(b Noyon, 10 July 1509; d Geneva, 27 May 1564). French theologian, one of the leaders of the Reformation in Switzerland.
ALBERT DUNNING/R
In 1523 he studied theology in Paris, then studied law in Orléans in 1528 and in Bourges in 1529. In 1531 he returned to Paris to complete his classical studies, publishing a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia in the following year. Between 1528 and 1533 he became converted to reformed doctrines and in 1533 he had to leave Paris when the Lutheran sect at the university was proscribed by the court. He went to Basle at the end of 1534 and began work on his Christianae religionis institutio; in the dedication of the first edition (1536) to François I he called for toleration of Protestants. In 1536 he stayed for a short time at the court of Renée of France in Ferrara, and there met Clément Marot. On his way back to Strasbourg he went to Geneva, where the reformer Guillaume Favel persuaded him to help with the organization of the Church. However, in 1538 the city authorities forced Calvin to leave on account of his excessive zeal and strictness in introducing the order of service which he desired.
He went to Basle and then to Strasbourg, there meeting Martin Butzer, who probably greatly influenced his musical ideas. Butzer had played a leading role in establishing the pattern of worship in Strasbourg, so that there was a tradition that unison congregational singing was the only music in the service. In 1539 Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant was published under Calvin’s guidance for the congregation of refugees in Strasbourg. This anthology of settings of Marot’s and Calvin’s translations included several tunes from earlier Strasbourg hymnbooks.
When Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541 he dedicated himself anew to establishing an order of service that included music. In the following year he published another anthology of psalms which, with its enlarged editions, became the nucleus of Calvinist music.
By the time he died Calvin’s efforts had established a musical practice that is still widely accepted today. Unlike Luther his outlook was influenced by his understanding of the theological position rather than by his own response to music – in fact he does not appear to have had any particular musical sensibility. As a humanist, familiar with the musical ideals of antiquity, he was convinced of the power of music to affect human behaviour, referring to it in his letter A tous chretiens et amateurs de la parole de Dieu. He agreed with the ancient theological concept of the divine origins of music and from that inferred that music should be used ‘pour invoquer Dieu d’un zèle plus véhément et ardent’. However, he believed that the psychological effect of vocal music should be kept within reasonable limits and he excluded instrumental music because it belonged to the Old Testament. Congregational singing had already proved its advantages and suitability, but Calvin was strict in maintaining that all the music was to be monophonic: any kind of polyphonic texture would distract the congregation from the meaning of the words, and for Calvin the scriptures were of supreme importance. For the same reason he insisted on the use of the vernacular for all church worship.
Strictly speaking, Calvinist music is limited to music composed for use in the reformed churches adhering to Calvin’s doctrines; as such it comprises unaccompanied, monophonic settings of the psalms and some canticles in rhymed vernacular translations, designed for congregational singing. Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant incorporated these ideals. Calvin himself added verse translations in French of the Nunc dimittis, the Decalogue, the Creed and six psalms. Greiter composed a few of the melodies; the other composers are unknown. Although Marot’s psalm paraphrases were sung to various popular tunes in France, even at the Catholic court, it is now accepted that the melodies of the 1539 psalter do not use secular tunes. Five of its psalms were included in the so-called First Genevan Psalter of 1542, La forme des prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques (for facsimile of Psalm cxxx see Psalms, metrical, fig.1), which was completed soon after Calvin’s return to Geneva. In 1543 he published Cinquante pseaumes, based on Marot’s translations of the same year. This psalter seems to have gone through several editions by the time Loys Bourgeois’s Pseaumes octantetrois appeared (?1554, lost), with 34 translations by Bèze. Bourgeois claimed in the preface that he composed the melodies for Bèze’s psalms and either rewrote or revised 36 others out of a total of 85. His melodies are far superior to the others both in this edition and in subsequent ones. In 1562 the complete psalter (sometimes called the Genevan or Huguenot psalter) with 125 tunes was published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris, Lyons and elsewhere. Bourgeois appears to have had no connection with the psalter after the first edition; the additional tunes were attributed to ‘Maître Pierre’. Pierre Du Buisson, Pierre Dagues and Pierre Vallette have all been suggested as possible candidates (Vallette wrote a new musical preface to the 1556 edition, but this makes no mention of the composition of melodies); however, it seems that Pierre Davantes is most likely to have been the composer.
The melodies are characterized by the exclusive use of minims and semiminims, syllabic settings and simple flowing melodic lines. Contemporary secular and Catholic music, though having similar traits, had developed patterns of detailed textual interpretation and word-painting, but these found no place in Calvin’s church: both the strophic nature of the psalms and the religious ethos behind the psalter precluded such a relationship between words and music.
Calvin’s musical ideals and his psalter rapidly gained support in other countries. In the Netherlands the main Calvinist activity was in the Dutch-language area. In 1564 Plantin printed the 1562 psalter in Antwerp (in French), but it was banned and he had to destroy the edition. A Dutch metrical translation of the psalms by Willem Zuylen van Nyevelt had been in use since 1540; these Souterliedekens, based on Lutheran models and provided with folksong melodies, enjoyed great popularity into the 17th century but were gradually superseded by Dutch translations of the Genevan psalter. Translations by Utenhove, using the Genevan melodies, appeared in London and Emden where he and his fellow Protestants were exiled, and by 1565 he had completed his psalter, which was published in 1566, the year after his death. Petrus Dathenus published a translation of Marot’s and Bèze’s psalms, with Genevan melodies, also in 1566, and two years later it became the official psalter of the Dutch Reformed Church. Dathenus’s texts were used until 1773 when most, though not all, of the reformed churches adopted other translations; but the Genevan melodies continued to be used. Further textual revisions were made during the 20th century, culminating in a new book of psalms and hymns published in 1973.
In Germany, Lutheran settings had been in use from 1524, but in 1573 Lobwasser published a German version of Calvin’s 1562 psalter. It rapidly became popular and was used not only in Germany but also in German communities in Switzerland and the Netherlands, by Lutherans as well as Calvinists. It remained in general use among Calvinists until the end of the 18th century, when Matthias Jorissen’s metrical psalter replaced it.
In England, Sternhold and Hopkins’s incomplete psalter of 1556, intended for English refugees in Geneva, shows much of the character of the Genevan tunes. Their complete 1562 psalter included 13 Genevan melodies, and such later psalters as those by Ravenscroft (1621), Playford (1677) and Tate and Brady (1696) either used Genevan melodies or displayed their stylistic traits. The Scottish Reformed Church was strongly influenced by the Genevan model after John Knox’s return in 1559. Of 105 melodies in the first Scottish psalter of 1564, 42 were Genevan and were retained in the harmonized psalter of 1635.
Almost all the various psalters taken by colonists to America contained a few Genevan tunes. Towards the end of the 18th century, however, hymn singing gradually replaced the psalms and only a few congregations continued to use the Genevan psalter. Later the tunes were replaced by those of English or German provenance more suited to the texts, which had been translated into English. More recently there has been a return to the original tunes.
Because of Calvin’s belief that polyphony was distracting in church, it was cultivated only for domestic use. The settings varied in difficulty according to the use for which they were intended. The earliest known settings of the Genevan melodies used by Calvinists were by Certon, published by Attaingnant in 1546. The most influential were Bourgeois’s Pseaulmes cinquante de David (Lyons, 1547), written in a four-voice chordal style with the psalm tune in the tenor. The same year he published Le premier livre de pseaulmes, 24 settings ‘en diversité de musique, a sçavoir, familière ou vaudeville, aultres plus musicales et aultres à voix pareilles, bien convenable aux instruments’. As well as a few simple homophonic settings this collection included motet-like compositions, but not all use the Calvinist tunes. Further polyphonic settings of the psalms, the Nunc dimittis, the Decalogue and the Creed appeared in 1550, 1554 and 1561.
Polyphonic settings of the Genevan tunes were widely disseminated thanks to the work of Claude Goudimel. He set 67 psalms ‘en form de motetz’, but by no means all of them use the Genevan melodies. However, there are complete settings of the psalter in both note-against-note (1564, 2/1565) and imitative (1580) styles. In the 1564 volume the psalms are set syllabically for four voices with the psalm tune usually in the tenor (it occurs in the superius in only 17 psalms). Unlike psalm settings in free motet form, Goudimel’s psalter was internationally recognized. It was translated into several languages and was officially approved by the Reformed Church; there is evidence that it was used in the actual service as early as the 16th century, although Goudimel stated in his own preface to the 1565 Genevan edition of his homophonic psalms that the settings were to be sung not in the church but in the home.
Claude Le Jeune was the most important French composer to set the Genevan psalter polyphonically. His Dix pseaumes de David (1564), using Bèze’s translations, did not use the Genevan tunes, but he used them in his Dodécacorde of 1598, setting them in motet style for two to seven voices. The posthumous 1601 edition of his complete psalter in four- and five-voice chordal settings was soon widely circulated in several languages, and most of the psalter also appeared in a more contrapuntal three-voice version.
Sweelinck set the entire Genevan psalter (with French texts) for four to eight voices between 1608 and 1621. He composed the psalms in motet style throughout, treating the Genevan tune in different ways, for example as a cantus firmus or a point for imitation.
The Dutch Souterliedekens appeared in various polyphonic arrangements; the earliest were the three-voice settings by Clemens non Papa, published in 1556–7 by Susato. The Dutch version, using Dathenus’s translations, of Goudimel’s settings was the official psalter, remaining in use until 1938, when it was replaced by settings by Wagenaar.
In Germany, Sigmund Hemmel set the entire psalter (published posthumously by Osiander in 1569) using a few Genevan tunes alongside many Lutheran ones. Osiander’s own 50 homophonic Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen (1586) had a lasting influence in both the Lutheran and the Reformed Churches. Lobwasser’s translations too were applied to Goudimel’s settings as well as being set by other composers.
Sweelinck was one of the last composers to arrange the Genevan psalter, for the melodies were not suitable for the new musical style of the 17th century. Today the complete Genevan psalter is used in relatively few churches, and scarcely any restrict themselves to monophonic singing. However, the polyphonic settings of the 16th century still provide the stylistic basis for the music in Calvinist churches.
Some instrumental versions appeared in the Netherlands, for example the keyboard arrangements by Sweelinck, Henderick Speuy and Anthoni van Noordt. In the 19th and 20th centuries composers showed new interest in the Genevan melodies: Jan Zwardt and his followers founded a short-lived fashion for organ psalm fantasias, and Gagnebin and Honegger composed works of greater importance using some of the old psalm tunes.
For the history of Calvinist music in England and Scotland see Psalms, metrical, §§III and IV, 1; see also Reformed and Presbyterian church music, §I.
MGG1 (W. Blankenburg)
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BlumeEK
MGG2 (Calvinistische Musik; A. Marti, J.R. Luth)
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