Who Is Allowed to Compose Catholic Church Music? Ferdinand Hiller's Insightful Report on the Sacred-Music Competition in Louvain (1866)

Authors

Jürgen Thym, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester)Follow
Ralph P. Locke, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester)Follow

Abstract

In 1866, a competition was held in Louvain (Belgium) for a new setting of the Latin Mass text; the aim was that the winning piece be accessible in style and require only choir and organ. The jury included, among others, the composers Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Ferdinand Hiller; the lexicographer Fétis; and Joseph d’Ortigue, music critic for the Journal des débats, editor of Le Ménestrel, and a prominent advocate for the regeneration of Catholic church music.

In 1880, Hiller—longtime director of the Cologne Conservatory—published an essay describing the competition in detail. His essay, never before translated or discussed, forms the core of the present article.

The Louvain competition resulted from conferences in France and Belgium during the 1860s aimed at improving the state of Catholic church music. Details of Hiller’s essay can be fleshed out by reference to two other published reports: an official one by the priest who organized the competition, Théodore-Joseph Devroye; and a newspaper report by d’Ortigue published immediately after the competition.

One of the 76 submitted pieces, favored by most of the jurors, was excluded because the composer had neglected to set two additional sacred texts as required. When the second-most-favored piece was proposed for the top award, a debate broke out about whether it should be disqualified because the composer, Edouard Silas, was from a Jewish family (in the Netherlands).

This brief debate about Silas (reported only by Hiller, himself of Jewish origin) involved Dutch composer Johannes Verhulst and touched on some basic questions, notably 1) must a composer be a devout believer in order to create good sacred music for a given religion or denomination?; and 2) how should one define a person’s religion: by his/her current status (after, say, having converted—Silas appears to have become Catholic by this point) or by family origin? The principle of categorizing individuals by the religion of their parents or grandparents amounts to a racialist rather than purely religious form of antisemitism and would become the notorious basis for the persecution of European Jewry in the twentieth century. Hiller’s essay is a uniquely detailed and reliable account of an important event in the history of religious music and a principled statement in support of religious tolerance and open-mindedness.

Author Biography

Jürgen Thym taught music history and musicology at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) for forty-six years. He has published critical editions of works of Schoenberg (Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene, Op. 34, and Theme and Variations, Op. 43A and 43B) and edited an important Lieder anthology: 100 Years of Eichendorff Songs (Madison, WI: 1983), and he has co-translated treatises on music theory: Kirnberger’s The Art of Strict Musical Composition (with David Beach; Yale University Press, 1982) and Schenker’s Counterpoint (with John Rothgeb; 2nd corrected edition Ann Arbor, MI: Musicalia Press, 2001). Some of his extensive writings on nineteenth-century German Lieder were republished in a book that he edited: Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (University of Rochester Press, 2010). He also edited Mendelssohn and the Music of the Past: Constructing Musical Legacies (University of Rochester Press, 2014), and edited and translated a collection of essays by the composer Luca Lombardi: Construction of Freedom and Other Writings (Verlag Valentin Koerner, 2006). In 2022, on his eightieth birthday, he was honored with a wide-ranging festschrift containing contributions in English and in German: Music: A Connected Art / Die Illusion der absoluten Musik (Verlag Valentin Koerner).

Ralph P. Locke taught music history and musicology for four decades at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. He is founding editor of the Eastman Studies in Music series (University of Rochester Press). His three monographs are Music and the Saint-Simonians (University of Chicago Press, 1986), Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He was a contributing co-editor of Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (University of California Press, 1997; now available open-access: http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft838nb58v). He contributes reviews to the open-access journal Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal (https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/mmp/) and to online magazines such as OperaToday.com, NewYorkArts.net, ArtsFuse.org, and the Boston Musical Intelligencer (https://www.classical-scene.com/).

Creative Commons License

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Recommended Citation

Thym, Jürgen and Locke, Ralph P. (2024) "Who Is Allowed to Compose Catholic Church Music? Ferdinand Hiller's Insightful Report on the Sacred-Music Competition in Louvain (1866)," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 10: No. 1, Article 4.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1294