Monteverdi and church music

by Denis Arnold

Monteverdi was born and lived in a time of great religious fervour. It was a time of saints: Teresa, Charles, Philip Neri — with the memory of Ignatius and Francis Xavier still very alive. It was a time of fine churches: Santa Maria in Vallicella and Santa Andrea della Valle in Rome and the Redentore in Venice, the Duomo Nuovo at Brescia and Santa Barbara at Mantua. It was a time of great church music: Palestrina’s mature Mass settings and motet cycle on the Song of Songs, Lasso’s Penitential Psalms, the Concerti of Andrea Gabrieli and Sacrae Symphoniae of Giovanni Gabrieli. It was, in fact, the time of what we call the Counter-Reformation.

The fervour did not last at the same pitch throughout the whole of Monteverdi’s long life. The Council of Trent had completed its deliberations just before his birth in 1567. The signs are that although — for musicians at least — it had a strong immediate effect, by the turn of the century great composers were turning to other things. But there can be no doubt that during Monteverdi’s formative years, religious music was at a peak. And Palestrina’s fine mass, Assumpta est Maria, shows just as much as the great motets of the great Venetians that it had a public face. The Counter-Reformation was not so much a time of quiet devotion but of missioning. The troops of the Jesuit order fought their battles for the influence of princes: the Oratorians of Philip Neri fought for the hearts of men with sermons, hymns and theatrical spectacle. The church of Rome was determined to use all the power of the senses to show mankind the glory of god: in majorem Dei et Ecclesiae gloriam was the motto of Pope Sixtus V in designing a new Rome. Thus its music was often grand and emotional.

The seventeenth-century organ in the cathedral of Brescia, Italy

The most obvious manifestation of the desire for public grandeur in church music was to be found in Venice. In St Mark’s — the Doge’s official chapel, the equivalent of London’s Westminster Abbey — the cappella was large: some twenty-five singers in the choir and up to the same number of instrumentalists for festival days. the style was based on the concept of cori spezzati , or divided choirs; groups of choristers were separated in the famous galleries of the basilica, from where they sang in dialogue, as it were, each phrase coming from a different place so as to amaze the listeners in the nave beneath. Cornetts and trombones would reinforce the voices to provide splendid sonorities. Thus were the foreigners, ambassadors, princes or rich German merchants impressed with the power of the Most Serene Republic.

Once a fair corpus of this music had been published in 1587 in a large volume called Concerti, containing works by the Gabrielis, the fashion spread throughout Italy. The Bologna composers working for the huge basilica of San Petronio took it up, publishing volumes with similar titles. It was popular not only in Italy: the Germans liked it, too, and a continual stream of composers came from the various northern European courts to study in Venice. Nor was it just a northern find. Palestrina published some equally splendid music for cori spezzati as early as 1572. Admittedly the Romans do not seem to have used instruments on the same scale as the Venetians; but voices alone can be impressive if church sonorities are imaginatively exploited. Palestrina, known today as the master of polyphony, in fact in later life was more concerned with music which stupefied the sense of hearing rather than delighted the intellect. Though there is ample imitative counterpoint in such a mass as the one entitled Te Deum laudibus, the main impression on the listener must have been that of the variety of sonority possible from a small six-stranded choir; mighty tenors and basses were matched against brilliant soprano castrati, and its full sound was brilliant at such moments as the opening of the Credo.

Piazza di San Marco, Venice (17th century engraving)

Things were not always as rosy as at St Mark’s or in the Sistine Chapel. We have the evidence of a maestro di cappella (Lodovico Viadana, who had worked at several provincial cathedrals and monastic churches) that motets and masses were performed with parts missing, simply because the choir was insufficient in numbers (and probably also in skill). Yet the point of interest in the preface to his first book of Concerti (1602), where he gives us this information, is precisely that he was concerned to invent a method of composition which would get round this problem. So came into being the basso continuo, a notation which allowed the organist to play chords, indicated by a bass line, to accompany just a single singer on occasion — or a very small group if things were a shade more accommodating. The impression we obtain form this and the flood of concertante motets which exploited this invention is that music had come to be considered desirable in many small church where previously there had been none. The new manner was quickly picked up by organists and choirmasters who had not (and perhaps could not have) mastered the old contrapuntal idiom. With this new style, anyone who could write a simple melody and back it up with elementary chords could claim to be a composer — and many did. But alongside there amateurs there were real composers who saw the possibilities opened up by a style based on attractive and expressive melody supported by perhaps a simple, though not to be despised, harmonic idiom.

The best of these composers achieved passion: for the non-public face of the Counter-Reformation is the individual’s profound religious feeling. Even before the basso continuo became popular, there had been this side to church music. As early as the 1560s, Lasso had composed some deeply-felt chromatic motets, in which the chromatic harmonies developed in that secret art, the musica reservata of Munich, were used. There is often a strong sense of sin in such motets, the prevailing mood being one of terror, as in the setting of ‘Timor et tremor’ in which the trembling is caused by the thought of eternal damnation — the same state of mind that is induced in the early stages of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises where the exercitant must ‘see the flames of Hell, smell the sulphur, hear the shrieks of the sufferers, taste the bitterness of their tears and feel their remorse.’

Just as in these Spiritual Exercises the participant evokes the Ascension of Christ, so does other music find the joys of religion. Here the motets for solo voice or voice with organ accompaniment often express such contentment by analogy with earthly love, motets to the Blessed Virgin being written in an erotic idiom derived from the secular song books of the time. Some of Monteverdi’s colleagues were excellent in this manner, notably his assistant in St Mark’s, Alessandro Grandi, whose settings of parts of the Song of Songs, a favourite hunting ground for the musician seeking texts throughout the Counter-Reformation period, are indeed ludicrous and erotic. Such works show the human face of the movement, just as clearly as do the New Testament scenes of Caravaggio or the martyrological statues of Bernini.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s ‘Ecstacy of Saint Theresa’

This, then, is the age of Monteverdi, and if many will prefer the religious music of the earlier Renaissance found in the balance of Josquin, or the more theological approach of the later Baroque conveyed in the patterned art of the Protestant Bach, there can be no doubt of the power of the church music of the time. Though the historians of music have usually concentrated on the secular genres — opera, monody — of the time and found church music less exciting and in the rearguard of musical advance, it is doubtful whether anybody saw it that way at the time. Opera was a delight for the rich connoisseurs, a thing for royal weddings and celebrations; monodic song sought a numerically wider but socially no less restricted audience. Church music was all around everyone. Italians do not divide their lives into secular and religious areas as northerners frequently do. Monteverdi, significantly, when classifying music did not write about ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’, but about two ‘practices’ which obeyed different aesthetic principles, according to the composer’s attitude to setting words. To think, as some commentators have done, of his music as ‘secular’ in tone is to misunderstand his mentality. Just as an anti-clerical Italian communist will seek the comfort of his priest when in extremis, so Monteverdi takes church music for granted. When he was bidden to compose it, he did so to the fullness of his capacity, just as he did and opera or madrigal when that duty called. And being a great composer, he naturally composed some great masterpieces in all these forms.

An extract from Monteverdi Church Music by Denis Arnold (© Elsie Arnold; reproduced by her kind permission).