The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470-1530

Rob C. Wegman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135923242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In the final decades of the fifteenth-century, the European musical world was shaken to its foundations by the onset of a veritable culture war on the art of polyphony. Now in paperback, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe tells the story of this cultural upheaval, drawing on a wide range of little-known texts and documents, and weaving them together in a narrative that takes the reader on an eventful musical journey through early-modern Europe.

1
“They Are Not Hofereyen!”

On December 21, 1486, Johannes Behem, parish priest of St. Nicholas in Görlitz, flew into a fuming rage. All those who had come to church that Monday morning expecting him to celebrate Mass as usual could hear his words echoing from afar: “You must not call them hofereyen! They are not hofereyen!” Standing by the choir stalls with the city elders and shaking his fist, he went on scolding them, oblivious to the parishioners who came filing in. Yet the elders remained silent, and when Behem had finally vented his rage he stormed off, leaving behind him a bewildered congregation. It had been an unsettling scene.

The word that so infuriated Behem, hoferey, can be translated as pride, vanity, or vainglory, and the city elders had used it to characterize the singing of mensural polyphony in church. Their rejection of that practice was as categorical as their opinion of it was contemptuous. That morning they had asked the parish priest to have all hymns, Magnificats, and other chants of praise sung henceforth in plainchant, “and not allow them to be turned into hofereyen like they sing in the alehouses.”

With a remark like this, it is not hard to understand Behem’s outburst. Perhaps the city elders had not meant to imply that his preferences in church music smacked of the alehouse, though one cannot blame him if he took the analogy as a personal insult. But what really sent him into a rage, I suspect, was their refusal to view the issue as anything other than a choice between plainchant or hoferey. It would have been pointless for Behem to suggest, by way of compromise, that even if some styles of polyphony might have been expressive of pride, others conceivably had the potential to inspire devotion. The city elders would brook no qualification: all polyphony was vainglorious, or so they asseverated, and henceforth nothing but plainchant would meet with their approval.¹

Behem, a licentiate in canon law and a canon of Breslau Cathedral, was not a man to back down once he felt provoked, and the city elders must have realized that this would not be the end of it. Earlier that year, on February 21, he had already fallen out with the burgomaster over the use of the organ during Lent. The next day, Behem had celebrated the liturgy exactly as he saw fit—with the organ—in public defiance of the burgomaster’s objections.²

These two conflicts, of February and December 1486,³ were the beginning of what would become a bizarre chapter in the history of Görlitz. Other disputes and disagreements soon followed, and over the next two years, relations became strained to the point of erupting in petty warfare. By March 1489, Behem decided he would no longer put up with the city council; he submitted a formal complaint to the bishop of Meissen, citing seventeen grievances, of which the first two concerned the issues of polyphony and the organ. When the bishop failed to arbitrate the case to his satisfaction, Behem took off to Rome the next year to present his grievances before Pope Innocent VIII. The city of Görlitz, meanwhile, petitioned the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, to bring pressure on Behem to accept a position elsewhere. They succeeded eventually, but only after protracted litigation at massive legal expense. Decades later, people would still remember “that parish priest Behem, who took the city council to Rome for many thousands of guilders, only because it all started when they wouldn’t let him play the organ during Lent.”⁴

For some contemporaries, evidently, the city of Görlitz had only itself to blame for its troubles with the parish priest. If only the magistrates had been more flexible on issues that could have been resolved with a little flexibility, none of this need have happened. The verdict of music historians has not been more favorable; one scholar has typified their mentality as kleinlich, or narrow-minded.⁵ There is no question that the city council could be quite petty toward Behem. One of his grievances, for example, was that they never consulted or involved him in the building plans for his own parish church—an omission that he understandably took to be an intentional slight. When this grievance was brought before the bishop of Meissen in March 1489, the town secretary ventured in reply that a man as burdened with responsibilities as the parish priest would surely be glad to be absolved from such cares, hence they had been loath to trouble him unduly. The bishop rejected this patently disingenuous excuse and urged the city council to be more respectful of the parish priest.⁶

On the issue of mensural polyphony, however, Behem suffered a humiliating defeat. The bishop of Meissen ruled decisively in favor of the city council, decreeing “that one shall sing the chants of praise in the manner instituted by the Holy Fathers”—that is, in plainchant.⁷ This was a surprising verdict. Whether the magistrates of Görlitz were narrow-minded or not, on this particular issue they apparently managed to present the more convincing arguments: arguments against the use of polyphony in church. Obviously it would be interesting to know what those arguments were, and I intend to take a closer look at them in a short while. But before doing so, it may be useful to take a few steps back and view the story of Johannes Behem in a broader historical context.

A Backlash against Polyphony

In the final decades of the fifteenth century, the city of Görlitz was not alone in successfully opposing the use of polyphony in church. Four years prior, in 1482, Bishop Johannes Roth of Breslau had issued a similar prohibition in his diocese, on the grounds that “cantus figuratus [is] unfitting and profane in churches.”⁸ Roth, a man celebrated for his humanist erudition, was as contemptuous of the practice as the city elders of Görlitz; according to one chronicler, he used to refer to it as Krausengesang, “frilly singing.”⁹ Likewise, in March 1493, all forms of art polyphony were banished from the Cathedral and Baptistry in Florence, evidently in response to the rising popularity and political influence of Girolamo Savonarola.¹⁰ The latter’s attitude toward polyphony, as revealed in his sermons, was not just one of contempt; he regarded it as an evil pure and simple, a Satanic invention, and repeatedly called for it to be stamped out in all corners of society.¹¹

The three prohibitions of 1482, 1486, and 1493 can be understood in the context of a broader historical trend, whose nature and implications I propose to explore in the present essay.¹² Since the 1470s, vocal polyphony in church—and even outside it—had come increasingly under attack as a practice that was alleged by its critics to be useless, wasteful, decadent, immoral, and downright harmful.¹³ At a time when composers like Obrecht, Isaac, and Josquin brought the art of counterpoint to new heights of artistic excellence, musicians and their listeners had to contend with a vehement backlash against that same art. This backlash left a wealth of documentary evidence that has been amply reported in scholarly literature—including, for example, the three prohibitions mentioned so far. Yet music historians have not been inclined to overrate its historical significance, at least not before the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Nor is that surprising. The early critics of polyphony had nothing to contribute to the development of the art, which continued to flourish in spite of their calls for its suppression. To all appearances, their attacks did nothing to alter the course of music history, not even for the worse. It was not until several decades later, or so it seems reasonable to conclude, that the opposition to polyphony became a historical factor of any consequence.

And yet the early critics were more than just a trifling nuisance. As I will argue in what follows, they had a profound and enduring impact on early modern musical culture—not just after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but also well before it. This is not because they succeeded, in a few cases, to ban polyphony altogether. The three prohibitions in Görlitz, Florence, and Breslau could hardly be described as unqualified victories. It is telling, for example, that vocal polyphony was reinstated at Florence Cathedral within three weeks of Savonarola’s execution in 1498. The same happened in the diocese of Breslau shortly after Bishop Roth’s death in January 1506.¹⁴ It is equally telling that the city council of Görlitz was to be remembered not for having taken a praiseworthy initiative, but for having received its just deserts. The truth is that the prohibitions probably hurt rather than helped the case against polyphony. They played directly into the hands of the art’s defenders, who lost no time in publicizing and exploiting such cases for their own counter-polemics.

Prohibitions cannot reveal the true measure of the critics’ influence, in any case, since it was exceedingly difficult to effect such bans before the Reformation. Throughout Western Europe, the singing of Masses and motets in church had been made possible through foundations and endowments—gifts made by private individuals or corporate bodies on the express condition that polyphony be performed exactly as stipulated. Since these gifts had been made in good faith, and for the purpose of earning salvation in the afterlife, church administrators were under strict obligation to honor the benefactors’ wishes to the letter.¹⁵ No one was at liberty to revoke such private arrangements for salvation, least of all for reasons of musical propriety; if a benefactor had arranged for polyphony to be sung in perpetuity, there was nothing anyone could lawfully do to stop it. The three cases mentioned so far reflect these limitations. The cities of Görlitz and Florence could abolish polyphony only to the extent that they had supported it to begin with—that is, in their capacity as benefactors. (The same was true, in all probability, in the diocese of Breslau. Bishop Roth had the right to withdraw episcopal funds, but he could not annul the terms of donations or bequests made by others.) If one wanted to go further than that, it would be necessary to persuade other benefactors to act likewise.

For those engaged in a moral crusade against polyphony, then, the real battle was for the hearts and minds of benefactors—that is, potentially, every Christian believer with a soul to save and financial support to provide. It was these people who had to be persuaded, for their own spiritual good, to stop donating funds for Masses and motets, and to arrange for services in plainchant instead. This was a battle in which the force of arguments counted for more than the political power to enforce bans in the face of popular sentiment. We have already seen that not even bishops or spiritual leaders could prevent the immediate reinstatement of polyphony after their demise. Yet whereas the exercise of political power could easily backfire, the art of persuasion, as applied in sermons and devotional literature, might well bring lasting changes.

A paradoxical picture thus emerges. In the final decades of the fifteenth century, church polyphony flourished as never before. The practice was firmly established in churches throughout Europe, funded in many places by centuries’ worth of accumulated gifts and donations, and as such it was virtually unassailable.¹⁶ Yet during those same decades, popular support for polyphony was persistently being undermined by its opponents. In this respect, the practice proved far from unassailable.

In what they sought to accomplish, the critics of polyphony were extraordinarily successful. We can tell this not only from their own writings, but also from the vast numbers of counter-polemics that were launched in defense of polyphony from the 1470s onwards—and especially from the kinds of counter-arguments that we find in these. Advocates of polyphony had become genuinely worried that they might begin to lose popular support, and clearly felt that the arguments of their opponents could not be left to stand without rebuttals. Answering them was far from easy, however, if only because their adversaries enjoyed the advantage of the moral high ground and were quite ready to exploit that advantage with such dismissive putdowns as hoferey or krausengesang. Yet herein also lay their weakness, as we shall see. Advocates of polyphony quickly discovered that the most effective counter-strategy was not to insist on old certainties (which were no longer so certain in any case), but to adopt an attitude of compromise and concession, ceding ground on some issues while vigorously defending it on others. This strategy was bound to show up their opponents as hardline extremists (an impression that prohibitions usefully confirmed), and it allowed them to make a more modest case for polyphony in the name of reason and moderation.

Polyphony would survive, of course, but the critical question was: at what cost? If even advocates were ready to admit, as they now were, that in certain circumstances the art could be useless, wasteful, decadent, immoral, or harmful, then clearly things could never be the same again. Gone were the days, not long past, when the worst that could be said about any kind of polyphony was that it was ineptly composed, badly performed, or not appropriate to context.¹⁷ Now, not even the best compositions or performances were exempt in principle from criticism and attack. Gone, too, were the days when music—any music—could safely be considered “good” when it sounded good. Now, polyphony had to be better than it sounded, or even its defenders would admit that it amounted to nothing more than sound.

Some time in the 1470s, an old order had begun to crumble—an established set of paradigms about what music is, what it does, and what it is worth. What arose in its place was not a new order, but a state of perpetual controversy and debate over what the order should be. Our parish priest of Görlitz was only one of many who would find this out the hard way.

Behem Versus Görlitz

After Behem had submitted his complaint against the city council of Görlitz, the bishop of Meissen arranged a formal hearing of the case in his residential castle at Stolpen on March 21, 1489. At least seven people were present at the hearing: the parish priest himself, the town secretary of Görlitz, who had been deputized to speak on behalf of the council, and the bishop assisted by four senior clergy, three of whom were doctors of canon law.¹⁸

Of the seventeen grievances Behem voiced at the hearing, only the first concerns us here. In it, he complained that the city council had opposed the singing of polyphony in his church, and he offered two arguments in defense of the practice. The first was an argument from precedent: since polyphony was well-es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “They Are Not Hofereyen!”
• 2 Polyphony and Its Enemies: Before and After the 1470s
• 3 The Defense of Music
• 4 A Special Case: England
• 5 The Crisis and Its Legacy
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index