Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/368

348 quality to more and more elaborate music that Italy achieved her most notable success in the seventeenth century. This linking of poetry and music in melodrama and opera was a consequence, partly of the enormous advance made in music as a vehicle for the expression of feeling and picturesque representation, partly, like so many other things at the Renaissance, of the study of antiquity. It was while endeavouring to discover in what way the Greeks recited their tragedies, in song and to the accompaniment of music, that Vincenzio Galilei, father of the astronomer, devised, with others, the system of expressive recitative, and set to music the Ugolino canto in the Divina Commedia, and the Book of Lamentations. Once discovered, the new method was soon applied to other works, especially the favourite pastoral and mythological idylls and plays, and the first complete musical drama, La Dafne written by Ottavio Rinuccini (1562-1621) and set by Corsi and Jacopo Peri, was performed in 1595. Rinuccini's Euridice and Chiabrera's Rapimento di Cefalo soon followed, and opera, growing always more elaborate musically, was started on its long career,—a career which belongs to the history of music, not of literature, for in Addison's words "the poetry of them is generally as exquisitely ill as the music is good."

The literary drama of the seventeenth century in Italy is only a decadent continuation of the already decadent drama of the sixteenth—tragedies, religious and secular, modelled on Seneca, and abounding in horrors; comedy classical also, but