Palestrina’s, but they are issues that are still hotly contested today. They are spelled out in a quotation
from the nineteenth-century German philosopher Artur Schopenhauer that the composer placed at the head
of the score as an epigraph: “Alongside world history there goes, guiltless and unstained by blood, the
history of philosophy, science and the arts.”^13 The question thus raised—whether the history of art is an
idyllic parallel history, a transcendent history that is separate from that of the (rest of the) world, or
whether world history and art history are mutually implicated—has been the urgent subtext of this book
from the very first page.
The Palestrina legend was a good symbolic medium for broaching this enormous question because the
bishops’ call for “intelligible” church music, backed up by the legislated decrees of the Council of Trent
and the implied power of the Inquisition and of the “Holy Roman Empire” under whose auspices the
Council was convened, was a clear instance of public political intervention in the affairs of art and its
makers, as opposed to the accustomed pressures of private patronage. It brings to mind—to our
contemporary mind, at least—many other such interventions, some of which have had serious and even
tragic implications.
FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT
Such parallels are only too easy to overdraw, and we may take comfort on behalf of poor Pierluigi that he
never suffered the imprisonment or mortal duress that the operatic Palestrina had to endure. Not only that,
but Palestrina’s third book of Masses, published in 1570, contained the extremely complicated and
“artificial” works in Netherlandish style already discussed and sampled in Ex. 16-2 and 16-3. Clearly
there was never any actual inquisitorial ban on any form of Catholic worship music, at least in territories
subject to the strictures of the Council of Trent.
Still and all, the style of the Missa Papae Marcelli remains arguably a coerced, official style—not a
style, in other words, that Palestrina or Ruffo or any other composer would have adopted spontaneously
(to judge by their prior output and the values implied therein) but one imposed by an external force to suit
purposes that arguably ran counter to the interests of composers, but that were not negotiable. And yet the
style was (or could be made) a very beautiful and moving one, and one that later artists found sufficiently
inspiring to emulate willingly. As Pfitzner implied in his melodramatic way, it was a tribute to
Palestrina’s artistic imagination to have found so successful a means of reconciling artistic and
ecclesiastical criteria—a manner, moreover, that was very much in the spirit of the Church Militant.
As the Credo and the Agnus Dei from the Missa Papae Marcelli especially confirm, Palestrina’s
post–Council-of-Trent style was not a chastened, ascetic, quasi-penitent affair like Ruffo’s but a style of
special opulence, grace, and expressivity. Missa Papae Marcelli is a “freely composed” Mass, one of the
few by Palestrina that incorporates no preexisting material—or, at least, none that has been acknowledged
by the composer or subsequently detected. The composer’s shaping hand is all the more crucial, then, and
the Mass is given a musical shape more elegant than ever, in demonstrative compensation for the loss of
the usual external scaffold.
The opening idea of the Kyrie, the one intoned by the angel in Pfitzner’s opera, is both the subject of
the Mass’s first point of imitation (Ex. 16-7) and the Mass’s main melodic building block; and it
embodies the quintessence of Palestrina’s style, as identified by the many who have studied it with an eye
toward extracting from it a compositional method. That quintessence is the “recovered leap.” This model
motif (we’ll call it the “Ur-motif,” German-style) begins with an ascending leap of a fourth, which is
immediately filled in, or “recovered,” by descending stepwise motion. (Fascinating never-to-be-
answered questions: Was the similarity of this phrase to the opening phrase of the old L’Homme Armé