prototypes, the separation of Protestant music gradually became more obvious. Chorales were immensely popular and their number rapidly increased. Their harmonic style pushed its way into choir music, though never driving out counterpoint, for which German writers now began to show their eminent capacity. While Italian power in this field was on the wane, the Germans were preparing not only to preserve the old skill, but to open up new achievements for it. This development was upheld and furthered by the growth of organ composition (see Chapter XIII.).
The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) interfered with the steady flow of
musical progress. In many places musical establishments were wholly
suspended (notably at Dresden) and social life generally was unsettled.
The momentum of the early part of the century, however, enabled the art
to resume its place promptly after 1650.
The Palestrina style in its purity was never dominant in Germany,
though it had its isolated disciples. But the connection
with northern Italy was close, and, so far as definite influence
went, the Venetian type of church music was more likely to be
followed. Schütz of Dresden, the ablest German composer of
the century, studied at Venice and was fully alive to the new
movements there. Under his lead and that of some others, a
notable tendency set in to apply concertato writing to church
use in a more wholesome and suitable way than was common in
Italy. The German church cantata and oratorio soon began to
be more significant than their Italian prototypes, prefiguring the
nobler work of the 18th century. Thus the new methods of
accompaniments, solos, concerted passages and every device of
formal disposition was brought into the church without such
operatic sensuousness as to be debilitating. It is from these
beginnings that modern German and English church music really
took their rise.
As samples of Catholic composers, mostly in Austria or South Germany,
these names may be noted: Asprilio Pacelli (d. 1623), who, after service at
Rome, was from 1603 royal choirmaster at Warsaw (motets and psalms from
1597); Johann Stadlmayr (d. 1648), at Salzburg in 1603-7, then court-choirmaster
at Innsbruck, with masses, motets, psalms and hymns (from 1603);
Giovanni Felice Sances (d. 1679), of Roman birth, in the Imperial Chapel at
Vienna from 1637, second choirmaster from 1649 and first from 1669, with
many motets, psalms and secular songs (from 1633); Felicianus Schwab
