CHAPTER XVIII.
FIRST CENTURY OF ITALIAN OPERA AND
DRAMATIC SONG.
URING the last decade of the sixteenth century a company of Florentine gentlemen were in the habit of meeting at the house of Count Bardi for the study of ancient literature. Their attention had concentrated itself upon the drama of the Greeks, and the one thing which they sought to discover was the music of ancient tragedy, the stately and measured intonation to which the great periods of Æschylus, Euripides and Sophocles had been uttered. The alleged fragments of Pindar's music since discovered by Athanasius Kircher ([p. 69]) were not yet known, and they had nothing whatever to guide their researches beyond the mathematical computations of Ptolemy and the other Greek writers. At length, one evening, Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer Galileo, presented himself with a monody. Taking a scene from Dante's "Purgatorio" (the episode of Ugolini), he sang or chanted it to music of his own production, with the accompaniment of the viola played by himself. The assembly was in raptures. "Surely," they said, "this must have been the style of the music of the famous drama of Athens." Thereupon others set themselves to composing monodies, which, as yet, were not arias, but something between a recitative and an aria, having measure and a certain regularity of tune, but in general the freedom of the chant. Among the number at Count Bardi's was the poet Rinuccini, who prepared a drama called "Dafne." The music of this was composed in part by an amateur named Caccini, and in part by Jacopo Peri, all being members of this studious circle meeting at the house of Count Bardi. "Dafne" was performed in 1597 at the house of Count Corsi, with great success, but the music has been lost, and nothing more definite is known about it. This beginning of opera, for so it was, was also the beginning of opera in Germany, as we shall presently see, for about twenty years later a copy of "Dafne" was carried to Dresden for production there before the court, but when the libretto had been translated into German, it was found unsuited to the music of the Italian copy, whereupon the Dresden director, Heinrich Schütz, wrote new music for it, and thus became the composer of the first German opera ever written. In 1600 the marriage of Catherine de Medici with Henry IV of France was celebrated at Florence with great pomp, and Peri was commissioned to undertake a new opera, for which Rinuccini composed the text "Eurydice." The work was given with great éclat, and was shortly after printed. Only one copy of the first edition is now known to be in existence, and that, by a curious accident, is in the Newberry Library at Chicago. The British Museum has a copy of the second edition of 1608. The opera of "Eurydice" is short, the printed copy containing only fifty-eight pages, and the music is almost entirely recitative. There are two or three short choruses; there is one orchestral interlude for three flutes, extending to about twenty measures in all, but there is nothing like a finale or ensemble piece. Nevertheless, this is the beginning, out of which afterward grew the entire flower of Italian opera. On [page 225] is an [extract].
[From the first opera, "Eurydice" (1600). Jacopo Peri.]