Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/62

 character of music, and diverts it from its original purpose of pleasing the sense and comforting the heart.

Expert professional music was a thing of very slow growth. The old chapelmasters or choirmasters were, of course, in a sense professional, since they lived upon the church. But they had also a sacerdotal character. At the beginning they were always priests. To make a class of professional musicians, vying with one another for mere mastery, the public concert, with paid musicians, had to be developed.

Though the Philarmonia gave public concerts at Vicenza, as we have said, in the middle of the sixteenth century, concert music and opera music had no general existence for as much as a century afterward. The first opera ever represented was Peri's "Eurydice," written about 1600. Even that was merely the expression of a group of enthusiasts, a sort of private attempt to embody a