THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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overheating, as an anteroom to the wishful landscape where one forgets the wishing one has had. A seemingly modest and certainly striking example of this is provided
by the roundelay strains in Gluck's ‘Orpheus’, above all the Elysium scene: ‘What a clear sky covers this place’. Gluck gave more than the melodious sensuality of the
Neapolitan school here and also more than the dramatic contrast to the agitations and unhappinesses of his infernal chorus, on the contrary: there is over­dramatic lento
here, transparently simple at the same time. Elysium emerges, beyond vanquished death, in Orpheus' glance at the clear sky and its softer light, in the transfigured major
key of the roundelay, and then chorus, to the strains of which Orpheus greets Eurydice. This is the model of seraphic rest in the opera, but especially in the oratorio (to
which Gluck's ‘Orpheus’ half belongs); there is nothing majestic about it, only peace, peace, as the Koran says. The classical manifestation of what can be called arrival
style in music may not of course flourish in theatrical forms and hence forms of action at all, in so far as they also extend into the oratorio. It is rather wholly applied to
tranquillitas animi, and its musician: Palestrina is the master of such transfiguration. Its pure rainbow sound already lives in the secular madrigals of Palestrina's youth, it
triumphs in the sudden simplicity of his masses, as soon as the dogmatic keyword sounds. The rhythm is reduced to a minimum of movement, chromatics are avoided,
as the expression of individually broken feelings and feelings of distance. Melody and polyphony are totally cleared up, the four­part movement here has an absolutely
assertive effect, and shows ruling simplicity: homophony (often revelling in pure triads) does not interrupt but crowns a masterly counterpoint obtained from the Dutch.
Palestrina seeks an echo of that which Saint Cecilia hears, of whom the legend says that she had already heard the choirs of angels on earth. Such auditio beatifica
corresponds to Thomas Aquinas' and Dante's ideal of a visio beatifica Dei; it corresponds even more precisely to Augustine's ideal of music as a praeludium vitae
aeternae. The Palestrina style was thus the only one to indicate in practical terms what had remained theory in the musical ideal of the whole Middle Ages, a learned
though devout theory of paradise. Palestrina's art is really applied to the wishful image of the singing of angels, his music was in fact heard as the echo of heavenly
strains.Since Augustine, music had been theoretically celebrated as this echo, he himself had ascribed to the hymn­singing of the Church a share in his own conversion,
he himself had first reinterpreted the ancient harmony of the spheres, this astral­mythic psaltery, as the singing of angels, as a paradise sound in no longer planetary but
human­like form.