Cecilian Movement

The Cecilian Movement of church reform was centered in Italy but received great impetus from Regensburg, Germany, where Franz Xaver Haberl had a world-renowned school for church musicians. (Haberl was also the Regensburg Domkapellmeister (cathedral choirmaster), where he directed a choir highly skilled in polyphony and chant.) The Cecilian Movement was a reaction to the roughly hundred years (c.1800 to c.1900) when Gregorian Chant all but vanished from Catholic Masses.

In many serious church musicians, there was a deep-seated desire to revive Chant as well as the Renaissance polyphony of Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, Anerio, et al., and to rid Masses of the more entertaining, operatic style of music. Before Lorenzo Perosi, it may be said that Giovanni Tebaldini, Perosi's predecessor at the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, was one of the leaders of this movement named for Saint Cecilia, patroness of music. But by Tebaldini's own admission, it was Perosi who brought these hopes to fruition—albeit with the backing of the future Pope Pius X and his motu proprio, Tra le sollecitudini of 1903. The influence of Perosi, as well as Pius, was so strong that not only did chant and polyphony re-enter the Catholic repertory, but Perosi's works—from the 1890s until World War I and beyond—were by far the most widely performed contemporary works in the Roman Catholic Church. (Vide Lorenzo Perosi.)