As an authentic expression of leisure, music should at once please and elevate. As an aid to worship, music offers still more. At its best, it tutors us to feel correctly what faith and reason know to be true. Music can and should unite head with heart. That is what Palestrina and his Mass help us experience again.
Born in 1525 in Palestrina, a bedroom city outside of Rome, Giovanni Pierluigi was the preeminent composer of the sixteenth century until his death at age 68 or 69. When he was buried in St. John Lateran Cathedral, upon his coffin was emblazoned the title “Prince of Sacred Music”. The 500th anniversary of his birth offers an occasion to consider both the composer’s contribution to Catholic culture and the role of sacred music within divine worship.
As a boy, Palestrina sung in his home cathedral’s choir and by age 12 was a chorister at Rome’s St Mary Major Basilica. At 18 he returned home to serve as organist and choirmaster of the cathedral. When his local bishop was made bishop of Rome, the new pope brought the talented musician with him to lead the Vatican choir. Over most of the next 40 years Palestrina would compose sacred music under 10 popes.
Although a husband, a father, and a sometime wine-dealer, his output was prodigious. During his career he wrote 105 masses, 68 offertories, 300 motets, 72 hymns, and 35 Magnificats, in addition to 140 madrigals.
Some of his motets remain standard repertoire within the choirs of Catholic schools, colleges, and basilicas, worthy of the name. Among these are Sicut Cervus (the title is taken from the first words of psalm 42: “As the deer longs for water brooks, so my soul longs for you”), Alma Redemptoris Mater (the Marian Antiphon for the season of Advent and Christmas), and O Bone Jesu (commonly attributed to Palestrina though probably written by Ingegneri). Yet for all his renown, he is remembered above all for one work.
The Missa di Papa Marcello (1563) is so named after the short-lived pope who reigned during a defining moment of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Convened in response to the Protestant Reformation, the council sought to clarify doctrine and renew the discipline among the Catholic faithful.
By the mid-1500s all parties agreed the Church needed reform. But of what sort? Martin Luther wanted Christians to return to a simpler faith. The pope, cardinals, and bishops had carried development too far, he thought. In place of councils and creeds, Luther elevated subjective certainty (sola fide); in place of sacred Tradition, he wanted only the Bible (sola scriptura); in place of seven sacraments, he kept three.
What about worship? Should the music for liturgy also be simplified?
Whatever Luther’s own view, the weight of the question bore heavily upon the Council Fathers. It was really two questions they needed to consider. First, bishops worried that the complex polyphony of the preceding century was rendering the words of the Mass unintelligible. Second, they were concerned that the mixing of liturgy with secular melodies—read: drinking songs—would undermine the sacred character of worship. Just imagine today the damage that would be done to Catholic sensibility if a composer of, say, a setting of the Gloria, took for his inspiration the theme song from a children’s cartoon like “My Little Pony”.
In the end, Trent’s legislation on music was minimal. At the Council’s twenty-second session bishops were merely admonished to banish “all such music”, whether by the organ or in the singing, that “contains things that are lascivious or impure”. That’s about it.
Matters could have turned out otherwise. Certainly, a commission was called to implement musical reforms. The question for the cardinals was then not whether to impose upon Catholics Lutheran-style vernacular hymns. The question was, rather, whether to return composers to the textual simplicity of the Church’s oldest, most venerable musical expression, Gregorian Chant. Could polyphony stay? Palestrina’s earliest biographer recalls the scene:
On Saturday, 28 April 1565, by order of Cardinal Vitellozzi, all the singers of the papal chapel were gathered together at his residence. Cardinal Borromeo was already there, together with all the other six cardinals of the papal commission. Palestrina was there as well… they sang three Masses, of which the Pope Marcellus Mass was the last…. The greatest and most incessant praise was given to the third, which was extraordinarily acclaimed and, by virtue of its entirely novel character, astonished even the performers themselves. Their Eminences heaped their congratulations on the composer, recommending to him to go on writing in that style and to communicate it to his pupils.
Within only a few years after his death knowledgeable opinion within musical circles had concluded:
…music would have come very near to being banished from the Holy Church by a sovereign pontiff had not Giovanni Palestrina found the remedy, finding that the fault and error lay, not with music, but with the composers, and composing in confirmation of this the mass entitled Missa Papae Marcelli.
Whether or not the cardinals would have banned polyphony is unknown. What is known is that later tradition, and purportedly Palestrina himself, regarded the Pope Marcellus Mass as providing a demonstration for why a restrained polyphonic style could remain within the walls of the church.
“That style” which the Eminences commended was, in fact, taken up by others. In the seventeenth century, Gregorio Allegri (of the famed setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere), continued in the tradition. J. S. Bach wrote Palestrina’s masses by hand for his own education. The eighteenth century theorist of music, Johann Fux, based his classic textbook on counterpoint on Palestrina. In the nineteenth century Felix Mendelssohn praised Palestrina as one of the West’s four musical tetrarchs—alongside Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. In the twentieth century, a pope and the Second Vatican Council (19621965) again reaffirmed his style.
The Palestrina “legend” has sometimes been embellished. Hans Pfitzner’s 1917 opera “Palestrina” is one instance of this (a Wagnerian retelling which pits the artist’s spirit against the quarreling of petty gatekeepers). The composer’s gift to the Church and Western culture, nonetheless, is difficult to overstate.
When evaluating the suitability of various musical forms for divine worship, the Catholic Church, at least in her teaching since Trent, has been clear. In more recent times, the Church again reaffirmed that in the Roman liturgy Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place” (Second Vatican Council, Sacrosantum Concillium, 116). But sacred polyphony, at least “in the Roman School [of Palestrina]”, gets an honourable second mention (cf. Pope St. Pius X, On Sacred Music).
Each of the Mass’s five principal musical parts—Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei—requires its own psychological preparations: from recognition of our unworthiness to confidence in divine goodness, to the certainty of the Creed, to the reverence of the Sanctus, to the intimacy of the Agnus Dei. In the Mass we celebrate this evening, emotional progressions are handled with mastery.
Consider but two examples. The Kyrie is textually the least complex of the five parts. It comprises three terse phrases: “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison” (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). Listen to how Palestrina introduces each phrase with one or three clearly articulated voices, and then immediately pulls the worshiper into a sequence of vocal entrances. This technique ensures the intelligibility of the penitential act even amid intense, multilayered introspection, as we consider the straightforward and the subtle ways by which we have failed to respond to Christ’s love. In the Credo, listen to how exuberant waves of communal joy slow and then become calm at the individual Christian’s central affirmation: “Et incarnatus est et homo factus est…” And the Word became flesh and became man. Throughout the Mass, hear how interlacing musical lines invariably resolve into harmonically complete cadences: this too is an image of the Christian’s journey from complexity to simplicity.
While we post-moderns tend to trivialize the role of music in culture, settling for emotionally stunted, corporately packaged noise, and for music as mere entertainment, other ages felt differently. Music need not be a commodity. As an authentic expression of leisure, music—whether sacred or secular—should at once please and elevate. As an aid to worship, music offers still more. At its best, it tutors us to feel correctly what faith and reason know to be true. Debates about liturgical music need not denigrate into disagreements about preference. Music can and should unite head with heart. That is what Palestrina and his Mass help us experience again. For what characterizes his style, and what marks his music’s effect upon the soul, is what we might call a sober inebriation.
One of the unfortunate outcomes of the loss of the habit of faith is that we tend to separate elements once united within the traditional Christian culture of the West. Among the separations we now live with is the rendering of emotion from the life of the mind. For both those inside and outside of the Church, the music of Palestrina can go some way to healing that breach.
These reflections were originally offered as notes for the Palestrina at 500 Concert given by St. Joseph Basilica’s Schola Cantorum, in Edmonton, Alberta, June 15, 2025
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The featured image is a portrait of Palestrina, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.