Cecilian Movement

The Cecilian Movement for church music reform began in Germany in the second half of the 1800s as a reaction to the liberalization of the Enlightenment (Gmeinwieser 2001).

Franz Xaver Haberl

The young Lorenzo Perosi (photo-postcard late 1890s)

Giovanni Tebaldini

The Cecilian Movement received great impetus from Regensburg, where Franz Xaver Haberl had a world-renowned school for church musicians (Haberl 2001). Their theoretical ideas were formulated by Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Michael Sailer, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1814), and Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut (Gmeinwieser 2001).

Institutionalization

Although the movement traced its roots back to the 15th-century Congregazioni Ceciliani, which in turn inspired the formation during the 18th century in Munich, Passau, Vienna, and other places of Caecilien-Bündnisse (Cecilian Leagues) with the goal of promoting the a cappella singing of sacred music (in keeping with the edicts of the Council of Trent), the Cecilian movement proper is considered to have been established only in the 19th century. Franz Xaver Witt, a priest trained in Regensburg, published a call for reform of church music (Witt 1865) and three years later, on the occasion of a rally of Catholics in Bamberg, founded the first formal body of the movement, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Cäcilienverein. After Pope Pius IX sanctioned this organization in 1870, similar groups soon sprang up in the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, and North America (Gmeinwieser 2001).

Chant reform

The deficiencies of the official version of the Gradual and Antiphonal, the Medicean edition of 1614, had become evident by the beginning of the 19th century. Calls for its reform led to publication of the Mechlin edition in 1848 which, despite a few attempts at correction retained many of the faults of the Medicean version. in 1871, Franz Xaver Haberl and the publisher Pustet of Ratisbon reissued this edition of the Gradual, claiming it to be the work of Palestrina, which made it an initial success. They also issued an Antiphonal, based largely on the Venetian edition of 1580 (Combe 2008, 6).

In 1904, a papal decree reinstated the readings of the Editio vaticana, effectively bringing the Regensburg chant-reform efforts to an end and rendering Haberl's internationally disseminated textbook Magister choralis unusable (Haberl 2001).

Publishers

The German publishing houses most closely associated with the Cecilian movement were Pustet in Regensburg, Schwann in Düsseldorf, and Böhm in Augsburg. Journals allied with the movement include Fliegende Blätter für katholische Kirchenmusik, Musica sacra, Cäcilienkalender, Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch, and Gregoriusblatt in Germany, Chorwächter in Switzerland, Kirchenmusikalische Vierteljahresschrift and Wiener Blätter für katholische Kirchenmusik in Austria, and Caecilia in the United States (Gmeinwieser 2001).

Timeline

1848: Publication of the Mechlin Gradual
1852: Joseph d'Ortigue publishes Dictionnaire liturgique, historique et théorique de plain-chant et le musique d'église
1856: Karl Proske begins publication of Musica sacra
1868: Franz Xaver Witt founds Allgemeiner Cäcilien-Verband für Deutschland in Bamberg
1870: American Caecilian Society founded in Milwaukee
1871: Friedrich Pustet publishes the [Ratisbon Edition of Gregorian chant for the Mass, followed in 1878 by music of the Divine Office
1874: Franz Xaver Haberl founds a Katholische Kirchenmusikschule (now the Hochschule für Katholische Kirchenmusik und Musikpädagogik Regensburg) in Regensburg
1898: Lorenzo Perosi appointed to direct the Sistine Choir
1903: Pius X's motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini calls for the replacement of the Ratisbon Gradual by a Vatican Edition (issued 1908) based on the work of Solesmes Abbey

References

Combe, Dom Pierre. 2008. The Restoration of Gregorian Chant: Solesmes and the Vatican Edition, translated by Theodore N. Marier and William Skinner. CUA Press. ISBN 9780813215488.
Gmeinwieser, Siegfried. 2001. "Cecilian Movement". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Haberl, Dieter. 2001. "Haberl, Franz Xaver". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 1814. "Alte und neue Kirchenmusik". Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung No. 35, No. 36 and No. 37
Witt, Franz Xaver. 1865. Der Zustand der katholischen Kirchenmusik zunächst in Altbayern. Regensburg: Pustet.