And, curiously enough, this loose and somewhat commonplace tune introduces us to the greatest and most sincere of all English musicians (unless recent years have produced his peer) and to the song writer of whom, above all others, England has a right to be proud. This man was Henry Purcell. The tune of ‘Lilliburlero’ was written as an innocent dance in a book of virginal pieces and thence was brought into the open air to support the high spirits of the satiric verses. It is quite certain that Purcell never intended himself to be made immortal when he wrote it, or to be an instrument in the downfall of King James, to whom he wrote one of his many ‘odes.’ But into some of his other songs he put the best he had. They are graceful in the extreme, often decorated with the vocal turns and embellishments which were the fashion of the day, but never lacking in the musician’s touch. Their melodic facility is charming; their appropriateness to the spirit of the words is convincing; and their delicate architecture makes them, apart from their vocal quality, polished works of art. Purcell still frequently (and justly) appears on song programs. Among his many lyrics which are worth knowing we may mention ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands,’ to Shakespeare’s words, and ‘I Attempt from Love’s Sickness to Fly.’

But after Purcell English music showed a falling off in originality and spontaneous quality which has astonished and mystified historians. And English song suffered the same fate along with the rest of English music. Vigorous semi-folk-songs date from the early eighteenth century—notably ‘Down Among the Dead Men,’ ‘The Vicar of Bray,’ and ‘Pretty Polly Oliver’—but as the century progressed the song output became more and more vapid and superficial in spirit. This was doubtless in part due to the vogue of Italian opera which held fashionable England fascinated and smothered the creative work of native composers. And as people became disgusted with the fad they turned to the next best thing at hand, the ‘ballad opera.’ This was not a very exalted form of art, but it was at least fresher and more musical than the exaggerated vocal virtuosity of opera, with its conventionalized arias and its ‘castrati,’ or male sopranos. The ballad opera came into fashion in 1727, with the enormous success of ‘The Beggar’s Opera,’ a success comparable to that of ‘Pinafore’ a century and a half later. The ballad opera was strictly not opera at all, but only a lively and merry farce (often suggesting the operetta librettos of Sir William Gilbert) interspersed with songs and duets. These songs were at first but popular melodies of the street or countryside, adapted to new words, assuring the popularity of the opera because the tunes were favorites. As the number of native tunes seemed insufficient to supply the enormous number of ballad operas, the writers engaged well-known musicians to write original tunes in the same manner—sometimes as many as eight or ten composers for one work. The songs never appeared as organic parts of the action and hence offer no analogy to the arias of true opera, but they were usually made vaguely appropriate to the dramatic situation and were introduced in such a way as not to seem out of place. Among the host of these melodies which have come down to us there are indeed many which are fresh and attractive. But the great majority have the cheapness of the street without its abundant life. And they nearly always have a strain of the extreme sentimentality which has remained a blot on English song literature until recent times. On the whole, if the ballad operas delivered England from the pompous inanities of the Italian craze, they also seduced English taste from the exquisite manner of Purcell. The better part of musical England turned to the noble oratorios of Handel and against his thundering chords all minor lyric strains were fruitless.

The song writers of eighteenth-century England are a depressing crew. Henry Carey (1685-1743), to whom the melody of ‘God Save the King’ has been attributed, was a fruitful writer of ballad operas, though he is nowadays best known by ‘Sally in Our Alley,’ a tune which is the essence of awkwardness—a tune, in short, which could have happened nowhere but in eighteenth-century England. Thomas Arne (1710-78) was much more of a musician and a scholar, but also much of a pedant. Even such a dainty song as ‘Where the Bee Sucks’ is marred by its awkward overlaying of fiorituri. The song by which Arne is best known, ‘Rule Britannia,’ is indeed a stirring melody; but the fact that a man of Arne’s standing could write such a tune to the given words and that England could accept the two as belonging together proves to what a depth the country had sunk in musical matters. We need only quote the first line:

When Britain first at Heav’n’s command

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Wagner said that this phrase contained the whole spirit of the English people. But what about the words and that ridiculous ‘fir-r-r-r-rst?’ Samuel Arnold (1740-1802), Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), James Hook (1746-1827), and John Davy (1764-1824) need only be mentioned and forgotten. Henry Bishop (1788-1855) was a man of more artistic sense and a composer of graceful and emotional melody, but without his operas he would scarcely be remembered. The tradition of awkward and sentimental melody which these men established or maintained continued to disgrace English song until the close of the nineteenth century and even to-day in the half-conscious English popular ballad we seem to hear the debased strains of the ballad opera.

IV

During all this period song, as we have tried to show, was under a cloud. It was the aria, illegitimate child of the stile rappresentativo and dearest daughter of sunny Italy, that held sway over the nations. Vocal music was commonly thought in terms of the aria. All else was little better than a diversion for an idle moment—understood, of course, that we are speaking of polite culture. What aria meant to the seventeenth and especially to the early eighteenth century was chiefly vocal display of one sort or another. But formally we may distinguish it by the da capo form. Da capo, meaning ‘from the beginning,’ was the open sesame into the mazes of vocalization. Monteverdi must get the credit for it. He lit the fire. Numerous rubbish piled on by other hands furnished the smoke. For Monteverdi was, above and beyond the innovator in him, a skilled and sensitive musician. He felt, and felt truly, that the stile rappresentativo made his beloved music decidedly a second best. Very well to reveal the emotional qualities of the text! But if the music cannot itself hang together there is something wrong. And it was with one of those very keen and very simple devices that Monteverdi righted matters. ‘Represent’ your text to your heart’s content, he said, but before you have done go back and sing a little of the beginning over again. Thus you give the musician a chance; for you mark off the music as something having its own architecture. And, moreover, you ‘represent’ all the more truly, for you mark off at the same time the lyrical emotion and make a musical unit of what is properly also a unit of drama. This Monteverdi did in simplest terms in the first of arias—‘Ariadne’s Lament,’ in his opera Arianna, and this same Lament, it is recorded, very properly moved the audience to tears. The aria is beautiful still. Monteverdi’s dissonances have not lost their emotional expressive value. And the da capo repetition, which enters so unobtrusively, underscores the emotion as nothing else could. But Monteverdi was not the inventor of this form. Needless to say the folk-song had been there before him. And, as always happens, when the art of the people had been commandeered for a single well-chosen one of its treasures, it gave gold where silver had been asked.

Nevertheless gold can be put to base uses. Scarcely had dilettantes discovered that the da capo form could be used to give unity to some vocalist’s singing than they used it to give form to all sorts of formless things. We cannot at this distance imagine the vapidity of endless runs and roulades which passed in the seventeenth century for vocal music. Or at least we cannot until we see the actual fact on a cold printed page. And then, to do the seventeenth century justice, we cannot imagine the brilliancy of these same runs and roulades when brilliantly sung with the incomparable Italian vocal art of the time. Brilliancy of a kind! Let us call it brilliancy merely, and not plague it with the name of music. However that may be, we certainly cannot imagine the hold this institution of the aria had over the imaginations of the people of the time. To them it must have seemed the Muses on wings as compared with the Muses on foot. Aria became a science. More, it became a code of honor. Its nuances and conventions were tabulated as nicely as those of fencing or love making. A sin against the code was the unforgivable sin. There were, scientifically accredited, certain classes of arias with certain subdivisions thereunto appertaining. An opera must contain so many of each sort. Each major singer must have so many, no two alike and all equitably distributed. No aria must fall in the same class as that just preceding. There were many rules such as these, and more of the same sort which are well buried in dusty dictionaries. And if there were any to protest against such a condition they were promptly silenced by the statement that the arrangement was excellent for the singers.