Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Veronese. I intended to represent a servant whose nose is bleeding because of some accident. We painters take the same licence as poets and I have represented two soldiers, one drinking and the other eating on the stairs, because I have been told that the owner of the house was rich and would have such servants.

  I. What is St Peter doing?

  V. Carving the lamb to pass it to the other end of the table.

  I. And the one next to him?

  V. He has a toothpick and cleans his teeth.

  I. Did anyone commission you to paint Germans [i.e., Protestants], buffoons and similar things in your picture?

  V. No, my lords, but to decorate the space.

  I. Are not the added decorations to be suitable?

  V. I paint pictures as I see fit and as well as my talent permits.

  I. Do you not know that in Germany and other places infected with heresy, pictures mock and scorn the things of the Holy Catholic Church in order to teach bad doctrine to the ignorant?

  V. Yes, that is wrong, but I repeat that I am bound to follow what my superiors in art have done.

  I. What have they done?

  V. Michelangelo in Rome painted the Lord, His Mother, the Saints, and the Heavenly Host in the nude–even the Virgin Mary.

  The inquisitors exacted an apology from Veronese and made him promise to amend the painting within three months. He did so, but not in the way the Inquisition anticipated. All that was changed was the picture’s title, to The Feast in the House of Levi. That was much safer, since, in the Bible, the event was attended by ‘publicans and sinners’.29

  Such an exchange would have been unthinkable a century before and shows how the status of artists had changed. If it achieved nothing else, humanism brought about the emancipation of the artist, a development that is still very much with us.

  In 1470, at a public festival in Breslau, in honour of the marriage of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary, the newlyweds were treated to the sound of many trumpets and ‘all kinds of string instruments’. This is regarded as the earliest account of a large number of strings, the essential ingredient of what would later come to be called an orchestra. A hundred years afterwards, roughly, between 1580 and 1589, a number of gentlemen started to meet regularly at the home of Count Giovanni dei Bardi in Florence. This group, known as the camerata, sounds like proto-mafiosi but in fact they consisted of a celebrated flautist, Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei), Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, also musicians, and Ottavio Rinuccini, a poet. In the course of their discussions, mainly about classical drama, the idea was conceived that such drama could be sung ‘in a declamatory manner’.30 In this way was opera born. Roughly speaking, in the century between these two dates, 1470 and 1590, we may say that the main elements of modern music came into being. It paralleled the explosion in painting.

  The musical developments may be divided into three. There was first a number of technical advances, in instrumentalisation and vocalisation, which evolved the types of sound we hear today. There was, second, the development of a number of musical forms, which led to the shape of music as we know it today. And, third, in line with all this there emerged the first composers of modern music, the first famous names that we still remember.

  Among the technical developments, we may identify first the principle of ‘imitation’. This was an innovation of the Flemish school of music, of whom the most celebrated practitioners were Jean Ockeghem (c. 1430–1495) and Jacob Obrecht (c. 1430–1505). During the fifteenth century, however, and throughout a good part of the sixteenth, Flemish music was in the ascendancy, not just in the north of Europe but across Italy. At the papal court in Rome, at the cathedral of St Mark in Venice, in Florence and in Milan, Flemish musicians were those in demand. ‘Imitation’ in this context refers to the practice of having individual voices in a polyphonic work begin singing not together, but one after another, each individual voice repeating the words. The device developed a great expressive power and has remained popular to this day in all forms of music. At the same time there was the introduction of massed voices in choirs and choruses. In particular, the papal choir became very important, though in Venice the Fleming Adrian Willaert (c. 1480–1562) introduced the double chorus, in which two vocal bodies were continually juxtaposed against each other. This had even greater dramatic force.31

  It was in Venice too that a beginning was made in orchestration, the idea of designating specific instruments for every part.32 This had to do with the fact that the printing of music also began in Venice around 1501, meaning that people could take away musical ideas, ‘not in their heads, but in their luggage’.33 Venice produced two remarkable musicians, Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni. It was they who perfected the balance of choruses, with groups of strings, wind and brass, in opposing choir lofts, throwing the music back and forth, with two great organs as base. Yehudi Menuhin regarded this as ‘the moment in Western music which marks the real beginning of independent instrumental music’, and in particular a feature that was to be of vital importance throughout the modern age: the suspended dissonance. This deliberately planned dissonance, calling attention to itself and demanding to be resolved (at least until Schönberg, in 1907) heightened the emotionality of music and brought forth the technique of modulation, the free movement from one key to another and without which the romantic movement in music would have been impossible (Wagner, for instance).34

  The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also saw a growth in the number of instruments available and, in a rudimentary sense, the beginning of the orchestra. Most significant was, first, the spread of the bow from central Asia, via Islam and Byzantium, where the rabab and lura were played with a one- or two-stringed bow by the tenth century. The bow first appeared in Europe in Spain and Sicily but quickly spread north. The playing bow is a direct descendant of the hunting bow–the sound of plucked strings died away quickly but it was found that, with a bow, the notes of vibrating strings could be sustained for much longer, as it was drawn across the string. The second decisive event for the evolution of Western music was the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. New instruments encountered in the Middle East spread quickly, in particular the fiddle. This is first seen in Byzantine illustrations in the eleventh century, when it had many shapes–oval, elliptical, rectangular–and was already often waisted for flexibility in bowing. Other instruments were the rebec and the gittern, the forerunner of the guitar, a massive instrument hollowed out of a solid block of wood.35

  Stringed keyboard instruments appeared initially in the first half of the fifteenth century, perhaps developing out of a mysterious instrument, the checker, which is known only from drawings–no actual examples have survived. There was also an early form of clavichord, known as a monacordys (perhaps invented by Pythagoras), and an early harpsichord, a largeish instrument, out of which the smaller spinet and virginals developed. By the sixteenth century, the lute, the guitar, the viol and the violin had all grown greatly in popularity, as the taste for chromaticism in music expanded. Charles IX, who ruled as king of France between 1560 and 1574, ordered thirty-eight violins from Andrea Amati, the famous violin-maker of Cremona. He specified twelve large and twelve small violins, six violas and eight basses.

  Among the wind instruments the organ had been in use since Roman times though from the tenth century on it had been exclusively a church instrument. The most important import from the East was the shawm, derived from the Persian surna, a double-reed instrument with finger-holes and a flared bell. The modern oboe was probably invented in the middle of the seventeenth century by a member of the Hotteterre family, where it was used at the French court.36 The oboe was seen as complementary to the violins and helped in the continuo.

  Several new forms of music emerged from the eleventh century on, of which we may single out the madrigal, the sonata, the chorale, the concerto, the oratorio and (as previously mentioned) the opera. Coming to prominence around 1530, the madrigal was the ma
in secular form of music among the cultured classes of Italy. It originated in the frottole, which were usually love songs and designed as amusements rather than as serious comments on the affections of the heart, accompanied by a single instrument. Under the influence of Adrian Willaert the madrigal became more ambitious–five voices were the norm with him, enabling the choral work to grow richer and more sensuous. As the madrigal matured, the musical leadership of Europe passed from the Flemings to the Italians, Rome and Venice in particular, though we should not overlook the contribution of the French in creating the chanson, known elsewhere as the canzon francese. The chanson was very airy, sprightly, often comprising sentimental ‘love-ditties’, in Alfred Einstein’s words, in which the voice would seek to imitate birds, battle scenes and so on, and it was out of this habit that the sonata eventually emerged. The great exponents of the madrigal and the chanson/sonata were Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) and Orlando Lassus (1532–1594). Palestrina was maestro di cappella at St Peter’s in Rome from 1571 on. He composed ninety-four masses and 140 madrigals, but he was essentially a religious composer, creating an unearthly purity in his music, whereas Lassus was the master of the madrigal and the motet, celebrating love in this life, on this earth. The pursuit of instrumental style and excellence led eventually to the emergence of the virtuoso musician, in particular on keyboard instruments and woodwind. Here we see another parallel with painting–the evolution of the musician as a respected artist in his own right.37

  Towards the end of the century, the canzon francese divided into two types–the sonata for wind instruments, and the canzona for strings. The former developed into the concerto (and then, later, the symphony), while the latter evolved into the chamber sonata. The earliest meaning of concerto was a ‘solo ensemble’, and no distinction was made between voices and instruments. In fact, to begin with, ‘concerto’, ‘sinfonia’ and ‘sonata’ were used interchangeably. But then the meaning of sonata was modified to denote a composition for one instrument and, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, concerto came to mean an exclusively instrumental group as a whole, with the exclusion of voices. For a time, therefore, concerto meant, essentially, what we mean by orchestra, until that term came into use in the middle of the eighteenth century. After that ‘concerto’ coalesced to mean more or less what it means today, the standard term for solo instrument and orchestra.

  The humanists in Florence who gave birth to opera were convinced that the prime function of music was to intensify the emotional impact of the spoken word. To begin with the new musical speech was called recitativo (recitative), in which the text was recited or declaimed against a musical background, which consisted mainly of a series of chords, with the occasional dissonance for dramatic effect. From the start, however, there was an harmonic structure–what is called ‘vertical’ as opposed to merely ‘horizontal’ music. The chord, a musical unit composed of simultaneously sounding tones (written vertically), became an important element in opera.38 This was very different from polyphony. The opera also encouraged the development of the orchestra, that particular name deriving from the fact that the ensemble of instruments was near the stage (in ancient Greece the orchestra was where the chorus stood, in front of the main acting area of the theatre).

  The first great operatic composer was Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). His Orfeo, written for viols and violins and produced in Mantua in 1607, was a significant advance over the earlier operas produced in Florence. Monteverdi had an original harmonic gift which also allowed him to introduce some bold dissonances, but the chief characteristic of his music is its great expressive colour, much advanced on earlier works. Orfeo was so popular that the full score was published immediately, the first time this had happened, and comprised a major breakthrough in the printer’s art. A year later, also in Mantua, he produced Arianna, arguably even more dramatic, and even more harmonic. During the writing of the opera, Monteverdi’s wife died and he was plunged into despair. The result was the famous Lament of Arianna, which was probably the first operatic aria to become a popular song, ‘and was hummed or whistled all over Italy’. Thanks to the successes of Monteverdi, opera houses began to be built across Europe, although up to 1637 they were private, the exclusive preserve of the nobility. Only after that date, again in Venice, was a paying audience admitted. Sixteen opera houses existed in Venice in the seventeenth century, four of which would be open on any given night.39

  The oratorio is a sacred analogue of opera and it developed at much the same time. It embodied a sacred drama set to music throughout. This had been tried before but it was only when Emilio Cavalieri (c. 1550–1602), one of Count Bardi’s circle, set to music The Representation of the Soul and the Body, in 1600, that the modern form of oratorio may be said to have begun. Its first performance was in the oratory of the church of St Philip Neri in Rome, and this is how the form got its name. In an oratorio, the full panoply of singers, musicians and chorus is used, but there is no ‘action’, no costumes or scenic effects.40

  Story-telling came a little later to music than it did to painting, but once it had arrived, it soon found full expression. The secularisation of music, which is essentially what happened in the sixteenth century, freed it from religious constraints and the new forms became ways to tell different stories, of different length, and at differing levels of seriousness. It is probably the biggest change to have overtaken the history of music at any point.

  At more or less the time that Veronese was appearing before the Inquisition in Venice, and the camerata were meeting in Florence, something equally noteworthy was happening in London. ‘Contemporaries recognised it; foreign visitors marvelled at it, and in his Itinerary of 1617 Fynes Moryson identified it: “there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London than in all the partes of the worlde I have seene, so doe these players or Comedians excel all other in the worlde.” What they were seeing was an explosion on the stages of London, an explosion that reflected a sudden creative flowering in all forms of literature: the drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe, the poetry of Donne and Spenser, and the translation of the Authorised Version of the Bible.’41 But it was drama in England that stood out most.

  The defining point, Peter Hall says, was spring 1576, when James Burbage, a member of one of the great theatre companies, went outside the city limits, to Shoreditch, to build the first fixed home for drama and, in the process, ‘turned a recreation into a profession’. In only a quarter-century after that, the new idea had reached its culmination: Shakespeare and Marlowe had come and gone, their dramas making new and huge demands on actors, and the main traditions of the stage had evolved and coalesced. In a dozen new theatres something like eight hundred plays had been performed, though how many more have been lost simply isn’t known. What is known is that, in addition to Shakespeare and Marlowe, twenty other writers were responsible for twelve or more plays each: Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger, Henry Chettle, James Shirley, Ben Jonson, William Hathaway, Anthony Munday, Wentworth Smith, Francis Beaumont.42 Heywood wrote that he ‘had a maine finger’ in 220 plays.

  The explosion of drama reflects the fact that London was now following Florence as one of the most successful bourgeois cities of the time. Central to this, in London’s case, were the great sixteenth-century voyages of exploration, covered in the next chapter. The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas greatly increased the money supply in Europe, price inflation cheapened labour, and capitalists enjoyed super-profits. There was too a comparable increase in the professional classes. Enrolments to Oxford and Cambridge rose from 450 a year in 1500 to nearly a thousand a year by 1642, the cost increasing from £20 a year in 1600 to £30 in 1660. Admissions to the Inns of Court, where lawyers were trained, likewise quadrupled between 1500 and 1600. ‘What happened between 1540 and 1640,’ says Richard Stone, ‘was a massive shift of relative wealth away from the Church and Crown…toward the upper middle and middle classes’.43 It was a similar change to that which happ
ened in Florence. ‘The realm aboundeth in riches,’ said another account, ‘as may be seen by the general excess of the people in purchasing, in building, in meat, drink and feastings, and most notably in apparel.’44 This is a statement that recalls van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis.

  The change in London was fundamental. Religious figures disappeared, as the monasteries, chantries and hospitals were sold off. So too did the nobles, to be replaced by commerce and craftsmen. The Law Courts proliferated, ‘as legislation became a favoured alternative to violence’. St Paul’s cathedral was now the chief place for gossip and it had the air of a club. ‘The Elizabethan-about-Town would habitually look in of a morning to see who was there, and if there were any major news, any minor scandal, any interesting comment on the latest book or play, or anything in the way of a new epigram or anecdote suitable for retailing at home.’45 But the rendezvous par excellence was the Mermaid Tavern, the best of the pubs and Elizabethan London’s literary and dramatic centre, the meeting place of its poets, dramatists and wits, who gathered there on the first Friday of every month. The most famous of Elizabethans would attend: Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Thomas Campion, Richard Carew, Francis Beaumont, Walter Raleigh. Beaumont once wrote to Ben Jonson, summarising the Mermaid’s appeal:

  …What things we have seen