to discord. Instruments do not blend like voices; and players,
producing their notes by more mechanical means, have not
the singer’s difficulty in making combinations which the ear
does not readily understand.
The one difficulty of the new art was fatal: there were no limitations. When Monteverde introduced his unprepared discords, the effect upon musical style was like that of introducing modern metaphors into classical Greek. There were no harmonic principles to control the new material, except those which just sufficed to hold together the pure 16th-century style; and that style depended on an exquisite continuity of flow which was incompatible with any rigidity either of harmony or rhythm. Accordingly there were also no rhythmic principles to hold Monteverde’s work together, except such as could be borrowed from types of secular and popular music that had hitherto been beneath serious attention. If the 17th century seems almost devoid of great musical names it is not for want of incessant musical activity. The task of organizing new resources into a consistent language was too gigantic to be accomplished within three generations. Its fascinating dramatic suggestiveness and incalculable range disguised for those who first undertook it the fact that the new art was as difficult and elementary in its beginnings as the very beginning of harmony itself in the 13th and 14th centuries. And the most beautiful compositions at the beginning of the 17th century are rather those which show the decadence of 16th-century art than those in which the new principles were most consistently adopted. Thus the madrigals of Monteverde, though often dull and always rough, contain more music than his operas. On the other hand, almost until the middle of the 17th century great men were not wanting who still carried on the pure polyphonic style. Their asceticism denotes a spirit less comprehensive than that of the great artists for whom the golden age was a natural environment; but in parts of the world where the new influences did not yet prevail even this is not the case, and a composer like Orlando Gibbons, who died in 1625, is well worthy to be ranked with the great Italian and Flemish masters of the preceding century.
But the main task of composers of the 17th century lay elsewhere; and if the result of their steady attention to it was trivial in comparison with the glories of the past, it at least led to the glories of the greater world organized by Bach and Handel. The early monodists, Monteverde and his fellows, directed attention to the right quarter in attempting to express emotion by means of single voices supported by instruments; but the formless declamation of their dramatic writings soon proved too monotonous for permanent interest, and such method as it showed became permanent only by being codified into the formulas of recitative, which are, for the most part, very happy idealizations of speech-cadence, and which accordingly survive as dramatic elements in music at the present day, though, like all rhetorical figures, they have often lost meaning from careless use.[1] It was all very well to revolutionize current conceptions of harmony, so that chords were no longer considered, as in the days of pure polyphony, to be the result of so many independent melodies. But in art, as elsewhere, new thought eventually shows itself as an addition to, not a substitute for, the wisdom of ages. Moreover, it is a mistake, though one endorsed by high authorities, to suppose that the 16th-century composers did not appreciate the beauty of successions of chords apart from polyphonic design. On the contrary, Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso themselves are the greatest masters the world has ever seen of a style which depends wholly on the beauty of masses of harmony, entirely devoid of polyphonic detail, and held together by a delicately balanced rhythm in which obvious symmetry is as carefully avoided as it is in the successions of chords themselves. Nevertheless, the monody of the 17th century is radically different in principle, not only because chords are used which were an outrage on 16th-century ears, but because the fundamental idea is that of a solo voice declaiming phrases of paramount emotional interest, and supported by instruments that play such chords as will heighten the poignancy of the voice. And the first advance made on this chaotic monody consisted, not in the reintroduction of vitality into the texture of the harmonies, but in giving formal symmetry and balance to the vocal surface. This involved the strengthening of the harmonic system, so that it could carry the new discords as parts of an intelligible scheme, and not merely as uncontrollable expressions of emotion. In other words, the chief energies of the successors of the monodists were devoted to the establishment of the modern key-system; a system in comparison with which the subtle variety of modal concord sounded vague and ill-balanced, until the new key-system itself was so safely established that Bach and Beethoven could once more appreciate and use essentially modal successions of chords in their true meaning.
The second advance of the monodic movement was in the cultivation of the solo voice. This developed together with the cultivation of the violin, the most capable and expressive of the instruments used to support it. Monteverde already knew how to make interesting experiments with violins, such as directing them to play pizzicato, and accompanying an excited description of a duel by rapidly repeated strokes on a major chord, followed by sustained dying harmonies in the minor. By the middle of the century violin music is fairly common, and the distinction between Sonata da chiesa and Sonata da camera appears (see Sonata). But the cultivation of instrumental technique had also a great effect on that of the voice; and Italian vocal technique soon developed into a monstrosity that so corrupted musical taste as not only to blind the contemporaries of Bach and Handel to the greatness of their choral art, but, in Handel’s case, actually to swamp a great deal of his best work. The balance between a solo voice and a group of instruments was, however, successfully cultivated together with the modern key-system and melodic form; with the result that the classical aria, a highly effective art-form, took shape. This, while it totally destroyed the dramatic character of opera for the next hundred years, yet did good service in furnishing a reasonably effective means of musical expression which could encourage composers and listeners to continue cultivating the art until the day of small things was past. The operatic aria, as matured by Alessandro Scarlatti, is at its worst a fine opportunity for a gorgeously dressed singer to display feats of vocal gymnastics, either on a concert platform, or in scenery worthy of the Drury Lane pantomime. At its best it is a beautiful means of expression for the devout fervour of Bach and Handel. At all times it paralyses dramatic action, and no more ironic revenge has ever overtaken iconoclastic reformers than the historic development by which the purely dramatic declamation of the monodists settled down into a series of about thirty successive displays of vocalization, designed on rigidly musical conventions, and produced under spectacular conditions by artificial sopranos as the highest ideal of music-drama.
The principal new art-forms of the 17th century are then, firstly, the aria (not the opera, which was merely a spectacular condition under which people consented to listen to some thirty arias in succession); and, secondly, the polyphonic instrumental forms, of which those of the suite or sonata da camera were mainly derived from the necessity for ballet music in the opera (and hence greatly stimulated by the taste of the French court under Louis XIV.), while those of the sonata da chiesa were also inspired by a renaissance of interest in polyphonic texture. The sonata da chiesa soon settled into a conventionality only less inert than that of the aria because violin technique had wider possibilities than vocal; but when Lulli settled in France and raised to a higher level of effect the operatic style suggested by Cambert, he brought with him just enough of the new instrumental polyphony to make his typical form of French overture (with its slow introduction in dotted rhythm, and its quasi-fugal allegro) worthy of the important place it occupies in Bach’s and Handel’s art.
- ↑ The “invention” of recitative is frequently ascribed to this or that monodist, with as little room for dispute as when we ascribe the invention of clothes to Adam and Eve. All monody was recitative, if only from inability to organize melodies.
