ad made the classic
tragedy dear to their hearts. They knew that in the olden time
tragedy, of which the words only have come down to us, had been
musical throughout. In their efforts to bring about an intimacy
between dramatic poetry and music they found that nothing could be
done with the polite music of their time. It was the period of highest
development in ecclesiastical music, and the climax of artificiality.
The professional musicians to whom they turned scorned their theories
and would not help them; so they fell back on their own resources.
They cut the Gordian knot and invented a new style of music, which
they fancied was like that used by the ancients in their stage-plays.
They abolished polyphony, or contrapuntal music, in everything except
their choruses, and created a sort of musical declamation, using
variations of pitch and harmonies built up on a simple bass to give
emotional life to their words. In choosing their tones they were
guided by observation of the vocal inflections produced in speech
under stress of feeling, showing thus a recognition of the law which
Herbert Spencer formulated two hundred and fifty years later.

[Sidenote: _The music of the Florentine reformers._]

[Sidenote: _The solo style, harmony, and declamation._]

[Sidenote: _Fluent recitatives._]

The music which these men produced and admired sounds to us monotonous
in the extreme, for what little melody there is in it is in the
choruses, which they failed to emancipate from the ecclesiastical art,
and which for that reason were as stiff and inelastic as the music
which in their controversies with the musicians they condemned with
vigor. Yet within their invention there lay an entirely new world of
music. Out of it came the solo style, a song with instrumental
accompaniment of a kind unknown to the church composers. Out of it,
too, came harmony as an independent factor in music instead of an
accident of the simultaneous flow of melodies; and out of it came
declamation, which drew its life from the text. The recitatives which
they wrote had the fluency of spoken words and were not retarded by
melodic forms. The new style did not accomplish what its creators
hoped for, but it gave birth to Italian opera and emancipated music in
a large measure from the formalism that dominated it so long as it
belonged exclusively to the composers for the church.

[Sidenote: _Predecessors of Wagner._]

[Sidenote: _Old operatic distinctions._]