the parts are reversed. It is the Italian Quinault who composes poems at the harpsichord, already tracing the outline of the melody which is to clothe them.—In a letter of the 15th of April, 1750, Metastasio, sending to the Principessa di Belmonte Caffarello's setting of a poem of his, Partenza di Nice, adds: "Caffarello realised the defects of my composition"—(which gives us to understand that he had written one);—"he has had compassion on the words and has clad them in better stuff."[1]—In another letter of the same year (21st February, 1750) to the same lady, he says:
"Your Excellency knows that I can write nothing that is to be sung without imagining the music for it (good or bad). The poem that I am sending you was written to the music that accompanies it. It is, in truth, a very simple composition; but if the singer will sing it with the expression that I have imagined it will be found that it contains all that is needed to second the words. All that can be added to it, though it be of the choicest, may assuredly win more applause for the musician, but will certainly give less pleasure to loving hearts."[2]
Never did Metastasio give his poems to a friend without adding the musical setting. Consequently we have not the right to judge his verses separately, deprived of the melody intended for them, of which he had, as Marmontel says, "the presentiment."[3]—Music seemed to him all the more indispensable to poetry
- ↑ Unpublished letters which appeared in the Nuova Autologia, vol. 77, and are quoted by Jole-Maria Baroni, in his essay on the Lirica musicale di Metastasio (Rivista musicale Italiana, 1905).
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ "A talent without which it is impossible for a poet to write an aria properly is the presentiment of the song, that is, of the character which the melody should possess, the compass demanded and the appropriate mood." (Marmontel.)
