Part 20 (1/2)

[Sidenote: _Secularization of the Ma.s.s._]

Transferred from the Church to the concert-room, and considered as an art-form instead of the eucharistic office, the Ma.s.s has always made a strong appeal to composers, and half a dozen masterpieces of missal composition hold places in the concert lists of the singing societies.

Notable among these are the Requiems of Mozart, Berlioz, and Verdi, and the Solemn Ma.s.s in D by Beethoven. These works represent at one and the same time the climax of accomplishment in the musical treatment and the secularization of the missal text. They are the natural outcome of the expansion of the office by the introduction of the orchestra into the Church, the departure from the _a capella_ style of writing, which could not be consorted with the orchestra, and the growth of a desire to enhance the pomp of great occasions in the Church by the production of ma.s.ses specially composed for them. Under such circ.u.mstances the devotional purpose of the ma.s.s was lost in the artistic, and composers gave free reign to their powers, for which they found an ample stimulus in the missal text.

[Sidenote: _Sentimental ma.s.ses._]

[Sidenote: _Mozart and the Ma.s.s._]

[Sidenote: _The ma.s.ses for the dead._]

[Sidenote: _Gossec's Requiem._]

The first effect, and the one which largely justifies the adherents of the old ecclesiastical style in their crusade against the Catholic Church music of to-day, was to make the ma.s.ses sentimental and operatic. So little regard was had for the sentiment of the words, so little respect for the solemnity of the sacrament, that more than a century ago Mozart (whose ma.s.ses are far from being models of religious expression) could say to Cantor Doles of a _Gloria_ which the latter showed him, ”_S'ist ja alles nix_,” and immediately sing the music to ”_Hol's der Geier, das geht flink!_” which words, he said, went better. The liberty begotten by this license, though it tended to ruin the ma.s.s, considered strictly as a liturgical service, developed it musically. The ma.s.ses for the dead were among the earliest to feel the spirit of the time, for in the sequence, _Dies irae_, they contained the dramatic element which the solemn ma.s.s lacked. The _Kyrie_, _Credo_, _Gloria_, _Sanctus_, and _Agnus Dei_ are purely lyrical, and though the evolutionary movement ended in Beethoven conceiving certain portions (notably the _Agnus Dei_) in a dramatic sense, it was but natural that so far as tradition fixed the disposition and formal style of the various parts, it should not be disturbed. At an early date the composers began to put forth their powers of description in the _Dies irae_, however, and there is extant in a French ma.s.s an amusing example of the length to which tone-painting in this music was carried by them. Gossec wrote a Requiem on the death of Mirabeau which became famous. The words, _Quantus tremor est futurus_, he set so that on each syllable there were repet.i.tions, _staccato_, of a single tone, thus:

[Music ill.u.s.tration: Quan-tus tre---mor, tre-- etc.]

This absurd stuttering Gossec designed to picture the terror inspired by the coming of the Judge at the last trumpet.

[Sidenote: _The orchestra in the Ma.s.s._]

[Sidenote: _Beethoven and Berlioz._]

The development of instrumentation placed a factor in the hands of these writers which they were not slow to utilize, especially in writing music for the _Dies irae_, and how effectively Mozart used the orchestra in his Requiem it is not necessary to state. It is a safe a.s.sumption that Beethoven's Ma.s.s in D was largely instrumental in inspiring Berlioz to set the Requiem as he did. With Beethoven the dramatic idea is the controlling one, and so it is with Berlioz.

Beethoven, while showing a reverence for the formulas of the Church, and respecting the tradition which gave the _Kyrie_ a triple division and made fugue movements out of the phrases ”_c.u.m sancto spiritu in gloria Dei patris--Amen_,” ”_Et vitam venturi_,” and ”_Osanna in excelsis_,” nevertheless gave his composition a scope which placed it beyond the apparatus of the Church, and filled it with a spirit that spurns the limitations of any creed of less breadth and universality than the grand Theism which affectionate communion with nature had taught him.

[Sidenote: _Berlioz's Requiem._]

[Sidenote: _Dramatic effects in Haydn's ma.s.ses._]

[Sidenote: _Berlioz's orchestra._]

Berlioz, less religious, less reverential, but equally fired by the solemnity and majesty of the matter given into his hands, wrote a work in which he placed his highest conception of the awfulness of the Last Judgment and the emotions which are awakened by its contemplation. In respect of the instrumentation he showed a far greater audacity than Beethoven displayed even in the much-mooted trumpets and drums of the _Agnus Dei_, where he introduces the sounds of war to heighten the intensity of the prayer for peace, ”_Dona n.o.bis pacem_.” This is talked about in the books as a bold innovation. It seems to have escaped notice that the idea had occurred to Haydn twenty-four years before and been realized by him. In 1796 Haydn wrote a ma.s.s, ”In Tempore Belli,” the French army being at the time in Steyermark. He set the words, ”_Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi_,”

to an accompaniment of drums, ”as if the enemy were already heard coming in the distance.” He went farther than this in a Ma.s.s in D minor, when he accompanied the _Benedictus_ with fanfares of trumpets.

But all such timid ventures in the use of instruments in the ma.s.s sink into utter insignificance when compared with Berlioz's apparatus in the _Tuba mirum_ of his Requiem, which supplements the ordinary symphonic orchestra, some of its instruments already doubled, with four bra.s.s bands of eight or ten instruments each, sixteen extra drums, and a tam-tam.

FOOTNOTES:

[H] ”Notes on the Cultivation of Choral Music,” by H.E. Krehbiel, p.

17.

IX

_Musician, Critic, and Public_

[Sidenote: _The newspapers and the public._]