Other Keyed Instruments. 111 orchestra in itself, the most interesting, the pianoforte, had as yet no existence, save in its embryo, the dulcimer, which is of immense antiquity, and not yet quite extinct. The domestic instruments of the Third Period, as of the Second, were the clavicytherium, the clavichord, the virginal, and the spinetinstruments differing in shape and size, in compass and power, but essentially the same in principle; the tone being produced by some kind of plectrum pulling the string out of its place, and setting it in vibration. This class attained perfection in the harpsichord, an instrument on which more than one venerable musician still among us first practised his scales,* but of which specimens become every year more rare. A new harpsichord has not perhaps been made for more than half a century; but clavichords, I believe, are still manufactured in considerable numbers in Germany. Music for these instruments has always been plentiful enough in every country where they themselves were manufactured and played upon. In Italy, in France, in Germany and in England, composers innumerable, many of whose names and all of whose works are forgotten, laboured then as now to meet that appetite for "some new thing" which, rest assured, is not peculiar to this or any ascertained age. Nor, let me add, is the passion for display, the taste for mere manual dexterity, at all a sudden growth of this nineteenth century, or a necessary consequence of anything essential to the music of the Fourth Period. Music for the virginal and other varieties of the harpsichord family has come down to us which is not merely difficult for its day, but difficult for any day; demanding for its execution much strength and elasticity and individuality of finger. Nor were the performers on what we now call orchestral instruments without material on which to exercise their skill. * Among them, by his own account, the great pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (d. 1870). As vocal music became more difficult of intonation, and more various and intricate in its rhythmical forms, the aid of instrumental accompaniment became first a luxury and afterwards a necessity. And, as the variety of the instruments and the skill of the performers on them increased, instrumental concerted music as distinct from vocal, developed itself from a more adjunct to a great and independent power. On Italy still our attention has to be turned to watch the results of this development. To Italy, alike the mother of new arts as the mistress of old, we owe the latest and not the least noble of the forms which it has taken. As the birthplace of inarticulate music, Rome was (even in the seventeenth century) to show herself still "the Eternal City." In 1683 Archangelo Corelli, a native of Imola in the Papal States, being then thirty years of age, published in Rome his first work, a collection of sonatas for two violins and bass, with accompaniment for the organ, or cembalo. It is needless to describe compositions with which every lover of music is more or less familiar; and it would be impertinent to praise that which, at the distance of more than a century and a half, is not merely tolerated but heard with pleasure. The progress of art is not always made on an inclined plane; it is checked from time to time by barriers which present no obvious outlet, and are, to the common eye, inaccessible. Some of the most forbidding of these would seem to have been surmounted by the genius of Corelli. He had certainly few if any models, hardly even a point of departure; he did not so much improve, or correct, or mould, or transform, as create; and his creations were the earliest music, pure and simple, which is still able to give pleasure. I return now to Carissimi, of the greatest of whose great services to modern music it becomes necessary to speak. He is said to have been the teacher of Alessandro Scarlatti, another example of a musician whose works never by any chance find their way into contemporary concert programmes or domestic portfolios, and whose name even may be heard by some of you now for the first time. Alessandro Scarlatti was, nevertheless, not only an inventive and learned composer, but one of the most popular composers that ever lived. More than that, he was the founder of the Neapolitan School, in which were trained the majority of the greatest musicians of the last century, and which exercised an influence, indirect where not direct, on every composer, with probably one exception, who has flourished since. With the school of Naples begins modern musical practice; better methods of fingering keyed instruments, better methods of bowing stringed instruments, and better instruments of all kinds; and, above all these in importance and difficulty, the art of singing. Three persons of the same family, known as musicians, have borne the name of Scarlatti; Alessandro, Domenico his son, and Giuseppe his grandson. The genius of the founder of the family extended to the second, though not to the third generation. Giuseppe attained the rank of a respectable average musician; but Domenico became the greatest performer of his day on the harpsichord, his compositions for which have had the good fortune to keep a place in public estimation which has been denied to any of the immeasurably superior and far more numerous vocal productions of his father. Alessandro Scarlatti was born at Trapani, in Sicily, in the year 1659. It is not known how or from whom he learned the elements of his art, but tradition has attributed his instruction in the higher branches of it to Carissimi. Doubts have been thrown on the relationship of these two illustrious musicians, growing out of a comparison of dates. This comparison, however, simply shows that Carissimi must have been very old, and Scarlatti very young, at the time they were master and pupil; no very exceptional case in the history of music. The longevity and the precocity of musicians are alike ་ remarkable; they begin professional life earlier, and end it later, than the majority of other men. Carissimi was, without doubt, living and practising his art in Rome in the year 1672, when he must have been upwards of eighty-five years of age; and there is nothing improbable in the fact of Scarlatti's having received instructions from him for a year or two before this, when he (Scarlatti) would have been at least ten; an age at which many musicians have already attracted attention by their compositions or performance. Few passages in musical bistory could be more interesting than this brief intercourse of Carissimi and Scarlatti. Look, for a moment, at the chronological table marked "Italy." At the time of Carissimi's birth the Roman School was in its zenith; its great type, Palestrina, still in the active exercise of his matured powers. Scarlatti lived to know, and to appreciate, Handel. The artistic lives of the two men nearly fill up the hundred and fifty years which I have assigned to the Second Period. Had Scarlatti's career been a little extended, he might have seen Haydn. Palestrina and Haydn! The works of Chaucer and Pope, of Orcagna and Titian, of William of Sens and Sir Christopher Wren, do not present examples of more striking contrast than does the music current when Carissimi entered, and when Scarlatti quitted, the world. In an early lecture I said that, in tracing the progress of modern music, our attention would have to be directed to four peoples; and first, to the Belgians and French, whom I classed together as one people. The frontier line of France has, in modern times, been so often changed, that it has become very difficult to determine the nationality of more than one illustrious musician. It cannot be denied that the word "Belgian" has been somewhat loosely applied in respect to the great masters of the Second Period; while, on the other hand, the French themselves (who have recently succeeded in adding Columbus, Francis de Sales, and Garibaldi to the list of their compatriots) have never for a moment hesitated to appropriate anybody worth appropriating who, for ever so short a time, had lived under French rule, or borne a Gallicized name. I have therefore spoken always of those great musicians who, whether French or Belgian, are indisputably the founders of modern music, as forming the Gallo-Belgian School. This, you will remember, as an individual school, became extinct, or absorbed into the Italian, in the course of the sixteenth century. Italy, however, proved willing and able to repay with interest her debt both to the Teuton and the Gaul. For the moment we must deal only with the latter. The history of the French School proper only begins in the second half of the seventeenth century, early in which a charter was granted by Louis XIV. to the Abbé Perrin, Robert Cambert, and the Marquis de Sourdéac, for the presentation, during ten years, of operas and dramas in French verse, after the manner of the Italian. Of this association, the first-named was the poet, the second the composer, and the last the mechanist. During the preparations for turning this charter to account, by the opening of the existing Académie, then Royale and since by turns Nationale and Impériale, Perrin and Cambert produced the first veritable French opera, the "Pastorale en Musique," and two others, "Ariane" and "Adonis." The Académie was opened (in 1671) with "Pomone," by the same author and composer. This found such favour, that the performances of it occupied the theatre for eight months successively. You may be interested to know the number of persons engaged in the execution of a grand opera in those days, in the best. appointed theatre in Europe. The company consisted of five male and four female principal performers, of a chorus of fifteen, and an orchestra of thirteen! The prosperity of the undertaking, despite its privileges and the public support it found, was short-lived, and brought suddenly to an end by the intrigues of a musician, then young |