Old and New Church Music

A heartfelt plea for reverence and beauty in worship, this spirited essay finds one of Romanticism's most musical minds weighing the sacred masters of the past against the church music of his own day.

Written in 1814, Old and New Church Music (Alte und neue Kirchenmusik) is Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann's impassioned reflection on sacred composition, exalting the pure, otherworldly polyphony of Palestrina and the old Italian school while lamenting the theatrical excess he heard creeping into worship. A jurist, composer, and pioneering critic born in Konigsberg in 1776, Hoffmann (who died in 1822) helped invent Romantic music criticism, and this remains one of his most eloquent statements on the spiritual power of song.

This edition features:

• A passionate defence of the pure choral tradition of Palestrina, Allegri, and the old masters of sacred polyphony.
• Hoffmann's influential lament for the decline he perceived in the church music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
• A vital document in the birth of Romantic music criticism, from a composer who wrote as feelingly as he theorised.
• A concise, self-contained piece, ideal for admirers of choral music, liturgical history, and Romantic thought.