Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/194

182 the first vase room British Museum, Case 53, No. 744. The portion engraved represents Apollo holding a Cithara or large lyre as rarely shown in detail in Greek art. With his left hand he at once supports the instrument and stops the strings. The plectrum would be held in the right hand and be guided by the thumb, the fingers closing over it.

The modern Greek 'lyra' is a kind of rebec, a bowed instrument with three strings, having no connection with the ancient lyre or cithara, the link between the latter and modern stringed instruments being supplied by the, in use in the Byzantine epoch, from which was developed the clavecin, and ultimately the pianoforte. But in the 14th century there were several bowed instruments known in Europe as lyres, and also the, the lyra mendicorum. In Italy, in the last century, there was a bowed lyra bearing a similar relation to the viol that the well-known theorbo did to the lute—namely, that from a second and higher neck, bass strings were hung that were not in contact with the fingerboard. Three varieties have been distinguished—Lyra di braccio, Lyra di gamba, and Archiviole di lyra. It would be for one of these, a favourite instrument with Ferdinand IV. King of Naples, that Haydn wrote twelve pieces. [See vol. i. 709, 720.] The museums, at home or abroad, known to the writer, have no specimens of this bijuga viol; the cut is taken from the Archiviole di lyra in 'Recueil de Planches de l'Encyclopédie,' tome iii. (Paris, 1784). [ A. J. H. ]

LYRIC; LYRICAL. The term Lyric is obviously derived from the lyre, which served as an accompaniment or support to the voice in singing the smaller forms of poetry among the ancient Greeks. The poems thus accompanied were distinguished by the name of Odes, and all Odes were in those times essentially made to be sung. Among the Romans this style of poetry was not much cultivated, and the poems which fall under the same category, such as those of Horace and Catullus, were not expressly intended to be sung; but inasmuch as they were cast after the same manner as the Greek poems which had been made to be sung, they also were called Odes or Lyrics. On the same principle, the name has been retained for a special class of poems in modern times which have some intrinsic relationship in form to the Odes of the ancients; though, on the one hand, the term Ode has considerably changed its signification, and become more restricted in its application; and, on the other, the term Lyric is not generally associated either in the minds of the poets or their public with music of any sort. It is true that a great proportion are not only admirably fitted to be sung, but actually are set to most exquisite music; but this fact has little or no influence upon the classification. Thus the able and intelligent editor of the beautiful collection of modern lyrics called the Golden Treasury explains in his preface that he has held the term 'Lyrical' 'to imply that each poem shall turn upon a single thought, feeling, or situation,' and though he afterwards uses the term 'Song' as practically synonymous, he does not seem to imply that it should necessarily be sung. In another part of his preface he suggests an opinion which is no doubt very commonly held, that the lyrical and dramatic are distinct branches of poetry; and Mendelssohn has used the word in this sense even in relation to music, in a letter, where he speaks of his Lobgesang as follows: 'The composition is not a little Oratorio, its plan being not dramatic but lyrical.' But it is in respect of this sense of the term that its use in modern times is so singularly contradictory. It is true that the class of poems which modern critics have agreed to distinguish as Lyrics are quite different in spirit from the dramatic kind—Mr. Robert Browning's 'Dramatic Lyrics' notwithstanding—but the principle of classification has really been erroneous all along, as though a man were called a sailor because he chose to wear a sailor's hat. Consequently the apparent anomaly of calling dramatic works lyrical