Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de Musique Romantique Française

After the Revolutionary period, the restoration of religious worship, in 1803, led to a revival of sacred music, but the results were at first somewhat lacklustre, since musicians no longer had the proper training. The educational initiatives of Choron (1825) and Niedermeyer (1853) accompanied an interest in Palestrina; the Schola Cantorum (1894) followed in their wake.

Despite some militancy in favour of the restoration of Gregorian chant and the creation of a specific sacred repertoire, music for worship adopted the same aesthetics as Romantic opera. Neglecting simple mass settings, composers – Cherubini, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Bruneau, Gouvy, Fauré and others – preferred to set the Requiem Mass.

But as the century went on there was a gradual loss of interest in the spectacular and a move towards a more ethereal – and soon Sulpician – type of expression. The relaxing of the dogma and the dissemination of the ideas of the ultramontane Catholic Lamennais also favoured the development of the oratorio, which allowed composers more freedom; its exponents included Elwart, David, Gounod, Berlioz, Franck, Dubois, Massenet and others, with Théodore Gouvy taking the genre to its limits in works ranging from the cantata for solo voice (La Religieuse) to his great dramatic cantatas (Œdipe à Colone, Polyxène, Électre, and so on), and his Easter oratorio Le Calvaire of 1877. Only the motet seems to have come down over the centuries without losing the interest of artists.