James Garratt. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in
Nineteenth-Century Music. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv +
318 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-80737-1.
Reviewed by Pamela Potter (School of Music and Department of German, University of
Wisconsin-Madison)
Published on H-German (January, 2004)
The reputation of the Italian Renaissance composer
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525? -1594) spread far
beyond the borders of Italy, elevating his liturgical vocal works to the status of milestone accomplishments in
the history of Western music and perpetuating certain
myths about his fierce defense of the musical art against
encroachments by Counterreformation church authorities. As the legend goes, Palestrina was summoned by
the cardinals at the Council of Trent during their deliberations over the fate of polyphonic church music. Troubled that the ornate polyphony used in musical settings
of the liturgy were distracting worshippers and rendering
the sacred words unintelligible, the Council was prepared
to ban polyphony and replace it entirely with Gregorian chant. Supposedly in response to this threat, Palestrina wrote his most influential work, the Pope Marcellus
Mass, to show how polyphonic music could be beautiful without obscuring the text. Although just a legend
(the dates of the Mass’s composition do not coincide with
the years that musical questions were discussed in the
Council, and there is no evidence of the Council’s intention to ban polyphony, this romanticized account has
succeeded in canonizing Palestrina as both the savior of
sacred polyphony and the most skilled master of counterpoint.
terpoint, a pedagogical method that persists to this day.
Furthermore, it was a German composer, Hans Pfitzner,
who in 1915 wrote an opera based on the legend of his encounter with the Council of Trent. Pfitzner was inspired
by the Italian master’s putative struggle with church authorities to preserve sacred polyphony and saw it as parallel to his own self-imposed crusade to safeguard the
German musical legacy from the onslaught of internationalism and modernism. The German reverence for
Palestrina had become so deeply rooted that the Nazi-era
race theorist Richard Eichenauer attempted to claim the
composer as an Aryan.
Given this long and uninterrupted history, it is surprising that no one had up to this point traced the history
of Palestrina’s influence on German musical culture and
the nineteenth-century Palestrina revival. This lacuna
may be explained by the more blatant and widespread influence of the concurrent Bach revival, and indeed these
two revivals shared many features and were integrally
linked with one another. Nevertheless, the thorough
and systematic coverage offered by Garratt is a welcome
and fascinating addition to our understanding of musical trends in this formative period of Germany’s quest
for musical and national self-definition. Although the
level of detail and analysis makes most of the work potentially more useful for specialists in the area, historians
and German literature scholars will find much of interest
particularly in the discussions of philosophers’ and writers’ involvement in the musical debates surrounding the
Palestrina revival.
It is remarkable, however, that this canonization
arose not so much from the efforts of Italians, but rather
from the Germans and Austrians who started to take
an interest in Palestrina more than a century after his
death. Austrian composer and music theorist Johann
Joseph Fux, awed by the genius of Palestrina’s contrapuntal writing, carefully studied its details to codify a
technique that would serve as a basis for teaching coun-
In his introduction, Garratt makes the rather bold
claim that the Palestrina revival was as important as the
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Gothic revival and the Pre-Raphaelite movement (p. 2),
and although this does not quite bear out in the rest of the
book, the author nevertheless makes a strong case for its
relevance especially to German composers of the nineteenth century. The author in fact admonishes readers
that he will examine the Palestrina revival from the perspective of “compositional historicism” and will not delve
very far into its broader political, aesthetic, educational,
religious, or social implications (p. 5). Still, the first
two chapters do provide some important insights into the
intellectual history of the nineteenth-century Germany
and the preoccupation of many (not only composers)
with the future of church music. In the first chapter,
Garratt presents nineteenth-century composers’ obsession with originality as a subject of post-Enlightenment
debate rather than as a consensus and synthesizes the
various positions of Schopenhauer, Goethe, Nietzsche,
Winckelmann, Herder, Schlegel, Tieck, Wackenroder,
Novalis, Richter, Schorn, and most notably Hegel, whose
position offered the most promise as a framework for
the adherents of the Palestrina revival. In chapter 2,
Garratt then brings us closer to the direct engagement
with Palestrina by explicating E. T. A. Hoffmann’s seminal essay, “Alte und neue Kirchenmusik” (1814). Hoffmann was one of the first to call attention to Palestrina
and, along with the legal scholar and amateur conductor Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, constructed the image of a golden age of Italian church music around Palestrina’s vocal polyphony. Even though Palestrina was relatively unknown in Germany at the time, the legend of the
Council of Trent served as justification for singling him
out. Garratt also shows here how much of the language
of this early Palestrina revival borrowed heavily from
the writing of art historians enamored of Italian Renaissance painting. Palestrina’s advocates also drew from
Schlegel’s new mythology of art and literature and from
the idealization of Catholicism as naive and therefore potentially purer form of Christianity. It is also interesting
to learn that Hoffmann managed to classify Palestrina’s
vocal music as “absolute music,” a term generally referring to the purely autonomous instrumental music which
was gaining currency throughout the nineteenth century
as the highest form of musical expression owing to its
complete independence from textual or other extramusical associations. By bringing this vocal repertoire into
the realm of absolute music (its texts notwithstanding!),
Hoffmann could edge it closer to the popular Beethovenian paradigm and elevate it to a loftier realm, hovering
above all other texted music.
in the Protestant and Catholic churches, respectively. In
covering the Protestant movement, Garratt directs his
attention mainly to Berlin (Carl Friedrich Zelter’s Singakademie) and Heidelberg (Thibaut’s Singverein), then
looks closely at the compositions of Otto Nicolai, Ludwig
Spohr, and especially Felix Mendelssohn. It is in these
discussions that we see how the adaptations of Palestrina and Bach are at times inextricable and almost indistinguishable, and one might question whether Garratt’s identifications of Palestrina style in Mendelssohn’s
works are always really explicitly so, particularly since
the cited criticism by Heine of Mendelssohn’s St. Paul
oratorio makes direct references to the work’s imitations
of Bach and Handel, not of Palestrina, and Mendelssohn
never seems to mention Palestrina in his responses to
such criticisms (pp. 90-93). The chapter concludes with a
highly informative reconstruction of the contributions of
musicologists to the Palestrina revival and the codification of Palestrina’s contrapuntal technique as a pedagogical method. In chapter 4, Garratt outlines the Catholic
Palestrina revival as following a very different trajectory
from its Protestant counterpart, with a much heavier emphasis on the liturgical significance of emulating Palestrina in composing for the church. Emanating mainly
from the Munich-based Allgemeine Deutsche CaecilienVerein, the Catholic component involved a much more
literal approach to Palestrina, in which composers imitated his style more directly and launched the publication of new critical editions of his complete works. The
liturgical compositions of Franz Liszt and Anton Bruckner even displayed some elements of these styles, and in
this context Garratt ventures into a discussion of the political implications of the Palestrina revival at the time of
unification: as Prussian nationalism moved composers in
new directions away from Italian models such as Palestrina, southern Catholics preserved the Palestrina influence as an assertion of political and cultural difference
(p. 213).
Having established a number of musical criteria for
identifying the Palestrina revival in sacred music, in
chapter 5 Garratt then attempts to tease out such features in works intended for secular venues, such as
Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony and several
non-liturgical works by Liszt and even Richard Wagner.
In the brief final chapter, Garratt retroactively imposes a
theoretical framework on his study by engaging theories
of imitation, historicism, irony, critique, and translation,
drawing on the works of Schleiermacher and Humboldt,
as well as Linda Hutcheon and Eve Tavor Bannet. While
Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the Palestrina revivals these discussions are perhaps the least convincing por-
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tions of the study as a whole, they should not detract from
the wealth of detail and fascinating new insights on the
formation of German identity through music offered in
this thoroughly researched volume.
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Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-
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Citation: Pamela Potter. Review of Garratt, James, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting
Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8768
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
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