Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/209

 prototypes, the separation of Protestant music gradually became more obvious. Chorales were immensely popular and their number rapidly increased. Their harmonic style pushed its way into choir music, though never driving out counterpoint, for which German writers now began to show their eminent capacity. While Italian power in this field was on the wane, the Germans were preparing not only to preserve the old skill, but to open up new achievements for it. This development was upheld and furthered by the growth of organ composition (see Chapter XIII.).

The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) interfered with the steady flow of musical progress. In many places musical establishments were wholly suspended (notably at Dresden) and social life generally was unsettled. The momentum of the early part of the century, however, enabled the art to resume its place promptly after 1650.

The Palestrina style in its purity was never dominant in Germany, though it had its isolated disciples. But the connection with northern Italy was close, and, so far as definite influence went, the Venetian type of church music was more likely to be followed. Schütz of Dresden, the ablest German composer of the century, studied at Venice and was fully alive to the new movements there. Under his lead and that of some others, a notable tendency set in to apply concertato writing to church use in a more wholesome and suitable way than was common in Italy. The German church cantata and oratorio soon began to be more significant than their Italian prototypes, prefiguring the nobler work of the 18th century. Thus the new methods of accompaniments, solos, concerted passages and every device of formal disposition was brought into the church without such operatic sensuousness as to be debilitating. It is from these beginnings that modern German and English church music really took their rise.

As samples of Catholic composers, mostly in Austria or South Germany, these names may be noted: Asprilio Pacelli (d. 1623), who, after service at Rome, was from 1603 royal choirmaster at Warsaw (motets and psalms from 1597); Johann Stadlmayr (d. 1648), at Salzburg in 1603-7, then court-choirmaster at Innsbruck, with masses, motets, psalms and hymns (from 1603); Giovanni Felice Sances (d. 1679), of Roman birth, in the Imperial Chapel at Vienna from 1637, second choirmaster from 1649 and first from 1669, with many motets, psalms and secular songs (from 1633); Felicianus Schwab