Note 341 — Chapter VIII · MUSIC AND PLASTIC

There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of Homer—so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already foreshadowed in Corelli and Händel and had, earlier even, almost led to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.

(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If Wagner’s suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to forbid “unworthy music in the house of God” and to bring the subject under the disciplinary control of the Bishops.—Tr.)