quality to more and more elaborate music that Italy Poetry and
Music. achieved her most notable success in the seventeenth century. This linking of poetry and music in melodrama and opera was a consequence, partly of the enormous advance made in
music as a vehicle for the expression of feeling and
picturesque representation, partly, like so many other
things at the Renaissance, of the study of antiquity.
It was while endeavouring to discover in what way
the Greeks recited their tragedies, in song and to
the accompaniment of music, that Vincenzio Galilei,
father of the astronomer, devised, with others, the
system of expressive recitative, and set to music
the Ugolino canto in the Divina Commedia, and the
Book of Lamentations. Once discovered, the new
method was soon applied to other works, especially
the favourite pastoral and mythological idylls and
plays, and the first complete musical drama, La Dafne
written by Ottavio Rinuccini (1562-1621) and set by
Corsi and Jacopo Peri, was performed in 1595. Rinuccini's Euridice and Chiabrera's Rapimento di Cefalo
soon followed, and opera, growing always more elaborate musically, was started on its long career,—a
career which belongs to the history of music, not of
literature, for in Addison's words "the poetry of them
is generally as exquisitely ill as the music is good."
The literary drama of the seventeenth century in Italy is only a decadent continuation of the already decadent Drama. drama of the sixteenth—tragedies, religious and secular, modelled on Seneca, and abounding in horrors; comedy classical also, but
