The importance of the principle thus introduced—the preference of expressive quality to purely musical effect—cannot be plain-song germ of romanticism itself lies in this departure, the elements of Gluck’s reform, of Wagner’s creed, repose in the assertion of Caccini that ‘one is always beautiful when one is expressive.’
Peri’s Dafne, after charming the circle of intimates, was performed at the house of Corsi one evening during the carnival of 1597, the composer singing the rôle of Apollo, in the presence of the Grand Duke Ferdinando de Medici, the cardinals dal Monte and Montalto, the poets Piero Strozzi and Francesco Cini and ‘a great number of gentlemen.’ ‘The pleasure and the stupor which seized the audience is inexpressible,’ said Gagliano later in the preface to his own Dafne. Every person there felt that he was in the presence of a new art. Spurred on by this victory, Rinuccini composed his Euridice for the festivities occasioned by the marriage of Maria de Medici to Henri IV, king of France, in 1600. Peri again wrote the music, though at the performance, which took place on October 6 at the Pitti palace, some of the numbers of Caccini’s version (composed after Peri’s) were substituted because of Caccini’s influence with the singers. The title rôle was sung by the famous Vittoria Archilei, ‘the Euterpe of Italy,’ while Peri himself impersonated Orpheus. The event not only aroused the greatest enthusiasm among the distinguished assemblage, but its echoes resounded through all the courts of Europe and tremendously stimulated interest in the new art.
The score of Euridice has been reprinted in Florence in 1863 and may be examined by the student. It consists of 48 small octavo pages of simple recitative dialogue written over a figured bass, interspersed with five-part choruses in predominatingly diatonic harmony. The preface indicates that the figured bass was executed by a clavier, a chitarrone, a lira grande and a large flute (in one place a triflauto—triple flute—is added), but it is not clear how the musicians managed to produce effective harmony without written-out parts. The impoverished quality of the music indicates a distinct retrogression from the contrapuntal compositions of the day, and vastly so when we consider the a capella style of Palestrina. Its striking novelty alone accounts for the extraordinary effect it had upon the hearers. Its value was not in its intrinsic quality but in the direction which it indicated, the path which was to lead to untold riches of sound.
Following closely upon the heels of Peri’s work came the setting of the same poem by Caccini, who had already produced Il rapimento di Caffalo (1597, performed 1600); Marco da Gagaliano (1575-1642) was already at work along similar lines and in 1608 produced his Dafne at Mantua—one year after Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’ which, however, marked so great an advance that it might have been written a generation later. Before discussing that master, it will be necessary to consider the utilization of the representative style in another field—that of the sacred drama or oratorio—by Emilio de’ Cavalieri,[133] whose dramatic essays in connection with Laura Guidicioni have already been mentioned.
The origin of the oratorio is twofold: the prose oratorio latino and the Italian oratorio volgare. The former is derived from the mediæval liturgical plays already spoken of, and the ‘mysteries’ and ‘moralities’ of the fifteenth century are clearly forerunners of it. The oratorio volgare, a didactic poem independent of scripture text, had its point of departure in the esercizii spirituali (scriptural lessons), instituted by the priest Filippo Neri (afterward canonized) at Rome. He became the founder of the congregation of Oratorians, which regularly met for Bible study under his leadership. On certain evenings of the week his sermons were preceded and followed either by a selection of popular hymns or by the dramatic rendering of a biblical scene. From the place in which these were first enacted, the oratory of the church of S. Maria in Vallicella, they received their name—Oratorio.
Just as the dramatic madrigal was built upon the style of the secular madrigal, so these sacred dramas probably modelled themselves after the ‘spiritual’ madrigal. While Peri and Caccini were still engaged in their experiments, Cavalieri, in 1600, staged in Neri’s oratory his most important creation La Rappresentazione di anima e di corpo, slightly antedating Peri’s Euridice. Like that work, it was written in ‘expressive’ style, of which Cavalieri may indeed have been the real originator. Cavalieri’s work belongs to the province of sacred opera, being the first of this important branch of the music drama, which is further represented by such works as Landis’ S. Alessio (1637) and Marazolli’s allegorical opera La Vita humana (1658). It is distinguished from the true non-scenic oratorio, which is associated with the artistic personality Carissimi. To show the distinction between his work and that of Florentines, however, we quote the criticism of his Il Satiro, by Giovanni Battista Doni, the historian of the Florentine monodists: ‘It must, however, be well understood,’ he says, ‘that these melodies are very different from those of to-day (seventeenth century) which are written in the stile recitativo; the others (of Cavalieri, etc.) are nothing but ariettas with all sorts of artifices and repetitions, echoes and other similar things, having nothing to do with the good and true dramatic music....’
On the other hand, Cavalieri’s own instructions show his wonderful practical knowledge in the performance of opera, and give us an exact idea of the first operatic theatre: ‘The hall should not hold more than a thousand spectators comfortably seated, in the greatest silence. Larger halls have bad acoustics: they make the singer force his voice and they kill expression. Moreover, when the words are not understood the music becomes tiresome. The number of instruments must be proportioned to the place of performance. The orchestra is invisible, hidden behind the drop. The instrumentation should change according to the emotion expressed. An overture, an instrumental and vocal introduction, are of good effect before the curtain rises. The ritornelle and sinfonie should be played by many instruments. A ballet, or better a singing ballet, should close the performance. The actor must seek to acquire absolute perfection in his voice, physique, gestures, bearing, and even his walk. He should sing with emotion—as it is written—not one passage like the other; and he must be careful to pronounce his words distinctly, so that he may be heard che siano intese. The chorus should not think they are excused from acting when they do not have to sing. They must feign to listen to what is going on; they must occasionally change their places, rise, sit down, make gestures. The performance should not exceed two hours.... Three acts suffice and one must be careful to infuse variety, not only into the music but also the poem, and even the costumes....’
‘Gluck and Wagner,’ says Romain Rolland, ‘have added little to these rules!’
III
The favolo in musica (it was not called opera as yet) had taken root; its first tender shoots, delectable morsels for a fastidious intellectual aristocracy, nurtured in the soil of princely patronage, had given evidence of hardihood. But it was an exotic, a hot-house plant, limited by its very nature to the homes of aristocracy: in order to flourish and grow to noble proportions it had to bathe in the sunlight of popular favor; it required the care of a master, a genius who substituted imagination for synthetic reason, intuition for experiment. That master was Monteverdi. If the works of Peri and Caccini smelt of the midnight oil, there coursed in his creations the red blood of humanity. If their music was ‘representative’ of the exact meaning of the word, attuned to the niceties of accent and inflection, his portrayed the gamut of human passions, the soul itself, even at times violating literary fidelity to reach that greater purpose. While they had ‘thrust upon them’ the honor of creating a new method of expression, he, the musical genius of a century, could deliberately choose between the old and the new—and he chose the new. ‘With him the new evolution began and the new edifice, hardly risen above the ground, became a magnificent monument. Well did he see what was lacking in the conception of the Florentines: he understood that to fight successfully against the resources of counterpoint new riches had to be brought, different but equally valuable. His prodigious inventive genius discovered them: he found them in harmony, in the expressive accent of the monodic chant and in the variety of instrumentation.’