The Older Cecilian Movement and Gregor Rihar

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th century it was also in Slovene church music that the influence of the ideas of the Cecilian movement started to be felt. These were based on two demands: that church music be subordinated to the text and to the lithurgical ceremony, and that the way how ceremonial texts are set to music reflect the objectivity and universality of Catholic lithurgy. The Cecilian ideas strongly opposed the established late-classicist and early romantic aesthetic schemes of the church music of that time in Slovenia. In this way they meant an end to the cultivation of vocal-instrumental music of the 18th and of the beginning of the 19th centuries, and at the same time they attempted to remove also a few decades older repertoire of works by Gregor Rihar and his contemporaries. Various Cecilian authors gradually sharpened their demands for most of these works from the Slovene church music repertoire to be excluded. The article follows up all the most important Cecilian reviews of Rihar's musical legacy and traces the gradual formation of the mature Cecilian evaluation of it: from Pogačar's circular letter in 1868, the newspaper polemics in the years 1879/80, Sattner's article Church Song from the year 1881 to the publication of the song-book Cecilia (1883-1884), in which it received its practical realization.