Palestrina und die klassische Vokalpolyphonie als Vorbild kirchenmusikalischer Komponisten im 19. Jahrhundert.

Day, Thomas

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many competent artists who could paint neo-Renaissance (perhaps neo-Raphael) murals for Roman Catholic churches. In those same years, there were some composers, mostly in places where German was spoken, who labored diligently to craft music that sounded like the polyphony of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, or at least like something from the late Renaissance. In 1991, Winfried Kirsch led a symposium at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt am Main, on the topic of how Palestrina's music (or an approximation) was imitated by composers in the nineteenth century. This book contains the eleven papers given at the symposium, together with a summary of the panel discussions that followed their reading.

The volume begins, appropriately, with the "Palestrina legend" as handed down by Giuseppe Baini, who wrote the first major biography of the composer (Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina [Rome: Dalla Societa tipografica, 1828; reprinted 1967]). Baini, a member of the Sistine Chapel Choir for almost fifty years, paid homage to Palestrina's works as a source of true church music but, in his own very weak compositions for the liturgy, showed little understanding of the example set by the Renaissance master. There was more opera in Baini's ears than sixteenth-century counterpoint. Baini was not alone in this respect. Composers of music for the papal choirs in the nineteenth century, despite the a cappella restrictions and all the artistic treasures in the archives, usually found more inspiration in opera than Palestrina. Thus, the use of Palestrina's style (or what could be called a reminiscence of it) as a model for composing new music would not grow into a "phenomenon" in nineteenth-century Rome but in places where the sermons were in German.

Friedhelm Brusniak describes how the Mannerchor, that distinctively German institution, started as a local association of men who sang mostly pious music; then, beginning in the 1840s, the local amateur groups began to come together for large festivals or conventions, where a massed choir would sing; in some cases, the words of the music performed at these festivals were influenced by political and nationalistic themes. Brusniak reports on Johann Georg Mettenleiter, who composed psalms with somewhat ambitious counterpoint for these Mannerchor festivals. This music was described by some as a second blooming of the great polyphonic traditions of the Renaissance, but criticized by others as too complicated and difficult for the amateur singers.

Siegfried Gmeinwieser and Albrecht Riethmuller analyze the career and works of Caspar Ett, a key figure in the movement to "restore" liturgical music. Winfried Kirsch gives detailed information about the neo-Palestrina Masses of Franz Xaver Witt. Ulrich Konrad describes Carl Loewe's neo-Renaissance music for his oratorios, especially Johann Huss. Helmut Loos presents a great deal of information on the "Lenten Mass" in a cappella style and traces its history from the seventeenth century up to Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner. There are also commentaries on obscure but worthy music by Peter Piel, Michael Haller, and Heinrich Bellermann.

At one point in this symposium, Riethmuller remarks that the liturgical music of Ett is "like alcohol-free beer or decaffeinated coffee" - no stimulation, no excitement, no intoxication. The cynic might say that this "second flowering" of Palestrina's style was all about third-rate musicians who were alienated from the modern world and yearning for a lost musical utopia (a criticism that has also been directed, not infrequently, at musicologists). The more sympathetic observer might link this pseudo-neo-Palestrina "phenomenon" with the new music in an old style that Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninov composed for the Russian Orthodox Church; on the page, such music might look cold and monotonous but, placed in the context of a ritual, it makes sense and sounds appropriately angelic.

THOMAS DAY Salve Regina University