So much for the revolution in terms. In the more sig nificant matter of purpose, the same principle holds good. The inventors of the Italian opera, for reasons which they thought valid, sought to bring music into the service of the drama, and, in pursuit of this plan, they strove hard for the dramatic expression of which they conceived music capable, not at all caring to add to the purely artistic beauty of music as such. In the progress of time, musical beauty became the dominant idea of the opera — the idea to which the action (but not its outward dress), was made slavishly subservient. Then came a revulsion from the conventionalism of this phase and gradually a return to the original purpose, which held the play to be " the thing " and music one of the agencies for its attainment. Meanwhile, of course, the pos sibilities of musical expression had been marvelously in creased by the influence of romantic feeling, which developed harmony, and the growth in the instrumental art; and, by the time that composers were willing to make their music a helpful agency in the expression of the drama, they had been equipped with an apparatus a thousandfold more effica cious than that at the command of their precursors of two and a half centuries before. To make possible the direct pursuit of the dramatic Meal, which had originally been the aim of opera writers, they now had to shuffle off some of the formularies which had grown up in the service of musical beauty and stood in the way of the truthful dramatic expression, and thus we reach the age of reform, of which Gluck and Wagner are the shining lights. These men regenerators of the old quite as much as they were reformers of contemporaneous art — opened the way to the absolute freedom exercised by the composers of today, and give at least some measure of justification to the methods of the latest revolutionary, Richard Strauss, in whose " Salome," music surrenders all its functions as an independent art, and becomes a mere adjunct of the drama; a part of the scene, an emotional voice in the service of the ugly as well as of the beautiful, realistic and delineative.
As has been intimated, it is customary for writers to begin the history of opera with a dramatic and musical work produced in 1600. The " Eurydice " referred to is a con venient mile-post simply because it stands forth brightly illuminated by the sun of the renaissance of learning. As a matter of fact, the opera is as old as the drama and, the world over, its elements are found in harmonious union. The primitive form of stage play which may be witnessed in China, Siam, and other countries, or even in the religious functions of our own American Indians, shows that union of poetry, music and action whose development into the tragedy of the ancient Greeks, was the inspiration of the inventors whose achievements fill the first chapter of specific opera history. Music was once an integral element of all speech and remained an integral element of all solemn and beau tiful speech when the Athenian tragedians created the art works which are still the subjects of enthusiastic literary study. In the classical drama the lines were chanted and the individual actors had the co-operation of instruments and of a chorus which sang and danced with solemn and lovely gravity to heighten the expressiveness of word and dramatic situation. This fact seemed a matter of large moment in
the minds of a coterie of scholars who, toward the close of the Sixteenth Century, were in the habit of meeting for learned discussion in the house of one Giovanni Bardi, the Count Vernio, in Florence. These men were, for the greater part, merely amateurs in music; only two of them were professional musicians, Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. Among the others was Vincenzo Galileo, father of the great astronomer, and Ottavio Rinuccini, a poet. These men had convinced themselves by study that the classic drama had been delivered in a kind of exalted declamation, approaching song. There was nothing like it in the vocal music of their time; folk-song, it would seem, was condemned by them as much as it was by the composers of their day, and artistic music was fettered by the forms which the church musicians had given it. For a whole century, at least, music had been used in the drama, but it was all polyphonic; that is, many voiced music. No actor sang alone; even if he were deliv ering a soliloquy alone upon the stage, he sang only one part of a many-voiced composition in the style of a madrigal; the other voices, which supplied the harmony, being sung by companions who were hidden behind the scenes. A solo without harmony, or with harmonic support from an instru ment or instruments playing in chords, was unknown. Instru mental music was in its infancy and its forms were vocal and polyphonic. Song with instrumental accompaniment was but an assignment of one part to a singer while the other parts were played as if each instrument was a member of a vocal choir. Expressive melody was, therefore, out of the question, and an expressive melody was the first require ment, if the drama was to become musical throughout, as the classic tragedy was conceived to have been. And so these Florentines brushed aside the art as it had been devel oped by the great musicians (Palestrina and the rest), and invented a new manner of utterance, which they called (as we have seen in the title of Caccini's " Eurydice "), the representative, or, perhaps it were better to say, the expres sive style. The actors sang alone and had the help of instruments which were played behind the scenes, the first operatic orchestra being, like Wagner's at Bayreuth, out of sight. They did not sing set tunes; that is, formal melo dies, divided into periods balancing each other symmet rically, but they created a kind of recitative, as it is called in operatic terminology. They observed carefully the inflec tions in ordinary conversation which spring involuntarily from an emotional stimulus and tried to reproduce them in the musical setting of the poetry. The music followed the rhythmical flow of the words with great exactness and helped to make them impressive. Like the Greeks, they made use of a chorus, and, believing that the choral por tions of the classic drama were more highly and artificially developed than the dialogue (as indeed they were, and, I believe, more richly accompanied by instruments), they wrote their choruses in the style of the artistic music which they had cast aside in the other portions of the drama; that is to say, the choral odes became madrigals.