19 - The Reformation and Music

Summary

AT the end of the First World War, Karl Straube, the recently appointed Thomaskantor in Leipzig, wrote the following in a letter to the young musicologist Wilibald Gurlitt :

I see hardly anything in Protestant art of the age of the Reformation that I could not also find in the musical masters of Catholic circles. At least, I can find no difference between Joh. Walter, Senfl, and Hassler (all more or less under Lutheran influence) on the one hand, and Orlando di Lasso or Gallus on the other hand. Only much later does the spiritually form-giving influence of Protestantism begin, perhaps starting with Sweelinck and Schutz and becoming sharply manifest in Bach. In regard to these three one can really speak of a distinctly Protestant essence. I have been able to find nothing of the sort among those musicians contemporary with Luther.

Straube suggests that the impact of the Reformation on music was minimal and that the development of overtly Protestant music did not really occur until the era of Renaissance and Reformation had given way to the early Baroque. The implication is that not until after Catholicism had redefined itself at the Council of Trent, and the first-generation Reforming movement had been displaced by the secondgeneration Protestant establishment, that specifically Protestant music becomes distinguishable.

There is substance to this opinion in that, in purely musical terms, distinctions between Catholic and Protestant music in the sixteenth century are sometimes difficult to establish. But the situation was in fact more complex than Straube suggested. Part of the problem is the common assumption that the basic historical and theological impact of the Reformation was substantially antithetical to all that preceded it. But when this model is applied to the music of the period, the theory is often at variance with the evidence, since much of the music was used interchangeably within worship on both sides of the Catholic/Protestant divide. There were, of course, strong antithetical elements in the Reforming movement, especially those influenced by Zwingli and Calvin, but the Reformation in general was a catalytic process of change rather than a cataclysmic programme of substitution.