Opera

OPERA, a drama set to music, as distinguished from plays in which music is merely incidental.

Italian Beginnings.

The historian, Doni, tells us that in the last years of the 16th century a group of amateurs held meetings at the house of the Bardi in Florence with the object of trying experiments in musical declamation by solo voices supported by instruments. Hitherto the only high musical art was unaccom panied choral music; its expression was perfect within such lim its that dramatic music within those limits was as inconceivable as dramatic architecture. But the literary dilettanti who met at the house of the Bardi were not mature musical artists; and no technical scruples interfered with their glorious project of restor ing the musical glories of the Greek tragedy. Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo, warbled the story of Ugolino to the accom panimentof the lute, much to the amusement of expert musicians; but he gained the respectful sympathy of literary listeners.

The first public production in this "monodic" style was Jacopo Peri's Euridice (I600), which was followed by a less successful effort of Caccini's on the same subject. Feeble as were these efforts, they impressed contemporary imagination as infinitely more suggestive of life and passion than the forlorn attempts then in vogue, to provide good music for a music-drama by means of a polyphonic chorus behind th,, scene, with actors in dumb-show on the stage. As Parry happily points out in this connection, the laying of a foundation stone suggests a future so inspiriting as to exclude all sense of the triviality of the present achievement. A great master of pure polyphony, Orazio Vecchi, had already, in 1594, the year of Palestrina's death, laughed the madrigal-opera to extinction in his Amfiparnasso. The woodcuts which adorn its first edition show how the actors sang or mimed in front, while the other singers completed the harmony behind the stage.

With the decadence of the madrigal, Monteverdi (q.v.) brought a real musical power to bear on the new style. At the beginning of the i7th century no impressionable young musician could fail to be profoundly stirred by Monteverdi's Orfeo (16o2), Arianna (16o8) and Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), works in which instruments were used with the same archaic bold ness, the same rhetorical force and the same lack of artistic organ ization as vocal style and harmonic resources. So explosive was

the spark of Monteverdi's genius that the next step necessary for the progress of opera was a development of forms, not only non-dramatic but anti-dramatic.

The types of monody conceivable by the pioneers of opera were codified in the system of free musical declamation known as recitative. This is said to have been used by Emilio del Cava lieri as early as 1588. Formal melody, such as that of popular songs, was as much beneath the dignity of monody as it had been beneath that of the highest forms of polyphony ; but in the ab sence of any harmonic system but that of the church modes, which was ruined by the new unprepared discords, formal melody proved a godsend as the novelty of recitative faded. Tunes were soon legalized at moments of dramatic repose ; it was in the tunes that the strong harmonic system of Neapolitan tonality took shape ; and by the early days of Alessandro Scarlatti, before the end of the 17th century, the art of tune-making had blossomed into the musically safe and effective form of the aria (q.v.).

The poet Metastasio realized that there was nothing unnatural in a scheme of drama which allowed each stage of the action to culminate in a tableau marked by a burst of lyric poetry and lyric music. Some 3o such tableaux would give occasion for 3o arias (including a few duets, rarely a trio and only once in Handel's 42 operas a quartet) while the connecting action and dialogue was set in recitative. Metastasio devoted his whole life to opera-libretti on this plan, which he executed with consum mate skill. He was far from satisfied with the way in which most composers set his texts. The scheme was fatally easy for small musicians and did not stimulate the higher faculties of great ones; while great and small were equally at the mercy of singers.