318 ART. III.-The Art of Singing, Past and Present. (1) Opinioni dei Cantori Antichi e Moderni, o sieno Osservazioni sopra il Canto figurato di Pierfrancesco Tosi, Accademico filarmonico. Dedicate a sua Eccellenza My Lord Peterborough, Generale di Sbarco dell' Armi Reali della Gran Brettagna, per Lelio della Volpe. Bologna. 1723. (2) Riflessioni prattiche sul Canto figurato di Giambattista (3) Vie de Rossini. Par M. DE STENDHAL. Paris. 1826. By a curious coincidence the dates of the four books at the head of this article represent not inaccurately the chronological landmarks of the history of the art of singing; while the opinions of their respective authors display very clearly the changes of which that history consists. They are the works of four eminent authorities on the subject, who wrote at an interval of about half a century from each other; so that between the writing of the first book on our list and the writing of the last is comprised the greater part of the rapid development, the long maturity, and the slow, but daily less slow, decline of singing. Thus while Tosi was already a well-known performer at the end of the seventeenth century, and had learned from the earliest generation of singers belonging to a really independent art, Professor Panofka, on the other hand, is at the present moment striving to revive, by teachings and writings, the better school of singing of his own youth. Mancini and Stendhal stand midway between these two masters, the one of an art scarcely mature, the other of an art well-nigh effete: Mancini, the singing-master of Maria Theresa's children, the pupil of Leo and Bernacchi, the friend of Gluck and Sacchini, still surrounded by an apparently vigorous artistic life; Stendhal, the crotchety novelist and amateur critic, the expounder of the aesthetic meaning of Rossini, already noticing the beginnings of artistic decay. The four books are intensely illustrative of the respective conditions of the art at the precise moment when each was written, but they cannot show us how and why these conditions succeeded each other. The cheerful precepts of Tosi, the chattering admonitions of Mancini, the elegiac rhapsodies of Stendhal, and the critical jeremiads of Panofka, require to be connected by an historical bond; and such a bond can be found in no history of music in general, much less in any work on singing in particular. The history of the art of singing must be laboriously and intelligently deciphered among the complications of musical history, and out of comparatively few, fragmentary, and often very confusing data. As yet the work has not even been attempted. There have been technical manuals, and æsthetical disquisitions, and romantic rhapsodies, and biographical imbecilities; but there has been no history of singing. A great amount of useless detail has been ferreted out concerning the character and lives of singers, but not the most rudimentary outlines have been sketched of the character and life of the art of singing. Is this deficiency a mere proof of the inutility of what is missing? Do we not give the subject just as much or as little attention as it deserves? Is singing really an art, and has it really a history? Most certainly if there had never existed any singing different from that of our own days, the subject would deserve no more attention than it has received; most certainly if singing had always been what it is at present, it would scarcely be an art and could scarcely have a history. But singing has been an art; and it has a history, showing how gradually it has ceased to be such; and were singing to become the subject of more general and more intelligent interest, it might perhaps become a real art once more. People always have sung and always will continue to sing; yet as an art singing is at once of very recent origin and of very proximate end. For solo singing, which alone is an independent art, is an extremely artificial product, which did not appear before music had developed to a very considerable extent, and which seems likely to prove incompatible with a musical over-development such as we must expect in the future. It is probable that solo singing preceded choral singing, but that was at a time when singing was not singing, but scarcely more than declaiming, or shouting, or screeching; and as soon as music began to enfranchise itself from dancing and declamation, singing became the work not of one but of several individuals. For the growth of music consisted, throughout the middle ages, in the gradual construction of that system of harmonic relations which was indispensable as the basis of a real art; and only the combination and balancing of several parts could conduce to this end. A single voice, pursuing its course in erratic solitude, could never have created a musical system such as was necessary even for the existence of artistic solo singing; it would have wandered about without meeting limits, and consequently without moving in a definite figure; whereas several voices meeting and mingling and clashing up against each other, immediately suggested the necessity of each voice moving in such a manner and in such given relations to the others as to render the continual movement possible the single vocal thread could form no pattern; but the various vocal threads, unless they were crossed and recrossed in a definite manner, formed merely a hopeless tangle, to avoid which they were woven together into a compact harmonic woof. To perfect this woof of many voices, to carry each thread in such a manner as to knit it firmly with its companions, and to permit their being taken up and placed in their turn; to do this, was the slow work of the middle ages-a work finally completed by the great Flemish school of counterpoint, which, ramifying during the sixteenth century into Spain and Italy, found its latest and greatest master in Palestrina. Upon this harmonic woof succeeding generations were to embroider designs the most artistically free and capricious, but which could not have existed without the formal and almost mathematical basis created by the earlier composers. But as soon as this harmonic basis was thoroughly complete, a work of partial disintegration necessarily began in its constant search after harmonious combinations, the school of the sixteenth century had rejected a great number of elements of musical form; in its dread of confusion and discord, it had surrounded the various parts with cramping limits, and had condemned them to move in monotonous circles. It was the work of the Italian composers of the early seventeenth century gradually to break through these restrictions, to abolish this monotony; to introduce, with those dissonances, which the older school had so dreaded, life and movement into this unruffled musical stagnation. It was, above all, their work to force the various parts, voices, and instruments from the captivity of the merely harmonic school, and to teach them to move and act separately. For as long as the object had been to establish the relations of the various voices or parts among each other, no independent action could be permitted to any of them; whereas, as soon as these relations had been thoroughly established, no progress could be made save by the development of the individual powers of each separate part. The old musical unity was broken up; instead of the homogeneous harmonic composition in several well-balanced vocal or instrumental parts, perfectly unvarying in movement, rhythm, and expression, the masters of the early seventeenth century attempted different and various musical forms: partially declaimed, entirely sung, accompanied, unaccompanied, melancholy or cheerful-abortive productions for the most part, but various, characteristic, and eminently fruitful. The instruments were separated from the voices, and the various instruments from each other; the voices were freed, and each single voice permitted to seek its own development and work. This is the moment when solo singing begins, and with solo singing begins singing as an art. During the supremacy of the school of Palestrina the singer had been but part of a chord, subject to the will of another man, and as merely physical an agent as was a single key of the organ beneath the organist's fingers; as soon as the school of Palestrina broke up, the singer became an individual and an artist, not played upon, but himself playing upon the instrument in his throat. As long as six or eight voices of the same pitch were united to constitute one homogeneous part of a chorus, there could be no development of the physical resources of the individual voice, whose excellence and defects were equally lost in the general mass of sound; nor could there be any development of the intellectual qualities of the performer, whose every movement was required to resemble that of his companions, and to be dictated by the director of the whole performance. But as soon as the individual voice began to be heard alone, merely sustained by the instruments, its qualities were noticed, defects began to be remedied and beauties began to be cultivated; the intelligence also of the artist, his conception of the proportions of the piece he was performing, was called upon now that the rendering of the notes was left entirely to himself. To improve to the utmost the physical powers, to obtain the purest, strongest sound, the longest breath, the greatest facility of vocalization and enunciation from throat, lungs, and lips; and, on the other hand, to develop to the highest degree the musical feeling of the performers, to obtain from the mind and heart the keenest and most subtle perception of musical form, the most unerring judgment in selecting inflexions and shades of expression, the most rapid and masterly invention of extemporary embellishments-all this became the task of the singers of the seventeenth century; and in it consists the whole art of singing, an art complex and various in proportion to the numberless complexities and varieties of physical and mental endowment. This new art of solo singing progressed with the greatest rapidity, dragged along by the general musical impulse of the day, by the rapid development of theatrical music, by the daily growing importance of melody as opposed to the mere harmony of the old school. At the end of the sixteenth century music had consisted almost exclusively of complicated choral performances; it had been confined mainly to the Church; and, even when adapted to secular purposes, it had never lost its eminently religious character. There had been choirs of singers attached to great churches and to court chapels, but there had not been one man or woman specially known for vocal talent; the individual was still hidden in the choral mass. By the middle of the seventeenth century music had split into many branches. The choral pieces remained in the Church, but broken by innumerable solos, duets, and trios. On the stage the single-voiced air and the noted declamation of the recitative reigned supreme; cantatas, combinations of airs and recitatives, accompanied by one or more instruments, took in the drawing-room the place of the cumbersome madrigals of former days-complicated harmonic combinations, fragments of church music set to profane words, which had differed from the masses and psalms of the Church only by each of their parts being sung by a single voice instead of being sung in unison by half a dozen voices. By the middle of the seventeenth century there existed throughout Italy individual singers, men and women, like the Laurettos and Pasqualinos mentioned by John Evelyn, the Leonora Baroni celebrated in Milton's Latin verses, and that Baldassare Ferri, whom the whole aristocracy of Bologna sallied forth to receive two miles outside the city gatessingers celebrated throughout the country, and destined speedily to become celebrated in Germany and England. Towards the end of the seventeenth century various towns became centres of vocal schools, owing to the accidental presence of some distinguished master, like the Sicilian Pistocchi, who, after a brilliant career in Italy and Germany, turned monk at Bologna, and amused himself preparing for the stage the most brilliant singers of the early eighteenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the most eminent composers, Scarlatti and Porpora at Naples, Gasparini and Lotti at Venice, were employed to teach singing to the boys and girls at the music schools; and every town of Italy possessed its school of singing-intensely local, personal, and characteristic, like the local schools of painting of the Renaissance. The whole artistic energy of the nation was concentrated in music. The art of singing developed with extra |