Great Italian and French Composers | Page 2

Of the celebrated penitential psalms of Di
Lasso, it is said that Charles IX. of France ordered them to be written
"in order to obtain rest for his soul after the horrible massacre of St.
Bartholomew." Aside from his works, this musician has a claim on
fame through his lasting improvements in musical form and method.

He illuminated, and at the same time closed, the great epoch of Belgian
ascendancy, which had given three hundred musicians of great science
to the times in which they lived. So much has been said of Orlando di
Lasso, for he was the model and Mentor of the greatest of early church
composers, Palestrina.
II.
The melodious and fascinating style, soon to give birth to the
characteristic genius of the opera, was as yet unborn, though dormant.
In Rome, the chief seat of the Belgian art, the exclusive study of
technical skill had frozen music to a mere formula. The Gregorian
chant had become so overladen with mere embellishments as to make
the prescribed church-form difficult of recognition in its borrowed garb,
for it had become a mere jumble of sound. Musicians, indeed, carried
their profanation so far as to take secular melodies as the themes for
masses and motetts. These were often called by their profane titles. So
the name of a love-sonnet or a drinking-song would sometimes be
attached to a miserere. The council of Trent, in 1562, cut at these evils
with sweeping axe, and the solemn anathemas of the church fathers
roused the creative powei's of the subject of this sketch, who raised his
art to an independent national existence, and made it rank with
sculpture and painting, which had already reached their zenith in
Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michel Angelo.
Henceforth Italian music was to be a vigorous, fruitful stock.
Giovanni Perluigui Aloisio da Palestrina was born at Palestrina, the
ancient Præneste, in 1524.*
* Our composer, as was common with artists and scholars in those days,
took the name of his natal town, and by this he is known to fame. Old
documents also give him the old Latin name of the town with the
personal ending.
The memorials of his childhood are scanty. We know but little except
that his parents were poor peasants, and that he learned the rudiments
of literature and music as a choir-singer, a starting-point so common in
the lives of great composers. In 1540 he went to Rome and studied in

the school of Goudimel, a stern Huguenot Fleming, tolerated in the
papal capital on account of his superior science and method of teaching,
and afterward murdered at Lyons on the day of the Paris massacre.
Palestrina grasped the essential doctrines of the school without
adopting its mannerisms. At the age of thirty he published his first
compositions, and dedicated them to the reigning pontiff, Julius III. In
the formation of his style, which moved with such easy, original grace
within the old prescribed rules, he learned much from the personal
influence and advice of Orlando di Lasso, his warm friend and constant
companion during these earlier days.
Several of his compositions, written at this time, are still performed in
Rome on Good Friday, and Goethe and Mendelssohn have left their
eloquent tributes to the impression made on them by music alike simple
and sublime. The pope was highly pleased with Palestrina's noble
music, and appointed him one of the papal choristers, then regarded as
a great honor. But beyond Rome the new light of music was but little
known. The Council of Trent, in their first indignation at the abuse of
church music, had resolved to abolish everything but the simple
Gregorian chants, but the remonstrances of the Emperor Ferdinand and
the Roman cardinals stayed the austere fiat. The final decision was
made to rest on a new composition of Palestrina, who was permitted to
demonstrate that the higher forms of musical art were consistent with
the solemnities of church worship.
All eyes were directed to the young musician, for the very existence of
his art was at stake. The motto of his first mass, "Illumina oculos
meos," shows the pious enthusiasm with which he undertook his labors.
Instead of one, he composed three six-part masses. The third of these
excited such admiration that the pope exclaimed in raptures, "It is John
who gives us here in this earthly Jerusalem a foretaste of that new song
which the holy Apostle John realized in the heavenly Jerusalem in his
prophetic trance." This is now known as the "mass of Pope Marcel," in
honor of a former patron of Palestrina.
A new pope, Paul IV., on ascending the pontifical throne, carried his
desire of reforming abuses to fanaticism. He insisted on all the papal

choristers being clerical. Palestrina had married early in life