[96] ‘Life of Palestrina,’ Rome, 1828.

[97] Hullah: ‘Lectures on the History of Modern Music,’ p. 53.

CHAPTER IX
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

Spirit of the Renaissance—Trovatori and cantori a liuto; The Florentine Ars nova; Landino; caccia, ballata, madrigal—The fifteenth century; the Medici; Netherland influence; popular song forms—Adrian Willaert and the new madrigal—Orazio Vecchi and the dramatic madrigal.

We have learned in the previous chapters how music, an incipient art fastened in the bondage of religious mysticism, groped through the blackness of the mediæval night; how, bound by dogmatic rule, it became the object of intellectual lucubration, the scholastic medium of pedants, who reared their stupendous structure of Gothic intricacy beyond the reach of ordinary man, ‘that tower of Babel, in the building of which tongues were confounded, till no one understood what he sang nor what he heard.’ And we have seen how this edifice, in adapting itself to the use of the denizens, softened its lines and its angles, broadened its spaces and became a thing of beauty—a process in which we see reflected the dawn of a new era, when humanity breathes a freer air; that glorious spiritual awakening which found its religious expression in the Reformation, its æsthetic revelation in the Renaissance. We shall presently consider the influence of the former upon the course of music in Germany; our immediate purpose is to follow the path of the parallel process accomplished through the Renaissance in Italy.

In the words of J. Addington Symonds, the history of the Renaissance is ‘the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.’ In politics it meant the breaking down of the reactionary forces vested in the church and the empire, in science it meant the substitution of knowledge for superstition, the fearless exploring of new continents and the demonstration of the infinity of the universe; in art it meant the firing of man’s imagination, the stimulation of his creative faculties by the Revival of Learning, ‘that rediscovery of the classic past which restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after a spiritual freedom, ... which held up for emulation master works of literature, philosophy and art, provoked inquiry, shattered the narrow mental barrier imposed by mediæval orthodoxy.’

Just as the artist ‘humanized the altar pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked’ and so ‘silently substituted the love of beauty and the interest of actual life for the principles of the church,’ so the musician ‘humanized’ the service of the church, brought beauty, expression and emotion into his masses and motets, imbuing them with the dramatic spirit, the spirit of passion, which had never been absent from the secular music of the people, the music that is always indigenous to the soil. It is in this music that we must first seek the embodiment of the Renaissance spirit, which means the direct expression of human emotions in terms of oral beauty. That spirit has been associated in the history of music with two things: the ‘invention’ of monody[98] and the rise of opera, both of which are placed about the end of the sixteenth century. But recent research has shown these apparently sudden events to be the outcome of a development extending back nearly three hundred years, so that they become the objective rather than the starting point of our account, which will aim to trace the steps by which this momentous reform was accomplished.

I

Our story has a direct connection with Chapter VII, where we spoke of the art of the Provençal troubadours. Though their influence was not felt in Italy till late in the twelfth century it bore a fruit as rich as it had in France. In the middle of the thirteenth a number of troubadours and jongleurs visited Frederick II at Milan, in the train of Raymon Berengar, Count of Provence. The Emperor extended his patronage to them, as did also Charles d’Anjou, the king of Naples. They became known among the people as uomini di corti, and ciarlatanti (because their chief theme was the exploits of Charlemagne), and the natives taught by them were called trovatori and giocolini. These soon cultivated native poetry in the Italian vernacular, the volgar poesia, which spread its influence to northern Italy as well and found representatives especially in Florence and Bologna. The thirteenth century records the names of Quittona d’Arezzo, Guido Guincelli and Jacopone da Todi, and upon the threshold of the fourteenth stands Dante (1265-1321), one of the greatest poets of all times, who with Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375) finally demonstrates the power of the Italian language as an artistic medium. In these three, Symonds says, ‘Italy recovered the consciousness of intellectual liberty.’ What is more to our purpose, they so clarified and amplified the Italian tongue that it became the vehicle for a national literature, in which were produced not only epics after the classic models, but also lyric gems in new and spontaneous forms, which would inspire the creation of melody.