Chapter 10

From Frottola Drama to Madrigal

With such a simple and dignified beginning as that of the "Orfeo" how came the lyric drama of the next century to wander into such sensuous luxuriance, such spectacular extravagance of both action and music? In the drama of Poliziano the means employed, as well as the ends sought, were artistic and full of suggestions as to possible methods of development. But whereas the opera in the seventeenth century suffered from contact with the public, the lyric drama of the sixteenth was led into paths of dalliance by the dominant taste of splendor-loving courts. The character of this taste encouraged the development of the musical apparatus of the lyric drama toward opulent complexity, and the medium for this was found in the rapidly growing madrigal, which soon ruled the realm of secular music. In it the frottola, raised to an art form and equipped with the wealth of contrapuntal device, passed almost insensibly into a new life. Berlioz says that it takes a long time to discover musical Mediterraneans and still longer to learn to navigate them. The madrigal was a musical Mediterranean. It was the song of the people touched by the culture of the church. It was the priestly art of cathedral music transferred to the service of human emotion.

The Italian madrigal had a specifically Italian character. It followed the path of sensuous dalliance trod by the people of Boccaccio's tales. It differentiated itself from the secular song of the northern musicians as clearly as the architecture of Venice distinguished itself from all other Gothic art. Even in that era those characteristics which subsequently defined the racial and temperamental differences between the musical art of northern Europe and that of Italy were fully perceptible. The north moved steadily toward instrumental polyphony, Italy toward the individual utterance of the solo voice. That her first experiments were made in the popular madrigal form was to be expected. The "Orfeo" of Poliziano and his unknown musical associates set the model for a century. In the course of that century the irresistible drift of Italian art feeling, retarded as it was by the supreme vogue of musicians trained in the northern schools, moved steadily toward its destination, the solo melody, yet the end was not reached till the madrigal had worked itself to its logical conclusion, to wit, a demonstration of its own inherent weakness. We must not be blind to the fact that while the Netherland art at first powerfully affected that of Italy, the latter in the end reacted on the former, and these two influences crossed and recrossed in ways that demand the closest scrutiny of the analytical historian. But at this particular period that which immediately concerns us is the manner in which Italian musical art defined itself. The secret of the differentiation already mentioned must be sought in the powerful feeling of Gothic art for organization. Gothic architecture is above all things organic and Teutonic music has the same character. Its most Gothic form, the North German fugue, which is the instrumental descendant of the Netherlands church music, is the most closely organized of musical types. The Italian architecture, on the other hand, displayed an aversion for the infinite detail of Gothic methods and found its individual expression in the grand and patent relations of noble mass effects. This same feeling speedily found its way into Italian music, even that composed by the Netherland masters who had settled in Italy.

Adrian Willaert, who is often called the father of the madrigal (despite the fact that madrigals were written before he was born), became chapel master of St. Mark's, Venice, in 1527. He seized with avidity the suggestion offered by the existence of two organs in the cathedral and wrote great works "for two choruses of four voices each, so that the choruses could answer each other across the church. He paid much less attention to rigid canonic style than his predecessors had done because it was not suited to the kind of music which he felt was fitting for his church. He sought for grand, broad mass effects, which he learned could be obtained only by the employment of frequent passages in chords. So he began trying to write his counterpoint in such a way that the voice parts should often come together in successions of chords. In order to do this he was compelled to adopt the kind of formations still in use and the fundamental chord relations of modern music--the tonic, dominant and subdominant."[30]

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

In music of this kind there was no longer a field for the intricate working of canonically constructed voice parts. It must seek its chief results in the opposition of one choir against the other, not in multiplicity of voice parts, but in imposing contrasts as of "deep answering unto deep." The development of fundamental chord harmonies was inevitable and from them in the fullness of time was bound to spring the pure harmonic style. Chord successions without any melodic union cannot be long sustained, and the Italians, with the tentative achievements of the frottolists before them, were not long blind to this fact. Leone Battista Alberti, father of Renaissance architecture, in writing of his church of St. Francis at Rimini uses the expression "tutta questa musica." One understands him to mean the harmonious disposition of the parts of his design so that all "sound" together, as it were, for the artistic perception.

It was feeling of this same kind that led the apostles of the Netherlands school and their Italian pupils to follow the physical trend of all Italian art rather than struggle to impose upon it the shackles of an uncongenial intellectuality forged in the canonic shops of Ockeghem and his disciples. The seed of beauty had been sown by the mighty Josquin des Prés what time he was a Roman singer and a Mantuan composer. The fruit blossomed in the Renaissance music of Willaert, Cyprian de Rore and others and came to its perfection in the later works of Palestrina and Lasso. The resistless operation of the tendencies of the school was such that at the close of the sixteenth century we are suddenly confronted with the knowledge that all the details of polyphony so studiously cultivated by the northern schools have in Italy suddenly been packed away in a thorough bass supporting one voice which is permitted to proclaim itself in a proud individuality.

Yet if we permit ourselves to believe that the lyric solo made but a single spasmodic appearance in the "Orfeo" and had to be born again in the artistic conversion brought about by the labors of Galilei and Caccini, we shall be deceived. The fashion set by Poliziano's production was not wholly abandoned and throughout the remainder of the fifteenth and the whole of the sixteenth centuries there were productions closely related to it in style and construction. Not only is the slow assimilation of the mass of heterogeneous elements thrown together in these dramas not astonishing, but to the thoughtful student it must appear to be inevitable. On the one hand was the insatiable desire for voluptuous spectacle, for the lascivious pseudo-classicism of the pictorial dance, for the bewildering richness of movement which had originated in the earlier triumphal processions, and for the stupendous scenic apparatus made possible in the open air sacred plays. On the other was the widespread taste for part singing and the constantly growing skill of composers in adapting to secular ideas the polyphonic science of the church. Added to these elements was the imperative need of some method of imparting individuality of utterance to the principal characters in a play while at the same time strengthening their charm by the use of song.

For nearly a century, then, we find the lyric drama continuing to utilize the materials of the sacra rappresentazione as adapted to secular purposes by Poliziano, but with the natural results of the improvement in artistic device in music. It is not necessary here to enter into a detailed account of the growth of musical expression. Every student of the history of the art knows that many centuries were required to build up a technical praxis sufficient to enable composers to shape compositions in such a large form as the Roman Catholic mass. When the basic laws of contrapuntal technic had been codified, Josquin des Prés led the way to the production of music possessing a beauty purely musical. Then followed the next logical step, namely, the attempt to imitate externals. Such pieces as Jannequin's "Chant des Oiseaux" and Gombert's "Chasse du Liévre" are examples of what was achieved in this direction. Finally, Palestrina demonstrated the scope of polyphonic music in the expression of religious emotions at times bordering upon the dramatic in their poignancy.

We cannot well doubt that the Italians of the late sixteenth century felt the failure of their secular music to meet the demands of secular poetry as religious music was meeting those of the canticles of the church. The festal entertainments which had graced the marriages of princes had most of the machinery of opera, but they lacked the vital principle. They failed to become living art entities solely because they wanted the medium for the adequate publication of individuality. They made their march of a century on the very verge of the promised land, but they had to lose themselves in the bewitching wilderness of the madrigal drama before they found their Moses. It was the gradual growth of skill in musical expression that brought the way into sight, and that growth had to be effected by natural and logical processes, not by the discovery or by the world-moving genius of any one composer.

The Doric architecture of the frottola had to be developed into the Italian Renaissance style of the madrigal by the ripening of the craft of composers in adapting the music of ecclesiastical polyphony to the communication of worldly thought. Then the Renaissance style had to lose itself in the baroque struggles of the final period of the madrigal drama--struggles of artistic impulse against an impossible style of structure and the uncultivated taste of the auditors. Then and then only was the time for revolt and the revolt came.

In the meanwhile we may remark that the intense theatricalism of opera ought never to be a source of astonishment to any one who has studied the history of its origins. The supreme trait of the lyric drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth century was its spectacular quality. The reforms of Galilei and Caccini were, as we shall see, aimed at this condition. Their endeavors to escape the contrapuntal music of the madrigal drama were the labors of men consciously confronting conditions which had been surely, if not boldly, moving toward their own rectification. The madrigal opera was intrinsically operatic, but it was not yet freed from the restrictions of impersonality from which its parent, the polyphony of the church, could not logically rid itself even with the aid of a Palestrina's genius. We must then follow this line of later development.