then, emotion in music became a hot topic. The theorist Gioseffo Zarlino, in his 1558 text Le istitutioni harmoniche, instructed composers to use “cheerful harmonies and fast rhythms for cheerful subjects and sad harmonies and grave rhythms for sad subjects.” Zarlino went on: “When a composer wishes to express effects of grief and sorrow, he should (observing the rules given) use movements which proceed through the semitone, the semiditone, and similar intervals”—a reference to the sinuous chromatic scale, which had long been discouraged as musically erroneous but which in these years became a modish thing. Various scholars promoted the idea of a stile moderno, or “modern style”—music strong in feeling, alert to the nuances of texts, attentive to the movement of a singing voice.
The passions of the late Renaissance primed the scene for opera, which emerged in Italy just before 1600. In the decades leading up to that breakthrough, the great laboratory of musical invention was the madrigal—a secular polyphonic genre that allowed for much experiment in the blending of word and tone. While early madrigals tended to be straightforwardly songful, later ones were at times willfully convoluted, comparable in spirit to Mannerist painting. High-minded patrons encouraged innovation, even an avant-garde mentality; the dukes of Ferrara commissioned a repertory of musica secreta, or “secret music.” The arch-magus of musical Mannerism was Carlo Gesualdo, a nobleman-composer who put forward some of the most harmonically peculiar music of the premodern epoch. His madrigal Moro lasso—“I die, alas, in my grief”—begins with a kaleidoscopic sequence of chords pinned to a four-note chromatic slide; Dolcissima mia vita ends with a briar patch of chromatic lines around the words “I must love you or die.” The words are ironic in light of Gesualdo’s personal history: in 1590, he discovered his wife in bed with another man and had both of them slaughtered.
The madrigal fad spread to England, where Elizabethan intellectuals were raising their own banners of independence. Drowning oneself in sorrow was one way of resisting the outward hierarchy of late-Renaissance society, the beehive ideal of each human worker performing his assigned task. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was first performed around 1601, is the obvious case in point. The grief of the Prince of Denmark shines like a grim lantern on Claudius’s rotten kingdom, exposing not only Hamlet’s private loss but the hollowness of all human affairs: “I have that within, which passeth show; / These, but the trappings and the suits of woe.” Music was a favorite site for brooding in the Danish style. The composer Thomas Morley set down some guidelines in his 1597 textbook A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke: “If [the subject] be lamentable, the note must goe in slow and heavy motions, as semibriefs, briefs, and such like … Where your dittie speaketh of descending, lowenes, depth, hell, and others such, you must make your musick descend.” This echoed Zarlino’s literal-minded directive of 1558. In Elizabethan England, an inordinate number of ditties spoke of lowness, depth, and hell, leaving the heavenly register somewhat neglected.
The supreme melancholic among English composers was the lutenist John Dowland. Like so many of his international colleagues, Dowland indulged in chromatic esoterica, but he also showed a songwriter’s flair for hummable phrases: his lute piece Lachrimae, or Tears, achieved hit status across Europe in the last years of the sixteenth century. When, in 1600, Dowland published his Second Book of Songs, he included a vocal version of Lachrimae, with words suitable for a Hamlet soliloquy:
Flow my tears, fall from your springs,
Exil’d forever let me mourn
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.
The first four notes of the melody have a familiar ring: they traverse the same intervals—whole tone, whole tone, semitone—that usher in Ockeghem’s “Fors seulement.” Underscoring the personal significance of the theme, Dowland made it the leitmotif of his 1604 cycle of pieces for viol consort, also titled Lachrimae.
In Dowland’s instrumental masterpiece, no reason for the flow of tears is given, no biblical or literary motive. Music becomes self-sufficient, taking its own expressive power as its subject. Lachrimae could have been cited as an illustration in Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, which meditates on music’s capacity to conquer all human defenses: “Speaking without a mouth, it exercises domination over the soul, and carries it beyond itself, helps, elevates, extends it.” Music might inject melancholy into an otherwise happy temperament, Burton concedes, but it is a “pleasing melancholy.” That phrase encapsulates Dowland’s aesthetic. His forlorn songs have about them an air of luxury, as if sadness were a place of refuge far from the hurly-burly, a twilight realm where time stops for a while. The Lachrimae tune becomes, in a way, the anthem of the eternally lonely man. Indeed, as the musicologist Peter Holman points out, Dowland anticipated Burton’s thought in the preface to his collection: “No doubt pleasant are the tears which Musicke weepes.”
It has long been understood that music has the ability to stir feelings for which we do not have a name. The neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, in his book Music, Language, and the Brain, lays out myriad relationships between music and speech, and yet he allows that “musical sounds can evoke emotions that speech sounds cannot.” The dream of a private kingdom beyond the grasp of ordinary language seems to have been crucial for the process of self-fashioning that so preoccupied Renaissance intellectuals: through music, one could make an autonomous, unknowable self that stood apart from the order of things. In a wider sense, Dowland forecast the untrammeled emotionalism of the Romantic era, and even the moodier dropout anthems of the 1960s, the likes of “Nowhere Man” and “Desolation Row.” As Oscar Wilde wrote of Hamlet, “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.”
OPERA
In 1589, Ferdinando de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, married Christine of Lorraine. The duke had acquired his title two years earlier, after the sudden demise of his older brother, Francesco. Modern analysis has confirmed what rumor long held: Francesco died of arsenic poisoning. Against this suitably sinister backdrop the art of opera arose. For decades, Medici festivities had offered dramatic musical interludes within a larger theatrical presentation. These intermedi, as they were called, grew ever more extravagant as the century went on, serving, in the words of the poet Giovanni Battista Strozzi the Younger, to “stun the beholder with their grandeur.” The play accompanied the music rather than the other way around. The writers and composers of Florence eventually decided to let the music run continuously. It was a new kind of sung drama, modeled on the theater of ancient Greece.
The first true opera was apparently Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, presented in Florence in 1598, with a text by Ottavio Rinuccini. Two years later, for another Medici wedding, Peri set Rinuccini’s Euridice, telling of the unhappy adventures of the poet and musician Orpheus. In a preface to the score, Peri announced the ascendancy of “a new manner of song,” through which grief and joy would speak forth with unusual immediacy. Peri’s chief rival, the singer-composer Giulio Caccini, wrote an opera on the same Euridice libretto not long after, and managed to get his version into print first. Claudio Monteverdi, an ambitious younger composer from Cremona, trumped them both with his five-act opera Orfeo, which had its premiere in 1607, at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua, and which still holds the stage more than four centuries later.
Without the lament, opera might never have caught fire. The story of Orpheus is little more than a string of lamentations: the bard bewails the loss of Euridice, goes down into the underworld to rescue her (his plaint wins Hades over), and then, with one ill-timed backward glance, loses her again. Both Euridice operas, despite their tacked-on happy endings, perform familiar gestures of musical weeping. Peri briefly applies the falling four-note figure to Orpheus’s words “Chi mi t’ha tolto, ohime” (“Who has torn you from
