I
The last half of the fifteenth century was a period of unrest and profound change in music. As we have seen,[10] it was in this period that the old pure style of church music reached its highest perfection under Palestrina, and, because the resources of the style had been exhausted, began to give place to the style which we know as modern. Out of this change grew directly most of the modern musical forms—the opera, the oratorio, the independent orchestral piece with its searching out of instrumental resources, and—the Art-Song.
It is one of the vagaries of history that the Art-Song, though it commenced with definite consciousness about the year 1600, did not become a firmly established art form for full two centuries. By all the signs of the times it seems as though it should quickly have risen to maturity. The humanistic enthusiasm of the Renaissance had sensitized people to individual emotions and moods—the very material of the art-song. Singing was universal and had attained a high degree of technical excellence. And the earliest composers of opera of the time had hit upon the very principles which Schubert exemplified two centuries later—the accurate following of the words by expressive music, independent of ‘pattern’ form. But for various reasons, which we shall examine presently, the art-song became side-tracked. Within twenty years of its birth it had been exiled to a dark cellar of history and its feeble attempts at growth had been smothered by an institution which presently captured the whole civilized world—the opera.
So the history of song from 1600 to 1800 is not unlike that of the five centuries preceding—a delving into the out-of-the-way places where there is to be found much that is charming and interesting, but little with broad and conscious artistic drive. Nevertheless, song in this period does show organic development. The outcast infant in the cellar does grow and become beautiful. But its growth is that of music in general. As technical materials and artistic consciousness develop, song partakes of the common benefits, but only secondarily, here and there, as the servant picks crumbs from the master’s table.
First of all, in common with music in general, song partook of the change from the old modes to the major and minor scales. And here, indeed, it was a leader rather than a follower. We have seen in the previous chapter how the folk-songs of Provence and of the Rhine blossomed into a gentle and flowing major mode centuries before the ecclesiastical music had achieved anything like a feeling for the tonic. And it was perhaps partly because of the introduction of folk-tunes into church music that the latter presently began to show evidences of the change. In all countries we can see how the folk-song, increasing its hold over conscious composers, began to set the spirit for all secular music.
Great Singers of the Past.
Top: Pauline Viardot-García and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient
Bottom: Adelina Patti and Jenny Lind
In Italy, where the change from the old style to the new was most marked and dramatic, the art-song grew gradually out of the madrigal and part-song. While we have no traces of the folk-song of the sixteenth century, we know that composers began to write their part-songs in the folk-spirit. This meant, besides the predominance of the major mode and the tonic feeling, a stressing of the upper or ‘melody’ voice, whereas in the older contrapuntal music it was the tenor which carried the chief tune. The frottolle of the time were ballads popular both in words and melody; the villanelle, or ‘village songs,’ sought to preserve an artless and rustic flavor; and the villotte, or drinking songs, were filled with the high spirits for which the Italians are famous. All these were essentially folk-like melodies treated contrapuntally. Gradually the counterpoint became simpler, reflecting perhaps the growing simplification of church music, and with Perissone Cambio, in 1547, the part-songs assumed the nature of melodies harmonized in four parts with a free use of passing notes—much as in the four-part chorales of J. S. Bach. The simplification continued, and with Giacomo Gastoldi, in 1591, we have true ‘chord-for-note’ harmonizations of melodies in the modern style. With this, the song element has been liberated. The melody has gained complete mastery, and the harmony is used simply to enrich and support the upper part.
And as we have seen in another chapter[11] singers quickly seized the import of the new developments. As early as 1539 Sileno is recorded to have sung the upper part of a madrigal, with wind instruments for the lower voices. Of course these madrigals were still essentially polyphonic, but the composers of the time steadily continued to stress the upper voice for its melodic value and to simplify and suppress the inner voices until they became a mere harmonic support. It was this ‘one-voiced madrigal’ which became the parent of the airs du cour and the simple solo songs and romances of seventeenth century France.
But the abortive development of the art-song was an entirely different matter. It had little or nothing to do with the tendency to stress a madrigal melody, or with the liberation of the seventeenth-century romance. The style called monody, or the stile rappresentativo, which might have produced a true art-song in the seventeenth century, was invented or revived quite in opposition to the madrigal and its spirit. The one thing it had in common with the new madrigal was the ‘chord-for-note’ harmonic style. This, thanks to the popularity of the new madrigal, had become common property. When the Florentine innovators began their experiments, they found it ready to hand. But the true monodic style was, so far as song is concerned, a wholly abortive affair. Its history has been traced elsewhere.[12] We know of the painful efforts toward monody for nearly two centuries previous to the Florentine experiments; we know of the solo songs of Vincenzo Galilei in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and of the songs in Giulio Caccini’s Nuovo Musiche, published in 1600. We dimly feel that a musical style devoted to the conscientious reproduction of the spirit of the words, detail for detail, should have resulted in a vigorous tradition of art-song. And yet we see the whole force of monody veering into the opera, quickly being caught up in the da capo aria form, and in an unbelievably short time forgetting all about its early ideals of textual fidelity and serving only as an exposition gallery for vocal virtuosity. Within a quarter of a century monody had forsaken one ideal for its polar opposite. The true ‘representative style’ had been left high and dry. It remained neglected and forgotten until Beethoven wrote An die ferne Geliebte, or Schubert his Gretchen am Spinnenrad.
Why was this? How could an art-form, which had caught the very essence of the modern song, thus sell its birthright for a mess of pottage? Reason enough. The mess of pottage was very attractive. For the monodic experiments of the Florentines were the play-things of a set of dilettantes. They were artificial and exotic. They had consciously no use for the true musical tradition, the folk-song, which was living and throbbing among the people. The body was there but the soul was missing. The Florentines were chiefly interested in decorating the lives of the aristocracy, in arranging court masques and private theatricals. Aristocracy is always weak when it exists in opposition to and at the expense of the life of the people, as it did in the decadence of Renaissance Italy. The art which such an aristocracy produces may be brilliant, but it is empty. It tinkles and it clatters, but it does not resound. For the isolated aristocrat is not interested in humanity, but in his own glorification. The joys and sorrows of the people are repulsive to him: he seeks to escape sorrows, and he longs for some more highly colored joys. He floats on the surface of life as he floats on the surface of society. His art tends to become the maximum of show and the minimum of meaning.
So when the aristocracy of the time discovered the new monodic style, it sought to make use of it for theatrical entertainment, neglecting the more human and personal song. Vocal coloratura provided aristocracy with precisely the thing it had unconsciously been seeking—the maximum of show and the minimum of meaning. The skilled singers of the time caught the trick of introducing impromptu embellishments on the simple monodic recitative. Monteverdi hit upon the device which would give such coloratura singing a centre of gravity—the da capo form. Monody as heightened speech was wholly forgotten, except for the debased recitativo secco, which bridged the gaps between arias, and tinsel opera became the furore of the leisured class. The middle class of Italy, becoming prosperous in business and always anxious to ape its betters, flocked to these entertainments as soon as large opera houses began to spring up, and opera as an institution overshadowed all other musical forms. The oratorio, presumably devotional in spirit, became no less debased in its display. Song, as a great art-form, was strangled for another century or two, receiving no new ideals and serving as a mere diversion for composer and singer. Thus does the easy convenience of abstract form often stifle poetic expression.
We have spoken of the da capo form and its unfortunate influence on the monodic style. Strictly speaking, the term da capo was not used until Tenaglia used it in his opera Cleano, in 1661. But the ordinary statement that the da capo was invented by Tenaglia (or by Alessandro Scarlatti, as is more frequently said) is quite misleading. Tenaglia’s da capo aria is of little historical importance. The composer used the term probably not out of a sense of form, but out of pure laziness, preferring not to copy out the opening section a second time. The real da capo, which in its more developed state becomes the sonata form, can be traced back vaguely into primitive music, and exists in miniature perfection in many folk-songs. It becomes a recognized mold for musical composition about the time of Monteverdi. With the later opera and oratorio composers we find it in a debased state, where it exists not as an artistic form but as a mere stenographic convenience.
This debasement is typical of the cheapening of opera which continued pretty steadily up to the time of Gluck. The coloratura aria obscured to all minds the expressive possibilities of the stile rappresentativo, and left to song nothing but the old madrigal tradition fused with certain elements of popular feeling. The many arias, ariettas, canzoni, cantate, and even one-voiced madrigals, which were published by the fashionable composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed little regard for dramatic or precise emotional expression, but continued to sing with the placid lyrical feeling of the great madrigal age. They were only obliged, with the growth of solo singing, to become clearer as to form, more regular in metre and line. For their ability to achieve this they had the popular song almost wholly to thank. Scarlatti’s beautiful canzonetta, O cessate di piagarmi, with its simple guitar accompaniment, might pass for a Neapolitan folk-song of to-day. Yet, on the whole, the solo songs of this period failed to fulfill the high artistic promise of the early seventeenth century.
There was a great quantity of these lyrical pieces, however, and they gained a high popularity. For the most part they remain to-day in their original state, published with the curious notation and the archaic clefs of the time, unknown except to the savants. But certain anthologies have presented a few of the songs to the general public, and these have astonished hearers with their strange placid beauty. In some ways it is the best genius of the time which we find in these songs. In them the lyric impulse of the Italians came out in its purest form. The flashy ideals of the opera house were far removed from their tender strains. Their beauty is like the sunlight of an early spring morning, which illumines all things and exaggerates none. The words, though naïve and somewhat conventional in their continual playing with sentimental love, are not without their grace and beauty. And the music is remarkably varied. Among these songs we find lullabies, fanciful dialogues, dance songs, gentle laments, and delightful musical jokes. There is among them much less of pure convention than in the operas of the period, and at times there is a sensuous or emotional quality which seems to look forward many decades. To the singer these songs are especially valuable, since they represent at its purest the old Italian ideal of bel canto, free from either declamatory or coloratura influence. There can be no better school for the formation of purity of tone and fluency of phrasing than these early canzoni.
Their general character, as contrasted with that of modern music, is strikingly illustrated in Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier. In the first act of this work the court musician sings a few strophes of a song which is supposed to be of the period of the opera, and the composer has deftly imitated the music of the time. The song shows no touch of emotional agitation or harshness. It has no climaxes, scarcely any variations of tonal power. It is merely a lovely melody, sung purely and smoothly, somewhat aimless in melodic formation, in long fluent phrases and gentle melancholy cadences. To hear this canzone, contrasted with the agitated modern music which surrounds it in the opera, will demonstrate most eloquently the spiritual difference between the music of the seventeenth and that of the twentieth century.
The song composers of this period are those whose names we meet in the history of opera and oratorio, for it continued to be the part of every popular composer in the larger forms to maintain and broaden his reputation by means of small and popular pieces. Further, some of the best of the songs are taken from the larger works. Not all the arias were of the coloratura type. Often, especially in the seventeenth century, charming canzoni and ariosos found their way into a long choral or stage work. The harmonic support (in many cases supplied by the modern editors from the original figured bass) is at the beginning simple and somewhat angular. But as the seventeenth century wears on we find Monteverdi’s great discovery of the unprepared dissonance working more freely into the texture of the accompaniment. The lower voices of the accompaniment become more connected and song-like as the rappresentativo feeling gives way to the lyrical. And long before the end of the century the simpler vocal numbers begin to look very much like those of the early Handel operas. With Alessandro Scarlatti, working at the end of the century, the change from the madrigal style of Palestrina’s time is complete. In place of pure, motionless triads and solid, block-like architecture, we have the movement and flow of song in all the parts. Music becomes sharply differentiated in character by the nature of the emotion or feeling it is intended to express. What we miss, judging by modern standards, is a definite rise and fall of the feeling. The phrases seem too long, too little differentiated. There is no definite climax-point in the whole. There is too much linked sweetness. But this is precisely the virtue of the songs. They are the canonization of bel canto. They seek before all else perfect purity of tone and style.
From the Monteverdi operas, much talked-of but little known, we should mention the famous arioso from Arianna, the so-called ‘Ariadne’s Lament.’ In all the Italian music of the time no more poignant emotional utterance can be found. In its freedom and directness, it seems to be a foreshadowing of the opera of the late nineteenth century. But as the line of opera composers continues the pure bel canto ideal gains the upper hand. This we find represented in the one-voiced madrigals of Monteverdi’s contemporaries, as, for example, in the charming Amarilli of Caccini. Cavalli, who continued the operatic tradition of Monteverdi and gave greater freedom to the aria, gives us a type of song which contains many elements of the popular. Carissimi, first writer of oratorios and founder of the great Italian coloratura tradition, writes more brilliantly. One of the best known songs of the time is his Vittoria,[13] which has an irresistible verve and energy. Marco Antonio Cesti, follower and disciple of Carissimi, was by nature more of a lyricist. His style is wonderfully suave and melodious, often appealing in a striking way to the sentiments and the senses. Though he was primarily a religious composer, his many madrigals and secular ariettas bring to us the sunny sensuousness of the south. Many more of the popular composers of the time are all but unknown to us.
Antonio Caldara (1671-1763), a maestro di capella in Mantua and Vienna, wrote secular songs, of which one, Come raggio di sol,[14] has preserved his fame. This, with its fine sostenuto melody over a throbbing accompaniment of repeated chords, carries eloquently a delicate rise and fall of feeling which seems to be of the age of Schubert. A certain G. B. Fasolo, whose dates are not even known, has left us a charming song of sentiment, Cangia, cangia tue voglie, which in its delicacy of workmanship suggests the French songs of the eighteenth century. Giovanni Battista Bassani (1657-1716), maestro di cappella at Bologna and Ferrara, left a number of love-songs of exquisite grace and tenderness, of which the lullaby, Posate, dormite, will serve as an example. Other song-writers, most of them more or less known for their work in the larger forms, were Antonio Vivaldi, Alessandro Stradella, Francesco P. Sacrati, Paolo Magni, Jacopo Perti, Antonio Lotti, Niccola Jomelli, Domenico Sarri, Raffaello Rontani, Benedetto Marcello, Pier Domenico Paradies, Francesco Gasparini, Andrea Falconiere, Francesco Durante, G. B. Bononcini, Arcangelo del Leuto, and S. de Luca. Some of these men are no more than names in musical history, who are known at all only because some dusty manuscript preserved their fame. For some the primary biographical facts are missing.
Others, of course, were men of wide influence, who have made a place for themselves in musical history. But the excellence of the work of the obscure men reveals to us how widespread was the art of musical composition at the time, how excellent the tradition that was rooted in the whole nation.
Easily the greatest song-writer of the period was the distinguished opera composer, Alessandro Scarlatti. He was a notable innovator in many forms, and this power of origination is shown in the poetic variety he has given to his songs. We have already mentioned his folk-like song, O cessate di piagarmi, which combines with the grace of the dance the sweetness which invites to tears. In a quite different vein nothing could be finer than Su, venite a consiglio, in which the author holds a dialogue with his Fancies—a smoothly-moving allegro of the utmost delicacy. Scarlatti’s emotional style is represented in the arietta, Sento nel core, and as a pupil of the worldly Carissimi he can, of course, show numberless arias in the brilliant bravura style which was so popular at the time.
Pergolesi, the brilliant composer of opera buffa, whose early death robbed music of one of its most promising votaries, is known to singers everywhere by his song Tre giorni. The purest Italian lyricism also flows in his andantino song, Se tu m’ami, se sospiri. Coming down to a later date we find the extremely popular song-writer and composer of opera buffa, Giovanni Paesiello (1741-1816), whose arietta, Caro mio ben, is one of the purest examples of cantilena in all music. We may also notice the delicate gypsy song, Chi vuol la Zingarella. In Paesiello we find all the traditional Italian virtues in the highest degree—simplicity, grace, expressiveness—together with a sympathetic understanding of the voice which has rarely been surpassed in Italian song-writing.