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The Gregorian chant had become so overladen with mere embellishments as to make the prescribed church-form difficult of recognition in its borrowed garb, for it had become a mere jumble of sound. Musicians, indeed, carried their profanation so far as to take secular melodies as the themes for masses and motetts. These were often called by their profane titles.
The face of his former foe set him to thinking. It was furrowed like a field under cultivation and burnt like a hearthstone. It was the face of a criminal, crabbed, enervated, tense, and breathed upon, it seemed, by threatening clouds. Herr Carovius was a connoisseur of faces. In order to avoid the discomfort of fatuous conversation, Daniel played a number of old motetts for Herr Carovius.
During these masses motetts are sung by the famous Sixtine choir, under the direction of the old Maestro Mustafa, once the greatest soprano of the century, but at the same time so accomplished a musician as to have earned the common name of 'Palestrina redivivus. It is to be regretted that he has never allowed any of his beautiful compositions to be published.
But much good music is quite beyond the reach of the public Palestrina's best motetts, airs by Alessandro Stradella, the famous hymn of Raimondi, in short a great musical library, an 'archivio' as the Romans call such a collection, all of which is practically lost to the world. It is wonderful that under such circumstances the choir of Saint Peter's should obtain even such creditable results.
Those three worthies meet together of evenings, and sit on the balcony, singing motetts of Carissimi's till all the dogs and cats in the neighbourhood yell and howl, and the human beings within earshot devote the hellish trio to all the thousand devils.
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