Selected letters of Mendelssohn/Letter 7
TO HIS FAMILY.
Rome, 4th April, 1831.
The first of the offices was on Palm Sunday. The crush was so great that I could not make my way into the interior to my accustomed seat on the so-called bench of the prelates, but had to remain standing among the guard of honour. I could see the ceremony well enough, but could not follow the music completely, for they pronounced the words indistinctly, and I had no book. So, this first day, all the different antiphones, the chanting of the gospels and psalms, and the reading in recitative, all which exist here in their primitive form, gave me the strangest, most confusing impression; I had no definite idea by what rule the various cadences were adjusted. My efforts to get a grasp of these rules were, however, gradually successful, and at the last I could have taken a part in the singing. They helped me also to escape the ennui which everybody complains of during the endless psalms which come before the Miserere; I could catch the differences in the monotony, and by writing down any cadence I was sure of, at last, as I deserved, secured eight psalm chants, noted down the antiphones and so forth, and thus kept myself throughout busy and intent. But as I said, the first Sunday I could not find my way in the music, and only know that the choir sang “Hosanna in exelsis” and intoned several hymns while the plaited palms were being given to the Pope and divided by him among the cardinals. They are long staves adorned with fretted points, crosses, and crowns, but all made of dried palm leaves, which make them look as though they were gold. The cardinals who are seated in a square in the inner chapel with their abbés at their feet, advance singly and receive each a palm staff, with which they retire; then come the bishops, monks, abbots, all the remaining ecclesiastics, then the choirmen, the cavaliers of honour and everyone else. They all receive olive branches bound with palm leaves; this makes a long procession, and meanwhile the choir continues to sing. The abbés hold the tall palms of their cardinals, looking like so many sentinels’ lances, and then lay them in front on the ground; just then the pomp of colour in the chapel was beyond what I ever saw in any other ceremonial. There are the cardinals in vestments worked in gold with red caps, before them the violet-robed abbés holding the golden palms, further off the brilliant dresses of the Pope’s attendants, then the Greek priests and the patriarchs in all their splendour, the Capuchins with their white beards and all the other monks; on another side one sees the Swiss guards with their uniforms as gay as the plumage of paroquets; all have olive branches in their hands, and the music goes on perpetually. One scarcely took in what they were singing, but only felt the melody of it; then the Pope has his throne brought to him, that is, the chair on which he is carried in state in all processions, and on which I saw Pius VIII. enthroned the day of my arrival in Rome; the cardinals, two and two, bearing palms, commence the procession; the sweeping doors of the chapel are thrown back, and the train proceeds slowly out.
The chant, which till now has seemed to fill the atmosphere about one, now grows fainter and fainter, for the choristers retire in the procession, and at last one is just aware of a faint murmur reaching the chapel from without. Then a choir stationed within commences a chant very loud, the other sends back the response from a great distance, and this continues for a time, till, as the procession draws nearer again, the two choirs unite. Here, too, it does not matter so much how and what they sing; the effect is splendid, and though, it is true, that the chants are very uniform, indeed formless, in simple unison without real construction and sung fortissimo throughout, still nobody could deny their power. The procession is followed by the recitation of the Gospel with the most peculiar intonation, then comes the mass. What charmed me in this was the creed. Now for the first time the priest stands immediately before the altar and intones Seb. Bach’s Creed in his hoarse, aged voice; as he concludes, all the ecclesiastics rise, the cardinals leave their seats, and advancing to the centre of the chapel, form a circle, and altogether repeat aloud the continuation “patrem omnipotentem,” and so on. At once the choir strikes in and sings the same words. When I first heard my well-known
“Cre-do in un-um De-um,”
and all the monastic voices round me took up the words with a sort of eager resonance, the result was fairly startling; it is still always my special moment. After the service Santini presented me with his olive branch, and I walked about with it in my hand all day, for the weather was charming. The Stabat Mater, which they placed after the creeds, impressed me little, the singing was uncertain, sometimes false, and they cut it short; our academy sings it better beyond comparison.