Who Is Allowed to Compose Catholic Church Music? Ferdinand Hiller's Insightful Report on the Sacred-Music Competition in Louvain (1866)

In 1866, a competition was held in Louvain (Belgium) for a new setting of the Latin Mass text; the aim was that the winning piece be accessible in style and require only choir and organ. The jury included, among others, the composers Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Ferdinand Hiller; the lexicographer Fétis; and Joseph d’Ortigue, music critic for the Journal des débats, editor of Le Ménestrel, and a prominent advocate for the regeneration of Catholic church music. In 1880, Hiller—longtime director of the Cologne Conservatory—published an essay describing the competition in detail. His essay, never before translated or discussed, forms the core of the present article. The Louvain competition resulted from conferences in France and Belgium during the 1860s aimed at improving the state of Catholic church music. Details of Hiller’s essay can be fleshed out by reference to two other published reports: an official one by the priest who organized the competition, Théodore-Joseph Devroye; and a newspaper report by d’Ortigue published immediately after the competition. One of the 76 submitted pieces, favored by most of the jurors, was excluded because the composer had neglected to set two additional sacred texts as required. When the second-most-favored piece was proposed for the top award, a debate broke out about whether it should be disqualified because the composer, Edouard Silas, was from a Jewish family (in the Netherlands). This brief debate about Silas (reported only by Hiller, himself of Jewish origin) involved Dutch composer Johannes Verhulst and touched on some basic questions, notably 1) must a composer be a devout believer in order to create good sacred music for a given religion or denomination?; and 2) how should one define a person’s religion: by his/her current status (after, say, having converted—Silas appears to have become Catholic by this point) or by family origin? The principle of categorizing individuals by the religion of their parents or grandparents amounts to a racialist rather than purely religious form of antisemitism and would become the notorious basis for the persecution of European Jewry in the twentieth century. Hiller’s essay is a uniquely detailed and reliable account of an important event in the history of religious music and a principled statement in support of religious tolerance and open-mindedness.