i's works were produced and met with favor even after the
pseudo-Hellenic invention of the Bardi fraternity had burst upon Italy.
Indeed the madrigal drama died hard and its final burial was not
accomplished till the opera had begun to take shape more definite than
that found in the experimental productions of its founders. With the
declining years of this curious form we need not concern ourselves. We
may now turn to a consideration of the experiments which led to the
creation of dramatic recitative, the missing link in the primeval world
of the lyric drama.

CHAPTER XIV

The Spectacular Element in Music

While the madrigal drama was in the ripeness of its glory the young
Florentine coterie which brought the opera to birth was engaged in its
experiments with monody. The history of its labors has been told in many
books and need not be repeated here. But connected with it are certain
important facts which are too often overlooked or at best denied their
correct position in the story.

In the first place, then, let us remind ourselves that while the
madrigal drama was utilizing in a novel manner the musical form from
which it took its name, the method of adapting the madrigal to solo
purposes had never been abandoned. The singular path of development
followed by the musical drama had been leading away from its true goal,
that of solo utterance, but the Italian salon still heard the charms of
the madrigal arranged as a lyric for single voice.

The first secular drama, the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, was equipped with the
elements from which might have been evolved quickly all the materials of
the first experimental operas; but the rapid spread of the polyphonic
music through Italy and the sudden and overwhelming popularity of part
singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a
manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of
comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by
the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic
composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not
the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction
making this impossible. The noble classic figure of Orpheus, with his
flowing white robe, his simple fillet on his brow, and his lyre in his
arm, standing before the iron gates and moving by his song the powers of
hell, soon gave way to the gorgeous exhibitions in which the splendors