But the abortive development of the art-song was an entirely different matter. It had little or nothing to do with the tendency to stress a madrigal melody, or with the liberation of the seventeenth-century romance. The style called monody, or the _stile rappresentativo_, which might have produced a true art-song in the seventeenth century, was invented or revived quite in opposition to the madrigal and its spirit. The one thing it had in common with the new madrigal was the ‘chord-for-note’ harmonic style. This, thanks to the popularity of the new madrigal, had become common property. When the Florentine innovators began their experiments, they found it ready to hand. But the true monodic style was, so far as song is concerned, a wholly abortive affair. Its history has been traced elsewhere.[12] We know of the painful efforts toward monody for nearly two centuries previous to the Florentine experiments; we know of the solo songs of Vincenzo Galilei in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and of the songs in Giulio Caccini’s _Nuovo Musiche_, published in 1600. We dimly feel that a musical style devoted to the conscientious reproduction of the spirit of the words, detail for detail, should have resulted in a vigorous tradition of art-song. And yet we see the whole force of monody veering into the opera, quickly being caught up in the _da capo_ aria form, and in an unbelievably short time forgetting all about its early ideals of textual fidelity and serving only as an exposition gallery for vocal virtuosity. Within a quarter of a century monody had forsaken one ideal for its polar opposite. The true ‘representative style’ had been left high and dry. It remained neglected and forgotten until Beethoven wrote _An die ferne Geliebte_, or Schubert his _Gretchen am Spinnenrad_.