wrote before musical evolution had given the world that principle of metrical structure so essential to modern music; and his style, therefore, lacks definite meter, lacks all rhythm save that vague one superposed upon it by his Latin prose text. His music, devoid of any regular segmental division, is indeed a sort of tonal prose, as massive and majestic as the “Religio Medici.”

One other technical peculiarity of the music of the polyphonic period deserves notice here, as it involved a principle destined to assume great importance in later stages of art. The polyphonic writers often introduced successive voices with an identical formula of notes, which by repetition came to have somewhat the virtue of a motif or subject in giving to the music rationality and sequence. They had not as yet, to be sure, enough experience in composing definite themes strictly measured in time to make these embryonic motifs either very long or very distinct, but they did make and utilize subjects striking enough to be remembered and recognized. In this way they introduced the important device of “Imitation.” This imitating of one part by another, even when crudely carried out, gave a certain air of intention and fore-thought to what without it would have been a haphazard utterance of tones, and in later times, when developed to a high pitch of perfection in the fugue and allied forms, became a powerful agent for securing intelligibility. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the intelligibility of the sixteenth-century music depended chiefly on the fine melodic cogency and expressiveness of its individual voice parts. Although time-measurement was well understood, melody was without metrical structure and rhythmic organization. Harmony was the art of making pleasant sounds by bringing the voices together, at prominent moments, on consonant chords; it took no heed of chord relation, of tonality, or of orderly modulation; and it used dissonance with extreme conservatism. Such, in sum, were the most notable technical peculiarities of that polyphonic period which Palestrina brought to its culmination.

Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, named Palestrina from the place of his birth, which was a small town in the Campagna not far from Rome, was born of humble parents about the year 1524. About 1550 he went to Rome as teacher of the boy-singers in the Capella Giulia of the Vatican. All the rest of his life was spent in Rome, in various posts in the service of the church, and in studious and uneventful labor at his great compositions. Although a married man, he was made in 1554 one of the singers in the Papal choir by Pope Julius III, to whom he had dedicated a set of masses; on the accession of Pope Paul IV a year later he was dismissed, and became ill with anxiety as to the support of his growing family; he was nevertheless almost immediately appointed music-director of the Lateran Church, and later he held successively the posts of music-director in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, “Composer to the Pontifical Choir,” leader of the choir of St. Peter’s, and music-director to Cardinal Aldobrandini. Aside from these meagre and arid details, unfortunately, little is known of the man Palestrina. His private life is almost a blank. The one story oftenest told of him, that his Mass of Pope Marcellus, produced in 1565, was written to convince the reforming Council of Trent of the possibility of purging church music of the trivialities and abuses which had crept into it, has been discredited by recent historians. Mythical also seems to be the story of Palestrina’s one great popular triumph, in 1575, a year of jubilee, when fifteen hundred residents of the composer’s native town are said to have entered Rome in three companies, singing his works, and led by himself. The story is a severe tax on the credulity of anyone whose ideas of chorus-singing are based on modern methods.

In character Palestrina was devout, pious, frugal, and industrious. Though so few records exist, we can guess his industry from the mass of the work he achieved, and his honor and sense of responsibility from his anxiety when the support of his family seemed in danger. As to his piety, all his music is one eloquent demonstration of it. Nor is it without verbal testimony in the dedications and inscriptions on his manuscripts. In dedicating his first book of motets to Cardinal d’Este he expressed his artistic convictions as follows: “Music exerts a great influence on the minds of mankind, and is intended not only to cheer these, but also to guide and control them, a statement which has not only been made by the ancients, but which is found equally true to-day. The sharper blame, therefore, do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing. As regards myself, I have from youth been affrighted at such misuse, and anxiously have I avoided giving forth anything which could lead anyone to become more wicked or godless. All the more should I, now that I have attained to riper years, and am not far removed from old age, place my entire thoughts on lofty, earnest things, such as are worthy of a Christian.” When, in 1594, Palestrina died, almost his last words, whispered to his son Igino, directed the publication of his latest manuscript works, “to the glory of the most high God, and the worship of his holy temple.”

A sentence in the dedication by Palestrina just cited affords us as serviceable a key as we could desire to the fundamental temper or mood of mind which underlay the type of art he represents. The technical peculiarities of this art already traced in the foregoing pages, do not in themselves explain it; they are, indeed, but manifestations of a deeper spirit underneath, a spirit that was as characteristic of the mediæval mind as idealism is of the modern mind. Incommensurate as were the technical resources of the mediæval composer with ours, their whole mental temper and outlook upon life was in even more striking contrast with the modern attitude. We have, therefore, next to ask: What was the most characteristic peculiarity of this age? What was its most pervasive general trait? What was the one dominant quality in which most of Palestrina’s contemporaries, for all their minor differences, were alike?

Palestrina himself suggests the answer to such questions. “The sharper blame, therefore,” he writes, “do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing.” This setting in antithesis of “men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil,” with the attribution of a “great and splendid gift” to a God conceived as remote from men though beneficent to them, exemplifies the essence of that mediæval view of life which we wish to understand, and for which perhaps the best single name is mysticism. The mystic begins his philosophy with a sharp sundering of himself, considered as an individual existing in time and space, with earthly body, finite mind, and human passions, from what he considers supreme, formless, and eternal good. In common with other men, he has his instinctive perceptions of the divine; but unlike other men he cuts off very sharply the divine thus perceived from the real world in which he eats and drinks, works and plays, lives and dies. His is a world of strong contrasts, of extreme antithesis--the world that mystical terminology divides into “apparent and real,” “divine and carnal,” “temporal and eternal.” His intuition of what is beyond the veil of mortality, absolute, permanent, serves only to emphasize more poignantly his own frailty, partiality, and transience. He not only hypostatizes his own ideal, his dream and aspiration of what ought to be, making of it, as all men do, a real objective existence, but he then cuts it off from himself, makes it a touchstone of all the dross that in him exists alongside the pure gold, and while he attributes all virtue to this “other” or “beyond” projected by his unconscious imagination, reserves to his present actual self, as directly known, all wickedness, sin, and failure. God is perfect, but remote; man is near--and base.

This was the characteristic attitude of religious-minded men in the middle ages. If to us it may seem pathetically childish and superstitious, we should not judge it without remembering the epoch of which it was a part. When we reconstruct in imagination that historic moment, that peculiar inheritance and environment of the sixteenth century Europeans, it is hard to conceive how else they could have interpreted the world. Theirs was an age, we must remind ourselves, of violence and bloodshed, of greed, hypocrisy, lust, and faithlessness. Craft and cruelty reigned in places of power, and the minds of the common people groped in the obscurity of gross ignorance, made even darker by fitful flashes of superstition. The poor were ground down by tyrannies and oppressions, the powerful were tormented by constant dread of treachery and assassination. Plagues and pestilence, war and famine and drought, made physical existence miserable; priestly bigotry and dogmatism crushed all mental initiative. It is not surprising that humanity, in the midst of such conditions, failed to recognize, as the source of its beliefs, its own latent virtue; the wonder is rather that it succeeded in rising at all to the intuition of a holiness which, by a natural error, it conceived as entirely severed from itself. It was much to arrive at this point. The object of the present analysis is not to discredit the mediæval conception of the world, but, by pointing out its peculiarities, to throw light on the music which was one of its profoundest utterances.

The most familiar, and in some respects the most characteristic, element of mysticism is its ecstatic, devout attitude towards the deity or Absolute it worships. The mystic throws himself on the ground before his God, so to speak, in an ecstasy of complete self-abandonment and surrender. He is utterly prone, passive, will-less. His worship is the most complete, the most devoted worship of which there is record. The Greek pagans might sacrifice a lamb or an ox at the altars of their gods, the mystic sacrifices nothing less than himself, his very personality. He desires no reciprocal relations with his deity, makes no reservations in his commerce with it, retains no claim to independence, seeks no special favors; what he longs for, whole-heartedly and with a passionate fervor, is complete absorption, utter annihilation. In the trances of the devotees, consciousness dwindles to a point, all sense of individuality lapses, perception, sensation, thought even, flag and cease, and there remains only a vast, vague sense of the infinite self in which the human self is dissolved and obliterated.

So prominent a feature in this longing or absorption in the infinite, however, was the characteristic mystical condemnation of the finite, that an account of the relations of mystical belief and practice to the affairs of actual life reduces itself largely to a series of negative statements. Closely connected with the dogma of the supreme worth of the absolute, and producing even more conspicuous effects than that, was the obverse dogma of the worthlessness of the immediate, of whatever could be called “this,” “now,” or “here.” Love of God was considered to involve contempt of man, and since man was nearer, more immediate in experience, than God, mysticism expressed itself, historically, very largely in negations. It acted, in all departments of life, and on all planes--the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional or spiritual--as an anti-naturalistic force, for which, perhaps, the best general name is asceticism.

On the physical plane, asceticism took the form of abstinence and mortification of the flesh. In its milder phases it prompted merely the refusal of all the natural calls of instinct and appetite. Because it was natural to hunger, asceticism required men to fast; because to sleep was natural, it counselled vigils; because men naturally enjoy women’s love, material well-being, and personal initiative, monastic orders imposed the triple oath of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Of course it is true that there were positive benefits to be derived from all these modes of discipline, and that much could be argued in their favor by mere common-sense; but over and above their positive virtues there was about them an opposition to nature, a violence to human instincts, that even more irresistibly commended them to true ascetics. A still further application of the same principle was mortification of the flesh. Indian Jogis, Mohammedan dervishes and fakirs, Christian cenobites and anchorites, all, in a word, who held the mystical doctrine of the absolute opposition of body and spirit, believed that to mortify the flesh was to vivify the soul, and carried out their belief with the help of a thousand engines of penance.

On the intellectual plane, the same distrust of man and of nature prompted an agelong opposition to science, to independent metaphysical or religious thinking, and indeed to all forms of free mental activity. The story of Galileo summoned before the seven cardinals at Rome and forced to deny his belief in the heretical doctrine that the earth revolved round the sun is typical of the experiences of almost all venturesome thinkers in the middle age. The application of human intellect to the unravelling of the august mysteries of God was zealously punished as a blasphemy; the only authorized channel of knowledge was revelation. The rational and systematic questioning of nature that has given us modern science was by the true mystical mind held in horror, first because the intelligence is a human and therefore corrupt instrument, and secondly because nature itself is an illusion, a pitfall for unwary feet that falter in their search for heaven.

An asceticism which saw in the physical and intellectual activities of the natural man more evil than good, could hardly be expected to look more leniently on his emotional life, which is, perhaps, the most intensely human and natural part of him, and of which the organized expression is art. Ordinary human feelings, exercised spontaneously in the present world, and not as mere offerings to the beyond, seemed to the ascetic as unworthy of a God-fearing man as sensuous pleasures and intellectual quests. And especially abhorrent to him was their free embodiment in art. As religion is the expression of man’s consciousness of the supernatural, so art is the expression of his delight and joy in the natural. Its work is to build, out of primitive sensations, utterances of feeling and monuments of beauty. But these sensations are all ultimately physical. These feelings are the simple, instinctive feelings of humanity, and this beauty is one that is apprehended by no metaphysical faculty, but by ordinary human powers--by the senses, the heart, and the mind. Art is the most radically and inexorably human of all man’s interests. And since the whole bias of asceticism was against the free development or expression of merely human powers, it was inevitable that mysticism, in which the ascetic element is so considerable, should be even more restrictive than helpful in its influence on art. While it did indeed foster the purely devout and adoring element in artistic expression, it discouraged that full appeal to the whole man by which alone art attains its maturity.

The music of Palestrina’s age is probably the most consummate expression in the whole history of art of this peculiar type of feeling, with all its characteristic qualities and limitations. “No other form of chorus music has existed,” writes Mr. Edward Dickinson,[14] “so objective and impersonal, so free from the stress and stir of passion, so plainly reflecting an exalted, spiritualized state of feeling. This music is singularly adapted to reinforce the impression of the Catholic mysteries by reason of its technical form and its peculiar emotional appeal.... It is as far as possible removed from profane suggestion; in its ineffable calmness, and an indescribable tone of chastened exultation, pure from every trace of struggle, with which it vibrates, it is the most adequate emblem of that eternal repose toward which the believer yearns.”

It was, we must now once more insist, these peculiar qualities of feeling to be expressed in mystical art, that reacted to determine the peculiarities of the technique in which they had to be embodied, just as a man’s spirit reacts to determine the nature of the body in which its purposes have to be wrought out. That “ineffable calmness,” that “chastened exultation,” of the mystical temper, could be voiced in sound only through the medium of clear, ethereal vocal tones, combined in chords prevailingly consonant and void of harshness. Such a translucent fabric of tones as was produced by human voices, singing, without instrumental accompaniment, the purest consonances, was best fitted to merge with the vast, cool arch of the cathedral, with the unlocalized murmur and reverberation that stirred in it, and with the somnolent fumes of incense, to form a background apt for mystical contemplation. And then, against this background, the phrases of aspiring but unimpassioned melody which one by one sounded above the general murmur, traced, as it were, arabesques of more definite human feeling. One by one they rose into momentary prominence, to hover above the other voices as prayers hover among the tranquil thoughts of simple and devout minds. There was about them a celestial clarity, an unearthly plangency of accent, but no turmoil or confusion, no hint of mortal pain.