The culture of the times demanded a higher gratification for man's dramatic cravings than either rude religious or secular plays afforded. Other music was required to depict the emotions than that of the contrapuntist, with its puzzling intricacies. So thought these ardent Hellenists, and a burning zeal possessed them to mate dramatic poetry with a music that would heighten and intensify its expression and effect. They who seek are sure to find, even if it be not always the object of their search. In the earnest quest of these reformers for dramatic truth an unexpected treasure was disclosed.
Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo Galilei, opened the way. He was the active champion of monody, in which a principal melody was intoned or sung to the accompaniment of subordinate harmonies, believing that in music designed to arouse personal feeling individualism should predominate. The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint. Not content with giving his ideas to the world in the form of a dialogue, Galilei composed two musical monologues, between 1581 and 1590, one to the scene of Count Ugolino, in Dante's "Inferno," and one to a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah. These the chroniclers tell us he sang very sweetly, accompanying himself on the lute. He was also a fine performer on the viola.
A dramatic representation at a court marriage, in 1590, in which the artificially constructed ecclesiastical music illy fitted the text lauding the bride's loveliness, gave a new impulse to the "Academy" efforts. Soon there was produced at court, by a company of highborn ladies and gentlemen, two pastoral plays: "Il Satiro" and "La Disperazione di Fileno," so set to music that they could be sung or declaimed throughout. The author of the text was Signora Laura Guidiccioni, of the Lucchesini family, renowned in her day for her poetic gifts and brilliant attainments. Signor Emilio del Cavalieri was the composer, and he triumphantly announced his music as that "of the ancients recovered," having power to "excite grief, pity, joy and pleasure."
These two "musical dramas," as they were called, contained the germs of modern opera, despite their crudities of harmony and monotonous melody. That noble songstress, Vittoria Archilei, known as "Euterpe" among her Italian contemporaries, greatly enhanced the success of the new venture with her superb voice, artistic skill, musical fire and splendid intelligence. She "whose excellence in music is generally known," as we are told, and who was able to "draw tears from her audience" at the right moment, also aroused enthusiasm for a third work of a similar nature by the same authors, "Il Giuco della Cieco," that appeared in 1595.
Besides being the first to tell the entire story of a play musically and to utilize the solo, Cavalieri introduced various ornaments into vocal music and increased the demands on instrumentation. He did not succeed, however, in satisfying the Academicians with his attempt to grasp the medium between speech and song, and his choruses were thought tedious because of their employment of the intricate polyphonic style. Further reform was desired.
This came through Jacopo Peri, maestro at the Medician court, and after 1601 at the court of Ferrara. In studying Greek dramas, as he states in one of his writings, he became convinced that their musical expression was that of highly colored emotional speech. Closely observing diverse modes of utterance in daily life, he endeavored to reproduce soft, gentle words by half-spoken, half-sung tones, sustained by an instrumental bass, and to express excitement by extended intervals, lively tempo and suitable distribution of dissonances in the accompaniment. To him may be attributed the first dramatic recitative. It appeared in his "Daphne," a "Dramma per la Musica," written to text by the poet Rinuccini and privately performed at the Palazzo Corsi, in 1597. This was actually the first opera, although the term was not applied to such compositions until half a century later. Several solos were added by the court singer, Giulio Caccini, who composed a number of songs for a single voice, "in imitation of Galilei," as a contemporary stated, "but in a more beautiful and pleasing style." Invited three years later to produce a similar work for the festivities attending the marriage of Henry IV. of France with Maria di Medici, Peri wrote his "Eurydice," and once more Signora Archilei interpreted the leading rôle, greatly to the composer's satisfaction. It was the first opera performed in public. The singing had a bald accompaniment of an orchestra placed behind the scenes and consisting of a clavicembalo, or harpsichord, a viola da gamba, a theorbo, or large lute, and a flute, the last being used to imitate Pan-pipes in the hands of one of the characters.
Seven years afterward, for another court marriage, a musical drama was written by a man of genius who completely broke the fetters of ancient polyphony. This was Claudio Monteverde, then in his thirty-ninth year, and chapel master to the Duke of Mantua. He was the first composer to use unprepared chords of the seventh, dominant and diminished, and to emphasize passionate situations with dissonances. He invented the tremolo and the pizzicato, and originated the vocal duet. His keen dramatic sense enabled him to arouse interest through contrasts, conspicuously characteristic passages, and independent orchestral preludes, interludes and bits of descriptive tone-painting.
His opera, "Orfeo," 1608, had an orchestra of two harpsichords, two bass viols, two violas di gamba, ten tenor viols, two little French violins, one harp, two large guitars, three small organs, four trombones, two cornets, one piccolo, one clarion and three trumpets. In "Tancredi e Clorinda," produced in Venice, in 1624, a string quartet indicated the galloping of horses, a prototype of the "Ride of the Valkyries." Like Abbé Liszt, he took holy orders late in life, without ceasing to compose. At seventy-four years of age, when the fire of his genius burned brightly as ever, he wrote his last opera "L'Incoronazione di Poppea." It may truly be said that Monteverde was the great operatic reformer, the Wagner, of the seventeenth century, as Gluck was of the eighteenth.
An epoch-making event in opera history was the opening, in 1637, of the first public opera house in commercial Venice whose wealth afforded her citizens leisure to cultivate art. Soon popular demand led to the erection of many Italian opera-houses. At the same time growing taste for magnificence of stage setting and brilliant, dazzling, even extravagant song effects, caused neglect of Academician principles. The learned and gifted Neapolitan composer, Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the famous harpsichordist, gave an impulse in his operas, during the last quarter of the century, to sensuous charm and beauty of melody. He invested recitative with classic value, enlarged the aria, and devised the da capo which became a menace to dramatic truth.
In France, the troubadours had borne melody into the domain of sentiment, and laid a solid foundation for musical growth. Adam de la Hallé's pastoral, "Robin et Marion," was an actual prototype of the opera. During the seventeenth century Corneille and Molière refined the dramatic taste of their compatriots. Attempts to introduce Italian opera only resulted in arousing a desire for an opera in accord with French ideals.