For Every Music Lover / A Series of Practical Essays on Music

and Its

he unfolding of the spiritual life of the human race. Man is essentially dramatic by nature, and both history a

ut the altar, told the story of the god's wanderings and adventures, in simple words, accompanied by gesture, dance and music. This expression of thought and feeling mirrored the emotions of the worshipers, kindled the imagination, and strengthened the innate instinct for freedom. Gradually

act that it was highly esteemed. Aristotle tells us that it was an essential element in Greek stage plays and their greatest embellishment. Both ?schylus and Sophocles were practical musicians and composed music for

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, often remaining in their seats twenty-four hours before the play began in order to secure desirable places. Fully fifty thousand spectators could be accommod

f human existence were pictured in them. They expressed the world-view of an entire people. Under Roman dominion, with its corr

read in the churches, illustrated with living pictures and music. Gradually the characters personated began to speak and to move. The drama rose anew at the foot of the altar. Christian priests were its reformers, its guardians and its actors. Designed for the amusement as well as the instruction of the gaping multitudes, it was necessarily a pretty crude affair. Satan was introduced as the clown, and laughter was provoked at his discomfitu

ratorio. The descent of the Opera may be traced also to another source, to the secular play which persiste

nd played on musical instruments. They afforded a welcome means of communication with the outside world; they broke up the monotony of life when events were few. A

emy," resolved to recover the much discussed music of the Greek drama. The place of rendezvous was the palace of Count Bardi, a member of one of the oldest patrician families in Tuscany. Edifying discourse and laud

the contrapuntist, with its puzzling intricacies. So thought these ardent Hellenists, and a burning zeal possessed them to mate dramatic poetry with a music that would heighten and intensify its exp

, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint. Not content with giving his ideas to the world in

a company of highborn ladies and gentlemen, two pastoral plays: "Il Satiro" and "La Disperazione di Fileno," so set to music that they could be sung or declaimed throughout. The author of the text was Signora Laura Guidiccioni, of the Lucchesini fami

her Italian contemporaries, greatly enhanced the success of the new venture with her superb voice, artistic skill, musical fire and splendid intelligence. She "whose excellence in music is generally known," as w

c and increased the demands on instrumentation. He did not succeed, however, in satisfying the Academicians with his attempt to grasp the medium bet

t. To him may be attributed the first dramatic recitative. It appeared in his "Daphne," a "Dramma per la Musica," written to text by the poet Rinuccini and privately performed at the Palazzo Corsi, in 1597. This was actually the first opera, although the term was not applied to such compositions until half a century later. Several solos were added by the court singer, Giulio Caccini, who composed a number of songs for a single voice, "in imitation of Galilei," as a contemporary stated, "but in a more beautiful and pleasing style." Invited three years

aster to the Duke of Mantua. He was the first composer to use unprepared chords of the seventh, dominant and diminished, and to emphasize passionate situations with dissonances. He invented the tremolo and the pizzicato, and

trumpets. In "Tancredi e Clorinda," produced in Venice, in 1624, a string quartet indicated the galloping of horses, a prototype of the "Ride of the Valkyries." Like Abbé Liszt, he took holy orders late in life, without ceasing to compose. At seventy-four ye

t the same time growing taste for magnificence of stage setting and brilliant, dazzling, even extravagant song effects, caused neglect of Academician principles. The learned and gifted Neapolitan composer, Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the famous h

pastoral, "Robin et Marion," was an actual prototype of the opera. During the seventeenth century Corneille and Molière refined the dramatic

introduced the ballet. New life was infused into the traditions he left when Jean Philippe Rameau, in 1733, at fifty years of age, wrote his first opera. He was well-known as a theorist and composer, and was the author of a harmony treatise in which were set forth the laws of chord inversions and derivations, a stroke of genius that hopelessly entangled him in perpl

, he produced his first opera. He attempted no reform, but his instinct for the true relation between the accents of speech and those of melody and recitative seems to have been unerring. Saturated with native English melody, tingling with fertile fancy and controlled by education, whether he wrote for stage, church, or chamber, he evinced a freshness and vi

ndeur seemed the embodiment of the Greek art spirit. His choice of subjects indicates the enterprise on which he had embarked. He sought simplicity, subjugation of music to poetic sentiment, dramatic sincerity and organic unity. His ope

st the innovations that had been permitted to suit the caprices and gratify the vanity of singers. It was his idea that the Sinfonia, in other words the Overture or Prelude, should indicate the subject and prepare the spectators for the chara

ary of its treasures unlocked, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who, without thought of being a reformer, unconsciously infused German spirit into Italian forms. It was during the last five years of his brief life, from 1786 to 1791, that he produced his operatic masterpieces, "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "The Magic Flute." His marvelous musical

tten in 1805. Ranked, though it is, rather as a symphony for voice and orchestra than as the musical complement of a dramatic poem, there is nevertheless infused into some of its chief numbers more potent dramatic expression than is found in a

peras on romantic themes, and depicted in tones the things of the weird, fantastic and elfish world that kindled his imagination. He has been called the connecting link between Mozart and Wagner, and in many of his theories he anticipated

gned, as they were, to picture man's essential life, they have slowly but surely found their way to the popular heart. It was the very essence of his musical dramatic creed that to have blood in its veins and sincerity in its soul art must come from the people and be addressed to the people. He chose the national myth

pical motives." Moreover, the orchestration of Berlioz had been a precursor of his orchestral tone-coloring. Nevertheless, everything he touched was so characteristically applied by him as to produce new impressions, and to emphasize the idea of

y ceased to be satisfying to those of us who have Teutonic blood in our veins. The Italian opera composer who holds the highest place to-day in the heart of the serious musician is that grand old man of mus