Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (review)

For many years, scholars customarily outlined the history of music using a scheme that would be more appropriate for the history of technology. In this interpretation, history is made chiefly by brilliant innovators who fearlessly defy conventional wisdom and invent something new. The critics and pedagogues scoff at the unfamiliar technique, but eventually they are forced to concede defeat. When they finally enshrine the innovator in their pantheon and the novel procedures in their textbooks, they create a new conventional wisdom that will in turn be overturned by a young rebel from the next generation. Modernist composer-critics such as Arnold Schoenberg were the most influential exponents of this view, but it had much to offer historians as well; they gained a convenient structure that helped them transform the messy abundance of life into a coherent narrative of progress, with each chapter emerging logically from its predecessor. With the decline of modernism, however, scholars are taking a second look at the history of the twentieth century, this time being careful to include music that was never part of the great chain of innovations. Composers ranging from Samuel Barber to Sergey Rachmaninoff have gained entrance to the canon, even if their works seem more engaged with the past than with the future.

But the twentieth century was not the first in which the imperative of innovation jostled uneasily against a growing awareness of the multiplicity of musical styles. Our model of the composer as heroic rebel was already a quintessentially Romantic story long before the advent of modernism. At the same time, the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented interest in the music of the past: the works of Mozart and Haydn persisted in the repertory, those of Bach and Handel were revived, and a veritable cult grew up around the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. For critics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, Palestrina came to symbolize the purity, innocence, and sublimity of a lost age of naïve faith. These critics condemned the church music of their own era, arguing that it had been corrupted by the aesthetics of the Enlightenment and the tawdriness of opera. As the Palestrina revival gained adherents, it reached beyond mere polemics: the reformers began to transcribe, publish, and perform more works by Palestrina and other early composers, and they also created a large body of new sacred music in emulation of their heroes.

Until recently, this movement usually received no more than a passing mention in the history books. Commentators such as Carl Dahlhaus strenuously disapproved of attempts to replicate the musical style of an earlier era. In the past two decades, however, German musicologists have done extensive research in this field, and now James Garratt has provided English-speaking readers with an important new study. Although the Palestrina revival had advocates throughout Europe and found its symbolic home in the Sistine Chapel, Garratt has chosen to focus on Germany, where most of its leading figures were active.

The book begins with chapters on nineteenth-century historicism and on Romanticism and church music. Garratt ably guides the reader through the sometimes murky world of German Romantic aesthetics, and his comments are detailed and subtle. He demonstrates that the idealization of Palestrina drew on art history, particularly the writings of Johann Winckelmann, which emphasized the glories of a lost Golden Age, and which described historical trends with organic metaphors of growth and decay. Winckelmann's Golden Age took place in ancient Greece, but since musicians lacked a usable Greek heritage, they had to look elsewhere for the noble simplicity Winckelmann discerned in ancient sculpture.

After this survey of the aesthetic and literary background, Garratt turns his attention to practical efforts at reforming sacred music, with separate chapters on the Protestant and...