This was on the 30th of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had resigned his important post at Saint Peter’s.  He was a young man with a family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever and came nigh to death.  But he recovered, and two months later found another post as canon of the Lateran, of which by the 1st of October, 1555, he was maestro.  Eleven years later, a year after he had written his immortal Improperia, we find him begging on account of the needs of his family to be given an increase of salary, or the acceptance of his resignation.  They gave him the acceptance.  Again he found another post, and ten years later was back again as maestro of the Vatican after his many wanderings and vicissitudes.

In the meanwhile he had written his famous mass named after his old friend, Pope Marcellus II.  The ten years between 1561 and 1571 had marked an epoch not merely in the life of Palestrina, but in the history of religious music.

The reform Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics.  The churchmen of that day did in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of the streets.  The trouble was that many of the congregation would think only of the original words of these catchy tunes, and in the general uproar some of the priests would sing the actual texts, thinking that the people would not hear them, and forgetting that they were supposed to be for an all-hearing ear.

I find an interesting example of this custom in the career of a musician, a contemporary of Palestrina’s mentioned by Van der Straeten; his name was Ambrosio de Cotes.  He was the Maestro de Capilla of the King’s Chapel at Grenada; he was of either Flemish or English birth, and, though he was a churchman, was a gambler and drunkard; he kept a mistress, who ought to have been pretty to fit her pretty name, Juana de Espinosa.  Besides, De Cotes caroused miscellaneously, he ran the streets at night, in bad company, and singing bad songs.  In 1591 he was officially reproved for these habits, and for singing improper words to sacred music (y cantan muchos rezes letras profanas, yndecentes).

So great was the scandal throughout the whole world of church music that contrapuntal music came near being abandoned entirely.  It was given a last chance in a proposition to Palestrina to see if it were worthy and capable of redemption.  He composed three masses, and the third of them, dedicated to the memory of Pope Marcellus II., was accepted, not only as the rescue of the old school of vocal worship, but also as the final word and ultimate model for future church music.