A pastoral called " Dafne," for which Rinuccini wrote the text and Peri the music, which, it is to be supposed, embodied the new ideas, was produced privately in the palace of Jacopo Corsi, one of the eager Florentine coterie, in 1597. It would, perhaps, be called the first opera, had it had a public hearing or had it been preserved. Since fate forbade both of these things, that honor falls to " Eurydice," which Pen was commissioned to write three years later, for the festivities attending the marriage of Henri IV. of France and Marie di Medici. Caccini, who was a singer, helped Peri to compose the music and at the performance his setting, as well as that of Peri, was drawn up. Afterward, both men printed their scores, if they can be so called, and their music is available for study and even for reproduction, having been reprinted, only the reproduction of the instrumental part would be accomplished with difficulty, for, though the har mony is indicated by a figured bass (which was also a new invention), there is no indication in the music how the instruments were employed. The noble amateurs and their friends acted as orchestra and played the harmony—it may be assumed in a manner suggested by the composers — on a harpsichord, chitarrone, lira grande, theorbo or large lute, and three flutes. Naturally, other cities became emulous of Florence, and before the end of the Seventeenth Century, Mantua, Rome, Bologna and Venice entered the lists, each contributing somewhat to the advancement of the new art form. At first, like most other manifestations of the beau tiful in art, it remained in the service of the nobility and aristocracy; but Rome saw the beginning of its populari zation at the carnival of 1606, when, like another Thespis, a mountebank musician fitted up a little play with music, and helped by five performers, went through the streets playing it upon a stage mounted on a cart. Nothing more is heard of this beginning, however, and a quarter of a century elapsed before there was an operatic performance in the house of a Roman nobleman. Venice was the first city to devote a theater to operatic representations. It was the Teatro di San Cassiano, which opened its doors to the public in 1637, and before the century came to an end there were eleven opera houses in Venice, for which a numerous brood of composers were kept busy writing. One of these, who has come to be called Cavalli, produced no less than thirty-four operas for Venice alone, and his fame went throughout Europe. Of his immediate successors, Cesti, Pallavicino, Legrenzi, Sar torio, Strozzi and a few others were the most popular. But it would add little to our knowledge of the growth of opera to discuss the personal history of the men or the character of the music which they wrote. The progress which the best of them marked had its starting point in the operas of Claudio Monteverde (1568-1643), who was Cavalli's teacher, who, when he produced his " Orfeo " in 1607, had already created a stir by the innovations which he had introduced into polyphonic music for the purpose of giving it greater emotional expressiveness. The score of " Orfeo " has been preserved and republished in Germany within recent times, but there is nothing in it comparable with a short mono logue, the lament of Ariadne after her desertion by Theseus, which is all that has remained of the later opera, "Arianna " — a song of the arioso type, which for truthfulness and poignancy of expression is comparable with anything that has been composed by the great masters since. Its beginning is " Lasciatemi movire," and as it is obtainable in the best music shops, with its harmonies written out from the old thorough bass, no student of dramatic song should fail to study it. This lamentation marks the crystallization of the free and formless monody, as it was called, into the arioso, and, while in itself an achievement of great significance and value, it is a mile-post on the road over which Monteverde's successors traveled with great rapidity for a century and a half, by which time the old lyric drama had degenerated into a soulless art form, to the artificialities and sensuous beauties of which all the high purposes of its inventors had been sacrificed. When arioso, which had grown out of the repre sentative style, had grown into the artificial formula known as the aria, the tragedy with music became an opera, and the opera became a mere concert in costume. A brief account of the opera as it existed at the time of Handel will be given presently, but first it must be stated that largely under the influence of Monteverde, the potency of the instrumental element in it had been developed far beyond the dreams of Peri and Caccini. In place of their band, which might be replaced today with a small pianoforte, flutes and a few guitars, Monteverde used no less than thirty-six instruments, including violins, trombones, trumpets and three small port able organs. For these instruments, moreover, he wrote independent movements, and he used them in groups for dramatic effect. To him is attributed the invention of the pizzicato and tremolo on the violins — two effects that every composer has employed since.
While Italian opera was still in its infancy, it began the invasion of the other European countries. Germany, Aus
tria, France and England at first adopted it bodily and then gradually modified it to suit the taste of their people, this being an inevitable result of the democratic tendency which prevented it from remaining the plaything of the courts. Royalty and nobility might tolerate it in its original tongue, but when it came to be presented to the people and to ask their patronage, the vernacular asserted its rights in each of the countries mentioned. In all of them, however, must be pre supposed a period like that which prevailed in Italy before the Florentine coterie made their invention, in which efforts were made to adapt the artistic forms of music to masques and pantomimes. In Germany, Heinrich Schutz wrote music (which doubtless approached its Italian model), for a translation of Rinuccini's " Dafne," at the command of the Saxon Elector, Johann George IL, in 1627. Seventeen years later, Sigismund Gottlieb Staden composed a pastoral called " Seelewig," which was thoroughly German, though it leaned heavily on Italian models. The first opera house in Germany was opened in Hamburg in 1678, forty years after Italy saw the first institution of the kind. The operas were heavy-footed German affairs, made clumsily over the Italian last, and none of the composers made a mark upon the historic page until the arrival of Reinhard Keiser (1673 1739), in whose orchestra Handel sat and whose successes no doubt had much to do with the development of Handel's genius. Cavalli, who had previously gone to Vienna to pro duce some of his operas, went to Paris in 1660. The French capital had been familiar with Italian works and Italian singers for fifteen years, but then the national spirit (Chau vinism, we call it when in an unamiable mood), had already asserted itself so vigorously that Cavalli made a failure with two operas, though he came under the patronage of Mazarin. In 1671, the Academy of Music, now popularly spoken of as the Grand Opera, was established under letters patent obtained from Louis XIV., and in this institution, which has ever since held the eye of the civilized world, the real beginnings of French opera were made, though it did not achieve much until it fell into the hands of Lully (1633 1687), an Italian who had been taken to Paris to be a scullion in the kitchen of the Montpensier. He became a power, and a most tyrannical one, indeed, and though he helped to foster the ballets which won the chief delight of the grand monarch and his court, he composed twenty operas, some of the airs of which may still be studied with profit and heard with pleasure, and fixed the form of the French grand opera, which recognized then and still recog nizes the keen instincts of the French people for the drama. Italian influences did not lose their hold in Paris, however, and when Gluck came, in the Eighteenth Century, to write in the manner that might have been expected to make an irresistible appeal to the French people, he had to fight his bitter battle with Piccini. In England, the principles represented by the Florentines found expression in a setting of a masque from Ben Jonson in 1617, by Nicolo Laniere, an Italian born in London; but the fashion of setting an entire stage play to music was not established by Laniere's experi ment. Even when England's most powerful and original genius, Henry Purcell (1658-1695) came, the operatic form still lagged. Purcell was a pupil of Pelham Humphries, a pupil of Lully ; yet Purcell, with unmistakable dramatic instincts, wrote no complete opera, but only incidental dra matic music for masques and plays, though some of these compositions have the form, dimensions and significance of operatic scenes. Italian opera of the accepted Italian type came into dominant vogue with Handel in 1711.
What was opera like at the close of the period which has now been outlined ? I can only give a few significant hints and leave the filling out to the imagination of the reader, or the completion of his knowledge by further study. In Germany and England, we are confronted for a time with an anomaly of language. The purveyors felt that the people ought to understand the words of the play, but they were dependent on foreign singers and foreign composers to a great extent, and they knew that their own languages were not as well adapted to Italian music as the Italian. So, for a space, they made use of two languages, Italian and the vernacular. Handel's "Almira," written for Hamburg, has German recitatives for the dialogue, and Italian arias. For three years in London, Italian and English were mixed in the manner amusingly described by Addison: " The King or hero of the play generally spoke in Italian, and his slaves answered him in English; the lover frequently made his court and gained the heart of his princess in a language which she did not understand. At length the audience got tired of understanding half the opera and to ease themselves entirely of the fatigue of thinking, so ordered it that the whole opera was performed in an unknown tongue." Addison thought that the grandchildren of his generation would wonder at the conduct on the part of their forefathers, in listening to plays which they did not understand; but the English and American people do the same thing today.