Chapter 8

The Solos of the "Orfeo"

The failure of the vocal solo in the field of artistic music of Europe might be traced to the establishment of the unisonal chant in the service of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet in defining such ground we should easily be led to exaggerate the importance of the solo. In the infancy of modern music the solo existed only in the folk song, in the rhapsodies of religious ecstatics and in the uncertain lyrics of the minnesingers and troubadours. Of these the folk song, and the troubadour lyrics had some musical figure, out of which a clear form might have been developed. But, as all students of musical history know, the study of the art originated among the fathers of the church and in their pursuit of principles of structure they chose a path which led them directly away from the rhythmic and strophic basis of the song and into the realm of polyphonic imitation. The vocal solo had no place in their system and hence it never appears in the art music of their time.

Consequently the advent of the dramatic recitative introduced by Peri, Caccini and Cavaliere appears to be a striking phenomenon in the growth of music, and we are easily induced to believe that this new species burst upon the artistic firmament like a meteor. The truth is, however, that the vague desire for solo expression had made itself felt in music for centuries before the Florentine movement. The real significance of the Florentine invention was its destruction of the musical shackles which had so long hampered the advance toward truthful utterance.

We read frequently that the first instance of solo singing was the delivery of a madrigal of Corteccia in a play of 1539. The character Sileno sang the upper part and accompanied himself on the violone, while the lower parts were given to other instruments. But this was nothing new. This kind of solo was considerably older than Sileno and the performance of Baccio Ugolino in Poliziano's "Orfeo" was unquestionably of the same type. And this manner of delivering a solo, which Castiglione called "recitar alla lira," was a descendant of the art of singing with lute accompaniment which was well known in the fourteenth century.

Doubtless Casella, who was born in 1300 and set to music Dante's sonnet "Amor che nella mente," was one of the _cantori a liuto_. Minuccio d'Arezzo, mentioned by Boccaccio, was another. Here again we must recur to the observations of Burney and the examinations of Ambros. The former records that in the Vatican there is a poem by Lemmo of Pistoja, with the note "Casella diede il suono." It is likely that this musician was well known in Italy and that he would not have had to rely for his immortality upon the passing mention of a poet if the art of notation had been more advanced in his day.

The story of Minuccio, as told by Boccaccio, is this. A young maiden of Palermo, seized with violent love for the King, begged Minuccio to help her. Not being a verse-maker himself, he hastened to the poet Mico of Siena, who wrote a poem setting forth the maiden's woes. This Minuccio set at once to exquisite and heart-moving music and sang it for the King to the accompaniment of his own viol. The poem is in the main strophic and the melody is of similar nature. Whether Boccaccio or Mico wrote the poem matters not in the historical sense. The important facts are that such a poem exists and that a hint as to its music has come down to us.

In the "Decameron" we are told often how some one or other of the personages sings to the company. Sometimes it is a dance song, as for example the "Io son si vaga della mia bellezza." To this all the others spontaneously dance while singing the refrain in chorus. Another time the queen of the day, Emilia, invites Dioneo to sing a canzona. There is much pretty banter, while Dioneo teases the women by making false starts at several then familiar songs. In another place Dioneo with lute and Fiametta with viol play a dance. Again one sings while Dioneo accompanies her on the lute.

Thus Boccaccio in his marvelous portraiture of the social life of his time has casually handed down to us invaluable facts about vocal and instrumental music. There is no question that Ambros is fully justified in his conclusion that the _cantori a liuto_ were a well-marked class of musicians. They were vocal soloists and often improvisatori, clearly differentiated from the cantori a libro, who were "singers by book and note" and who sang the polyphonic art music of the time.

It is pretty well established that the songs of Dante were everywhere known and sung. We have reason to believe that many of those of Boccaccio were also familiar to the people. We may also feel confident that when most of the Italian lute singers of the time had acquired sufficient skill to make their own poems as well as their own melodies, they followed the models provided in the verses of the great masters. What is still more important for us to note is that these lyrics were strophical and that they were no further removed from the folk song of the era than the frottola was. Indeed they bore a closer resemblance to the frottola. They differed in that they were solos with instrumental accompaniment instead of being part songs unaccompanied.

But this difference is not so important as it appears. The part song method was at the basis of all these old lute songs. This is well proved by the fact that before the end of the century the device of turning part songs into solo pieces with lute accompaniment had become quite familiar. It was so common that we are driven to something more substantial than a mere suspicion that Casella and Minuccio employed a similar method and that the domination of polyphonic thought in music had spread from the regions occupied by the church compositions of Dufay and his contemporaries downward into the secular fancies of people whose daily thought was influenced by the authority of the church.

Furthermore this method of turning part songs into solos survived until the era of the full fledged madrigal dramas of Vecchi in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and at what may be called the golden era of the frottola was generally and successfully applied to that species of composition. Whatever the troubadours and minnesingers may have done toward establishing a metrical melodic form of monophonic character was soon obliterated by the swift popularity of part singing and the immense vogue of the secular songs of the polyphonic composers. When the desire for the vocal solo made itself felt in the exquisitely sensuous life of medieval Italy, it found its only gratification in the easy art of adaptation. In such scenes as those described by Boccaccio and much later by Castiglione there was no incentive to artistic reform, no impulse to creative activity.

We find ourselves, then, equipped with these significant facts: first, that the composition of secular music in polyphonic forms was at least as old as the thirteenth century; that part singing was practised in Italy as far back as the fourteenth century; that songs for one voice were made with Italian texts at least as early as the time of Dante and Boccaccio; that the art of arranging polyphonic compositions as vocal solos by giving the secondary parts to the accompanying instrument was known in the time of Minuccio and Casella; that at the time of Poliziano's "Orfeo" the frottola was the reigning form of part song, and that then and for years afterward it was customary to arrange frottole as solos by giving the polyphony to the lute or other accompanying instrument.

It seems, then, that we shall not be far astray if we conclude that the solo parts of Poliziano's lyric drama consisted of music of the better frottola type and that the moving appeals of his hero were accompanied on a "lyre" of the period in precisely the same manner as frottole transformed into vocal solos were accompanied on the lute. For these reasons an example of the method of arranging a frottola for voice and lute will give us some idea of the character of the music sung by Baccio Ugolino in the "Orfeo." The examples here offered are those given in the great history of Ambros. The first is a fragment of a frottola (composed by Tromboncino) in its original shape. The second shows the same music as arranged for solo voice and lute by Franciscus Bossinensis as found in a collection published by Petrucci in 1509.

[Musical Notation: two excerpts]

How far removed this species of lyric solo was from the dramatic recitative of Peri and Caccini is apparent at a single glance. But on the other hand it is impossible to be blind to its relationship to the more metrical arioso of Monteverde's earlier work or perhaps to the canzone of Caccini's "Nuove Musiche." The line of development or progress is distinctly traceable. At this point it is not essential that we should satisfy ourselves that the solo songs of Caccini were descendants of the lyrics of the _cantori a liuto_, for when the two species are placed in juxtaposition the lineage is almost unmistakable. What we do need to remember here is that the method of the lute singers entered fully into the construction of the score--if it may be so called--of Poliziano's "Orfeo" and passed from that to the madrigal drama and was there brought under the reformatory experiments of Galilei and his contemporaries. This subject must be discussed more fully in a later chapter.

The first lyric number of the "Orfeo," that sung by Aristæus, is plainly labeled "canzona," and was, therefore, without doubt a song made after the manner of the lutenists. The words "forth from thy wallet take thy pipe" indicate that a wind instrument figured in this number. What sort of instrument we shall inquire in the next chapter. At present we may content ourselves with assuming that no highly developed solo part was assigned to it. The existence of such a part would imply the co-existence of considerable musicianship on the part of the pipe player and of an advanced technic in the composition of instrumental obbligati. It might also presuppose the existence of a system of notation much better than that of the fifteenth century. But this is a point about which we cannot be too sure.

The decision must be sought in the general state of music at the time. The learned masters cultivated only _a capella_ choral music, and the unlearned imitated them. There was no systematic study of instrumental composition. Even the organ had as yet acquired no independent office, but simply supported voices by doubling their notes. It seems unlikely, then, that the pipe in "Orfeo" could have had a real part. What it probably did was to repeat as a sort of ritornello the clearly marked refrain of the song. This would have been thoroughly in keeping with the growing tendency of the frottola to use refrains and advance toward strophical form.

The lyre, with which Baccio Ugolino as Orfeo accompanied himself, may have been a cithara, but the probabilities are that it was not. As late as the time of Prætorius's great work (Syntagma Musicum) the word "lyra" was used to designate certain instruments of close relationship to the viol family. Prætorius tells us that there were two kinds of Italian lyres. The large lyre, called _lirone perfetto_, or arce violyra, was in structure like the bass of the viola da gamba, but that the body and the neck on account of the numerous strings were somewhat wider. Some had twelve, some fourteen and some even sixteen strings, so that madrigals and compositions both chromatic and diatonic could be performed and a fine harmony produced. The small lyre was like the tenor viola di braccio and was called the lyra di braccio. It had seven strings, two of them outside the finger board and the other five over it. Upon this instrument also certain harmonized compositions could be played. The pictures of these two lyres show that they looked much like viols and were played with bows.[27] An eighth century manuscript shows an instrument with a body like a mandolin, a neck without frets and a small bow. This instrument is entitled "lyra" in the manuscript. If now we come down to the period when the modern opera was taking form we learn that Galilei sang his own "Ugolino" monody and accompanied himself on the viola. Various pictures show us that small instruments of the bowed varieties were used by the minnesingers, and again by jongleurs in the fifteenth century. Early Italian painters put such instruments into the hands of angels and carvers left them for us to see, as in the cathedral of Amiens. In fact there is every reason to believe that the wandering poets and minstrels of the Middle Ages used the small vielle, rebek or lyre for their accompaniments much oftener than the harp, which was more cumbersome and a greater impediment in traveling.

[Footnote 27: Michael Prætorius, "Syntagma Musicum," vol. ii, Organographia. Wolfenbüttel, 1619-20.]

The instruments used to support song, that of the troubadour or that of a Casella, or later still that of a Galilei, being of the same lineage, the only novelty was the adaptation to them of the lutenist's method of arranging polyphonic music for one voice with accompaniment. That this offered no large difficulties is proved by the account of Prætorius. If at the close of the sixteenth century chromatic compositions, which were then making much progress, could be performed on a bowed lyre, there is no reason to think that in Poliziano's time there would have been much labor in arranging frottola melodies for voice and lyra di braccio. It is safe to assume that the instrument to which Baccio Ugolino was wont to improvise and which was therefore utilized in "Orfeo" was the lyra di braccio and that del Lungo's imaginative picture must be corrected by the substitution of the bow for the plectrum. We have not even recourse to the supposition that Ugolino may have employed the pizzicato since that was not invented till after his day by Monteverde.

We are, however, compelled to conclude that Baccio Ugolino preceded Corteccia in this manner of solo, afterwards called "recitar alla lira." We may now reconstruct for ourselves the classic scene with Orpheus "singing on the hill to his lyre" the verses "O meos longum modulata lusus." The music was the half melancholy, half passionate melody of some wandering Italian frottola which readily fitted itself to the sonorous Sapphics. The accompaniment on the mellow lyra di braccio, one of the tender sisters of the viola, was a simplified version of the subordinate voice parts of the frottola. And perchance there were even other instruments, an embryonic orchestra. Here, indeed, we must pause lest reconstructive ardor carry us too far. We must content ourselves with the conclusion that the vocal music of the entire drama was simple in melodic structure, for such was the character of the part music out of which it was made. It was certainly well fitted to be one of the parents of the recitative of Peri and Caccini with the church chant as the other.