The groups of instruments were intended to express, accompany and even symbolize each personage in the drama. Orfeo was, therefore, not an innovation; it was the highest expression of the end of a period—the crowning-point of the music of the Italian Renaissance.
There were several new ideas in Orfeo, however, even if the instruments of the Orchestra were just those of the Italian Renaissance. In one place, for instance, two violins were allowed to play independently of the viols; and that was absolutely novel. The fact is Monteverde was new, if his Orchestra was not; and his originality was going to express itself more fully in after years as we shall presently see.
CLAUDIO MONTEVERDE
Let us run through the arrangement of Act III. The curtain rises on the Infernal Regions with scenery painted in the magnificent style of the Italian painters of the period—Titian, Tintoret, Correggio—any of the great masters we may like to think of—and with many ingenious mechanical devices; for these brilliant Italians were very well accustomed to getting up pageants and festas. The trombone, cornet and organ play large and sombre chords to evoke the idea of Hades. Orpheus enters and tries to conquer the Powers of Darkness with all the resources of his art. The first couplet of his song is accompanied by the organo di legno (organ with the flute tones) and the chitaroni; and when Orpheus begins to sing, the two violins play. At the second couplet, after a ritournella by the violins, two cornets take their places and play; and at the third couplet, when Orpheus sings “Where Eurydice is, is paradise for me,” the double harp plays graceful arpeggios. Then Orpheus sings some very elaborate vocalizations accompanied by two violins and a basso da braccio (a deep violin). When Orpheus bids Charon, the ferryman, let him pass over the river Styx, the string-quartet plays chords; and, finally, when Orpheus is triumphant, the whole Orchestra bursts forth in one grand finale.
Orfeo was a truly wonderful work. It was startling in many ways; but its Orchestra was conservative. The instruments played together in families. There was no attempt to mingle all their voices together, nor to combine instruments except at the very end when the curtain was falling.
It is not Orfeo, therefore, that marks the beginning of our modern Orchestra, but an opera that Monteverde brought out twenty years later called Il Combattimento di Tancrede e Clorinda.
In the Combat of Tancred and Clorinda, to give the opera its English name, Monteverde used a very different Orchestra from the one he had used in Orfeo. Here he has two violins, two viols (tenor and bass) and the contrabasso da gamba. At this very moment—the year 1627—the violin took root in the Orchestra. In ten years’ time it became the leading instrument.[38] By 1639 there were no more players on the viol in Italy that amounted to anything. From 1634 the violoncello was also established as an orchestral instrument.
Truly, a great change had taken place! Monteverde’s Orchestra—we can now call it so—had become one in which the violins and the instruments of the piano class—the clavecin, etc.—form the new body of the Orchestra.
When Monteverde wanted certain effects, he now used special timbres, or kinds of voices: trumpets and drums for triumphal scenes; cornets and trombones for fantastic scenes; and flutes for pastoral scenes. Such was the Orchestra that Monteverde used in his celebrated opera, the Incoronazione di Poppea, which he brought out in 1642, at the end of his life, and which the Orchestras of Venice followed for years.