Andante spianato op. 22, G major

[…] But of all he played when I heard him, I best remember the Andante Spianato […] Physical weakness was not, however, the cause of his tenderly-subdued style of playing. This was his own, and inseparable from his conception of pianoforte touch; it was incapable of modification from any influence whatever. His fortissimo was the full pure tone without noise, a harsh inelastic note being to him painful. His nuances were modifications of that tone, decreasing to the faintest yet always distinct pianissimo. His singing legatissimo touch was marvellous. The wide extended arpeggios in the bass were transfused by touch and pedal into their corresponding sustained chords, and swelled or diminished like waves in an ocean of sound. He kept his elbows close to his sides, and played only with finger-touch, no weight from the arms. He used a simple, natural position of the hands as conditioned by scale- and chord-playing, adopting the easiest fingering, although it might be against the rules, that came to him.

Gregory the Great

The traditional iconography of Pope Gregory I (590–604), as it appears in the miniatures decorating innumerable liturgical manuscripts of the Middle Ages, shows him clad in papal vestments, with stylus and volumen in hand, while a dove, symbolising divine inspiration, suggests the texts and melodies of the liturgy to him. The image sums up the centuries-old belief that Gregory had played a central and active role in the formation of the liturgical heritage of the West, to the point where the name ‘Gregorian’ had been given to the chant of the Roman church.

The accuracy of this traditional view was first questioned in the seventeenth century, by Pierre Goussainville, and from the nineteenth century onwards the problem came to seem increasingly urgent and indeed fundamental. Historians were forced to make their choice among contrary positions. Even today the controversy awaits a complete and definitive solution, but historical researches presented in support of the various hypotheses make it easier to form a balanced judgement which corresponds more closely to the truth.

Born in 540 into a noble Roman family (probably the gens Anicia), Gregory had the most thorough education available in the society of his time. It was one of the darkest periods in Roman history, when the city, taken and retaken by Ostrogoths and Byzantines during the Gothic war, was in danger of destruction at the hands of King Totila. After administrative and educational order was re-established by the Pragmatica sanctio of Justinian in 554, Gregory was able to embark on the career of public office for which his family had intended him.

Troubadour and trouvère lyric

The vast array of metrical and musical forms in mediaeval Latin lyric was the indispensable basis for the appearance of lyrics in the languages of Provence (d'oc) and France (d'oïl). This is a simple recognition of undeniable facts, not a statement of position in the dispute over the origins of troubadour and trouvère poetry. The observation becomes even more relevant when it is noted that the new poetry flowered in the very regions which had led the way in the creative ferment which produced tropes, versus, sequences and dramas. Furthermore, as mentioned above, it was precisely the name vers which was given to the compositions of the first troubadours. Another lexical derivation is also significant, though the evidence for it is not altogether convincing: that of trovatore from trovare, which in its turn comes from tropare, ‘to make tropes’. These details are worth bearing in mind before setting out to search abroad for what may be found within easy reach at home. (Consider also the hypothesis of Arab influence mediated through Spain as a result of the Crusades.)

One of the most striking features of troubadour and trouvère poetry is the enormous disproportion between the number of poems known to exist (about five thousand) and the number of surviving melodies (about a third of that number). For the troubadours alone we have 2,542 texts and 264 melodies. Other interesting details also deserve to be recorded.

The jubilus in St Augustine

The evidence of the early Christian sources

No musical material from the early centuries of Christianity has survived to the present day, with the exception of an incomplete fragment of a hymn in Greek alphabetical notation (homoû pâsai …) discovered in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus 1786 and attributed to the second half of the third century ad. It is, therefore, impossible to gain a complete picture of the first developments in Christian chant from direct examination of sources.

It is the study of the earliest forms of liturgy which offers the only means of obtaining information on the distant origins of chant, and the broad outlines of such liturgy are familiar to us from the writings of the New Testament and the apostolic period, though in an incomplete and far from coherent form. Moreover, no other source can throw light on a phenomenon – that of primitive Christianity – which appears as such an anomaly in relation to the historical traditions of the Western world. The movement has often been called a ‘graft’, an image which expresses neatly the complete originality and novelty of a doctrine which arose and developed in the East according to cultural and religious traditions altogether foreign to those of the West, that is, to the synthesis of Greco-Roman civilisation. Past writers who have claimed that Christian chant derived in unbroken succession from Greco-Roman precedent were either unaware of, or else underestimated, the immense gulf created by the radical opposition between the Gospel (and the consequent new vision of God, man and the world) and pagan thought, even in its loftiest and most noble formulations, those of the philosophers.

Greco-Byzantine chant

In the early centuries of the Christian era the comparative independence of individual communities encouraged, at the expense of any tendency to centralisation, the uninhibited development of local liturgies and their gradual coalescence in regional groups, distinguished further from one another by the use of different languages. We have already considered the position of the liturgy in the Christian East with its numerous rites. Each rite also developed its own musical tradition, and the variety and richness of these traditions is visible evidence of the extraordinary vitality of Christianity. Taken as a whole, they not only have certain functional characteristics in common – in that the several liturgies are variant forms of the same worship – but also reveal a more or less striking uniformity in their musical structure itself. Nowadays it is usual, quite rightly, to call Christian chant ‘plainchant’; and it is true that the name cantus planus or musica plana does not appear before the twelfth century, and then only in contrast to musica mensurata. But the expression has gradually taken on a more specific and yet a broader meaning, so that, for example, the French plain-chant, the Italian canto gregoriano (‘Gregorian chant’) and the English ‘plainchant’ cover the whole of monodic church music. Since this latter name is used nowadays in a more precise and technical sense, it is better to use the expression ‘plainchant’ (‘plainsong’) to denote the entire range of the music of the Christian churches in West and East alike, emphasising thereby certain common elements implicit in the name itself.

Sequences

The encounter and subsequent fusion between the Roman liturgical and musical tradition and that of the countries north of the Alps was not the only development which took place during the Carolingian period. The immediate consequence of Charlemagne's educational reforms was the appearance of an important monastic culture. The great monasteries with their schools, their scriptoria and their workshops encouraged intensive artistic activity, which took its basic inspiration from the liturgy which it was to enrich so generously in its turn.

One of the most important innovations of the ninth century, the birth of neumatic musical script, has already been discussed in an earlier chapter. This discussion was brought forward to preserve continuity of argument, and it should not be forgotten that the discovery of notation was taking place at about the same time as the innovations which we are now to consider. The same is true of another significant novelty, the origin and elaboration of early polyphonic forms. The study of these has been assigned to another volume (by F. A. Gallo) in order not to disrupt the unity of the present treatment. But the first traces of polyphonic chant do appear in the Carolingian era; if the invention of notation and the first experiments with polyphony are added, as they should be, to the innovations which are the subject of this chapter, the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ will be seen, at least from a musical viewpoint, to be an historically justifiable reality.