A Canadian Music Director at St Peter's

Hmmm... how did I miss this news?
A Canadian bucks tradition to please the Pope
August 2, 2008 ROME -- The Baroque sacristy of St. Peter's Basilica, the Vatican's church, is alive with movement. Vespers, the traditional evening prayer service, is about to begin in the apse behind the papal altar and no one seems quite ready.
Musicians and singers with the venerable St. Peter's Choir hunt for their gowns and music while priests and several archbishops make sure that their own violet, red and white robes are in order. But where is Rev. Pierre Paul? The maestro, or director, of the Music Chapel of St. Peter's is running late, and when he arrives, looking distinctly unpriestly in black jeans and a blue shirt, the hefty cleric is sweating profusely in the church's dank, still air.
"The choir is in good shape," he says. "I'm not. I'm tired."
A moment later, he is a man transformed, clad in violet and purple and charging off to a job that can trace its lineage back 1,400 years to the pope who later became Saint Gregory the Great and founded the Schola Cantorum, the school of ecclesiastical chant.
Today, the first Canadian ever to hold the post has drawn a big audience. Officially appointed in April (though he had already been on the job for a year), he brings fresh appeal to a choir grown tired and undisciplined in recent years. With a chuckle, one priest refers to the old group as the "St. Peter's Screechers," because they were prone to shouting.
Father Paul is attached to traditional music and is a reformer. He is a devotee of the official and pure Gregorian chant - the archconservative [:oP] Pope Benedict XVI would have it no other way - and yet to get the right sound, he is using female singers at vespers on a regular basis for the first time in the choir's history.
The 45-minute performance is rousing. The 38 or so singers - priests, student priests and laymen along with the women, about two-thirds of them Italians, the rest from elsewhere in Europe and Latin America - have strong, full voices.
The small orchestra is flawless, testimony to Father Paul's insistence on regular practices. A minor miracle: Antonio Vivaldi's Magnificat goes off without a hitch, even though the orchestra had played it only once before. Not bad for a man trying to hold down two full-time jobs. "The sound of Father Paul's new choir is an order of magnitude better than the old one," says Donald Smith, who until last month was Canada's ambassador to the Holy See, where he employed the priest as his ecclesiastical counsellor and, on occasion, to entertain at residence parties.
ONE MAN, TWO OCCUPATIONS, 'I LIVE LIKE A CRAZY MAN'
At 50, the maestro is a man possessed with work and usually looks worn for good reason. He says he has the equivalent of two full-time jobs, labours through the evenings, goes to bed at midnight and is up at dawn. "I don't balance either job," he says. "I live like a crazy man."
His other occupation is general secretary of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, a small order that he describes as neither conservative nor liberal ("we're just normal priests"). Founded in 1826, it has members preaching in Africa and makes its home in a pretty villa with a fountain and gardens on the hill behind Trastevere, the medieval Roman neighbourhood south of the Vatican. No doubt his workaholic disposition, along with demands for perfection and discipline from the choir and orchestra, have added to the stress of running the St. Peter's Choir. The choir required an overhaul - new singers, different music, regular practice, revamped music booklets, some of which he designed and printed. "I had to build everything from scratch," he says. "I try to be firm. I request from them some commitment, that we be serious. We do this in the service of God."
But the workload makes him worry about his health. He is overweight, but he has put himself on a diet and rarely drinks alcohol. Once in a while, he has time to take a walk. He is able to truly relax, he says, only on trips home to Quebec, where he visits his parents and sneaks in a few days of trout fishing. He was born in Trois-Rivières in 1958, and he says that "I have had music since I was in the womb." His father, Maurice, 81, is a former provincial bureaucrat, but his mother, Marie-Thérèse, 80, was a travelling opera singer. His aunts and sisters also were musicians and, as a kid, he was something of a musical prodigy. He could listen to a record and then, more or less, replicate it on the piano.
After formal musical training through the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto, the young organist became interested in liturgical music and sacred chant.
About the same time, he "felt the call from God," he says, and decided to become a priest. He entered the Diocese of Trois-Rivières in 1976, finished his theology studies in Rome, joined the Oblates, was ordained by Pope John Paul II in 1984 and has yet to leave the Eternal City.
His musical talents were not lost on the Vatican. In the early 1980s, he began collaborating with the Office of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations as an organist and conducted the choir for some papal masses. In 2003, he was appointed music director of the Pontifical North American College in Rome.
In April, 2005, when Pope John Paul died, he was chosen as the musician for the cardinals' secret [:oP] conclave just before they elected Joseph Alois Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. The next morning, Father Paul was the organist and cantor, or liturgical singer, at the new Pope's first mass in the Sistine Chapel.
"That was a great honour for me," he says.
Three years later, the archpriest of St. Peter's, Cardinal Angelo Comastri, appointed him maestro of the St. Peter's Choir. While the Pope had no direct role in the selection process, it's impossible to imagine the Canadian priest would have landed the job unless he were devoted to the purest forms of ecclesiastical music.
"I think the Pope might have known about my music in the basilica," he says, adding that liturgical music is "so important" for the pontiff.
NOT JUST ANY MUSIC, THE CHANT'S THE THING
Indeed, there is no higher art form than ecclesiastical music, as far as the Vatican is concerned. In the early 1960s, the Second Vatican Council highlighted its importance: "The music tradition of the universal church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art. The main reason for pre-eminence is that, as sacred melody united to words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy." I
n 2003, Pope John Paul II wrote a chirograph (a letter to the clergy) on sacred music that singled out Gregorian chant, saying it "has a special place" and was considered by St. Pius X (who was pope from 1903 to 1914) the "supreme model of sacred music."
The church does not know who exactly wrote the original chants named after Saint Gregory, who was pope from 590 to 604, but they are considered special because the text is almost always from sacred scripture. "It's the word of God that has become music," Father Paul says. "It carries the strength of the word of God. Yes, they reach directly into the soul and make me feel closer to God." As far as he can tell from the archives, Father Paul is the 29th maestro to direct the St. Peter's Choir since its modern incarnation, in 1513, under Julius II, the soldier pope who was also one of Rome's great arts patrons. Julius laid the cornerstone of St. Peter's Basilica, employed Michelangelo to pretty up the Sistine Chapel and filled the Vatican with music (the Sistine Chapel Choir, the pope's private choristers, is a separate group, although some of the music is similar).
Father Paul has some hard acts to follow. His predecessors include Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the celebrated composer and talented practitioner of Renaissance polyphony - music given a rich texture by using two or more melodic voices. He composed very little ecclesiastic music exclusively for male voices even though women couldn't perform it because cantors were considered a type of liturgical minister - and ministers had to be men.
Enter the "castrati" - males castrated before puberty to produce a powerful alto or soprano. They were the rage of the Vatican choirs and Italian opera in the 17th and 18th centuries, but then in 1878, Pope Leo XIII prohibited the hiring of any new ones. According to Angels Against Their Will, a book by German historian Hubert Ortkemper, the last castrato was Alessandro Moreschi, who performed until 1913. Other historians, however, suspect Domenico Mancini, a pontifical singer who performed until 1959, was one as well.
After the castrato era ended, children were used until the 1970s to preserve the soprano and alto voices. Then came choirs composed of fully intact men, with predictably damaging results to the quality of the performances. [:oP] With castration and child labour no longer viable options, Father Paul felt that he had no choice but to recruit women. Regular masses and special services at St. Peter's, such as Christmas and Easter, had used mixed choirs for decades. Vespers first crossed the great divide for Christmas, 2006.
Now, half of the St. Peter's Choir is female, apparently with the Pope's full approval. But the move may have rumpled robes elsewhere in the Vatican. Asked about internal reaction to his bold move, Father Paul bites his tongue. "This I won't answer," he says. "I'll just say that tradition is strong." 'REVIVE THE SPLENDOURS OF THE ROMAN MUSICAL STYLE'
Of course, he isn't the basilica's music man just because he had the fortitude to break the gender barrier in pursuit of quality music. Pope Benedict loves traditional sacred music and Father Paul can deliver it.
Last October, the pontiff reminded the clergy at the basilica that "it is necessary that, beside the tomb of St. Peter, there be a stable community of prayer to guarantee continuity with tradition." When he then mentioned Saint Gregory, his audience realized that continuity of tradition would extend to music too.
Afterward, journalist and author Sandro Magister, whose specialty is religious news, wrote that "Gregorian chant has been restored as the primary form of singing for mass and solemn vespers in St. Peter's Basilica. The rebirth of the Gregorian chant coincided with the appointment of a new choir director." At the time, Father Paul was teaching his new choir, as Mr. Magister put it, "to sing mass and vespers in pure Gregorian chant" in an effort "to revive the splendors of the Roman musical style."
Unofficial adaptations used by previous maestros had been banished because, the maestro says, the chants and other traditional church music, from Palestrina to Vivaldi, represent the highest forms of prayer.
"St. Augustine said, 'He who sings well prays twice,' " he explains.
Eric Reguly is a Rome-based member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.