Chapter 2

The Sacre Rappresentazioni

Leaving D'Ancona, Vasari and the others in their confusion of dates, we find ourselves provided with a satisfactory point of departure and with some facts well defined. The drift of Provençal ideas over the borders into Lombardy may or may not have given some impetus to the growth of certain forms in Tuscany and Umbria, but at any rate it is clear that the Italian form of "Sacre Rappresentazioni" grew chiefly out of the poetic form called "Laud."

This itself was one of the products of a religious emotion. To observe it in its cradle we must go back to the beginnings of Italian literature. The seemingly endless battle between Emperor and Pope, which scarred the soul of Italy through so many years, was at that time raging between Frederick II and Innocent III and Gregory IX. The land reeked with carnage, rapine, murder, fire and famine. So great was the force of all this that the people fell into a state of religious terror. They believed that the vengeance of a wrathful God must immediately descend upon the country, and as a penance the practice of flagellation was introduced.

Against this horrible atonement came a violent reaction, and out of the reaction attempts to continue in a soberer and more rational form the propitiatory ideas of the flagellants. The chief furtherers of these reforms were lay fraternities, calling themselves Disciplinati di Gesu Cristo. From the very outset these fraternities practised the singing of hymns in Italian, instead of Latin, the church language. These hymns dealt chiefly with the Passion. They were called "Lauds" and they had a rude directness and unlettered force which the Latin hymns never possessed. Presently the disciplinati became known as Laudesi. The master maker of "Lauds" was Jacopone da Todi and his most significant production took the form of a dialogue between Mary and the Savior on the cross, followed by the lamentation of the mother over her Son. Mary at one point appeals to Pilate, but is interrupted by the chorus of Jews, crying "Crucify him!" Many other "Lauds," however, were rather more in the manner of short songs than in that of the subsequently developed cantata. The music employed was without doubt that of the popular songs of the time. It appears to have made no difference to the Italians what kind of tune they employed. They "sang the same strambotti to the Virgin and the lady of their love, to the rose of Jericho and the red rose of the balcony."

Here, then, we find a significant difference between the liturgical drama and the sacred representations. The chant, which was the musical garb of the former appears to have had no position in the latter. We shall perceive later that this difference marked a point of departure from which the entire lyric drama of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prior to the invention of dramatic recitative by the Florentines, proceeded to move in a musical world of its own.

The sacred representations built up a method complex and pregnant without chancing upon the defining element of opera. And this result was reached chiefly, if not solely, because the ecclesiastic chant was not employed. In its stead the musical forms practised by composers of secular music and adopted by musicians of such small education as hardly to be worthy of the title of composers, makers of carnival songs and frottole, predominated and determined the musical character not only of the Sacre Rappresentazioni, but also of the secular lyric plays which succeeded them and which continued to exist in Italy even after the "stile rappresentativo" had been introduced in the primitive dramma per musica of Caccini and Peri.

A closer examination of the songs of this period and of the manner in which they affected the lyric character of the sacred plays and the succeeding secular dramas may be postponed until we have permitted ourselves a glance at the character of the sacred plays as literary products and have taken into account the manner of their performance.

The Disciplinati di Gesu began by intoning their lauds before a crucifix or the shrine of some saint. Presently they introduced antiphonal singing and in the end dialogue and action. By the middle of the fourteenth century the laud came to be called "Divozione." After being written in a number of meters it finally adhered to the _ottava rima_, the stanza generally used in the popular poetry of the fifteenth century. It was the custom to sing these dramatic lauds or "Divozioni" in the oratories. Every fraternity had a collection of such lauds and that they were performed with much detail is easily ascertained.

Records of the Perugian Confraternity of San Domenico for 1339 show that wings and crowns for angels, a crimson robe for Christ, black veils for the Maries, a coat of mail for Longinus, a dove to symbolize the Holy Ghost and other properties had been used. By 1375 the "Divozioni" were acted in church on a specially constructed stage, built against the screen separating the choir from the nave. The audience sat in the nave, and a preacher from time to time made explanations and comments. The stage had two stories, the upper of which was reserved for celestial beings.

The "Divozione" appears to be, as Symonds declares it to be, the Italian variety of liturgical drama. The Sacra Rappresentazione, which was developed from it, was a very different affair. Just when these representations took definite individual form is not known, but the period of their high development was from 1470 to 1520. It was precisely at this time that their entire apparatus was adapted to the dramatization of secular stories and the secular lyric drama came into existence.

This whole subject has been exhaustively treated by John Addington Symonds in the fourth volume in his great work "The Renaissance in Italy." He examines briefly, but suggestively, D'Ancona's theory, that the "Sacre Rappresentazioni" resulted from a blending of the Umbrian divozioni with the civic pageants of St. John's Day in Florence. Civic pageants were common and in them sacred and profane elements were curiously mingled. For example, "Perugia gratified Eugenius IV in 1444 with the story of the Minotaur, the tragedy of Iphigenia, the Nativity and the Ascension."

In the great midsummer pageant of St. John's Day there were twenty-two floats with scenery and actors to represent such events as the Delivery of the Law to Moses, the Creation, the Temptation, etc. The machinery of those shows was so elaborate that the cathedral plaza was covered with a blue awning to represent the heavens, while wooden frames, covered with wool and lighted up, represented clouds amid which various saints appeared. Iron supports bore up children dressed as angels and the whole was made to "move slowly on the backs of bearers concealed beneath the frame."

We are justified in inferring that ability to supply an elaborate scenic investiture for the sacred drama was not wanting. When the sacred plays began to be written, their authors were for the most part persons of no distinction, but Lorenzo de Medici wrote one and Pulci also contributed to this form of art. The best writers, according to Symonds, were Feo Belcari and Castellano Castellani.

The sacred plays were not divided into acts, but the stage directions make it plain that scenes were changed. The dramas were not very artistic in structure. The story was set forth baldly and simply, and the language became stereotyped. The "success of the play," says Symonds, "depended on the movement of the story, and the attractions of the scenery, costumes and music."

Symonds describes at some length "Saint Uliva" and the interludes of Cecchi's "Esaltazione della Croce." The latter belongs to 1589, but it is almost certain that the manner of presentation was traditional. That similar splendors might have been exhibited in the fifteenth century we shall see later. Symonds thus describes the introduction to the "Esaltazione." A skilful architect turned the field of San Giovanni into a theater, covered with a red tent. The rising of the curtain showed Jacob asleep with his head resting on rocks, while he wore a shirt of fine linen and cloth of silver stockings and had costly furs thrown over him. As he slept the heavens opened and seven angels appeared sitting on clouds and making "a most pleasant noise with horns, greater and less viols, lutes and organ.... The music of this and all the other interludes was the composition of Luca Bati, a man of this art most excellent." After this celestial music another part of the heavens opened and disclosed God the Father. A ladder was let down, and God leaning upon it "sang majestically to the sound of many instruments in a sonorous bass voice."

The other interludes were also filled with scenic and musical effects. For instance one showed the ecstasy of David, dancing before the ark "to the sound of a large lute, a violin, a trombone, but more especially to his own harp." These references to the employment of many instruments in accompanying the voice or the dance make us wonder whether our historical stories of the birth and development of the orchestra are well grounded. But we shall have occasion to consider this matter more fully when we approach the study of the musical apparatus of the first lyric dramas. It may be noted, however, in passing that the Italian word "violino" was used as late as 1597 to designate the tenor viol. This instance of uncertainty in terminology warns us to be careful in accepting all things literally.

Perhaps what is of greater significance is the fact that there seems to have been more uniformity of effort and style in the first secular drama, doubtless owing to its great superiority as a piece of literary art. That sacred plays were seldom written by men of literary rank and ability we have already noted. That they were long drawn out, cumbersome, disjointed and quite without dramatic design has also been indicated. Their real significance as forerunners of opera lies in their insistent employment of certain materials, such as verse, music and spectacular action, which afterwards became essential parts of the machinery of the lyric drama.

Indeed in the profusion of spectacular interludes one finds much that resembles not only opera, but also the English masque and sometimes even the French pastoral. Yet close examination will convince any student of operatic history that almost every form of theatrical performance, from the choral dance to the most elaborate festival show, exerted a certain amount of influence on the hybrid product called opera. For example, between the acts of "Saint Uliva," which required two days for its presentation, the "Masque of Hope" was given. The stage directions say: "You will cause three women, well beseen, to issue, one of them attired in white, one in red, the other in green, with golden balls in their hands, and with them a young man robed in white; and let him, after looking many times first on one and then on another of these damsels, at last stay still and say the following verses, gazing at her who is clad in green." The story of Echo and Narcissus was also enacted and the choir of nymphs which carried off the dead youth had a song beginning thus:

"Fly forth in bliss to heaven, Thou happy soul and fair."

On the other hand some few sacred plays showed skill in the treatment of character. The "Mary Magdalen" is one of these. The Magdalen is portrayed with power and even passion. But the general purpose of the sacred play, which was to instruct the populace in the stories of Bible history, precluded the exercise of high literary imagination. Fancy and the taste of the time seem to have governed the fashioning of these plays. Their historic importance thus becomes much larger than their artistic value. Their close approach to the character of early opera is beyond question.