Some Forerunners of Italian OperaHenderson, W. J. (William James)
History
Some Forerunners of Italian Opera
Henderson, W. J. (William James)
Opera -- Italy
We have already inquired into the nature of the instrument which Baccio
Ugolino carried on the stage and with which after the manner of the
minstrels of his time he accompanied himself. It remains now only to ask
what was the pipe which the shepherd Aristaeus mentions in the first
scene. It was probably not a flageolet, though that instrument suggests
itself as particularly appropriate to the episode. But the good Dr.
Burney says that the flageolet was invented by the Sieur Juvigny, who
played it in the "Ballet Comique de la Royne," the first French pastoral
opera, in 1581. It could have been a recorder, the ancestor of the
flageolet, which was probably in use in the fourteenth and surely in the
fifteenth century. But more probably it was one of the older reed
instruments of the oboe family, the pommer or possibly a schalmei. The
schalmei is mentioned as far back as Sebastian Virdung's "Musica
getuscht und ausgezogen" (1511). Its ancestor was probably the
zamr-el-kebyr, an Oriental reed instrument. The schalmei was developed
into a whole family, enumerated by Praetorius in the work already
mentioned. The highest of these, the little schalmei, was seldom used,
but the "soprano schalmei is the primitive type of the modern oboe."[29]
[Footnote 29: See "A Note on Oboes," by Philip Hale. Programme
Books of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, season of 1905-06,
p. 644.]
It is thus tolerably certain that the instrumental tone used to voice
the pastoral character of the scene was the same as that which Beethoven
used in his "Pastoral" symphony, as Berlioz used in his "Fantastic," as
Gounod used in his "Faust," and that thus at least one element of the
instrumental embodiment of Poliziano's story has come down to us.
CHAPTER X
From Frottola Drama to Madrigal
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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