BWV 1080 said:
The Catholic tradition was incredibly rich prior to Luther (just listen to Josquin or Ockeghem) and continued to produce great sacred music up to this day including Byrd, Haydn's Masses and Oratorios, Schubert's Ave Maria, Bruckner, Liszt (who was affiliated later in life with a Franciscan order), Messiaen & Wourinen too name a few.
Haydn was heavily influenced by the protestant Emmanuel Bach and the reform of Church music instituted by Pope Pius X equivalently debarred them from use at liturgical services, in some instances on account of the alterations and repetitions effected in the text, and in others because of the operatic character of the music itself. I guess it wasn't "chant-like" enough.
Franz Peter Schubert, born 1797, died 1828, the Austrian composer. He wrote two Masses and a large amount of other Catholic music, yet like Beethoven and Mozart, he was a skeptic. In his
Dictionory of Music, Sir George Grove says that "of formal or dogmatic religion we can find no trace" in his life. That's in Volume IV, page 634. He quotes Schubert saying of creeds and churches, "Not a word of it is true." Also, one can read Elly Ziese in
Shubert's Tod. There it is noted that Catholic biographers say that the man who wrote the beautiful
Ave Maria must have been a Catholic, although "he has no external connection with the Church." One might as well say that all the artists who painted beautiful Venuses must have believed in the goddess Venus. Perhaps the answer is that only the religious art form was accepted, or acceptable, at that time.
Liszt was an omnivorous reader. He explored the heights and depths of literature. He plodded over the stony roads and wayless wildernesses of science, history, and philosophy, and loitered on the flowery paths of poetry and romance. Chateaubriand was probably the first author (excepting devotional writers) who made a deep impression upon him. René (the detached episode of this authors Le Génie du Christianisme), which has been called the French Werther, held him for a long time enthralled. Lamartine and Victor Hugo exercised a lasting influence over him, a fact which declares itself openly in his musical works: that of the former in the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and Les Préludes, that of the latter in Mazeppa and Ce qu-on entend sur la Montagne. With these two poets Liszt, who had more or less intercourse with almost all the distinguished authors and artists living at Paris, was also personally acquainted. George Sand became a most intimate friend of his. Very characteristic of the man is the interest with which he studied and the enthusiasm with which he to a great extent
adopted the socialistic, religious, philosophical, socio-religious, and socio-philosophical systems of his time, as set forth, for instance, in Saint-Simons Nouveau Christianisme, Ballanches Essai sur les institutions sociales, Fouriers Traité de lassociation domestique-agricole, and Lamennais Paroles dun croyant. George Sand speaks in one of her letters of Liszt as the pupil of Ballanche, Rodrigues, and Sénancour. Olinde Rodrigues was a disciple of Saint-Simon, Sénancour the author of Obermann, a psychological romance in letters, of which we now and then read in Liszts literary writings. But let us see what Heine has to say of Liszt, with whom he was personally acquainted. He is a man of a distorted (
verschrobenen) but noble character, unselfish and without guile. His intellectual tendencies are very remarkable. He has great talent for speculation, and, more than even by the concerns of his art, he is interested by the investigations of the different schools which occupy themselves with the solution of the great problem comprehending heaven and earth.
He was long enamoured of the beautiful Saint-Simonian view of the world, subsequently the spiritualistic, or rather vaporous, thoughts of Ballanche befogged him, now he raves about the republico-catholic doctrines of Lamennais, who has planted a Jacobin cap on the cross . . . Heaven knows in what intellectual stable he will find his next hobby.
