Some Forerunners of Italian Opera Part 7

[Footnote 34: Something suggestive of a similar train of musical thought is found in some reflections of George Moore on Zola: "I had read the 'a.s.somoir,' and had been much impressed by its pyramid size, strength, height and decorative grandeur, and also by the immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new--the washhouse, for example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness; it is worked up to _crescendo_, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is given forth." ("Confessions of a Young Man.")]

One can have no difficulty in imagining how this story, furnished as it must have been, with some very free action, was set to music in the madrigal style. The contrast of moods provides an excellent background for variety of musical movement and for a generous exercise of the expressional skill which the composers of that period had acquired.

Lovers of the ballet of action will perceive that the scenario of Striggio's musical comedy could also serve perfectly for that of a suite of pantomimic dances.

Nor can the reader fail to discern in this story some of the germs of the opera buffa. What is lacking here, to wit, the advancing of some individual characters from the choral ma.s.s to the center of the stage, was better accomplished in the earlier or more serious works. The Orpheus of Poliziano was doubtless a striking figure in the minds of the Mantuan audience of 1484. While perhaps there was a distinct decline in directness of expression in the attempts of later lyric dramatists, the departure was possibly not as large in the case of the serious writers as in that of the humorists. We shall in all likelihood better understand this after a survey of the labors of the dominant figure of the artistic period of the humorous madrigal drama.

CHAPTER XIII

Vecchi and the Matured Madrigal Drama

The fully developed madrigal drama of the latter years of the sixteenth century was an art form entirely dissimilar to anything known to the modern stage, and, as we shall presently see, it was in itself a frank confession of utter confusion in the search for a musical means of individual expression. If no other evidence were at hand, the works of Vecchi would be sufficient to prove that the logical progress of the medieval lyric drama in one direction had led it into the very mazes of the polyphonic wilderness. This new form lacked the spectacular glories of the really operatic shows described in Chapter XI and it abandoned even their ways of voicing the utterances of individual characters. Much misinformation concerning this madrigal drama has been disseminated by the comfortable process of repeating without scrutiny errors early fastened upon histories of music.

The master spirit of the madrigal drama was Orazio Vecchi, born about 1551 at Modena. He became a priest and was canon of Corregio in 1586 and in 1591 deacon. He became chapel master at the cathedral of Modena in 1596 and after numerous vicissitudes died in 1605. His most important work was "L'Amfiparnaso, commedia harmonica," performed at Modena in 1594. This has been preserved in its entirety, together with the author's preface, from which valuable information may be gathered. The work is an attempt to turn into a lyric form the "Commedia dell' Arte,"

enacted in early times at village fairs in northern Italy. The characters are Arlecchino, Pantalone, Doctor Graziano, Brigh.e.l.la, Isabella, Lelio and others. The story of the play, however, does not concern us so much as the author's artistic purposes and the methods by which he sought to achieve them. In the addresses to the reader prefixed to his scores Vecchi states some of his artistic beliefs. He says:

"The gross jests, which are found in the comedies of our time, and which are their meat rather than the spice, are the reasons why he who says 'Comedy' seems to speak of a buffoon's pastime. They wrong themselves who give to such gracious poesy a sense so unworthy. True comedy, properly regarded, has for its object the representation in divers personages of almost all the actions of familiar life. To hold the mirror up to human life it bestows attention no less upon the useful than upon the pleasing, and it does not suffice it to raise a laugh." ("Amfiparnaso.")

"It will be said that it is contrary to convention to mingle serious music with that which is merely pleasing and that one thus brings discredit on the profession. But the pleasing and the serious according to report have been mingled from father to son. Aristotle says so; Homer and Virgil give examples." ("Veglie di Siena," 1604.)

"I know full well that at first view some will be able to judge my artistic caprices low and flimsy, but they ought to know that it requires as much grace, art and nature to draw well a role of comedy as to represent a wise old grumbler." ("Selva di Varia Ricreatione,"

1590.)

"Everything has a precise meaning, and the actor should try to find it; and, that done, to express it well and intelligently in such a way as to give life to the work." ("Amfiparnaso.")

"The moral intention of it will be less than that of the simple comedy, for music applies itself to the pa.s.sion rather than to the reason, and hence I have been compelled to use reflective elements with moderation. Moreover, the action has less scope for development, spoken words being more rapid than song; so it is expedient to condense, to restrict, to suppress details, and to take only the capital situations. The imagination ought to supply the rest." ("Amfiparnaso.")

When we turn to the drama itself to ascertain how the composer embodied his artistic ideas, we find that the score shows a series of scenes containing speeches for single personages and dialogues for two or more.

All of these are set to madrigal music in five parts. This music exhibits much variety of style and expressive power. The composer was undoubtedly a master of his material. How intricate and yet pictorial his style can become may be seen in these four measures from Act I, scene second, which contain words uttered by Lelio.

[Musical Notation]

That the composer sometimes employed skilfully the contrast of pure chord sequence is seen in his setting of the "tag" of the play spoken by Lelio and beginning thus:

[Musical Notation]

Interesting as this music is in itself, the temptation to enter upon a prolonged examination of the score must be resisted for the good reason that a more important matter demands our attention. It has often been stated that in the madrigal drama, when the musician wished a single personage to speak, that character sang his part in the madrigal while alone on the stage and the other parts were sung behind the scenes. This error has persistently clung to musical history, despite the fact that it was long ago exposed by European authors who ought to have commanded more consideration. The present writer is indebted to Romain Rolland for guidance in his examination into this matter.

Vecchi had an enthusiastic disciple in Adriano Banchieri, born at Bologna in 1567 and died in the same city in 1634. Although he was a pupil of Giuseppe Guami, organist of St. Mark's, himself an organist of St. Michele in Bologna, and a serious theoretician, he was none the less the author of several comedies and satires, which he wrote under the pseudonym of Camillo Scaligeri della Fratta. He states in the t.i.tle page that his comedy, "Il Studio Dilettevole" (for three voices) produced in 1603, is after the manner of Vecchi's "Amfiparnaso." His "Saggezia Giovenile," produced somewhat later, is equipped with a preface containing full directions as the method of performing a madrigal drama.

He says:

"Before the music begins one of the singers will read in a loud voice the t.i.tle of the scene, the names of the personages and the argument.

"The place of the scene is a chamber of moderate size, as well closed as possible (for the quality of the sound). In an angle of the room are placed two pieces of carpet on the floor and a pleasing scene. Two chairs are placed, one at the right, the other at the left. Behind the scene are benches for the singers, which are turned toward the public and separated from one another by the breadth of a palm. Behind these is an orchestra of lutes, clavicembali, and other instruments, in tune with the voices. From above the scene falls a large curtain which shuts off the singers and instrumentalists; the rule of procedure will be according to the following order:

"The invisible singers read the music from their parts. They will be three at a time, or better, six, two sopranos, two tenors, one alto and one ba.s.s, singing or remaining silent according to the occasion, giving with spirit the lively words and with feeling the sentimental ones and p.r.o.nouncing all with loud and intelligible voices according to the judgment of prudent singers.

"The actors alone on the scene, and reciting, should prepare their parts so as to know them by heart and in every detail of place and time follow the music with all care as to time. It will not be a bad idea to have a prompter to aid the singers, instrumentalists and reciters."

The words, carefully chosen by the writer, prove conclusively that the actors did not sing; they spoke. The only music was that which came from behind the curtain at the rear.

Further directions for the performance of a madrigal drama by Vecchi tell us that when a single person speaks on the stage, all the musical parts join in representing him. In the case of a dialogue between two actors the voices are to be divided into two groups situated so that the musical sounds shall seem to proceed from the actors. For example, when Lucio and Isabella converse, men's voices represent the former and women's voices the latter. The subjoined pa.s.sage of dialogue between Frulla and Isabella, Act II, scene fifth, will show how two voices were represented:

[Musical Notation]

In the "Fidi Amanti" of Torelli there is a scene for two men, a satyr and a shepherd, and one woman, a nymph. In this the two men are represented always by the tenor and the ba.s.s, the latter having the chief burden of the delineation of the satyr. The soprano and alto voices are reserved for the nymph. Yet in this scene whenever the emotion becomes intense, whether sad or joyous, the four voices unite in singing the princ.i.p.al phrase.

Rolland, with his customary ac.u.men, notes that in Vecchi's five part madrigals for the stage the employment of the odd voice is plainly governed by musical needs. It has to be common to both personages in a scene for two and hence it is always the least characteristic voice. Its chief business is to fill in the harmony.

It is not essential to the purpose of this work that the story of "L'Amfiparnaso" or any of the other important madrigal dramas should be told. The significant points are the disappearance of the more gorgeous elements of spectacle found in the older court shows, the rise to prominence of the comic element, and above all the entire obliteration of the tentative methods of solo song found in the earlier lyric drama.

The old-fashioned _cantori a liuti_ sank into obscurity as the madrigal grew in general favor in Italy, and in the latter years of the sixteenth century their art seems to have undergone alterations quite in keeping with the growing complexity of madrigal forms. The madrigal was now the solo form with an instrumental accompaniment made from the under voices, and this solo form was not used in the madrigal drama. Its musicians had laid aside the "recitar alla lira," so much praised by Castiglione in 1514, and were seeking for some new way of setting solo utterance to music. The method chosen by Vecchi must appear to us to be removed from possibilities of artistic success still further than the solo adaptations of frottole, yet the historical fact is that his "Amfiparnaso" had an extraordinary popularity and set a fashion.

Some of Vecchi's works were produced and met with favor even after the pseudo-h.e.l.lenic invention of the Bardi fraternity had burst upon Italy.

Indeed the madrigal drama died hard and its final burial was not accomplished till the opera had begun to take shape more definite than that found in the experimental productions of its founders. With the declining years of this curious form we need not concern ourselves. We may now turn to a consideration of the experiments which led to the creation of dramatic recitative, the missing link in the primeval world of the lyric drama.

CHAPTER XIV

The Spectacular Element in Music

While the madrigal drama was in the ripeness of its glory the young Florentine coterie which brought the opera to birth was engaged in its experiments with monody. The history of its labors has been told in many books and need not be repeated here. But connected with it are certain important facts which are too often overlooked or at best denied their correct position in the story.

In the first place, then, let us remind ourselves that while the madrigal drama was utilizing in a novel manner the musical form from which it took its name, the method of adapting the madrigal to solo purposes had never been abandoned. The singular path of development followed by the musical drama had been leading away from its true goal, that of solo utterance, but the Italian salon still heard the charms of the madrigal arranged as a lyric for single voice.

The first secular drama, the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, was equipped with the elements from which might have been evolved quickly all the materials of the first experimental operas; but the rapid spread of the polyphonic music through Italy and the sudden and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the c.u.mbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The n.o.ble cla.s.sic figure of Orpheus, with his flowing white robe, his simple fillet on his brow, and his lyre in his arm, standing before the iron gates and moving by his song the powers of h.e.l.l, soon gave way to the gorgeous exhibitions in which the splendors of Night and Dawn were made the subjects of a series of glittering scenes enveloping a plan much like that of some modern ballet spectacle.

Throughout the sixteenth century, as we have seen, these court representations grew in complexity of pictorial detail, while the importance of the development of a medium for individual expression sank further and further out of notice. One reads of occasional uses of the old method of solo recitation to the lyre, but never as a controlling motive in the dramatic construction. It appears only as an incident in the general medley of sensuous allurements. So, too, the convocation of ma.s.ses of singers, dancers and instrumentalists seems to have been nothing more than a natural demonstration of that growing appet.i.te for luxury which characterized the approach of the feeble intellectual era of the Seicentisti, that era in which "ecclesiastical intolerance had rendered Italy nearly dest.i.tute of great men."

These quoted words are Symonds's; let him speak still further: "Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnescchi burned, Paleario burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished after a quarter of a century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe. Ta.s.so, worn out with misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Scarpi survived the stylus of the Roman curia with calm inscrutability at St. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch tower behind Bello Squardo. With Michael Angelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto in 1594, the G.o.dlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor one. Marino, Ta.s.soni, the younger Buonarotti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature.

The Bolognese academy in painting. After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento--barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation--Jesuitry translated into false culture."

Symonds is here speaking of the dawn of the seventeenth century, but the movement toward these conditions is quite clearly marked in the later years of the preceding cycle. Its influence on the lyric drama is manifest in the multiplication of luxurious accessories and superficial splendors, designed to appeal to the taste of n.o.bles plunged in sensuous extravagances and easily mistaking delight in them for a lofty appreciation of the drama and art. The reform of the Florentine coterie conquered Italy for less than fifty years. The return to showy productions, to the congregation of purely theatric effects, scenic as well as musical, was swift, and the student of operatic art can to-day discern with facility that the invention of the Florentines was soon reduced to the state of a thread to bind together episodes of pictorial and vocal display. But in the beginning it was unquestionably the outcome of a hostility to these very things, or at any rate to their merely spectacular employment.

Peri, Caccini, Bardi and others of the Florentine "camerata" were engaged as composers, stage managers, actors and singers in many of the elaborate court spectacles, intermezzi and madrigal dramas produced toward the end of the sixteenth century. Peri and Caccini were professional singers, and their experiences were not only those of students, but also those of pract.i.tioners. Their revolt against the contrapuntal lyric drama was largely, though not wholly, based on deep-seated objection to the unintelligibility of the text. It does not require profound consideration to bring us to the opinion that the method of Vecchi was in part an attempt to overcome the innate defect of the polyphonic style in this matter of intelligibility. The resort to the spoken text on the stage while the music was sung behind the scenes appears on the face of it to have been compelled by a wish for some method of conveying the meaning of the poet to the audience.

Why, then, did not these young reformers find at hand in the madrigal arranged for solo voice the suggestion for their line of lyric reconstruction? Partly by reason of the confusion caused by obedience to old polyphonic customs in making the accompaniments, and partly because the madrigal had become a field for the display of vocal agility.

Already the development of colorature singing had reached a high degree of perfection. Already the singer sought to astonish the hearer by covering an air with a bewildering variety of ornaments. The time was not far off when the opera prima donna was to become the incarnation of the artistic sensuousness which had beguiled Italy with a dream of Grecian resurrection. The way had been well built, for the attention of the fathers of the Roman church had been turned early to the necessity of system in the delivery of the liturgical chants. The study of a style had developed a technic and to the achievement of vocal feats this technic had been incited by the rapid rise of the act of descant.

Hand in hand the technic and the art of descant had come down the years.

The sharp distinction early made between "contrapunctus a penna" and "contrapunctus a mente" showed that composers and singers to a certain degree actually stood in rivalry in their production of pa.s.sage work for voices. The rapid expansion of the florid element in the polyphonic music of the composers indicates to us that the improvised descant of the singer had a sensible influence. We need not be astonished, then, to learn that long before the end of the sixteenth century a very considerable knowledge of what was later systematized as the so-called "Italian method" had been acquired. The registers of head and chest were understood, breathing was studied, the hygiene of the voice was not a stranger, and vocalizes on all the vowels and for all the voices had been written. Numerous singers had risen to note, and the records show that their distinction rested not only on the beauty of their voices and the elegance of their singing, but also on their ability to perform those instrumental feats which have from that time to this been dear to the colorature singer and to the operatic public.

In the closing years of the sixteenth century we find that the famous singers were heard not oftener in public entertainments than in private a.s.semblies. Occasionally a madrigal arranged as a solo figured in a lyric play, but the singing of madrigals for one voice was a popular field for the exhibition of the powers of celebrated prima donnas such as Vittoria Archilei and eminent tenors like Jacopo Peri.