mplished on a wider platform by Gluck in the
eighteenth, and in our own days the same deliverance has been attempted
by Wagner. The efforts of all these epoch-making musicians have been
directed toward restraining the tendencies of music to assert an
independence, which for herself becomes the source of weakness by
reducing her to co-operation with insignificant words, and which renders
her subservient to merely technical dexterities.

Giovanni Pier Luigi, called Palestrina from his birthplace in one of the
Colonna fiefs near Rome, the ancient Praeneste, was born of poor
parents, in the year 1524, He went to Rome about 1540, and began his
musical career probably as a choir-boy in one of the Basilicas. Claude
Goudimel, the Besancon composer, who subsequently met a tragic death at
Lyons in a massacre of Huguenots, had opened a school of harmony in
Rome, where Palestrina learned the first rudiments of that science. What
Palestrina owed to Goudimel, is not clear. But we have the right to
assume that the Protestant part-songs of the French people which
Goudimel transferred to the hymn-books of the Huguenots, had a potent
influence upon the formation of his style. They may have been for him
what the Chorales of Germany were for the school of Bach.[207]
Externally, Palestrina's life was a very uneventful one, and the records
collected with indefatigable diligence by his biographer have only
brought to light changes from one post to another in several Basilicas,
and unceasing industry in composition. The vast number of works
published by Palestrina in his lifetime, or left in MS. at his death, or
known to have been written and now lost, would be truly astonishing were
it not a fact that very eminent creative genius is always copious, and
in no province of the arts more fertile than in that of music.
Palestrina lived and died a poor man. In his dedications he occasionally
remarks with sober pathos on the difficulty of pursuing scientific
studies in the midst of domestic anxiety. His pay was very small, and
the expense of publishing his works, which does not seem to have been
defrayed by patrons, was at that time very great. Yet he enjoyed an
uncontested reputation as the first of living composers, the saviour of
Church music, the creator of a new style; and on his tomb, in 1594, was
inscribed this title: _Princeps Musicae_.

[Footnote 207: See Michelet, _Histoire de France_, vol. xi. pp. 76, 101,
vol. xii. p. 383 (Paris: Lacroi