emotion. The Italian is not born for heavy, contrapuntal, “vain
ticklings of the ears”; nor, on the other hand, for too intimate
effusions or symbolic mysteries. He is sensuous through and through;
delight in playing and in sound is the very life of his music, as
delight in outline and in colour is the very life of his painting. The
intoxication of absolute tone runs through the masses of his churches,
the operas of his theatre, the chamber-music of his salons. Delight
in sound gave the impulse to every Italian musician in his bid for
fame. It created virtuosity, which loves playing for its own sake; it
created the dramatic choruses, with which the Venetian school began
its career; it created the melody predominating over the harmony,
with the discovery of which in the Florentine opera the greatest blow
was struck for the new principles of “secular” musicianship. From
love of sound the Venetians cast the instruments free from their
old corporate unity, and gave them an individual meaning and value.
From love of sound Frescobaldi led the organ, Corelli the violin,
Scarlatti the clavier, to undreamt-of technical creations. And the
_bel canto_ of the human voice almost attained the capacity of an
instrument; so small was the influence of the mere words. They were
enamoured of melody, which, unlike the ecclesiastical counterpoint,
sought its new objective not in the manifold transformation, but in
the natural development of a motive: they were captivated with the
“da capo” repetition of concerted pieces or arias, a habit grounded
on the psychological law of the higher effectiveness of all repeated
passages. They rioted in the multitude of forms, in which they found
a place for every kind of music, for every “tempo,” every rhythm, and
for all kinds of expression. Throughout all this was to be perceived
the sensuous Italian love for music, which expressed in this
manifoldness its freedom of artistic activity, and in that freedom the
unity of thematic construction and consequently the unity of formal
repetition.
[Illustration: Frescobaldi.]
Technical ability was appreciated in Venice earlier than elsewhere.
The registers of organists at St Mark’s go back to 1318. In Venice
not the office only, but the art, was honoured. The musician was not,
as he was much later at Florence, interrupted by the ringing of a
bell, if he continued his performance too long. The emancipation of
artists, which in our own century we have seen carried out in the
person of the orchestral conductor, was in Venice effected by the
instrumental musician; and as to-day the orchestra has grown in repute
by the agency of the conductor, so in those days the prestige of
instrumental music advanced alongside that of the performer. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century a Frescobaldi could already gain
so important a position as player of the organ and clavier, that it
was said that no clavier-player was respected who did not play after
his new fashion. When he gave his first recital in St Peter’s, thirty
thousand persons were there to hear him. What Frescobaldi was in the
first half of the seventeenth century, that was Pasquini in the second
half. In Italy, Austria, and France he was treated like a prince; and
his tombstone bears the proud inscription, “Organist of the Senate and
People of Rome.” With Scarlatti the art of clavier-playing reaches its
height, and begins to decline. It is not clavierists but violinists,
the wordless rivals of the singers, who have carried the type of
Italian virtuosity into our own times--Corelli, Vivaldi, Locatelli,
Tartini, Paganini.
This sensuous devotion to music apart from inner meaning, this passion
for poetic beauty, the Italians have not yet, even under Wagnerian
influences, wholly forgotten. The victorious rule of absolute tone,
while it constituted their greatness, carried with it the germ of
their decay. Virtuosity is the mark of their art and of their life.
We must take them as they are, in the whole light-hearted temperament
of their existence. This Bohemian type of the Italian musician of
the time may profitably be compared with the similar French type.
What a seductive brilliancy there is in the adventurous career of
a Bononcini! His operas are received at Vienna with unparalleled
enthusiasm. Queen Sophia Charlotte is the clavier-player at the
production of his “Polifemo” in Berlin. In London he enters upon a
contest with Handel, in which social intrigues are involved with high
political aims. Next, he appears in a lawsuit, and is unmasked as a
common plagiary[47] of a madrigal of Lotti’s; shortly after he is away
to Paris with an alchemist, who swindles him of all his property,
and leaves him to make his living by the sweat of his brow to his
ninetieth year. Stradella’s fate is well known--how he ran away with
the mistress of a Venetian before the first performance of his own
opera;[48] was more than once attacked with a dagger, and finally
actually murdered.[49] What, compared with this, is the story of
Rameau’s youthful love and its punishment, and of his tardy attainment
of the haven of fortune, or what the anecdotes of Marchand, with his
love affairs, his expulsion from Paris, and his smiling return? The
dangerous glitter of this Italian Bohemianism is the fitting framework
of that sensuous, lively, irresponsible music.
It was inevitable that the Italians should invent the opera--the
opera, in which every thing tends rapidly to the spectacular; singers,
scene painters, musicians, and the public. Apart from its relation
to opera all Italian music is unintelligible, and it is no accident
that for centuries the Italians stood in the forefront of opera.
Those lucky misunderstandings are well-known, which led, about the
year 1600, to the rise of this form of art. A circle of Platonic
dreamers (led by Giovanni Bardi, Count of Vernio) in Florence,
anxious to revive the ancient tragedy, engaged certain musicians
to compose monodic songs with accompaniment. They merely meant by
this to be antique; but as a matter of fact they were unconsciously
acting along the line of the most modern of needs, which had long
tended towards isolated melody. The dainty and delicate songs,
which took their origin in this, the Venetians, and afterwards the
Neapolitans, accepted eagerly as a material on which to construct
forms of ravishing virtuosity, until a Jomelli, with his dashing
bravura passages on the most solemn words, finally arrives at that
very “laceramento della poesia”[50] which the Florentine reformer
Caccini had once fanatically combated as a madness of the ancient song
in several parts. In a very short time the opera runs through the
whole gamut of the joys and sorrows of virtuosity. The sweet charm of
sound, exhibited by a voice which bears the melody, so suited to the
narrow outlines of poetry, is found in the old vestal airs of Caccini
and Peri. The delight in a multitude of forms, in an alternation of
different rhythms in short portions of the aria, lived in the songs
of the Venetian Cavalli, in which we are reminded of the alternating
tempi of the old instrumental pieces[51]--the toccatas, fantasias,
and canzoni. Yet empty vanity shows itself all too soon. The original
simplicity was overlaid by various corrupt accretions, first by
songs, introduced in loose dependence on the action, then by complete
concerted pieces, which are indicated in the libretto--together with
directions to tailors, architects, and decorators, and alongside of
the titles and orders of the performers. In Naples, worse still,
the music gradually declines into a stiff and wearisome form and
sweet playful nothingness. The well-defined outline of the aria
appears, now regularly written “da capo”; it alternates to a tiresome
degree with the accompanied recitative; the chorus recedes into
the background before the soloists. It is the old typical form,
skilfully adapted to virtuosity, precisely as a sonata of Scarlatti is
differentiated from a toccata of Frescobaldi or Pasquini. Originality
is vanquished; elegance has created a set of formalities in which
technique can freely exercise itself. The substantive style, so to
speak, has given way to the adjective, and matter is conquered by
form. This Neapolitan class of opera, which thus exalts the virtuoso,
begins with Alessandro Scarlatti. He is the father of that species
of art which is afterwards included in the name of Italian opera,
in which we see a contempt for the words, a love of vocal bravura,
the supremacy of the aria, and a delight in the human voice as an
instrument. In the forms of his ornamentations we discover again in
antitype the passages of Domenico; in his love of the _da capo_ and
instrumental repetitions of vocal phrases we see once more in antitype
Domenico’s repetitions of shorter or longer groups of bars. In the
“Alessandro nelle Indie” of the Neapolitan Leonardo Vinci the hero
sings arias full of slurred “divisions,” syncopations, unprepared
sevenths, which to a man acquainted with Scarlatti’s sonatas appear
to bear a strong family resemblance to Scarlatti. Old rubbish bears
germs of new creations; released from the heavy burden of the words,
the light play of the voices in the clavier-pieces introduces a fresh,
youthful life that is full of promise for the future.
The isolation of the voice and of the instrument, the sensuous delight
in sound, demands a chamber-music and a chamber-style. Chamber-music
demands the Maecenas of the great house, and the wealthy amateur, who
is so powerful a factor in every advance of art. Roman musical life,
for instance, draws its strength from the practical encouragement
of the Pope’s, or from the concerts and operas performed in
aristocratic houses. A Venetian nobleman, Benedetto Marcello, became a
distinguished and favourite composer, a poet and a satirist. A Roman
nobleman, Emilio dei Cavalieri, became the founder of the modern
oratorio, an opera-composer of the advanced school, perhaps even the
very earliest composer of vocal monody. Vincenzo Galilei, the father
of the astronomer, became known by his monodies in that circle of
Florentine Platonists, to whose worthy amateurism is due the origin of
the opera; and he wrote a work on the technique and fingering of all
instruments.
Music in the home is in Italy not too intimate, but proud, splendid,
mere pastime. Like the opera of the virtuosos, like the secularised
church-music, it tends to rely upon effect, and lives on applause.
It depends chiefly on the performer, and knows little of the mutual
intelligence of souls. A subtle aristocratic love of music runs
through the Italy of the Middle Ages. Many are the names of high-born
men and women who had mastered the art of the lute by ear--for a
notation was as yet unknown.[52] In the Decameron (1350), alongside of
the novel-telling, it is song, lute-playing, viol-playing, dance and
choral refrain, with which that pleasant company loves most to kill
the time.
The music of dances, songs, and instrumental pieces, which was soon
to find its proper home in the clavier, is a child of the world,
and, in the view of a serious theoretician like Pietro Bembo, it is
exposed to all the dangers of emptiness and vanity. In 1529 he writes
to his daughter Helena, who like many of the women in her position,
intended to receive instruction on the clavier in her convent: “As to
your request to be allowed to learn the monochord,[53] I answer that
you cannot yet, on account of your youth, understand that playing is
only suited for idle and volatile ladies; whereas I desired you to be
the most pure and loveable maiden in the world. Also, it would bring
you but little pleasure or renown if you should play badly; while to
play well you would have to devote ten or twelve years to practice,
without being able to think of anything else. Consider a moment
whether _this_ would become you. And if your friends wish you to learn
to play in order to give them pleasure, reply that you do not wish to
make yourself ridiculous in their eyes; and content yourself with the
sciences and domestic occupations.”
A hundred years later chamber-music is at its zenith. The great
Carissimi (d. 1674) put the flourishing chamber cantata[54]--that
half-dramatic, half-lyric song of the seventeenth century--by the
side of the monodic church-songs of Viadana; and Steffani added
his renowned chamber-duets. The case was precisely similar with
instrumental music; by the side of the “sonata da chiesa,” with its
free and independent style, came the “sonata da camera,” as a suite
of favourite dance forms;[55] and the “concerti,” with their several
instruments playing to a small accompanying orchestra. Above all, the
possibility is now realised of suitably accompanying monodies and
concerted works on the clavier, from the figured bass; and this in
its turn contributes not a little to the victorious advance of the
melodic song. But as a solo-instrument, the clavier suns itself in the
light of the chamber-style, in which brilliancy, dexterity of hand,
and elasticity of form are not less admired than the many small and
spirited caprices, which in the “grand” style of music have perhaps
not yet been attempted.
[Illustration: A Clavier Lesson. Painting by an unknown Dutch Master,
17th century, in the Royal Gallery at Dresden.]
Among all the instruments of tone which achieve an independent
existence in Italy, the clavier naturally takes its stand last.
From its first movement towards this independence, in Venice in the
sixteenth century, to the full liberty of a Scarlatti, stretches an
interval of a hundred and fifty years. It was in fact partly too much
occupied in the orchestra, and partly too dependent on the technique
of the organ. We find it already in the orchestra in the first
operas of Peri; under Monteverde, the first of all great orchestral
geniuses, there were two claviers, on the right and left of the stage.
They serve to accompany solo singing, or, along with small organs, to
fill up the harmony of the orchestral body. As a rule the operatic
composer writes only the figured bass, but occasionally adds some of
the melodic voice-parts; the conductor completes the score, leaving to
the several players, however, a certain freedom of improvisation in
colouring, a freedom which a well-trained musician would not abuse to
the detriment of the _tout ensemble_.
But clavier-pieces pure and simple had a characteristically
_dependent_ existence. Even in that Venetian circle where Willaert
(1490-1563) Gabrieli,[56] and Merulo moved, in which instruments
were first emancipated, in which they were boldly introduced into
church-music, and solo-pieces were written for orchestral or for keyed
instruments, even here the soul of the clavier lay still fettered. It
is the organ that indicates colour and takes the lead. In the pieces
of the two Gabrielis, or of Merulo, the old contrapuntal, pictorial
fashion lives still almost untouched by external disturbances; and the
picture seldom allows us to anticipate that stiff adherence to the
theme, and that well-wrought harmony which, in the England of the same
age, we found so full of promise. Down to the time of Frescobaldi,
organist at St Peter’s in 1615, who stands as a landmark in this
development, the Italian sense for absolute music is far too strong
for an “applied” music to be able, as it did in France and England, to
_modernise_ the instrumental pieces by their necessary dependence on
song and dance. Canzoni[57] are treated in a light fugal style; the
so-called Ricercari[58] represent another and freer fugal form; the
toccatas, capriccios and fantasias are variegated attempts to unite
all tempi and all kinds of playing in one piece. The composers are
aiming at typical forms, and only attain an unrestrained formlessness
which all these pieces with their trifling differences alike exhibit.
The juxtaposition of chords, successions of canonic imitations, free
alternations of tempo, piquant applications of the newly-discovered
chromatic possibilities--all these interest these writers much more
than character or expression. All these ricercari, canzoni, fantasias,
toccatas, are alike “sonatas”--pieces which exist for the sake of
their _tones_ and technique, and, as Couperin says, not in the least
for the sake of their soul or content. Dance-suites and variations
on songs, which as time went on gained in popularity, sharpened,
here as elsewhere, the sense for form; but these never became the
predominant class. The free form of the fantasia always ranked as the
principal species of the higher clavier-pieces. In Frescobaldi we
already see the process of crystallisation. His canzoni and fugues not
only exhibit for the first time the good fugal style familiar to us,
but also betray the modern sense for arrangement and method in their
frequent division[59] into three movements, and in their progressive
quickening of tempo. He it is also who reduces under a distinct law of
arrangement the various movements of the whole instrumental fantasia.
With Pasquini in the second half of the seventeenth century, we meet
the visible line of demarcation between organ and clavier. Hitherto
the organ had been in everything the predominant partner. The whole
aspect of the clavier-pieces was that of the organ. The old Venetians
had frequently written for it in three or four parts and brought
the instrument into popularity. But even Frescobaldi had written no
piece for clavier alone. Diruta, organist at Chioggia, the pupil of
Merulo, wrote a dialogue between 1597 and 1609 on the best method of
playing organ and clavier, and had of course drawn attention to the
characteristic features of clavier-playing; but all his observations
on holding the hands horizontal,[60] on the good and bad fingers
(the second and fourth are the “good,” and fall on the strong accents
of the bar), or on the ornamentations and their execution, are in
the first instance written with reference to the organ. Indeed, he
actually begins his book with a panegyric on that instrument. As
a matter of fact the true emancipator of the Italian clavier was
Pasquini. He wrote for the clavicymbal alone; in his figures and
style of play he thus early showed a genuine sense for the clavier;
he abandoned the practice of setting chord passages and runs in close
juxtaposition, but elaborated out of the two the proper clavier style;
he brought into strong connection with a theme the quicker and slower
parts of his sonatas, and set them clearly over against each other;
and he attempts, as in his Capriccio on the motive of the cuckoo’s
song, to draw from the clavier all kinds of characteristic effects,
still wild and confused, but full of the freshness of spring.
[Illustration: Virginal in shape of a work-box.]
[Illustration: The same opened, showing the instrument within, which
can be taken out.]
[Illustration: The instrument taken out. Constructed in 1631 by
Valerius Perius Romanus. De Wit collection, Leipsic.]
So far is the early Italian clavier (when the violin begins its
victorious career) from assuming a leading position, that the
cembalo can do nothing better than make use of the experiences of
the violin. For we must give up the legend of the genius of Michel
Angelo Rossi. This story is one of the most amusing freaks of musical
history. We find in many popular collections of old music an andante
and allegro in G major by this man, who is tolerably well known as
an operatic composer and violinist. He was a pupil of Frescobaldi
and died in 1660. This piece is so captivating in its melody, so
decided in its form, so restrained in its arrangement, that it would
have done honour to Mozart. Had these pieces truly sprung from the
_intavolatura_ of Michel Angelo Rossi, the modernity of their form
and melody would give such a shock to musical history that it would
be shivered into fragments. Yet a man like Pauer, who published them,
could actually believe that this music was possible before 1660.[61]
A later historian, Rolland, in his “Histoire de l’Opéra avant Lully
et Scarlatti,” led astray by the same mistake, fancies he detects
in the choruses of Rossi’s opera of Hermione anticipations of the
Zauberflöte.[62] Parry alone, the author of the brilliant article on
the sonata in Grove’s Dictionary of Music, has boggled at this pseudo
Rossi. Heaven knows to whom the pretty little pieces really belong. It
is not unlikely that Scarlatti wrote them in his old age.
[Illustration:
Italian cembalo, from a monastery, of the 18th century. Made of
cypress wood. The pictures on the lid represent a concert of monks and
a landscape. On the sides of the case are Cupids and garlands. De Wit
collection, Leipsic. ]
The thematically precise sonatas and concertos of Corelli, the old
violin master; the pieces of Vivaldi, so wonderfully rich in melody;
the intellectual suites of Locatelli; it is in these violin works
that the form of the Italian instrumental piece first appears,
deriving itself from the joint experiences of the free toccata and
of the fettered dance. Corelli, who died so early as 1713, was one
of those strange phenomena in the history of art, which reach the
utmost heights of an epoch, without freezing into an icy classicism.
His pieces are even to-day of a ravishing sensuousness, and must be
produced in the flowery dress of an improvised _coloratura_.[63] They
mark the highest point in the monodic style of the virginal Italian
music. From the point of view of melody they are the freshest dances
and arias written about 1700, full of unparalleled invention and of a
rhythmical freedom which anticipates the scherzi of Beethoven. They
are indeed the works of a genius in form. But they never stiffen into
one shape, like the operatic overtures.[64] In Corelli the sonata
still stands in the full bloom of its manifold forms. Among his
numerous pieces there are not many which exhibit precisely the same
arrangement of the movements and of their tempi, or of the various
dances. Even the number of these movements varies, so that one can
lay down no precise rule. Slow movements begin, or stand in the
middle, or come at the end; or even, with a modernised reminiscence
of old times, introduce themselves for a few bars[65] between the
allegros and the vivaces. This is, from the point of view of form, the
same rhythmic freedom which Beethoven, on deeper material grounds,
reintroduced in his latest sonatas and quartets. All is held together
by an ornamental, delicate, and thematic filigree-work. More rarely,
as in the fourth Sonata da chiesa and in the fifth Sonata da camera,
a certain thematic relation between the several movements is to be
detected; but within the movement the thematic conception is so worked
out that it is treated with natural modulations and appropriate
intermediate passages. The movement falls into two parts which are
repeated as a matter of course; the second part begins with the
modulated main motive of the first. Occasionally, as in the allemande
of the tenth concerto and in the allegro of the twelfth, we find an
exact return to the first theme. This combination of the da capo
system with the modulation of the theme; and in the midst of this
the miniature da capo system of the concerted violins imitating each
other; and especially the favourite concluding repetitions of bars,
alternating from forte to piano,--all these became the groundwork of
the Scarlattian style.
The da capo is in fact the scaffolding of this formal music. To our
modern minds it appears pointless; but in those days it was natural
enough. Some day the history of musical repetition ought to be
written; it would be indeed the history of quite half of music. Even
in Greek writings we meet melodic repetitions; it is on the principle
of imitation that the contrapuntal style of the Middle Ages[66] is
built; from the repetition of parts, or the rearrangement of the
themes, musical sentences become capable of new effects; and further,
there was the germ of progress in the thematic conception of whole
bars, whole groups of bars and whole movements, which finally,
whether arias or sonatas, were taken da capo. This is the last step
of thematic music which has shaken off the contrapuntal forms.
To-day we are in a period of repetition which, for want of a better
word, we may call “Thematic.” In dependence on the old beginnings of
programme-music, which were greatly developed by Beethoven, the new
_subjective_ repetition takes the place of the older. This new form
works chiefly in the _idée fixe_, in the Leit-motiv, which is subtly
treated and varied according to the situations represented. Founded
deep in the essence of music, the principle of repetition has at all
times been an ever-changing, ever re-incarnating characteristic of the
condition of the tonic art.
[Illustration: