DEVELOPMENT OF THE OPERA The title of the oldest opera extant is " Eurydice." its classic characters little prophetic of the motley crowd which has followed in its wake. The all-comprising field has been as wide as the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth, and fancy has been called upon to supplement with beings indigenous to none of these. For opera the Bible has opened its pages to give up its most picturesque figures; hosts of angels have descended from heaven to foil the wicked and reward the good; the gods and goddesses have voiced their mighty passions in aria and recitative; history has furnished manifold actors and incidents, from a Roman emperor exhibiting in himself a grotesque combination of self-satisfied pedantry and mon strous tyranny, to a benevolent, sham-despising cobbler of Nuremburg; romance has been lured from its quiet retreat within the covers of a book, to gay trappings and the glare of the calcium; almost the entire Shakespearean band have had their immortal sentiments transferred to a place below the staff; for opera the walls of fairyland have fallen down to set free its dainty citizens; the grave has given up its sheeted dead, who have marched forward with sepulchral moanings and the rattling of dry bones; gnomes, sprites and genii have appeared at a wave of the conductor's wand; numberless witches have broken down for mortals the con fines of the natural and have dispensed love potions as freely as wine in Capri; the devil himself has assumed conventional garments and taken a singing part; the fairy tales of child hood have come to life; birds and beasts have been dowered with the power of speech and prophecy; marble statues have repeatedly taken life at crucial moments and sauntered from their pedestals. The enumeration is tempting in itself and takes one far afield from "Eurydice." When the dawn of the Seventeenth Century was begin ning to streak the clearing sky of the Renaissance, a little group of friends formed the habit of meeting at the palace of Giovanni Bardi, Count di Vernio, in Florence. It is safe to say that the discourse was interesting, for the company was far from commonplace. Beside the host there was Vincenzo Galileo, father of the great astronomer (and wit ness the debt of science to the " Heavenly Maid "— the tube of the first telescope constructed by the son was an old organ pipe cast off by the musical parent) ; Bernardo Strozzi, and Girolamo Mei, aristocratic dilettanti; the poet, Ottavio Rinuc cini, and the musicians, Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, Giacomo Corsi and Emilio del Cavaliere—La Camerata, as they called themselves. Now, a deep regard for anything which had
come down from classic times was one of the phases of the Renaissance. This attitude is not hard to understand in the light of the simple grandeur of the sculpture and poetry which the ages have left as a legacy, but the ancient canons of the less tangible art of music could only be conjectured from certain allusions in classical literature. From these, La Camerata came to the conclusion that it was at least probable that " the ancient Greeks and Romans sang their tragedies throughout upon the stage," accompanied by an orchestra of lyres and flutes. Must Michaelangelo and Ariosto work alone for the world? Not while La Camerata existed! And what could be better worth the effort than a revival of that stately entertainment for which ./Eschylus and Sophocles were librettists? " Dafne," by the way, was writ ten and produced in 1597, but its score has been lost. In 1600, Rinuccini wrote a poem, with very obvious appropri ateness choosing the story of the musician Orpheus, whose strains, if we may believe all we are told, remain to the present day unrivaled in potency. Both Peri and Caccini put it to music, but evidently the setting of Peri accorded better with the ideals of the coterie, for when festivities were arranged to celebrate the marriage of Henry IV. of France to Marie di Medici, it was chosen for presentation. We know little of the costumes or the stage setting and effects of the premier performance, but we do know that the composer sang the hero's role, that back of the scenes Signor Corsi presided at the harpsichord, and that three of his friends played upon the chitarroni or guitar, the lira grande or viol da gamba, and the theorbo or large lute, and that three flutes were used in the ritornelle, in which the shepherd is supposed to play upon the triple pipe. We know that each of the five acts concluded with a chorus, and that the dialogue was in recitative. We know, too, that no later offering of pageantry and tunefulness has been accorded greater acclamation. What an amusing whimsy of fortune that the origin of opera as it exists today should be due to an accident! How absurdly unconscious were La Camerata of the fact that they had failed utterly to revive the ancient Greek musical declamation, but that they had hit upon some thing quite new, a form of which the " Ring of the Nibe lung " is a lineal descendant.