been so abruptly terminated, but who was now looked back upon as the spur that had set an important
musical reform in motion.
That reform had reached a critical point in the year 1562, when the Nineteenth Ecumenical Council of
the Western Church (popularly known as the Council of Trent, after the north Italian city where it met),
finally got around to music. The Council of Trent was an emergency legislative body that had been
convened in 1545 by Pope Paul III to stem the tide of the Protestant Reformation. Music, clearly, was not
terribly high on the Council’s agenda, but it, too, could play a part in the general effort to revitalize the
church through modesty and piety, to some extent to personalize its religious message, and by so doing to
steal some of the Protestants’ thunder. Appropriate music could be of assistance in the project of adjusting
the traditionally unworldly, impersonal (and indeed rather haughty) tone of Catholic worship to the point
where it might meet the comprehension of the ordinary worshiper halfway.
That, ideally, was the purpose that motivated the “intelligibility” crusade, and it was explicitly
formulated by the Council in its “Canon on Music to be Used in the Mass,” promulgated in September
- The singing of the Mass, this document decreed, should not be an obstacle to the worshipers’
involvement but should allow the Mass and its sacred symbolism “to reach tranquilly into the ears and
hearts of those who hear them.”^7 Music was not provided in church for the benefit of music lovers: “The
whole plan of singing in musical modes should be constituted not to give empty pleasure to the ear, but in
such a way that the words be clearly understood by all, and thus the hearts of the listeners be drawn to
desire of heavenly harmonies, in the contemplation of the joys of the blessed.” It was left to musicians to
find the means for implementing these general guidelines, but it was up to the bishops and cardinals to
make sure that those means were found. In the years immediately following the Council’s Canon, several
important princes of the church took an active part in overseeing the work of composers. One of them was
the redoubtable Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, the Archbishop of Milan and the chief enforcer, as papal
secretary of state, of the Council’s decrees. Borromeo directly charged Vincenzo Ruffo, the maestro di
cappella at Milan, “to compose a Mass that should be as clear as possible and to send it to me here,” that
is to Rome, where it might be tested.^8
This commission was issued on 10 March 1565. Several weeks later, on 28 April, according to the
official diary of the Papal Chapel Choir, “we assembled at the request of the Most Reverend Cardinal
Vitellozzi at his residence to sing some Masses and to test whether the words could be understood, as
their Eminences desire.”^9 That Ruffo’s Mass was among these seems virtually certain; the effort of this
composer, famed earlier for his contrapuntal skill, to conform to the dictates of the Cardinals is touchingly
evident (see Ex. 16-6).
Whether Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli was among the Masses tested that day is a matter of
conjecture, but the notion is made plausible by the date of the Mass’s publication two years later, and it
has formed the basis of one of the most durable myths in the history of European church music. The legend
exaggerated the test at Cardinal Vitellozzi’s into a public trial, thence into a virtual musical Inquisition,
with music coming “very near to being banished from the Holy Church by a sovereign pontiff [Pius IV],
had not Giovanni Palestrina found the remedy, showing that the error lay, not with music, but with the
composers, and composing in confirmation of this the Mass entitled Missa Papae Marcelli.”^10
The words just quoted are from an aside by Agostino Agazzari, the maestro di capella of the Jesuit
Seminary in Rome, in the course of a treatise on instrumental music that he published in 1607, a dozen
years and more after Palestrina’s death. It is the first report of the post-Council intervention by the
hierarchy of the Church Militant in the affairs of music to cast it in such radical and confrontational terms,
and the first explicitly to associate the Missa Papae Marcelli with those events. It is hard to know
whether Agazzari was drawing on “oral history” here, or on unsubstantiated rumor, or on his imagination.