Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/164

152 Jole-Maria Baroni, in an essay on the Lirica musicale di Metastasio, makes a brief analysis of the various poetico-musical forms of which he writes: canzonette, cantate and arie. Here I will confine myself to indicating the musical reforms which Metastasio accomplished.

To him we owe the restoration of the chorus in Italian opera. In this respect he was guided by the musical traditions which had been preserved in Vienna. While the chorus had become obsolete as far as the Italian operas were concerned, the Viennese masters, J. J. Fux and Carlo Agostino Babia, had obstinately retained its employment. Metastasio took advantage of this survival, and handled the chorus with an art unknown before his time. He was careful only to introduce the chorus at such moments when it was natural and necessary to the action of the drama. We feel that in writing his choruses he often took as his model the solemn simplicity of the ancient tragedies. It was in the same spirit that those composers who were friends of Metastasio's, and influenced by him, as was Hasse, treated the chorus in music. Whosoever will turn to the magnificent chorus of the priests in Hasse's Olimpiade (1756) will marvel at the full development of the neo-antique style—simple, tragic, and religious—the monopoly or invention of which has been only too often attributed to Gluck.

But it was in the recitative that Metastasio and his composers introduced the greatest improvements.

The Italian opera at that time was an ill-balanced