II
The fifteenth century saw Italy well advanced toward the state in which it has been compared to ancient Greece. The work begun by Petrarch had made mighty strides, the recovery of ancient learning and ancient art had become the great passion of the age, and the worship of beauty was the second, if not the first, creed of a people but recently emerged from the broils of civil war and settled down to a prosperous period, under a benevolent tyranny of which the rule of the Medici at Florence was the arch-type. Learning and culture had become a badge of nobility and the patronage of the arts an instrument of power. That music shared in the boon which came to art is unquestionable; a musical education was once again, as in ancient Greece, an essential part of a gentleman’s equipment; poets and musicians shared the patronage of princes, who themselves had no greater ambition than to be accounted men of genius—in truth, Florence had become the Athens of the modern world.
Cosimo de Medici returned from his Venetian exile in 1434 and, once installed in power, we see him surrounded by such men as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia. Gemistos Plethos, the Byzantine Greek, fires his passion for Plato’s philosophy and Marsilio Ficino is trained under his patronage to translate the works of the sage. Vespasiano assures us of his versatility as follows: ‘When giving audience to a scholar, he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians he showed his acquaintance with theology, ... astrologers found him well versed in their science, ... musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he much delighted.’
Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), far surpassed his grandsire in talent and culture. He was a writer of prose and poetry, gave the impulse to the revival of a national literature, and may be said to have raised popular poetry to the dignity of an art, in writing new verses for the canzone a ballo which the young men and girls sang and danced upon the squares of Florence to celebrate the return of May, and the canti carnascialeschi, the songs that the Florentine populace sang, masked, at carnival times. He organized for these occasions great pageants in which he himself took part, engaging the best artists for the embellishment of chariots and the designing of costumes, while he himself wrote songs appropriate to the characters represented on the cars, causing new musical settings to be made by eminent composers. ‘Every festivity,’ says Symonds, ‘May morning tournaments, summer evening dances on the squares of Florence, weddings, carnival processions, and vintage banquets at the villa, had their own lyrics with music and the Carola.’
Lorenzo’s famous academy constituted perhaps the greatest intellectual galaxy of the age, for at his table sat Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, Luigi Pulci. Surrounded by these companions we behold him in the streets of Florence, not disdaining to perform his own songs, in the midst of an approving populace, or, perchance, ‘when Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno and the large Italian stars come forth above,’ accompanied by a few kindred spirits, lute in hand, singing the verses of a Dante or a Petrarch to the accompaniment of soft Italian zephyrs; or, again, in his villa ‘on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole,’ with Michael Angelo, ‘seated between Ficino and Politian, with the voices of prophets vibrating in his memory and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears ... till Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo’s last-made ballata.’[105]
To such gatherings of boon companions and to the small domestic circle the cantori a liuto were finally relegated, for, as we shall see, their usefulness had been outlived. Such men as these were the perpetuators of their art and the last, perhaps, to cultivate the spontaneous monodies of their Florentine forbears, for it is unthinkable that these worshippers of beauty, these æsthetic sentimentalists should have escaped the charm of that school and have forgone it in favor of that which followed. For meantime the musicians of the Netherland school continued to spread their propaganda in Italy, and so successfully, that their contrapuntal works began to supersede the native monodic style.
Altar of the Virgin.
After the painting by Bellini (Venice Academy).
Their method had, indeed, undergone great improvement: Josquin des Près and his more expressive style had achieved tremendous popularity throughout Europe.[106] Toward the end of the fifteenth century these masters cultivated the secular forms more and more, always, of course, in their wonted contrapuntal method. They would frequently take the melody of a favorite folk-song, use it as their tenor (the middle part) around which they wove an artful counterpoint. In Germany the ‘harmonization’ of popular melodies, or melodies in the popular vein, had been going forward for some time, and it is a noteworthy fact that Heinrich Isaac, one of those most prominently engaged in this work, was organist in Florence from 1484 to 1494 and again after 1514. The style of writing adopted in these popular settings was a simple ‘note against note,’ which emphasized chord progressions rather than melodic integrity.
Definite ideas of harmony were beginning to take root about this time. Ramis de Pareja, the Spanish theoretician, in 1482 had, by his new mathematical definitions of the ratio of intervals, established the consonant nature of the triad; Franchino Gafori and Ludovico Fogliano (d. 1539) had insisted upon the same principle. In 1558 Gioseffo Zarlino[107] gave to the world his Institutioni harmoniche, which, following the Ptolomean determination of intervals, established the natural relations of the tones of the major triad (divisione armonica) and in the course of the century his ideas of harmony became the common property of musicians. With harmony as the predominating principle of music, with ‘vertical’ hearing rather than ‘horizontal’ as the prevailing habit, and the constantly freer use of chromatics, the doom of ecclesiastical modes was sounded, even if not fully accomplished till later, and the real advent of modern music had been reached.
The Italians, from early times as to-day primarily and essentially melodists, never found great appeal in the barbarous descant and counterpoint of the Netherlanders. ‘But they could not but perceive the charm of harmony, once it had been cleansed of its dross, when composers no longer worked for the eye of their expert colleagues alone, but for the ears of the people as well.’ Hence polyphonic music was gradually accepted in the place of the native monodies which had now lost caste, and it became fashionable to perform motets for the entertainment of one’s guests. However, the number of native singers able to perform this ‘learned’ music was insufficient to supply even the churches outside of Rome, much less the palaces of the aristocracy, until the increased influx of Netherlanders as singers and teachers spread their art among the musicians of Italy. During the sixteenth century the simplification of notation made the art of reading music accessible to the dilettanti, who now formed musical coteries for the performance of polyphonic songs. Native composers busied themselves to supply the demand and their products were spread broadcast by enterprising publishers, for meantime, in 1476, the art of printing had been introduced in Rome.[108] The first of these publishers was Ottaviano dei Petrucci, who, though not its inventor, so advanced the art of music printing as to render it a practical medium. His office in Venice produced in 1501 a collection of ninety-six songs written by various composers. Thus he brought polyphonic music to the people and so caused the old monodies of the lutenists and earlier masters to pass still farther into oblivion.
Among the native products of Petrucci’s press we see a number of four-part songs of lighter genre called frottole. This was a simple popular form akin to the ballata and usually supposed to be of humorous content. The frottola was essentially a street song, originally sung to an improvised accompaniment, and did not really belong to the a capella species. But in Petrucci’s collection (between 1504 and 1509 he published nine books of frottole) they appear as polyphonic pieces in a manner of the time.[109] In this guise they were stepping stones to a nobler form which was to achieve immense popularity and, practised by the more educated circles of amateurs, became the ‘chamber music’ of the period. This was the madrigal or, to be precise, the new madrigal, for though the old verses of Dante, Petrarch, etc., served as bases, its musical structure had little to do with the earlier form (see above, p. 264).
This, in fact, was the only excuse for adopting the name madrigal for this new type of composition. Composers were weary of the short forms with their endless repetition of phrases and, recognizing the superiority of the old classic poems both in sentiment and structure, proceeded to apply to them their polyphonic skill. Like in the motet the setting was continuous (durchkomponiert), with or without reiteration of musical ideas, but, unlike that stereotyped form, the madrigal was the child of free invention throughout, not a contrapuntal exercise upon a given cantus firmus. The tenor was not more prominent than the other voices; neither, on the other hand, was the treble a real ‘melody’ in the modern sense, being the result of simultaneous calculation. The madrigal was the a capella composition par excellence and, as the secular counterpart of the motet, became the standard form in which the pure vocal style was developed.