re they found their Moses. It was the gradual growth
of skill in musical expression that brought the way into sight, and that
growth had to be effected by natural and logical processes, not by the
discovery or by the world-moving genius of any one composer.

The Doric architecture of the frottola had to be developed into the
Italian Renaissance style of the madrigal by the ripening of the craft
of composers in adapting the music of ecclesiastical polyphony to the
communication of worldly thought. Then the Renaissance style had to lose
itself in the baroque struggles of the final period of the madrigal
drama--struggles of artistic impulse against an impossible style of
structure and the uncultivated taste of the auditors. Then and then only
was the time for revolt and the revolt came.

In the meanwhile we may remark that the intense theatricalism of opera
ought never to be a source of astonishment to any one who has studied
the history of its origins. The supreme trait of the lyric drama of the
fifteenth and sixteenth century was its spectacular quality. The reforms
of Galilei and Caccini were, as we shall see, aimed at this condition.
Their endeavors to escape the contrapuntal music of the madrigal drama
were the labors of men consciously confronting conditions which had been
surely, if not boldly, moving toward their own rectification. The
madrigal opera was intrinsically operatic, but it was not yet freed from
the restrictions of impersonality from which its parent, the polyphony
of the church, could not logically rid itself even with the aid of a
Palestrina's genius. We must then follow this line of later development.

CHAPTER XI

The Predominance of the Spectacular

Throughout the fifteenth century the lyric drama of Italy continued to
be a denizen of courts and to be saturated with what has been called the
"passionate sensualism" of the Italian genius. The rivalry of lords,
spiritual and temporal, of popes, of dukes and princes, in the luxury of
their fetes was a salient phenomenon of the time. The lyric drama became
a field for gorgeous display and its pomp and circumstance included not
only elegant song, but considerable assemblies of instruments, dazzling
ballets, pantomimic exhibitions, elaborate stage machinery, imported
singers and instrumentalists. As the painters had represented popes and
potentates mingling with the holy family at the sacred manger, so the
lyric dramatists assembled the gods an