Anonymous Sienese artist, Biccherna tablet with the commission for the calendar reform, 1582-1583. Siena, State Archive. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Teresa of Ávila died at Alba de Tormes, in Castile, during the night between 4 and 5 October 1582. The 5th of October never came that year: the morning after her death the calendar read the 15th, and the Church still keeps her feast on 15 October. That same night, in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland, ten days vanished by decree. The bull Inter gravissimas, signed by Gregory XIII on 24 February of that year, had struck them out to bring the spring equinox back to 21 March, and with the equinox Easter, which the Julian calendar had let drift, century after century.
The document that concerns music is five years older and carries the same pope’s signature. On 25 October 1577 Gregory XIII entrusted Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Annibale Zoilo with revising the Church’s chant books, graduals and antiphonaries: after the Council of Trent the missals and breviaries had been reformed, and the melodies no longer matched the texts. The papal brief complains of barbarisms, obscurities, contradictions and superfluities, and blames them on the clumsiness, negligence and even malice of composers, copyists and printers. Within a few years the same pontiff had laid his hands on the two clocks of Christendom: the clock of the stars, which decides when Easter falls, and the clock of the voice, which decides how it is sung.
The first clock was corrected quickly. The second was not. Palestrina had lost two sons, Rodolfo and Angelo, to plague, and in 1580 he lost his wife, Lucrezia; he split the work with Zoilo, Sundays for himself and saints’ feasts for the other, and then the project stalled. The manuscripts were lost after his death in 1594. The new Gradual appeared only in 1614 and 1615 from the Medici Press in Rome, edited by six musicians including Felice Anerio and Francesco Soriano, and it had little or nothing to do with Palestrina’s work. The calendar had come into force less than eight months after the bull. The chant took thirty-seven years.
There is a difference that weighs more. The reformed chant remained a Catholic affair; the calendar, by contrast, split Europe. Protestant princes refused a reform that came from Rome, and for more than a century a musician crossing the Alps changed dates as well as languages. When Heinrich Schütz, sent by Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, went down to Venice in 1609 to study with Giovanni Gabrieli, he entered a country living ten days ahead of his own. His dates still carry the double heading of his biographers: born at Köstritz on 8 October 1585 in the old style, the 18th in ours.
The same goes for the two great men of 1685. Johann Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach on 21 March, a Julian date, which in today’s calendar is 31 March. George Frideric Handel had been born at Halle on 23 February, that is, 5 March for us. Protestant Germany fell into line only in 1700, when 18 February was followed directly by 1 March, and Bach was fourteen. Handel, by contrast, spent his life straddling the frontier of time. In 1706 he went down to Italy and for a few years lived in the pope’s calendar, between Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice; then he settled in London, where the old Julian calendar stayed in force until 1752.
Messiah was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and that date is still Julian. Ten years later Great Britain made the leap, and it had to be a longer one than Italy’s: 2 September 1752 was followed by the 14th, eleven days, because in the meantime 1700, a leap year for Julius Caesar and not for Gregory, had added another day of drift. Handel died in London on 14 April 1759, and that date is already Gregorian. On gravestones and in dictionaries, seventeen years and a day separate the premiere of Messiah from the death of its composer. Counted on the same calendar, the seventeen years fall ten days short.