Most of the grand turning points in cultural history are illusory. What appears in the rearview mirror as a sudden disjunction, a leap from the old to the new, could hardly have happened without a long series of smaller shifts and alterations making it possible. The role of the chronicler is to bring this trail of events to life, revealing the gradual, organic processes behind the apparently spontaneous arising of the new. Put differently, there are no on/off switches in history. Even the sudden moments of illumination require a long vigil to prepare us for the coming dawn.
Even so, there is something remarkable about the year 1600. I’m hardly surprised that Michel Foucault focused on this juncture as the moment when a great rift emerged in the order of things, leaving behind the categories of the classical world and opening the way for new modes of representation. Foucault pays little attention to performance styles from this period—music was outside of his purview—but we could hardly find a more important date in music history than 1600. The oldest surviving opera, Euridice by Jacopo Peri, had its premiere in Florence on October 6 of that year. Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo, often considered the first oratorio, made its debut in Rome a few months earlier, in February. The madrigal was also flourishing in 1600, with Claudio Monteverdi working on many of the defining masterpieces of that genre. The basso continuo emerged as an important musical technique around this same time—seemingly a small matter, until one realizes its significance in tilting the balance away from group-oriented polyphony and toward individualistic works built on melody and accompaniment. This same shift could be seen in the increasing use of the term sonata to describe instrumental works for a soloist or small group of musicians. Each of these shifts had different causes and ramifications, but the overall trend was an accentuation of the personality-driven ethos in music.1
Not everyone greeted these changes with enthusiasm. In that same momentous year, music theorist Giovanni Artusi admitted that though “it pleases me, at my age, to see a new method of composing,” he was dismayed by newcomers who seemed determined to “corrupt, spoil and ruin the good traditional rules handed down in former times by so many theorists and most excellent musicians.” This refrain should be familiar by now: the hostility and resistance brought out by musical innovation. Artusi had the greatest composer of his day, Claudio Monteverdi, in his crosshairs, and now stirred up one of the most heated controversies in the history of music. Yet here we also encounter, a few years later, the same process of legitimization documented again and again in this book. In 1633, Monteverdi went so far as to claim that his hostile critic had embraced the new modern sounds before his death. “Not only did he [Artusi] stop overruling me—turning his pen in my praise—but he began to like and admire me.” This is the way musical revolutions almost always end: the acrimony is washed away, and connections between former combatants are emphasized. The details differ from century to century, but the motivation is almost always the same: the loser in a culture war decides to join the winning side.2
It was the dawn of a new age. In the past, the musicians had been asked to serve a higher power—which didn’t always mean God. More often earthly potentates, and their sometimes hidebound institutions, called the shots. They still aimed to do so in the age of Monteverdi, and even after, but their weakening control over musical matters was increasingly apparent. The number of options in the marketplace for musicians to earn a living as freelancers expanded rapidly in the early decades of the seventeenth century. True, many musicians had made money on a transaction-by-transaction basis before this—even Pythagoras and his followers hired out their services, back when Western music was first codifying its practices—but never had they faced such a rich array of profitable ventures. At the close of the Renaissance we encounter true music businesses. (In fact, one of them is still operating today: Zildjian, a leading supplier of cymbals and drum accessories, with its headquarters in Massachusetts, was founded in Istanbul in 1623 by the family that still runs it.) Music publishing gained traction in the early 1600s and set practices in motion that the entertainment industry still follows today. Opera emerged as a privileged spectacle for the wealthy, then gradually turned into commercial entertainment for the general public. Other income streams, from concertizing in public to teaching in private, expanded with the growth in the market economies of Europe.
Despite these opportunities, few of the leading composers supported themselves solely by freelancing. Elite musicians still sought the security and prestige of an official appointment in a church or court. But almost all the major figures from the Baroque period, as this era came to be known, doubled as entrepreneurs, seeking out attractive commercial engagements in the marketplace. It’s worth noting, in passing, that critics initially applied the term baroque as an insult, deriding the fussy intricacy and extravagant individualism of the aesthetic vision and contrasting it with the holistic elegance of the Renaissance. This label, too, like many of the musicians under discussion here, was later legitimized, and became a term of praise. But there is something unsettling and eccentric about the new order of things, with everything still in flux and the stars of the era fluttering from opportunity to opportunity. In an odd yet fitting way, the newfound freedom and flexibility in seventeenth-century music is matched by composers themselves in their career paths, which were just as baroque as the music of the era. We must puzzle over Monteverdi, so skilled at imparting an “aroused eroticism” (in the words of musicologist Gary Tomlinson) to his famous songs of love, taking orders as a Catholic priest. By this time, the composer had already been married and had fathered three children. Or take the even more unusual résumé of Jean-Baptiste Lully, who not only composed ballet music but danced to it—with Louis XIV as a dancing partner!—and at various points in his career played guitar, performed as a street entertainer (dressed as a harlequin), collaborated with the playwright Molière, invented the French overture, helped establish opera in France, experimented with unconventional and ‘exotic’ instruments, from castanets to bagpipes, and, of course, like all his peers, wrote music for Catholic religious services. With our current mindset of genre specialization, we can hardly imagine careers that move so effortlessly from idiom to idiom, but such was increasingly the norm in that age of redefinition and excess.3
These revered figures, who seem like the definitive ‘establishment’ composers of their day, were far more prickly and independent than we might guess from their institutional affiliations. Musicologist Richard Taruskin has suggested that Monteverdi’s surviving letters are the earliest examples on record “of artistic alienation” in Western classical music, and calls particular attention to “a hair-raisingly sarcastic reply… the most famous letter by a composer before the eighteenth century.” Here the composer goes on for page after page lambasting his Mantuan patrons, denouncing their lack of respect and tardy payments, bragging about his renown, his superior salary and freelance income in Venice, the better musicians now available to him, etc. He ends by asserting that the Gonzaga family, the target of this abuse, should give him some landed property that he could pass on to his children, because it would accrue to their “everlasting honor.”4
In the case of Lully, the causes of conflict were different, and controversies stemmed from many sources—for example, a scandalous poem about his patroness, and various love affairs with young men (concurrent with a marriage that produced ten children). Lully even lost the favor of the king after the composer seduced a young page, Brunet, who was training for service in the royal court. Lully was fifty-three years old at the time, and he was able to escape prosecution because of his renown and connections. Brunet, for his part, was sent off to a monastery for roughshod rehabilitation. In the cases of Lully and Monteverdi, as for so many others in the pantheon of classical music, we need to look past their institutional affiliations, which are almost always fraught with tension and provide a misleading aura of respectability to their biographies, to grasp how often they battled with the norms and expectations of their times. History paints them as the consummate insiders, but the details of their day-to-day lives tell a different story.
In the Monteverdi letter mentioned above, the composer brags about his ability to earn money from sideline activities, in addition to his salary as maestro di cappella at the Basilica San Marco in Venice. Venice was the perfect place for a freelance musician at this time. The city stood out as the most vibrant center of music publishing in the world, and was the incubator where opera evolved from a patron’s self-indulgent spectacle into true popular entertainment. Here again, a port city that served as a gateway to other cultures emerges as a center of musical innovation, much as Lesbos did in ancient Greece, or New Orleans in twentieth-century America. Despite these advantages, Monteverdi could only count on freelancing for around one-third of his income. Intellectual property rights for composers were primitive, mostly limited to the simplest work-for-hire terms without any of the residual or royalty income we are familiar with nowadays. If composers wanted to make a real business out of publishing, they needed to set up as publishers themselves. And a surprising number of them took this step, typically as part of their relationship with a powerful patron.
Queen Elizabeth granted William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent on the printing and publishing of music in England for a period of twenty-one years. This right extended to blank music staff paper other composers used to write their works—even before a single note was written, Byrd and Tallis got their cut. Similar arrangements took place elsewhere in Europe and influenced the dissemination of music for more than two centuries. In 1521, Bartolomeo Tromboncino received a fifteen-year exclusive privilege from the Venetian Senate for printing music, although he may have never taken advantage of it—indeed, this favor may have been intended more as a copyright than an actual incentive to enter the publishing business. But a patent awarded to organist Marco Antonio Cavazzoni in 1523 clearly aimed to provide him with a monopoly over a new technology, apparently an innovative form of music tablature; we can merely guess at its scope, because the only works published by the holder employ conventional notation. Half a century later, composer Orlando di Lasso secured a printing privilege covering his works in France, and later sought similar rights in present-day Germany from Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor. Lully was elevated almost to the level of a cultural czar around this time, and even controlled all opera performances in France—a perk that allowed him to leave behind an estate of 800,000 livres, more than what many powerful government ministers of the time accumulated during entire careers. These pay-for-play privileges continued into the eighteenth century. As late as 1724, composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier received a royal license on music engraving, and thus turned a second-class talent into substantial wealth. He allegedly responded to criticisms of his undistinguished music with boasts about how much money he was earning.
At first glance, this might seem a wonderful turn of events: musicians were given control of the latest technology in their field, and could use it for the betterment of the art form. Sad to say, the reality was far different. Musicians often proved just as domineering as the patrons of old, or driven by envy and spite. (Are you surprised?) They frequently relied on their patents and privileges to hinder the dissemination of music by others. When the original patent granted to Byrd and Tallis expired in 1596, a brief interlude of creative ferment ensued as their rivals were finally allowed to publish their works—“making 1597 a high point in the history of English music publishing,” according to musicologist Graham Freeman. In other words, music flourished when the musicians lost control. The patent holders may also have used their authority to control the kinds of music that circulated in England. I note, for example, the absence of published lute music during the period of the initial patent, and wonder whether Byrd’s lack of interest in the instrument may have played a role in this neglect. We find other instances in which these privileges served to constrain rather than advance musical arts, and are left with the displeasing notion (to me, at least) that musicians themselves may not be the best custodians of new technologies in their field.5
The music ecosystem seemed better served when patents went to printers, not composers. Ottaviano Petrucci used his patent on music publishing in Venice to advance the technology with his application of triple impression printing. This process demanded great care, with words, staves, and notes applied in separate steps, but represented a major improvement in the field. Petrucci published more than sixty volumes of music, and did more than almost anyone of his day to transform music into a true business, a field where entrepreneurs could prosper without playing an instrument or composing a note. Even so, this leap forward hardly allowed for true mass production, or for ‘best sellers’ as we would define them today. A typical print run for a musical work was a few hundred copies. Other printers in Europe, most notably Pierre Attaingnant in Paris, adopted a cheaper printing technology, using a single impression, that was better suited for high-volume production. Still, Attaingnant’s press runs were probably only around one thousand copies. As a result, composers often had to reach into their own pockets to subsidize the printing of their works, although their intellectual property rights in the finished product were limited. How amusing, yet sadly revealing, to consider the first copyright warning on a published work of music, found attached to a collection of motets by Salamone Rossi issued in Venice in 1623: it involved no legal threats, merely a curse on anyone infringing on the composer’s rights. Anyone who dared reprint the works without permission would get bitten by a serpent—and this threat, readers were told, was authorized by angels. Given these various constraints, no musician in these early days could envision getting rich from publishing music, or even consider it a primary source of income. But it did serve as a powerful source of legitimization for a composer, established a canon of ‘classic’ works, and laid the groundwork for true mass consumption of printed music at a later stage in history.
In fact, the rise of opera did more to help the economic prospects of musicians during this period than the expansion in music publishing. Yet, strangely enough, composers weren’t the main beneficiaries. Singers were the true stars, and were also the ones who could demand the most money. Soprano Giulia Massotti incited bidding wars, and in 1666 she could demand more than four times as much money as the composers whose works she performed; before the end of the decade, she was getting paid six times as much. The cost of singers could take up more than 40 percent of the total budget for producing an opera, and the other participants fought over the rest. Composer Pietro Ziani complained to impresario Marco Faustini that singers were receiving ten times or more what he had made for Annibale in Capua (1660), even though this was his fifth opera for the promoter. As opera gained in popularity and more theaters were built, the competition to secure vocal talent only grew more intense, and even a famous composer needed to take a back seat to the diva onstage. More than half a century later, soprano Francesca Cuzzoni was still earning more for singing Handel’s music than Handel made from composing it.
Other perks confirmed the status of the prima donna (or “first lady”), as these singers were now called. These privileges went far beyond private boxes and special allowances, extending into artistic control over the music and libretto. A star singer could decide whether songs were added, cut, transposed, or edited, and in some instances dictate the creation of an entirely new role. But even this was not enough to please some fickle performers, who brought their favorite songs with them from other operas, insisting on their inclusion in a new production. The term diva, which would eventually be applied to these singers, is revealing of their high status: in Italian, the word means goddess, a veritable female deity. The challenges in pleasing such celestial beings are so extreme that the label of diva is sometimes used nowadays on a lesser talent, or even someone who doesn’t sing, provided their demands are sufficiently outrageous and their assertion of special privileges beyond the pale. This all started with the switch from opera as a private spectacle for a patron to a profit-driven entertainment business.
Yet what an amazing change this represents in the social status of female vocalists! Consider the fact that, until the late sixteenth century, the two types of female workers most closely associated with singing in the Western world were, as noted in Chapter 12, prostitutes and nuns. In other words, the songs of females were either sinful seductions… or else kept under lock and key in the cloister, where they could be heard by God, and not lust-ridden men. A significant turning point occurred in the 1570s and 1580s, when Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, began enlisting female singers as permanent members of his court. At first, these women performed in ensemble with men, but eventually formed a segregated single-sex unit known as the concerto delle donne (the consort of ladies). Other nobles were quick to emulate this new concept. It’s hard for us today to grasp how fresh and exciting this approach was at the time, although many must have been scandalized as well. Some observers were convinced that these women were really courtesans who gave out sexual favors as part of their job descriptions. The available evidence tells a different story. It shows that many of these women not only avoided scandal, but secured desirable marriage matches and gained great social prestige via their vocal skills. In any event, the music world shifted permanently at this turning point, with singing women finally securing a career path outside of a brothel or nunnery.
Yet even the patrons who hired these singers may have had mixed ideas about the skills and requirements for this new kind of performer. Note, for example, the disturbing case of Caterina Martinelli, who was forced to undergo a medical test to certify her virginity at the age of thirteen before Duke Vincenzo I of Mantua would hire her. Perhaps he was only trying to avoid scurrilous rumor and ensure that the female performers at his court were above suspicion; or maybe he wanted to make clear that he was not involved in what we would today call sex trafficking. But the request reminds us how much musical and sexual matters have always overlapped in Western culture. So who can be surprised that audiences allowed entrée to these unprecedented performances might also speculate—or perhaps fantasize—on matters of erotic intrigue.
The cult of the opera prima donna, which represents in some ways the next step in this evolution of the professional female singer, was also shaped by these sexual rumors and musings. For the next three centuries, opera retained a reputation that bordered on dishonorable and sinful, and sometimes crossed far beyond the border. In Paris at the close of the seventeenth century, eminent men tried to arrange private meetings with opera singers, or invited them into their private boxes. Many of these performers eventually opted to live under the ‘protection’ of a noble. One might even conclude that the most prosperous career path went directly from the stage to the bedroom. A commentator of the period joked that the Academy of Music, a Parisian opera house, ought to be renamed the “Academy of Love.” Yet these venues didn’t need to serve as pickup spots to upset the primmer members of the community. The activities presented onstage were sufficiently shocking to stir up protests. How many of the most popular operas deal with prostitutes, mistresses, adulterers, and other ‘fallen’ women? The aura of legitimacy attached today to works such as La Traviata (which translates, in effect, as “fallen woman”), Carmen, Madame Butterfly, Don Giovanni, and other canonic operas shouldn’t blind us to the fact that they were the edgiest entertainment of their day.6
Yet male musicians also found themselves subject to erotic gazes during the same period. I suspect that the sexual resonance on display was linked to the rising popularity of music featuring a solo singer backed by instrumental accompaniment, an important part of popular European culture since before the days of the troubadours, but now gaining greater momentum as a form of artistic expression. I hope scholars someday undertake a detailed statistical analysis of the use of first-person grammatical constructions in the songs of the Western world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even a cursory examination of the lyrics shows the growing tension between meaning and delivery in this music. The madrigal composers might be writing elaborate works requiring several singers, yet they still felt compelled to use the first-person singular “I” in their texts. The romantic themes, so popular among listeners, demanded this contradiction. Yet consider the incongruity of Monteverdi composing a song declaring “Ardo, avvampo, mi struggo, ardo: acorrete” (I burn, I catch fire, I’m consumed, I burn: run), but setting it for performance by eight singers. Is this the setup for an intimate romance, or incitement for an orgy? Form and content were out of alignment, and something would need to change to restore the lost equilibrium.7
It can hardly be a coincidence that solo singing with lute accompaniment was so popular during this same period. The lute captured the public’s imagination as the instrument of seducers—check out the various appearances of the instrument in Shakespeare’s plays to gauge the range of its erotic associations. By the same token, portraits of men playing the lute, a sexualized subject popular with European visual artists since the early days of the Renaissance, frequently evoked a marked lasciviousness. The lutenists who appear in paintings by Giovanni Cariani, Bernardo Strozzi, Valentin de Boulogne, Hendrick ter Brugghen, and others are presented as romantic protagonists, men who, while gratifying the ears, also threatened the chastity of their listeners. As we have seen, no lute music was published during the period when the ardent (but secret) Catholic William Byrd controlled the patent on music publishing in England. That may have been a matter of chance or musical taste, but I suspect certain moral qualms might have entered into the equation as well. Even so, the moralists were bound to lose this battle. The public wanted seductive music, and this meant that sacred polyphony by Byrd (and others) would inevitably be forced to compete in the marketplace with the passionate songs of opera divas and doe-eyed lutenists.
A cultural shift in matters of love and sex was also taking place around the year 1600—a final rejection of feudal sentiments that had lingered far beyond their expiration date and turned into embarrassing anachronisms—and this move inevitably fed into the profound changes taking place in Western music. It’s hard to overstate the stagnancy of the love lyric at this juncture. As the example from Monteverdi shows, songs often repeated the same clichés of the suffering lover that Petrarch had brought into the forefront of Italian poetry more than two centuries before. And Petrarch himself was holding onto many of the clichés of the courtly love ethos that were two centuries old when he was born. The world had changed, and the constraints of feudalism had disappeared in the real world, yet in the fields of storytelling and popular songs, the notion of fawning, masochistic service to an idealized lady still permeated European culture at every turn.
If we fail to grasp that incongruity, we can hardly understand why Don Quixote, published in two volumes by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605 and 1615, had such a profound effect. This story not only ridiculed the notion of knightly servitude to a perfect lady, but specifically targeted the popular culture works that celebrated it. The protagonist literally loses his mind from consuming too many popular romances, and ends up pursuing ridiculous adventures in service to a lady who doesn’t exist. Cervantes was not a songwriter, but his work signaled that these old-style love lyrics needed to be replaced with something more vibrant, more realistic, and more attuned to the new world of the seventeenth century. At that same point in history, Shakespeare was ridiculing knightly pretensions in the guise of Sir John Falstaff, perhaps his most popular character—he appears in three of the Bard’s plays (and is referenced in two others), the final time in The Merry Wives of Windsor, coinciding with Cervantes’s work on his famous novel. Shakespeare’s lost play The History of Cardenio, performed in 1613, was apparently based on an episode in Don Quixote. Consider the significance of the two greatest writers of the time—and indeed, of their respective nations—working almost in tandem to undermine the outdated romantic notions of their day. Composers of songs would inevitably follow along the same path.
This is the very moment when Monteverdi, the greatest madrigal composer, embraces opera, the idiom that will redefine how human relations are presented in musical settings over the next three hundred years. Monteverdi couldn’t abandon the older form entirely—his audience demanded new madrigals, and his talents were perfectly suited to the form—but, like Shakespeare and Cervantes, he must have understood that the old recipes were losing their aesthetic force.
At this moment, a chasm enters into Western song. Two opposing visions contend for dominance. Those who followed the models of the past still wanted songs that drew audiences to something larger than reality, into a realm of purified Platonic ideals where spirituality, well-regulated human relations, and harmonious behavior triumphed over all obstacles, stepping out from the chaos of everyday life with glimmering perfection. The emotions celebrated here often collapsed into stylized sentimentality or a reverent and decorous devotion demarcated by poetic clichés. But now there was an alternative, a kind of song that evoked something closer to real life, perhaps even exaggerated the messiness and passionate disorder in how people deal with each other.
In an earlier day, powerful leaders or religious authorities might have dictated which of these two models most deserved emulation. But in the new era of audience-driven art, raw emotions offered a more compelling spectacle and would inevitably triumph over Platonic ideals. Songs of entropic messiness were destined to displace anthems of perfection—at least if the promoters hoped to sell tickets and fill the house. By necessity, this process would play out slowly, with many bumps and temporary reversals along the way. But who could doubt the endpoint? By any reasonable measure, we are still living in it now.