PALESTRINA.*

Ix England there has been no great wave of popularity for Palestrina that will account for the appearance of Miss Pyne's full yet concise biography of the Roman Master. At this particular period of musical development the pure, restrained beauty of his work appeals to few. However, in Rome, a few years ago, a number of documents were found which throw much new light upon certain aspects of Paleetrina's life. These discoveries were made public by Msgr. Casimiri—who, curiously enough, occupies the position of Heater of the Chapel of St. John Lateran, onoe held by Palestrina—and no doubt partly stimulated Miss Pyne to give us this excellent biography.

If the date of Palestrina's birth is controversial (Miss Pyne contributes a valuable chapter on the subject) there can be no doubt that his musical education was ideal. He was completely immersed from early boyhood in the great Roman School of Composition, of which he is now regarded as the culminating glory. The archives of S. Maria Maggiore mention a Johannes de pekstrina [sic.] among the six choirboys recorded in 1537. In 1540, the new discoveries also show, Firmin le Bel is referred to as choirmaster. At that time Palestrina was about fourteen, and it is reasonable to suppose that he had at least a year's training under the Frenchman. This at any rate disposes of the legend that Gaudis Mell (identified both as Goudimel the Huguenot and Cimello the Neapolitan musician) was Palestrina's master. Miss Pyne tentatively suggests that between 1541 and 1544, when he became organist and choirmaster of the Cathedral of S. Agapito in his native town, a period upon which the records. fail to give us any information, Palestrina continued to study. under Firmin le Bel. Certainly ho must have been a highly accomplished and promising musician to obtain a post of such responsibility at so early an age. Indeed, some historians have been inclined to put his birth much earlier on account of this appointment. Circumstances continued to smile on him. A new Bishop was appointed to the Cathedral of S. Agapito, by name Cardinal Giammaria Ciocchi del Monte, who in 1550 was elected Pope. Julius IIL, as he became, had • Giovanni rrenulpi de Palestrina: Hie 1.rifo and Times. Ey Zoii Kendrick Pyne. Dindon : John Lone. 17e. ed. net.]

evidently been impressed with Palestrina's musicianship, for a year later Palestrina's life appointment to the Cathedral was annulled, in unusual proceeding, and he was appointed Master of the Boys in the Julian Choir. At the time Palestrina arrived in Rome a new influence was at work in religious music. Mere dexterity was giving way to more idealistic tendencies. The Spanish musicians in the Pontifical Choir, among them Morales, were partly responsible for the change. " Music," Morales asserted, " should be to educate the soul in strength and nobility."

Palestrina's first book of Masses, published in 1554 and dedi- cated to Julius III., shows how he reacted to these influences. This, as Grove points out, is the first instance of an Italian composer dedicating his work to a Pope, for foreign musicians had hitherto been dominant in Italy. Most probably the dedication earned Palestrina his elevation to the Pontifical Choir—a poet to which he was not entitled since he was a layman, a married man, and a poor singer. This, heightened by the fact that he had written and published secular madrigals while a member of the choir, brought about his speedy dismissal on the accession of Paul IV. For the next fifteen years he was choirmaster. first at the Lateran and afterwards at Santa Maria Maggiore. Many fine works like the /mproperia, which had previously been chanted to plain-song, the Hexachord Maas and the great Mass of Pope Marsala: belong to those years. Palestrina was fortunate in having at his disposal a choir quite as efficient as that of St. Peter's. One is reminded of Haydn at Eisenstadt. Frequent opportunities of hearing his own work adequately performed perhaps constitute the best educa- tion a composer can have. Certainly the majority of works of Palestrina's time are as dead as the paper upon which they were so ounningly elaborated, while the beat of Palestrina sings itself. While Paleetrina was at S. Maria Maggiore the question of Church music was put before the Council of Trent. There was a possibility that music would be entirely excluded from the Office of the Mass, and not without reason. The Bishop of Ruremonde stated, for instance, that after giving the closest

attention he had been unable to distinguish one word sung by the choir." Though it is difficult to realize the general state of Church music of that day, the clergy had obvious grounds for complaint. The setting of the Mass was clogged with

scholastic and ineffectual artifices. The Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo and the Agnate were fitted tei the lewd ballad tunes of Flanders and Provence. It was, indeed, well that the Bishop of Ruremonde and others could not distinguish one word sung by the choir, for it is said that sometimes the secular words were sung side by side with the sacred. A committee of eight Cardinals was formed to attend to the purgation of Church music, and certain works of Paleetrina were cited as models of intelligibility and correctness.

In 1571, Paleetrina again became Master of the Julian Chapel, yet continued to compose with remarkable industry. He did, of course, not turn out masterpieces with monotonous regu- larity, because masterpieces are not written in that way. The twenty-six madrigals of 1581, for instance, are comparatively uninteresting, yet in the same year he wrote the wonderful motet, Super 'lumina Babylonia, which may well have been a lament for his wife, who died shortly before. The last years of Palestrina's life, although his position was settled, were not uneventful. In 1575 three great choirs, numbering altogether

some fifteen hundred people, came from his native town, and entered Rome in a solemn procession singing his music. Then,

in 1581, he directed a series of concerts organized by the Duke of Sora. Unfortunately, our knowledge from then to 1594, when Palestrina succumbed to an attack of pleurisy, is very scanty, and amounts to little more than a record of the works

he wrote and published. Miss Pyne shows fairly conclusively that the popular tales of Palestrina's poverty are unfounded. His greatest misfortune was the early death of his talented sons.

Miss Pyne displays remarkable sympathy with the spirit of Palestrina's compositions. She approaches him as a daring explorer in the regions of polyphonic music, which he was, and not as a dull old contrapuntist, as some of us regard him. We are tempted to quote freely, but these two passages must suffice.

The first is a comment on the Motets from the Song of Solomon :- " Composers, then, were not compelled to choose between a more or less marked plagiarism or eccentricity. They were groping their way along a beautiful strange road ; led spiritually, with the better expression of the Church's meaning as their guiding star. . . . In these motets, written before the operatic idea had taken root in human consciousness, is to be found the nne tolerable medium for conveying a passionate symbolism that only man in the beauty of a pastoral simplicity might dare to use. Not a vestige of the dramatic or the sensuous is there, but a longing so etherealized, so rare that it forms a truly wonderful expression of soaring idealism. The music interprets an inner ecstasy not to be readied through the medium of words. Here is something more than the old Platonic definition of the movement of sounds . . . much more than the Renaissance ideal of pure beauty, for it adorns these concep- tions with spirituality."

Here, again, is an extract from a chapter on unaccompanied polyphony :-

" Paradoxical as it may seem, modern music, while gaining in subtlety, colouring and weight, has loot in site. An unao- nom six-part Mass is practically immeasurable, for it is conf ned in no limit of rhythmic beat, thematic structure or chromatic formula. Not that there is no beet, no structure, no key-scheme ; such a course would result in chaos ; but the beat is not limited by regularly recurring bar-lines, or the structure by fixed patterns—if the expression be allowed—of development. . . . The uniformity of timbre through the sole employment of the human voice, the absence of percussion, or of violent changes of any sort, create a certain atmosphere on which the spirit floats. To borrow an illustration from architecture—it is unlikely that anyone could enter the Pantheon in Rome without a sudden and startling sense of the vast apace. Reflection alone reveals the art hidden in the cunning gradations of the vast dome. . . . There is no apparent standard by which to gauge the proportions of the whole. In Palestrina's music there is the same absence of a definite point of comparison, and if the score be examined this seems even more remarkable, as nothing in the disposition of the voices would lead one to anticipate this quality of infinite space, this effect of divine freedom.

Miss Pyne has proved herself eminently fitted to the task of writing a life of the Homer of European Music—the man who, Baini declared, " must have made up his mind to be the simple amanuensis of God !"

[Only a few weeks ago Londoners had an epportunity of hearing sixteenth century music sung at the Albert Hall by the Vatican Choir under Msgr. Casimiri. The technical per- fection of the singers was a thing to wonder at ; but for many people a still greater cause for surprise was that the programme —drawn mainly from Palestrina—lacked neither variety nor freshness. The extent of Palestrina's range of expression is astounding when we remember that practically all his work was written for performance in church. At the Albert Hall concerts were heard such widely differing works as the Im- properium, Expeetavit cor mettm, with its ;smote spiritual beauty and certain motets from The Song of Solomon with their sug- geetions of Eastern colouring, and their roaring lions and leaping deer and other attempts at realism. Of great beauty, too, was a motet by Firmin le Bel, Palestrina's master, which abounded in wonderful contrasts of polyphony.]