The Medium for Individual Utterance
A closer examination of the musical reforms instituted by the camerata
which met at the Vernio and Corsi palaces will convince us that they
were directed toward two objects; first, the restoration of the Greek
method of delivering the declamation of a drama, and second, the
reduction of purely lyric forms to a rational musical basis on which
could be built intelligible settings of texts. The revolt was not only
against polyphonic music in which text was treated without regard for
its communicative purpose, but also against the decorative manner of
solo singing, which made words only backgrounds for arabesques of sound.
On this point we have the conclusive evidence of Caccini's own words as
found in the preface to his "Nuove Musiche."[36] He begins by giving the
reasons why he had not earlier published his lyrics in the new style,
though they had long been sung. He continues:
"But when I now see many of these pieces torn apart and altered in
form, when I see to what evil uses the long runs are put, to wit,
those consisting of single and double notes (repeated ones), as if
both kinds were combined, and which were invented by me in order to
do away with the former old fashion of introduced passages, which
were for wind or stringed instruments rather than the human voice;
when further I see how dynamic gradations of tone are used without
discrimination, what enunciation now is, and how trills, gruppetti
and other ornaments are introduced, I consider it necessary--and in
this I am upheld by my friends--to have my music printed."
[Footnote 36: "Nuove Musiche di Giulio Caccini detto Romano."
Florence, 1601.]
Furthermore he will explain in this preface the principles which led him
to write in this manner for the solo voice. He says that for a long time
he has been a member of the Florentine circle of cultivated men and that
he has learned from them more than he acquired in thirty years in the
schools of counterpoint.
"For these wise and noble personages have constantly strengthened me
and with most lucid reasons determined me to place no value upon
that music which makes it impossible to understand the words and
thus to destroy the unity and meter, sometimes lengthening the
syllables, sometimes shortening them in order to suit the
counterpoint--a real mangling of the poetry--but to hold fast to
that principle so greatly extolled by Plato and other philosophers:
'Let music be first of all language and rhythm and secondly tone,'
but not vice versa, and moreover to strive to force music into the
consciousness of the hearer and create there those impressions so
admirable and so much praised by the ancients, and to produce which
modern music through its counterpoint is impotent. Especially true
is this of solo singing with the accompaniment of a stringed
instrument when the words are not understood because of the
immoderate introduction of passages."
This, he declares, can only extort applause of the "crowd" and such
music can only result in mere tickling of the ear, because when the text
is not intelligible there can be no appeal to the understanding.
"The idea came to me to introduce a style of music which makes it
possible in a certain manner to speak musically by employing, as
already said, a certain noble subordination of the song, with now
and then some dissonances, while however holding the chord by means
of the sustained bass, except when I follow the already common
custom of assigning the middle voices to the accompanying
instrument for the purpose of increasing the effect, for which
purpose alone they are, in my opinion, appropriate."
He now tells us that, after he found that his principle stood the tests
of practice and he was satisfied that in the new style lay a power to
touch hearts far beyond that possessed by polyphony, he wrote certain
madrigals for the solo voice in the manner described, which manner
"I hereafter used for the representations in Florence." Then he went to
Rome where the dilettanti, particularly Lione Strozzi, gathered at the
house of Nero Neri, expressed themselves enthusiastically about the new
revelation of the power of solo song to move the heart. These amateurs
became convinced that there was no longer any satisfaction to be drawn
from the old way of singing the soprano part of madrigals and turning
the other parts into an instrumental accompaniment.
Caccini went back to Florence and continued to set canzonettas. He says
that in these compositions he tried continually to give the meaning of
the words and so to touch responsive chords of feeling. He endeavored to
compose in a pleasing style by hiding all contrapuntal effects as much
as possible. He set long syllables to consonances and let passing notes
go with short syllables. He applied similar considerations to the
introduction of passages "although sometimes as a certain ornamentation
I have used a few broken notes to the value of a quarter, or at most a
half note, on a short syllable, something one can endure, because they
quickly slip by and are not really passages, but only add to the
pleasant effect."
Caccini continues his preface with reiterated objections to vocal
passages used merely for display, and says that he has striven to show
how they can be turned to artistic uses. He deprecates the employment of
contrapuntal device for its own sake, and says that he employs it only
infrequently and to fill out middle voices. He forcefully condemns all
haphazard use of vocal resources and says that the singer should labor
to penetrate the meaning and passion of that which he sings and to
convey it to the hearer. This he asserts can never be accomplished by
the delivery of passages.
Here, then, we have a clear statement of the artistic ideals cherished
by Caccini, and these, we may take it, were shared by the other members
of the camerata who were engaged in the pursuit of a method of direct,
eloquent, dramatic solo expression. The opening measures of one of the
numbers in the "Nuove Musiche" will serve to show in what manner Caccini
developed his theories in practice and equally what close relation this
style had to that of the new dramatic recitative.
[Musical Notation]
In the preface to his score of "Euridice" Peri has set forth his ideas
about recitative. He has told us how he tried to base its movement upon
that of ordinary speech, using few tones and calm movements for quiet
conversation and more extended intervals and animated movement for the
delineation of emotion. This was founded upon the same basis as the
theory of Caccini, which condemned emphatically the indiscriminate
employment of swelled tones, exclamatory emphases and other vocal
devices. Caccini desired that the employment of all these factors in
song should be regulated by the significance of the text. In other words
these reformers were fighting a fight not unlike that of Wagner. They
deplored the making of vocal ornaments and the display of ingenuity in
the interweaving of parts for their own sakes, just as Wagner decried
the writing of tune for tune's sake, and on one of the same grounds,
namely, that nothing could result but a tickling of the ear. Yet these
young reformers had no intention of throwing overboard all the charms of
floridity in song. Here are two examples of their treatment of
passionate utterance in recitative. The first is by Peri and the second
by Caccini. Both are settings of the same text in the "Euridice."
[Musical Notation: two excerpts]
Caccini was somewhat more liberal than Peri in the use of floridity and
always showed taste and judgement therein. Here is a sample of his style
taken from a solo by one of the nymphs in "Euridice":
[Musical Notation]
Caccini also showed that he was not averse to the lascivious allurements
of two female voices moving in elementary harmonies. Here is a passage
from a scene between two nymphs upon which rest many hundreds of pages
in later Italian operas.
[Musical Notation]
This was the immediate predecessor of the well-known "Saliam cantando"
in Monteverde's "Orfeo."
The innovations of the Florentine reformers included also the invention
of thorough bass, or the basso continuo, as the Italians call it.
Ludovico Grossi, called Viadana from the place of his birth, seems to
have been the first to use the term basso continuo and on the authority
of Prætorius and other writers was long credited with the invention of
the thing itself. But it was in 1602 that he published his "Cento
concerti ecclesiastici a 1, a 2, a 3, e a 4 voci, con il basso continuo
per sonar nell' organo." The basso continuo had been in use for some
time before this. It appears in the score of Peri's Euridice as well as
in the "Nuove Musiche" of Caccini. It was employed in Cavaliere's "Anima
e Corpo" and was doubtless utilized in some of the camerata's earlier
attempts which have not come down to us.
Just which one of the Florentines devised this method of noting the
chords arranged for the support of the voice in the new style matters
little. The fact remains that the fundamental principle of related chord
harmonies, as distinguished from incidental accords arising in the
interweavings of voice parts melodic in themselves, had been recognized
and the basis of modern melodic composition established. This, indeed,
was not the achievement of the young innovators, but the result of a
slow and steady development in the art of composition. The introduction
of thorough bass shows us that the reformers had found it essential to
the success of their experiments that, in their effort to pack away in
solid chords the tangle of parts which had so offended them in the old
counterpoint, they should codify to some extent the relations of
fundamental chords and contrive a simple method of indicating their
sequence in the new and elementary kind of accompaniments. They at any
rate perceived that the vital fact concerning the new monophonic style
was that the melody alone demanded individual independence, while the
other parts could not, as in polyphony, ask for equal suffrage, but must
sink themselves in the solid and concrete structure of the supporting
chord. Thorough bass was in later periods utilized in such music as
Bach's and Handel's, but its original nature always stood forth most
clearly when it was employed in the support of vocal music approaching
the recitative type.
Here, then, we may permit the entire matter to rest. It ought now to be
manifest that in their experiments at the resuscitation of the Greek
manner of declamation the ardent young Florentines were impelled first
of all by the feeling that the obliteration of the text by musical
device was a crying evil and that by it dramatic expression was rendered
impossible. Doubtless they felt that their art lacked a medium for the
publication of the individual, but it is by no means likely that they
realized the full significance of this deficiency or of their own
efforts to supply it. Nevertheless, what they did under the incentive
of a genuine artistic impulse was in direct line with the whole
intellectual progress of the Renaissance. The thing that was patent to
them was the importance of studying the models of antiquity to find out
how dramatic delineation was to be accomplished; but in doing so they
discovered the one element which had been wanting in the Italian lyric
drama since its birth in the Mantuan court, namely, the way to set
speeches for one actor to music having communicative potency and capable
of preserving the intelligibility of the text.
So they completed a cycle of the art of dramatic music, and, having
found the link that was missing in the musical chain of Poliziano's
"Orfeo," reincarnated Italy's Arcadian prophet, and built the gates
through which Monteverde ushered lyric composition to the broad highway
of modern opera.
INDEX
Agility, vocal, 214
Alemannia, Rudolfo de, 41
Alessandro, Gian Andrea di, 46
Ambros, August Wilhelm, 107
"Amfiparnaso," 191 et seq.
"Apollo and the Python," spectacular intermezzo, 174
Arcadia, the Italian, 62 et seq.
Archilei, Vittoria, 216, 218
Argyropoulos, John, 69
"Arion," spectacular intermezzo, 175
Ariosto, performance of his "Suppositi," 90, 136
Ballata, 76, 116, 144
"Ballet Comique de la Reine," 178
Banchieri, Adriano, 198
Banquets, music at, 139
Basso continuo, 232
Bati, Luca, 30
Beccari, 170
Bembo, Pietro, 61
Boccaccio, 59
Botta, Bergonzo, festal play by, 161
Busnois, Antoine, 115
Caccini, Giulio, 172
"Nuove Musiche," its aim, 221 et seq.
"Calandra," performance of, 96
_Cantori a liuto_, 119, 121 et seq.
Carnival Song (canto carnascialesco), 76, 105, 116
Casella, 119
Castiglione, 61, 114
performance of his "Tirsi," 164
Cavaliere, Emilio del, first recitatives written by, 177
Chant, music of liturgical drama, 11
disappearance from "Sacre Rappresentazioni," 24
Chartreux, Jean le, 40
Chorus, in first secular drama, 89, 116
Comedy, influence on lyric drama, 179 et seq.
Vecchi's theories, 192
Compère, Loyset, 115
Concerts, early, 142
Corteccia, 119
Costumes in early lyric plays, 92
Dance, dramatic, in church ritual, 2, 3
in open-air plays, 16
orchestral music for, 144
executed to concealed chorus, 172
characteristic national, 176
Dante, 58
Della Viola, Alfonso, 170
Della Viola, Gian Pietro, 45
Des Prés, Josquin, 104
Disciplinati di Gesu Cristo, 22
"Divozione," 25 et seq.
Drama, lyric, sources, 4
open-air religious, 13
at Florence, 19
revival in Europe, 54
causes of disappearance, 53
Dramatic dialogue, in madrigal drama, 184
Dramatic element, in early church music, 2
in ceremonials, 4, 5
"Esaltazione della Croce," sacred play, 29
orchestra in, 138
"Euridice," Peri's, 219
Feltre, Vittorino da, 37, 41
Ferrara, musical relations with Mantua, 46
Festa, Constanzo, 165
Fête of the Ass, 14
Ficino, Marsilio, 70
Florence, reform of dramatic music, 220, 234
Florid element, in early church music, 1
its disappearance, 2
in madrigal, 214
in early operas, 231
Frottola, 76, 101, 102, 104 et seq., 122
distinguished from madrigal, 108, 112
arranged for solo voice, 124 et seq.
Gaffori, Franchino, 43
Gonzaga, house of, 35 et seq.
Gian Francesco, 37
Ludovico, 38
Grecian ideals in Italian literature, 54, 58 et seq., 62 et seq.
Gualterotti, spectacular festal play, 171
"Harmony of the Spheres," intermezzo by Cavaliere, 173
Harmony, modern begun, 233
Individuality, medium of expression sought, 155, 157
found, 220 et seq.
Intermezzi, spectacular in 1589, 173
Intermezzo, 91
Isaak, Heinrich, 107
Italian, Latin preferred to, 59
Poliziano's use of, 72
Italian music, defining its character, 149
Italian thought, state of in sixteenth century, 181, 209, 210, 211
Italy, lack of national unity, 60
Kallistos, Andronicus, 69
Landino, 61, 69
Lauds, 21 et seq.
music of, 23
development of, 25
Lavagnolo, Lorenzo, teacher of dance at Mantua, 45
Lighting in early plays, 95
Liturgical drama, 1 et seq.
early examples, 6 et seq.
its longevity, 9
character of music, 5, 6, 10
French as related to opera, 12
costumes, etc., 26
stage used, 26
Luzzaschi, music to "Pastor Fido," 172
Lyra di braccio, 134
Lyre, 130
Madrigal, 102, 104, 105, 112
Italian, 148
solo, 168, 216, 217, 218, 219, 223
florid element in, 214
ornamented by singer, 217, 218
Madrigal drama, transition to from frottola, 147 et seq.
in maturity, 191 et seq.
Madrigal dramas, 166
comedy in, 179 et seq.
dialogue in, 181, 198 et seq., 201, 203
instruments in, 185, 199
manner of performance, 198 et seq.
voices in, 200
solo in, 201
unintelligibility of text, 213
Mantegna, 38, 39, 40
Mantua, birthplace of secular drama, 35
sketch of the marquisate, 35 et seq.
literary and artistic importance, 36
music at, 40 et seq.
musical relations with Ferrara, 46
Marenzio, Luca, 50
"Marienklage, die," liturgical drama, 9
"Mary Magdalen," sacred play, 33
Masques, 32, 33
Medici, Lorenzo de, writer of sacred plays, 29
Merulo, Claudio, his "Tragedia," 171
Minuccio, 119, 120
Monody, movement toward, 149
Caccini's, 222, 225
Music, in sixteenth century lyric dramas, 164
[Transcriber's Note: The letter "N" is absent from the Index.
Possible entries include:
Namur, Naples, Narcissus, Naumann, Nero Neri, Netherlands,
Noirville, Novellara, Nuremberg.]
Oboe, 145
Opera buffa, germs of, 188
Orchestra, in "Sacre Rappresentazioni," 30, 31
at Mantua, 44
in first secular drama, 89, 136 et seq.
Striggio's, 138, 185, 186
in other early lyric plays, 161, 162, 174, 175, 177, 199
"Orfeo," performed at Mantua, 52, 55, 68
Italian estimates of, 55, 56
importance of its production, 57, 66
its lyric character, 66, 77, 79
description of poem, 76 et seq.
how written, 72
Sismondi's comments on, 73
Symonds on, 74
editions compared, 75, 79, 80
how performed, 85 et seq.
examination of its music, 98 et seq.
choruses, 101, 116
solo parts, 101, 117 et seq.
solo parts, frottola as basis of, 124
instrumental parts, 101, 129, 136 et seq., 144
Orpheus, embodiment of Arcadian ideal, 63, 65
Paganism, Italian medieval, 62
Pageant of St. John's Day, Florence, 28
Pageants, relation to "Sacre Rappresentazioni," 27
Part singing, its popularity in fifteenth century, 103
Passion, early performances of, 17
French fourteenth century version, 17
Pastoral drama, 170
Peri, Jacopo, 216, 219
Petrarch, 59
Philosophy, its effect on medieval literature, 64
Poliziano, Angelo, 52, 55
sketch of career, 68 et seq.
Procession, succeeds dance, 3
Prompter, 200
Realism, Italian, 61
"Recitar alla lira," 114, 170
Recitative, in liturgical drama, 10
in first secular plays, 114
Florentine, 118, 212, 224
beginnings, 177
in comic opera, 181
impulses leading to modern, 207 et seq.
Caccini's, 224, 225, 229
Peri's, 227, 229
Romano, Giulio, 39
"Sacre Rappresentazioni," 13, 21 et seq.
music of, 24
time of origin, 27
sources of, 27
their construction and performance, 29
scenic effects, 30
as forerunners of opera, 32
"Saint Uliva," sacred play, 29
Sannazzaro, Jacopo, his "Arcadia," 62
Scene painting, in early plays, 93
Scenic effects, in "Sacre Rappresentazioni," 30
in Poliziano's "Orfeo," 86, 93
Schalmei, 145
Sensualism, esthetic in Italy, 61
Singing, development of technic, 214, 215
Solo, superseded by part song, 117
in madrigal drama, 198, 205
vocal, 114, 119, 222 et seq., 227
adapted from part songs, 119 et seq.
florid element abused, 222
Songs, arranged for lute accompaniment, 121
Spectacular, element in early plays, 93, 155, 166
in early dramatic music, 158
predominance of the, 160 et seq.
in music of sixteenth century, 207 et seq.
in music of sixteenth century, revolt against, 212
Striggio, Alessandro, 51, 185
his art work, 185
Table music, 139
Tasso, "Aminto," music of, 172
Technic, vocal, 214
Thoroughbass, 154, 232
Todi, Jacopone da, 23
Tromboncino, Bartolomeo, 46, 115
Ugolino, Baccio, original _Orfeo_, 79, 87
Vecchi, Orazio, 190 et seq.
artistic theories, 192
Viadana, Ludovico, 232
"Vierges sages et Vierges folles," 6 et seq.
Villanelle, 112
Violinists, early, 142
Virgil, Italian worship of, 59
Visconti, Nicolo de Corregio, his "Cephale et Aurore," 163
Voices, in madrigal plays, 200, 203
Voice, technic in early music, 215
Wert, Jacques de, 49
Willaert, Adrian, 104, 112, 151, 165
* * * * *
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* * * * *
Transcriber's notes:
Errors and Anomalies:
Pauluzo : Pauluzzo (envoy from Ferrara)
_spelling not regularized_
_name also recorded in other sources as "Paolucci"_
Monteverde
_this spelling is used throughout the text_
"machine representing hell was fixed upon the boats, and that the
subject of the drama was the perennially popular tale of 'Dives and
Lazarus'."
_original punctuation:_
"machine representing hell ... tale of "Dives and Lazarus."
scholars and dilettanti
_text reads "dilletanti"_
and believed that in the pastoral kingdom
_text reads "belived"_
Lorenzo passed away and Poliziano wrote
_text reads "Poliliziano"_
Buccolics appeared to them
_spelling unchanged_
there were two obligato instruments
_spelling unchanged_
The teachings and practice of the Netherlands masters
_text reads "Nethererlands"_
its plebian parent
_spelling unchanged_
the frottola was in the lusty vigor of its maturity
_text reads "frottole" (plural)_
Dioneo teases the women
_text reads "Dineo"_
The large lyre, called _lirone perfetto_
_text reads "lironi" (plural)_
small instruments of the bowed varieties
_text reads "varities"_
arranging frottola melodies
_text reads "aranging"_
racial and temperamental differences between
_text reads "betwen"_
the untimely death of my Euridice
_text reads "unitmely"_
"Before the music begins .... instrumentalists and reciters"
_text has close quote after first and third paragraph-- but not
second-- of inset quotation_
the four voices unite / in singing
_text reads "unit"_