Great Italian and French Composers | Page 4

allowed to disturb and weaken the ideal atmosphere of the whole
work. However Palestrina's successors have aimed to imitate his effects,
they have, with the exception of Cherubini, failed for the most part; for
every peculiar genus of art is the result of innate genuine inspiration,
and the spontaneous growth of the age which produces it. As a parent
of musical form he was the protagonist of Italian music, both sacred
and secular, and left an admirable model, which even the new school of
opera so soon to rise found it necessary to follow in the construction of
harmony. The splendid and often licentious music of the theatre built
its most worthy effects on the work of the pious composer, who lived,
labored, and died in an atmosphere of almost anchorite sanctity.
The great disciples of his school, Nannini and Allegri, continued his
work, and the splendid "Miserere" of the latter was regarded as such an
inestimable treasure that no copy of it was allowed to go out of the
Sistine chapel, till the infant prodigy, Wolfgang Mozart, wrote it out
from the memory of a single hearing.

PICCINI, PAISIELLO, AND CIMAROSA
I.
Music, as speaking the language of feeling, emotion, and passion,
found its first full expansion in the operatic form. There had been
attempts to represent drama with chorus, founded on the ancient Greek
drama, but it was soon discovered that dialogue and monologue could
not be embodied in choral forms without involving an utter absurdity.
The spirit of the renaissance had freed poetry, statuary, and painting,
from the monopolizing elaims of the church. Music, which had become
a well equipped and developed science, could not long rest in a similar
servitude. Though it is not the aim of the author to discuss operatic
history, a brief survey of the progress of opera from its birth cannot be

omitted.
The oldest of the entertainments which ripened into Italian opera
belongs to the last years of the fifteenth century, and was the work of
the brilliant Politian, known as one of the revivalists of Greek learning
attached to the court of Cosmo de' Medici and his son Lorenzo. This
was the musical drama of "Orfeo." The story was written in Latin, and
sung in music principally choral, though a few solo phrases were given
to the principal characters. It was performed at Rome with great
magnificence, and Vasari tells us that Peruzzi, the decorator of the
papal theatre, painted such scenery for it that even the great Titian was
so struck with the vraisemblance of the work that he was not satisfied
until he had touched the canvas to be sure of its not being in relief. We
may fancy indeed that the scenery was one great attraction of the
representation. In spite of spasmodic encouragement by the more
liberally minded pontiffs, the general weight of church influence was
against the new musical tendency, and the most skilled composers were
at first afraid to devote their talents to further its growth.
What musicians did not dare undertake out of dread of the thunderbolts
of the church, a company of literati at Florence commenced in 1580.
The primary purpose was the revival of Greek art, including music.
This association, in conjunction with the Medicean Academy, laid
down the rule that distinct individuality of expression in music was to
be sought for. As results, quickly came musical drama with recitative
(modern form of the Greek chorus) and solo melody for characteristic
parts of the legend or story. Out of this beginning swiftly grew the
opera. Composers in the new form sprung up in various parts of Italy,
though Naples, Venice, and Florence continued to be its centres.
Between 1637 and 1700, there were performed three hundred operas at
Venice alone. An account of the performance of "Berenice," composed
by Domenico Freschi, at Padua, in 1680, dwarfs all our present ideas of
spectacular splendor. In this opera there were choruses of a hundred
virgins and a hundred soldiers; a hundred horsemen in steel armor; a
hundred performers on trumpets, cornets, sackbuts, drums, flutes, and
other instruments, on horseback and on foot; two lions led by two

Turks, and two elephants led by two Indians; Berenice's triumphal car
drawn by four horses, and six other cars with spoils and prisoners,
drawn by twelve horses. Among the scenes in the first act was a vast
plain with two triumphal arches; another with pavilions and tents; a
square prepared for the entrance of the triumphal procession, and a
forest for the chase. In the second act there were the royal apartments
of Berenice's temple of vengeance, a spacious court with view of the
prison and a covered way with long lines of chariots. In the third act
there were the royal dressing-room, the stables with a