and with most lucid reasons determined me to place no value upon
that music which makes it impossible to understand the words and
thus to destroy the unity and meter, sometimes lengthening the
syllables, sometimes shortening them in order to suit the
counterpoint--a real mangling of the poetry--but to hold fast to
that principle so greatly extolled by Plato and other philosophers:
'Let music be first of all language and rhythm and secondly tone,'
but not vice versa, and moreover to strive to force music into the
consciousness of the hearer and create there those impressions so
admirable and so much praised by the ancients, and to produce which
modern music through its counterpoint is impotent. Especially true
is this of solo singing with the accompaniment of a stringed
instrument when the words are not understood because of the
immoderate introduction of passages."

This, he declares, can only extort applause of the "crowd" and such
music can only result in mere tickling of the ear, because when the text
is not intelligible there can be no appeal to the understanding.

"The idea came to me to introduce a style of music which makes it
possible in a certain manner to speak musically by employing, as
already said, a certain noble subordination of the song, with now
and then some dissonances, while however holding the chord by means
of the sustained bass, except when I follow the already common
custom of assigning the middle voices to the accompanying
instrument for the purpose of increasing the effect, for which
purpose alone they are, in my opinion, appropriate."

He now tells us that, after he found that his principle stood the tests
of practice and he was satisfied that in the new style lay a power to
touch hearts far beyond that possessed by polyphony, he wrote certain
madrigals for the solo voice in the manner described, which manner
"I hereafter used for the representations in Florence." Then he went to
Rome where the dilettanti, particularly Lione Strozzi, gathered at the
house of Nero Neri, expressed themselves enthusiastically about the new
revelation of the power of solo song to move the heart. These amateurs
became convinced that there was no longer any satisfaction to be drawn
from the old way of singing the soprano part of madrigals and turning
the other parts into an instrumental accompaniment.

Caccini went back to Florence and continued to set canzonettas. He s