These considerations are adduced to justify the importance attached by me to the episode of which Palestrina was the hero.  Yet it should not be forgotten that other influences were at work at the same time in Italy, which greatly stimulated the advance of music.  If space permitted, it would be interesting to enlarge upon the work of Luca Marenzio, the prince of madrigal-writers, and on the services rendered by Vincenzo Galileo, father of the greatest man of science in his age, in placing the practice of stringed instruments on a sound basis.  It should also be remembered that in the society of Filippo Neri at Rome, the Oratorio was taking shape, and emerging from the simple elements of the Spiritual Laud and Aria Divota.  This form, however, would certainly have perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.

There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence, which deserves some detailed mention.  A private academy of amateurs and artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical declamation of the Greeks.  As the new ecclesiastical style created by Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the Classical Revival.  The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces.  It was now, much later in the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt.  Their quest was vague and visionary.  Nothing remained of Greek or Roman music.  To guide these explorers, there was only a dim instinct that the ancients had declaimed dramatic verse with musical intonation.  But, as the alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone, and founded modern chemistry; as, according to an ancient proverb, they who search for silver find gold; so it happened that, from the pedantic and ill-directed attempts of this academy proceeded the system on which the modern Oratorio and Opera were based.  What is noticeable in these experiments is, that a new form of musical expression, declamatory and continuous, therefore dramatic, as opposed to the lyrical and fugal methods of the contrapuntists, was in process of elaboration.  Claudio Monteverde, who may be termed the pioneer of recitativo, in his opera of Orfeo; Giacomo Carissimi, in whose Jephtha the form of the Oratorio it already outlined, were the most eminent masters of the school which took its origin in the Florentine Academy of the Palazzo Vernio.

To pursue the subject further, would be to transgress the chronological limits of my subject.  It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species determined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.  How that art at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be read in an English work of singular ability and originality.[212]