One evening toward the close of the sixteenth century, a group of
gentlemen were hurrying up the staircases and along the corridors of a
house in Florence.
They were richly dressed, according to the custom of the time. But they
were all students, all deeply absorbed in music, and they were on their
way to the salons of one Giovanni Bardi, Conte di Vernio, for the
purpose of discussing a new idea in their beloved art.
Now if we followed these gentlemen, what should we hear and see?
Something very interesting, but, from our point of view to-day, very
strange; for they were determined to develop _opera_, yet they had but
the vaguest idea how it should be done.
Opera in its present form had so far been unheard of. The only idea
these Italian gentlemen had of it was from the Greek lyrical dramas. You
know that in ancient Athens there was a famous theatre where plays were
given, accompanied by an orchestra of lyres and flutes. The chorus of
the _Agamemnon_ was sung, and some of the dialogue was given in a sort
of recitative. Then, in early English times, music, or recitatives was
introduced into the simple plays usually performed in the public
streets. People in various countries had been gifted with some
perception of the beauty of music and dialogue, but a regular opera, as
I have said, was unknown.
Our Italian gentlemen discussed this idea over and over again, and some
efforts were made to carry it out. One of these gentlemen, named
Caccini, wrote a series of songs or "pieces," which he sang at Bardi's
house one evening, accompanying himself on the lute. He had a beautiful
voice, and every one was delighted.
Little by little the idea of a musical drama gathered strength, and one
of the first performances we read of was at Mantua, in 1594, when a
curious sort of work called _L'Amfiparnasso_ was given. We who have seen
opera in its perfection would be, I am sure, highly amused could we hear
_L'Amfiparnasso_ given just as it was then.
There were five voices, no overture, and no instrumental accompaniment
of any kind. But when two singers were on the stage, the remaining three
stood behind the scenes singing a sort of accompaniment. Everybody in
Mantua was delighted, and _L'Amfiparnasso_ was a great success.
What would dear old Master Vecchio, who wrote it, have said had he
looked ahead nearly three hundred years, and seen the great Bayreuth
Festival, where Wagner's operas were produced with such a wealth of
orchestra and voices?
I think it safe to say that the first true Italian opera, on which all
others have been founded, was _Euridice_, by Peri, and this was produced
in 1600, when Henry IV. married Mary of Medicis. Several noblemen
performed in it. Behind the scenes they had a sort of orchestra: a
harpsichord, a chitarone,[1] a sort of viol, and a large lute. Three
flutes were added to this little orchestra. I have just been reading
part of the score, and it has much delicacy and spirit.
[1] A very long double-necked lute with wire strings and two sets of
tuning-pegs. An old chitarone is preserved in the South Kensington
Museum.
I have not space to tell you of the progress of the opera in Italy and
Germany and France, but it advanced steadily, and in France, where a
composer named Lulli lived in 1650, it reached a great height. Lulli had
been brought from Florence as a page at the court of Louis XIV. He
served the King's niece, Mademoiselle De Montpensier, and no doubt heard
all the finest music in her boudoir. He it was who established the opera
in France.
Among Italian composers of this early period, the man who seems to me
most interesting was Alessandro Scarlatti. He made many improvements in
the form of the opera, varying its monotony in very original ways.
Another famous Italian of the same period was Stradella, whose church
music we hear now much more than formerly. Poor Stradella's life was a
terribly sad one. He was a gentleman of great refinement, but he was not
of the highest rank, so that when he fell in love with one of his
pupils, whose rank was above his, there was a great deal of excitement
over it in Venice. Stradella married his fair pupil, and for some years
led a life of terror, as assassins pursued him. Once, we are told, three
of these men, hired to kill him, followed him to the Church of St. John,
in Rome, where he was to sing, and there, listening to his heavenly
voice, their purpose changed. His music took away all their
blood-thirsty feelings. But he was not destined to escape the vengeance
of his wife's friends. In Genoa, after repeated attempts on Stradella's
life, he and his wife were both cruelly stabbed to death, the assassins
escaping. Stradella was only in his thirtieth year, but he had written
some of the finest music in Italy.
I could tell you much of the rise and progress of opera in England, but
in our short space must group a few facts about some one centre. The
English seemed from very early times to delight in combining music with
dialogue. They used, as I have said, to give performances in the public
streets. The singers stood in large carts, around which crowds of people
collected. With all their grotesqueness and absurdity there was a
dignity about them which impressed their rude audiences.
[Illustration]
In 1658 was born in London a boy named Henry Purcell. Music seemed to
grow with him. When he was very young he was put into the choir school
at Westminster Abbey, and it was only the other day I was standing in
the old school-room where the boy Purcell sat, and looking at a quaint
old picture of him which hangs upon the wall.
The Westminster boys were taught music very fairly by old Cook and
Humphries. It must have been a cheerful life. To-day the school has been
enlarged and beautified, but even then it surely possessed the charm of
peace, and yet great harmonies, for it stands almost in the shelter of
the Abbey, and all day long the boys had the dear old cloisters to run
about in, and twice a day they listened to glorious music on the organ.
Purcell grew full of musical fire, and when he was eighteen he was
appointed organist of the great Abbey. He wrote constantly--catches,
glees, songs, and hymns, which to this day are listened to and sung with
delight.
It was when Purcell was about nineteen that he one day received an
invitation from a school-master to call, on musical business, at his
house in Chelsea. Thither he went. He found a young ladies' school, and
an energetic master who wished his pupils to perform something operatic.
So Purcell wrote the music, and Tate the words, of _Dido and Æneas_, a
little operetta, in which he himself performed, and which was so
successful that henceforth he wrote chiefly for the stage.
But all the time everybody in London was singing or playing his glees
and madrigals. In Westminster was a famous old tavern known as Purcell's
Head, and clubs used to meet there to sing his music. Meanwhile we can
fancy Milton as a youth playing his most solemn music in that quaint
room of his with its faded hangings and grand organ, and at the theatre
elaborate performances of _The Tempest_, _The Indian Queen_, and other
plays, to which was added "Mr. Purcell's musicke."
Those were rollicking and riotous times. Purcell's sweet music seems to
come in with some feeling of soothing sounds, but had the times been
better, he would have done more, I am sure, in his noblest direction.
Everything at court and around it was careless and reckless. Dryden, the
poet, who wrote many of the plays for which Purcell furnished music,
bitterly regretted when he was older that he had wasted so much time
amusing an ungodly people. Purcell seems only to have thought of his
music, and certainly at this date, two hundred years after his death,
his sweetness and charm are as strongly felt. In 1695 he died, and his
tomb is in the Abbey where his childish feet so often passed and
repassed, and beneath the organ where he so often played in his most
innocent and most happy years.
Opera seems from the end of the seventeenth century to have gone on
gaining new force and beauty in every country, and to-day it is supposed
by some critics to have attained its highest form in Wagner's music. I
fear those eager Italian gentlemen who used to meet in Conte Vernio's
brilliant rooms would be very much alarmed by some of the German operas
of to-day, and I own that, with all love of Wagner's great music, there
is a peculiar charm in the old airs of operas which people try to scoff
at now. Ten minutes ago an organ-grinder stopped under my window and
began droning out "Ai nostri morte," that sweet air in Verdi's
_Trovatore_, and I felt as if it was very near the Italy of the
seventeenth century. But this must not make you think that Wagner has
not science and strength and the utmost beauty on his side.
[Illustration: WHAT THE SPRING BROUGHT TO LITTLE LAME ELSIE.]