6 - Music for Body and Soul

Summary

The requirement for music that moved the emotions that was articulated by both Cirillo and Spada resonates across the medical and religious remit of the Hospital. Affecting the passions was more critical than simple enter-tainment, it was the means of regaining wellbeing, both bodily and in spirit. A healthy soul was the gateway to a healthy body, and both could be reached by music. While the desire to move public emotions towards a renewal of devotion and piety is especially evident in the celebration of Pentecost, it also surfaces in other music written in response to Tridentine liturgy and doctrine.

Pius V not only revised the breviary and missal in order to clarify and unify the liturgy, which as noted in Chapter 5 transformed the celebration of Pentecost, he also issued a Bull that would have an impact in hospitals. This Bull, dated 1566, and titled Super gregem dominicum, forbade doctors to treat patients who refused confession for more than three days. Several sessions of the Council of Trent had discussed the sacramental process as ‘medicamentum’. The underlying assumption was held that disease was caused by sin, and that confession and taking Communion were in themselves a medicine.

From earliest times the Eucharist – the re-enactment of the Last Supper in which Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples before his crucifix-ion, instructing them to take and eat it as it was his body and blood – was deemed a ‘mystery’, but it was, and is, central to Catholic belief. The conse-crated bread and wine was regarded as holy food as it contained the truth of the Word of God. Any fraudulent use of it was a crime that resulted in a grue-some death. The doctrine of transubstantiation, first conceived by theologians in the twelfth century, was formalised into an official statement by the Council of Trent. This doctrine insisted that at the moment of consecration, the bread and wine became the actual body and blood of Christ and were not just sacred symbols or representations as declared by Protestants. Further, that if anyone denied this, he should be ‘anathema’.