Reflections after reading Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy by Patrick Macey:
Savonarola is intensely loved by diverse and contrary people for diverse and contrary reasons; and intensely hated by equally diverse and contrary people for equally diverse and contrary reasons. The friar's influence on art, politics, philosophy, and religion has been debated for six centuries. Macey's book and its accompanying compact disk bring attention to his influence in the less considered realm of music. The first half discusses laude: the vernacular, extraliturgical songs that arose with the mendicant orders. Savonarola composed several, which were sung in processions and popular religious festivals during his republic.
More fascinating is the second half, discussing Latin motets musically alluding to the martyred friar, written by the greatest composers of the 15th and 16th centuries. Most commonly, this allusion was made by quoting a popular melody for Ecce quam bonum, the first verse of psalm 132, which was the motto of Savonarola. In his Lenten sermons, he often placed the tune on the lips of the elect when explicating his visions of doom. The Dominican friars of St. Mark sang it in procession several times weekly, and the citizenry of Florence spontaneously broke into choruses of Ecce quam bonum while throwing their vanities to the flames. After Savonarola was hanged and burned, it became an expression of solidarity and resolve among his disciples.
The tune was woven into complex polyphonic motets that served as coded eulogies sung to the friar at private low Masses in the court chapels of commiserative noblemen, or as statements of civicalism in the religious ceremonies of the restored Florentine republic. Outstanding examples of these include Jean Richafort's O quam dulcis and Philippe Verdelot's Laetamini in domino. The latter is particularly delightful; the Ecce quam bonum melody is sung in canon by the tenor voices in an AATTBB motet. Macey heard echoes of Savonarola in the setting of the Miserere by Josquin DesPrez.
The fiftieth psalm is associated with Savonarola by the gloss he wrote while awaiting execution. Having been brutally tortured on the rack, with only his right arm spared to enable him to sign his confession, the doomed friar wrote his stunningly beautiful meditation on the psalm. Wracked with guilt for having capitulated under torture and denied his visions, he peered into the abyss of despair and found refuge in God. He began also a gloss of psalm 30, finishing only to the third verse before the summon of the hangman. The beginning paragraphs of these meditations were themselves set as polyphonic motets. At least seven motets of the Infelix ego were written: by Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Nicola Vicentio, Simon Joly, Orlande de Lassus, Jacob Reiner, William Byrd. The setting by Byrd is the most famous, one of the greatest works of the great composer. Two motets of the Tristia obsedit me are known, by Clemens non Papa and Claude Le Jeune.
Surprisingly, these contrapuntal extolments were to a man who detested polyphonic music. In his sermons, Savonarola declared it an invention of the devil. His harshest condemnation was preached on 5 March 1496:
The Lord wants not these things; rather He says: Remove from me the uproar of your songs, I will not listen to the songs of your lyre. God says: Take away your beautiful canti figurati. These signori have chapels of singers who appear to be in a regular uproar, as the prophet says here, because there stands a singer with a big voice who seems to be a calf and the others howl around him like dogs, and one cannot understand a word they say. Give up these canti figurati, and sing the plainchant ordained by the Church. You wish to play organs too; you go to church to hear organs. God says: I listen not to your organs.One might facetiously observe that the admirers of Savonarola love him for such contrary reasons that they do not mind contradicting Savonarola himself. But something more profound, I think, is at work.
Savonarola was a grouch. He was like many of the great reformers and controversialists; in his concern for refuting the abundant errors of his age, he condemned even the authentically joyful practices of the Church in his reaction. I am reminded of St. Bernard railing against architectural ornament, or of St. Jerome railing against cento poetry and inch-high letters on purple paper.
The great contributions of these men to Catholicism are undeniable and invaluable. Yet we are not obligated to understand their greatness with the same reactionary spirit in which it was first manifested. There is beauty in remembering, honoring and loving Savonarola - with complete sincerity - by writing polyphonic motets of his words. Or in building a Gothic chapel to the name of St. Bernard. Or in imagining the most literal of the Church Fathers in anachronistic cardinalate garb.
Post-Tridentine Catholicism, formulated against the threat of Protestantism, can be a grouch of a religion. Its inability to value far more ancient traditions is the saddest result of its reactionary origins. In the place of a natural traditionalism, it too often substituted a legalism, rubricism, and ultramontanism that was supposed to be more effective in combating the heresy. The result was a Catholicism understood with the mind of a Protestant. In response to the new heresy of progressive Catholicism, a conservative Catholicism that repeats the same error is being formulated; one that reduces the religion to a mere expression of assent and then congratulates itself for meeting such a minimal expectation.
As traditionalists who wish to recover the greatness and joy of Catholicism, we must look not with eyes that are ever more cynical but with eyes that are ever more innocent. We must see it as Gothic architects saw St. Bernard, as polyphonic composers saw Savonarola, as mediaeval iconographers saw St. Jerome. We will find it to be older and better and stronger. The magnanimity of the ancient religion need not be lost forever.