No delight of life can give more content. As the angel withdrew the dart, he left me all burning with a great love of God.^6There can be little doubt that—paradoxically though it may appear—it was the extravagant sensuality
of Saint Teresa’s description that made it a spiritual classic. (At first her visions, so tinged with the
erotic, aroused suspicion: the Vida was originally composed as an apologia, at the behest of the
Inquisition.) And it is that spiritualized sensuality or sensualized spirituality that Counter Reformation art
reflects at its most potent.
In music, that sensuality had two main avenues of expression. One was transfer to the religious
domain of the techniques of quasi-pictorial illustration and affective (often highly erotic) connotation that
had been developed by the madrigalists. The other was the augmentation of the sheer sound medium and
its spectacular deployment, so that sound itself became virtually palpable. Both of these strains can be
found at a high level of early development in the Opus musicum, the mammoth, calendrically organized
collection of Latin liturgical music published in Prague between 1586 and 1591 by Jacobus Gallus (or
Jakob Handl, or Jacov Petelin—in all cases the surname means “rooster”), a composer from Slovenia
who worked in Bohemia, both Slavic areas within the Austrian dominion of the Holy Roman Empire.
Mirabile mysterium (Ex. 18-9), a Christmas motet, is literally mystical. That is, it seeks to portray—
give direct apprehension of—a mystery that lay at the very foundation of church dogma: the fleshly
incarnation of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ, God become Man. In it, for the first time, we may observe
the chromatic techniques of Lasso, Marenzio, and Gesualdo—techniques involving the direct “irrational”
inflection of scale degrees—applied to a liturgical text (that is, a text meant, unlike Lasso’s Sibylline
Prophecies, for actual performance in church) as a way of rendering uncanny secrets and imparting
uncanny sensation. It is music that seeks to provide a religious experience.
FIG. 18-4 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila (1652) at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
Compare Bernini’s hectic sensuality with the “perfect” art of Raphael in Fig. 15-1.
The opening point of imitation, announcing the “marvelous mystery,” already includes a chromatic
inflection that gives rise to marvelously mysterious harmonic progressions (Ex. 18-9a). A suggestion of
commixture of opposites is already given at the words innovantur naturae, where sharped notes and
flatted notes are combined “vertically” in harmonies that had no theoretical explanation—in terms of the
ars perfecta theory books this was indeed an “innovation of nature.” The thesis is stated in terms of a
bald opposition: the distance from God to man is dramatized by a precipitous octave descent in all
voices, from which, in emphatic violation of the Palestrina ideal, a further descent is made into a region
where the singers’ voices will sound weak and helpless, like man before God (Ex. 18-9b). Where the text