A Short History of Opera, fourth edition

WITH THE COMING OF THE RENAISSANCE, interest in all forms of secular music increased. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, music was a feature of courtly entertainments, banquets, tourneys, festivals, triumphal entrances, and similar brilliant occasions.¹ This music cannot properly be called “dramatic,” since it did not serve to carry on the action of a drama. Nevertheless, its connection with the history of opera is important, for these courtly displays of the Renaissance established the practice of bringing together many different artistic resources—singing, playing, dancing, scenery, costumes, stage effects—in a single spectacle calculated to appeal equally to the eye, the ear, and the imagination. Scenes of this kind—nondramatic displays with accompaniment of music—came into opera very early in the seventeenth century and have remained characteristic of opera ever since. In the sixteenth century the most important of the many types of entertainment in which music served were the ballet and the intermedio.

The ancestor of the ballet was the masquerade (French mascarade, Italian mascherata, English masque). Originally a popular spectacle associated with Carnival time, the Italian mascherata had developed into a favorite court amusement, which was imitated by the French and English in the sixteenth century. The French mascarades frequently formed part of the ceremonies of welcome to a distinguished personage, as on the occasion of a visit of Charles IX to Bar-le-Duc in 1564, when actors representing the four elements, the four planets, and various allegorical and mythological personages, including the god Jupiter, united in a sumptuous ceremony of homage to the king. Mascarades of this sort later became the models for the French opera prologues. By the sixteenth century, as these mascarades show, aristocratic poetry had taken over the whole panoply of ancient pagan deities, demigods, nymphs, satyrs, and heroes, together with scores of figures from the pages of medieval epics and romances; all these were freely introduced on the stage, usually more lavishly than logically. In those mascarades where the purpose was the entertainment of an entire company rather than the complimenting of an illustrious guest, dancing was the chief attraction, and it was from mascarades of this sort that the characteristic French form of the ballet was derived.

The French word ballet comes from the Italian balletto, the diminutive of ballo (dance). The most famous ballet of the period was the Ballet comique de la reine (originally titled Circé ou le Balet comique de la royne), which was performed at the Petit-Bourbon palace in Paris, October 1581, on the occasion of the marriage of the queen’s sister, Marguerite de Vaudémont, to the Duc de Joyeuse. A complete account of this incredibly lavish production was published with the score in the following year.² The principal author and director, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, explains in his introduction that the word comique refers to the fact that here for the first time an attempt was made to unify all the elements of the ballet by means of a coherent plot (comédie), a simple dramatic framework that gave occasion for the introduction of many different stage settings and dances. Slight as it was, this introduction of a dramatic action into the ballet might have led at once to the creation of French opera if only the musicians had undertaken to solve the problem of setting dramatic dialogue, thereby making continuous music possible. But neither their interest nor that of their audiences lay in this direction. The dramatic ballet survived for a few decades in France, but by 1620 all pretense of a unified plot was abandoned, and the ballet reverted to a mere diversified spectacle for the amusement of the court.

The music for the Ballet comique was by Lambert de Beaulieu and Jacques Salmon. It consists of eight choruses, two dialogues with choral refrains, two solos, and two sets of instrumental dances scored in five-part texture and played by ten violons. The choruses are strictly homophonic and rather dull, partly because their musical rhythm is slavishly bound to that of the words, with long and short notes for the “long” and “short” syllables according to the principles of musique measurée à l’antique. The bass solos, as was customary in the period, simply follow the bass of the harmony. Some of the soprano airs are highly ornamented—a style of writing frequently found in solo madrigals and also used by Monteverdi for one aria in his Orfeo. The most interesting pieces are the dances, with their formal, stately, geometrical rhythms. One of them, “Le Son de la clochette,” has retained its popularity to this day (example 3.1). The Ballet comique exerted considerable influence on the masques of Ben Jonson long before it was presented in London in 1632 in the form of a close adaptation by Aurelia Townsend entitled Tempe Restored.

The English masque, somewhat similar to the Italian mascarade and the French ballet, made its appearance at the beginning of the sixteenth century as a form of courtly entertainment designed to pay homage to the royal family and to exalt the glories of the kingdom.³ Since it was written for a specific occasion, a masque rarely had more than one performance. It was allegorical in character, with the main interest focused on costumes and spectacle, and included spoken dialogue, songs, dances, and instrumental music. The earliest masques consisted of a sequence of dance episodes or “entries” centered on a common theme, performed by masked courtiers. Although the masque was popular throughout the century, its heyday did not come until the next century, during the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49).

Both the ballet and the masque exercised a strong influence on the formation of the respective French and English national operas, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

In such pieces as the masquerades and ballets, the function of music was essentially that of adjunct to a visual spectacle. There is another class of sixteenth-century works in which the role of music was to offer diversion in connection with a regular spoken play. As is well known, one of the features of the Renaissance was the revival of secular drama. The movement began in Italy toward the end of the fifteenth century with performances of Latin plays, in the original or in translation, under courtly auspices and at various centers, of which Ferrara, Rome, Florence, Mantua, and Venice were particularly prominent. Many new plays were written, in Latin or Italian, imitating classical models. Practically all these plays made use of music to some extent, though often in a subordinate, decorative fashion.⁴ In addition to instrumental pieces, occasional solos or duets, and madrigals, these plays frequently included musical settings of the choruses, especially in tragedies based on Greek originals. Long famous were Andrea Gabrieli’s settings of four of the choruses in an Italian translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus rex (Vicenza, 1585).⁵

The general tendency was to separate the musical numbers from the play itself by placing them in the prologue and at the ends of the acts, so that each appeared as an intermedio, that is, something “intermediate” in the action of the play. Their subjects were, as a rule, connected in some allegorical way with the subject of the drama. Only on especially festive occasions, such as princely marriages, would the intermedi be very elaborate. Those set to music by Francesco Corteccia (1502–71) and performed with Antonio Landi’s Il commodo (Florence, 1539) to celebrate the marriage of Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo provide an early example of this type of courtly entertainment. This particular set of intermedi included three solo songs and four madrigals for four to eight voices with varied instrumental accompaniment.⁶

For the festivities celebrating the wedding of Francesco de’ Medici and Giovanna of Austria at Florence in 1565, the comedy La cofanaria by Francesco d’Ambra was staged together with six intermedi. These intermedi were unified by a single theme derived from the story of Cupid and Psyche. The portions of this story selected were intended to coordinate with the plot of La cofanaria so “that which is enacted by the gods in the fable of the intermedii, is likewise enacted—as it were, under constraint of a higher power—by the mortals in the comedy.”⁷ A wide gamut of musical effects was explored in the six intermedi with dances, vocal solos, madrigals, and other ensemble pieces composed by Francesco Corteccia and Alessandro Striggio, the elder (c. 1540–92). Accompaniment was provided by large and varied orchestral groups consisting of viols, harpsichords, lutes, woodwinds, and some brass instruments.⁸ Four years later, Striggio provided intermedi for L’amico fido (Florence, 1569); they were presented with a pomp of staging and music that foreshadowed many seventeenth-century operas.⁹

Perhaps the most elaborate intermedi of the sixteenth century were those performed at Florence in May 1589 as part of the festivities for the wedding of Prince Don Ferdinando de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine.¹⁰ Six intermedi were staged as independent interludes between the acts of Girolamo Bargagli’s comedy La pellegrina.¹¹ Documentation of this extraordinary event comes from a number of sources, among them a publication of the vocal and instrumental parts with performance directions, engravings of the principal scenes, and descriptions of the costumes designed by Bernardo Buontalenti.¹² These intermedi were planned by Count Giovanni Bardi de Vernio (1534–1612), and both he and Emilio de’ Cavalieri (1550–1601), who had recently arrived from Rome to take up his duties at the Florentine court, had responsibility for their production. Many of the texts were by Ottavio Rinuccini and are based, for the most part, on classical myths related to the power of music.¹³ For example, the first intermedio concerns the “music of the spheres”; the sixth depicts the descent of the gods on clouds bringing “the gifts of harmony (song) and rhythm (dance)” to mortals on earth. The musical portions were by several different composers. Cristofano Malvezzi (1547–99) provided most of the music for the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth intermedi, with Luca Marenzio (c. 1553–99) doing the same for the second and third intermedi. Among the other contributors were Giulio Caccini (1546–1618), Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), Bardi, and Cavalieri, with the last named composing and choreographing a spectacular choric dance as the concluding element of the sixth intermedio.¹⁴ The text that appears with this finale was added by Laura Guidiccioni after the music and choreography were completed.¹⁵

Included in this set of intermedi are five- and six-part madrigals, double and triple choruses, and a final madrigal that calls for seven different vocal ensembles with a total of thirty parts. These songs are accompanied by various groups of instruments that also are called for in a number of interpolated sinfonie. Three of the six vocal solos are in ordinary madrigal style, with the lower voices played on instruments. The others exemplify the florid solo style of the sixteenth century, the voice ornamenting a melodic line that is given simultaneously in unornamented form in the accompaniment. This can be seen in example 3.2, which Cavalieri scored for soprano with the accompaniment of a chitarrone.

Some of the most celebrated musicians of the time took part in the 1589 performance. The orchestra included organs, lutes, lyres, harps, viols, trombones, cornetts, and other instruments arranged in different combinations for each number.¹⁶ Since there was not enough space on, above, or in front of the stage to accommodate the forty-one musicians who took part in the production, much of the instrumental accompaniment was performed from behind the scenes or behind an object on the stage, out of view of the audience. The stage design for the second intermedio offered a solution for bringing the instrumental sound closer to the singers; it included niches in which the musicians could be positioned.

With intermedi on such a scale as this, we can well imagine that the audience must have had little attention to give to the play itself, and this was no doubt often the case with such performances in Italy in the sixteenth century. “For the majority of the audience the dances and pageants formed the chief attraction. It is therefore no marvel if the drama, considered as a branch of high poetic art, was suffocated by the growth of its mere accessories.”¹⁷

As a forerunner of opera, the intermedio is important for two reasons: first, because it kept alive in the minds of Italian poets and musicians the idea of close collaboration between drama and music, and second, because in these works, as in the French dramatic ballet, the external form of the future opera is already outlined—a drama with interludes of music and with dancing, splendid scenery, and spectacular stage effects. As soon as the drama itself could be set to music and sung instead of spoken, opera would be achieved. The advent of this new artistic form, however, did not at once put an end to the intermedi and similar spectacles. On the contrary, the intermedio remained popular at Italian courts well into the seventeenth century.

The theater music of the sixteenth century, far from being a mere tentative and imperfect experiment, was a well-developed, essential feature of the entire Renaissance movement. The academies of Italy and France quite naturally interested themselves in music as one aspect of their interest in the revival of ancient art and letters. The texts of the ballets and intermedi imply a degree of familiarity with Greek mythology on the part of their audiences that is hardly conceivable in this day and age. Mingled with this, as a heritage from the Middle Ages, is a pervasive, subtle use of allegory and personification; yet these works were not intended only for the erudite. They were a common part of the luxurious, pleasure-loving court life of cultivated persons. Princes and nobles, poets, painters, and musicians, amateur and professional alike, all participated in their composition and performed in them side by side. The music itself, as has been said, was not dramatic; all the action and passion of the drama were in spoken dialogue, leaving for music only the adornment of the spectacular, reflective, or lyrical scenes. But in these, the important musical forms of the sixteenth century found their place: instrumental dances, airs, madrigals, choruses, chansons, canzonets—everything that music had to offer, with one notable exception: the learned contrapuntal art of the Netherlanders. By the last decade of the sixteenth century, Europe was on the verge of opera. It remained only to transform the relation between drama and music from a mere association into an organic union. For this end, two things were necessary: a kind of drama suitable for continuous music, and a kind of music capable of dramatic expression. The former was found in the pastorale and the latter in the monodic style of the Florentine composers Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini.

Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, the pastorale began to displace all other types of dramatic poetry in Italy.¹⁸ So complete did its dominance become that Angelo Ingegneri, the foremost writer on the theater in the latter part of the century, remarked that “if it were not for the pastorales, it might almost be said that the theater was extinct.”¹⁹ A dramatic pastorale is a poem, lyric in substance but dramatic in form, intended for either reading or stage presentation, with shepherds, shepherdesses, and sylvan deities for the chief characters, and with a background of fields, forests, or other idyllic and pleasant scenes of nature. The dramatic action is restricted to mild love adventures and a few incidents arising out of the circumstances of pastoral life, and it usually ends happily. The attraction of the pastorale consisted, therefore, not in the plot but in the scenes and moods, the sensuous charm of the language, and the delicately voluptuous imagery, at which the Italian Renaissance poets excelled. The sources of the pastoral ideal lay partly in literary studies (Theocritus, Virgil), but it was redeemed from affectation by the sincere and profound Italian feeling for the beauties of “nature humanized by industry.”

The vision of a Golden Age idealized man’s actual enjoyment of the country, and hallowed, as with inexplicable pathos, the details of ordinary rustic life. Weary with courts and worldly pleasures, in moments of revolt against the passions and ambitions that wasted their best energies, the poets of that century, who were nearly always also men of state and public office, sighed for the good old times, when honor was an unknown name, and truth was spoken, and love sincere, and steel lay hidden in the earth, and ships sailed not the sea, and old age led the way to death unterrified by coming doom. As time advanced, their ideal took form and substance. There rose into existence, for the rhymesters to wander in, and for the readers of romance to dream about, a region called Arcadia, where all that was imagined of the Golden Age was found in combination with refined society and manners proper to the civil state.²⁰

Music forms an integral part of Angelo Poliziano’s La fabula d’Orfeo, one of the earliest pastoral plays and one of the first Italian secular dramas to be written wholly in the vernacular.²¹ Based upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this play was performed at Mantua (c. 1480) with music consisting of at least three solo songs and one chorus, interspersed with the spoken dialogue.²² It is a relatively short work, consisting of some four hundred lines, and adheres closely to its Ovidian model.

The pastoral poem was firmly established by Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), but the real beginning of the pastoral drama is usually dated from the performances of Agostino Beccari’s Il sacrificio d’Abramo at Ferrara in 1554, which included music composed by Alfonso della Viola (c. 1508–c. 1573).²³ Only two excerpts from Il sacrificio survive. One is a strophic monologue for bass, with choral refrain, in the third scene of Act III. The solo part is a kind of psalmodic recitative on the bass notes of the harmonies, which were undoubtedly filled in (perhaps improvised) by a lute or similar instrument (example 3.3). The other excerpt is the final canzona. It is set for four parts in a simple chordal style and could have been performed by a vocal ensemble or by a solo voice and instrumentalists assigned to the three lower parts.

The finest examples of the pastorale, and indeed two of the most beautiful poems in all sixteenth-century Italian literature, are Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (Ferrara, 1573) and Battista Guarini’s II pastor fido (written at Ferrara between 1581 and 1590).²⁴ The pastorales lent themselves naturally to musical treatment not only because of their preponderantly lyric content, brevity, and use of choruses, songs, and dances, but also because of the very language, “flowery and sweet … so that one may even admit that it has melody in its every part, since there are shown deities, nymphs, and shepherds from that most remote age when music was natural and speech like poetry.”²⁵ In Aminta, the words are hovering on the edge of song at every moment; every phrase is filled with that unheard music that Tasso himself called “the sweetness and, so to speak, the soul of poetry.”²⁶ Tasso, like many other Italian artists and poets of his time, was an amateur of music and particularly admired Gesualdo, who made settings of a number of his madrigals. He was also a friend of Cavalieri, who composed the incidental music for a performance of Aminta at Florence in 1590.²⁷ Rinuccini, the librettist of the first operas, was a disciple of Tasso, and his poems Dafne and Euridice along with Striggio’s Orfeo (set by Monteverdi in 1607) are simply pastorales modeled on Tasso’s and Guarini’s works.

Great tragedy and great comedy were denied to the Italians. But they produced a novel species in the pastoral drama, which testified to their artistic originality and led by natural transitions to the opera. Poetry was on the point of expiring, but music was rising to take her place. And the imaginative medium, prepared by the lyrical scenes of the Arcadian play, afforded just that generality and aloofness from actual conditions of life, which were needed by the new art in its first dramatic essays…. Aminta and Pastor fido … complete and close the Renaissance, bequeathing in a new species of art its form and pressure to succeeding generations.²⁸

In studies of sixteenth-century Italian music, attention is usually concentrated on two fields: the sacred polyphonic music stemming from the Netherlands tradition and brought to its culmination by Palestrina, and the polyphonic madrigal, represented at its height by Marenzio, Gesualdo, and Monteverdi. With the great body of sixteenth-century church music, the history of opera has simply nothing to do. With the madrigal, however, the case might be different. The experiments of the latter part of the century include a number of works now known as madrigal comedies, which represent attempts to adapt the madrigal to dramatic requirements.²⁹ The most famous of these was L’Amfiparnaso (1594) by Orazio Vecchi (1550–1605).³⁰

L’Amfiparnaso and similar works show clearly in their plots, character types (Pantalone, Pedrolino, Isabella, and the like), and use of dialect their derivation from the commedia dell’arte.³¹ In L’Amfiparnaso there are eleven dialogues and three monologues, the same kind of musical setting being used for all—namely, five-part (one four-part) madrigal ensembles. In the monologues, all five voices sing; in the dialogues, the differentiation of persons is commonly suggested by contrasting the three highest with the three lowest voices (the quinto or middle part being in both groups), though at times all five are used even here. The music of the comic characters is mostly in simple note-against-note style, with a fine sense of the animation of comic dialogue. This contrasts with some of the five-voice pieces, which are beautiful examples of the serious Italian madrigal style. L’Amfiparnaso was not staged, but only sung as a madrigal cycle.³²

The madrigal comedies were an early attempt to combine a farcical type of comedy with music and to exploit the lively, popular commedia dell’arte as against the languid, aristocratic pastorales. But they were merely suites of madrigals, not theater music. So far as their contribution to opera is concerned, their chief usefulness may have been to prove that madrigals alone were not suitable for dramatic purposes. It has even been surmised that Vecchi intended L’Amfiparnaso (the title has been freely translated The Lower Slopes of Parnassus) as a satire on the early attempts at operatic music. In the hands of Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634) and other later composers, the madrigal comedies soon declined and eventually disappeared.

The first composers of monodic recitative at Florence believed that they were renewing a musical practice of the ancient Greeks and that, in so doing, they were accomplishing something of revolutionary importance. Yet the mere singing of solos to instrumental accompaniment could not be considered revolutionary. Even in the performance of polyphonic madrigals, it was not uncommon for one part to be sung while the others were played, perhaps by the singer, in a simplified version on a lute. The prevalence of solo singing in sixteenth-century Italy has the character of a national reaction against the Netherlands polyphony, which had been implanted there in the early part of the century. It is a manifestation of certain deep-rooted Italian traits that have remained constant throughout the musical history of that nation: an aversion to complexity and obscurity, a profound feeling for melody as constituting the essence of music, and (this partly as a result of the whole mental attitude of the Renaissance) a preference for the individual artist as against the communal group represented by the church choir or the madrigal vocal ensemble.

It is a fact provable by many examples in the history of music that the establishment of a new practice, particularly if it be in conflict with an older practice, sooner or later calls forth a theory by which the new practice is sought to be justified. In the present case, the development of the theory, as well as its practical applications, was the work of scholars, poets, musicians, and amateurs in Florence who, from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, organized themselves into informal groups (camerate) and academies.

Florentine interest in Greek music can be attributed in large measure to the work of a professor at the university in Florence, Piero Vettori (1499–1585), and his student, Girolamo Mei (1519–94). Vettori and Mei sought access to Greek manuscripts in order that they and their colleagues might read from original sources instead of having to rely on Latin translations. Their quest was not in vain, for they managed to bring to light Euripides’ Electra and the complete text of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Vettori focused his scholarly efforts on the writings of Aristotle, creating new translations and producing commentaries based upon research conducted with the help of Mei. This research not only brought Mei into contact with the Poetics, from which he gained valuable insight into the musical aesthetics of the Greeks, but also helped him develop a methodology for studying other Greek writings.

In 1540 Mei was admitted to the recently established Accademia Fiorentina in recognition of his outstanding work as a classical philologist and historian. This honor, however, was not sufficient to persuade Mei to remain in his native city. Between 1540 and 1559 he held a variety of positions in France and Italy, with none furthering his aspirations to reside in Rome, and thus denying him access to the wealth of Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library. Finally, in 1560 he secured a position in Rome as secretary and legal counsel to Cardinal Giovanni Ricci, and this afforded him an opportunity to pursue his lifelong interest in the study of Greek drama and music. The fruits of his fourteen years of research into Greek music history and theory were eventually set forth in De modes musicus antiquorum (1574), the significance of which was later acknowledged in the writings of Giovanni Battista Doni.³³

Two years before the completion of this treatise, Mei began receiving letters from Vincenzo Galilei (d. 1591), father of the famous astronomer and himself a singer and a composer of music and madrigals. Galilei requested information about ancient Greek music that had heretofore eluded him and others associated with various Florentine intellectual groups and academies.³⁴ At the time, Galilei was associated with both the Accademia degli Alterati, a Florentine literary academy founded in 1569, and Giovanni Bardi’s camerata, an informal academy where the subject of ancient Greek music was frequently discussed.³⁵ First and foremost among the many questions Galilei wanted Mei to answer was why Greek music was capable of setting poetic texts so expressively. Mei’s response—the Greeks’ reliance on a monodic style allowed the emotions of the text to be expressed by a single melodic line—proved to be a significant catalyst for Florentine composers to explore the possibilities of this new style. Much of what Mei communicated to Galilei between 1572 and 1581 concerning his discoveries and conclusions about Greek music was set forth in Galilei’s Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna.³⁶ This work, published at Florence in 1581, contained, among other matters, Galilei’s explicit “declaration of war against counterpoint.”³⁷

Three examples of Greek music were included in the Dialogo, but Galilei had not been able to transcribe them. Consequently, he and his colleagues were left to deduce the character of the music by way of the information gathered from Mei’s research. This led them to formulate a basic principle, namely, that the secret of Greek music lay in the perfect union of words and melody, a union to be achieved by making the former dominate and control the latter: “Plato and other philosophers … declare that music is none other than words and rhythm, and sound last of all, and not the reverse.”³⁸ From this principle three corollaries followed.

First, the text must be clearly understood. Therefore, the performance must be by a solo voice with the simplest possible accompaniment, preferably a lute or similar instrument played by the singer. There must be no contrapuntal writing, for this distracts the mind and produces confusion, owing to different words being heard at the same time with different rhythms in different parts, leading to distortion of pronunciation (in Caccini’s phrase, “laceramento della poesia”) and, in general, appealing not to the intelligence at all but only to the sense of hearing. (This wholesale condemnation of counterpoint was due rather to the exigencies of the theory than to ignorance or lack of appreciation and need not be taken altogether seriously.)

The second corollary was that the words must be sung with correct and natural declamation, as they would be spoken, avoiding on the one hand the regular dancelike meters of popular songs such as the villanelle, and on the other the textual repetitions and subservience to contrapuntal necessities found in madrigal and motet writing. Caccini writes: “The idea came to me to introduce a kind of music whereby people as it were speak in tones [in armonia faveliare], using therein … a certain noble negligence of melody [sprezzatura di canto], now and then running over some dissonant tones [false], but holding firmly to the chord in the bass.”³⁹ Peri is even more explicit: “I believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans (who, according to the opinion of many, sang their tragedies throughout) used a kind of music more advanced than ordinary speech, but less than the melody of singing, thus taking a middle position between the two.”⁴⁰

The third and final corollary had to do with the relation between music and words: The melody must not depict mere graphic details in the text but must interpret the feeling of the whole passage, by imitating and intensifying the intonations and accents proper to the voice of a person who is speaking the words under the influence of the emotion that gives rise to them.⁴¹ This pronouncement was evidently directed against certain aspects of textual treatment in the sixteenth-century madrigals and motets.

These same corollaries are expressed in an anonymous treatise, attributed to Bardi and dated c. 1585, on how tragedy should be performed.⁴² It was in these aesthetic principles and their practical consequences, not in the mere employment of the solo voice, that the revolutionary character of the Florentine reform consisted. They formed the necessary foundation for true dramatic music and thus made possible the creation of opera. Tentative experiments in the new style were made by Galilei as early as 1582, when he composed a setting of Ugolino’s monologue from Dante’s Inferno (canto xxiii, verses 4–75), which he sang to the accompaniment of four viols. Neither this music nor his setting of part of the Lamentations of Jeremiah from about the same date has been preserved. It seems that the new ideas must have made their way very slowly at first, for no trace of them is to be found in the music of the famous intermedi of 1589.

While Count Bardi was playing host to his camerata, he himself was being stimulated intellectually at the Accademia degli Alterati.⁴³ Documents concerning Bard’s association with the Alterati from as early as 1574 reveal his active participation in their scholarly sessions.⁴⁴ Many of the topics discussed were the very ones that concerned other groups of literati and musicians in Florence. Bardi’s camerata lasted at least until 1592, the year when he went to Rome, taking Caccini as his secretary. In the wake of his departure, Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602) emerged as the principal patron of the arts in Florence. He was a composer, harpsichordist, member of the Accademia degli Alterati, and leader of an artistic group that frequented his palace. Members of his camerata included Tasso, Chiabrera, Monteverdi, Rinuccini, and Peri, some of whom were rivals of those in Bardi’s group. Corsi’s name figures prominently in the early history of opera, for it was his circle of Florentines, more than any other, that is credited with the development of a distinctive type of declamatory style that paved the way for the creation of Italian drama with continuous music.

The earliest extant examples of Florentine monody are some of the songs in Caccini’s Le nuove musiche, which, although not published until 1602, were composed at least ten years earlier.⁴⁵ The collection consists of arias and madrigals for solo voice with accompaniment of a chitarrone or other stringed instrument. The music is in a style that permits a more symmetrical organization of phrases and a certain amount of textual repetition and vocal embellishment—in other words, a free arioso type of melody.⁴⁶ The arias, which are strophic in form, have simpler and more regular rhythms than the madrigals.

The “new music” immediately found imitators all over Italy and soon spread to other countries. The older contrapuntal art of the sixteenth century did not, of course, disappear, but the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a gradual modification of the language of music, owing to the interaction of the monodic idea with the contrapuntal principles and to the efforts of composers to find a means of reconciling the two. For a long time they existed side by side. Christoph Bernhard, in his Tractatus compositionis (written about 1648), distinguished between the stylus gravis or antiquus (marked by slow notes, little use of dissonance, “music mistress of poetry”) and stylus luxurians or modernus (some fast notes, unusual skips, more dissonance, more ornamentation, more tuneful melody). The latter in turn he subdivided into communis, in which poetry and music were of equal importance, and theatralis, in which poetry was the “absolute mistress” of music.⁴⁷ The integration of monody with the traditional practices of music and the earliest adaptation of the resultant new style to opera were achieved during the first half of the seventeenth century.

1. See Nolhac and Solerti, Il viaggio in ltalia di Enrico III, re di Francia [1574], for some notable instances. Comparatively little of this music has been preserved; some examples are published in Ghisi, Feste musicali della Firenze Medicea. A comprehensive general treatment of all this pre-operatic music is in Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, 4:161–346.

2. Beaujoyeulx et al., eds., Circé ou le Balet comique de la royne, Paris, 1582 (facsimile editions by C. and L. MacClintock and by McGowan). See also Ménestrier, Des Ballets anciens et modernes; Yates, The French Academies, chap. 11; idem, “Poésie et musique pour les magnificences”; Anthony, French Baroque Music; McGowan, L’Art du ballet de cour; Christout, Le Ballet de cour au XVIIe siècle; Buch, Dance Music from the Ballet de Cour, 1575–1651; Donington, The Rise of Opera; Demuth, French Opera. (On the importance of the Beaujoyeulx edition for an understanding of the Valois tapestries, see Yates, The Valois Tapestries.)

4. See Rubsamen, Literary Sources of Secular Music, chap. 6;Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, 283ff.

5. See Schrade, La Représentation d’Edipo tiranno au Teatro Olimpico (Vicenza, 1585). These a cappella choruses, which served as finales for the various acts of the drama, were of considerable length and involved a variety of textures ranging from one to six parts.

6. For an edition of the music and a translation of the text, see Minor and Mitchell, A Renaissance Entertainment: Festivities for the Marriage of Cosimo I, Duke of Florence, in 1539. Cf. Pirrotta, with Povoledo, Music and Theatre; Osthoff, Theatergesang; Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1539–1637.

7. Anton Francesco Grazzini, also known as il Lasca, made this comment in his Descrizione degl’ intermedii (Florence, 1566), which appears as a foreword to the intermedi Psyche ed Amore, reprinted in Sonneck, Miscellaneous Studies, 269–86, and in MA 3 (1911), 40–53. Pirrotta considers this to be the first instance in which the plots of intermedi are integrated with a comedy. See Pirrotta, with Povoledo, Music and Theatre, 176.

8. Cf. Brown, Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation:The Music of the Florentine Intermedii.

9. See description by Balduccini in Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, 4:245–51. Other composers of intermedi include Alfonso della Viola (Giraldi’s Orbecche, Ferrara, 1641), Antonio dal Cornetto (Giraldi’s Eglè, Ferrara, 1545), and Claudio Merulo (Dolce’s Marianna, Venice, 1565).

10. The two principal source documents differ in some details as to the composers. For a critical edition of these six intermedi based upon the musical print of 1591, see D. P. Walker, ed., Musique des intermèdes de La pellegrina. See also Solerti, Musica, ballo e drammatica alla corte Medicea, 12–22;idem, Gli albori del melodramma; D. P. Walker, “La Musique des intermèdes florentins de 1589”; Pirrotta, with Povoledo, Music and Theatre, 213–36 and 373–83; Pirrotta, Music and Culture in Italy; Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, chap. 4;Wolff, The Opera I: 17th Century; Nevile, “Cavalieri’s Theatrical Ballo; and Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589.

11. These intermedi were also staged in conjunction with two other dramatic productions presented during these same festivities.

12. The music was originally printed by Malvezzi in Venice, 1591. Cf. Les Fêtes du mariage. All six of the engravings are reproduced in Pirrotta, with Povoledo, Music and Theatre, plates 34–39, and in Brown, Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation. Several of these engravings are also in Wolff, Oper: Szene und Darstellung, and in Donington, The Rise of Opera.

13. The text for the fourth intermedio was by Giovanni Battista Strozzi il Giovane (1551–1634), who also wrote a treatise on how to construct intermedi. This treatise has been translated as “Prescriptions for Intermedi” and is included in Palisca, ed., The Florentine Camerata, 218–25.

14. The harmonic-bass progression of the music for this ballo, which is known as either “L’Aria di Fiorenza” or “Ballo del Gran Duca,” forms the basis of a number of other compositions in the seventeenth century. See Kirkendale, L’Aria di Fiorenza.

15. In his essay “‘O che nuovo miracolo!’: A New Hypothesis about the ‘Aria di Fiorenza,’” Hill discusses his discovery of a religious text in the Palatina collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, that has the same incipit as the secular text of this finale. He concluded that the 1589 text is a parody of the Palatina text.

16. The cornett (Italian cornetto, German Zinke) is not to be confused with the modern cornet. S. V. “Cornett” in The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 1:498–503. The instrumentation required for these intermedi is similar to that in Monteverdi’s Orfeo. For a comparison of the two, see table 4.2.

18. Three works dealing with the history of this genre are Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica; Crescimbeni, Commentarii intorno all’ Istoria della poesia italiana; Greg, Pastoral Poetry. See also Harris, Handel and the Pastoral Tradition.

20. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 2:196–97 (paraphrased in part from the closing chorus of Act I of Tasso’s Aminta, which in turn is paraphrased from Ovid’s Metamorphoses I, verses 89–112).

21. See Poliziano, Orfeo; idem, Le stanze, l’Orfeo e le rime, 369–507; Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 1:409–15. See also Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 1530–1630, chap. 23.

22. Ovid (43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.), a Roman poet, wrote Metamorphoses between 1 and 8 C.E. It is a long poem subdivided into a series of stories suitable for dramatic presentation. The Ovidian story of Orfeo forms the basis for many opera librettos, beginning with Rinuccini’s Orfeo of 1600. Four possible dates for performance—1471, 1472. 1474, and 1480—are mentioned by Pirrotta, Li due Orfei, 5. Donington, The Rise of Opera, 32, writes that Orfeo was performed “probably in 1478 (rather than in 1472 as previously supposed but certainly no later than 1483).” Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, 57, states that Poliziano’s Orfeo was performed first in 1480, printed in 1494, and reprinted up until 1600.

23. The score of Il sacrificio d’Abramo was published first in 1555 and again in 1587 in a revised version. For an edition of the extant music, see Kaufman, “Music for a Favola Pastorale (1554).”

24. Cf. Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso; Brand, Torquato Tasso; Neri, “Gli intermezzi del Pastor fido.” On the significance of Ferrara and the ducal family of Este in the history of Italian sixteenth-century music, see Solerti, ed., Ferrara e la corte Estense.

25. Doni, “Trattato della musica scenica,” chap. 6, reprinted in Solerti, comp. and ed., Le origini del melodramma, 203. Giovanni Battista Doni (1595–1647), a philologist and music theorist, focused his scholarly work on the music of ancient Greece.

26. “La dolcezza, e quasi l’anima della poesia.” Tasso, Dialoghi, 3:111.

27. The music for other pastorales by this composer has not been preserved (see chapter four). According to Doni (“Trattato della musica scenica,” chap. 9, reprinted in Solerti, ed., Le origini), the pastorales were not in recitative style.

29. A famous predecessor of these works, Striggio’s Cicalamento delle donne (1567), is reprinted in Solerti, “Primi saggi del melodramma giocoso.”

30. L’Amfiparnaso was published in 1597. For a modern edition with important introductory essays, see O. Vecchi, L’Amfiparnaso, edited by Adkins. See also Dent, “Notes on the Amfiparnaso,” and Ronga, “Lettura storica dell’Amfiparnaso.”

31. Beginning with the early decades of the sixteenth century, the term commedia dell’arte refers to plays performed by professional comici dell’arte. These plays had scenari (plot-outlines), stock characters, and a mode of performance involving masks and improvisation. See Apollonio, Storia della commedia dell’arte; Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre; Pirrotta, “Commedia dell’arte and Opera.”

32. An example of how a similar work was brought to the stage is offered by Vecchi’s pupil Adriano Banchieri. He gives directions in the preface to his madrigal comedy La pazza senile (1598) that indicate the singers in his work were placed behind the scenes, while the actors on the stage mimed their parts. (It is not clear whether there was also spoken dialogue by the actors.)

34. The letters are published in Palisca, ed., Girolamo Mei, which contains an excellent introductory essay. See also Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought.

35. The term camerata was first applied to Bardi’s informal circle of learned men by Caccini in his preface to Euridice (pub. 1600) and in his preface to Le nuove musiche (1602). Pietro de’ Bardi, in a letter written to G. B. Doni in 1634, also used the term to refer to his father’s group. See Donington, The Rise of Opera, 78–79.

36. Doni correctly identified Mei’s role in fostering the revival of the monodic style. With the possible exception of Charles Burney who acknowledged Mei’s role in his General History of Music, few music historians attached much significance to this information until a reappraisal of Mei’s contribution was made in the twentieth century by Palisca, Pirrotta, Hanning, et al. Of particular interest is Hill’s documentation of the importance of the Mei-Galilei correspondence for the agenda of Bardi’s camerata in the year 1577, set forth in his “Oratory Music in Florence, I: Recitar Cantando, 1583–1655.”

37. Excerpts from Galilei,’s Dialogo are translated in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 302–22.

38. Caccini, foreword to his Le nuove musiche (in Solerti, ed., Le origini del melodramma, 56); the entire foreword is translated in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 377–92.

39. Caccini, Le nuove musiche. Similarly, in the dedicatory letter to his Euridice. Caccini writes: “Nella quale maniere di canto, ho io usata una certa sprezzatura, che io ho stimato, che habbia del nobile, parendomi conessi di essermi appressato quel più alla natural favella.” The entire letter is translated in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 370–72.

40. Peri, foreword to Euridice. printed in Solerti, comp. and ed., Le origini del melodramma, 45–46, and translated in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 373–76.

41. Galilei, Dialogo, 88–89, translated in Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 315–19.

42. This treatise appears as “Frammento di un trattato della musica degli antichi” in Doni’s Lyra Barberina, vol. 2, appendix, 98–100. For a translation, see Palisca, ed., The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations, 132–51.

44. In 1585 Bardi also joined another group in Florence, the Accademia della Crusca.

45. Caccini’s Le nuove musiche was published in 1601, according to the Florentine calendar.

46. The distinction between “reciting” (recitativo) and “theater” (rappresentatione) styles was first made explicit about 1635 by G. B. Doni in his “Trattato della musica scenica,” found in his Lyra Barberina, 2:28–30. For a discussion of these terms, see Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, chap. 2.