Not only at Florence and Mantua, but in Venice, in Ferrara at the court of Hercules I, in Rome under papal auspices, in fact wherever there was a fastidious aristocracy, these ‘antique’ comedie flourished. Among artists, Leonardo da Vinci at Milan, Raphael at Rome, Andrea del Sarto at Florence, Dosso Dossi at Ferrara, and numerous other immortal names of the Renaissance are associated with their production, and among musicians Alphonso della Viola, Antonio dal Cornetto, Claudio Merulo, Andrea Gabrieli, and many more. As Humanism succumbs to the Catholic reaction, with the pillaging of Rome by Charles V (1527) and the taking of Florence soon after, as liberty of thought is crushed by the Inquisition, as petty tyrants supersede broad-spirited despots, the harmless pastoral play succeeds the comedia. Sumptuous settings and meaningless music now outweigh dramatic significance. Poets such as Ariosto and Tasso are the authors of these spectacles, and another generation of great artists, John of Bologna, Salviati, Bernardo Bumlalente and perhaps Michael Angelo, lavish their skill upon them. Indeed both painters and poets in this age are musicians. Music had at this epoch obsessed the entire thought of Italy. Painters, writers, the élite, especially in the north of Italy, madly abandoned themselves to it. Nearly all great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century: Giorgione, Bassano, Tintoretto, Giovanni d’Udine, Sebastiano del Piombo, were musicians. Let us recall the numerous paintings of ‘concerts,’ either sacred (Bellini) or profane (Giorgione, Bonifazio, Veronese); remember how in the ‘Marriage at Canaan’ of the Louvre, Titian holds the bass viol and Bassano the flute. Sebastiano del Piombo was celebrated as lute player and singer, while Vasari recognized more willing Tintoretto’s talent as a musician than as a painter. At the court of Leo X music superseded all the other arts. The pope decreed for two virtuosi, charged with the superintendence of St. Peter’s, a stipend equal to Raphael’s. A Jewish lutenist, Giammaria, received the title of count and a palace. A singer, Gabriel Merino, became archbishop of Bari. Finally, it will be remembered that, when Leonardo da Vinci presented himself at the court of Ludovico il Moro at Milan, it was, according to Vasari, not in the capacity of painter, but as musician. Girolamo Parabasco said, ‘I am a musician, not a poet’ and the great Tasso, ‘Music is, so to speak, the soul of poetry.’

Beccari’s Sacrificio, produced in 1554 with music by Alfonso della Viola (which is preserved), before Hercules II of Ferrara, the Aretusa of Alberto Lollio (1563), the Sfortunato of Agostino Argenti, and the famous Aminta of Torquato Tasso,[129] given with music at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany in 1590, are examples of pastoral plays. Tasso’s collaborators and advisers in this production were none other than Emilio de’ Cavalieri and Laura Guidicioni (perhaps also Ottavio Rinuccini, at any rate a spectator) who, we shall presently see, are to become instrumental in the creation of true opera. In the same year these two produced privately their pastoral plays with music, Il Satiro and Disperazione di fileno, the first known examples of opera, for they were set to music throughout, and probably even in ‘representative’ style, as it was called. Five years later (1595) followed Il Gioco della cieca, played before the Archduke Ferdinand, but the music of none of these works has been preserved.

‘The Concert’.

After the painting by Giorgione (Pitti Palace).

II

The opera, then, had arrived. But, unaware of the fact, its so-called inventors, caught in the spell of antiquarian research, their imaginations transported by the glories of the classic past, turned their vision back to ancient Greece—to Athens, that prototype of their own city of Florence—where Æschylus unfolds before the eyes of his countrymen a spectacle worthy of the gods. They see no analogy in their madrigals and the dithyrambic chorus of the ancients, no parallel in their sacre rappresentazione to the Eleusynian mysteries and Bacchic festivals, but, rejecting all that has gone before, attempt to resurrect the magic power of music as an organic part of human speech, and the revival of the greatest product of classic genius—the Greek tragedy. Such was the purpose of the camerata, that genial circle of amateurs, literati and musicians which gathered at the house of Giovanni Bardi, count of Vernio, in Florence, one of those famous ‘academies’ which were the centres of the intellectual life of Italy in the sixteenth century.

Jacopo Peri, an erudite musician and a favorite singer; his younger colleague Giulio Caccini of Rome; the already familiar Emilio de’ Cavalieri, inspector-general of the artists in Florence; Luca Marenzio, the most eminent musician of the city, and Christoforo Malvezzi, all of whom had collaborated on the intermezzi to Bardi’s L’Amico fido in 1589, were, together with Jacopo Corsi, a wealthy and intelligent patron of music, and Vincenzo Galilei, father of the great astronomer, the chief members of the circle, besides the host. These men, liberal thinkers, modernists, literati rather than professional musicians, were out of sympathy with the pedants of the contrapuntal school, the ‘Goths’ against whom Galilei[130] had already published his diatribe in 1551. The Latin translations of Aristoxenus’, Ptolemy’s and Aristotle’s treatises on music, published in 1562, aroused their keenest interest and discussion, and their admiration of the plastic arts which had signalized the Renaissance in the preceding centuries now found an echo in their attempt to reconstruct a lost ideal. In 1585 the great Andrea Gabrieli had written choruses for the solemn performance of Œdipus Rex at Vincenza, and in 1589 Luca Marenzio wrote a ‘Combat of Apollo and the Dragon,’ drawing his inspiration from the descriptions of the Nomos Pythikos of the Greeks (see Chap. IV, p. 127). Convinced, despite the lack of examples, of the greater expressive power of Greek music with the employment of simpler means, Galilei, after long research with the aid of Bardi, now composed for a solo voice and instrumental accompaniment Dante’s ‘Lament of Ugolino,’ in the so-called stile rappresentativo, the representative style. His experiment proved suggestive if not altogether successful, and the task was next taken up by Caccini,[131] who, with probably more natural talent than Galilei, set himself to the composition of several canzone in the new style, a simple cantilena over a figured bass (see Chap. XI, p. 355) which provided a harmonious support to be executed by instruments (lute or theorbo). Endowed with a beautiful and well-cultivated voice, he achieved a genuine success among his sympathetic circle. To make sure of himself, however, he proceeded to Rome, where his new songs were applauded by an assemblage of connoisseurs. Thus encouraged, he appealed to his literary friends for verses in all metres, which he promptly set to music. Some years later (1601) these were published under the title La nuove musiche (‘The New Music’) with a remarkable preface, in which their author claims the merit for having originated the stile rappresentativo, and which contains so much technical information for singers that it may well be considered the first vocal method. Caccini’s arie were disseminated largely through his vocal pupils, for they adapted themselves admirably to the beautiful Italian style of singing of which he was one of the first masters. We may mention incidentally that his daughter, Septimia, became one of the famous singers of the period and aroused the admiration of Monteverdi. Her sister, Francesca, achieved distinction both as singer and composer.

Caccini, though he was probably the first to use and secure public acceptance of the arioso style, was—despite his own claims—not the originator of the true recitative. That distinction belongs to Jacopo Peri, a more learned musician though a less genial personality, who meantime had begun the application of the representative style to the drama.[132] Corsi, the successor of Bardi (now become papal chamberlain in Rome), as host and patron, was a close friend of the poet Ottavio Rinuccini (d. 1623). Both were familiar with the experiments of Cavalieri in the realm of dramatic music. After joint deliberation, the two appealed to Peri ‘to give a simple proof of the power of modern music’ by setting Rinuccini’s dramatic poem Dafne, a scene of which had already been experimented with by Bardi. ‘Remembering that it was a question of dramatic poetry and that the melody must at all times be modelled after the words,’ Peri concluded ‘that the ancients employed musical forms which, more elevated than ordinary speech yet less regularly designed than common song melodies, were half-way between the two.’ In an effort to forget every known style, he at first attempted to rediscover the diastematica of the Greeks, the quarter-tone interval, in the inflections of ordinary speech. According to his own testimony, he closely observed persons speaking, so that he might reproduce as naturally as possible their expressions, whether moderate or passionate. Thus he decided to have quiet expressions sung in half-spoken tones over a resting instrumental bass. In emotional moments, however, the voices proceeded in a more animated tempo and by larger intervals instead of strictly conjunct motion, while the accompaniment indulged in more frequently changing, and sometimes dissonant, harmonies. In other words, he used what we know to-day as recitative.