IV
During all this period song, as we have tried to show, was under a cloud. It was the aria, illegitimate child of the stile rappresentativo and dearest daughter of sunny Italy, that held sway over the nations. Vocal music was commonly thought in terms of the aria. All else was little better than a diversion for an idle moment—understood, of course, that we are speaking of polite culture. What aria meant to the seventeenth and especially to the early eighteenth century was chiefly vocal display of one sort or another. But formally we may distinguish it by the da capo form. Da capo, meaning ‘from the beginning,’ was the open sesame into the mazes of vocalization. Monteverdi must get the credit for it. He lit the fire. Numerous rubbish piled on by other hands furnished the smoke. For Monteverdi was, above and beyond the innovator in him, a skilled and sensitive musician. He felt, and felt truly, that the stile rappresentativo made his beloved music decidedly a second best. Very well to reveal the emotional qualities of the text! But if the music cannot itself hang together there is something wrong. And it was with one of those very keen and very simple devices that Monteverdi righted matters. ‘Represent’ your text to your heart’s content, he said, but before you have done go back and sing a little of the beginning over again. Thus you give the musician a chance; for you mark off the music as something having its own architecture. And, moreover, you ‘represent’ all the more truly, for you mark off at the same time the lyrical emotion and make a musical unit of what is properly also a unit of drama. This Monteverdi did in simplest terms in the first of arias—‘Ariadne’s Lament,’ in his opera Arianna, and this same Lament, it is recorded, very properly moved the audience to tears. The aria is beautiful still. Monteverdi’s dissonances have not lost their emotional expressive value. And the da capo repetition, which enters so unobtrusively, underscores the emotion as nothing else could. But Monteverdi was not the inventor of this form. Needless to say the folk-song had been there before him. And, as always happens, when the art of the people had been commandeered for a single well-chosen one of its treasures, it gave gold where silver had been asked.
Nevertheless gold can be put to base uses. Scarcely had dilettantes discovered that the da capo form could be used to give unity to some vocalist’s singing than they used it to give form to all sorts of formless things. We cannot at this distance imagine the vapidity of endless runs and roulades which passed in the seventeenth century for vocal music. Or at least we cannot until we see the actual fact on a cold printed page. And then, to do the seventeenth century justice, we cannot imagine the brilliancy of these same runs and roulades when brilliantly sung with the incomparable Italian vocal art of the time. Brilliancy of a kind! Let us call it brilliancy merely, and not plague it with the name of music. However that may be, we certainly cannot imagine the hold this institution of the aria had over the imaginations of the people of the time. To them it must have seemed the Muses on wings as compared with the Muses on foot. Aria became a science. More, it became a code of honor. Its nuances and conventions were tabulated as nicely as those of fencing or love making. A sin against the code was the unforgivable sin. There were, scientifically accredited, certain classes of arias with certain subdivisions thereunto appertaining. An opera must contain so many of each sort. Each major singer must have so many, no two alike and all equitably distributed. No aria must fall in the same class as that just preceding. There were many rules such as these, and more of the same sort which are well buried in dusty dictionaries. And if there were any to protest against such a condition they were promptly silenced by the statement that the arrangement was excellent for the singers.
Those who studied this deep subject most profoundly at the time agreed that the aria was to be divided into some five classes, to wit: aria bravura—brilliant, rapid, difficult; aria cantabile—smooth, long drawn out, designed to exhibit purity of tone and manipulation of the breath; aria buffa—humorous; aria di portamento—simple in outline, playing with the singer’s trick of swelling out on long-sustained tones; and aria parlante—simulating rapid spoken speech, a type peculiarly grateful to the Italian language. These classes had their subdivisions, as, for instance, the aria parlante, which might be agitata, or infuriata, or fugata, or what not. The lore of aria was endless. Except that the form continued into Italian opera of the middle nineteenth century it would scarcely be worth recalling. But the greatest of the arias (with considerable musical value added) are among the latest. The ‘Factotum’ aria which opens Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville’ is a perfect example of the buffa and might also come under the head of the parlante; and Leonora’s first aria in Il Trovatore is in the true manner of the bravura. In addition to the arias proper we should mention the cavatina and the arioso; the former a short aria, rather more musical and graceful than was considered necessary in the longer forms; and the latter a brief lyrical strain, free as to form, planned truly to express an emotion in its momentary passing. All these forms have little more than an archeological interest to us now (though the da capo idea remains one of the most fruitful in all music), except for the purposes of vocal study. But this exception is considerable. The arias were designed to exhibit the utmost of vocal virtuosity. They serve to-day to develop and exercise the same, so far as modern music and musical taste demand it, for the rather more artistic purposes of the twentieth century.