Chapter 9

The Orchestra of the "Orfeo"

That there was some sort of an orchestra in the "Orfeo" is probable, though it is not wholly certain. The letter of the Envoy Pauluzo on the performance of Ariosto's "Suppositi" at the Vatican in March, 1518, has already been quoted. From this we learn that there was an orchestra containing fifes, bag-pipes, two cornets, some viols and lutes and a small organ. It is a pity that Pauluzzo did not record the number of stringed instruments in order that we might have some idea of the balance of this orchestra. On the other hand, as there was no system of orchestration at that time, we might not learn much from the enumeration. Rolland, in commenting on this letter, says, as we have already noted, that this was the type of musical plays performed in Italy at least as far back as the time of Poliziano. There is no imperative demand that Rolland's statement on this point should be accepted as authoritative, for his admirable book is without evidence that the author gave this matter any special attention. On the other hand it is almost certain that his assertion contains the truth. All the instruments mentioned by him were in use long before the date of the "Orfeo." Furthermore assemblies of instruments played together, as we well know. But we are without data as to what they played, and are driven to the conclusion that since there was no separate composition for instruments till near the close of the sixteenth century, the performance of the early assemblies of instruments must have been devoted to popular songs or dances of the time. A little examination into the character of these early "orchestras" may serve to throw light on the nature of the instrumental accompaniments in Poliziano's "Orfeo."

Symonds's description of the performance of Cecchi's "Esaltazione della Croce," already quoted in Chapter III, shows us that in 1589 a sacred representation had an orchestra of viols, lutes, horns and organ, that it played an interlude with special music composed by Luca Bati, and that it also accompanied a solo allotted to the Deity. Another interlude showed David dancing to lute, viol, trombone and harp. It is evident, therefore, that at a period a century after that of the "Orfeo" there was a certain sort of orchestra. But this period was somewhat later than that of Striggio, who had already employed orchestras of considerable variety. In his "La Cofanaria" (1566) he used two gravicembali, four viols, two trombones, two straight flutes, one cornet, one traverso and two lutes, and in a motet composed in 1569 he had eight viols, eight trombones, eight flutes, an instrument of the spinet family and a large lute, together with voices. To delve backward from this point is not so easy as it looks, yet however far back we may choose to go we cannot fail to find evidences that assemblies of instruments were employed, sometimes to accompany voices and again to play independently.

The antiquity of music at banquets, for example, is attested by sayings as old as Solomon, by bitter comments of Plato, by the account of Xenophon and by passages in the comedies of Aristophanes. The instrumental music at banquets in Plato's time was that of Greek girl flute players and harpers. Early in the Middle Ages the banquet music consisted of any collection of instruments that chanced to be at hand. In an ancient manuscript in the National Library of Paris there is a picture of Heinrich of Meissen, the minnesinger (born 1260), conducting a choir of singers and instrumental performers. The instruments are viols and wooden wind instruments of the schalmei family. A bas relief in the church of St. Gregory at Boscherville in Normandy shows an orchestra of several players. This relief is of the twelfth century. It presents first on the left a king who plays a three-stringed gamba, which he holds between his knees, like a violoncello. A woman performer handles an organistrum, a sort of large hurdy-gurdy, sometimes (as apparently in this case) requiring two players, one for the crank and another for the stops. Then comes a man with a pandean pipe, next another with a semicircular harp and then one with a portable organ. Next comes a performer on a round-bodied fiddle (the usual form of the instrument at that time). Next to him is a harper, using a plectrum, and at the right end of the group is a pair of players, man and woman, performing on a glockenspiel. This orchestra was probably playing for dancing, as no singers are in sight.

In a fifteenth century breviary reposing in the library of Brussels there is a representation of a similar orchestra, and this brings us nearer to the era of Poliziano's "Orfeo." The instruments are harp, lute, dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy, double flute, pommer (an ancient oboe form), bag-pipe, trombone, portable organ, triangle and a straight flute with its accompanying little tambour. One of the musicians did not play, but beat time as a director. It is interesting to make a brief comparison between the two representations, for this shows the novelties which entered between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. The lute, the trombone, the pommer and the triangle were new acquisitions. If now we refer again to the orchestra of 1518 mentioned by Pauluzo we shall seem to have gone backward. But the truth must be clear to all students that these orchestras were not brought together with any definite musical design. They consisted of the players who chanced to be at hand. Even the letter of the Duke of Milan in 1473 (see Chapter III), in which he announces his intention of engaging a good orchestra from Rome, can hardly mean anything more than a purpose to get as many good instrumentalists as he could.[28]

[Footnote 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.]

While, then, it must be confessed that no conclusive evidence can be produced that an orchestra was employed in the "Orfeo," the indications are strong that there was one. We may assume without much fear of error that it was used only to accompany the choral numbers and the dance and that in fulfilling the last mentioned function it was heard to the best advantage. Years after the period of the "Orfeo" of Poliziano independent instrumental forms had not yet been developed. Fully a century later compositions "da cantare e sonare" betray to us the fact that bodies of instruments performing without voices merely played the madrigals which at other times were sung. Such compositions were not conceived in the instrumental idiom and must have floated in an exceedingly thin atmosphere when separated from text and the expressive nuances of the human tone. But the music of the dance was centuries old and it had in all eras been sung by instruments, as well as by voices. The invasion of the realm of popular melody by crude imitations of the polyphonic devices of the Netherlanders could not have crushed out the melodic and rhythmic basis of dance music and this had fitted itself to the utterance of instruments. We are therefore justified in believing that if the accompaniment of the first chorus in the "Orfeo" was superfluous and vague that of the final ballata must have been clearer in character and better suited to the nature of the scene. The dance following the ballata must have been effective. The instruments were most probably lutes, viols, flute, oboe, and possibly bag-pipe, hurdy-gurdy and little organ.

We have already inquired into the nature of the instrument which Baccio Ugolino carried on the stage and with which after the manner of the minstrels of his time he accompanied himself. It remains now only to ask what was the pipe which the shepherd Aristæus mentions in the first scene. It was probably not a flageolet, though that instrument suggests itself as particularly appropriate to the episode. But the good Dr. Burney says that the flageolet was invented by the Sieur Juvigny, who played it in the "Ballet Comique de la Royne," the first French pastoral opera, in 1581. It could have been a recorder, the ancestor of the flageolet, which was probably in use in the fourteenth and surely in the fifteenth century. But more probably it was one of the older reed instruments of the oboe family, the pommer or possibly a schalmei. The schalmei is mentioned as far back as Sebastian Virdung's "Musica getuscht und ausgezogen" (1511). Its ancestor was probably the zamr-el-kebyr, an Oriental reed instrument. The schalmei was developed into a whole family, enumerated by Prætorius in the work already mentioned. The highest of these, the little schalmei, was seldom used, but the "soprano schalmei is the primitive type of the modern oboe."[29]

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

It is thus tolerably certain that the instrumental tone used to voice the pastoral character of the scene was the same as that which Beethoven used in his "Pastoral" symphony, as Berlioz used in his "Fantastic," as Gounod used in his "Faust," and that thus at least one element of the instrumental embodiment of Poliziano's story has come down to us.