[Illustration: Great Singers of the Past. Top: Pauline Viardot-García and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient Bottom: Adelina Patti and Jenny Lind] In Italy, where the change from the old style to the new was most marked and dramatic, the art-song grew gradually out of the madrigal and part-song. While we have no traces of the folk-song of the sixteenth century, we know that composers began to write their part-songs in the folk-spirit. This meant, besides the predominance of the major mode and the tonic feeling, a stressing of the upper or ‘melody’ voice, whereas in the older contrapuntal music it was the tenor which carried the chief tune. The _frottolle_ of the time were ballads popular both in words and melody; the _villanelle_, or ‘village songs,’ sought to preserve an artless and rustic flavor; and the _villotte_, or drinking songs, were filled with the high spirits for which the Italians are famous. All these were essentially folk-like melodies treated contrapuntally. Gradually the counterpoint became simpler, reflecting perhaps the growing simplification of church music, and with Perissone Cambio, in 1547, the part-songs assumed the nature of melodies harmonized in four parts with a free use of passing notes--much as in the four-part chorales of J. S. Bach. The simplification continued, and with Giacomo Gastoldi, in 1591, we have true ‘chord-for-note’ harmonizations of melodies in the modern style. With this, the song element has been liberated. The melody has gained complete mastery, and the harmony is used simply to enrich and support the upper part. And as we have seen in another chapter[11] singers quickly seized the import of the new developments. As early as 1539 Sileno is recorded to have sung the upper part of a madrigal, with wind instruments for the lower voices. Of course these madrigals were still essentially polyphonic, but the composers of the time steadily continued to stress the upper voice for its melodic value and to simplify and suppress the inner voices until they became a mere harmonic support. It was this ‘one-voiced madrigal’ which became the parent of the _airs du cour_ and the simple solo songs and romances of seventeenth century France.