70. The Florentine Monodies.—Throughout the later 16th century composers were groping toward dramatic music. So long as the only recognized type of writing was contrapuntal, nothing significant could be accomplished, since without the solo the element of personality in song was kept at a minimum.
Several experiments were tried with incidental music for plays (intermezzi)
in madrigal style, as by A. della Viola (1541-63), Striggio (1565-85), Merulo
(1579), A. Gabrieli (1585) and Orazio Vecchi (1594). Only the last of these
was specially successful, and one of them, at the wedding of Duke Francesco
of Tuscany at Venice in 1579, led to a war of pamphlets between Venetian
and Florentine critics.
About 1575 there began at Florence a movement that had
important consequences. A wealthy and cultivated nobleman,
Giovanni Bardi, Count of Vernio, himself a poet and amateur
musician, drew about him a group of dilettanti in literature and
art who were all inquiring after some method of dramatic expression
of an intenser form than was then known. Their
ambition was to restore the Greek drama in its entirety. This
raised the question of musical declamation as a means. Such
declamation was practically a lost art, and numerous attempts
were made to rediscover it. These experiments were called
'monodies,' the first of which were simply recitatives with a
slight accompaniment.
The circle of Florentine dilettanti was originally a social club drawn together
by common tastes, but before long became animated by a positive
purpose of revolution in the direction of solo music. The chief names, besides
Bardi, were Jacopo Corsi (d. 1604), a rich patron of the arts and a good player
on the gravicembalo, who from 1592 was the head of the movement, Bardi
having moved to Rome; the poet Ottavio Rinuccini (d. 1621), afterwards most
serviceable as librettist; Emilio del Cavaliere (d. 1602), a Roman noble, at the
time Ducal Inspector of Art at Florence, who was well versed in musical work
and later one of the composers in the new style; Vincenzo Galilei (d. c. 1600),
not so famous as his son, the astronomer, but a talented lutist and a good
student and writer, who led the way in practical experiments and zealously
defended the new ideas in pamphlets (from 1581); Giulio Caccini
(d. 1618), singer in the Ducal Chapel from 1565 and a lutist whose versatile
skill powerfully aided the movement; Jacopo Peri (d. 1633), also a well-trained
musician, ducal choirmaster at Florence and later at Ferrara, who likewise
served notably as a composer in the new style; Pietro Strozzi, who took
part with Merulo and Striggio in the wedding music at Venice mentioned
above and later heartily accepted the new ideas; Marco da Gagliano (d. 1642),
at the time a young student for the priesthood, but later a composer in the
monodic form.
