Cecilian Movement

The Cecilian Movement of church music reform was centered in Germany in the second half of the 1800s (Gmeinwieser 2001), and received great impetus from Regensburg, where Franz Xaver Haberl had a world-renowned school for church musicians (Haberl 2001).

The Cecilian Movement was a reaction to the liberalization of the Enlightenment. Their theoretical ideas were formulated by Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Michael Sailer, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1814), and Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut (Gmeinwieser 2001).

Although the movement traced its roots back to the 15th-century Congregazioni Ceciliani, which in turn inspired the formation during the 18th century in Munich, Passau, Vienna, and other places of Caecilien-Bündnisse (Cecilian Leagues) with the goal of promoting the a cappella singing of sacred music (in keeping with the edicts of the Council of Trent), the Cecilian movement proper is considered to have been established only in the 19th century. Franz Xaver Witt, a priest trained in Regensburg, published a call for reform of church music (Witt 1865) and three years later, on the occasion of a rally of Catholics in Bamberg, founded the first formal body of the movement, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Cäcilienverein. After Pope Pius IX sanctioned this organization in 1870, similar groups soon sprang up in the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, and North America (Gmeinwieser 2001).

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