till has power to impress
and please our ears. A little later an instrumental music of the
cultivated kind began to be developed. The two Gabriellis, in Venice,
wrote various kinds of organ pieces of a semi-secular flavor; the
violin found its form, and, by the beginning of the sixteenth century,
had become an instrument somewhat highly esteemed. The principal
instrument still in use among the people, however, was the lute, which
had taken the place of the harp, and both these instruments naturally
tended to develop a taste for chords, since chords were what might be
called their "natural product."

About the year 1600 a new department of musical creation was opened in
the discovery of opera. This great form of art, which has now attained
so much importance, was an accidental evolution from the effort to
recover the Greek drama, in which, owing to the size of the theaters,
the lines were chanted or intoned rather than spoken, in order that the
voice might carry farther. The first operatic composers sought only a
clear expression of the declamation, and intended to give their written
notes similar effects to those which a speaker's voice would produce in
the emphatic delivery of the sentiments and words of the text.
Accordingly, the first opera had no melody, properly so called; but
almost immediately, in 1608, there appeared a genius in this new form
of composition, Monteverde, who not only introduced melodies, but also
made a very intelligent use of harmony, and, above all, showed himself
the founder of modern instrumentation by placing the violin at the head
of the orchestra. Then ensued in Italy a century of the most animated
musical productivity the world has ever seen. Operas followed each
other from a great variety of composers, and opera-houses were erected
in all the principal cities; opera was played everywhere, sometimes by
the support of princes and sometimes by the support of the people
themselves.

The development of opera was the most important creative inspiration
which had ever come into the art of music, since, in the nature of the
case, everything was new. What the music sought to do almost
immediately, beginning with Monteverde himself in his opera "Tancred,"
was to represent the feeling of the dramatic moment. Almost at the
very first they began to use music in the melodramatic way for
accompanying the critical moments of the action, when the performers
were not singing, and the forms of t