been far otherwise with
religious authors. That is, provided that profane music and religious
music really exist, which I doubt; for me there is only--music--and I
think he will be a clever man who draws the line where one ends and
where the other begins. Behind this wall of Saint Christopher's, the
works of all the great Spanish musicians sleep, mutilated and covered
with dust. Perhaps it is better they do sleep, when you hear what is
sung in this choir! Here you will find Christobal Morales, who three
hundred years ago was Chapel-master here, and began the reform of
music twenty years before Palestrina. In Rome he shares the glory
with the famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his
lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for
centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period;
his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking
all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in
Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian,
they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master who no
one remembers, but in the archives there is a whole volume of his
masses, and Romero de Avila, who more than anyone had studied the
Muzarabe chants, and Ramos de Pareja, not the least musician of
the fifteenth century, who wrote in Bologna his book 'De Musica
Tractatus,' and destroyed the ancient system of Guido de Arezzo,
discovering the tonality of sound; and the Monk Urena, who added the
note 'si' to the scale, and Javier Garcia, who in the last century
reformed music, leading it towards Italy (God forgive him!), a beaten
track from which we have not yet emerged; and Nebra, the great
organist of Carlos III., who, a century before Wagner was born, used
musical discords. When he wrote the Requiem for the funeral of Dona
Barbara di Braganza, foreseeing the surprise and difficulties that the
musicians and singers would meet with in the innovations in his score,
he wrote on the margin, 'This is to give notice that there are no
mistakes in the score.' His Litany became so celebrated that it was
forbidden to copy it, under pain of excommunication; but I think
to-day the persons who remember it would be the excommunicated.
Believe me, Gabriel, these archives are a pantheon of great men, but a
pantheon, unluckily, from which no one emerges."

Then he added, lowering his voice:

"The Church has never been a great lover of musi