1 | From Renaissance to Baroque

“Why cause words to be sung by four or five voices so that they cannot be distinguished, when the ancient Greeks aroused the strongest passions by means of a single voice supported by a lyre? Renounce counterpoint . . . and return to simplicity!”

A Florentine critic, 1581

The madrigal, we saw in Chapter 7, was the most “advanced” form in late Renaissance music. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the search for expression led madrigal composers to increasingly extreme — even weird — kinds of word painting. Previously taboo dissonances and rhythmic contrasts were explored to illustrate emotional texts in a more and more exaggerated fashion. The fluid High Renaissance style broke down.

At the same time, a reaction set in against the madrigal. In Florence, an influential group of intellectuals mounted an attack on the madrigalists’ favorite technique, word painting. It was artificial and childish, they said, and the many voices of a madrigal ensemble could not focus feeling or express it strongly.

True emotionality could be projected only by a single human agent, an individual, a singer who would learn from great actors how to move an audience to laughter, anger, or tears. A new style of solo singing was developed, recitative, that aimed to join together features of music and speech. This led inevitably to the stage and, as we shall see, to opera. Invented in Florence around 1600, opera became one of the greatest and most characteristic products of the Baroque imagination.