Kitabı oku: «Music in the History of the Western Church», sayfa 12

The Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, composed 1818-1822, can hardly be considered from the liturgic point of view. In the vastness of its dimensions it is quite disproportioned to the ceremony to which it theoretically belongs, and its almost unparalleled difficulty of execution and the grandeur of its choral climaxes remove it beyond the reach of all but the most exceptional choirs. It is, therefore, performed only as a concert work by choral societies with a full orchestral equipment. For these reasons it is not to be classed with the service masses of the Catholic Church, but may be placed beside the B minor Mass of Sebastian Bach, both holding a position outside all ordinary comparisons. Each of these colossal creations stands on its own solitary eminence, the projection in tones of the religious conceptions of two gigantic, all-comprehending intellects. For neither of these two works is the Catholic Church strictly responsible. They do not proceed from within the Church. Bach was a strict Protestant; Beethoven, although nominally a disciple of the Catholic Church, had almost no share in her communion, and his religious belief, so far as the testimony goes, was a sort of pantheistic mysticism. Both these supreme artists in the later periods of their careers gave free rein to their imaginations and not only well-nigh exceeded all available means of performance, but also seemed to strive to force musical forms and the powers of instruments and voices beyond their limits in the efforts to realize that which is unrealizable through any human medium. In this endeavor they went to the very verge of the sublime, and produced achievements which excite wonder and awe. These two masses defy all imitation, and represent no school. The spirit of individualism in religious music can go no further.

The last masses of international importance produced on Austrian soil are those of Franz Schubert. Of his six Latin masses four are youthful works, pure and graceful, but not especially significant. In his E flat and A flat masses, however, he takes a place in the upper rank of mass composers of this century. The E flat Mass is weakened by the diffuseness which was Schubert’s besetting sin; the A flat is more terse and sustained in excellence, and thoroughly available for practical use. Both of them contain movements of purest ideal beauty and sincere worshipful spirit, and often rise to a grandeur that is unmarred by sensationalism and wholly in keeping with the tone of awe which pervades even the most exultant moments of the liturgy.

The lofty idealism exemplified in such works as Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Mass in D, Schubert’s last two masses, and in a less degree in Weber’s Mass in E flat has never since been lost from the German mass, in spite of local and temporary reactions. Such composers as Kiel, Havert, Grell, and Rheinberger have done noble service in holding German Catholic music fast to the tradition of seriousness and truth which has been taking form all through this century in German secular music. It must be said, however, that the German Catholic Church at large, especially in the country districts, has been too often dull to the righteous claims of the profounder expression of devotional feeling, and has maintained the vogue of the Italian mass and the shallower products of the Austrian school. Against this indifference the St. Cecilia Society has directed its noble missionary labors, with as yet but partial success.

If we turn our observation to Italy and France we find that the music of the Church is at every period sympathetically responsive to the fluctuations in secular music. Elevated and dignified, if somewhat cold and constrained, in the writings of the nobler spirits of the Neapolitan school such as Durante and Jomelli, sweet and graceful even to effeminacy in Pergolesi, sensuous and saccharine in Rossini, imposing and massive, rising at times to epic grandeur, in Cherubini, by turns ecstatic and voluptuous in Gounod, ardent and impassioned in Verdi – the ecclesiastical music of the Latin nations offers works of adorable beauty, sometimes true to the pure devotional ideal, sometimes perverse, and by their isolation serving to illustrate the dependence of the church composer’s inspiration upon the general conditions of musical taste and progress. Not only were those musicians of France and Italy who were prominent as church composers also among the leaders in opera, but their ideals and methods in opera were closely paralleled by those displayed in their religious productions. It is impossible to separate the powerful masses of Cherubini, with their pomp and majesty of movement, their reserved and pathetic melody, their grandiose dimensions and their sumptuous orchestration, from those contemporary tendencies in dramatic art which issued in the “historic school” of grand opera as exemplified in the pretentious works of Spontini and Meyerbeer. They may be said to be the reflection in church art of the hollow splendor of French imperialism. Such an expression, however, may be accused of failing in justice to the undeniable merits of Cherubini’s masses. As a man and as a musician Cherubini commands unbounded respect for his unswerving sincerity in an age of sham, his uncompromising assertion of his dignity as an artist in an age of sycophancy, and the solid worth of his achievement in the midst of shallow aims and mediocre results. As a church composer he towers so high above his predecessors of the eighteenth century in respect to learning and imagination that his masses are not unworthy to stand beside Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis as auguries of the loftier aims that were soon to prevail in the realm of religious music. His Requiem in C minor, particularly, by reason of its exquisite tenderness, breadth of thought, nobility of expression, and avoidance of all excess either of agitation or of gloom, must be ranked among the most admirable modern examples of pure Catholic art.

The effort of Lesueur (1763-1837) to introduce into church music a picturesque and imitative style – which, in spite of much that was striking and attractive in result, must be pronounced a false direction in church music – was characteristically French and was continued in such works as Berlioz’s Requiem and to a certain extent in the masses and psalms of Liszt. The genius of Liszt, notwithstanding his Hungarian birth, was closely akin to the French in his tendency to connect every musical impulse with a picture or with some mental conception which could be grasped in distinct concrete outline. In his youth Liszt, in his despair over the degeneracy of liturgic music in France and its complete separation from the real life of the people, proclaimed the necessity of a rapprochement between church music and popular music. In an article written for a Paris journal in 1834, which remains a fragment, he imagined a new style of religious music which should “unite in colossal relations theatre and church, which should be at the same time dramatic and solemn, imposing and simple, festive and earnest, fiery and unconstrained, stormy and reposeful, clear and fervent.” These expressions are too vague to serve as a program for a new art movement. They imply, however, a protest against the one-sided operatic tendency of the day, at the same time indicating the conviction that the problem is not to be solved in a pedantic reaction toward the ancient austere ideal, and yet that the old and new endeavors, liturgic appropriateness and characteristic expression, reverence of mood and recognition of the claims of contemporary taste, should in some way be made to harmonize. The man who all his life conceived the theatre as a means of popular education, and who strove to realize that conception as court music director at Weimar, would also lament any alienation between the church ceremony and the intellectual and emotional habitudes and inclinations of the people. A devoted churchman reverencing the ancient ecclesiastical tradition, and at the same time a musical artist of the advanced modern type, Liszt’s instincts yearned more or less blindly towards an alliance between the sacerdotal conception of religious art and the general artistic spirit of the age. Some such vision evidently floated before his mind in the masses, psalms, and oratorios of his later years, as shown in their frequent striving after the picturesque, together with an inclination toward the older ecclesiastical forms. These two ideals are probably incompatible; at any rate Liszt did not possess the genius to unite them in a convincing manner.

Among the later ecclesiastical composers of France, Gounod shines out conspicuously by virtue of those fascinating melodic gifts which have made the fame of the St. Cecilia mass almost conterminous with that of the opera “Faust.” Indeed, there is hardly a better example of the modern propensity of the dramatic and religious styles to reflect each other’s lineaments than is found in the close parallelism which appears in Gounod’s secular and church productions. So liable, or perhaps we might say, so neutral is his art, that a similar quality of melting cadence is made to portray the mutual avowals of love-lorn souls and the raptures of heavenly aspiration. Those who condemn Gounod’s religious music on this account as sensuous have some reason on their side, yet no one has ever ventured to accuse Gounod of insincerity, and it may well be that his wide human sympathy saw enough correspondence between the worship of an earthly ideal and that of a heavenly – each implying the abandonment of self-consciousness in the yearning for a happiness which is at the moment the highest conceivable – as to make the musical expression of both essentially similar. This is to say that the composer forgets liturgic claims in behalf of the purely human. This principle no doubt involves the destruction of church music as a distinctive form of art, but it is certain that the world at large, as evinced by the immense popularity of Gounod’s religious works, sees no incongruity and does not feel that such usage is profane. Criticism on the part of all but the most austere is disarmed by the pure, seraphic beauty which this complacent art of Gounod often reveals. The intoxicating sweetness of his melody and harmony never sinks to a Rossinian flippancy. Of Gounod’s reverence for the Church and for its art ideals, there can be no question. A man’s views of the proper tone of church music will be controlled largely by his temperament, and Gounod’s temperament was as warm as an Oriental’s. He offered to the Church his best, and as the Magi brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to a babe born among cattle in a stable, so Gounod, with a consecration equally sincere, clothed his prayers in strains so ecstatic that compared with them the most impassioned accents of “Faust” and “Romeo and Juliet” are tame. He was a profound student of Palestrina, Mozart, and Cherubini, and strong traces of the styles of these masters are apparent in his works.

Somewhat similar qualities, although far less sensational, are found in the productions of that admirable band of organists and church composers that now lends such lustre to the art life of the French capital. The culture of such representatives of this school as Guilmant, Widor, Saint-Saëns, Dubois, Gigout is so solidly based, and their views of religious music so judicious, that the methods and traditions which they are conscientiously engaged in establishing need only the reinforcement of still higher genius to bring forth works which will confer even greater honor upon Catholicism than she has yet received from the devotion of her musical sons in France. No purer or nobler type of religious music has appeared in these latter days than is to be found in the compositions of César Franck (1822-1890). For the greater part of his life overlooked or disdained by all save a devoted band of disciples, in spirit and in learning he was allied to the Palestrinas and the Bachs, and there are many who place him in respect to genius among the foremost of the French musicians of the nineteenth century.

The religious works of Verdi might be characterized in much the same terms as those of Gounod. In Verdi also we have a truly filial devotion to the Catholic Church, united with a temperament easily excited to a white heat when submitted to his musical inspiration, and a genius for melody and seductive harmonic combinations in which he is hardly equalled among modern composers. In his Manzoni Requiem, Stabat Mater, and Te Deum these qualities are no less in evidence than in “Aida” and “Otello,” and it would be idle to deny their devotional sincerity on account of their lavish profusion of nerve-exciting effects. The controversy between the contemners and the defenders of the Manzoni Requiem is now somewhat stale and need not be revived here. Any who may wish to resuscitate it, however, on account of the perennial importance of the question of what constitutes purity and appropriateness in church art, must in justice put themselves into imaginative sympathy with the racial religious feeling of an Italian, and make allowance also for the undeniable suggestion of the dramatic in the Catholic ritual, and for the natural effect of the Catholic ceremonial and its peculiar atmosphere upon the more ardent, enthusiastic order of minds.

The most imposing contributions that have been made to Catholic liturgic music since Verdi’s Requiem are undoubtedly the Requiem Mass and the Stabat Mater of Dvořák. All the wealth of tone color which is contained upon the palette of this master of harmony and instrumentation has been laid upon these two magnificent scores. Inferior to Verdi in variety and gorgeousness of melody, the Bohemian composer surpasses the great Italian in massiveness, dignity, and in unfailing good taste. There can be no question that Dvořák’s Stabat Mater is supreme over all other settings – the only one, except Verdi’s much shorter work, that is worthy of the pathos and tenderness of this immortal Sequence. The Requiem of Dvořák in spite of a tendency to monotony, is a work of exceeding beauty, rising often to grandeur, and is notable, apart from its sheer musical qualities, as the most precious gift to Catholic art that has come from the often rebellious land of Bohemia.

It would be profitless to attempt to predict the future of Catholic church music. In the hasty survey which we have made of the Catholic mass in the past three centuries we have been able to discover no law of development except the almost unanimous agreement of the chief composers to reject law and employ the sacred text of Scripture and liturgy as the basis of works in which not the common consciousness of the Church shall be expressed, but the emotions aroused by the action of sacred ideas upon different temperaments and divergent artistic methods. There is no sign that this principle of individual liberty will be renounced. Nevertheless, the increasing deference that is paid to authority, the growing study of the works and ideals of the past which is so apparent in the culture of the present day, will here and there issue in partial reactions. The mind of the present, having seen the successful working out of certain modern problems and the barrenness of others, is turning eclectic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of musical culture, both religious and secular. We see that in many influential circles the question becomes more and more insistent, what is truth and appropriateness? – whereas formerly the demand was for novelty and “effect.” Under this better inspiration many beautiful works are produced which are marked by dignity, moderation, and an almost austere reserve, drawing a sharp distinction between the proper ecclesiastical tone and that suited to concert and dramatic music, restoring once more the idea of impersonality, expressing in song the conception of the fathers that the Church is a refuge, a retreat from the tempests of the world, a place of penitence and restoration to confidence in the near presence of heaven.

Such masses as the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, the D minor of Cherubini, the Messe Solennelle of Rossini, the St. Cecilia of Gounod, the Requiems of Berlioz and Verdi, sublime and unspeakably beautiful as they are from the broadly human standpoint, are yet in a certain sense sceptical. They reveal a mood of agitation which is not that intended by the ministrations of the Church in her organized acts of worship. And yet such works will continue to be produced, and the Church will accept them, in grateful recognition of the sincere homage which their creation implies. It is of the nature of the highest artistic genius that it cannot restrain its own fierce impulses out of conformity to a type or external tradition. It will express its own individual emotion or it will become paralyzed and mute. The religious compositions that will humbly yield to a strict liturgic standard in form and expression will be those of writers of the third or fourth grade, just as the church hymns have been, with few exceptions, the production, not of the great poets, but of men of lesser artistic endowment, and who were primarily churchmen, and poets only by second intention. This will doubtless be the law for all time. The Michael Angelos, the Dantes, the Beethovens will forever break over rules, even though they be the rules of a beloved mother Church.

The time is past, however, when we may fear any degeneracy like to that which overtook church music one hundred or more years ago. The principles of such consecrated church musicians as Witt, Tinel, and the leaders of the St. Cecilia Society and the Paris Schola Cantorum, the influence of the will of the Church implied in all her admonitions on the subject of liturgic song, the growing interest in the study of the masters of the past, and, more than all, the growth of sound views of art as a detail of the higher and the popular education, must inevitably promote an increasing conviction among clergy, choir leaders, and people of the importance of purity and appropriateness in the music of the Church. The need of reform in many of the Catholic churches of this and other countries is known to every one. Doubtless one cause of the frequent indifference, of priests to the condition of the choir music in their churches is the knowledge that the chorus and organ are after all but accessories; that the Church possesses in the Gregorian chant a form of song that is the legal, universal, and unchangeable foundation of the musical ceremony, and that any corruption in the gallery music can never by any possibility extend to the heart of the system. The Church is indeed fortunate in the possession of this altar song, the unifying chain which can never be loosened. All the more reason, therefore, why this consciousness of unity should pervade all portions of the ceremony, and the spirit of the liturgic chant should blend even with the large freedom of modern musical experiment.

CHAPTER VII
THE RISE OF THE LUTHERAN HYMNODY

The music of the Protestant Church of Germany, while adopting many features from its great antagonist, presents certain points of contrast which are of the highest importance not only in the subsequent history of ecclesiastical song, but also as significant of certain national traits which were conspicuous among the causes of the schism of the sixteenth century. The musical system of the Catholic Church proceeded from the Gregorian chant, which is strictly a detail of the sacerdotal office. The Lutheran music, on the contrary, is primarily based on the congregational hymn. The one is clerical, the other laic; the one official, prescribed, liturgic, unalterable, the other free, spontaneous, and democratic. In these two forms and ideals we find reflected the same conceptions which especially characterize the doctrine, worship, and government of these oppugnant confessions.

The Catholic Church, as we have seen, was consistent in withdrawing the office of song from the laity and assigning it to a separate company who were at first taken from the minor clergy, and who even in later periods were conceived as exercising a semi-clerical function. Congregational singing, although not officially and without exception discountenanced by the Catholic Church, has never been encouraged, and song, like prayer, is looked upon as essentially a liturgic office.

In the Protestant Church the barrier of an intermediary priesthood between the believer and his God is broken down. The entire membership of the Christian body is recognized as a universal priesthood, with access to the Father through one mediator, Jesus Christ. This conception restores the offices of worship to the body of believers, and they in turn delegate their administration to certain officials, who, together with certain independent privileges attached to the office, share with the laity in the determination of matters of faith and polity.

It was a perfectly natural result of this principle that congregational song should hold a place in the Protestant cultus which the Catholic Church has never sanctioned. The one has promoted and tenaciously maintained it; the other as consistently repressed it, – not on aesthetic grounds, nor primarily on grounds of devotional effect, but really through a more or less distinct perception of its significance in respect to the theoretical relationship of the individual to the Church. The struggles over popular song in public worship which appear throughout the early history of Protestantism are thus to be explained. The emancipated layman found in the general hymn a symbol as well as an agent of the assertion of his new rights and privileges in the Gospel. The people’s song of early Protestantism has therefore a militant ring. It marks its epoch no less significantly than Luther’s ninety-five theses and the Augsburg Confession. It was a sort of spiritual Triumphlied, proclaiming to the universe that the day of spiritual emancipation had dawned.

The second radical distinction between the music of the Protestant Church and that of the Catholic is that the vernacular language takes the place of the Latin. The natural desire of a people is that they may worship in their native idiom; and since the secession from the ancient Church inevitably resulted in the formation of national or independent churches, the necessities which maintained in the Catholic Church a common liturgic language no longer obtained, and the people fell back upon their national speech.

Among the historic groups of hymns that have appeared since Clement of Alexandria and Ephraëm the Syrian set in motion the tide of Christian song, the Lutheran hymnody has the greatest interest to the student of church history. In sheer literary excellence it is undoubtedly surpassed by the Latin hymns of the mediaeval Church and the English-American group; in musical merit it no more than equals these; but in historic importance the Lutheran song takes the foremost place. The Latin and the English hymns belong only to the history of poetry and of inward spiritual experience; the Lutheran have a place in the annals of politics and doctrinal strifes as well. German Protestant hymnody dates from Martin Luther; his lyrics were the models of the hymns of the reformed Church in Germany for a century or more. The principle that lay at the basis of his movement gave them their characteristic tone; they were among the most efficient agencies in carrying this principle to the mind of the common people, and they also contributed powerfully to the enthusiasm which enabled the new faith to maintain itself in the conflicts by which it was tested. The melodies to which the hymns of Luther and his followers were set became the foundation of a musical style which is the one school worthy to be placed beside the Italian Catholic music of the sixteenth century. This hymnody and its music afforded the first adequate outlet for the poetic and musical genius of the German people, and established the pregnant democratic traditions of German art as against the aristocratic traditions of Italy and France. As we cannot overestimate the spiritual and intellectual force which entered the European arena with Luther and his disciples, so we must also recognize the analogous elements which asserted themselves at the same moment and under the same inspiration in the field of art expression, and gave to this movement a language which helps us in a peculiar way to understand its real import.

The first questions which present themselves in tracing the historic connections of the early Lutheran hymnody are: What was its origin? Had it models, and if so, what and where were they? In giving a store of congregational songs to the German people was Luther original, or only an imitator? In this department of his work does he deserve the honor which Protestants have awarded him?

Protestant writers have, as a rule, bestowed unstinted praise upon Luther as the man who first gave the people a voice with which to utter their religious emotions in song. Most of these writers are undoubtedly aware that a national poesy is never the creation of a single man, and that a brilliant epoch of national literature or art must always be preceded by a period of experiment and fermentation; yet they are disposed to make little account of the existence of a popular religious song in Germany before the Reformation, and represent Luther almost as performing the miracle of making the dumb to speak. Even those who recognize the fact of a preëxisting school of hymnody usually seek to give the impression that pure evangelical religion was almost, if not quite, unknown in the popular religious poetry of the centuries before the Reformation, and that the Lutheran hymnody was composed of altogether novel elements. They also ascribe to Luther creative work in music as well as in poetry. Catholic writers, on the other hand, will allow Luther no originality whatever; they find, or pretend to find, every essential feature of his work in the Catholic hymns and tunes of the previous centuries, or in those of the Bohemian sectaries. They admit the great influence of Luther’s hymns in disseminating the new doctrines, but give him credit only for cleverness in dressing up his borrowed ideas and forms in a taking popular guise. As is usually the case in controversy, the truth lies between the two extremes. Luther’s originality has been overrated by Protestants, and the true nature of the germinal force which he imparted to German congregational song has been misconceived by Catholics. It was not new forms, but a new spirit, which Luther gave to his Church. He did not break with the past, but found in the past a new standing-ground. He sought truth in the Scriptures, in the writings of the fathers and the mediaeval theologians; he rejected what he deemed false or barren in the mother Church, adopted and developed what was true and fruitful, and moulded it into forms whose style was already familiar to the people. In poetry, music, and the several details of church worship Luther recast the old models, and gave them to his followers with contents purified and adapted to those needs which he himself had made them to realize. He understood the character of his people; he knew where to find the nourishment suited to their wants; he knew how to turn their enthusiasms into practical and progressive directions. This was Luther’s achievement in the sphere of church art, and if, in recognizing the precise nature of his work, we seem to question his reputation for creative genius, we do him better justice by honoring his practical wisdom.

The singing of religious songs by the common people in their own language in connection with public worship did not begin in Germany with the Reformation. The German popular song is of ancient date, and the religious lyric always had a prominent place in it. The Teutonic tribes before their conversion to Christianity had a large store of hymns to their deities, and afterward their musical fervor turned itself no less ardently to the service of their new allegiance. Wackernagel, in the second volume of his monumental collection of German hymns from the earliest time to the beginning of the seventeenth century, includes fourteen hundred and forty-eight religious lyrics in the German tongue composed between the year 868 and 1518.⁶⁸ This collection, he says, is as complete as possible, but we must suppose that a very large number written before the invention of printing have been lost. About half the hymns in this volume are of unknown authorship. Among the writers whose names are given we find such notable poets as Walther von der Vogelweide, Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, Frauenlob, Reinmar der Zweter, Kunrad der Marner, Heinrich von Loufenberg, Michel Behem, and Hans Sachs, besides famous churchmen like Eckart and Tauler, who are not otherwise known as poets. A great number of these poems are hymns only in a qualified sense, having been written, not for public use, but for private satisfaction; but many others are true hymns, and have often resounded from the mouths of the people in social religious functions.

Down to the tenth century the only practice among the Germans that could be called a popular church song was the ejaculation of the words Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison. These phrases, which are among the most ancient in the Mass and the litanies, and which came originally from the Eastern Church, were sung or shouted by the German Christians on all possible occasions. In processions, on pilgrimages, at burials, greeting of distinguished visitors, consecration of a church or prelate, in many subordinate liturgic offices, invocations of supernatural aid in times of distress, on the march, going into battle, – in almost every social action in which religious sanctions were involved the people were in duty bound to utter this phrase, often several hundred times in succession. The words were often abbreviated into Kyrieles, Kyrie eleis, Kyrielle, Kerleis, and Kles, and sometimes became mere inarticulate cries.