How Music Developed / A Critical and Explanatory Account of the Growth of Modern Music

by W. J. Henderson

[Chapter XVIII]

The Birth of Opera

Festival plays and intermezzi—Dreary character of music in plays—Influence of Greek learning—Attempt to resuscitate the dramatic declamation of the Greeks—Galilei and his "Ugolino"—Caccini's Nuove Musiche—Peri's setting of "Daphne"—Production of Rinuccini and Peri's "Eurydice"—The character of the new music.

THE modern opera was the result of a deliberate attempt to revive the Greek drama, and that attempt was caused chiefly by dissatisfaction with the music of medieval festival plays. The direction of the attempt was guided by the revival of Greek learning in Italy, a revival of which the reader has already been informed in Chapter VI. In order, however, that the reader may have a clear understanding of the conditions which led to the birth of opera, it is necessary that the author should briefly review the state of vocal music employed in plays in the sixteenth century. The reader will best understand this by recollecting that the entire art music of the time was colored by the use of the ecclesiastical scales and the complete devotion of composers to church counterpoint. The result was that in the beginning there was no difference, except in the subjects of the libretti, between the religious dramas, from which the oratorio was developed, and the secular plays with music, which may be regarded as the forerunners of the opera. These plays contained no recitative, because recitative had not yet been invented. They consisted of dialogue interspersed with choruses, and these choruses were always written, like the madrigals and other secular songs of the time, in one or the other of the ecclesiastical scales and in three, four, or five part polyphony.

Accounts have come down to us from a time as early as 1350 of the employment of plays with musical accompaniment performed to bring to a close the carnival festivities in Florence. This accompaniment at first consisted of a single chorus sung at the end of a scene, to a text bearing some relation to that of the play. The absurdity into which it fell at times may be understood from the fact that the text sung in a polyphonic chorus was frequently supposed to be the utterance of one of the personages of the drama. Toward the end of the fourteenth century the custom of introducing these pieces of music grew until they were known as intermezzi. The intermezzo grew in importance till it became a separate play of lighter character than the principal drama. As our fathers used to go to the theatre to see "Richard III.," followed by a one act farce, so these medieval Italians went to see a serious drama relieved by a humorous or fanciful intermezzo; the difference being that the intermezzo was performed between the acts of the play. The intermezzo subsequently rose to such an importance that it developed into opera buffa, the comic Italian opera. But for the present we are concerned with it only as a forerunner of opera.

In 1589 Giovanni Bardi, Count of Vernio, wrote, as the festival play for the marriage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand with Christine de Lorraine, "L'Amico fido" with "grand, spectacular intermezzi." There were five intermezzi: "The Harmony of the Spheres," by Rinuccini, Cavaliere, and Malvezzi; "The Judgment of the Hamadryads," by Rinuccini and Marenzio; "The Triumph of Apollo," by Rinuccini, Marenzio, and Vernio; "The Infernal Regions," by Strozzi and Caccini; and "The Fable of Arion," by Rinuccini, Cavaliere and Marenzio. This production naturally stimulated the movement in the direction of true opera, while it served to emphasize the utter unfitness of the extant style of music for dramatic purposes. The more frequently the composers undertook to set to music dramatic libretti, even of the simplest nature, the more firmly they became convinced that their music was not the right kind. The musical artists of the time had followed the methods of the religious drama, described in the chapter on the birth of oratorio, and were now gradually awakening to the fact that its style of music was incapable of illustrating the human passions and emotions of the secular drama. The dissatisfaction first found general voice in 1579, when a festival play, with music by Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli, was performed in honor of the marriage of Francesco I., Duke of Tuscany, with Bianca Capella, of Venice. The text of the choruses was full of joyous praise of the beauty of the bride; the music was in strict canon and in four parts, and made the wedding songs sound like funeral hymns. The artistic nobility of Florence was deeply displeased, and it was then that the Count of Vernio and a circle of his friends set out to see how they could improve the state of dramatic music.

The reader will recollect that in Chapter VI I spoke of the great influence of the revival of Greek learning in Italy on the simplification of musical style. The friends and associates of Count Vernio were all enthusiastic students of Greek literature; and to them the masterpieces of Æschylus and Euripides had come as revelations. It became their fondest ambition to restore the Greek drama, but they soon learned that in order to do this they must find their way back to something like the Greek music used in that drama. It was in searching for this that they hit upon the much desired substitute for the unsuitable polyphonic choruses. The Greek drama resembled the opera rather than the play of the present day. Music was an essential part of it. The dramatic and lyric elements were inseparable, and the one modified the other. The spirit of the text was as faithfully represented in the music as it was possible to represent it with the music of that age. We have abundant evidence that the Greek tragic writers were also composers. H. E. Krehbiel, in his "Studies in the Wagnerian Drama," has excellently summarized this evidence. A fragment of a theoretical work on rhythm by Aristoxenus is filled with lamentations over the decadence of dramatic music since the days of Æschylus. The author accuses contemporary composers of pandering to a depraved public taste. Sophocles was not only a poet and a composer, but an actor and a singer. In his own drama "Thamyris" he appeared as a singer stricken blind by the muses. Special note is made by the Greek writers that Euripides had to call in the aid of a composer to supply the music for one of his plays. In the Greek play the actors did not declaim their lines; they chanted them. The odes which filled the pauses between the various stages of the dramatic action were sung by the chorus which gravely danced around an altar between the stage and the audience. These choruses were sung in unison, and were accompanied by instruments.

It was this dramatic recitation in music as practised by the Greeks that the little circle of enthusiasts, habitually assembled at the Palazzo Bardi, set out to resuscitate. But they had no specimens of it and hence were forced to do the best they could from descriptions. The most significant fact that struck home into their minds was that a single personage sang or intoned his part alone, and with an accompaniment of lyres or instruments of that class. Of course solo singing was not unknown to the medieval Italians. The troubadours and minstrels were practising it, and furthermore it is inconceivable that they themselves did not often hum the catch of a madrigal. Musical historians too often speak of solo singing as if it were a sudden invention of the Bardi circle. What they did was to begin the artistic cultivation of it on certain lines and to produce something which became dramatic recitative. Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo, the famous astronomer, was a most enthusiastic advocate of the ancient music. He entered into a published controversy with the composer and theorist Zarlino, who warmly defended the music of his time. Galilei's "Dialogo della Musica Antica e Moderna," published in 1581, presents Count Vernio and Pietro Strozzi, one of the poets of the Vernio circle, as discussing ancient and modern music. It seems strange to us to find Galilei condemning modern music—that of the church in 1581—as suitable only for uncultivated persons and not for the scholar. Galilei, however, was not content with precept; he added example. He selected a passage from Dante's "Inferno" and under the title of "Il Conte Ugolino" he set it to music for a single voice with lute accompaniment. He was an admirable lutenist and his performance of this, the first artistic monody of which we have any record, must have been very effective. The work itself is lost.

Giovanni Battista Doni, in his "Compendio del Trattato de' Generi e de' Modi della Musica" (Rome, 1635), tells us that Galilei was the "first who composed songs for a single voice," but he declares that Giulio Caccini, another member of the circle, "in imitation of Galilei, but in a more beautiful and pleasing style, set many canzonets and sonnets written by excellent poets." Caccini collected a number of these songs, which are in pure recitative style, and published them in 1601, under the title of "Nuove Musiche." He wrote a long preface, in which he claimed the honor of the highest achievement in this new kind of music and stoutly upheld its superiority to that of the contrapuntists. Here is a specimen of this "new music," which will give an excellent idea of the kind of musical recitation those enthusiasts of Florence evolved from their attempts to revive the Greek drama.