Monteverdi and his fellow monodists had, in no mood of ca price, moved in the one direction that was universally important for music ; yet their formless declamation soon palled, and its method survived only by becoming codified into the formulas of RECITATIVE, which are happy idealizations of Italian speech cadence, and which survive as dramatic idioms in all music even at the present day. The "invention" of recitative has been as cribed to this or that monodist, with as little room for dispute as when we ascribe the invention of clothes to Adam and Eve. Any vocal music which, whether from inability or from disin clination, avoids organizing symmetrical melody, will be called recitative. When Wagner was still a subject of controversy, critics cn both sides used to say that Das Rheingold was all recitative.
Two tendencies converged to make music become formal after the "first fine careless rapture" of monody was spent. First, the dramatic stage, with baroque scenery in magnificent development as early as 1667, in Cesti's Porno d'Oro, greatly encouraged the ballet ; so that when serious musicians cultivated the stage they also cultivated dance-music. This, however, was less im portant than the rise of the violin. Monteverdi had already un derstood its importance; and one symptom of the decadence of polyphony had been the growing habit of solo-singers to sing the top parts of madrigals with all manner of ridiculous flourishes.
Persons less legendary than King Cole felt the fascination of the "tweedle-dee" of the fiddle; the great Dutch polyphonist Swee linck (q.v.) used to adorn his organ works with passages of imi tatio violinistica; and the last quarter of the 17th century saw the brilliant work of Biber with his queer abnormal violin-tunings, and the sober classical sonate da chiesa and sonate da camera of Corelli (q.v.). Artistically as well as morally this development of the violin was healthier than that of the voice, wherein colora tura singing tended to become an acrobatic monstrosity though it had first been regarded as a means of emotional expression. A talent for the violin was no danger to a boy; but a beautiful voice put a boy in deadly peril in an age when all the great opera-singers were castrati. Even Haydn had a narrow escape in his youth. And yet there is, on the whole, more beauty than decadence in the vast mass of solo vocal music produced between 163o and 176o. That period takes us from the advent of mature instru ments and instrumentalized music to a time beyond the death of Handel. Except for the device of the ground-bass (see VARIA