In addition to this combination of singing and acting, the tenson or poetic debate (which was one form of the troubadour songs, and one very often acted by the jongleurs) probably also did its part towards giving stability to this new art form.  The earliest specimen of it, in its purely secular aspect, is a small work entitled “Robin et Marian,” by Adam de la Hale, a well-known troubadour (called “the humpback,” born at Arras in the south of France in 1240), who followed in the train of that ferocious Duke Charles of Anjou, who beheaded Konradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, in 1268, and Manfred, both of them minnesingers.

As the Mystery was the direct ancestor of our oratorio, so was the little pastoral of Adam de la Hale the germ of the modern French vaudeville.  One of its melodies is said to be sung to this day in some parts of southern France.

The entire object in this little play being that both words and action should be perfectly understood, it is obvious that as little as possible should be going on during the singing.  Thus, such melodies as we find in these old pastoral plays would be accompanied by short notes, serving merely to give the pitch and tonality, which would gradually develop into chords, thus laying the foundation for harmony.

If, on the other hand, we look at the “church play” of the same period, the Mystery, and remember that it was sung by men accustomed to singing the organum of Hucbald, we have a clue as to what it was and what it led up to.  For while one part or voice of the music would give a melody (copied from or at any rate resembling the Gregorian chant or the sequences of Notker of Tubilo), the other voices would sing songs in the vernacular, and, strangest of all, one voice would repeat some Latin word, or even a “nonsense word” (to use Edward Lear’s term) but much more slowly than the other voices.  Thus the needs of the Mystery were as well met by incipient counterpoint on the one hand, as, on the other, the secular song-play engendered the sense of harmony.

That the early secular forerunner of opera, as represented by “Robin et Marian,” was still, to a certain degree, controlled by the church is clear if we remember that at that time the only methods of noting music were entirely in the hands of the clergy.  The notation for the lute, for instance, was invented about 1460 to 1500.  Thus, we can say that the recording of secular music was not free from church influence until some time after the sixteenth century.

This primitive “opera” music was thus fettered by difficulty of notation and the influence of the ecclesiastical rules until perhaps about 1600, when the first real opera began to find a place in Italy.  Jacopo Peri and Caccini were among the first workers in the comparatively new form, and they both took the same subject, Eurydice.  Of the former the following two short excerpts will suffice; the first is where Orpheus bewails his fate; in the second he expresses his joy at bringing Eurydice back to earth.  Caccini’s opera was perhaps the first to introduce the many useless ornaments that, up to the middle of this century, were characteristic of Italian opera.