Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/510

498 Dialogue has been censured, by unmusical critics, as contrary to Nature. It is, undoubtedly, contrary to the practice of every-day life, but not to the principles of Art. It is necessary that the truth of this proposition should be very clearly established; for unless we make it our starting-point, we shall never arrive at the true raison d'être of the Lyric Drama, nor be prepared with a satisfactory answer to the cavils of those who, like Addison and Steele, condemn it as a monstrous anomaly. It is open to no charge of inconsistency to which the Spoken Drama is not equally exposed. The Poet writes his Tragedy in Verse, because he thereby gains the power of expressing great thoughts with the greatest amount of dignity that language can command. His Verses are sung, in order that they may be invested with a deeper pathos than the most careful form of ordinary declamation can reach. No one objects to the Iambics of the 'Seven against Thebes,' or the Blank Verse of 'King John'; yet surely our sense of the fitness of things is not more rudely shocked by the melodious ''Ah! soccorso! son tradito!'' uttered by the Commendatore after Don Giovanni has pierced him through with his sword, than by the touching couplet with which Prince Arthur, at the moment of his death, breaks forth into rhyme—

The conventionalities of common life are violated no less signally in the one case than in the other; yet, in the Opera as well as in the Play, the result of their violation is an artistic conception, as easily defensible on logical grounds as the proportions of a statue or the colouring of a picture—neither of which are faithful imitations of Nature, though founded upon a natural Ideal.

These appear to have been the views entertained, towards the close of the 16th century, by a little band of Men of Letters and Musicians—all ardent disciples of the Renaissance—who met in Florence at the house of Giovanni Bardi, Conte di Vernio, with the avowed object of resuscitating the style of musical declamation peculiar to Greek Tragedy. This end was unattainable. The antagonism between Greek and modern tonalities would alone have sufficed to make it an impossibility, had there been no other difficulties in the way. But, just as the search for the Philosopher's Stone resulted in some of the most important discoveries known to Chemistry, this vain endeavour to restore a lost Art led to the one thing upon which, above all others, the future fate of the Lyric Drama depended—and compassed it, on this wise.

Among the Musicians who frequented the Count of Vernio's réunions were three whose names afterwards became celebrated. Vincenzo Galilei—the father of the great Astronomer—was a pupil of the old school, but burning to strike out something new. Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini were young men, with little or no knowledge of Counterpoint, but gifted with a wealth of original genius, and sufficient energy of character to enable them to turn it to the best account. All were thoroughly in earnest, thoroughly dissatisfied with the Music of the period, and longing for a style of composition better fitted to express the varying shades of human passion than that then generally cultivated. The first result of their tentative efforts to reach this long-cherished Ideal was the invention of the Cantata—a ssecular composition, for a single Voice accompanied by a single Instrument. Galilei produced a work of this description, entitled 'Il Conte Ugolino,' which has unhappily been lost. Caccini—already celebrated for the beauty of his Voice, and the excellence of his performance upon the Lute—wrote a number of shorter pieces, which he sang with unbounded applause at Bardi's house, to the Accompaniment of a Theorbo, played by Bardilla. Some of these Canzonette were published, in 1602, under the title of 'Le nuove Musiche'; and an entire verse of one of them will be found in the article in the present volume. They are, indeed, most interesting, as examples of the earliest phase of the style—fitly called Monodic—which exchanged the contrapuntal richness of the Polyphonic School for the simplest of Melodies, confined to a single part, and accompanied by a Bass, which was often not only simple, but of the rudest possible construction. The particular verse to which we have referred—Diteli voi se di me vi cale—is exceptionally symmetrical in form. As a general rule, the Melodies of this transitional period were so destitute of what we now call 'Figure' as to be all but amorphous; and it is precisely to this peculiarity that we are indebted for the extraordinary effect they wrought. All that their Composers aimed at in constructing them, was the exact oratorical rendering of the words with which they had to deal; and in striving to attain this they unconsciously, and as if by a kind of inspiration, achieved that potent medium of passionate expression which alone was needed to make the Lyric Drama possible—pure, well-accented, declamatory Recitative. Not, as they fondly imagined, the exact method of delivery cultivated by the Greek Dramatists; but, we may fairly believe, the nearest approach to it consistent with the modern Scale—the true Musica parlante, or Stilo rappresentativo, which, by regulating the inflections of the Voice in accordance with the principles of sound rhetorical science, invests them, if the experience of nearly three centuries may be trusted, with an amount of dramatic power attainable by no other means.

The necessity for some such provision as this must have been painfully apparent to all thinking men. The Polyphonic School, brought to absolute perfection by Palestrina and his great contemporaries, was utterly unfit for dramatic purposes; yet, in ignorance of a more approprial form of expression, attempts to turn it to account in that direction had not been wanting. It certain that great part of Poliziano's 'Orfeo,' written in the latter half of the 15th century, was set to Music of some kind; and Leo Allatius