Scan 32
The American history and encyclopedia of music .., 1908
4 lines. Read by computer on 7 September 2026. Printed page 8. See the scan on archive.org.
1which is all that has remained of the later opera, "Arianna" — a song of the arioso type, which for truthfulness and poignancy of expression is comparable with anything that has been composed by the great masters since. Its beginning is "Lasciatemi movire," and as it is obtainable in the best music shops, with its harmonies written out from the old thorough bass, no student of dramatic song should fail to study it. This lamentation marks the crystallization of the free and formless monody, as it was called, into the arioso, and, while in itself an achievement of great significance and value, it is a mile-post on the road over which Monteverde's successors traveled with great rapidity for a century and a half, by which time the old lyric drama had degenerated into a soulless art form, to the artificialities and sensuous beauties of which all the high purposes of its inventors had been sacrificed. When arioso, which had grown out of the representative style, had grown into the artificial formula known as the aria, the tragedy with music became an opera, and the opera became a mere concert in costume. A brief account of the opera as it existed at the time of Handel will be given presently, but first it must be stated that largely under the influence of Monteverde, the potency of the instrumental element in it had been developed far beyond the dreams of Peri and Caccini. In place of their band, which might be replaced today with a small pianoforte, flutes and a few guitars, Monteverde used no less than thirty-six instruments, including violins, trombones, trumpets and three small portable organs. For these instruments, moreover, he wrote independent movements, and he used them in groups for dramatic effect. To him is attributed the invention of the pizzicato and tremolo on the violins — two effects that every composer has employed since.
3While Italian opera was still in its infancy, it began the invasion of the other European countries. Germany, Austria, France and England at first adopted it bodily and then gradually modified it to suit the taste of their people, this being an inevitable result of the democratic tendency which
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