This invasion of Italy by French musicians, preceding by a century its invasion by French armies, produced toward 1520 a revolution in Italian music. For these men from the north—and the Italians whom they trained —were steeped in the ars nova, and applied it in setting to music the lyric poetry of Italy. In Petrarch, Ariosto, Sannazaro, and Bembo—later in Tasso and Guarini—they found delectable verses crying out for music; indeed, had not poetry always intended itself to be at least a recitative, if not a song? Petrarch’s canzoniere had already lured musicians; now every line of it was set to music, some stanzas a dozen times or more; Petrarch is the most completely musicked poet in world literature. Or there were little lyrics of unknown authorship but simple and viable sentiment, that touched the chords of every heart, and invited the strings of every instrument. E.g.:
One from the other borrowing leaves and flowers,
I saw fair maidens beneath summer trees,
Weaving bright garlands with low love ditties.
Mid that sweet sisterhood the loveliest
Turned her soft eyes to me and whispered, “Take!”
Love-lost I stood, and not a word I spake.
My heart she read, and her fair garland gave;
Therefore I am her servant to the grave.108
To such verses the composers applied the full and complex music of the motet: polyphony in which all four parts—sung by four or eight voices-were of equal value, instead of three parts subserving one; and all the complex subtlety of counterpoint* and fugue wove the four independent rivulets of sound into a stream of harmony. So rose the Italian madrigal of the sixteenth century—one of the fairest flowers of Italian art. Whereas in Dante’s time music had been a handmaid to poetry, now it became a full-fledged partner, not obscuring the words, not slurring the sentiment, but uniting them with a music that made them doubly stir the soul, while delighting with its technical skill the educated mind.
Almost all the great composers of sixteenth-century Italy, even Palestrina, turned their art now and then to the madrigal. Philippe Verdelot, a Frenchman living in Italy, and Costanza Festa, an Italian, contest the honor of having first developed the new form, between 1520 and 1530; soon after them came the Arcadelt—a Fleming in Rome—mentioned by Rabelais.109 In Venice Adrian Willaert relaxed from his duties as choir master at San Marco to compose the finest madrigals of his time.
Usually the madrigal was sung without instrumental accompaniment. Musical instruments were innumerable, but only the organ dared compete with the human voice. Instrumental music slowly developed in the early sixteenth century out of music forms originally intended for dances or choruses; so the pavane, the saltarello, and the saraband graduated from dance accompaniments to instrumental pieces, alone or in suite; and the music for a madrigal, played without song, became the instrumental canzone, the distant progenitor of the sonata,109a and therefore of the symphony.
The organ was already in the fourteenth century almost as highly developed as today. The pedal board appeared in Germany and the Low Countries in that age, and was soon adopted in France and Spain; Italy delayed acceptance of it till the sixteenth century. By that time most large organs had two or three keyboards, with a variety of stops and couplers. Great church organs were themselves works of art, designed, carved, and painted by masters. The same love of form went into the making of other musical instruments. The lute—the favorite instrument of the home—was built of wood and ivory, shaped like a pear, pierced with sound holes in a graceful pattern, with a finger board divided by frets of silver or brass, and ending in a pegbox turned at a right angle to the neck. A pretty woman plucking the strings of a lute held in her lap made a picture that went to the head of many a sensitive Italian. Harps, citherns, psalters, dulcimers, and guitars were also favorites with musical fingers.
For those who preferred fiddling to plucking there were viols of diverse sizes, including the tenor viola da braccio, held on the arm, and the bass viola da gamba, resting against the leg. The latter became the later violoncello, and the viol, about 1540, became the violin. Wind instruments were less popular than the stringed; the Renaissance had the same objection that Alcibiades had raised to making music by puffing out the cheeks; nevertheless there were flutes and fifes (“pipes”), bagpipes, trumpets, horns, flageolets, and the shawm or oboe. Percussion instruments—drums, tabors, cymbals, tambourines, castanets—added their fury to the ensemble. All Renaissance musical instruments were of Oriental origin except for the keyboard that was added to other instruments besides the organ to indirectly strike or pluck the strings. The oldest of these keyboard instruments was the clavichord (clavis meaning key), which appeared in the twelfth century and had a sentimental resurrection in the days of Bach; here the strings were struck with little brass tangents operated by the keys. In the sixteenth century it was displaced by the clavicembalo or harpsichord, whose strings were plucked by points of quill or leather attached to wooden “jacks” that rose when the keys were depressed. The virginal was an English, the spinet an Italian, variant, of the harpsichord.
All these instruments were as yet subordinate to the voice; and the great virtuosos of the Renaissance were singers. But at the baptism of Alfonso of Ferrara in 1476 we hear of a feast in the Schifanoia Palace, at which a concert was given by a hundred trumpeters, pipers, and tambourine players. In the sixteenth century the Signory of Florence employed a regular band of musicians, of which Cellini was one. Performances by several instruments in concert were given in this period, but they were still for the aristocratic few. On the other hand solo instrumental performances were almost fanatically popular. Men went to church not always to pray but to hear a great organist like Squarcialupi or Orcagna. When Pietro Bono played the lute at the court of Borso in Ferrara the souls of the listeners, we are told, flew out of this world into another.110 The great executants were the happy favorites of a day, who asked no fame of posterity but received all their renown before their deaths.
Musical theory lagged a generation behind practice: performers innovated, professors denounced, then debated, then approved. Meanwhile the principles of polyphony, counterpoint, and fugue were formulated for easier instruction and transmission. The great musical feature of the Renaissance was not theory, nor even technical advances; it was the increasing secularization of music. In the sixteenth century it was no longer religious music that made the advances and experiments; it was the music of the madrigal and the courts. Side by side with philosophy and literature, and reflecting the pagan aspect of Renaissance art and the relaxation of morals, the music of sixteenth-century Italy escaped from ecclesiastical control, and sought inspiration in the poetry of love; the old conflict between religion and sex was resolved for a time in the triumph of Eros. The reign of the Virgin ended, the ascendancy of woman began. But under either rule music was the handmaid of the queen.
XI. PERSPECTIVE
Were the morals of Renaissance Italy really worse than those of other lands or times? It is difficult to make comparisons, since all evidence is a selection. The age of Alcibiades in Athens displayed much of the immorality of the Renaissance in sexual relations and political chicanery; it too practised abortion on a large scale, and cultivated erudite courtesans; it too liberated simultaneously the intellect and the instincts; and, anticipating Machiavelli, Sophists like Thrasybulus in Plato’s Republic attacked morality as weakness. Perhaps (for in these matters we are limited to vague impressions) there was less private violence in classic Greece than in Renaissance Italy, and a bit less of corruption in religion and politics. During an entire century of Roman history—from Caesar to Nero—we find greater corruption in government, and a worse breakdown of marriage, than in the Renaissance; but even in that epoch there remained many Stoic virtues in the Roman character; Caesar, with all his ambivalent capacity in bribery and love, was still the greatest general in a nation of generals.