above everything;[1] and it was evidently on this account that his work required less effort of the intelligence than was necessitated by the severe art of Scarlatti, or the recitative and expressive art of Lully.[2] In him was inaugurated the reaction of fashionable good taste in the general public against that of the savant.[3] Contrast the grand airs Da Capo, broadly developed in a more or less contrapuntal fashion, with his tiny little airs, also Da Capo, but in miniature, easy to understand, which touched the popular feeling for melody. He carefully perfumed it and served it up for the taste of the elegant and fashionable.[4] This distinguished simplicity, this delicate sensibility, rather feeble, always so correct in its audacities and restrained in its pleasures, made Bononcini a drawing-room favourite, a fashionable revolutionary. The more he
- ↑ See the gentle suspension of notes in the Cantata Dori e Aminta (manuscript in the Library of the Conservatoire of Paris), or the Cantata Care luci (ibid.).
- ↑ "What is necessary in music," said The London Journal of February 24, 1722, "is that it should chase away ennui, and relieve clever men from the trouble of thinking."
- ↑ It is the eternal struggle between the art of knowledge and the pseudo-popular art. It recurred again a little later with Rousseau. The principal difference between the two phases of the strife is that in the epoch with which we are occupied the champion of the anti-learned art was a well-instructed musician who did not uphold his cause by ignorance, but by laziness and by profligacy.
- ↑ "To study this more closely," says Hugo Goldschmidt (Vocal Ornamentation, 1908), "Bononcini's songs are really lieder, to which is applied, for good or evil, the old form of the Aria Da Capo, or the Cavatina: the taste for little airs in the form of a song spread itself widely during the end of the seventeenth century in Germany and in England." Bononcini, who was always led naturally by fashion, and by his indolent facility, abandoned himself to it still more in England, and suited it to the English taste.
