The part about howling, bellowing, and stammering was just all-purpose invective, but the point about
imitation was a fair one, and it proceeded, moreover, from a genuine, specifically Italian humanist
impulse—“specifically Italian,” because as we have seen, English musicians, for one example, could be
every bit as devout and yet quite indifferent to the matter of textual intelligibility, seeing music as serving
another sort of religious purpose that had little to do with humanism. In Italy, though, what had been a
crotchety minority opinion in the 1540s had become a concern of powerful “mainstream” Catholics by the
middle of the next decade, when Palestrina was beginning to establish himself as a papal musician.
According to Bishop Cirillo Franco himself, writing a quarter of a century later around 1575, one of
these mainstream figures was Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who in 1555 was elected pope, and who
promised his friend the bishop that he would do something about the problem. Cirillo Franco claimed that
in due course he received from Rome “a Mass that conformed very closely to what I was seeking.”^4
Cardinal Cervini reigned, as Pope Marcellus II, for only twenty days before his sudden death; but there is
nevertheless evidence that corroborates Cirillo Franco’s testimony about the pope’s concern for
“intelligible” church music. The diary of Angelo Massarelli, Pope Marcellus’s private secretary, contains
an entry dated Good Friday (12 April) 1555, the third day of the pontiff’s brief reign. Marcellus came
down to the Sistine Chapel to hear the choir, of which Palestrina was then a member, sing the gravest
liturgy of the church year. “Yet the music performed,” Massarelli noted,