seemingly unsurpassable peak in 1828 in the first full-length biography of Palestrina, by the priest
Giuseppe Baini, a papal musician and composer in his own right and a follower in Palestrina’s footsteps
as a Sistine Chapel chorister. “Povero Pierluigi!,” Baini wrote: “Poor Pierluigi! He was placed in the
hardest straits of his career. The fate of church music hung from his pen, and so did his own career, at the
height of his fame....”^11
But Baini’s account was only seemingly unsurpassable. It has been surpassed many times over in
popular history—“Church music was saved forever. Italian music was founded at the same time. What if
Palestrina had not succeeded? The mind staggers”^12 —and was even worked up into an opera. The latter, a
“musical legend” in three acts called Palestrina, by the German composer Hans Pfitzner (to his own
libretto), was composed in 1915, and first performed in Munich two years later, while World War I was
raging. Not only Palestrina (tenor) but Cardinal Borromeo (baritone), Pope Pius IV (bass), Angelo
Massarelli (transmuted into the general secretary to the Council of Trent) and even Josquin des Prez are
cast as characters (the last as an apparition). Women’s roles are entirely incidental: Palestrina’s daughter,
his deceased first wife (another apparition), and three angels.
In act I, Cardinal Borromeo issues the commission to a reluctant Palestrina, whom he has to cajole
with actual imprisonment and threatened torture. The spirits of the dead masters (including Josquin)
exhort the composer to add “the last stone” to the jeweled necklace of musical perfection, and an angel
intones the first motive from the Kyrie of the Missa Papae Marcelli, followed by the whole angelic host
who dictate to Palestrina the music that saved music (see Fig. 16-2). Act II shows the assembled Council
of Trent engaged in luridly acrimonious debate over music, with a sizable faction calling for its outright
abolition. Act III shows the outcome of the musical show trial: Palestrina, released from prison but
tormented by self-doubt, receives the plaudits of the singers and compliments from the pope himself, for
having emerged victorious as the savior of music.
FIG. 16-2 Angelic dictation scene from Pfitzner, Palestrina (Munich, Prinzregententheater, 12 June 1917).
Pfitzner’s Palestrina is an important work—or rather, at the least, a work that raises important issues.
They are issues, admittedly, that were probably more consciously pondered in Pfitzner’s time than in