Palestrina and the German romantic imagination: interpreting historicism in nineteenth-century music 9780521807371, 9780521001960, 9780511103001

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgements (page xi)
List of abbreviations (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
1 Historicism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture (page 9)
2 Romanticism and the problem of church music (page 36)
3 The Protestant Palestrina revival (page 62)
4 The Catholic Palestrina (page 133)
5 Palestrina in the concert hall (page 214)
6 Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music (page 241)
Notes (page 261)
Bibliography (page 296)
Index (page 311)

Citation preview

PALESTRINA AND THE GERMAN ROMANTIC IMAGINATION Focusing on the reception of Palestrina, this bold interdisciplinary study explains how and why the works of a sixteenth-century composer came to be viewed as a paradigm for modern church music. It explores the diverse ways in which later composers responded

to his works and style, and expounds a provocative new model for interpreting compositional historicism. In addition to presenting insights into the works of Bruckner, Mendelssohn and Liszt, the book offers new perspectives on the institutional, aesthetic and ideological frameworks sustaining the cultivation of choral music in this period. ‘This is the first modern publication to provide an overview and analysis of the relation between the Palestrina revival and nineteenth-century composition, and it demonstrates that the

revival. : Palestrina revival was just as significant for nineteenth-century culture as parallel movements in the other arts, such as the Gothic

JAMES GARRATT isa lecturer in music at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, specializing in nineteenth-century German music, aesthetics and culture. He 1s also active as a choral conductor.

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Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music

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PALESTRINA AND THE

GERMAN ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music

JAMES GARRATT

CAMBRIDGE 59) UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, ‘Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cB2 2Ru, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY roo11-4211, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, ‘The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © James Garratt 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2002

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Baskerville Monotype 11/12.5 pt System IRX2¢ [TB] A catalogue record for this book 1s available from the British Library |

ISBN 0 521 80737 9 hardback

Lo my parents

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Contents

Acknowledgements page xi xi Last of abbreviations

Introduction I

and culture 9

1 Historicism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics

Originality: consensus or controversy? 9 ‘On the benefit and detriment of history’ 12

Hegel, historicism and the “Decay and disintegration of Art’ 28

2 Romanticism and the problem of church music 30 Hoffmann and the Romantic idealization of Palestrina 36

Palestrina and the Romantic new mythology 47

Palestrina and absolute vocal music 52 Palestrina and the modern composer 57

3 The Protestant Palestrina revival 62 Old Italian music, Bildung and the German Singvereine 62

Quasi-liturgical music: Spohr and Nicolai 69

Mendelssohn and the Berlin Palestrina revival 78

Winterfeld and the historical Palestrina 93

Broader trends in performance and composition 98

Palestrina and the primacy of vocal music 109

4 ‘The Catholic Palestrina revival 133

Tradition and reform 133

Witt and the Allgemeine Deutsche Cacilten- Verein 144

Broader trends in composition: Palestrinianism 161 Completing Palestrina: Haberl, Haller and the Gesamtausgabe 168

Liturgical function and aesthetic value 173 Liszt, Bruckner and the Palestrina revival 181 1x

x Contents

5 Palestrina in the concert hall 214

Palestrina in secular and non-liturgical music 214

Wagner’s ‘Stabat mater’ and the poetics of arrangement 222

Liszt, Wagner and allusion 2277

Notes 261 Bibliography 296 Index QIl 6 Interpreting the secondary discourse of

nineteenth-century music 241

Acknowledgements |

The Palestrina revival has been at the centre of my concerns for the best part of a decade, and with this book I take leave — at least provisionally —

of this fascinating and extraordinarily rich topic. I would like to thank everyone whose help and encouragement have sustained my work in this field. I first began exploring the Palestrina revival via an undergraduate dissertation on the church music of Liszt and Bruckner (the sole copy of which, thankfully, is in my possession), and must thank Roger Parker, John Warrack and Susan Wollenberg for stimulating my interest in this topic. Then, having moved from Oxford to the University of Wales

Cardiff, | wrote my Ph.D. thesis under the title of the present book; my research would not have been possible without the financial support of a Research Studentship from Cardiff University. I am very grateful to everyone at Cardiff who gave advice and support, including Kenneth Gloag, Natasha Page, Robin Stowell, Stephen Walsh, Peter Williams and especially my doctoral supervisor, David Wyn Jones. Although based on my Ph.D. dissertation, this book represents a substantial reworking of my initial ideas; I have also drawn on my more recent work on historiography and performance practice. Some of the new material has appeared in other publications: portions of chapters 3 and 6 were first published in my ‘Mendelssohn’s Babel: Romanticism and the Poetics of ‘Translation’, Music and Letters 80 (1999), 234.9; portions

of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in a different form in ‘Prophets Looking Backwards: German Romantic Historicism and the Representation of Renaissance Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125 (2000), 164—

204; and various passages of the book (in the age of ‘copy and paste’, it is hard to be more specific) have appeared in ‘Performing Renaissance Church Music in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Issues and Challenges in the Study of Performative Reception’, Music and Letters 83 (2002), 187-236. I am grateful to the Stadelsches Kunstinstitut und Stadtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main, for permission to reproduce Philipp Veit’s XI

xl Acknowledgements Die Einfiihrung der Riinste in Deutschland durch das Christenthum (left panel:

Italia) as the jacket illustration. ‘This idealized representation of Italy (by an artist related to two of the protagonists in the book, Felrx Mendelssohn and Friedrich Schlegel), provides a rich and inspiring metaphor for the present topic. It was John Butt who suggested that I reshape my dissertation into a book, and Iam very grateful to him and to Penny Souster for the enthusiasm with which they have pursued this project. I must also thank my colleagues at the National University of Ireland Maynooth for their advice

and assistance, especially Barra Boydell, Patrick Devine and Gerard Gillen; in addition, I acknowledge with gratitude the work of all the librarians who have facilitated my research, especially the staff of the Music Department Resource Centre at Cardiff and of the Russell and Jobn Paul II libraries at Maynooth. Most of all, I wish to thank Sinéad Dempsey, who not only typeset the music examples at the very last minute, but who — in its final stages — tolerated the book’s inexorable encroachment into what seemed like every minute of our lives.

Abbreviations

Amx Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Keitung BR Atta del secondo convegno internazionale di studi Palestriniana: Palestrina e la sua presenza nella musica e nella cultura europea dal suo

tempo ad oggi (Palestrina, 1986), ed. Lino Bianchi and Giancarlo

Rostirolla, Palestrina, 1991.

CK Caecilien Kalender

CU Der Caecilianismus: Anfange — Grundlagen — Wirkungen. Internationales Symposium zur Rarchenmustk des 19. Jahrhunderts,

ed. Hubert Unverricht, ‘Tutzing, 1988, Eichstatter

, Abhandlungen zur Musikwissenschaft 5.

CVC Vereins-Catalog. (Begonnen 1870.) Die von dem Referentencollegium des Cacilen-Vereines fiir alle Lander deutscher unge in den ‘Vereins-Catalog’ aufgenommenen kirchenmusikalischen oder auf

Kirchenmustk beztighchen Werke enthaltend. (Supplement to FB.)

DC1 Franz Xaver Witt, Reden an den Cacilien- Verein, ed. Christoph Lickleder, Regensburg, 1983, Documenta Caeciliana 1. DC2 Franz Xaver Witt, Das kel. bayerische Cultus-Ministerum, die bayerische Abgeordneten-Rammer und der Gacilien- Verein. 1.

Abtheilung, ed. Christoph Lickleder, Regensburg, 1983,

Documenta Caeciliana 2. DC3 Christoph Lickleder, Choral und figurierte Kirchenmustk in der Sicht Franz Xaver Witts anhand der ‘Flegenden Blatter’ und der ‘Musica

sacra’, Regensburg, 1988, Documenta Caeciliana 3. FB Fhegende Blatter fiir katholische Kirchen-Musik

HA Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Asthetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge, 2 vols., 2nd edn, Berlin and Weimar, 1965. HSA Heinrich Heine Sakularausgabe, ed. Fritz Mende e¢ al., 27 vols., Berlin and Paris, 1970-.

xi ,

XIV List of abbreviations ASW Johann Gottfried Herder, Sdmiliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols., Berlin, 1877—99; repr. Hildesheim, 1967-8. HW Die Ausbreitung des Historismus tiber die Musik: Aufsatze und Diskusstonen, ed. Walter Wiora, Regensburg, 1969, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts 14. KESA Knitische Friednich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols., Munich, 1958- .

Kfb Kirchenmustkalisches fahrbuch MGG Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopadie ) der Musik, ed. Friedrich Blume, Kassel, 194.9—68, 1973-0. MGGe2 Die Musik im Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopadre der Musik begriindet von Fnednch Blume, 2nd edn, ed.

Ludwig Finscher, Kassel and Stuttgart, 1994- . MS Musica sacra. Beitrage zur Reform und Forderung der katholischen Kirchen-Mustk ©

NG The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols., ed. Stanley Sadie, London, 1980. PGA Giovanni Prerluigi da Palestrinas Werke. Erste kritisch durchgesehene Gesammtausgabe, ed. Franz Xaver Haberl et al., 33 vols., Leipzig, 1862—1903.

PRr Palestrina und die Kurchenmustk im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. I: Palestrina und die Idee der klassischen Vokalpolyphonie wm 19. Jahrhundert: zur Geschichte eines kirchenmustkalischen Stalideals.

Bericht tiber ein Symposion in Frankfurt am Main, ed. Winfried

Kirsch, Regensburg, 1989. Pk3 Palestrina und die Kirchenmustk um 19. Jahrhundert, vol. LI: Palestrina und die klassische Vokalpolyphonie als Vorbild kurchenmustkalischer Kompositionen im 19. fahrhundert, ed.

Martina Janitzek and Winfried Kirsch, Kassel, 1995. POC Le opere complete di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, ed. Raftaele Casimiri et al., Rome, 1939-65, 1973-. RW Religiose Musik 1n nicht-hturgischen Werken von Beethoven bis

| Reger, ed. Walter Wiora, Regensburg, 1978, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts 51. KAR Keuschrift fiir katholsche Kirchenmustk

Introduction

This study explores historicism in nineteenth-century German music, focusing on the reception of Renaissance church music, in particular the works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525-94). It explains how and why the works of a sixteenth-century composer came to be viewed as the paradigm of church music, assessing and interpreting the relationship between the idealization of his style and contemporary composition. The approach taken is threefold in nature. First, it confronts and offers solutions to an aesthetic problem, establishing why nineteenth-century

composers sought to relate their works to the music of Palestrina and how they were able to justify such relationships in the face of Romantic

postulates of originality, authenticity and contemporaneity in the art- | work. Second, it addresses a historical problem, examining the complex differing natures of the Protestant and Catholic Palestrina revivals, and comparing the compositional responses to Palestrina by north German

Protestants and south German Catholics. ‘Third, it addresses a theoretical problem, exploring how relationships to earlier musical styles and materials in nineteenth-century compositions can best be discussed and understood, proposing a new model for interpreting compositional historicism. The Palestrina revival — a phrase used throughout the study to indicate both the reawakening of interest in Palestrina’s music and its emulation by nineteenth-century composers — has not been entirely neglected by modern musicology. Even so, outside Germany and Austria this topic has had a marginal role within musical scholarship: it has often been treated as an esoteric oddity, merely an episode in the epic tale of the decline and fall of church music, of little or no relevance to the mainstream of nineteenth-century music or modern musicology (the sole contact that many anglophone readers will have had with the issues raised by the Palestrina revival 1s through occasional, gnomic remarks in the translated works of Carl Dahlhaus). In recent years, however, German I

2 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination and Austrian scholars have devoted increasing attention to aspects of the Palestrina revival: in particular, two collections of papers edited by Winfried Kirsch have provided much information on the critical reception of Palestrina’s works in Germany, the liturgical backgrounds to the Palestrina revival and the relation between it and the works of individual composers (especially those associated with the Catholic revival in Bavaria), while Peter Liittig has explored the role of the Palestrina style in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterpoint treatises.’ ‘The present study builds on and challenges ideas that have emerged in recent German studies: in particular, the three problems outlined above

represent a response to what is absent or underdeveloped in previous discussions of the topic.’ It 1s the first modern publication to provide an overview and interpretation of the relation between the Palestrina revival and nineteenth-century composition, and aims to establish the importance of this topic to the wider field of nmeteenth-century music, thought and culture; in short, I hope to demonstrate that the Palestrina revival was just as significant as parallel trends in the other arts, most notably the Gothic revival and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. ‘The picture that emerges is complicated and multifaceted, a complexity that stands in a _ paradoxical relationship with the self-conscious simplicity of much of the music examined. Such contradictions, however, are fundamental to the Palestrina revival and to nineteenth-century church music in general. Of crucial importance in discussing the relation between Palestrina and nineteenth-century music — both in terms of establishing the intentions of composers who engaged with the ideal that Palestrina represented and in interpreting their works — 1s disentangling the meanings and associations of the term Palestrina-Stil. My concern is primarily with

relationships to the style of Palestrina as evinced in his works, with nineteenth-century perceptions of that style and with the compositional reception of specific Renaissance pieces, not with the use of the abstract , and supposedly timeless rules of the ‘Palestrina style’. ‘The employment of such universal laws of composition 1s discussed here only in so far as they were conceived as an accompaniment to and means of more accurately replicating the style of Palestrina and his contemporaries. A central problem in previous discussions of this topic 1s that the distinction between Palestrina’s style and the “Palestrina style’ is even less easily apprehended in German than in English. While the English phrase ‘Palestrina style’ generally refers to the body of contrapuntal techniques that became, in part through the mediation of Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), a timeless corpus of rules applicable within a variety of styles, the term Palestrina-Stil

, Introduction 3 can refer in nineteenth-century and more recent usage to a wider range of idioms: (i) ‘The style of Palestrina as evinced in his works.

(1) ‘The style of Palestrina and his Roman contemporaries (from now on, for the sake of clarity, ‘Palestrina’s language’), or of late sixteenth-

- century choral music in general. |

(i) ‘he language of Palestrina’s Roman successors or ‘school’, in particular Felice Anerio (c. 1560-1614), Giovanni Francesco Anerio (c. 1567-1630), Francesco Soriano (¢. 1548-1621) and Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652). (iv) ‘The Palestrina tradition, the continuation in Italy of stele antico com-

and eighteenth centuries. position as an alternative liturgical idiom throughout the seventeenth

(v) The strenge Satz (‘strict style’) of counterpoint outlined in Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) and subsequent treatises.

(vi) The stylus a capella described in Fux’s Gradus, the combination of components of the stvenge Saiz with later musical elements that remained in use in south Germany and Austria well into the nineteenth century. In exploring the relationships between Palestrina and nineteenth-century

compositions, it is vital that these categories be differentiated, since they have very different aesthetic implications. It will become clear not only that these distinctions are ignored in some critical discussions, but that some nineteenth-century composers relied on this ambiguity as a means of justifying their cultivation of Palestrina’s language.% An appreciation of these distinctions 1s essential in discussing the aesthetic problems raised by nineteenth-century church music: crucially, the question of how composers were able to reconcile the cultivation of Palestrina’s language with contemporary aesthetic norms. An adherence to the rules of the strenge Satz need not, of course, result in the imperatives of originality, authenticity and contemporaneity being contravened; similarly, the perpetuation of the Fuxian stylus a capella does not suggest the intention to replicate or even emulate Palestrina. But the presence of compositions that were intended to replicate Palestrina’s language demands that the aesthetic frameworks underpinning them be scrutinized. It cannot be assumed that such compositions were somehow exempted from these imperatives, that church music was not subject to aesthetic criteria operative in other fields. In addition, the notion that such replication was justified by a continued adherence to otherwise outmoded aesthetic conceptions — eighteenth-century doctrines of imitation — does

4 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination not provide a plausible explanation of the compositions of the Palestrina revival.

Chapter 1 provides a broad-based introduction to nineteenth-century historicism and to the ideational foundations underpinning the critical, historiographical and compositional reception of early music. In idealizing Palestrina and elevating his works as a model for modern church music, critics and musicians deployed a complex range of ideas derived from many extra-musical sources. As a consequence, it is vital to locate compositional historicism within broader artistic trends. While in Chapter 1 the relationship between the historicism and originality in nineteenth-century art 1s explored in general terms, the ideas discussed here are applied more directly to the Palestrina revival in Chapter 2, via an examination of E. ‘I. A. Hoffmann’s essay ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’. ‘he purpose here is not to treat the essay to a minute exegesis, but rather to use it as a point of access to the views of the wider body of writers who contributed to the idealization of Palestrina. Hoffmann’s complex answer to the question of how modern composers should res-

pond to this model provides a point of entry to the diverse types of compositional response examined subsequently. The second problem outlined above concerns the differing natures of

the Protestant and Catholic Palestrina revivals. Hitherto, the majority of discussions of this topic have approached it via the works of a single composer, or by concentrating solely on the Catholic Palestrina revival. Neither approach is capable of doing justice to the complexities of the phenomenon as a whole: any attempt to interpret the ramifications of the idealization of Palestrina for nineteenth-century music must take into account the activities of both Protestant and Catholic composers, since to fail to do this would result in a distorted picture of the revival. At the opposite extreme, to attempt to provide an exhaustive historical survey of the revival in Germany and Austria would run the risk, given its widely pervasive nature, of becoming drowned in minutiae of little interest to the non-specialist. In striving to provide a more balanced approach, this study does not attempt to present an encyclopaedic survey of the revival in Germany and Austria, or undertake thoroughgoing comparisons with similar trends elsewhere in Europe (most notably in France and Italy).* Rather, it focuses on the high points of the Protestant

and Catholic revivals: in north Germany, primarily Berlin, from the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s; and in south Germany and Austria, primarily Regensburg, from c. 1870 to ¢. 1890. Further, since it is impossible to explore the relevant works of all composers active within these periods,

Introduction 5 the discussions focus primarily on Protestant composers associated with the Berlin Domchor and Singakademiee (especially Mendelssohn, Nicolai, Grell and Bellermann), and Catholics associated with the Allgemeime Deutsche Cacihen- Verein in south Germany and Austria (especially Witt, Haller, Liszt and Bruckner). With regard to genre, the liturgical music discussed 1s in general restricted to motets and other single-movement

compositions. For both Catholic and Protestant musicians, the replication or emulation of Palestrina was, in part, associated with spectfic seasons of the church year; since motet texts are explicitly linked with par-

ticular seasons and feasts they provide a means of establishing whether, within one centre or composer’s output, the cultivation of Palestrina was universal or seasonally restricted. Furthermore, it 1s in such pieces that the tension between aesthetic and functional imperatives fundamental to the Palestrina revival 1s most pronounced. Although the two central chapters are devoted primarily to examining and comparing compositional responses to Palestrina, and to exploring how individual composers justified the use of earlier artistic materials, the broader implications of these works are also discussed. Each subsection introduces either an issue that was crucial in encouraging compositional historicism, or one of the features that distinguishes the Palestrina revival from similar contemporary movements, or a problematic factor characterizing the reception of Renaissance music. The Palestrina revival touches on a huge range of aesthetic, historical and theoretical issues: the problems surrounding music and moral education, objective versus subjective historicism, music and politics, value judgement, the sublime, the process of secularization in nineteenth-century society, and many others. It should be borne in mind that the discussions of these topics approach them from the perspective of compositional historicism, and are not intended as comprehensive interpretations of these wider issues in and of themselves. Chapter 3 explores the institutional and ideological frameworks sustaining the Protestant Palestrina revival. In addition to discussing how the ethical concerns of the north German choral societies encouraged composers to disregard aesthetic criteria, it explores the importance of quasi-liturgical music as a vehicle for the emulation of Palestrina, exemplified in the works of Nicolai and Spohr. At the heart of this chapter 1s an exploration of Mendelssohn’s engagement with old Italian music; his output serves to epitomize the aesthetic and stylistic tensions present in church music from the first half of the nineteenth century, and illustrates how composers and their critics wrestled with the problem of authenticity.

6 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination In the 1840s and 1850s, perceptions of Palestrina’s language gradually changed as a result of the proliferation of editions of Renaissance music, while ideological factors encouraged Protestant reformers to shift their attention to German music of the Reformation era. ‘These developments are explored through a consideration of the views of the historian Carl

von Winterfeld and through a survey of the repertory of the Berlin Domchor. Finally, this chapter discusses how the emulation of Palestrina was stimulated by the rejection of aesthetic norms: the activities of Grell

and Bellermann represent a counter not only to the idea of absolute

music, but to aesthetic autonomy. | Chapter 4 explores the diverse ideological, liturgical and aesthetic factors animating the Catholic Palestrina revival. In contrast to the historicist revival of Renaissance music in north Germany, the activities of south German musicians exhibit a tension between tradition and reform: in the first half of the century, the revival and emulation of Palestrina coexisted with the perpetuation of the Fuxian stylus a capella. ‘The central focus is the work of the Allgemeine Deutsche Cacilien- Verein, the most influential

nineteenth-century movement for church music reform. In addition to examining the compositions and polemical writings of its first president, Franz Xaver Witt, the tensions within this organization are discussed: of particular interest are the views of those, such as Haller, who advocated the literal replication of Palestrina’s language. he chapter culminates with a discussion of the wider influence of the movement, examining the relation between the most significant composers of Catholic church music — Liszt and Bruckner — and the Palestrina revival. While Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned solely with liturgical and quasiliturgical music, the wider ramifications of the idealization of Palestrina

for nineteenth-century composition are discussed in Chapter 5. Here, the problems involved in interpreting references to Palestrina’s music or language in secular and non-liturgical religious works are discussed. In addition to delineating the specific associations that such references can access, works by Mendelssohn, Loewe, Liszt and Wagner serve as test cases for exploring their function and significance. The third problem addressed — how relationships to Palestrina’s language in nineteenth-century compositions can fruitfully be interpreted —

is discussed empirically throughout the study, and a framework for exploring such relationships is formulated in the final chapter. It will become apparent that the traditional concepts with which this topic is discussed, imitation and historicism, prove inadequate for understanding the complex varieties of stylistic pluralism that are encountered. On the

Introduction 7 other hand, while critical interpretations of this repertory need not be wholly couched around the intentions of the composers concerned, to ignore the historical and aesthetic context of the works by approaching them via critical ideas conceived around later music or other art forms will not prove satisfactory either. Kevin Korsyn, for example, has approached the music of Brahms from such a perspective: ‘What appears modern — or rather postmodern — in Brahms is his recruitment of a plurality of musical languages. By mobilising a number of historically differentiated discourses, Brahms becomes “both the historian and the agent of his own language”. Thus he knew the very modern anxiety ... of having to choose an orientation among languages.” In Korsyn’s analysis, Brahms’s compositional confrontation with earlier musical languages 1s

an act of clairvoyance, a sign of ‘the extent to which Romanticism an- , ticipated our problems’.® But viewing concern with and employment of historical discourses as something peculiar to modernism downplays the importance, even centrality, of stylistic pluralism to Romanticism, a phenomenon clearly apparent in the repertory discussed here. While it could well be argued that one justification for studying how nineteenthcentury composers were able to use the music of the past and reconcile themselves with such use is its relevance to the issues and problems of our

postmodern age, it will become clear that the reverse is not necessarily the case. The stylistic pluralism in the works examined 1s the product of the specific context under discussion; this cannot be disregarded in interpreting this repertory.

Finally, it is necessary to justify the central premiss behind this study: the conviction that studying the relation between sixteenth- and nineteenth-century music can contribute significantly to our understand-

ing of both. This is not the place for a thoroughgoing discussion of the aesthetics of reception or of competing reception theories; 1t would, however, invite misunderstanding if some fundamental issues are not rendered explicit. ‘The main justification for discussing the engagement of one group of musicians with another is, as with any study of such distant or remote reception, the light that it sheds on the recipient. Accordingly, it will be evident that this study is intended primarily as a contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century music, aesthetics and culture. But a further crucial task for reception history is its potential for mediating between past and present perceptions of a body of art; that is, its use as a means of understanding present-day conceptions and interrogating their foundations. Indeed, any discussion of the analytical, critical or historiographical reception of Renaissance and Baroque compositions

8 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination wil broach matters fundamental to how we discuss them today. In addition to acknowledging the potential of reception studies as a means of redefining the relation between nineteenth-century and modern conceptions, it 1s vital to recognize the extent to which these matters impinge on our perceptions of Palestrina, his works and his place in history. It is

often still contended that the reception of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century compositions in the nineteenth century need bear no relation to our engagement with this music: that it is the task of the music historian to strip away the distortions and misconceptions accrued in the course of history. But instead of viewing these successive responses

to Palestrina and his music as redundant detritus, to be stripped away in order to access original truths, we should recognize that his cultural sionificance and the meanings of his works subsist in a dynamic interplay between past and present. We should recognize — following Hegel’s dictum that “every work of art is a dialogue with all who confront it’ — that these successive responses ineluctably constitute part of the essence

of his music.’ |

I

Fistoricism in nineteenth-century art,

| aesthetics and culture

ORIGINALITY: CONSENSUS OR CONTROVERSY?

The relation between nineteenth-century compositions and Palestrina’s music presents an intractable aesthetic problem: how were composers and their audiences able to reconcile the compositional use of the music of the past with the Romantic imperatives of originality, authenticity and contemporaneity? This discussion approaches the wide range of relationships to Palestrina that are distinguished in the rest of the study in more general terms: here, the implications of such relationships for these three postulates — and thus for aesthetic value — are more important than their specific configurations. But, given the existence of compositions whose totality is defined by their relation to Palestrina’s language, it 1s necessary to explore contemporary aesthetic frameworks which not only justify the partial or transformed use of historical styles in modern art, but also legitimize or condone the literal replication of an earlier style. While the composers discussed in later chapters justified their engagement with the music of the distant past in a variety of ways, one factor is constant: they conceived the problem of compositional historicism not in isolation, but in the context of broader artistic trends. Accordingly, in exploring how art historians, critics and philosophers confronted artistic historicism, the aim is not to construct a spurious Zeitgeist as a background to contemporary musical activities. Rather, it is to seek provisional solutions to this aesthetic problem from a wide range of sources, solutions which will be refined subsequently in relation to specifically musical debates.

The centrality of the concept of originality to post-Enlightenment aesthetics is indisputable. ‘This concept — uniting the categories of individuality, novelty and spontaneity — stands diametrically opposed to imitation and copying: the artist is permitted to learn from, and to be

inspired by the works of the past ‘by a sort of noble contagion’, but must avoid at all costs any kind of ‘sordid theft’. In describing the 9

10 Palestrina and the German Romantic magination status of originality in Romanticism, Leonard B. Meyer comments that ‘geniuses are natural innovators (the “Walters”, not the “Beckmessers”’, of the world). And this innate proclivity was encouraged by an ideology

that not only placed a premium on originality and change, but highly prized individual expression.” But to speak of a Romantic ideology of originality is misleading, if it implies that all contemporary writers, artists

and composers subscribed to a monolithic and unquestioned doctrine. In early nineteenth-century Germany, conceptions of originality were the subject of debate rather than consensus.

The ideas of Schopenhauer and Goethe represent two different stances regarding originality, and a consideration of their views not only reveals the wide divergence of these opinions but clarifies the issues involved. Schopenhauer emphasizes the difference between the genius who,

although steeped in tradition is cut off from the world and creates the original, and the imitator, who — being dependent on the achievements of others rather than his own instincts — lifts elements of previous works whole, producing nothing more than collections of undigested material.

The genius, in the moment of inspiration, 1s able to surrender himself to the representation of the archetypal forms of nature, becoming ‘the clear mirror of the inner nature of the world’.. In contrast, the artist not possessing the gift of genius can only represent what he has earlier experienced in concrete form, in nature or in art.t For Schopenhauer, there is seemingly no middle ground between originality and imitation; artists lacking the inspiration and spontaneity of genius inevitably produce reflective, contrived fabrications: Imitators, mannerists, wztatores, servuum pecus [1mitators, the slavish mob] . . . note what pleases and affects in genuine works, make this clear to themselves, fix it in the concept, and hence in the abstract, and then imitate it, openly or in disguise, with skill and intention. Like parasitic plants, they suck their nourishment from

the works of others; and like polyps, take on the colour of their nourishment. Indeed, we could even carry the comparison farther, and assert that they are like machines which mince very fine and mix up what is put into them, but can never digest it, so that the constituent elements of others can always be found again, and picked out and separated from the mixture. Only the genius, on the other hand, 1s like the organic body that assimilates, transforms and produces.°

Schopenhauer’s conception of originality, while influential and indicative of the changing status of the artwork in the early nineteenth century,

was not shared by all his contemporaries. Goethe repeatedly dismissed the idea of originality, arguing that no artist could rely solely on instinct and inspiration: ‘Even the greatest genius would not get far if he wanted

ENstoricism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture II

to owe everything to his innermost self."° The idea that the artist can divorce himself from other artworks and produce a work unconsciously from the gift of genius is absurd, and ‘so-called creation out-of-oneself? (Aus-sich-Schépfen) produces merely ‘false originals and mannerists’./ Rather, every artist is a composite being indebted to a multiplicity of sources, and greatness can proceed only from the ‘appropriation of other people’s treasures’ (Aneignung fremder Schitze).® The inevitability of the author being influenced by his predecessors makes it ridiculous for critics to attempt to discredit him by criticizing his dependence on their works: ‘It is truly ridiculous’, said Goethe; ‘people might just as well ask a well-fed man

about the beef, mutton and pork which he ate and which gave him strength. We probably have our own talents, but we owe our development to a thousand effects of a great world upon us, from which we pick up what we can and what

suits uS...’. ‘Anyway’, continued Goethe, ‘the world 1s now so old, and so many significant men have for thousands of years lived and thought, that little new can be found and said anymore.”?

The gulf separating Goethe and Schopenhauer, both of whom expressed these opinions at roughly the same time, is sufficient to confirm that no unified conception of originality existed in the early nineteenth century. Further, the complex ways 1n which such views will be seen to interact reflects not merely two coexisting mentalities (it would be illusory to label these positions ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’), but a plethora of competing ideologies. From the perspective of the compositional emulation of Palestrina, it will become clear that commentators on church music frequently echoed Goethe’s equation of originality with mere novelty

and mannerism, a gambit that served to buttress the conviction that it was subservient to other concerns. But if the concept of originality could thus be diluted and disregarded, the allied imperatives of authenticity and contemporaneity could not be dismissed so readily. In discuss-

ing originality, both Goethe and Schopenhauer formulate their ideas around adjacent authors and works: they do not distinguish between, on the one hand, the relation between an author and his contemporaries or immediate precursors, and on the other cases where the texts involved are not chronologically immediate or where the earlier author has had no significant prior relation to the cultural milieu of the later one. But while such a distinction is seemingly not important to the concept of originality, the ‘warping’ of history represented by relationships between nineteenth-century works and the art of the distant past raises

12 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination its own aesthetic problems. Such relationships risk contravening imperatives which, although often formulated in nebulous terms, were of crucial importance throughout the nineteenth century: the demand that, to be of value, a work must be the authentic expression of its author’s convictions and of the world-view of his age, an authenticity that must be reflected in the contemporaneity of its forms. It is necessary, therefore, to explore

how authors articulated these criteria in discussing the engagement of modern artists with the art of the past, and to establish the margins within which such relationships could be legitimized. ‘ON THE BENEFIT AND DETRIMENT OF HISTORY’

The relation between nineteenth-century compositions and the music of the distant past cannot be considered in isolation from the rise in historical consciousness at the beginning of the century and its subsequent development. In a provocative interpretation of this paradigm shift, Michel Foucault argues that as a result of the new awareness of the historicity of language, objects and man himself, Western civilization was ‘dehistoricized’; a hitherto uniform and essentially unchanging inheri-

tance shattered into a thousand alien pasts; artefacts came to symbolize fragmentation and transience rather than unity and permanence.” History becomes a strategy of retrieval and repossession: the cherishing of objects from the past represents an attempted return to origins, an endeavour to deny the pastness of the past by asserting the pastness of the present.” Both nineteenth-century and modern commentators have often approached the development of this new historical consciousness — the

rise of historicism — by dividing it into two interacting strands, a method that provides a useful provisional strategy for imterpreting the complex and seemingly contradictory nature of the relationships between Romanticism and the art of the distant past. These two strands have been characterized by Walter Wiora as retrospective and relativistic historicism: on the one hand, ‘increased devotion to earlier times and their gifts to posterity, for example, the cultivation and copying of varied styles of old music’ and, on the other hand, the belief that all phenomena are essentially historical and determined by the circumstances in which they arose.’* Similarly, Stephen Bann contrasts the subjective ‘desire for history’ that retrospective historicism represents with the development of a more objectified, relativistic historical consciousness that emerged

at the same time.’ The tension between these two positions is clear:

HMistoricism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture 13

while objective historiography sought to represent ‘how it really was’, it neglected the demands of those whose prime concern was to use the past as a guide to ‘how it really should be’. It will become evident that this opposition was a decisive element within Romantic representations

of Palestrina, in that the desire for a malleable myth and source for compositional renewal interacted uneasily with the impulse towards the faithful representation of the past. The relation between these two forms of historicism was addressed by the music historian Philipp Spitta and, more famously, by Nietzsche. Spitta’s analysis, in ‘Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst’ (1883), seeks sharply to distinguish the academic treatment of history from other approaches

to the past, and to disentangle the history of art from contemporary artistic concerns. Spitta insists that the value of historical scholarship is not dependent on its potential for reforming contemporary art: the historian’s task is to seek after truth through the piecemeal reconstruction of the past, and it is an abuse of history when ‘historical points of view are elevated and are supposed to serve as criteria for judgement, where only aesthetic criteria have legitimacy’.'* While he acknowledges that a crucial part of the historian’s role is the recovery of old artworks for the present, the scholar must not attempt to dictate present-day artistic practices through recourse to history: “Rules which were authoritative in the past are not as a consequence still important for the future. The oftused phrase “the historian is a prophet looking backwards” [ein riickwairts gewandter Prophet| is a dangerous half-truth.’®

The most compelling nineteenth-century analysis of the relation between these forms of historicism, that of Nietzsche, presents a wholly different perspective. In Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fiir das Leben

(1874) he depicts subjective historicism as being of benefit to modern life if not depended on excessively, while it is objective historicism, the treatment of history as a quasi-scientific intellectual pursuit, that is the deviant, detrimental offshoot from true historical perception. Nietzsche describes

the burden that the historical orientation of his and the preceding two generations has placed on modern life and creativity; this is the result of the failure to use history as a means of serving present needs: ‘Certainly we need history. But our need for history is quite different from that of the spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge, even if he in his refinement looks down on our rude and graceless requirements and needs. .. . Only so far as history serves life will we serve it.’ The subordination of history to present-day culture is impossible if history is elevated to the status of a science, since the need to maintain the dynamics of historical research

14 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination and writing results in modern life no longer being ‘the sole ruler and master of the knowledge of the past’."” Scholarly objectivity “neuters’ the

use of history for life; Nietzsche characterizes objective historians as a ‘race of eunuchs’ guarding the ‘great historical world-harem’, whose vain

pretension to being servants of truth renders them impotent in serving the present.’ In a typically oracular utterance, he sums up the mistaken perspective of the objective historian: ‘Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are mad! Your knowledge does not complete nature but only kills your own. Just measure your height as a knower by your

depth as a doer.’ In opposition to objective historicism, Nietzsche discusses three ways in which history may be used to enhance the understanding of the present

and to serve contemporary needs: ‘it belongs to him in so far as he is active and striving, in so far as he preserves and venerates, and in so far as he suffers and is in need of liberation’.*° These three kinds of history — monumental, antiquarian, and critical — constitute the possible

subjective relationships to the past that he percerved in contemporary life, and are capable of being both of benefit and of detriment to it. Monumental history serves the present by providing modern man with a classicizing perspective, forming a chain linking mankind’s highest cultural and artistic achievements: it provides inspiration through giving

the knowledge that greatness was once possible and may be possible again.*' Instead of the distortion that arises through the monumental way of viewing the past, antiquarian history views all past events and artefacts as equally significant, but is concerned solely with preserving life, not with generating it.?? In contrast, critical history provides a means of ‘judging and annihilating a past’ in order to create a new present.*3

While, for Nietzsche, these three perspectives combine to form a complete picture of contemporary subjective historicism, his categories, taken individually, provide valuable critical tools for assessing the impact of successive developments in German historicist thought on aesthetics

and criticism. As will be shown in the next chapter, the appropriation of the ideas, constructions and terminology of earlier art and literary historiography — exemplified here by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the Romantic circle — played a crucial role in facilitating and shaping the idealization of the church music of the past, and in encouraging the elevation of Palestrina. Crucially, Nietzsche’s tripartite scheme also provides a means of elucidating shifting attitudes towards both the use of historical elements in modern art and its aesthetic implications.

Eistoricism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture 15 Monumental history

The twin strands of retrospective and relativistic historicism emerged in German art history in Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums

(1764), a work whose ideas and language, transmitted both directly and indirectly, resonate throughout nineteenth-century descriptions of Renaissance music. This study was considered in the early nineteenth century to have marked the birth of a new historical sense and outlook; Winckelmann represents ancient Greek artworks as characteristic products of their cultural context, and describes them in terms ofa succession of styles rather than merely as timeless aesthetic objects. ‘The greatest significance of Winckelmann’s work for the nineteenth century, and the factor which most clearly links him to Nietzsche’s monumental history, is his initiation of a tradition of historical writing whose primary justification was its relevance to perceived problems in contemporary art: he viewed his history as ‘no mere narration of successive periods and

developments’, but rather ‘an attempt to produce a didactic system | Lehrgebdude|’, a means of freeing contemporary art from the inauthentic restrictions of French neo-classicism.** Winckelmann’s historical outlook reflects a critical uneasiness with his own time; he contemplates the dec-

line of art, in a description much alluded to by the Romantics, ‘as a woman on the seashore gazes after her departing lover without hope of seeing him again; her weeping eyes follow him into the distance and believe they can see the shadow of her beloved on the sails of his ship’.*° By idealizing the art of ancient Greece and placing the zenith of artistic perfection in the distant past, he decisively contradicted Aufkldrung notions of linear artistic progress, fulfilling Nietzsche’s description of those for

whom ‘monumental history is the disguise in which the hatred of the mighty and the great of their time parades as satisfied admiration of the mighty and great of past ages’.?° In spite of his longing for the past, Winckelmann’s history is orientated around present-day reform: as Herder saw it, his conception of ancient

Greek and Renaissance art was entirely determined by the desire to awaken a new Raphael among modern German artists.” For Nietzsche,

the insistence of monumental historiography on elevating illustrious models as exemplars for imitation results in a distortion of the past: those portions of the past considered unworthy of modern attention are ignored or vilified, while that which remains is ‘reinterpreted according to aesthetic criteria and thus brought closer to fiction [ freien Erdichtung]’.?°

Nietzsche considers that monumental historiography fictionalizes history

16 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination by forcing ‘the individuality of the past into a universal form’, in which ‘all sharp corners and lines are broken off for the sake of conformity’ .?9 This notion of fictionalization provides a means of approaching two key con-

cepts that early nmeteenth-century commentators on church music appropriated from art historiography: the idea ofa golden age in the distant past and the organic model of narrative construction. Winckelmann’s deployment of these concepts has a firmly didactic role; he presents a triadic

historical scheme consisting of a golden age, its decline and fall, and a third stage, the hope ofa future art and culture revivified through a return to earlier artistic principles. ‘This basic scheme is underpinned by one of the most elemental modes ofnarrative emplotment: the organic model, the tracing of the successive stages of artistic development by analogy with

the processes of organic life. For Winckelmann, a history of art should teach its origin, growth, development and fall; using this basic plan of the life cycle of an organism, he traces the successive stylistic developments of ancient Greek art.3° The older style lasted until Phidias: it was forceful

but harsh, powerful but lacking in grace, and was hidebound by rules that distanced it from nature. Art flourished with Phidias and his contemporaries; while traits of the older style remain, the ‘great and lofty style’ is freer and more sublime. ‘The age of Praxiteles, Lysippus and Apelles is characterized by a greater degree of gracefulness and agreeableness, but _ the ‘beautiful style’, maintained by their school, descended in the hands

of imitators into mannerism and eclecticism, leading gradually to the fall of art. Winckelmann employs a similar emplotment in his treatment of Renaissance painting, and in so doing reveals the malleable nature of the organic model: The fate of art in more recent times is basically the same as that of antiquity with regard to periods: likewise, four chief changes occurred, but with the difference that art did not gradually decline from its peak as with the Greeks, but rather suddenly fell back again ...as soon as it had reached the highest possible level of perfection in two great men. The style was dry and stiff up until Michelangelo and Raphael; with these two men the re-establishment of art reached its peak; following an interregnum ruled by bad taste came the style of the imitators: the Caraccis, their school, and their followers, and this extended up to Carl Maratta.3"

Winckelmann’s organic construction serves two purposes, both of which were crucial to nineteenth-century representations of Renaissance

music. He characterizes it as a universal model for art history, an inevitable natural law whose existence may be presumed in individual cases even in the absence of evidence; it provides a means of creating a

Fistoricism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture 17 coherent picture in spite of ‘the shortcomings of our knowledge of ancient art’.3* Just as important, it serves a didactic purpose, by directing prac-

tising artists towards those beautiful monuments which are most suitable for “contemplation and imitation’.33 The artists of Winckelmann’s second golden age, the Italian Renaissance, owed their success entirely to having learned ‘good taste from its source’, and Raphael attained his high level of excellence through imitating the relics of antiquity.34 For Winckelmann, ‘the only way for us to become great, and even, if it is possible, inimitable, is by 1mitating the ancients.’3° Greek artworks

achieve their status as models for modern art because of their technical perfection and good taste, not primarily as a result of their venerable status as relics of a golden age; modern artists and connoisseurs must free

themselves from the prejudice that the only benefit to be gained from imitating them emanates from the ‘rust of antiquity’ (den Moder der Zeit).3°

Winckelmann does not consider that modern painting can obtain the chief qualities of ancient Greek and Renaissance art — ‘noble simplicity’ (edle Einfalt) and ‘calm grandeur’ (stele Grofe) — merely by being inspired by it or emulating its spirit; the only way to achieve these qualities is by transferring the techniques of Greek sculpture directly to modern art.3” It will become clear that the Romantic idealization of Palestrina was,

in some ways, related to the classicizing dimension of Winckelmann’s monumental historicism, to his view that the value of ancient artworks lies not in their pastness but in the universal norms of perfection which their techniques epitomize. It should not be assumed, however, that the historical origin of Palestrina’s music and language was immaterial for their nineteenth-century revival. For Dahlhaus, ‘the Palestrina style, though historical in origin, was extrapolated from his work and placed outside history. Combining textual intelligibility, a “pure” texture, and a “seraphic tone”, 1t was an ideal that burst the bonds of history... a musical verity that would remain true regardless of when it happened to be uttered’.3°> The problematic linguistic identity in German, discussed earlier, between the style of Palestrina as evinced in his works and the abstracted Palestrina style is readily apparent here. ‘This identity encourages the view that the Romantic idealization of that language exclusively reflects a classicizing impulse, the honouring of universal compositional rules. It will become clear, however, that while the nineteenth-century cultivation of the Palestrina style can represent an adherence to time-

honoured norms, the appeal to Palestrina’s language is a historicist ‘return to origins’. Winckelmann advocated the imitation of the Greeks as a means of revealing their true nature, which for him had been obscured

18 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination by the prescriptions and proscriptions of neo-classical poetics. Similarly, the shift in perceptions of Palestrina in the early nineteenth century re-

flects the impulse to reveal the true nature of his language, as distinct from the contrapuntal abstraction of the Palestrina style codified by Fux. Winckelmann’s notion that the reyuvenation of modern art requires

not merely the emulation of the spirit of Greek art but the imitation of its techniques raises problems fundamental to the Palestrina revival. This notion reflects the continued flourishing in the eighteenth century of a mimetic model of artistic production, whose tenets were justified by the belief that to imitate illustrious works of art was analogous to imitating nature. The replication of Palestrina’s language in nineteenthcentury compositions might seem initially to represent the perpetuation of this model. For Dahlhaus, church music was exempt in the nineteenth century from the aesthetic criteria applicable in other fields of compo‘sition, an exemption which granted legitimacy to imitation.39 The idea that imitation in liturgical compositions could be legitimized by aesthetic concepts outmoded in other fields cannot be dismissed entirely, but it will be seen that, in general, church music was not exempted from the postulate of originality by virtue of its functionality. ‘The idea of such an exemption would have granted church music the possibility of attaining value not in aesthetic terms, but solely in relation to the success with which it fulfils its function. Not all liturgical pieces were considered to be merely functional by their composers, and even those that were regarded in this light risked being condemned by contemporaries as ‘copies’ or ‘slavish imitations’. Church music as a whole was not exempted from aesthetic

criteria, and consequently the idea that the cultivation of Palestrina’s language in the nineteenth century represents a continuation of earlier mimetic conceptions is not unproblematic. Certainly, it does not suffice on its own as a means of explaining the intentions of Romantic composers whose works are related to this language. Antiquarian story

The impact of Winckelmann’s organicism and embryonic relativism is evident from Goethe’s [tahenische Reise: “Through Winckelmann we were

urged to separate the various periods and to recognize the different styles used by different peoples, and to see how they gradually emerged over the course of time and finally ended in decadence.”?° It was these aspects of Winckelmann’s writings, rather than his monumentalist conception of Greek art, that were most significant for eighteenth- and early

_Historicism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture 19

nineteenth-century thought; they provided a means for reassessing the art of other peoples and periods, crucially the art of the Middle Ages. Herder, while acclaiming Winckelmann as ‘the best historian of ancient art’, condemned the didactic thrust of his monumental classicism; for

Herder, the belief that the principles of classical art represent univer- . sal norms is wholly unjustifiable: ‘What legitimacy have the decrees of praise and rebuke which we shower on all the world as a result of being besotted with a favourite people of antiquity!’4" Since Winckelmann’s eye was ‘formed by the Greeks, and his spirit filled with the Greek ideal of beauty’, he was unable to appraise the art of other nations and periods

on its own terms; Herder considers such prejudices to be omnipresent in Enlightenment Germany, in that all art that fails to exhibit the Greek rules of beauty is condemned as barbaric: ‘a Greek temple must therefore for us be valued more highly than a Gothic church, Greek beauty more than Chinese beauty, Greek wisdom in literature and history more

than the passionate enthusiasm [Schwdarmerer| of the Arabs’.*? , | Herder’s relativism provided a means of reassessing medieval and Renaissance art on what he saw as its own terms, rather than subject-

ing it to criteria derived from classical antiquity. The reappraisal of Shakespeare, for example, required the realization that the standards of classical and neo-classical drama were not universal norms, an idea whose radical novelty can be seen in Herder’s emphatic repetition: ‘In Greece drama developed in a way that it could not develop in the north. In Greece it was what it could not be in the north. In the north, } therefore, it is not and should not be what it was in Greece.’43 Similarly, Goethe’s ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’ (1772), the essay which initiated the | German Gothic revival, is reliant on the emancipation of his critical perceptions from the norms of neo-classical taste. Goethe writes that on first visiting Strasbourg Minster, his head was full of ‘universal perceptions of

good taste’: a 7

Under the heading Gothic, as in a dictionary entry, I had drawn together all the synonymous misunderstandings concerning the ill-defined, the disordered, unnatural, cobbled together, patched-up, and overcrowded which had ever come to my mind. With no more wisdom than a people which terms barbaric all the world that is strange to it, I termed Gothic whatever did not fit my system.*4 |

Nietzsche expressly identifies Goethe’s interest in Strasbourg Minster as an example of antiquarian history. Nietzsche’s antiquarian historian reverences the past as a means of gaining contentment with his surroundings and a sense of deep-rootedness; Goethe’s empathetic identification

20 Palestrina and the German Romantic tmagination with the architect of the Minster, Erwin von Steinbach, allowed him to disregard the precepts of neo-classicism and view the architecture of the distant past as ancestral: ‘in the tempest of his [Goethe’s] emotions the historical cloud cover spread between them tore, and for the first time

he saw the German work again “exerting its influence out of a strong robust German soul’.’* But while the contentment and security that antiquarian history can provide are for Nietzsche a positive service to life, antiquarianism also has negative aspects which greatly contrast it with classicizing monumentalism. While antiquarian history encourages the reappraisal of artworks, styles or periods previously viewed as prim-

ittve or barbaric, this tendency contains the danger that ‘the time will finally come when everything old and past which has not totally been lost sight of will simply be taken as equally venerable’.4° The promiscuous idolization of everything that 1s old leads to a ‘blind lust for collecting’, ‘a restless raking together of all that once has been’.4” Nietzsche’s diagnosis calls to mind one of the most tangible symptoms of the antiquarianism of the Goethezeit, described by Theodore Ziolkowski as the ‘museal im-

pulse’: the desire to gather together a hoard of old cultural artefacts in a temple-like building and call the result a museum.** Although the museal impulse, like Winckelmann’s monumentalism, elevates old artworks to the sphere of timelessness, their indiscriminate veneration — epitomized by the potpourri nature of the early museum — cannot provide

exemplars for modern artists or encourage new composition. While Winckelmann’s monumentalism is orientated around the possibility of modern artistic renewal, antiquarianism stems from a belief in ‘the old age ofmankind .. . the belief of being a latecomer and epigone’: it under-

stands merely how to preserve the art of the distant past, not how to generate new art or to sustain its possibility.49

, _ Accordingly, the antiquarianism of Goethe and Herder discourages not only the imitation of classical art, but also the idea that modern art can be renewed through recourse to old models. Herder dismissed Winckelmann’s doctrine of classical imitation as a vain delusion, con- | sidering the time of the ‘beloved sweet simplicity’ of ancient art to be : irretrievably lost: ‘the dream of our memories, our histories, studies and fervent desires will not. reawaken it’.5° While both Herder and Goethe reject Aufkidrung notions of artistic progress — in Herder’s phrase, the assumption that ‘human destiny is marching forward in giant steps’ — their conception of human and artistic development is nonetheless based on organic growth: ‘the tender roots full of sap, the slender flourishing shoot, the mighty trunk, the thrusting entwined boughs, the broadly

— Historicism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture QI

radiating airy twigs — see how all these rest on each other and grow out

of each other! ... If all the branches and twigs wanted to be the trunk and the roots, what would become of the tree?’5' For Herder, every age can touch the ‘electric chain of destiny’ at only one point; no country can ‘take a backwards step and become for a second time what it was before’.°* Similarly — despite condemning the ideas of originality and . creation ‘out-of-oneself’.— Goethe dismissed attempts to revive earlier

styles, even if these are transformed through the addition of modern elements: “You choose yourselves a model and mix it with your individuality: that is all your art amounts to. No thought for any principle, schools, or successors; all 1s arbitrary and just as 1t occurs to you.”°3 In spite of his enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, Goethe condemned the idea that it could be imitated, believing that further historical and critical investigations would dispel the desire to copy medieval buildings; it is a false tendency to seek to bring back to life those aspects of the past that are treasured, because they developed under ‘completely different conditions’ .°4 ‘hus, for the antiquarian, the relativistic awareness of the different conditions under which the art of the past was produced prevents any single style being elevated as a universal ideal, or being adopted

as a paradigm for modern art. , . ,

| Cntical history - | While the subjective historicism of Winckelmann and of Goethe and Herder reflects, respectively, a preponderance of Nietzsche’s monumen-

tal and antiquarian histories, the historicism of the Romantic circle reveals a predominance of Nietzsche’s third category of subjective historicism: critical history. For the Romantic circle — Friedrich and August

Wilhelm Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Novalis and Jean Paul Richter — the revival of the art of the distant past provided a means of breaking free from more recent tradition:

a The genuinely new grows only from the old, , Our future must be founded on the past! , I shall not support the stifling present , I shall bind myself to you, eternal artists.°°

A. W. Schlegel’s condemnation of the ‘stifling present’ reveals a critical | attitude towards the artistic and intellectual legacy of the Aufklarung. For Nietzsche, the modern man of action whose impulses are curbed by tradition ‘must have the strength, and. use it from time to time, to

22 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination shatter and dissolve something to enable him to live: this he achieves _ by dragging it to the bar of judgment, interrogating it meticulously and finally condemning it’.5° The judgement and conviction of the immediate

past, and the use of the more distant past as an authority was not of course unprecedented before the nineteenth century. W. Jackson Bate

| comments in relation to English poetry of the eighteenth century that, | for the artist, invoking the art of the more distant past 1s ‘pleasing because it is not an authority looming over you but, as something ancestral rather

_ than parental, is remote enough to be more manageable in the quest for

, your own identity’.°’ The use of the distant past, the ancestral, permits one ‘even to disparage the parent in the name of “tradition”’.5° But for _ Nietzsche, any attempt to manufacture ‘a past from which one would like to be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended’ brings its own problems.59 However successfully a critical historicist is

able to implant a second nature within himself and make his first nature wither away, ‘second natures are mostly feebler than the first’.°° - In his polemical obituary for the early Romantics, Heinrich Heine em-

| phasized the extent of their dependency on the art of the Middle Ages aS a means of rejuvenating literature and turning German culture away from the French Enlightenment." He notes that the Romantics’ ideal of,

, in Goethe’s ironic phrase, ‘neu-deutsch-religiés-patriotische Kunst’ was - set up in opposition to the French neo-classical tradition, being a reaction against the ‘sober imitation of ancient classical art’; the anti-French fervour of A. W. Schlegel led him to ‘conspire against Racine in the same way that Minister Stein conspired against Napoleon’.®? According to Heine, the Schlegel brothers viewed medieval art and culture as the

, only means of providing rebirth for the belated modern writer: Our poetry [Poesie] is stale, said the Schlegels, our muse is an old woman who _ knits, our cupid is no youthful blonde but a shrivelled dwarf with grey hair, our feelings are withered, our fantasy is spent: we must refresh ourselves, we must seek out the buried streams of naive, stmple medieval poetry, since here bubbles the draught of reyuvenation . . . ‘They plunged into this miraculous fountain and

drank, slurped and guzzled with profligate greed.°3 Friedrich Schlegel explored the predicament of the modern artist and the role that the art of the distant past should have for modern art in his _Gesprach tiber die Poesie (1800). Schlegel — or rather his character Ludoviko —

comments that the modern artist lacks a firm foundation for his activity: ‘Our poetry, I assert, lacks a focal point, such as mythology was for the ancients; and one could summarize all the essentials in which modern

Fitstoricism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture == 23

poetry is inferior to the ancients in these words: we have no mythology. __ But, I add, we are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is tyme that we ~ earnestly work together to create one.’°+ Modern art lacks the coherent and communal world-view that provided the basis of classical and me- dieval poetry, lacking its basis in religion, which should be the ‘actual soul, the kindling spark of all poetry’.®5 In the absence of such a mythological

foundation, it is impossible for art to have a content; without a relation

to the infinite artworks are ‘quite simply empty and pointless’.°° As a , consequence, such a foundation must be created synthetically, through recourse to older works and systems of belief: ‘to accelerate the genesis of the new mythology, the other mythologies must also be reawakened

form.”°7 : Ce , according to the measure of their profundity, their beauty and their

Schlegel and his circle come closest to Heine’s polemical caricature in discussing how Catholic fine art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance | might aid the modern painter seeking to regain such a foundation for his

activities. ‘he conception of old Italian and German painting presentin the criticism of the Schlegels and Wackenroder evinces acomplex com- __ bination of Winckelmann’s monumentalism and Herder’s relativism. All three authors condemn or contradict Winckelmann’s insistence that Raphael’s excellence is the result of his adherence to classical precepts: for A. W. Schlegel, ‘1f one judges modern painters merely by their distance from or proximity to the ancients one will be unfair to them, as is undoubtedly true of Winckelmann with Raphael’. But while seeking to divorce Renaissance art from classical principles, they nevertheless construct golden ages according to the organic model and assert that the peaks of these periods represent a universal ideal. Schlegel’s golden , age of old Italian painting presents. two broad subdivisions instead of Winckelmann’s four; this scheme 1s also borrowed, as Schlegel reveals in

commenting that Italian painting is divided into old and new schools, ‘just like Italian poetry’.°9 Following Winckelmann’s pattern, Schlegel’s

oldest style of Italian painting is characterized by ‘strict, even meagre forms in sharp outlines’ and a ‘childlike, good-natured simplicity and restrictedness’; while the strictness of the older school remains present

up to Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael — alongside Titian, Correggio, Giulio Romano and Michelangelo — initiated the newer school, and thus is ul— timately responsible for the ‘ruination’ (Verderben) of art.’° The decline of art into effect and theatricality begins with the last works of Titian, and it is doubtful whether later painters and schools have a place in the history ~

of art.’’ Schlegel’s construction, like Winckelmann’s, has a clear didactic ,

24. Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination purpose. He shares Winckelmann’s conviction that works of art from _ the peak of his golden age remain a valid model for modern painting, emphasizing that only through the ‘living use of earlier achievements’ | can art be rejuvenated and the abuses of the Enlightenment redressed.’” Schlegel’s endeavours to create firm foundations for modern painting and literature through the idealization of medieval art and, eventually, by adopting Catholicism were derided by Heine: Schlegel was ‘a prophet looking backwards [einen umgekehrten Propheten|’, who ‘regarded the agonies

of our time not as the pains of rebirth but as the agonies of death, and fled

from this death-angst into the tottering ruins of the Catholic church’.’3 In Heine’s view, the enthusiasm with which Schlegel and his circle embraced medieval art not only legitimized and encouraged its imitation, but resulted in their works consisting of little else: “What then was the Romantic school in Germany? It was nothing other than the revival of the poetry |Poesze] of the Middle Ages, as it manifested itself in songs, sculpture and architecture, in art and life.””74 According to Heine, Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798) and Wackenroder’s Herzenserguessungen

| eines kunstlebenden Klosterbruders (1797) exhort artists not only to emulate the ‘piety and childlike quality’ of medieval poetry, but also to imitate its ‘clumsiness of technique’.’> Despite Heine’s remarks, the Romantic circle’s elevation of earlier art cannot be regarded as encouraging or legitimizing imitation. Friedrich Schlegel condemns imitation by linking it with mass-production: imitators are ‘strayed economists’ whose art is ‘vacuous and tradesman-like [handwerksméafig]’.7°. Similarly, A. W. Schlegel dismisses the products of imitation as ‘lifeless school exercises’ (tote Schuliibungen), simce material appropriated from earlier art must be

reborn within the artist in order for it to emerge poetically.’” Significantly, the Schlegels and Jean Paul focus their discussions of imitation on neo-classicism, as if imitation cannot be an issue in Romantic art.

. In Jean Paul’s taxonomy, imitation encompasses not only the appropriation of phrases and idioms from Greek poetry but also the attempt to emulate its simplicity and plainness.”° Furthermore, even unintentional dependency on earlier styles or works 1s equated with imitation: Jean Paul introduces the potentially useful concept of ‘reversed’ imita- | tion to describe authors who are so deeply immersed in Greek literature that the language unconsciously shapes their German prose.79

, _ Crucially, both Jean Paul and Friedrich Schlegel consider the replication of earlier works or styles not only to be illegitimate in theory but impossible in practice: even authors who attempt to replicate earlier styles

Historicism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture 25

precisely inevitably include modern elements, with the result that they produce parodies of the originals. Jean Paul considers the chief offence of the imitator to lie not in his theft of forms and material, but in his ‘reenactment — often against his will employing parody — of what is most sacred in the original, the imitation of the innate’.®° Similarly, for Schlegel

the ‘important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit’ can readily be seen in the imitation of classical poetry.®! The idea that the desire to imitate a work or style results — unintentionally —in parody brings us closer to establishing how the use of earlier materials could be justified

for the Romantic circle: through the corollary that ifthe treatmentofsuch _ materials is consciously parodic, or at least mediated by the critical reflection of the artist, it acquires legitimacy. While the imitator responds to the artworks of the past solely through objective calculation, and the ‘feminine, receptive or passive genius’ described by Jean Paul responds solely

through uncritical creation, Romantic irony offers a means of response that combines subjective creation and objective reflection.®? The broader

metaphysical and aesthetic ramifications of Romantic irony are explored | later; most important here are its implications for the two central components of originality, novelty and spontaneity. While Schopenhauer’s original genius creates spontaneously and instinctively, for Friedrich Schlegel the work of genius must also be the product of reflection: ‘In every good

poem everything must be intentional, and everything must be instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.’®3 Irony is not merely the habitual self-criticism of the artist, a factor that even Schopenhauer saw as necessary to artistic production, but a mode of reflection pervading _ all parts of the artwork and all stages of the creative process: “Chere are ancient and modern poems that breath the godly breath of irony in their entirety and in all their parts. ... Internally, in the mood that looks over everything and lifts itself infinitely above everything conditioned,.even above its own art, virtue, and genius; externally, in performing the mimic manner of a mediocre Italian clown [Buffo].’°4 But while such reflection enables artists to free themselves from the contingencies of instinctual creation, Schlegel nonetheless warns against the opposite extreme of unlimited arbitrariness, ‘otherwise caprice will turn into self-destruction’; further, self-creation, the invention and enthusiasm of the artist, must attain fruition before self-restraint is applied.°5 The knowing ironic artist produces Poesve (1.e., literature) that arbitrarily combines spontaneous, instinctual creation with critical reflection, the naive with the sentimen-

tal, the fruits of inspiration with wilful caprice: |

26 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination Intention taken to the point of irony and with the arbitrary appearance of selfdestruction is just as naive as instinct taken to the point of irony. Just as the naive plays with the contradictions of theory and practice, so the grotesque plays with strange transferences of form and material, liking the appearance of

the random and bizarre and flirting with unconditional caprice.® , The reflection of the ironic creator not only contravenes the postulate that originality necessitates spontaneity, but also the requirement for substantial novelty: instead of being tied to one mode of representation,

form or style, the artist may juxtapose and combine a wide variety of materials. For Schlegel, modern Romantic poetry must ‘now mix and - now fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and folk poetry [Naturpoesie] .. . fill and saturate the forms of art with strong cultural material [Bildungsstoff| of every kind’.®? The poet’s reception of the

cultural products of different ages and cultures has the result that he contains within himself ‘a whole system of personas’ and can transport himself arbitrarily into a multitude of spheres: he can tune himself at will, ‘as one tunes an instrument’ to being ‘critical or poetic, historical or rhetorical, ancient or modern’.** Importantly, Schlegel considers the Poesve of the reflective modern artist to consist not merely of the mixing of a variety of earlier styles and forms, but to constitute the fusion of poetry

and criticism. ‘he modern poet’s use of earlier styles and elements of earlier works is not merely the end product of critical reflection, but can itself embody an act of criticism, indeed, ‘poetry can be criticized only through poetry’.°9 Schlegel represents Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as the _ archetype of both the ironic juxtaposition of disparate materials and of Romantic Poesie functioning as a critical interpretation of an earlier work (in this case, Shakespeare’s Hamlet). The relationship between play and ~ novel is not one of repetition but of supplementation; the poetic critic

that Goethe exemplifies contemplates an earlier work of art and rep-_- resents it anew: ‘he will supplement the work, rejuvenate it, and newly - shape it.’9° The ironic attitude of the author is what unifies his disparate materials and guarantees the originality of his work: originality resides

in the author’s imagination, not in his materials: Although Schlegel’s conceptions of irony and critique are clearly related to his desire to establish new mythological foundations for art, these ideas interact problematically. The ironic adoption of earlier world-views could not adequately provide the modern artist with the firm foundation

that Schlegel sought, and it will become clear that his later writings — | especially those on fine art — confirm Heine’s notion of a withdrawal into the certainties of medievalism and Catholicism. Heine’s rejection of the

Fistoricism in nineteenth-century art, aesthetics and culture 27

Romantic circle’s engagement with the past as imitation is, in part, the , result of his more radical conception of irony and critique, which will

also prove important 1n later discussions. Although he dismissed early | Romantic attempts to duplicate the simplicity of medieval Volkslieder as resembling ‘artificial spa water’ and ‘German moonshine’, he nonethe-

less viewed the folksong as a touchstone for modern poetry.% In theory and practice, Heine advocates two ways for the modern poet to respond creatively to the medieval folksong. He praised Wilhelm Miller for cap-

turing the spirit of the old song forms without imitating them, through a , ‘sensible avoidance of all antiquated expressions and turns of phrase’.9

_ In addition to the avoidance of the most antiquated elements of me- — _ dieval poetry, Heine also engages with it through irony, which serves as a means of asserting the impossibility of naiv poetry in the modern age.% Heine’s use of an abrupt parodic twist at the conclusion of a Volkslied — the Stmmungsbrechung — effects a departure from the prevailing style and

mood of the rest of the poem: ‘Heine, at first: still a Romantic himself, ,

moved away from this by afhxing to all his poetry the little devil of frivolous irony which joyfully proclaims: “look how pretty this is, good people! But don’t kid yourselves that I myself believe in such stuff!”

Almost every one of his beautiful poems ends with such a suicide.’9+ This device can be seen at the end of Wahrhaftig from the Buch der Lreder (1827),

_ where the final quatrain ironically comments on the neo-medieval topics ~ and imagery (the joys of spring, minstrels, love songs) of the preceding _ _ lines: ‘But songs and stars and little flowers, and little eyes and moonlight and sunshine, however much this stuff pleases, it is nowhere near

being the whole world.’ Heine’s irony is more than a commentonthe futility of modern attempts to manufacture the nav: it also highlights the inadequacy of the content and expression of medieval poetry to modern — } sensibilities. By subjecting medieval poetry, neo-medievalismandhisown creativity to critique, Heine not only confronts the predicament of the reflective modern poet but ‘gives evidence of it through every nuance of

his form’.9° re OO a

7 While Nietzsche’s conception of critical history can be said to apply to the Romantic circle’s reaction against its immediate predecessors, Heine’s critique confronts not merely the immediate past (for him, the Romantic school) but also its golden age. In assessing the relation between Romantic ironic reflection and the various ideational strategies

sustaining the compositional products of the Palestrina revival, it will be necessary to take into account Heine’s brand of irony as well as that

of Schlegel. While 1t will become clear that the reflective construction

28 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination of a mythological basis for modern creation provides a useful perspective in examining the Palestrina revival, Heine’s subversion of such a foundation through the ‘little devil of frivolous irony’ may seem a less helpful means of approaching Romantic church music. Yet the presence of similarly abrupt stylistic shifts in some of the compositions of the Palestrina revival will be seen to function in a comparable, if not identical way. By asserting the presence of modernity within works that otherwise replicate the language of Palestrina, such stylistic shifts may suggest that these compositions also reflect the combination of spontaneity and reflection, critique and self-critique, embodied by Romantic

Poeste. : SO ,

HEGEL, HISTORICISM AND THE ‘DECAY AND ,

} - - DISINTEGRATION OF ART’ | , ,

It will become evident that the three strands of historicism discussed above collectively provided an impetus for the revival and idealization of Palestrina, and individually played important parts in shaping the critical _ and historiographical reception of Renaissance music. In addition, clear | relationships exist between the strategies with which Winckelmann and

the Romantic circle justified the use of earlier styles, and the ideas which | shaped compositional responses to Palestrina. It is crucial to recognize,

however, that while Winckelmann and the Romantic circle provided frameworks within which the use of earlier styles could be legitimized, these ideas had to compete with more pervasive and compelling aesthetic criteria. Consequently, while these ideas provide valuable perspectives for interpreting compositional historicism, they cannot be assumed to correspond with the ways in which composers justified their engagement

with earlier styles. , ,

A central aspect of these rival imperatives has already become ap- parent in the relativism of Herder and Goethe: their conception of the historicity of style 1s inimical to the warping of history that an artistic return to origins involves. For some early nineteenth-century critics, the | increasing concern for historicity served not only to militate against compositional historicism,. but to preclude it entirely: any work dependent on.an earlier style inevitably infringes the demand for contemporaneity

of expression and is thus an inauthentic product of its age. This rigid , stance was advocated by the classicist Ludwig Schorn, in the sole article dedicated to the subject of originality to appear in the Leipzig Am4

Nicolai’s quasi-liturgical pieces evidence a very different relation to Palestrina. The stylistic gulf between these works and his contemporary orchestral compositions 1s extraordinarily wide, and his ‘Pater noster’ — written shortly after he began taking regular lessons from Baini in 1835 — comes close to the literal replication of Palestrina’s language. In spite of Nicolai’s proximity to Baini, the relation between their compositions and the music of Palestrina is significantly different. Baini’s compositions for

the papal choir have sometimes been viewed as a historicist return to Palestrina’s language, ‘an anachronistic and impossible reinstatement of the past’.°° This view 1s misleading, to say the least: Bami’s music does

The Protestant Palestrina revwal 72 not constitute a ‘reinstatement’ of the past, but is rather the perpetuation of an idiom that had been in continuous use in the Sistine Chapel since Palestrina’s death (and was thus not anachronistic in this context). Baini himself emphasized this continuity of tradition in his Memone storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1828-9), asserting that

Palestrina’s successors have maintained ‘the spirit and tradition of his teaching, his living influence’ up to the present day.5° Baini’s perpetuation of the Palestrina tradition constitutes the use of modern harmonic and melodic elements within the framework of the stile antico rather than a replication of the historical language of Palestrina. Nicolai was aware of the distance between Palestrina’s language and Baini’s stile antico compositions; this can be seen in his description of Baini’s ten-part Miserere, where he notes that it ‘contrasts greatly with the customary older compositions of the Sistine on account of its modern modulations’.5’ Elsewhere,

Nicolai presents a more forthright analysis of the relation between this piece and Renaissance church music, condemning the unprepared dissonances, diminished-seventh chords and banal melodic figures that render it ‘as unlike Palestrina [wnpalestrinasch] as is possible’ 5° In contrast to Baini’s perpetuation of the stile antico tradition, Nicolai’s

‘Pater noster’ engages directly with the music of Palestrina. While Konrad has linked this motet to Venetian polychoral music on the basis of its double-choir scoring, it bears closer relation to two works by Palestrina in Nicolai’s possession: a (probably spurious) ‘Pater noster’ and the ‘Stabat mater’, both also for double choir.59 Nicolai’s handling of this texture, in particular the combining of individual and paired parts from both choirs, closely resembles the varied procedures found in the ‘Stabat mater’; in addition, his treatment of hemiola rhythms and use of a single contrasting section in triple time reflect this model. Aside from a brief passage of imitative writing (bars 87-100), the ‘Pater noster’ also shares the predominantly homophonic idiom of this work; Nicolai’s cultivation of homophony reflects not only the privileging of this idiom in contemporary German criticism, but also the views of Baini, who represented Palestrina’s homophony as a return to the imitation of nature following the empty abstractions of his predecessors. Nicolai’s studies with Baini

included a grounding in modal composition, and the harmonic idiom of this motet suggests an attempt to replicate Palestrina’s modal practice. In addition to melodic modal colouring (see Ex. 3.1) and the use of quasi-modal progressions in which secondary chords predominate, modal harmonic parameters operate at a structural level. ‘The internal cadences are on the first, fourth, fifth and sixth degrees of the scale, a

gf. : .

74. Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination

Et ne OS in ~ du - cas in ten - ta ~ fi1Phaiderannvnnnannnnsanamanmnnnanvnrnnnnarerey % en or . sae A A AN EN ~~ reTE Lee ©I< Ue idSR; =

QQ re [Pa

Choir |

Et ne nos in~| duo ~ = cas in

SS ee SSS ' _ _— afl cL. SEENEN SRO panacea = ccaaannamanenanemnentn

a ON ST ———— eect —

a ==

—_—— | — | a

OI og ~ “ ot nem.

’ AT, Sin es Ne oo nae ——F |} | | = [_

eye — 4 z 2 ??, jTutti

oy ——_ $4 —, — sa oe a sae ~ cu- lo |no - men. tu - um. Al - Iets 2 od 2 la. 2 ed d - @

Oe oe ee ee ee

25 rit. L) + ye iN . FF oF

fh SN A NT CE SE A oo

a nS ae

moe: . ¢ 8! 8

lu - ja, al - tle + lu - ja, al - le + lu - ~ ja.

Example 4.3. Witt, ‘Salvos fac nos, Domine, op. 34. no. 28, bars 17-28

The most interesting feature of these pieces is their frequent and sometimes abrupt stylistic shifts, and it is not hard to see why Witt’s critics inveighed against his eclecticism. A clear example of the contrast between rhythmically free, quasi-modal progressions and periodic, unambiguously tonal writing is present in “Salvos fac nos, Domine’ op. 34 no. 28 (Ex. 4.3). In bars 17-24 Palestrina’s language is evoked through adjacent

The Catholic Palestrina revwal 157 roots and secondary chords, while in bars 24—8 the modern elements of the “Wittian style’ such as rhythmic and harmonic sequences characterize the refrain. If the stylistic tensions present in the ‘Wittian style’ testify to an attempt to modernize the Palestrina ideal, other works come closer to the literal replication of his language. Indeed, contemporary critics condemned Witt’s works for their epigonal imitation just as often as for their eclecticism, seeking to demonstrate that they were merely an assemblage of reminiscences from the old masters. Habert, for mstance, derided his Missa in Memoriam Concilu Oecumenict op. 19 (1871) for being a ‘pale copy’

(Abklatsch) and slavish imitation of the ancients, demonstrating that the

Kyrie was assembled from motifs borrowed from Claudio Casciolini, Lassus and Hassler; he even offers a recipe for composers seeking to emulate Witt: ‘take an idea from Palestrina, follow through with one by Lassus, tack on one by Lotti and you have finished the first Kyrie... ’°°4

Although Witt himself conceded that some of his pieces were — in a ‘certain sense’ — copies of earlier music, it is clear that his intent was to improve on Palestrina’s language rather than to reproduce it. ‘Two distinct factors motivated the production of these works: the impulse to create a purified version of this language free from the defects Witt identified in Renaissance compositions, and the need to provide simple exemplars of it that could readily be used within the liturgy. Witt’s motets in this idiom — which, in contrast to those in the ‘Wittian style’, are generally in white notation — vary widely in their responses to Renaissance techniques and textures. Many of the simplest consist of homophonic passages alternated with falsobordone psalm tone harmonizations, as a means of attaining Witt’s ideals concerning text declamation. The homophonic writing 1s often very stark, with little independent partwriting, and dissonance is restricted to unaccented passing notes and occasional suspensions. Contrast is achieved 1n several of the shorter motets

through the use of a section in triple time, a gesture that while derived from Renaissance music rarely resembles it. Indeed, in Witt’s pieces and in Cecilian compositions in general, it is the handling of triple-time sections that most distances them from Palestrina’s music, as a result of their static part-writing, repetitive rhythms, regular phrases and chordal basis.

Alongside simple homophony, the most common texture in these pieces is rhythmic polyphony. As in the music of Grell, this may be characterized as a rhythmically dense form of homophony, in which a chordal texture with mainly syllabic part-writing is enlivened through

A SS ee ee

—{ ef — ee ie EO ET Ee mp EEE Lo - - cus i - - - ste, or ooo IB eT | TT eS Se 158 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination

Lo - - cus__ i - - ste,

ee ,

Lo - cad cus i -

TE Ee ) f - = Pg

4 i - - - ste_ a De - o

7ste, (7 EE ee i ~ ~Le. ~- ste_ 5 AY —— -_ = a a = 5& > = a Sse eel

10 est, a De - o fac -~- tus. est_ in- ae - sti " AT GEE GE © | A © SE = CE" CS

fac - tus est a De - o_ fac ~ tus est, in~ae ~ sti -

———————————————— ——

eo Ps G oe e a D a a d fac - tus | est

a De - o fac - - tus_ est Example 4.4. (cont.)

entries of the parts are generally close, and Witt’s fugal polyphony sometimes has the appearance of a constant stretto. These types of polyphony can be seen in the gradual ‘Locus iste’ op. 34 no. 153 (Ex. 4.4): in the opening five bars a short rhythmic motif permeates all five parts, while from bars 6—11 a four-note ‘thematic’ motif ensues, leading via a short passage of rhythmic polyphony to a more elaborate cadence.

,Ee nn— Ss 3 Oe

160 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination

43 ma ad bio = dew

ma - bi + jie t ~ i ~ | men ~ ~ ~

,|

Mae bi - | ie sa = ~cra ~- |men - tum, ir -

| be a 7 | 3 “3 re _—_ seonante Te aan Sana nnn nnn Fomnennamnannnrotni

$2 ~ cra ~ Men “

16 ro - ~ - “ ~ re - pre ~ hen- si - -

“fe - ” - pre-hen -| si - - ~ - turn, ir ~ re - ~ ~ pre - hen-~ si ~ ~

4 y falda 2 we Jd

sys it —————_—_—r— ee Erie serene s.. Pa

tum. ir ~ “ re ~~ pre ~ Hen

18 - ~ ~ ~ ~ bi ~ lis est

si bi - lis_ est | — Se —_zx =I IN; cei Sanaa || “ee bi ee ~ lisL_&%: - - est | _ Oe eEooo_l_aeeeEeEeeeeeeeeEEeEee

Bae — si ~ bi - iis. est ee Example 4.4. (cont.)

Witt claimed that the polyphonic movement in Cecilian compositions was less stiff and more singable than in many sixteenth-century works.'°° But Witt’s polyphony often contravenes these criteria, especially in passages of fugal imitation (among the motets in his Graduahensammlung

op. 34, this is particularly apparent in the two settings of ‘Benedicta et venerabilis’ nos. 64 and 65): its stiffness is the result of repetitive rhythms in the points and their development in regular two-bar phrases.

The Catholic Palestrina revwal 161 As elsewhere in Witt’s ‘white-note’ output, the dissonance treatment in these pieces remains bound by the rules of the strenge Satz; nonetheless, the frequent use of upper auxiliary notes and chains of parallel thirds serves to distance this music from Palestrina’s language. And while Witt criticized other Cecilian composers for the stereotypical manner with which they approached the emulation of the Renaissance masters, his own approach to dissonance sometimes results in passages that resemble species counterpoint more than sixteenth-century polyphony. BROADER TRENDS IN COMPOSITION: PALESTRINIANISM

Witt’s views on the composition of church music, while highly influential during his lifetime, should not necessarily be seen as reflecting the opinions of other composers who were members of the ACV. For Witt — in theory if not always in practice — the renewal of modern composition centred on two factors: the emulation but not the literal replication of Palestrina, and the fusion of artistic quality and liturgical suitability. For a piece of church music to be worthy of its calling, Witt sought evidence of both contemporaneity and aesthetic value. Witt considered some music unworthy for the church even though it broke none of the Cecilian rules for liturgical composition: he condemned structural incoherence since this resulted in works that were ‘spiritual cripples’ (gezstige Kriippel), while mediocre themes resulted in ‘senseless nattering’ (sennlos Zeug schwiitzen).'°° Witt classed as merely liturgical (blos liturgische) pieces

which, while suitable for church performance, had no value aside from their functional use. ‘These two central positions were however contradicted by other Cecilians, both in theory and in practice: it 1s necessary, therefore, to explore the factors that encouraged both the literal replication of Palestrina and a functional conception of church music. In surveying the music produced by members of the ACV, the Cecilian

commentator Peter Griesbacher sought to distinguish Witt’s manner of emulating Palestrina from the ‘Palestrinianism’ (Palestrinismus) rampant among his contemporaries.’°”? He identifies Michael Haller (1840-1915) and Ignaz Mitterer (1850-1924) as the epitome of this tendency, alongside a host of lesser figures including Nekes, Peter Piel (1835-1904), and Witt’s successor as president of the ACV, Friedrich Schmidt (1840—1923).%°° Of

these, the most significant exponent of the more literal replication of Palestrina — and arguably the most distinguished Cecilian composer — was Haller, who served as Stifiskapellmetster at the Alten Kapelle in Regensburg from 1867 to 1899 and as composition tutor at the Azrchenmustkschule

162 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination (founded in 1874). Haller’s importance for the Palestrina revival de- rives not only from his compositions, but from his work as an editor and contrapuntal theorist: his composition tutor, Komposztionslehre fur den polyphonen Rirchengesang (1891), rivalled Bellermann’s Der Contrapunkt as the

most widely circulated codification of the Palestrina-Stil.'°9 In addition, Haller contributed to the Palestrina Gesamtausgabe, through the completion of works no longer extant in their original form. For Haller, as for Proske and Witt, the liturgical primacy of Renaissance church music derives from its close relation to plainchant. Haller argues that the works of Palestrina and contemporaries invariably reflect

the spirit of the chant in their melodic and rhythmic aspects: it is for this reason that the rules of the Palestrina-Stl are inviolable in liturgical music."*® In outlining the implications of these twin ideals for modern church composition, Haller’s views are more rigid than Witt’s. He elevates diatonicism as an immutable, natural ideal for the church composer, invoking not only the practicalities of writing for voices but also the doctrine of the affections. ‘The idea that chromatic intervals are unsuitable in principle for church music, although dismissed by Witt, was advo~ cated vigorously by other contemporary reformers. Citing the views of Ambrosius Kienle, Haller banished chromatic intervals on the grounds of their detrimental effect on the listener and their unworthiness for religious worship; these intervals are forbidden because they serve ‘the representation and arousal of passionate feelings [Affekte]’ and deviate from the model of the chant: ‘Just as for the chalice only gold is befitting, so only the noblest tonal material [Zonmaterial|, only the most beautiful diatonic

intervals are worthy for the praise of God.’ In addition to the use of solely diatonic intervals, Haller contends that the composer’s emulation of Palestrina must be grounded in the ideal of the chant in its rhythmic aspect. While Haller considers it inevitable that music for several voices be notated metrically (except in_falsobordone), polyphonic music should

attempt to re-create the rhythmic freedom and responsiveness to the text that is found in plainchant melodies.’ ‘The composer must strive to mitigate the harshness of measured rhythm by entirely avoiding modern rhythmic conventions: ‘melodies with regularly recurring note groups or with divisions in the manner of the periodic structure of secular music by no means correspond with the archetype of all sacred melodies, the

chant.”"8 -

While Haller, like Bellermann, emphasizes that the rules outlined in his counterpoint tutor are universally valid, his emphasis on the primacy of the chant serves to limit their applicability. Nowhere does Haller question the aesthetic implications of modern composition in the

The Catholic Palestrina revival 163 Palestrina-Sul: rather, it is evident that contemporary aesthetic norms are irrelevant — indeed alien — to the composition of liturgical music. Haller directly contradicts Bellermann’s assertion that composers, if they are

inspired by other ideas, are entitled to go beyond the confines of the sixteenth-century rules: Haller stresses that modern Catholics are inspired by precisely the same ideas as in Palestrina’s time, implying that

these rules constitute immutable norms for liturgical music.“ Moreover, it is clear that he considers it a virtue, not a failing, for liturgical pieces to be entirely distant from other aspects of contemporary musical practice." Haller’s textbook serves as a means for the budding church composer, like Witt’s conjectured preacher in ‘Was haben die modernen Kirchencomponisten zu meiden?’, to become immersed in an older style to the extent that its forms become a valid alternative language. Haller encourages the young composer to study the works of Palestrina, Lassus and Victoria: “Such models should be studied diligently, often sung or played on an instrument attentively so that the type and manner of the _ melodic shapes are lived in [hineinzuleben], greatly encouraging the successful study of composition with independent voices.’ Through ‘living in’ the works of Palestrina and contemporaries, their language can become second nature to the modern composer, who may then compose in it successfully and unreflectively. The relation between Haller’s own compositions and Renaissance mu-

sic is more complicated than this stance may suggest. While it is generally | agreed that — as Witt put it— no other Cecilian composer followed the old masters more closely than Haller, the stylistic consequences of this have _ been interpreted differently."” Witt viewed some of Haller’s works as excessively dependent on Palestrina, dismissing his Missa octava ‘O salutaris hostia’ op. 20 as ‘a good copy of the ancients’. In contrast, Haller’s obituarist Max Sigl acclaimed his works as progressive, since they present an updated, more comprehensible version of Palestrina’s style.""9 And while

August Scharnagl views his output as an eclectic fusion of Renaissance formulas and Haller’s individuality, other commentators have stressed the absolute stylistic unity of his music.'?°

In evaluating these claims, it must first be noted that Haller himself viewed some of his works as literal replications of Palestrina’s language. Ihe preface to his three-voice Missa prima op. 4 (1875) presents a justification for its adherence to the part-writing and diatonicism of

the ancient school: Haller viewed the purpose of the piece as being to provide weaker choirs with an accessible introduction to Renaissance polyphony.’** Other works, in particular Haller’s motets and late masses, cannot be viewed merely as attempts to distil the idiom of Palestrina’s

164. Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination masses into a simpler format. This can be seen from his SANRIO, ill NOTIN EEO

tu - - - 0S, il - - los_ tu Example 4.7. Palestrina/Haller, ‘Salve regina’, bars 54-74

his Palestrinian ideal of the weaving of independent chant-like melodies, Haller diverges from Palestrina’s actual practice.

The recent rediscovery of the lost third-choir parts for three of these compositions — ‘Ad te levavi’, “Beati omnes’ and ‘Salve regina’ —

permits a more specific consideration of the differences between the techniques of Palestrina and Haller.89 In addition to divergences in

a 63 tu ~ Os mi - se - fri - cor _ - des oO ~

— hg ————__—-_-_ |__| _}, } ___4«»_-__, JE Gl; GE eee

iLEON £\. >). eT OO FT O_OoD OED_—_—0nnnvrNn»r—”’V/V"....__ —_...__ 1 _.”"”__ ere... 2. _—___ —__ OO(__—?2—”___. _._..___ fF _.____ or>—7 gy ..._ 620-0 oT

NE ES SEE 5 A, 00, CS SS EY 7” EE ERE

nicht, dass heu-te der al - lerheil- ligste.Char - frei-tag ist?

Wieder _aaDe eeeetwas ee langsame Ee eee — ae_ ye ._.-#Nuwvw#{$Po"--9 a PE 2

P ———— ———_—_— Example 5.2. Wagner, Parsifal, Act Il, Scene 1, bars 214~24

with adjacent roots) suggests other associations. This is confirmed in a fourth reference to the ‘Stabat mater’ chords in this scene that neither Weinmann nor Seidel mentions. At bars 474-6 the ‘Stabat mater’ chords (this time ff-E—D), this time in augmentation, succeed a presentation of the Grail motif itself (bars 471-3), with the text ‘[I sense he still has a great work to perform today,] to preside over a sacred service’. While the

236 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination Grail motif is here connected with Good Friday, the related ‘Palestrina motif” is linked to the sacred service over which Parsifal has to preside. In this way, the Palestrina motif is twice associated not only with Good Friday, but specifically with Catholic ritual: a ‘sacred service’ (Ami) is also a mass, and the ‘holy of holies’ (allerheiligste) mentioned in the text at the

third occurrence of the chords is ineluctably associated with the Blessed Sacrament (Allerheiligste).

In assigning these chords an ambiguous double association — and in arguing that the Faith motif, at its Aaivos in the communion scene, represents an allusion to Palestrina’s language — it is not my intention to contribute towards a Catholic or even Christian interpretation of Parsifal. Recognizing that these references have Catholic associations does nothing to lessen the complexities of the work as a whole. The musical references to Palestrina and textual references to Catholic ritual are only one ingredient in the synthesis of a multiplicity of mythologies (in Schlegel’s sense), and cannot be represented as an indication of the mythical basis of the work in its totality. Although the ideational basis of Christus is less complex than that of Parsifal, elements of Palestrina’s language serve a more diverse range of functions. On one level, as in Parsifal, they contribute to the construction of a religioso idiom: Cornelia Knotik argues —in terms that echo Hanslick—

that the use of chant and Palestrinian homophony provided a means to guarantee a religious tone.°” ‘This aspect is most apparent in the portions of the work that Liszt considered capable of being performed independently as part of the liturgy: no. 3 ‘Stabat mater speciosa’, no. 6 “Die Seligkeiten’, no. 7 ‘Pater noster’ and no. 13 ‘O Fili et Filiae’. In these movements, the limited use of Renaissance materials and techniques (including the evocation of falsobordone in no. 3) serves merely to help to

create a quasi-liturgical aura. In the movements for choir and orchestra, however, elements of Palestrina’s language acquire a more complex, associative role. The mixolydian harmonies and root-position chords in the first part of no. 2 (bars 10-18), for example, do not merely reflect the status of Palestrina’s language as the paradigm of church music. Rather,

they depict a chorus of angelic voices announcing the birth of Christ: here the association of Palestrina’s language with the language of the saints is unambiguously evoked, an association also elicited by the root progressions at the end of the movement. Similarly, the echoes of the ‘Stabat mater’ chords that occur throughout the work (see, for example, no. 1 bars 93-102 and no. 10 bars 204-7, 228-31) appear to function allusively.

Palestrina wn the concert hall 237 The most significant reference to these chords is the quotation and continuation of this progression at the conclusion of no. 12 ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’. Before discussing the associative function of this reference, it is useful to explore the allusions to these chords elsewhere in Liszt’s output. In the Messe fiir Mannerchor, as in the tenth movement of Christus, these

chords accompany textual references to Christ as king of heaven, and appear to function as a musical symbol of the divine. In ‘Cantantibus organis’, however, the allusion to these chords — in an antiphon for St Cecilia — elevates the “Stabat mater’ as an emblem of the moral and spiritual power of music itself (a similar association is evoked by the progression of third-related and adjacent roots at the conclusion of the symphonic poem Orpheus). ‘The reference most similar to that in Liszt’s ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’ is the allusion to and continuation of this progression at the conclusion of the ‘Dante’ Symphony (completed in 1856). Although Liszt heeded Wagner’s advice to abandon plans to represent paradise in a third instrumental movement, the Magnificat appended to the second movement, ‘Purgatorio’, seems to fulfil the function of representing Dante’s ‘Paradiso’. Liszt’s employment of the ‘Stabat mater’ progression as part of this evocation of paradise was described by him in a letter to Julius Schaffer: ‘At the close of my Dante Symphony I was tempted to bring in the liturgical intonations of the Magnificat. Perhaps the whole-tone scale of triads [Dretklangs-Scala in groBen Tonen| there will also interest you, which (to my knowledge, at least) has not been used in its entire range hitherto.’”°3 Here Liszt represents his use of these nonfunctional chords as wholly innovative, without mentioning Palestrina.

Their link to the “Stabat mater’ is clear however, especially since the disposition of the voices in the initial three chords of the harmonium part is identical to that in Palestrina’s work. Liszt’s continuation of the ‘Stabat mater’ progression can be viewed as an act of remodelling akin to that presented in Wagner’s arrangement of this work: an attempt to update this progression in the light of modern expressive parameters, 1n order to produce the same effect on modern listeners that Palestrina’s bold progression must have had on his contemporaries. Before accepting this explanation, the analogous use of the chords at the conclusion of Liszt’s “Stabat mater dolorosa’ must be considered (Ex. 5.3). Here the chords occur at the last line of the hymn: ‘[Quando

corpus morietur, fac ut animae donetur,] paradisi gloria’ (‘| When my body dies, let my soul be granted] the glory of paradise’). The ‘Stabat mater’ chords occur first at their original pitch (A-G—F), and then in a transposed version (D—C—Bb). While the references here are

ey OS i oS :2 77

238 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination

fh a tempo (molto moderato) Pp: .

ee ee Se ’" TA pp EE > nr TSan ee Se

Chorus pa-ra - di - si glo ~ ri - a

eee eee eee eee EE oO : ox AY:

Ab: 7 FO HG} — S82 ; ff S f) = ECan. — pmo

Oe renee

1 a ——_ >

ee o_o SC SS Sh OO di - si glo - - fi Zia.

DP EE STE TOE RE RRS ESE = ra

fn Oe eee , pa ra ro Fi. >.|SaS? ee ySS = SS ‘~S =< Ll ee: pa - ra -PP. di -Ca Si

De ee ee a Example 5.3. Liszt, “Stabat mater dolorosa’, Christus, no. 12, bars 911-25

undoubtedly allusive, their manner of presentation and the transformation that it involves suggest an ambivalence; Seidel comments that while the use of this progression 1s undoubtedly an act of homage, Liszt seems to

wish both to emphasize and to conceal the quotation.°+ Seidel does not

speculate on the cause of this ambivalence, but the nature of this reference, if considered in combination with that in the ‘Dante’ Symphony,

ee ee eee 1a OT ee a

CE rs ns ee Es ss

919 »p

Palestrina in the concert hall 239

- fa - di - Si 6): ee ee eee eepaeee eee eee

eeglooo eT Ee So ee - - - fi -: a oy eee eee eee ee eee eee eee eee

-di - - ~ - si ‘ al”x To. &:©Se Qu monocots ence: ne eeantenshaiteninantepumpuwe loxP eS ————

es ee eee Oe —? oe e- —S———

922 —T ey ee ee_.--__ —_ OS SS EO ee 2 eee2ee Eee Iee>TO OO eeEE OO ee eT

. PP >—— i Pe 4ee| see |oo ~——a

Oe ee ee a SE —— ————__T p= f\ Pp —_—— Se Sa nS ee Se a pa - ra ~ di - SI glo - ~ 4 PP g oS D o e PI

Pn ES TE ee eee py Bp rrr nnnnnn ns psec eee a TTT Tae

1ce eS eee Se ers nn| Example 5.3. (cont.)

becomes clear. In the symphony Liszt is able to evoke the music of par-

adise through the ‘Stabat mater’ with few qualms. But at the end of ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’ — his greatest movement for choir and orchestra,

in what he regarded as his most significant work — to depend on the work of an earlier composer at the peroration of the movement seems

24.0 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination like an admission of defeat. But Liszt has no choice: as has become clear, the use of Palestrina’s language is not merely one way of evoking a naw

vision of the infinite, but the sole means for the modern composer to attempt to convey such a conception. Here, as in much of the liturgical music discussed earlier, the composer is torn between using a historical language to represent the Christian infinite, and using his own language which is inadequate to this task. His solution is to speak with Palestrina;

only in this way can a language of Christian spirituality be combined with modern expression.

6

Interpreting the secondary discourse

of nineteenth-century music ,

Up to this point, I have taken a largely pragmatic approach in discussing the relationships between individual works and Palestrina’s language.

This approach does not reflect a belief in the possibility of neutral, objective interpretation, but rather the need to explore the mdividual configurations of such relationships without the drawback of an a pron theoretical framework: I have sought to describe these relationships without either exaggerating their significance for the pieces in question, or misrepresenting their nature in order to satisfy preconceived views. A variety of different critical concepts can now be applied as a means of enhancing our understanding of them. It is necessary, however, for two provisos to be taken into account. First, it is clear that the nature of the engagement of nineteenth-century German composers with Palestrina

is unique to this period: the aesthetic matrices that sustained this engagement are very different from those operative in other periods and contexts. To explore these relationships through the norms of analytical

aesthetics, or from the viewpoint of critical conceptions formulated around entirely different repertories, may lead to a distortion of what has already been established: any attempt to understand the relation

between nineteenth-century composition and the music of the distant , past must therefore be historically grounded. Second, and by extension, the complex nature of the nineteenth-century Palestrina — a construct consisting of the essence and appearance of his works, mediated through the multifarious conceptions of the Palestrina-Stil — must therefore be

taken into account in interpreting these relationships. With these provisos in mind, the following discussion approaches the compositional products of the Palestrina revival in terms of imitation and historicism, irony and critique, and translation.

241

The term imitation is often encountered in nineteenth-century dis-

cussions of these compositions and can also be found in modern musicological appraisals of them. It does not, however, provide a helpful means

24.2 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination of approaching this music, either as a description of the relationships seen in the majority of the pieces examined or as an explanation of the intentions of their composers. In particular, the common musicological use of this term in relation to the activities of the ACV has been seen to oversimplify the issues involved. Moreover, the status of imitation as a normative category limits its pertinence, even in cases where it seems appropriate as a description of the relation between a particular piece and Palestrina’s language. As a universally applicable concept — which, for the Romantics, served as a description of modern responses both to works from the immediate past and to the masterpieces of classical antiquity — it is too amorphous to be of use: 1t does not distinguish the most significant aspect of the relationships under discussion, the ‘warping’ of history that they represent. Finally, umitation, as a historical category associated with Winckelmann’s monumental classicism, must be rejected as an ex_ planation of intention. It has been seen that for most nineteenth-century musicians (the most notable exception being Proske), the continuation of Winckelmannian concepts of technical imitation was not compatible with the production of artworks: art and the imitation of earlier styles and techniques were mutually exclusive. For the majority of composers, the cultivation of Palestrina’s language was not legitimized by this outmoded

aesthetic criterion, and imitation is not appropriate as a description of intention. In contrast to imitation, the concept of historicism provides a means of exploring the warping of history embodied by these pieces. Earlier, I have used the phrase ‘compositional historicism’ to encompass the totality of ways in which nineteenth-century pieces engage with the music of the distant past (excluding localized allusion). But the pejorative sense in which the term is still often used serves to limit its applicability, and — more importantly — it proves inadequate as a means of delineating the types of relationship involved. It would be overly restrictive to consider historicism to be synonymous with the literal replication of earlier styles;

even so, the term and the constellation of issues and tensions that it signifies may seem to imply the preponderance of a historical idiom. While nineteenth-century compositions that are modelled on works by Palestrina or use an idiom abstracted from them may be characterized as historicist, such a characterization must take account of the degree to which the newer work utilizes elements of the older work or language. Only a small minority of these compositions fit in with Dahlhaus’s notion that ‘such musical experience moves in a twilight zone between the dead past and the denied present’, or with Wiora’s view that historicism

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 243

involves the imitation of the old outweighing the invention of the new.’ Rather, the compositional engagement with Palestrina represents a continuum, ranging from works in which the older element plays a restricted role, to ‘pure’ historicism, ‘copies and musical cul-de-sacs’.? Few of the compositions that have been discussed exhibit such ‘pure’ historicism, either because the composer did not intend to replicate Palestrina’s lan-

guage or, less often, because his intention to produce a literal copy was frustrated by an inadequate knowledge of it. Most of the works discussed present a mixture of musical styles, in which Renaissance elements are juxtaposed with nineteenth-century idioms. This dual nature

is emphasized in some German discussions of historicism, in the idea of eclecticism. But the very duality of these works may seem to render the term historicism inadequate, since by its nature it downplays the modern aspects of a piece. What is important in this eclectic repertory is its difference from its models, not just its points of similarity: a critical

concept is needed that emphasizes the dialogue between old and new |

_ present in such pieces. | |

Such a concept may seem to be provided by Romantic irony and modern critical ideas that are related to and indirectly derived from it. The freedom of the Romantic ironist to range over artistic materials from different periods and places, and to incorporate a variety of historical materials and stances within his discourse, may seem to provide a key to interpreting those products of the Palestrina revival in which historical and modern musical languages are juxtaposed or combined. In assessing the relevance of irony as a critical perspective, it must be established whether the dialogic compositions of the Palestrina revival evince the combination of spontaneity and reflection, critique and selfcritique, that characterizes ironic literature. It should not be ignored, however, that the reflection and caprice of the Romantic ironist are very distant from the strategies of legitimization deployed by the composers of the Palestrina revival. In the writings of Mendelssohn and Witt, irony — while not mentioned by name — represents an abhorrent deviation from (Hegelian) aesthetic norms. Mendelssohn’s insistence that his church compositions were the products of sincerity and conviction, and his assertion that they were spontaneous rather than reflective creations, have been seen to represent not only a denial of the intent to imitate

but an attempt to distance his activities from the irony of the early Romantics. Similarly, Witt’s demand that a composer’s style be the product of his conviction and world-view, being prompted solely by his feelings

rather than through the conscious replication of Palestrina, cannot be

244 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination concomitant with Friedrich Schlegel’s assertion that the artwork be the product of both inspiration and reflection. But while Mendelssohn, Witt, and other composers whose works and views have been examined represented their intentions as diametrically opposed to the reflection of the Romantic ironists, this does not nullify the value of irony as a critical tool; rather — since these works undeniably embody reflection as well as spontaneity — irony may provide a means of coming closer to their covert aesthetic basis. Schlegel’s idea that the literal imitation of ancient art is impossible — since authors inevitably include modern elements and as a consequence produce parodies — and his conception of the ironic artwork as an act of criticism of an earlier work, may provide a means of understanding the dialogic nature of the products of the Palestrina revival. In particular, Schlegel’s notion that portions of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister constitute a critical interpretation of Hamlet, serving to supplement and rejuvenate the earlier work, seems to provide a useful means of approaching the analogous processes at work in re-creations of Palestrina’s language. In addition, the abrupt stylistic shifts that have been noted in the music of Witt, Koenen, Bruckner and Liszt, can be linked — provisionally at least — to the more disjointed ironic juxtapositions produced by Heine’s use of the Stammungsbrechung, the sharp

parodic twist that undermines the prevailing mood and style of a neomedieval Volkslied, and in doing so asserts the presence of the spirit of modernity within a poem. Analogous ideas from modern literary theory may also provide a fruit-

ful means of interpreting the dialogism present in the compositions of the Palestrina revival. ‘The notion of the artwork functioning as a critique of an earlier text is, for instance, an important part of Linda Hutcheon’s consideration of linguistic multiplicity in postmedern art. For Hutcheon, the postmodern artist’s engagement with earlier art represents a stylistic

confrontation, in which this material is submitted to critical reassessment, ‘a modern recoding which establishes difference at the heart of similarity’.+ As with Romantic irony, the emphasis that Hutcheon places on difference provides a useful corrective to the emphasis on similarity present in both imitation and historicism. But to transfer these or similar

ideas to nineteenth-century works that are related to historical musical languages is not unproblematic. The dangers of this approach are apparent in a recent discussion of S¢ Paul by Peter Mercer-Taylor, who argues that Mendelssohn’s intent was not merely to appropriate earlier materials, but to make the act of appropriation the ‘subject matter’ of the work.° Quoting the literary theorist Patricia Waugh, he asserts that

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 24.5

Mendelssohn’s purpose was ‘simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. ‘The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinction between “creation” and “criticism” and merges them into the concepts of “interpretation” and “deconstruction”’.° The notion that S¢ Paul combines both critical reflection on earlier musical material and self-critique closely resembles Romantic conceptions of irony. As with irony, the idea that either Mendelssohn or the composers of the Palestrina revival sought to create religious works that critique their own premisses 1s questionable. ‘The problem with these concepts is not

their dissonant relation to the avowed intentions of the composers, but that they exaggerate the stylistic tensions within the works themselves. The question whether critique, either as a Romantic or (post)modern conception, can be accepted as a valid critical tool for mterpreting the relationships between nineteenth-century works and earlier church music must be resolved by considering the nature of this dialogism. Heine’s use of the Semmungsbrechung, while an extreme form of Romantic irony, highlights the problems involved in transferring it as a broader concept to the Palestrina revival, problems that increase in appropriating analogous modern critical ideas. While Heine’s Stummungsbrechung and the stylistic

shifts present in the dialogic compositions of the Palestrina revival are comparable in effect, they do not seem similar in function. These shifts of register are in both cases revelations of the presence of modernity, and serve to highlight the reflective character of the works concerned: in both cases the possibility of naw composition in a reflective age is tested empirically. But the dialogism of the works of the Palestrina revival provides a different response to this problem than that given by Heine’s abrupt par-

odic twists or the linguistic confrontations of postmodern art. Although Heine’s poetry and the dialogic products of the Palestrina revival evince the combination of spontaneity and reflection characteristic of irony, and both deny the possibility of resurrecting the naw art of earlier periods solely through repetition, the assertion of modernity within the compositions of the Palestrina revival does not constitute critique or self-critique. Heine’s irony not only undermines the external form of the medieval Volkshed, by violently juxtaposing it with modern stylistic elements, but also subverts the spiritual content of it, emphasizing that for the reflective modern artist, such naw world-views are no longer capable of recovery. In contrast, the music of the Palestrina revival constitutes the resistance of self-critique and an attempt at such a recovery. The dialogic compositions of the Palestrina revival seek to assert the continued possibility of

246 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination naw composition, through re-expressing Palestrina’s spiritual content via elements.of his language and interweaving these elements with components of modern musical syntax. While such pieces constitute reflective essays on the problem of church music, they seek to deny their own reflectivity. Such denial cannot be accommodated within the self-awareness of irony, and a concept must be found that emphasizes the coexistence of languages without the presence of critique or self-critique. The dialogic compositions of the Palestrina revival are clearly “music about music’ in some sense, if not in the sense of critique. They do not represent a commentary on Palestrina’s form, but reinterpret this form as a means of retrieving and re-expressing its spiritual content. A comparable process, clearly differentiated from critique, is described in a fragment that appeared in both Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Athenaum Fragmente’ and Novalis’s ‘Vermischte Bemerkungen’: ‘I can only show that I have

understood an author if I can act in his spirit, if I can translate and change him in a variety of ways without diminishing his individuality.” For Schlegel, all such translation involves ‘transplantation or metamorphosis

or both. ... Every real translation must be rejuvenation’.® Exploring the music of the Palestrina revival in terms of translation — of how nineteenthcentury composers transplanted and rejuvenated Palestrina’s language — emphasizes the dialogic nature of these works and allows us to approach

them in a more sophisticated and sympathetic way than the monologic conceptions of imitation and historicism. In addition to providing a means of interpreting the interaction of languages present in these

works, translation theories offer a means of exploring the attempted reclamation of Palestrina’s spiritual content that they enact. The following discussion — while centred around the ideas of Schleiermacher and the Romantic circle — is not restricted to theories from the Romantic tra-

dition, but instead represents a pragmatic translation ofa variety of useful approaches from literary and linguistic theory, and from the burgeoning

| discipline of translation studies. The meaning of translation in a musical context can be clarified through a recent description of the translating process by Eve ‘Tavor Bannet; she describes translation as ‘that mixture of chance and necessity by which the translator finds a means of transmitting the signs s/he has received from an other in such a way that the other can be heard afresh at her/his date’.9 Central to translation is therefore the idea of - recovery: the recovery of meanings or truths from a text or body of texts and the subsequent re-expression of this essential content in a new text. The relevance of such an idea to music is immediately obvious.

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 24.7

A performance of a piece of notated music can be seen as an act of translation, an interpretation and transmission of signs so that they can be ‘heard afresh’. As has been seen, the validity of nineteenth-century performances of Palestrina’s music was dependent for Witt on such an act of translation; while Palestrina’s essential content remained unchanged

in performance, the external form of the work is modified since ‘our spirit penetrates it and lets our singers perform it with our accents and our manner of expression’.’° Not only nineteenth-century performances of Palestrina, but also works that in some way use his language resemble translations; attempts to recover and adapt the meanings, the spiritual

content, of his works for the modern age. In addition, translation offers a means of exploring how composers came to terms with the new awareness of the multiplicity of earlier musical styles and of the foreign and contingent nature ascribed to them by historicism. ‘Translation represents an attempt to create unity from plurality, to ‘abolish multiplicity and to bring different world-pictures back into perfect congruence’: this perspective is relevant not only to early Romantic visions of a universal literature (Universalpoesie) but to the attempts of contemporary composers to reconcile the past with the present.” In addition, the desire to appropriate Palestrina’s language resembles the cultural imperialism of contemporary German translation theorists (for example, A. W. Schlegel ‘and Wilhelm von Humboldt) for whom the verbs iibersetzen (to translate) and verdeutschen (to “Germanize’) were interchangeable.” The attitudes of the composers of the Palestrina revival towards Renaissance works could be regarded as mirroring the nineteenth-century view of translation as a master/servant relationship, in which the translator attempts to improve and civilize his source texts."8

Before developing these broader interpretive perspectives, the primary relevance of translation to the Palestrina revival must be discussed:

its use as a method of approaching the dialogism, the combinations of languages present in these works. A translation is not simply the product, the end result, of the complex interaction of languages but is rather the embodiment of it, a conglomerate of semantic content and forms derived from two different linguistic systems.“* Two different models have recently been applied in translation theory for dealing with the combination of voices, the authorial and the translating, that a translation embodies. In the first, the interaction of texts and languages results in interpretive ‘undecidability’; when reading (or hearing) a translating text, ‘one cannot always be sure just whose voice, translator or source writer, one is hearing at any given moment’.’° Such an approach views a

248 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination translation as a series of fluctuations between translator dominance and original author dominance, the importance of each voice continuously changing. ‘The second model considers a translation to be a polyphonic text combining two acts of communication, author—text—receiver and translator—text—receiver.'° Here the contributions of author and trans-

lator are not confused but form two separate strands or envelopes of communication, both presented simultaneously.”

The parallels between the linguistic interaction described in these models and the dialogic products of the Palestrina revival can be seen by returning to Bruckner’s “lota pulchra es’. ‘This motet can be compared with a translating text, in which the authorial and translating voices — those of Palestrina and Bruckner — alternate in dominance. ‘The interplay of these voices can be seen at a localized level. While the opening sixteen bars can be regarded as exemplifying original author dominance, Bruckner’s voice is asserted in the truncation of the ‘Stabat mater’ ref-

erence, and in the static harmonies and ensuing sequential patterns in bars 20-7. A similar shift from original author dominance to translator dominance is exemplified in bars 41-52, in the movement away from phrygian harmonies culminating in a perfect cadence in Db. Alternatively (or additionally), following the second model outlined above, the motet could be viewed in terms of the continuous presentation of both languages, since syntactic elements of both are present throughout. The combination of restrictive dissonance treatment and predominantly rootposition harmonies in “Lota pulchra es’ could be viewed as a continuous signalling of the presence of the original author ‘envelope’, while again the translator’s continual presence is asserted in the periodic and tonal structures of the work. The limitations of this provisional comparison, and the broader prob- _

lems involved in viewing the interaction of musical styles in terms of translation, are already becoming evident. Before exploring these problems (which in themselves shed light on the nature of the stylistic pluralism in the music of the Palestrina revival), it is necessary to refine these models of linguistic interaction: in particular, translation provides a means of

enhancing our understanding of the difference in degrees of smilarity of nineteenth-century representations of Palestrina’s language. ‘Translation theorists have tackled such problems of similarity, and since the 1600s have tended to divide translations into three broad types: literal (wordfor-word) translation, free translation Gn Dryden’s words, ‘translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense’),

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 24.9

and a rogue third category, re-creation (often confusingly labelled, as with Dryden, ‘imitation’, ‘where the translator ... assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases’).'® A similar conceptual scheme 1s outlined in Schleiermacher’s speech ‘Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens’ (1813), which, more than any other German Romantic discussion of translation, addresses the problems provoked by the ways in which ‘a language can absorb products of another language that has been dead for many centuries’.'9 Like Dryden, Schleiermacher

proposes a scheme that encompasses literal and freer translation, and also asserts the existence of looser re-creations that belong outside the

concept. For the genuine translator, two methods are possible: Fither the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves __

the reader towards him, or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible , and moves the author towards him. Both methods are so completely different from one another that it is necessary that one or the other be followed as strictly as possible, since an extremely unreliable result would necessarily be produced

- by any mixing.”° Importantly, in Schleiermacher’s scheme translation occupies a conceptual space midway between, on the one hand, paraphrase, copying (Nachbildung), or free imitation in the target language and, on the other hand, creative expression and communication in the source language.’ The paraphrast or free imitator attempts to provide a reflection of a foreign work without its language being implicated within his production; his aim is not to bring together the author and reader, but ‘merely to give the latter a sumilar impression to that received from the original in its own language by its contemporaries’.** Such a goal is illusory: paraphrases

‘completely relinquish the impression made by the original, since the liv- | ing speech has been killed and is irretrievable’.*2 At the opposite end of Schleiermacher’s continuum of linguistic interaction from monolingual communication in the target language 1s another form of monolingual-

ism: comprehension and communication in the source language. He notes that some authors become immersed in a foreign language to the extent that their native tongue becomes alien to them, with the result that in comprehending works in this language ‘there is no longer a trace of the influence of their mother tongue’.** But those who are able to comprehend a source language in such a manner do not offer a model for the process of translation, and original works written in a language

250 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination which is not that to which the author was born rarely rise above pastiche: ‘only seldom does something originate in this way that has genuine

value aside from its mimic accuracy... [if] contrary to nature and custom, someone formally becomes a deserter [Uberliufer] from his mother tongue and offers himself to another’.*» ‘True translation lies between these two extremes; as a mode of communication and linguistic interaction it represents neither monolingual paraphrase in the target language, nor monolingual expression in a foreign language, but rather — if not bilingualism — at least a mode in which formal elements from the source language are sedimented in the translating text.?° Just as paraphrase in the target language and expression in the source language represent two extremes, translation can incline towards

either the one or the other. Freer translation — closest to paraphrase , on Schleiermacher’s continuum — brings the work effortlessly towards the reader, striving entirely to prevent the form of the source language insinuating itself into the target language.?” Schleiermacher rejects this ~ approach. Translation requires not merely the transference of the textual content, but also of the higher meaning of a work, ‘the musical element of language’; if this is not present in translations then the highest magic in the originals is lost.?° Freer translation proves inadequate as a means of re-expressing this higher meaning since this cannot be detached from its form of expression and represented afresh in a new language: Could anyone who is convinced that thought and expression are essentially and inwardly completely the same, and the entire art of all understanding of speech and therefore also of translation is based on this conviction . .. presume to break speech down to its innermost element in order to eliminate from it the constituent of language, and make, through a new chemical process as it were, that innermost element combine with the essence and power of another language?*9

Schleiermacher’s answer is a resounding no: the freer translation inevitably distorts the original at the most fundamental levels of its being, and for a translator to claim that he had rendered a book ‘just as the author would have written it 1f he had written 1t nm German’ would amount

to the same as providing the reader with ‘a portrait of a man just as he would have looked if his mother had conceived him with a different father’.8° Rather, in translating a work from the target language to the source language, the translator must transfer elements of the form of the original as well as the textual content. In addition to re-expressing this content and the musical element of the source language, translators must

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 251

also transfer the ‘sense of the strange’ (Geftihl des fremden) that they feel upon reading the work in its original language, a feeling of estrangement that is present regardless of how fluently they read this language.3’ The task of bending the target language towards ‘a resemblance of the foreign’ (ener fremden Aehnhchkeit) is probably the hardest task for the translator: Who would not prefer to allow his mother tongue to appear everywhere in the most popular and appropriate beauty of which each genre is capable? Who would not prefer to conceive children in whom the father’s line is reflected purely, rather than half-breeds [Blendlinge]? Who would readily be published when appearing in less fluent and graceful movements than he is capable of, from time to time seeming at the very least abrupt and stiff, in order to be as objectionable to the reader as is necessary so that he does not become unaware of the nature of the thing? Who would readily abandon himself to attempting to keep as close to the foreign language as his own permits, so that people reproach him — like parents who hand their children over to circus performers [Aunstspringern| — for introducing his mother tongue to foreign and unnatural contortions instead of skilfully exercising it in its native gymnastics [hemmuischen

Turnkunst|!... These are the renunciations [/ntsagungen| which every translator must necessarily undertake, these are the perils to which he exposes himself, if he does not observe the finest line in striving to keep the tone of the language foreign.?”

Schleiermacher places the translator in a double bind; he must convey foreignness in his translation, making his work in the target language reflect the form and musical element of the source language, but must draw a line between this and the production of linguistic Blendlinge (halfbreeds, bastards, hybrids, hermaphrodites).33 The result of this dilemma

is that translation requires a separate sub-language — a linguistic field [Sprachgebiet|n which transplantations and innovations are legitimate which could not be condoned in an original work.34 It is clear that Schleiermacher’s conception of linguistic orientation and interaction (however problematic as a theory of literary translation) offers much that is of relevance to stylistic pluralism in music. In addition,

Schleiermacher’s speech provides a means of situating texts which fall outside the concept of translation proper, resulting in a continuum: paraphrase/tfree imitation in the target language (monolingual), freer translation (monolingual), ‘translationese’ (bilingual), and foreign creation in the source language (monolingual). Such a continuum parallels the relation between the dialogic and monologic products of the Palestrina revival (pieces that emulate the Palestrina ideal solely through the use of modern musical syntax, or which replicate Palestrina’s language to such

252 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination an extent as to be monologic in the source language). ‘This progression can be refined by mapping onto it the two modern models of linguistic interaction discussed earlier; in this way the different categories of translation can also represent the alternations in linguistic dominance within a single text (and within its individual parameters). The following scheme accounts for all attempts to meet the Palestrina ideal, whether dialogic or monologic: (i) modern language works or moments (monolingual) (11) suppression, where elements of contemporary syntax are suppressed in order to meet with the ideal that the earlier language represents, but which includes no formal elements of the earlier language (mono-

lingual) .

(iil) suppressive translation, where in addition to the suppression of some modern elements, constituents of the earlier language are included, but insufficient to suggest re-creative translation (bilingual)

(iv) re-creative translation, where both languages are bound together forming two separate and simultaneous strands of communication of varying dominance (bilingual) (v) more literal translation, where the earlier linguistic strand predominates (bilingual) (vi) the literal replication of Palestrina’s language (monolingual). Approaching these compositions from the perspective of translation does not merely offer a descriptive vocabulary, but a way of exploring the complex linguistic interactions present within them. Crucially, it provides a key to interpreting the fluctuations in stylistic orientation present in most of the pieces discussed, and also a means of understanding the shifts of register that earlier proved similar, though less drastic stylistically, to Heine’s Stammungsbrechung. In the majority of the dialogic products of the Palestrina revival, fluctuations of style generally resemble moves to

another consecutive stage on the continuum presented above: a move from re-creative translation to suppressive translation in, say, Bruckner’s “Tota pulchra es’, or a move from more literal translation to the monolingual replication of Palestrina’s language in the case of a piece by Grell or Haller (this last category is of course no theoretical conceit, but is exemphified by Haller’s completion of Palestrina’s “Salve Regina’). ‘The puzzling, abrupt stylistic shifts in other works by Bruckner and in the church music of Witt, Koenen and Liszt are different in nature. While a fluctuation in linguistic orientation constitutes a consecutive move along the continuum, and while Heine’s Stammungsbrechung signifies a leap from replication

to a modern stylistic moment, these shifts of register in general suggest

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 253

a change of orientation midway between the two: a ‘leap-frogging’ shift that misses out a link in the chain. This is evident from Witt’s ‘Salvos fac nos, Domine’ (Ex. 4.3), which exemplifies the nature of the ‘Wittian style’ as a mode of translation. Here the linguistic shift is from the re-creative translation of the bilingual ‘Wittian style’ to monolingual translation in the target language. While in bars 17-23, quasi-modal progressions and freer rhythms suggest linguistic parity, the abrupt shift in bar 24 to tonal harmony, repetitive rhythms and harmonic sequences asserts the dominance of the translator’s language (while remaining in dialogue with the Palestrina ideal through the suppression of undesirable elements of modern syntax). ‘Uhese shifts are symptomatic of Witt’s ambition to recast Palestrina’s style in a form more accessible to modern listeners; they

parallel what Schleiermacher considered to be the result of trying to move the author towards the reader: “It 1s evident therefore that if this formula is followed completely in this field it will lead to either pure [free] imitation or to a still more strikingly repugnant and bewildering mixture

of translation and free imitation, in which the reader 1s bounced back and forth like a ball between his own and a foreign world, between the invention and wit of the author and that of the translator.’25 These shifts of register do not therefore constitute an intentional dualistic confrontation of the old and new, as is the case with Heine’s Stammungsbrechung; rather they represent merely the most visible signs of a more pervasive bilingualism. Before pursuing this comparison further, it is necessary to confront the major stumbling block to viewing these works as musical translations.

The fact that the compositions of the Palestrina revival are in general responses not to individual Renaissance works but to groups of works (or to a picture abstracted from this repertory as a totality) distances them from literary translation, where the concept usually refers to a relation between two texts. Certainly, only a small minority of these pieces can be regarded as musical translations: those that engage with a specific old Italian work, seeking to recover and adapt its content and form in order that it may function more successfully within the target culture. In the case of such pieces, a work by Palestrina (or by one of his contemporaries) provides not merely a limited point of reference, but 1s rather the premiss for its composition and a constant background within the finished work. ‘The clearest examples of this are Grell’s opp. 32

and 33, composed in order to supplement and replace movements from the Missa Papae Marcelli in a liturgical performance, and Naumann’s Psalm 190 (a re-creative translation of Allegri’s Miserere). ‘This perspective

254. Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination is also relevant to nineteenth-century adaptations and arrangements of Renaissance works. Bunsen’s adaptation of the /mpropena, for mstance,

represents an attempt to make it function in the target culture in a manner similar to how it functioned in its original context. ‘The resulting

conglomerate of Catholic Italian and Protestant German material, if considered from the perspective of Schleiermacher, inclines more closely

towards free transposition than to translation (in replacing the Greek responses at the centre of the original with a Lutheran chorale, Bunsen mitigates the alienation effect that would have been felt by its original receivers).

If the majority of the dialogic products of the Palestrina revival cannot be described as musical translations, it is because composers sought

to recover the generic meanings of Palestrina rather than the content of particular works. Even so, translation theories offer a useful means of exploring this process. For nineteenth-century composers, the chief motivation for engaging with Palestrina was the desire to reclaim not

his forms but his spiritual content. ‘The wide variety of theories as to how this might be achieved is paralleled in Romantic translation theory,

by a divergence in opinions as to whether the content of a work in one language can fully be expressed through the form of another. For Wilhelm von Humboldt, all contents are expressible in every language: ‘everything — the most lofty and the most earthbound, the strongest and most delicate — can be expressed in every language, even in the dialects of very primitive peoples. It is merely that these notes slumber, just as

in an unplayed instrument, until the nation understands how to coax them out.’3° For Humboldt, a content and the expression adequate to that content exist, dormant, as pure possibility in a language until the need to employ them acts as a catalyst for their awakening. Such a position is strikingly similar to those advocated by Hoffmann and Witt. For Hoffmann, as has been seen, the exposure of a young composer to the

| products of the golden age of church music will aid the revelation of the spiritual style latent within himself; he will not adopt the language of Palestrina, but find that through a miraculous process of sublimation the language of church music within himself will be revealed to him. Similarly, the ideal of modern church composition outlined in Witt’s essay “Der Palestrinastyl’ is for the composer to produce works in a contemporary musical language in which, by an analogous process, ‘prevails and wafts the spirit of Palestrina’.°/ For other translation theorists, Humboldt’s contention that the content of one language can be expressed through the form of another is

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 255

unfeasible. It has been seen that for Schleiermacher, it is not possible ‘to break speech down to its innermost element in order to eliminate from it the constituent of language’, in order to re-express this element, through a ‘chemical process’, in another language. ‘The translator must deal with the problem of expressing concepts in the source language that lack identical or even proximate equivalents in the target language by retaining the original form of the concept within his translation. Similarly, Schopenhauer notes that certain foreign words precisely capture nuances that are unavailable in other languages; as a result, anyone wishing to access these nuances in expressing their thoughts ‘will use the foreign word and ignore the barking of pedantic purists’.3° For the nineteenth-century composer, however, Palestrina’s language provides more than just a precise form of a concept that would otherwise have to be expressed periphrastically in

the target language. Rather, it represents that which can no longer be expressed. Palestrina’s language represents a primary, nav vision of the infinite translated into material form; the modern composer can represent the infinite only through secondary discourse, a further process of translation. No substitutes can be found for this language in modern speech; it is a concept that can no longer be represented in a purely contemporary musical language. Hoffmann’s ideal of a spiritual language being latent within the modern composer is clearly rejected by those composers whose music represents secondary discourse, since for them the suppression that he advocates, while being capable of producing music that is suitable for the church, cannot reestablish the tenuous link to the Christian infinite that translating Palestrina provides. Furthermore, to engage with Palestrina’s language — just as to translate a foreign work of literature — constitutes a gesture towards the negation

of the multiplicity and disunity of languages. For nineteenth-century composers, Palestrina’s effortless and assured command of his material epitomized not merely the inspiration of genius, but represented a unique musical lingua franca: unlike modern religious composers, artists and architects, Palestrina did not have to choose an orientation from a range of earlier styles, nor was he aware of their historicity and contingency. And in idealizing the Palestrina-Stil, musicians and critics created a musical equivalent to a pre-Babelian language that transcended geographical and temporal boundaries. The idea of Babel in literature 1s as old as civilization itself, remnforced by the daily difficulties of interlingual communication. But Babel’s equivalent in music is a nineteenth-century development: for the first time, a wide array of historical musical languages seemed equally accessible — and equally valid. It is the heightened _

256 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination awareness of these musical languages, a product of the rise of historicism,

that produced anxiety about the validity of the native tongue (a concept that in itself was increasingly unstable in the nineteenth century). A composer who responds to such languages monolingually, through literal replication, does nothing to reduce the apprehension that their existence causes. ‘he composer who attempts to restore literally a pure, pre-Babelian musical language, by replicating the form and taking on its spiritual content, neglects to re-create in his work the double content that he perceives in that language: its universal spiritual content and its specific historicity. Only by asserting contemporaneity within his form can he give historicity to his own product; only then can a re-creation of that language speak validly to the present. By establishing, through

translation, a kinship between his language and the earlier language, the composer can assert that his own language, while not capable of expressing that which the earlier language expresses, 1s at least capable of coexisting with it, of being akin to it. For this reason alone, translation is an issue 1n music as well as literature. It may seem as if the idea of translation can have no relevance for music, simply because nineteenth-century audiences and congregations had access to the music of Palestrina in its original guise. As has become evident, the refrain ‘what are copies for when we can have the originals?’ was voiced throughout the century by critics and composers alike. But the premiss behind this complaint — the notion that Renaissance compositions were readily accessible — was unrealistic, even in the late nineteenth century. Only a small number of Palestrina’s works were available in print in the first half of the century, while the numerous editions ~ published from the 1850s onwards were in general comprehensible only

to cognoscenti. Haberl, it will be recalled, lamented that the flood of Cecilian compositions would lead to Renaissance compositions being dismissed as superfluous.?9 But he, alongside other editors from Proske onwards, was in part responsible for this development: as Griesbacher noted, the desire to distance these works from modern music by retaining old clefs and other baffling hieroglyphics rendered their notation as impenetrable as Sanskrit.4#° Modern compositions that translated this language were not, however, intended simply as substitutes for the originals. A striking parallel to this can be seen in the field of literary translation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the flood of translations of Latin works into European vernaculars, despite the fact that most of the receivers of these translations were capable of reading them in the source language. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, translation from

Interpreting the secondary discourse of nineteenth-century music 257

German into Czech provided a means of asserting the possibilities of the Czech language, even though ‘very often the Czech language (hoch Bohmisch) was \ess understandable to the average Czech reader than German’.*’ For Vladimir Macura, the function of literary and scientific translations from German into Czech was ‘not to mediate a foreign text, which was usually easily accessible in German’; rather the cultivation of the Czech language itself ‘was regarded as the aim, the acme of the national endeavour’.** Similarly, the presence and continued validity of Palestrina’s music did not, in the eyes of composers at least, render the attempt to translate that language superfluous. Although the literal replication of his language was artistically redundant, to translate it provided

a means of proving the capabilities of a composer’s own discourse by asserting the continued possibility of religious composition. In addition, re-creating Palestrina through modern composition generated versions of his forms that were better attuned to modern German culture, omitting and reworking those aspects of the originals that were surplus to requirements. Similarly, for early Romantic theorists trans-

lation was not primarily a means to carry over passively the cultural products of foreign lands and distant periods, but rather provided an opportunity to “Germanize’ them. A. W. Schlegel noted that the Romantic desire to encounter the literature of other lands, while initially characterized by an indiscriminate lust for the strange, was becoming more

discriminating: it often degenerates into a ‘mania for imitation and a foolish predilection for the foreign, but it also always moves steadily to-

wards a free appropriation of the best’.43 Similarly, the composers of the Palestrina revival did not passively receive and transmit the works of Palestrina, but ‘broke up the foreign form’, retaining only what they considered to be ‘the best and most profound of it’.4* In striving to recover Palestrina’s spiritual content, composers discarded those elements of his

language that they considered inessential or undesirable. As has been seen, the homophonic ideal that dominated early Romantic representations of Palestrina’s language constituted a highly selective reading of his works (a reading that continued to be perpetuated despite the increasing

knowledge of his music). By a similar process of selective interpretation, Witt contended that modern composers could surpass Palestrina by discarding the defective aspects of his form. Given the double content perceived in Palestrina’s music — universal spiritual content and historically determined content — those formal elements considered un-

desirable could be linked to the latter, be viewed as merely historical (the transient aspect of Palestrina’s forms), and consequently could be

258 Palestrina and the German Romantic imagination considered unnecessary to a restitution of his spiritual content. Again, the best example of this is the way Witt describes the aspects of Palestrina’s language that he considered inessential to represent a merely historical aspect of his works, a continuation of tendencies outlawed by the Council of Trent. For the majority of translation theorists, both Romantic and modern, the omission of formal elements considered inessential has been represented as true fidelity to the original text. In discussing the benefits and drawbacks of metrical translations of poetry, A. W. Schlegel argued that ‘literalness is a long way from fidelity: fidelity means that the same or similar impressions are produced, because these are the essence of the matter’, while for Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘fidelity must be directed to-

wards the true character of the original and not rely on its accidentals [