Chapter 14

The Spectacular Element in Music

While the madrigal drama was in the ripeness of its glory the young Florentine coterie which brought the opera to birth was engaged in its experiments with monody. The history of its labors has been told in many books and need not be repeated here. But connected with it are certain important facts which are too often overlooked or at best denied their correct position in the story.

In the first place, then, let us remind ourselves that while the madrigal drama was utilizing in a novel manner the musical form from which it took its name, the method of adapting the madrigal to solo purposes had never been abandoned. The singular path of development followed by the musical drama had been leading away from its true goal, that of solo utterance, but the Italian salon still heard the charms of the madrigal arranged as a lyric for single voice.

The first secular drama, the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, was equipped with the elements from which might have been evolved quickly all the materials of the first experimental operas; but the rapid spread of the polyphonic music through Italy and the sudden and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The noble classic figure of Orpheus, with his flowing white robe, his simple fillet on his brow, and his lyre in his arm, standing before the iron gates and moving by his song the powers of hell, soon gave way to the gorgeous exhibitions in which the splendors of Night and Dawn were made the subjects of a series of glittering scenes enveloping a plan much like that of some modern ballet spectacle.

Throughout the sixteenth century, as we have seen, these court representations grew in complexity of pictorial detail, while the importance of the development of a medium for individual expression sank further and further out of notice. One reads of occasional uses of the old method of solo recitation to the lyre, but never as a controlling motive in the dramatic construction. It appears only as an incident in the general medley of sensuous allurements. So, too, the convocation of masses of singers, dancers and instrumentalists seems to have been nothing more than a natural demonstration of that growing appetite for luxury which characterized the approach of the feeble intellectual era of the Seicentisti, that era in which "ecclesiastical intolerance had rendered Italy nearly destitute of great men."

These quoted words are Symonds's; let him speak still further: "Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnescchi burned, Paleario burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished after a quarter of a century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe. Tasso, worn out with misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Scarpi survived the stylus of the Roman curia with calm inscrutability at St. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch tower behind Bello Squardo. With Michael Angelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto in 1594, the godlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor one. Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarotti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature. The Bolognese academy in painting. After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento--barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation--Jesuitry translated into false culture."

Symonds is here speaking of the dawn of the seventeenth century, but the movement toward these conditions is quite clearly marked in the later years of the preceding cycle. Its influence on the lyric drama is manifest in the multiplication of luxurious accessories and superficial splendors, designed to appeal to the taste of nobles plunged in sensuous extravagances and easily mistaking delight in them for a lofty appreciation of the drama and art. The reform of the Florentine coterie conquered Italy for less than fifty years. The return to showy productions, to the congregation of purely theatric effects, scenic as well as musical, was swift, and the student of operatic art can to-day discern with facility that the invention of the Florentines was soon reduced to the state of a thread to bind together episodes of pictorial and vocal display. But in the beginning it was unquestionably the outcome of a hostility to these very things, or at any rate to their merely spectacular employment.

Peri, Caccini, Bardi and others of the Florentine "camerata" were engaged as composers, stage managers, actors and singers in many of the elaborate court spectacles, intermezzi and madrigal dramas produced toward the end of the sixteenth century. Peri and Caccini were professional singers, and their experiences were not only those of students, but also those of practitioners. Their revolt against the contrapuntal lyric drama was largely, though not wholly, based on deep-seated objection to the unintelligibility of the text. It does not require profound consideration to bring us to the opinion that the method of Vecchi was in part an attempt to overcome the innate defect of the polyphonic style in this matter of intelligibility. The resort to the spoken text on the stage while the music was sung behind the scenes appears on the face of it to have been compelled by a wish for some method of conveying the meaning of the poet to the audience.

Why, then, did not these young reformers find at hand in the madrigal arranged for solo voice the suggestion for their line of lyric reconstruction? Partly by reason of the confusion caused by obedience to old polyphonic customs in making the accompaniments, and partly because the madrigal had become a field for the display of vocal agility. Already the development of colorature singing had reached a high degree of perfection. Already the singer sought to astonish the hearer by covering an air with a bewildering variety of ornaments. The time was not far off when the opera prima donna was to become the incarnation of the artistic sensuousness which had beguiled Italy with a dream of Grecian resurrection. The way had been well built, for the attention of the fathers of the Roman church had been turned early to the necessity of system in the delivery of the liturgical chants. The study of a style had developed a technic and to the achievement of vocal feats this technic had been incited by the rapid rise of the act of descant.

Hand in hand the technic and the art of descant had come down the years. The sharp distinction early made between "contrapunctus a penna" and "contrapunctus a mente" showed that composers and singers to a certain degree actually stood in rivalry in their production of passage work for voices. The rapid expansion of the florid element in the polyphonic music of the composers indicates to us that the improvised descant of the singer had a sensible influence. We need not be astonished, then, to learn that long before the end of the sixteenth century a very considerable knowledge of what was later systematized as the so-called "Italian method" had been acquired. The registers of head and chest were understood, breathing was studied, the hygiene of the voice was not a stranger, and vocalizes on all the vowels and for all the voices had been written. Numerous singers had risen to note, and the records show that their distinction rested not only on the beauty of their voices and the elegance of their singing, but also on their ability to perform those instrumental feats which have from that time to this been dear to the colorature singer and to the operatic public.

In the closing years of the sixteenth century we find that the famous singers were heard not oftener in public entertainments than in private assemblies. Occasionally a madrigal arranged as a solo figured in a lyric play, but the singing of madrigals for one voice was a popular field for the exhibition of the powers of celebrated prima donnas such as Vittoria Archilei and eminent tenors like Jacopo Peri. Kiesewetter[35] gives a madrigal sung as a solo by Archilei. The supporting parts of the composition were transferred from voices to instruments apparently with little trouble. Mme. Archilei herself played the lute and her husband, Antonio Archilei, and Antonio Nalda played two chitarroni. The music of the madrigal was composed by Signor Archilei. Here are the opening measures of this lyric:

[Musical Notation]

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

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

[Musical Notation]

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.