From Frottola Drama to Madrigal
With such a simple and dignified beginning as that of the "Orfeo" how
came the lyric drama of the next century to wander into such sensuous
luxuriance, such spectacular extravagance of both action and music? In
the drama of Poliziano the means employed, as well as the ends sought,
were artistic and full of suggestions as to possible methods of
development. But whereas the opera in the seventeenth century suffered
from contact with the public, the lyric drama of the sixteenth was led
into paths of dalliance by the dominant taste of splendor-loving courts.
The character of this taste encouraged the development of the musical
apparatus of the lyric drama toward opulent complexity, and the medium
for this was found in the rapidly growing madrigal, which soon ruled the
realm of secular music. In it the frottola, raised to an art form and
equipped with the wealth of contrapuntal device, passed almost
insensibly into a new life. Berlioz says that it takes a long time to
discover musical Mediterraneans and still longer to learn to navigate
them. The madrigal was a musical Mediterranean. It was the song of the
people touched by the culture of the church. It was the priestly art of
cathedral music transferred to the service of human emotion.
The Italian madrigal had a specifically Italian character. It followed
the path of sensuous dalliance trod by the people of Boccaccio's tales.
It differentiated itself from the secular song of the northern musicians
as clearly as the architecture of Venice distinguished itself from all
other Gothic art. Even in that era those characteristics which
subsequently defined the racial and temperamental differences between
the musical art of northern Europe and that of Italy were fully
perceptible. The north moved steadily toward instrumental polyphony,
Italy toward the individual utterance of the solo voice. That her first
experiments were made in the popular madrigal form was to be expected.
The "Orfeo" of Poliziano and his unknown musical associates set the
model for a century. In the course of that century the irresistible
drift of Italian art feeling, retarded as it was by the supreme vogue of
musicians trained in the northern schools, moved steadily toward its
destination, the solo melody, yet the end was not reached till the
madrigal had worked itself to its logical conclusion, to wit,
a demonstration of its own inherent weakness. We must not be blind to
the fact that while the Netherland art at first powerfully affected that
of Italy, the latter in the end reacted on the former, and these two
influences crossed and recrossed in ways that demand the closest
scrutiny of the analytical historian. But at this particular period that
which immediately concerns us is the manner in which Italian musical art
defined itself. The secret of the differentiation already mentioned must
be sought in the powerful feeling of Gothic art for organization. Gothic
architecture is above all things organic and Teutonic music has the same
character. Its most Gothic form, the North German fugue, which is the
instrumental descendant of the Netherlands church music, is the most
closely organized of musical types. The Italian architecture, on the
other hand, displayed an aversion for the infinite detail of Gothic
methods and found its individual expression in the grand and patent
relations of noble mass effects. This same feeling speedily found its
way into Italian music, even that composed by the Netherland masters who
had settled in Italy.
Adrian Willaert, who is often called the father of the madrigal (despite
the fact that madrigals were written before he was born), became chapel
master of St. Mark's, Venice, in 1527. He seized with avidity the
suggestion offered by the existence of two organs in the cathedral and
wrote great works "for two choruses of four voices each, so that the
choruses could answer each other across the church. He paid much less
attention to rigid canonic style than his predecessors had done because
it was not suited to the kind of music which he felt was fitting for his
church. He sought for grand, broad mass effects, which he learned could
be obtained only by the employment of frequent passages in chords. So he
began trying to write his counterpoint in such a way that the voice
parts should often come together in successions of chords. In order to
do this he was compelled to adopt the kind of formations still in use
and the fundamental chord relations of modern music--the tonic, dominant
and subdominant."[30]
[Footnote 30: From the present author's "How Music Developed." New
York, 1898.]
In music of this kind there was no longer a field for the intricate
working of canonically constructed voice parts. It must seek its chief
results in the opposition of one choir against the other, not in
multiplicity of voice parts, but in imposing contrasts as of "deep
answering unto deep." The development of fundamental chord harmonies was
inevitable and from them in the fullness of time was bound to spring the
pure harmonic style. Chord successions without any melodic union cannot
be long sustained, and the Italians, with the tentative achievements of
the frottolists before them, were not long blind to this fact. Leone
Battista Alberti, father of Renaissance architecture, in writing of his
church of St. Francis at Rimini uses the expression "tutta questa
musica." One understands him to mean the harmonious disposition of the
parts of his design so that all "sound" together, as it were, for the
artistic perception.
It was feeling of this same kind that led the apostles of the
Netherlands school and their Italian pupils to follow the physical trend
of all Italian art rather than struggle to impose upon it the shackles
of an uncongenial intellectuality forged in the canonic shops of
Ockeghem and his disciples. The seed of beauty had been sown by the
mighty Josquin des Prés what time he was a Roman singer and a Mantuan
composer. The fruit blossomed in the Renaissance music of Willaert,
Cyprian de Rore and others and came to its perfection in the later works
of Palestrina and Lasso. The resistless operation of the tendencies of
the school was such that at the close of the sixteenth century we are
suddenly confronted with the knowledge that all the details of polyphony
so studiously cultivated by the northern schools have in Italy suddenly
been packed away in a thorough bass supporting one voice which is
permitted to proclaim itself in a proud individuality.
Yet if we permit ourselves to believe that the lyric solo made but a
single spasmodic appearance in the "Orfeo" and had to be born again in
the artistic conversion brought about by the labors of Galilei and
Caccini, we shall be deceived. The fashion set by Poliziano's production
was not wholly abandoned and throughout the remainder of the fifteenth
and the whole of the sixteenth centuries there were productions closely
related to it in style and construction. Not only is the slow
assimilation of the mass of heterogeneous elements thrown together in
these dramas not astonishing, but to the thoughtful student it must
appear to be inevitable. On the one hand was the insatiable desire for
voluptuous spectacle, for the lascivious pseudo-classicism of the
pictorial dance, for the bewildering richness of movement which had
originated in the earlier triumphal processions, and for the stupendous
scenic apparatus made possible in the open air sacred plays. On the
other was the widespread taste for part singing and the constantly
growing skill of composers in adapting to secular ideas the polyphonic
science of the church. Added to these elements was the imperative need
of some method of imparting individuality of utterance to the principal
characters in a play while at the same time strengthening their charm by
the use of song.
For nearly a century, then, we find the lyric drama continuing to
utilize the materials of the sacra rappresentazione as adapted to
secular purposes by Poliziano, but with the natural results of the
improvement in artistic device in music. It is not necessary here to
enter into a detailed account of the growth of musical expression. Every
student of the history of the art knows that many centuries were
required to build up a technical praxis sufficient to enable composers
to shape compositions in such a large form as the Roman Catholic mass.
When the basic laws of contrapuntal technic had been codified, Josquin
des Prés led the way to the production of music possessing a beauty
purely musical. Then followed the next logical step, namely, the attempt
to imitate externals. Such pieces as Jannequin's "Chant des Oiseaux" and
Gombert's "Chasse du Liévre" are examples of what was achieved in this
direction. Finally, Palestrina demonstrated the scope of polyphonic
music in the expression of religious emotions at times bordering upon
the dramatic in their poignancy.
We cannot well doubt that the Italians of the late sixteenth century
felt the failure of their secular music to meet the demands of secular
poetry as religious music was meeting those of the canticles of the
church. The festal entertainments which had graced the marriages of
princes had most of the machinery of opera, but they lacked the vital
principle. They failed to become living art entities solely because they
wanted the medium for the adequate publication of individuality. They
made their march of a century on the very verge of the promised land,
but they had to lose themselves in the bewitching wilderness of the
madrigal drama before they found their Moses. It was the gradual growth
of skill in musical expression that brought the way into sight, and that
growth had to be effected by natural and logical processes, not by the
discovery or by the world-moving genius of any one composer.
The Doric architecture of the frottola had to be developed into the
Italian Renaissance style of the madrigal by the ripening of the craft
of composers in adapting the music of ecclesiastical polyphony to the
communication of worldly thought. Then the Renaissance style had to lose
itself in the baroque struggles of the final period of the madrigal
drama--struggles of artistic impulse against an impossible style of
structure and the uncultivated taste of the auditors. Then and then only
was the time for revolt and the revolt came.
In the meanwhile we may remark that the intense theatricalism of opera
ought never to be a source of astonishment to any one who has studied
the history of its origins. The supreme trait of the lyric drama of the
fifteenth and sixteenth century was its spectacular quality. The reforms
of Galilei and Caccini were, as we shall see, aimed at this condition.
Their endeavors to escape the contrapuntal music of the madrigal drama
were the labors of men consciously confronting conditions which had been
surely, if not boldly, moving toward their own rectification. The
madrigal opera was intrinsically operatic, but it was not yet freed from
the restrictions of impersonality from which its parent, the polyphony
of the church, could not logically rid itself even with the aid of a
Palestrina's genius. We must then follow this line of later development.