During all this period song, as we have tried to show, was under a cloud. It was the aria, illegitimate child of the _stile rappresentativo_ and dearest daughter of sunny Italy, that held sway over the nations. Vocal music was commonly thought in terms of the aria. All else was little better than a diversion for an idle moment--understood, of course, that we are speaking of polite culture. What aria meant to the seventeenth and especially to the early eighteenth century was chiefly vocal display of one sort or another. But formally we may distinguish it by the _da capo_ form. _Da capo_, meaning ‘from the beginning,’ was the open sesame into the mazes of vocalization. Monteverdi must get the credit for it. He lit the fire. Numerous rubbish piled on by other hands furnished the smoke. For Monteverdi was, above and beyond the innovator in him, a skilled and sensitive musician. He felt, and felt truly, that the _stile rappresentativo_ made his beloved music decidedly a second best. Very well to reveal the emotional qualities of the text! But if the music cannot itself hang together there is something wrong. And it was with one of those very keen and very simple devices that Monteverdi righted matters. ‘Represent’ your text to your heart’s content, he said, but before you have done go back and sing a little of the beginning over again. Thus you give the musician a chance; for you mark off the music as something having its own architecture. And, moreover, you ‘represent’ all the more truly, for you mark off at the same time the lyrical emotion and make a musical unit of what is properly also a unit of drama. This Monteverdi did in simplest terms in the first of arias--‘Ariadne’s Lament,’ in his opera _Arianna_, and this same Lament, it is recorded, very properly moved the audience to tears. The aria is beautiful still. Monteverdi’s dissonances have not lost their emotional expressive value. And the _da capo_ repetition, which enters so unobtrusively, underscores the emotion as nothing else could. But Monteverdi was not the inventor of this form. Needless to say the folk-song had been there before him. And, as always happens, when the art of the people had been commandeered for a single well-chosen one of its treasures, it gave gold where silver had been asked.