cathedrals are as much despised as were the minstrels in the old
chapels, players of the clarion and bassoon. For the canons, all that
sleeps in the musical archives is so much Greek, and we, the artistic
priests, form a race apart, and are only just a step above the
sacristans. The Chapel-master, the organist, the tenor, contralto, and
the bass form the chapel. We are clergy like the canons, we become
beneficiaries by appointment, we have studied religious science as
they have, and, moreover, we are musicians; but in spite of this
we receive less than half the salary of a canon, and to remind us
constantly of our inferior position we have to sit in the lower
stalls. We, the only ones in the choir who know anything about music,
have to occupy the lowest places. The precentor is by right the chief
of the singers, and the precentor is a canon named by Rome without
competition, probably not knowing a note of the pentagramma. Oh! the
anarchy, friend Gabriel! Oh! the contempt of the Church for music
which has always been its slave and never its daughter! In many
convents of nuns the organist and the singers are despised and called
sergeants. There seems money for everything in the Church: the
revenues of the building are ample for everything except for music.
The canons look upon us as fools masking in ecclesiastical robes. When
the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round,
and I dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero
attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of
half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I
have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the
miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for
something grander. In the end, friend Luna, it is dead, quite dead."

The complaint of the Chapel-master did not surprise Gabriel. Everyone
in the Cathedral complained of the miserable and sordid way in which
the services were conducted. Some, like the Silver Stick, declared
that it was due to the impiety of the age, others, like the musician,
made that same religion responsible, but they did not dare to say so
aloud. Respect to the Church and to the higher powers, instilled since
their childhood, kept the population of the Cathedral silent. The
greater part of the servitors of the Church were living morally in the
sixteenth century, in an atmosphere of servility and superstitious
fear of their superi