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"This to Avignon," said he to himself, as he concluded an epistle to the Pontiff. "We will see whether the friendship of the great house of the Colonna will outweigh the frantic support of the rabble's puppet. This to Palestrina, the rock is inaccessible! This to John di Vico, he may be relied upon, traitor though he be!
A little terror took him, and he wondered if he were about to lose Georgina, or if she were only trying to make him jealous. Perhaps he could not do better than make her jealous. For that purpose this young girl was just the thing. Moreover, he was interested in the revival of Palestrina at St. Joseph's, and he liked Ferrabosco's pavane.
It was a delicious day, and we had driven along this road for a couple of miles beyond the walls of the city, enjoying the most lovely view which the neighborhood of Rome affords, looking over the wondrous ruins of the old aqueducts up toward Tivoli and Palestrina.
The somewhat severe oval of her face was relieved by a pair of bright black eyes that seemed to grow larger as she sang. One hand rested gently on the shoulder of the girl at the piano, and with this she seemed to keep time, pressing gently on the shoulder of the performer to stimulate her zeal. And that hand was delicious! A hymn by Palestrina had succeeded the Bach prelude.
Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso represent the aftermath of the Middle Ages in the period of the Renaissance; Händel and Bach, in the eighteenth century, would have stood much closer to the Rococo than to the Pigtail, if they had not been such original and peculiar geniuses that one cannot quite classify them under these heads at all.
I wonder if he will allow the Reproaches to be sung in Holy Week? He will insist on the expense of the double choir." "But, father, do you think that the congregation of St. Joseph's is one that would care for the refinement of Palestrina? Would you not require a cultivated West-end audience the Oratory or Farm Street?" "That is Sir Owen's opinion." "I never heard him say so."
The boat quickly passes the mouth of the Chioggia harbour, the third spot at which the long thread of land which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic is pierced, and then makes for Palestrina, surely the narrowest town on earth, with a narrower walled cemetery just outside, old boats decaying on the shore, and the skin of naked boys who frolic at the water's edge glowing in the declining sun.
"All this avalanche of art passed over the Church, and she, according to her habit, appropriated everything that was most to her taste; in any country the Catholic religion adopted the music most in accordance with its traditions in Spain we have been saturated with the Italian style since the days of Palestrina, and German or French music never came to us.
Palestrina was composing the masses which reformed church music, and the Christian charity of Charles Borromeo was making him a saint before he was canonized.
But one day seeing in a book the words "viola d'amore," he fancied he would like to possess an instrument with such a name. The instrument demanded the music that had been written for it. Byrd's beautiful vocal Mass had led him to Palestrina and Vittoria, and these wakened in him dreams of a sufficient choir at St. Joseph's for a revival of their works.
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