text. After Orpheus finishes his lament, a nymph and various other voices echo him, bemoaning “Cruel death.” Caccini’s version is slower and grander than Peri’s, making more deliberate use of repetition. Seven times the chorus sings the formula “Sospirate, aure celesti, / lagrimate, o selve, o campi” (“Sigh, heavenly breezes / Weep, o forests, o fields”), with four-note laments threaded through the voices. The spaciousness of the sequence seems essentially operatic.
The next step was to back away from aristocratic refinement and incorporate elements of popular song and dance. Spain served as a primary source. Back in 1553, the viol player Diego Ortiz published a set of improvisations over a repeating bass line—a basso ostinato, or ground bass. The art of improvising on an ostinato went back centuries, although it had gone largely undocumented in notated music. When composers finally took hold of it, the effect was exhilarating, as if someone had switched on a rhythmic engine. Renaissance harmony in all its fullness was wedded to the dance. As Richard Taruskin observes, in his Oxford History of Western Music, this mammoth event—the birth of modern tonal language—was a revolution from below. A “great submerged iceberg” of unrecorded traditions, in Taruskin’s phrase, came into view, not least because publishers realized there was money in it.
The chaconne was one such bass-driven dance. The first major composer to impose his personality on the form was the magisterial Italian organist Girolamo Frescobaldi, another beneficiary of the largesse of the dukes of Ferrara. In 1627, Frescobaldi published Partite sopra ciaccona, or Variations on the Chaconne, in which the popular formula is sent through the compositional wringer: the bass line breaks away from its mold, the rhythmic pulse speeds up and slows down, and the harmony darkens several times from major to minor, with a spooky dissonance piercing the texture just before the end. Frescobaldi also wrote Partite on a related ostinato dance, the passacaglia, holding to the minor mode until the very end. (Chaconnes were generally in major keys and passacaglias in minor ones, although composers enjoyed subverting the rule.) A decade later, Frescobaldi upped the ante with his Cento partite, a dazzling sequence of one hundred variations that includes both passacaglias and chaconnes. In the words of the scholar Alexander Silbiger, Cento partite is “a narrative of the flow and unpredictability of human experience.” It deserves comparison with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and other consummate displays of compositional virtuosity.
Monteverdi, the reigning Italian master, appropriated the chaconne at around the same time. Although he held the lofty title of maestro di cappella, or director of music, at the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, he never lost his ear for the music of the streets. A rocketing chaconne propels the 1632 duet Zefiro torna, on a Rinuccini text:
Zephyr returns and blesses the air
with his soft perfume, draws bare feet to the shore,
and, murmuring among the green branches,
makes the flowers dance in the meadows to his pretty tune.
The buoyant rhythm neatly captures Rinuccini’s springtime imagery. The voices imitate one another and tease against the beat, like dancers weaving around a maypole. In the final lines, the sonnet takes a surprising turn: the protagonist of the poem reveals himself to be a disconsolate loner, singing and weeping over the absence of two fair eyes. And the bouncing beat gives way to a heaving lament. As in Lorca’s flamenco, sobs and kisses, pleasure and anguish, coincide.
Zefiro torna was a certifiable hit of the 1630s, grabbing the attention of many rival composers. Monteverdi deployed ostinato basses in several other pieces, most memorably in Lamento della ninfa, or Lament of the Nymph, which he published in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, of 1638. In an introduction to the volume, Monteverdi declared that he wished to give a complete musical picture of what he called the three passions—“anger, temperance, and humility or supplication.” Anger, he said, had never been properly depicted in music before, and he proudly underlined the groundbreaking achievement of his “madrigals of war.” But the Lamento is no less inventive in the way it goes about illustrating the third passion, that of the humbled soul. A solo female voice, representing a distraught nymph, sings a plaint—
Let my love return to me
as he was before
or take me then and kill me
so I rack myself no more.
—while three male voices paraphrase her woe (“unhappy one, ah, no more, she cannot suffer so much ice”). The bass line follows the classic lamenting shape. The notes A-G-F-E are heard thirty-four times in succession, never yielding.
The ostinato in Zefiro torna exudes a giddy, carefree air. The one in Lamento della ninfa is different. First, obsessive repetition focuses and magnifies the melancholy affect of the stepwise descent. Indeed, as the musicologist Ellen Rosand maintains, this work made the association almost official; the falling motif became an “emblem of lament,” one that composers employed consciously, with reference to Monteverdi’s model. Second, the ostinato has a symbolic function, carrying a tinge of psychological compulsion. The voice keeps tugging against the bass line, pushing upward, stretching its phrases beyond the two-bar unit, giving rise to dissonant clashes, breaking down into chromatic steps. The implacability of the bass suggests that these attempts at escape are in vain. Instead, the piece ends in a mood of shattered acquiescence, as the voice subsides to the note from which it began. Even so, there is no denying the seduction of repetition, the psychic pull of the circling motion. The ceremony of lament interrupts the ordinary passage of time, and therefore, paradoxically, holds mortality at bay.
In the early seventeenth century, opera spread across Italy, becoming more of a commercial entertainment in the process. In 1637, one year before Monteverdi published Lamento della ninfa, a touring troupe brought opera to the republic of Venice. The season took place during Carnival, the time of dissolution and self-reinvention. Opera was reborn as a many-layered, stylistically ravenous form, combining lyric tragedy with lewd comedy—the musical counterpart of the high-low drama of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Mythological subjects took on a modern edge; castrato singers flamboyantly restyled classical heroes; star divas enacted scenes of madness and lament; and a diverse public showed lusty approval. For the remainder of the century, up to five theaters were operating in Venice at one time, drawing an audience that included not only the upper crust but also courtesans, tourists, well-born students, and a smattering of ordinary people. In Ellen Rosand’s words, “opera as we know it assumed its definitive identity.”
Monteverdi was nearly seventy when opera came to Venice, but the phenomenon allowed him to experience a second youth. His two surviving late operas, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea, revel in extreme emotions, oscillating between suicidal angst and orgiastic joy. The two extant scores of Poppea—a drama of lust and greed in the high Roman Empire—both end with a disarmingly blissful duet between Nero and his lover Poppea, “Pur ti miro” (“I gaze upon you”), over a caressing major-key ground bass. Although scholars now believe that this duet was added by another composer, it communicates the heady allure of opera in its early days.
When Monteverdi died, in 1643, Francesco Cavalli, a gifted protégé, took his place. No less than his mentor had, Cavalli shaped the opera genre as we know it today, perfecting the transition from speechlike recitative to fully lyrical arioso singing. He had a particular gift for arias of lament, embedding them in velvety harmonic progressions. An early example appears in the 1640 opera Gli amori d’Apollo edi Dafne, which tells of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree. Toward the end, the god Apollo realizes that his beloved nymph has slipped from his grasp,
