It is one of the vagaries of history that the Art-Song, though it commenced with definite consciousness about the year 1600, did not become a firmly established art form for full two centuries. By all the signs of the times it seems as though it should quickly have risen to maturity. The humanistic enthusiasm of the Renaissance had sensitized people to individual emotions and moods—the very material of the art-song. Singing was universal and had attained a high degree of technical excellence. And the earliest composers of opera of the time had hit upon the very principles which Schubert exemplified two centuries later—the accurate following of the words by expressive music, independent of ‘pattern’ form. But for various reasons, which we shall examine presently, the art-song became side-tracked. Within twenty years of its birth it had been exiled to a dark cellar of history and its feeble attempts at growth had been smothered by an institution which presently captured the whole civilized world—the opera.
So the history of song from 1600 to 1800 is not unlike that of the five centuries preceding—a delving into the out-of-the-way places where there is to be found much that is charming and interesting, but little with broad and conscious artistic drive. Nevertheless, song in this period does show organic development. The outcast infant in the cellar does grow and become beautiful. But its growth is that of music in general. As technical materials and artistic consciousness develop, song partakes of the common benefits, but only secondarily, here and there, as the servant picks crumbs from the master’s table.
First of all, in common with music in general, song partook of the change from the old modes to the major and minor scales. And here, indeed, it was a leader rather than a follower. We have seen in the previous chapter how the folk-songs of Provence and of the Rhine blossomed into a gentle and flowing major mode centuries before the ecclesiastical music had achieved anything like a feeling for the tonic. And it was perhaps partly because of the introduction of folk-tunes into church music that the latter presently began to show evidences of the change. In all countries we can see how the folk-song, increasing its hold over conscious composers, began to set the spirit for all secular music.
Great Singers of the Past.
Top: Pauline Viardot-García and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient
Bottom: Adelina Patti and Jenny Lind
In Italy, where the change from the old style to the new was most marked and dramatic, the art-song grew gradually out of the madrigal and part-song. While we have no traces of the folk-song of the sixteenth century, we know that composers began to write their part-songs in the folk-spirit. This meant, besides the predominance of the major mode and the tonic feeling, a stressing of the upper or ‘melody’ voice, whereas in the older contrapuntal music it was the tenor which carried the chief tune. The frottolle of the time were ballads popular both in words and melody; the villanelle, or ‘village songs,’ sought to preserve an artless and rustic flavor; and the villotte, or drinking songs, were filled with the high spirits for which the Italians are famous. All these were essentially folk-like melodies treated contrapuntally. Gradually the counterpoint became simpler, reflecting perhaps the growing simplification of church music, and with Perissone Cambio, in 1547, the part-songs assumed the nature of melodies harmonized in four parts with a free use of passing notes—much as in the four-part chorales of J. S. Bach. The simplification continued, and with Giacomo Gastoldi, in 1591, we have true ‘chord-for-note’ harmonizations of melodies in the modern style. With this, the song element has been liberated. The melody has gained complete mastery, and the harmony is used simply to enrich and support the upper part.
And as we have seen in another chapter[11] singers quickly seized the import of the new developments. As early as 1539 Sileno is recorded to have sung the upper part of a madrigal, with wind instruments for the lower voices. Of course these madrigals were still essentially polyphonic, but the composers of the time steadily continued to stress the upper voice for its melodic value and to simplify and suppress the inner voices until they became a mere harmonic support. It was this ‘one-voiced madrigal’ which became the parent of the airs du cour and the simple solo songs and romances of seventeenth century France.
But the abortive development of the art-song was an entirely different matter. It had little or nothing to do with the tendency to stress a madrigal melody, or with the liberation of the seventeenth-century romance. The style called monody, or the stile rappresentativo, which might have produced a true art-song in the seventeenth century, was invented or revived quite in opposition to the madrigal and its spirit. The one thing it had in common with the new madrigal was the ‘chord-for-note’ harmonic style. This, thanks to the popularity of the new madrigal, had become common property. When the Florentine innovators began their experiments, they found it ready to hand. But the true monodic style was, so far as song is concerned, a wholly abortive affair. Its history has been traced elsewhere.[12] We know of the painful efforts toward monody for nearly two centuries previous to the Florentine experiments; we know of the solo songs of Vincenzo Galilei in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and of the songs in Giulio Caccini’s Nuovo Musiche, published in 1600. We dimly feel that a musical style devoted to the conscientious reproduction of the spirit of the words, detail for detail, should have resulted in a vigorous tradition of art-song. And yet we see the whole force of monody veering into the opera, quickly being caught up in the da capo aria form, and in an unbelievably short time forgetting all about its early ideals of textual fidelity and serving only as an exposition gallery for vocal virtuosity. Within a quarter of a century monody had forsaken one ideal for its polar opposite. The true ‘representative style’ had been left high and dry. It remained neglected and forgotten until Beethoven wrote An die ferne Geliebte, or Schubert his Gretchen am Spinnenrad.
Why was this? How could an art-form, which had caught the very essence of the modern song, thus sell its birthright for a mess of pottage? Reason enough. The mess of pottage was very attractive. For the monodic experiments of the Florentines were the play-things of a set of dilettantes. They were artificial and exotic. They had consciously no use for the true musical tradition, the folk-song, which was living and throbbing among the people. The body was there but the soul was missing. The Florentines were chiefly interested in decorating the lives of the aristocracy, in arranging court masques and private theatricals. Aristocracy is always weak when it exists in opposition to and at the expense of the life of the people, as it did in the decadence of Renaissance Italy. The art which such an aristocracy produces may be brilliant, but it is empty. It tinkles and it clatters, but it does not resound. For the isolated aristocrat is not interested in humanity, but in his own glorification. The joys and sorrows of the people are repulsive to him: he seeks to escape sorrows, and he longs for some more highly colored joys. He floats on the surface of life as he floats on the surface of society. His art tends to become the maximum of show and the minimum of meaning.
So when the aristocracy of the time discovered the new monodic style, it sought to make use of it for theatrical entertainment, neglecting the more human and personal song. Vocal coloratura provided aristocracy with precisely the thing it had unconsciously been seeking—the maximum of show and the minimum of meaning. The skilled singers of the time caught the trick of introducing impromptu embellishments on the simple monodic recitative. Monteverdi hit upon the device which would give such coloratura singing a centre of gravity—the da capo form. Monody as heightened speech was wholly forgotten, except for the debased recitativo secco, which bridged the gaps between arias, and tinsel opera became the furore of the leisured class. The middle class of Italy, becoming prosperous in business and always anxious to ape its betters, flocked to these entertainments as soon as large opera houses began to spring up, and opera as an institution overshadowed all other musical forms. The oratorio, presumably devotional in spirit, became no less debased in its display. Song, as a great art-form, was strangled for another century or two, receiving no new ideals and serving as a mere diversion for composer and singer. Thus does the easy convenience of abstract form often stifle poetic expression.