Some Forerunners of Italian Opera

by W. J. Henderson

Some of Vecchi's works were produced and met with favor even after the pseudo-Hellenic invention of the Bardi fraternity had burst upon Italy. Indeed the madrigal drama died hard and its final burial was not accomplished till the opera had begun to take shape more definite than that found in the experimental productions of its founders. With the declining years of this curious form we need not concern ourselves. We may now turn to a consideration of the experiments which led to the creation of dramatic recitative, the missing link in the primeval world of the lyric drama.

[CHAPTER XIV]

THE SPECTACULAR ELEMENT IN MUSIC

While the madrigal drama was in the ripeness of its glory the young Florentine coterie which brought the opera to birth was engaged in its experiments with monody. The history of its labors has been told in many books and need not be repeated here. But connected with it are certain important facts which are too often overlooked or at best denied their correct position in the story.

In the first place, then, let us remind ourselves that while the madrigal drama was utilizing in a novel manner the musical form from which it took its name, the method of adapting the madrigal to solo purposes had never been abandoned. The singular path of development followed by the musical drama had been leading away from its true goal, that of solo utterance, but the Italian salon still heard the charms of the madrigal arranged as a lyric for single voice.

The first secular drama, the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, was equipped with the elements from which might have been evolved quickly all the materials of the first experimental operas; but the rapid spread of the polyphonic music through Italy and the sudden and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The noble classic figure of Orpheus, with his flowing white robe, his simple fillet on his brow, and his lyre in his arm, standing before the iron gates and moving by his song the powers of hell, soon gave way to the gorgeous exhibitions in which the splendors of Night and Dawn were made the subjects of a series of glittering scenes enveloping a plan much like that of some modern ballet spectacle.

Throughout the sixteenth century, as we have seen, these court representations grew in complexity of pictorial detail, while the importance of the development of a medium for individual expression sank further and further out of notice. One reads of occasional uses of the old method of solo recitation to the lyre, but never as a controlling motive in the dramatic construction. It appears only as an incident in the general medley of sensuous allurements. So, too, the convocation of masses of singers, dancers and instrumentalists seems to have been nothing more than a natural demonstration of that growing appetite for luxury which characterized the approach of the feeble intellectual era of the Seicentisti, that era in which "ecclesiastical intolerance had rendered Italy nearly destitute of great men."

These quoted words are Symonds's; let him speak still further: "Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnescchi burned, Paleario burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished after a quarter of a century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe. Tasso, worn out with misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Scarpi survived the stylus of the Roman curia with calm inscrutability at St. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch tower behind Bello Squardo. With Michael Angelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto in 1594, the godlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor one. Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarotti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature. The Bolognese academy in painting. After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento—barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation—Jesuitry translated into false culture."

Symonds is here speaking of the dawn of the seventeenth century, but the movement toward these conditions is quite clearly marked in the later years of the preceding cycle. Its influence on the lyric drama is manifest in the multiplication of luxurious accessories and superficial splendors, designed to appeal to the taste of nobles plunged in sensuous extravagances and easily mistaking delight in them for a lofty appreciation of the drama and art. The reform of the Florentine coterie conquered Italy for less than fifty years. The return to showy productions, to the congregation of purely theatric effects, scenic as well as musical, was swift, and the student of operatic art can to-day discern with facility that the invention of the Florentines was soon reduced to the state of a thread to bind together episodes of pictorial and vocal display. But in the beginning it was unquestionably the outcome of a hostility to these very things, or at any rate to their merely spectacular employment.