étaient sans doute chantées sur une cantilène spéciale. De plus, on intercalait dans la Sacra Rappresentazione des morceaux de caractères variés : soit des pages de liturgie régulière ou populaire (des "Te Deum ou des " Laudi"), soit des chansons profanes et de la musique de danse, comme l'indiquent certains libretti: "Tel morceau doit être chanté comme les 'Vaghe montanine' de Sacchetti." Tel autre marqué: "bel canto." Ici, "Pilate répond en chantant alla imperiale." Là “Abraham tout joyeux dit une Stanza a ballo.' Il y avait des chants à deux et à trois voix. Le spectacle était precédé d'un prélude instrumental, qui suivait le prologue chanté. On avait donc un petit orchestre; et nous voyons mentionnés, ça et là, des violons, des violes et des luths.'

The intervals between the acts were filled with choruses and ballets of action, chosen apparently not for sheer contrast, as was the practice of eighteenth century opera, but with some bearing on the main issue. Thus we read of a chorus of huntsmen as intermezzo in the story of St Margaret; and there would seem to be other instances of a similar kind.

It is difficult to see what element is here lacking. We have prologue and overture, orchestra and singers, the play presented in musical phrase,* and with scenic effects so elaborate that they could hardly be surpassed by Munich and Bayreuth. We may smile at the simplicity of the directions; we may sometimes wonder at the incongruity of the designs; but we cannot doubt that to the congregations which assembled to witness these dramas the simplicity was natural and the incongruity non-existent. They were religious offices as vivid as the Good Friday procession in a modern Italian town, and at least as intimate as, to an Athenian audience, the representation of 'Agamemnon' or 'Edipus.'

In course of time the frank paganism which marked one side of the Renaissance invaded these ecclesiastical dramas and introduced among the most sacred subjects the triumphs of Cæsar and Trajan, and even the cars of Neptune and Venus. So, little by little, the scene shifted from church to palace, from Pius II to Beatrice d'Este and Ludovico Moro. About 1472 Politian wrote his 'Favola di Orfeo,' which Symonds describes as a true

* M. Rolland goes so far as to speak of 'un récitatif moulé sur la phrase parlée.' If this is correct, little was left for the moderns to invent.

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it was the superior of any lyric work e of Metastasio. Musically it was radically pera as it was from the liturgical drama. it contained some of the germs of the ad its solo, its chorus and its ballet. . . . e and secular, and was therefore as near pular music as any new attempt could

e century the change was complete; in of Plautus were given at Ferrara with ruses à l'antique'; in 1518 came the sto with an orchestra of 'fifes, bagpipes, zd organ,' and a flute obligato' which at to the company.' The whole form cial and courtly; music and spectacular ing the upper hand; a direct way was the baroque opera of the seventeenth ften happens, this clash of ideals struck form which owed direct allegiance to aan pastoral, of which Guarini's 'Pastor known example, and Tasso's Aminta' ef historical importance. Indeed, Tasso s matter more than a passing mention. to music, the soul of poetry' as he -ered its misuse in mere tunefulness and

he was the direct precursor of that lution the originality of which has been verestimated by musical historians. M. s on the significant fact that, at a famous

Aminta' in 1590 Rinuccini and Emilio were both present.

ewed those meetings at Count Bardi's house where Peri, Caccini, Rinuccini, Vincenzo hers proceeded to apply to secular art the Cavalieri was furthering at St Philip Neri's Rome. They had two antagonists to meet at

aners of Italian Opera,' pp. 66, 67. See also pp. 90, 91. Dent's article on the Baroque Opera, Musical Anti

the same time. Learned music, as represented by the great contrapuntists, was bound by a system of elaborate and formal rules, admirably adapted to preserve its purity and dignity of utterance, but not sufficiently flexible to allow of its extension into the domain of the theatre; drama, transferred from ritual observance to courtly display, was treating music as a separate independent art which made its own appeal, gave its own pleasure, and year by year was breaking the last threads of connexion that bound it to the requirements of plot and character. The aim of the Florentine reformers was to set on the stage a music which should be wholly expressive and dramatic, should emancipate itself from all formal regulations, and follow without question or hesitation the lead of the poet.

Their method of effecting this was to recover, so far as they could, the principles of Greek Tragedy.* They were all scholars; they were all animated by that passion for Greek art which had spread through Italy since Chrysoloras came from Byzantium to lecture in the Florentine schools; in Peri's Euridice' and in Monteverde's 'Orfeo' they once more vindicated that absolute fusion of music and drama which, as tradition attested, had been wrought by the hand of Eschylus. And herein lay at once their strength and their weakness. Greek Tragedy gave them the noblest of models; on that score their choice could not have more happily fallen. But it gave them also a range of themes which had become cold and remote, and which, for at least a generation, had been associated in the public mind with pageantry and scenic display. To ancient Athens Orpheus was a national hero, to mediæval Florence he was the centre of a picturesque fairy-tale; and it needed more genius than these men possessed to relight the fire on that old and forgotten altar. They struck a gallant blow in the cause of freedom, and in so doing have earned an honourable place in the history of the art; but they had not the strength to consolidate a permanent victory; and, despite all their endeavours, Italy soon fell back from its new

In comedy they moved with a more tentative step. Vecchi's 'Amfiparnasso' (1594), though very expressive and often very amusing, is a curious compromise between the methods of the stage and those of the madrigal.

ideals and accepted in their place the artificial pageants of the seventeenth century and the absurd pseudoclassicism of the eighteenth. It is significant that in 1644 Evelyn speaks of having seen at Rome an opera 'given by the architect Bernini'; it is not less significant that, some seventy years later, Addison summed up his experience of the Italian style by roundly asserting that 'music renders us incapable of hearing sense.'

6

Peri and Monteverde never reached the goal; and the art of their country turned aside from it. But they ran their stage in the race, and, when they ceased, handed the torch undimmed to a more powerful successor. Lully was born at Florence in 1633, was taken in early childhood to France, entered the royal service as violinist, and at the age of twenty was made Court composer, an office which he held until his death in 1687. His life in Paris coincided with the most splendid period of French Tragedy. The Cid' appeared in 1636, 'Horace' and 'Cinna' in 1640, Andromaque' in 1667, Iphigénie' in 1674, 'Phèdre' three years later. To a musician of true dramatic instinct there could have been no atmosphere more sustaining or more stimulating. For a time, no doubt, he was occupied with ceremonial duties, writing ballets and divertissements, many in collaboration with Molière, composing and arranging incidental music for 'M. de Pourceaugnac' and the 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Yet even these he inspired with the same vigour with which Ben Jonson inspired the English Masque; indeed, with him they are not mere pageants or episodes, but studies and sketches for the finished picture to come. All this while, too, he was improving his technique, analysing the work of Cavalli the Venetian, borrowing somewhat unscrupulously from his French predecessor Cambert, taking his goods where he found them, and bringing his orchestra to a perfection hitherto unknown in Europe.

Thus, when in 1672 he began with Quinault that series of operas which has made him famous, he came to the work with full equipment—a master of virile melody and of harmony which in his day was considered audacious, a great conductor, a great disciplinarian, and, above all, a dramatist who was determined to give to music, as nearly as possible, the rhythm and inflection of the spoken word. He chose his opera-singers less for

their vocalisation than for their power of acting; he filled page after page of his score with free declamatory recitative, keeping the melodic stanza for special effects of lyric emotion. To him belongs in full measure the praise which Wagner bestows upon Gluck, that in his music he took pains to speak correctly and intelligibly.' 'Si vous voulez bien chanter ma musique,' he said, 'allez entendre la Champmeslé,' naming a famous actress of the Comédie Française who, we are told, had been taught every tone and every phrase by Racine himself. So far, then, as concerns the important matter of a just and expressive recitation he marks an epoch in the history of the music-drama.

*

We may here pause for a moment to consider the point that has been reached. The religious impulse has for the time vanished altogether and has taken with it that particular need of dramatic music which it originally fostered and justified. In its place we have a form of secular tragedy, where the spoken voice is heightened by the musical medium, and the action emphasised and in some measure interpreted by musical accompaniment. This tragedy is not yet completely humanised; it still wears the pall and buskin; its characters, though we can recognise their image, are not of our mould and figure. The very titles are significant-'Atys' and 'Thesée,' 'Proserpine' and 'Bellerophon' and 'Roland'; the stage is set upon distant heights; the atmosphere is purer and more serene than our lower air. Yet, like Racine, Lully treats his heroes with true psychological insight, with less genius, of course, but with something of the same method and purpose; and the music which he employed as vehicle is no more of an intrusion than the Alexandrine couplet. It was entirely due to him that the French opera of his time' appartenait,' as M. Lanson says, 'à la littérature autant et presque plus qu'à l'art musical'; and in this sentence we may find the explanation of his dramatic ideals.

* The converse of this statement throws some light on the rhythm of the 'classical' Alexandrine. If Lully's recitatives may be taken as an indication, its basis was far more anapestic' than iambic-more like Byron's Destruction of Sennacherib' than the last line of a Spenserian stanza. Of course even then there were cross-rhythms; and since Victor Hugo (J'ai disloqué ce grand niais d'Alexandrin') the pattern has been much altered.