Some Forerunners of Italian Opera

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Here is the beginning of the composition as Mme. Archilei decorated it with her extraordinary skill in the vocal ornamentation of the period:

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We are told that despite the fine professions of the Florentines, Mme. Archilei was permitted to embroider Peri's Euridice in something like this fashion. But we must admit that even in those days a prima donna had power, and that something had to be conceded to popular taste. Furthermore, we shall see that the Florentines did not purpose to abolish floridity entirely.

CHAPTER XV

THE MEDIUM FOR INDIVIDUAL UTTERANCE

A  closer examination of the musical reforms instituted by the camerata which met at the Vernio and Corsi palaces will convince us that they were directed toward two objects; first, the restoration of the Greek method of delivering the declamation of a drama, and second, the reduction of purely lyric forms to a rational musical basis on which could be built intelligible settings of texts. The revolt was not only against polyphonic music in which text was treated without regard for its communicative purpose, but also against the decorative manner of solo singing, which made words only backgrounds for arabesques of sound. On this point we have the conclusive evidence of Caccini's own words as found in the preface to his "Nuove Musiche."36 He begins by giving the reasons why he had not earlier published his lyrics in the new style, though they had long been sung. He continues:

"But when I now see many of these pieces torn apart and altered in form, when I see to what evil uses the long runs are put, to wit, those consisting of single and double notes (repeated ones), as if both kinds were combined, and which were invented by me in order to do away with the former old fashion of introduced passages, which were for wind or stringed instruments rather than the human voice; when further I see how dynamic gradations of tone are used without discrimination, what enunciation now is, and how trills, gruppetti and other ornaments are introduced, I consider it necessary—and in this I am upheld by my friends—to have my music printed."

Furthermore he will explain in this preface the principles which led him to write in this manner for the solo voice. He says that for a long time he has been a member of the Florentine circle of cultivated men and that he has learned from them more than he acquired in thirty years in the schools of counterpoint.

"For these wise and noble personages have constantly strengthened me and with most lucid reasons determined me to place no value upon that music which makes it impossible to understand the words and thus to destroy the unity and meter, sometimes lengthening the syllables, sometimes shortening them in order to suit the counterpoint—a real mangling of the poetry—but to hold fast to that principle so greatly extolled by Plato and other philosophers: 'Let music be first of all language and rhythm and secondly tone,' but not vice versa, and moreover to strive to force music into the consciousness of the hearer and create there those impressions so admirable and so much praised by the ancients, and to produce which modern music through its counterpoint is impotent. Especially true is this of solo singing with the accompaniment of a stringed instrument when the words are not understood because of the immoderate introduction of passages."

This, he declares, can only extort applause of the "crowd" and such music can only result in mere tickling of the ear, because when the text is not intelligible there can be no appeal to the understanding.

"The idea came to me to introduce a style of music which makes it possible in a certain manner to speak musically by employing, as already said, a certain noble subordination of the song, with now and then some dissonances, while however holding the chord by means of the sustained bass, except when I follow the already common custom of assigning the middle voices to the accompanying instrument for the purpose of increasing the effect, for which purpose alone they are, in my opinion, appropriate."

He now tells us that, after he found that his principle stood the tests of practice and he was satisfied that in the new style lay a power to touch hearts far beyond that possessed by polyphony, he wrote certain madrigals for the solo voice in the manner described, which manner "I hereafter used for the representations in Florence." Then he went to Rome where the dilettanti, particularly Lione Strozzi, gathered at the house of Nero Neri, expressed themselves enthusiastically about the new revelation of the power of solo song to move the heart. These amateurs became convinced that there was no longer any satisfaction to be drawn from the old way of singing the soprano part of madrigals and turning the other parts into an instrumental accompaniment.

Caccini went back to Florence and continued to set canzonettas. He says that in these compositions he tried continually to give the meaning of the words and so to touch responsive chords of feeling. He endeavored to compose in a pleasing style by hiding all contrapuntal effects as much as possible. He set long syllables to consonances and let passing notes go with short syllables. He applied similar considerations to the introduction of passages "although sometimes as a certain ornamentation I have used a few broken notes to the value of a quarter, or at most a half note, on a short syllable, something one can endure, because they quickly slip by and are not really passages, but only add to the pleasant effect."

Caccini continues his preface with reiterated objections to vocal passages used merely for display, and says that he has striven to show how they can be turned to artistic uses. He deprecates the employment of contrapuntal device for its own sake, and says that he employs it only infrequently and to fill out middle voices. He forcefully condemns all haphazard use of vocal resources and says that the singer should labor to penetrate the meaning and passion of that which he sings and to convey it to the hearer. This he asserts can never be accomplished by the delivery of passages.

Here, then, we have a clear statement of the artistic ideals cherished by Caccini, and these, we may take it, were shared by the other members of the camerata who were engaged in the pursuit of a method of direct, eloquent, dramatic solo expression. The opening measures of one of the numbers in the "Nuove Musiche" will serve to show in what manner Caccini developed his theories in practice and equally what close relation this style had to that of the new dramatic recitative.

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In the preface to his score of "Euridice" Peri has set forth his ideas about recitative. He has told us how he tried to base its movement upon that of ordinary speech, using few tones and calm movements for quiet conversation and more extended intervals and animated movement for the delineation of emotion. This was founded upon the same basis as the theory of Caccini, which condemned emphatically the indiscriminate employment of swelled tones, exclamatory emphases and other vocal devices. Caccini desired that the employment of all these factors in song should be regulated by the significance of the text. In other words these reformers were fighting a fight not unlike that of Wagner. They deplored the making of vocal ornaments and the display of ingenuity in the interweaving of parts for their own sakes, just as Wagner decried the writing of tune for tune's sake, and on one of the same grounds, namely, that nothing could result but a tickling of the ear. Yet these young reformers had no intention of throwing overboard all the charms of floridity in song. Here are two examples of their treatment of passionate utterance in recitative. The first is by Peri and the second by Caccini. Both are settings of the same text in the "Euridice."

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Caccini was somewhat more liberal than Peri in the use of floridity and always showed taste and judgement therein. Here is a sample of his style taken from a solo by one of the nymphs in "Euridice":

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Caccini also showed that he was not averse to the lascivious allurements of two female voices moving in elementary harmonies. Here is a passage from a scene between two nymphs upon which rest many hundreds of pages in later Italian operas.

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This was the immediate predecessor of the well-known "Saliam cantando" in Monteverde's "Orfeo."

The innovations of the Florentine reformers included also the invention of thorough bass, or the basso continuo, as the Italians call it. Ludovico Grossi, called Viadana from the place of his birth, seems to have been the first to use the term basso continuo and on the authority of Prætorius and other writers was long credited with the invention of the thing itself. But it was in 1602 that he published his "Cento concerti ecclesiastici a 1, a 2, a 3, e a 4 voci, con il basso continuo per sonar nell' organo." The basso continuo had been in use for some time before this. It appears in the score of Peri's Euridice as well as in the "Nuove Musiche" of Caccini. It was employed in Cavaliere's "Anima e Corpo" and was doubtless utilized in some of the camerata's earlier attempts which have not come down to us.

Just which one of the Florentines devised this method of noting the chords arranged for the support of the voice in the new style matters little. The fact remains that the fundamental principle of related chord harmonies, as distinguished from incidental accords arising in the interweavings of voice parts melodic in themselves, had been recognized and the basis of modern melodic composition established. This, indeed, was not the achievement of the young innovators, but the result of a slow and steady development in the art of composition. The introduction of thorough bass shows us that the reformers had found it essential to the success of their experiments that, in their effort to pack away in solid chords the tangle of parts which had so offended them in the old counterpoint, they should codify to some extent the relations of fundamental chords and contrive a simple method of indicating their sequence in the new and elementary kind of accompaniments. They at any rate perceived that the vital fact concerning the new monophonic style was that the melody alone demanded individual independence, while the other parts could not, as in polyphony, ask for equal suffrage, but must sink themselves in the solid and concrete structure of the supporting chord. Thorough bass was in later periods utilized in such music as Bach's and Handel's, but its original nature always stood forth most clearly when it was employed in the support of vocal music approaching the recitative type.

Here, then, we may permit the entire matter to rest. It ought now to be manifest that in their experiments at the resuscitation of the Greek manner of declamation the ardent young Florentines were impelled first of all by the feeling that the obliteration of the text by musical device was a crying evil and that by it dramatic expression was rendered impossible. Doubtless they felt that their art lacked a medium for the publication of the individual, but it is by no means likely that they realized the full significance of this deficiency or of their own efforts to supply it. Nevertheless, what they did under the incentive of a genuine artistic impulse was in direct line with the whole intellectual progress of the Renaissance. The thing that was patent to them was the importance of studying the models of antiquity to find out how dramatic delineation was to be accomplished; but in doing so they discovered the one element which had been wanting in the Italian lyric drama since its birth in the Mantuan court, namely, the way to set speeches for one actor to music having communicative potency and capable of preserving the intelligibility of the text.

So they completed a cycle of the art of dramatic music, and, having found the link that was missing in the musical chain of Poliziano's "Orfeo," reincarnated Italy's Arcadian prophet, and built the gates through which Monteverde ushered lyric composition to the broad highway of modern opera.

Footnotes

1. "Les Origines du Théâtre Moderne ou Histoire du Génie Dramatique depuis le Premier Siècle jusqu'au XVI^e." Paris, 1838.

2. "Histoire de l'Harmonie au Moyen Age." Paris, 1852.

3. See Robert Eitner's introduction to the First Part of "Die Oper von ihren ersten Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts." Leipsic, 1881.

4. "Histoire de la Musique Dramatique en France," par Gustave Chouquet. Paris, 1873.

5. "An Historical and Critical Account of the Theaters in Europe," by Lewis Riccoboni, translated from the Italian. London, 1741.

6. "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIX Siècle," Edmond Vander Straeten. Brussels, 1867-1888.

7. "Musici alia Corte dei Gonzaga in Mantova dal Secolo XV al XVIII," per A. Bertolotti. Milan.

8. "A General History of the Science and Practice of Music," by Sir John Hawkins. London, 1776.

9. "Scena Letteraria degli Scrittori Bergamaschi," per Donato Calvi. Bergamo, 1664.

10. "Storia della Letteratura Italiana." Milan, 1905.

11. "Origini del Teatro in Italia." Firenze, 1877.

12. George Hogarth, in his "Memoirs of the Musical Drama," London, 1838, declares that this "Orfeo" was sung throughout, but he offers no ground for his assertion, which must be taken as a mere conjecture based on the character of the text. Dr. Burney, in his "General History of Music," makes a similar assertion, but does not support it.

13. John Argyropoulos, who was born at Constantinople in 1416, was one of the first teachers of Greek in Italy, where he was long a guest of Palla degli Strozzi at Padua. In 1456 he went to Florence, where Cosimo de Medici's son and grandson were among his pupils. He spent fifteen years in Florence and thence went to Rome. To this master, George Gemistos and George Trapezuntios, the acquisition of Greek knowledge at Florence in the fifteenth century was chiefly due. It should be particularly noted that all of them went to Italy before the fall of the Greek empire in 1453. Andronicus Kallistos was one of the popular lecturers of the time and one of the first Greeks to visit France. Cristoforo Landino, one of the famous coterie of intellectual men associated with Lorenzo de Medici, took the chair of rhetoric and poetry at Florence in 1454. He paid especial attention in his lectures to the Italian poets, and in 1481 published an edition of Dante. His famous "Camaldolese Discussions," modeled in part on Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations," is well known to students of Italian literature. Marsilio Ficino was a philosopher, and his chief aim was a reconciliation of ancient philosophy with Christianity.

14. "Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe," by J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, translated by Thomas Roscoe. London, 1895.

15. "Le Stanze, l'Orfeo e le Rime di Messer Angelo Abrogini Poliziano," per Giosue Carducci. Firenze, 1863.

16. In "Sketches and Studies in Italy," pp. 217-224.

17. "Florentia: Uomini e cose del Quattrocento," by Isidore del Lungo.

18. "Histoire de l'Opera en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti," par Romain Rolland. Paris, 1895.

19. "At the end of the fifteenth century, about 1480, are cited as famous scene painters Balthasar Reuzzi at Volterra, Parigi at Florence, Bibiena at Rome."—"Les Origines de l'Opera et le Ballet de la Reine," par Ludovic Celler. Paris, 1868.

20. "Les Décors, les Costumes et la Mise en Scène au XVII^e Siècle," par Ludovic Celler. Paris, 1869.

21. "Histoire du Théâtre de l'Opéra en France depuis l'Etablissement de l'Académie Royale de Musique jusqu'à présent." (Published anonymously.) Paris, 1753.

22. "During the fifteenth century the love of part-singing seems to have taken hold of all phases of society in the Netherlands; princes and people, corporate bodies, both lay and clerical, vying with each other in the formation of choral societies." Naumann, "History of Music," Vol. I, p. 318.

"The practice of concerted singing was not confined to the social circles of the dilettanti, but was also very popular in the army; and we have before alluded to the fact that Antoine Busnois and numerous others followed Charles the Bold into the field." Ibid., p. 320.

23. "The Present State of Music in France and Italy," by Charles Burney. London, 1773.

24. "Geschichte der Musik" von August Wilhelm Ambros. Leipsic, 1880.

25. "El Melopeo y Maestro," by Dominic Pierre Cerone. Naples, 1613. (Quoted here from Ambros.)

26. This passage is not a literal quotation, but partly a paraphrase and partly a condensation of the text of Ambros.

27. Michael Prætorius, "Syntagma Musicum," vol. ii, Organographia. Wolfenbüttel, 1619-20.

28. "Although the existence of 'Orfeo' as an opera appears to me to be problematical, there would be nothing impossible about the construction of a tragedy accompanied by music, because instruments were cultivated in Italy more than in France. Before that epoch the Medici had given concerts at Florence. Giovanni de Medici died in 1429, and Cosimo, who succeeded him and reigned till 1464, gave at the Pitti Palace concerts where there were as many as four hundred musicians. Under his successors and before the death of Alexander de' Medici in 1537, the violinists Pietro Caldara and Antonio Mazzini were often the objects of veritable ovations, and about the same time, 1536, at Venice, was played a piece called 'Il Sacrificio,' in which violins sustained the principal parts."—"Les Origines de l'Opera et le Ballet de la Reine," par Ludovic Celler. Paris, 1868.

29. See "A Note on Oboes," by Philip Hale. Programme Books of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, season of 1905-06, p. 644.

30. From the present author's "How Music Developed." New York, 1898.

31. "Le Rivoluzioni del Teatro Musicale Italiano della sua Origine fino al Presente," by Stefano Arteaga. Venice, 1785.

32. "Poesie Volgari e Latine del Conte B. Castiglione." Rome, 1760.

33. This account is taken from Bastiano de' Rossi's "Descrizione dell' apparato e degli intermedi fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze nello nozze del serenissimo D. Ferdinando Medici," etc. Firenze, 1589. This work is not in any of the great libraries and is here quoted from the previously mentioned history of M. Chouquet, who had access to it in the private library of an Italian scholar. The voice and instrumental partbooks were edited by Malvezzi, and published at Venice in 1591 under the title "Intermedii e concerti, fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze nelle nozze del Ferdinando Medici e Madama Cristiana di Lorena." Malvezzi's edition contains valuable notes and an instructive preface.

34. Something suggestive of a similar train of musical thought is found in some reflections of George Moore on Zola: "I had read the 'Assomoir,' and had been much impressed by its pyramid size, strength, height and decorative grandeur, and also by the immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new—the washhouse, for example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness; it is worked up to crescendo, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is given forth." ("Confessions of a Young Man.")

35. "Schicksale und Beschaffenheit des Weltlichen Gesanges," by R. G. Kiesewetter. Leipsic, 1841.

36. "Nuove Musiche di Giulio Caccini detto Romano." Florence, 1601.

INDEX