Scan 33
The American history and encyclopedia of music .., 1908
2 lines. Read by computer on 6 September 2026. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.
1be assumed in a manner suggested by the composers — on a harpsichord, chitarrone, lira grande, theorbo or large lute, and three flutes. Naturally, other cities became emulous of Florence, and before the end of the Seventeenth Century, Mantua, Rome, Bologna and Venice entered the lists, each contributing somewhat to the advancement of the new art form. At first, like most other manifestations of the beautiful in art, it remained in the service of the nobility and aristocracy; but Rome saw the beginning of its popularization at the carnival of 1606, when, like another Thespis, a mountebank musician fitted up a little play with music, and helped by five performers, went through the streets playing it upon a stage mounted on a cart. Nothing more is heard of this beginning, however, and a quarter of a century elapsed before there was an operatic performance in the house of a Roman nobleman. Venice was the first city to devote a theater to operatic representations. It was the Teatro di San Cassiano, which opened its doors to the public in 1637, and before the century came to an end there were eleven opera houses in Venice, for which a numerous brood of composers were kept busy writing. One of these, who has come to be called Cavalli, produced no less than thirty-four operas for Venice alone, and his fame went throughout Europe. Of his immediate successors, Cesti, Pallavicino, Legrenzi, Sartorio, Strozzi and a few others were the most popular. But it would add little to our knowledge of the growth of opera to discuss the personal history of the men or the character of the music which they wrote. The progress which the best of them marked had its starting point in the operas of Claudio Monteverde (1568-1643), who was Cavalli's teacher, who, when he produced his "Orfeo" in 1607, had already created a stir by the innovations which he had introduced into polyphonic music for the purpose of giving it greater emotional expressiveness. The score of "Orfeo" has been preserved and republished in Germany within recent times, but there is nothing in it comparable with a short monologue, the lament of Ariadne after her desertion by Theseus,
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