Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

altogether from the religious service, and Calvin forbade any church

music except unisonal singing by the congregation. But he allowed

polyphonic song in the home; and his Huguenot followers in France took

part of their strength and courage from family singing of hymns and

Psalms set to music for several voices. When Clement Marot

translated the Psalms into French verse Calvin so liked the result

that he condoned the polyphonic settings arranged by Claude

Goudimel, and the fact that this Protestant composer was slain in

the Massacre of St. Bartholomew made his Psalter a doubly holy book. A

century after Marot a Catholic bishop expressed his envy of the role

these translations and settings had played in the French

Reformation. "To know these Psalms by heart is, among the Huguenots, a

sign of the communion to which they belong; and in the towns in

which they are most numerous the airs may be heard coming from the

mouths of artisans, and, in the country, from those of tillers of

the Soil." `063412 The democratization of religious music marked the

lands of the Reformation, covering the darkness of the creed with

the releasing joy of song.

IV. PALESTRINA: 1526-94

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The Catholic Church remained the chief patron of music, as of the

other arts. North of the Alps Catholic music proceeded along the lines

set by the Flemish School. This tradition was confirmed by Ysaac in

Austria, and by Di Lasso in Bavaria. One of Luther's most generous

letters was addressed (1530) to Ludwig Senfl, complimenting him on the

music he was composing at Munich, and praising the Catholic dukes

there because "they cultivate and honor music." `063413

The choir of the Sistine Chapel was still the model on which kings

and princes established their "chapels" in the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries. Even among Protestants the highest form of

musical composition was the Mass, and the crowning glory of a Mass was

to be sung by the papal choir. The supreme ambition of a singer was to

join that choir, which was therefore able to include the best male

voices in Western Europe. Castrati - then called eunuchi - were

first admitted to the Sistine Choir about 1550; soon afterward some

appeared at the Bavarian court. The emasculation was performed on

consenting boys who were persuaded that their soprano voices would

be a greater asset to them than fertility- a vulgar virtue generally

supplied beyond demand.

Like any old and complex institution, which has so much to lose by

an unsuccessful innovation, the Church was conservative, even more

in ritual than in creed. Composers, on the contrary, were weary of old

modes, as they have been in all ages, and experiment was to them the

life of their art. All through these centuries the Church struggled to

prevent the artificiality of the ars nova, and the subtlety of

Flemish counterpoint, from weakening the dignity and grandeur of the

High Mass. In 1322 Pope John XXII issued a stern decree against

musical novelties and decoration, and ordered that the music of the

Mass should keep to unisonal plain song, the Gregorian chant, as its

foundation, and permit only such harmony as would be intelligible to

worshipers, and would deepen rather than distract piety. The order was

obeyed for a century; then it was evaded by having some of the

performers sing the bass part an octave higher than written; this

faulx bourdon - false bass- became a favorite ruse in France.

Complexities in Mass music developed again. Five, six, or eight

parts were sung in fugue and counterpoint, in which the words of the

liturgy ran upon one another's heels in professional confusion, or

were drowned in musical flourishes sometimes inserted by the singers

ad libitum. The custom of adapting popular tunes into a Mass led

even to the intrusion of profane words into the sacred text. Some

Masses came to be known from their secular sources, like The Mass

of Farewell My Loves, or The Mass in the Shadow of the

Bush. `063414 The liberal Erasmus was himself so disgusted with the

artificiality of "art Masses" that he protested, in a note to his

edition of the New Testament:

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Modern church music is so constructed that the congregation cannot

hear one distinct word. The choristers themselves do not understand

what they are singing.... There was no [church] music in St. Paul's

time. Words were then pronounced plainly. Words nowadays mean

nothing.... Men leave their work and go to church to listen to more

noises than were ever heard in Greek or Roman theaters. Money must

be made to buy organs and train boys to squeal. `063415

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In this matter the reform party within the Church agreed with

Erasmus. Bishop Giberti of Verona forbade the use of amorous songs

or popular melodies in the churches of his diocese, and Bishop

Morone of Modena prohibited all "figured" music- i.e., music adorned

with the elaboration of motives or themes. At the Council of Trent the

Catholic reformers urged the exclusion of all polyphonic music from

church services, and a return to monodic Gregorian chant. The

predilection of Pope Pius IV for Palestrina's Masses may have helped

to save the day for Catholic polyphony.

Giovanni Luigi Palestrina took his name from a little city in the

Roman Campagna, which in ancient days had entered history as

Praeneste. In 1537 we find him listed, at the age of eleven, among the

choirboys at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. He was not yet twenty-one

when he was appointed choirmaster in the cathedral of his native town.

So established, he married (1547) Lucrezia di Goris, a woman of

helpful but moderate means. When the bishop of Palestrina became

Julius III he brought his choirmaster to Rome, and made him head of

the Cappella Giulia, in St. Peter's, which trained singers for the

Sistine Chapel. To the new Pope the young composer dedicated his

First Book of Masses (1554), one of which presented a three-voice

counterpoint accompaniment to one voice in plain song. The Pope liked

these Masses enough to give Palestrina membership in the Sistine

Choir. As a married man Giovanni's position in this usually tonsured

group seemed irregular, and evoked some opposition. Palestrina was

about to dedicate a book of madrigals to the Pope when Julius

died (1555).

Marcellus II lived only three weeks after his elevation to the

papacy. To his memory the composer dedicated (1555) his famous

Missa Papae Marcelli, which was not published or so named till 1567.

Pope Paul IV, a man of inflexible and puritan principles, dismissed

the three married members from the Sistine Choir, allotting each a

small pension. Palestrina was soon made choirmaster at St. John

Lateran, but this position, though it buttered his bread, offered no

patronage to cover the expense of publishing musical compositions.

With the accession of Pius IV (1559) papal favor returned. Pius was

impressed by the Improperia that Palestrina wrote for the Good

Friday service, and from that time this composition became a regular

part of that ritual in the Sistine Chapel. Palestrina's marriage still

excluded him from the Sistine Choir, but his status rose with his

appointment (1561) as choirmaster at Santa Maria Maggiore.

A year later the reassembled Council of Trent took up the problem of

adjusting church music to the new spirit of reform. The extreme

proposal to forbid polyphony altogether was rejected; a compromise

measure was passed urging ecclesiastical authorities to "exclude

from churches all such music as... introduces anything of the impure

or lascivious, in order that the house of God may truly be seen to

be... the house of prayer." *06063 Pius IV appointed a committee of

eight cardinals to implement this decree in the diocese of Rome. A

pleasant story relates that the commission was on the verge of banning

polyphonic music when one member, Cardinal Charles Borromeo,

appealed to Palestrina to compose a Mass that would show the full

congruity of polyphony and piety; that Palestrina wrote, and a choir

sang, for the commission, three Masses, one of them the Missa Papae

Marcelli, and that the profound union of religious elevation and

chastened musical artistry in these Masses saved polyphony from

condemnation. However, the Mass of Pope Marcellus was already ten

years old, and the only known connection of Palestrina with this

commission is its extension of his pension. `063416 We may none the

less believe that the music which Palestrina had presented in the

choirs of Rome- by its fidelity to the words, its avoidance of secular

motives, and the subordination of musical art to religious intent-

played a part in leading the committee to sanction polyphonic

music. `063417 It was an added argument for polyphony that

Palestrina's ecclesiastical compositions normally dispensed with

instrumental adornment, and were almost always written a cappella -

"in chapel style"- i.e., for voices alone.

In 1571 Palestrina was again made choirmaster of the Cappella

Giulia, and he kept this post till his death. Meanwhile he composed

with uncontrollable fertility- in all, ninety-three Masses, 486

antiphons, offertories, motets, and psalms, and a great number of

madrigals. Some of these were on secular themes, but as Palestrina

aged he turned even this form to religious purposes. His First Book

of Spiritual Madrigals (1581) includes some of his most beautiful

chants. Personal misfortunes may have colored his music. In 1576 his

son Angelo died, leaving to his care two beloved grandchildren, who

died a few years later. Another son died about 1579, and in 1580 the

death of his wife moved the composer to think of becoming a monk.

However, he married again within a year.

The astonishing abundance and quality of Palestrina's product raised

him to the leadership of Italian, if not of all European, music. His

setting of the Song of Solomon to twenty-nine motets (1584), his

Lamentations of Jeremiah (1588), his Stabat Mater and Magnificat

(1590) confirmed his reputation and his persisting power. In 1592

his Italian competitors joined in presenting him with a Collection of

Vesper Psalms honoring him as the "common father of all musicians."

On January 1, 1594, he dedicated to the Grand Duchess Christina of

Tuscany a Second Book of Spiritual Madrigals, combining again

religious devotion with musical mastery. A month later he died, in the

sixty-ninth year of his age. His tomb bore under his name the title he

had earned, Musicae Princeps, Prince of Music.

We must not expect to appreciate Palestrina today unless,

ourselves in a religious mood, we hear his music in its proper setting

as part of some solemn ritual; and even there its technical aspects

may leave us more marveling than moved. In a literal sense the

proper setting can never return, for it was music of the Catholic

Reformation, the somber tone of a stern reaction against the

sensuous joyousness of the pagan Renaissance. It was Michelangelo

surviving Raphael, Paul IV replacing Leo X, Loyola displacing Bembo,

Calvin succeeding Luther. Our current preferences are a transient

and fallible norm; and an individual's taste- especially if he be

lacking in technical competence, in mysticism, and a sense of sin-

is a narrow base on which to rest a standard of judgment in music or

theology. But we can all agree that Palestrina carried to its

completion the religious polyphony of his day. Like most high artists,

he stood at the crest of a line of development in feeling and

technique; he received a tradition and completed it; he accepted

discipline, and through it gave structure to his music, an

architectonic stability against the winds of change. Who knows but

some not very distant age, tiring of orchestral sonorities and

operatic romances, may find again in such music as Palestrina's a

depth of feeling, a profound and placid flow of harmony, better fitted

to express the soul of man cleansed of pride in reason and power,

and standing again humble and fearful before the engulfing infinite.

CHAPTER XXXV: Literature in the Age of Rabelais: 1517-64

I. OF MAKING BOOKS

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AFTER Gutenberg the impulse to self-display took an added form-

the itch to be in print. It was a costly urge, for the only

copyright then known was the "exclusive privilege" given by civil or

ecclesiastical authorities to print a specified book. Such a grant was

exceptional, and without it rival publishers, even in the same

country, might "pirate" a work at will. If a book sold well the

publisher would usually give the author an honorarium; but almost

the only publications profitable enough to earn such a fee were

popular romances, tales of magic or marvels, and controversial

pamphlets which had to be abusive to sell. Works of scholarship were

lucky to pay their cost. Publishers encouraged authors to dedicate

such productions to state or Church dignitaries, or affluent

magnates or lords, in the hope of a gift for the laud.

Printing and publishing were generally united in the same firm,

and the man or family that engaged in them was a vital factor in his

town and times. Fame through printing alone was rare. Claude

Garamond of Paris managed it by discarding the "Gothic" type that

German printers had adopted from manuscript lettering, and designing

(c. 1540) a "roman" type based on the Carolongian minuscule script

of the ninth century as developed by Italian humanists and the

Aldine press. Italian, French, and English printers chose this roman

form; the Germans clung to Gothic till the nineteenth century. Some

styles of type still bear Garamond's name.

Germany led the world in publishing. There were active firms in

Basel, Strasbourg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Cologne,

Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Magdeburg. Twice a year publishers and

booksellers met at the Frankfurt fair, bought and sold books, and

exchanged ideas. One Frankfurt printer issued the first newspaper

(1548)- a sheet distributed at the fair and reporting recent events.

Antwerp became a publishing center when Christopher Plantin turned his

bindery into a printing shop (1555); two years later he sent 1,200

volumes to the Frankfurt fair. In France the hub of the book trade was

Lyons; 200 printing establishments made the city challenge Paris as

the intellectual capital of the land.

Etienne Dolet, printer and humanist, was the firebrand of Lyons.

Born in Orleans, schooled in Paris, he fell in love with Cicero; "I

approve only of Christ and Tully." Hearing that thought was

exceptionally free at Padua, he hurried there, and exchanged

irreverent epigrams with skeptical Averroists. At Toulouse he became

the soul of a freethinking band that laughed at "Papists" and

Lutherans alike. Banished, he went to Lyons and made a name for

himself with poems and articles, but he killed a painter in an

argument, and fled to Paris, where Marguerite of Navarre won him a

pardon from the King. He became friends- and quarreled- with Marot and

Rabelais. Returning to Lyons, he set up a printing press, and

specialized in publishing heretical works. The Inquisition summoned

him, tried him, imprisoned him;, he escaped, but was captured on a

clandestine visit to his son. On August 3, 1546, he was burned alive.

The most distinguished of French publishers were the Etiennes, a

dynasty as persistent in printing as the Fuggers in finance. Henri

Etienne started his press at Paris about 1500; it was continued by his

sons Francis, Robert, and Charles; to these four France owed her

finest editions of the Greek and Latin classics. Robert compiled a

Thesaurus linguae latinae (1532), which became the leaning-post

for all later Latin-French dictionaries. To the Etiennes Latin

became a second tongue; they regularly spoke it in their family

life. Francis I praised their work, supported Marguerite in

defending them against the Sorbonne, and on one occasion joined the

coterie of scholars that met in Robert's shop; a famous story tells

how the King waited patiently while Robert corrected an urgent

proof. Francis provided the funds with which Robert engaged Garamond

to design and cast a new font of Greek type, so beautiful that it

became the model of most later printing in Greek. The Sorbonne

disapproved of the King's flirtation with Hellenism; a professor

warned Parlement (1539) that "to propagate a knowledge of Greek

and Hebrew would operate to the destruction of all religion"; as for

Hebrew, said a monk, it was "well known that all who learn Hebrew

presently become Jews." `06351 After being harassed by the Sorbonne

for thirty years Robert transferred his press to Geneva (1552); and

there, in the year of his death (1559), he revealed his Protestant

inclinations by publishing an edition of Calvin's Institutes. His

son Henri Etienne II upheld the repute of the family by issuing in

Paris handsome editions of the classics, and compiling in five volumes

a Thesaurus linguae graecae (1572), which is still the most complete

of all Greek dictionaries. He brought the Sorbonne down upon him by

publishing an Apologie pour Herodote (1566), in which he pointed out

the parallels between Christian miracles and the incredible marvels

related by the Greek. He in his turn sought refuge in Geneva, but

found the Calvinist regime as intolerant as the Sorbonne.

Many publications of this age were models of typography,

engraving, and binding. The heavy half-metallic bindings of the

fifteenth century gave place to lighter and cheaper covers in leather,

velum, or parchment. Jean Grolier de Servieres, treasurer of France in

1534, had most of his 3,000 volumes so elegantly bound in Levantine

morocco that they rank among the handsomest books in existence.

Private libraries were now numberless, and public libraries were

opened in many cities- Cracow (1517), Hamburg (1529), Nuremberg

(1538).... Under Francis I the old royal library assembled by

Charles VIII was transferred from the Louvre to Fontainebleau, and was

enriched with new collections and fine bindings; this Bibliothique

du Roi became, after the Revolution, the Bibliothique Nationale.

Many monastic libraries perished in the Reformation, but many passed

into private hands, and what was of value in them found its way into

public repositories. Much is lost in history, but so much of worth has

been preserved that not a hundred lifetimes could absorb it.

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II. SCHOOLS

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It was natural that the Revolution should for a time disrupt the

educational system of Western Europe, for that system was almost

wholly a service of the Church, and the influence of the orthodox

clergy could not be successfully challenged without breaking their

control of education. Luther condemned the existing grammar schools as

teaching the student "only enough bad Latin to become a priest and

read Mass... and yet remain all his life a poor ignoramus fit

neither to cackle nor to lay eggs." `06352 As for the universities,

they seemed to him dens of murderers, temples of Moloch, synagogues of

corruption; "nothing more hellish... ever appeared on earth... or ever

would appear"; and he concluded that they were "only worthy of being

reduced to dust." `06353 Melanchthon agreed with him on the ground

that the universities were turning students into pagans. `06354 The

opinion of Carlstadt, the Zwickau "prophets," and the Anabaptists-

that education was a useless frill, a peril to morals, and a hindrance

to salvation- was readily accepted by parents who grudged the cost

of educating their children. Some fathers argued that since

secondary instruction was largely directed to preparing students for

the priesthood, and priests were now so unfashionable, it was

illogical to send sons to universities.

The Reformers had expected that the revenues of ecclesiastical

properties appropriated by the state would in part be devoted to

establishing new schools to replace those that were disappearing

with the closing of the monasteries; but "princes and lords," Luther

complained, "were so busily engaged in the high and important

affairs of the cellar, the kitchen, and the bedchamber that they had

no time" to help education. "In the German provinces," he wrote

(1524), "the schools are now everywhere allowed to go to ruin." `06355

By 1530 he and Melanchthon were lamenting the deterioration of the

German universities. `06356 At Erfurt the enrollment fell from 311

in 1520 to 120 in 1521, to 34 in 1524; at Rostock from 300 in 1517

to 15 in 1525; at Heidelberg in that year there were more professors

than students; and in 1526 only five scholars enrolled at the

University of Basel. `06357

Luther and Melanchthon labored to repair the damage. In an

Epistle to the Burgomasters (1524) Luther appealed to secular

authorities to establish schools. In 1530, far ahead of his time, he

proposed that elementary education should be made compulsory, and be

provided at public expense. `06358 To the universities, gradually

reconstituted under Protestant auspices, he recommended a curriculum

centered on the Bible, but also teaching Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German,

law, medicine, history, and "poets and orators... heathen or

Christian." `06359 Melanchthon made the revival of education a main

task of his life. Under his leadership and stimulus many new schools

were opened; by the end of the sixteenth century there were 300 in

Germany. He drew up a Schulplan (1527) for the organization of

schools and universities; he wrote textbooks of Latin and Greek

grammar, of rhetoric, logic, psychology, ethics, and theology; and

he trained thousands of teachers for the new institutions. His country

gratefully named him Praeceptor Germaniae, the Educator of

Germany. One by one the universities of northern Germany passed

under Protestant control: Wittenberg (1522), Marburg (1527),

Tubingen (1535), Leipzig (1539), Konigsberg (1544), Jena (1558).

Professors or students who (as Duke Ulrich of Wurttemberg put it) were

opposed to "the right, true, evangelical doctrine" were dismissed.

Calvinists were excluded from Lutheran colleges, and Protestants

were barred from universities still held by Catholics. Generally,

after the Peace of Augsburg (1555), German students were forbidden

to attend schools of another faith than that of the territorial

prince. `063510

Johannes Sturm immensely advanced the new education when he set up a

Gymnasium or secondary school at Strasbourg (1538), and published in

that year an influential tract On Rightly Opening Schools of Letters

( De litterarum ludis recte aperiendis ). Like so many leaders of

thought in Central Europe, Sturm had received his schooling from the

Brethren of the Common Life. Thence he went to Louvain and Paris,

where he met Rabelais; the famous letter of Gargantua on education may

echo a mutual influence. While making "a wise piety" the chief aim

of education, Sturm laid rising stress on the study of the Greek and

Latin languages and literatures; and this thoroughness of training

in the classics passed down to the later Gymnasien of Germany to

raise the army of scholars that in the nineteenth century raided and

ransacked the ancient world.

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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