In his Combattimento Monteverdi introduced a new effect, now familiar as the orchestral tremolo, which so startled the musicians that at first they refused to play it. His own explanation for its use is curious: ‘I have recognized,’ he says, ‘that our passions or emotions are expressed in three grades: anger (violence), temperate moderation, and humility or petition.... These three grades are clearly reflected in music, namely, in that of excited, tender, or moderate character (concitato, molle e temperato).’ Finding only the two last represented in the older music, he studied the question of spondeic and phyrric verse metre which the Greeks had transferred to music. Taking the semi-breve (whole note) for the unit of the former, he proposed to break it up into sixteen semicromes (sixteenths), which are to be played in succession upon one note to obtain the faster measure, which he calls concitato (tremolo).
This is but one instance of how Monteverdi constantly sought instructions from the ancients. In his letters of 1633 and 1634 he tells of his labors to rediscover human melody and the music of the passions. He had no one to guide him, and no books but Plato. The information which Galilei conveyed interested him, but he was careful not to be misled by the phantom of a lost art. He believed that in following his own principles he would be more true to classic thought than by trying to apply its formulas. He claimed that modern art has profited more from a study of Greek thought than from old-fashioned harmonic exercise. Thus the ancients had rendered to music the same service which the century before they had rendered to sculpture. They had taken it out of the studied formulas and had led artists back to the sole observation of nature. ‘Indeed, a real Renaissance opens at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Monteverdi—the Renaissance of the heart in the language of music.’
Monteverdi’s artistic creed and theories are to some extent perpetuated in his Selva morale e spirituale, dedicated to the Empress Eleonora Gonzaga, and published in 1640. Monteverdi died in Venice November 29, 1643, and was buried with great honors at the Chiesa dei Frari. With his death we see opera finally established in that place in the heart of the Italian people which it has held to this day. Others had already taken up the work, notably his pupil, Pietro Francesco Cavalli, whose genius burst upon the world in 1639 with his Nozze di Teti.
With the next generation the Florentine school divides into the new Venetian school founded by Giovanni Legrenzi (1635-1672), of which Antonio Lotti was to become the leader, and the Neapolitan, which found its guiding genius in Alessandro Scarlatti, one of the most conspicuous musical figures of the seventeenth century. From him and his teacher Francesco Provenzale (ca. 1669) there issued a long chain of masters and pupils—Francesco Durante (1684-1755); Leonardo Leo (1694-1744); Francesco Feo (1685-1740); Gaetano Greco (b. 1680), etc.—who developed the Italian opera in its narrowest sense—an opera that was purely vocal, whose chief aim was the production of beautiful melody and which paid a minimum of attention to orchestration and dramatic pathos. It was a purely musical school, and even more than that of Venice removed from the ideal of the Florentines. Against this school were ultimately to be directed the reforms of Gluck, whose theories are solidly founded upon the creed of Florence. Florence, then, is the true cradle of opera, also in its more modern sense, for the precepts there laid down have remained valid even to Wagner and the music drama of to-day.
C. S.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] In Musiciens d’autrefois (3me ed., 1912), p. 19.
[126] An example of a Marienklage, dating from the sixteenth century, is reprinted by Eitner in the Publikation älterer praktischer und theoretischer Musikwerke, Vol. X.
[127] A description of a highly developed example of this species, the Ballet-Comique de la royne, will be found in Chap. XIII, p. 401.
[128] Cf. W. J. Henderson: ‘Some Forerunners of Italian Opera.’ (1913.)