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.
Peri, Caccini, Bardi and others of the Florentine "camerata" were
engaged as composers, stage managers, actors and singers in many of the
elaborate court spectacles, intermezzi and madrigal dramas produced
toward the end of the sixteenth century. Peri and Caccini were
professional singers, and their experiences were not only those of
students, but also those of practitioners. Their revolt against the
contrapuntal lyric drama was largely, though not wholly, based on
deep-seated objection to the unintelligibility of the text. It does not
require profound consideration to bring us to the opinion that the
method of Vecchi was in part an attempt to overcome the innate defect of
the polyphonic style in this matter of intelligibility. The resort to
the spoken text on the stage while the music was sung behind the scenes
appears on the face of it to have been compelled by a wish for some
method of conveying the meaning of the poet to the audience.
Why, then, did not these young reformers find at hand in the madrigal
arranged for solo voice the suggestion for their line of lyric
reconstruction? Partly by reason of the confusion caused by obedience to
old polyphonic customs in making the accompaniments, and partly because
the madrigal had become a field for the display of vocal agility.
Already the development of colorature singing had reached a high degree
of perfection. Already the singer sought to astonish the hearer by
covering an air with a bewildering variety of ornaments. The time was
not far off when the opera prima donna was to become the incarnation of
the artistic sensuousness which had beguiled Italy with a dream of
Grecian resurrection. The way had been well built, for the attention of
the fathers of the Roman church had been turned early to the necessity
of system in the delivery of the liturgical chants. The study of a style
had developed a technic and to the achievement of vocal feats this
technic had been incited by the rapid rise of the act of descant.
Hand in hand the technic and the art of descant had come down the years.
The sharp distinction early made between "contrapunctus a penna" and
"contrapunctus a mente" showed that composers and singers to a certain
degree actually stood in rivalry in their production of passage work for
voices. The rapid expansion of the florid element in the polyphonic
music of the composers indicates to us that the improvised descant of
the singer had a sensible influence. We need not be astonished, then, to
learn that long before the end of the sixteenth century a very
considerable knowledge of what was later systematized as the so-called
"Italian method" had been acquired. The registers of head and chest were
understood, breathing was studied, the hygiene of the voice was not a
stranger, and vocalizes on all the vowels and for all the voices had
been written. Numerous singers had risen to note, and the records show
that their distinction rested not only on the beauty of their voices and
the elegance of their singing, but also on their ability to perform
those instrumental feats which have from that time to this been dear to
the colorature singer and to the operatic public.
In the closing years of the sixteenth century we find that the famous
singers were heard not oftener in public entertainments than in private
assemblies. Occasionally a madrigal arranged as a solo figured in a
lyric play, but the singing of madrigals for one voice was a popular
field for the exhibition of the powers of celebrated prima donnas such
as Vittoria Archilei and eminent tenors like Jacopo Peri.
Kiesewetter[35] gives a madrigal sung as a solo by Archilei. The
supporting parts of the composition were transferred from voices to
instruments apparently with little trouble. Mme. Archilei herself played
the lute and her husband, Antonio Archilei, and Antonio Nalda played two
chitarroni. The music of the madrigal was composed by Signor Archilei.
Here are the opening measures of this lyric:
[Musical Notation]
[Footnote 35: "Schicksale und Beschaffenheit des Weltlichen
Gesanges," by R. G. Kiesewetter. Leipsic, 1841.]
Here is the beginning of the composition as Mme. Archilei decorated it
with her extraordinary skill in the vocal ornamentation of the period:
[Musical Notation]
We are told that despite the fine professions of the Florentines, Mme.
Archilei was permitted to embroider Peri's _Euridice_ in something like
this fashion. But we must admit that even in those days a prima donna
had power, and that something had to be conceded to popular taste.
Furthermore, we shall see that the Florentines did not purpose to
abolish floridity entirely.