We are now face to face with one of the greatest geniuses of all time, Palestrina,[30] or to give his real name, Giovanni Pierluigi (1526-1594). Into his hands it was given not only to restore to Italy, for a time at least, its leadership in the domain of musical art, but also to carry to completion the magnificent structure of polyphonic ecclesiastical music founded and fashioned into stately proportions by the Netherlanders, and to utter the final words in the art of unaccompanied vocal counterpoint. Thus the cycle of development in Roman ritual-music was consummated on the very spot where just ten centuries before it had found its first definite formulation under the guiding hand of Gregory the Great and in perfect consonance with the spirit and best traditions of the great liturgy around which Christian worship had centred through all the intervening centuries, until Luther’s momentous break with Rome had caused a deflection in the current of religious thought. He summed up all the best qualities in the art of his predecessors. He added nothing new to its technique, but, child as he was of the land whose peculiar gift is melody, he crowned this art with a radiant richness of melodious charm and graceful movement which none of his masters could achieve. Palestrina’s peculiar greatness seems to lie in the supreme fact that, through a perfect sympathy with and understanding of the mysteries of the Roman system of worship and through an unequalled mastery of the Netherlanders’ art of contrapuntal expression, he was able to restore music to its proper relation to the service as established by the Early Church, a relation that had been lost by the incongruous and disturbing intricacies of the musical forms which by their very elaborateness had so overlaid the text as to render it unintelligible and thus obliterate the religious significance of the words and warp the whole function of music in the larger organism of the mass. This reform was brought about by a return to the simpler methods of the ancient church. While the musical world around him was teeming with signs of the new spirit of impending change and progress, his genius, the richest of them all, was satisfied to dwell within the sanctuary of tradition. While all his contemporaries were facing forward, filled with the rapture of discovery and innovation, ‘the Palestrina style belonged rather to the mediæval world, with its emphasis upon monastic reveries and contemplation.’[31] What has been termed ‘the Palestrina style’ had existed before his time in isolated church compositions, but, since his whole life was dedicated with singular fidelity and purity of purpose to the development of an exalted and chaste style that would perfectly reflect the inner spirit of the church ceremonies, his name has become attached to a type which is peculiarly his. Its external characteristics are the repudiation of mere intellectual cleverness,