This music must not be listened to with the notion in mind of dramatic expression such as we almost instinctively feel to-day. Palestrina does not seek to proclaim the varying sentiment which underlies his texts. That leads to individual interpretation and is foreign to the habits of churchmen in the old conception, when the individual was completely resolved in the organization. He aimed to exalt the mystery of the service, not to bring it down to popular comprehension and make it a personal utterance. For such a design in music we must wait until after the Reformation, when the ancient mysticism began to fall back before the demands of reason, when the idea of the sole and sufficient mediation of the Church lost some of its power in the face of the growing conviction of intimate personal relationship between man and his creator. Now idealism had to yield some of its dominion to realism, and a more rugged art grew up in place of that which had been so wonderfully sublimated by mysticism.
[Sidenote: The source of beauty in Palestrina’s music.]
It is in Bach, who came a century after Palestrina, that we find the most eloquent musical proclamation of the new regime, and it is in no sense disrespectful to the great German master if we feel that the change in ideals was accompanied with a loss in sensuous charm, or pure aesthetic beauty. Effect has had to yield to idea. It is in the flow of the voices, the color effects which result from combination and registers, the clarity of the harmonies, the reposefulness coming from conscious ease of utterance, the loveliness of each individual part, and the spiritual exaltation of the whole that the aesthetic mystery of Palestrina’s music lies.
[Sidenote: Bach.]
Like Palestrina, Bach is the culmination of the musical practice of his time, but, unlike Palestrina, he is also the starting-point of a new development. With Bach the old contrapuntal art, now not vocal merely but instrumental also and mixed, reaches its climax, and the tendency sets in which leads to the highly complex and dramatic art of to-day. Palestrina’s art is Roman; the spirit of restfulness, of celestial calm, of supernatural revelation and supernal beauty broods over it. Bach’s is Gothic—rugged, massive, upward striving, human. In Palestrina’s music the voice that speaks is the voice of angels; in Bach’s it is the voice of men.
[Sidenote: Bach a German Protestant.]
[Sidenote: Church and individual.]
[Sidenote: Ingenuousness of feeling.]