reeked
with carnage, rapine, murder, fire and famine. So great was the force of
all this that the people fell into a state of religious terror. They
believed that the vengeance of a wrathful God must immediately descend
upon the country, and as a penance the practice of flagellation was
introduced.

Against this horrible atonement came a violent reaction, and out of the
reaction attempts to continue in a soberer and more rational form the
propitiatory ideas of the flagellants. The chief furtherers of these
reforms were lay fraternities, calling themselves Disciplinati di Gesu
Cristo. From the very outset these fraternities practised the singing of
hymns in Italian, instead of Latin, the church language. These hymns
dealt chiefly with the Passion. They were called "Lauds" and they had a
rude directness and unlettered force which the Latin hymns never
possessed. Presently the disciplinati became known as Laudesi. The
master maker of "Lauds" was Jacopone da Todi and his most significant
production took the form of a dialogue between Mary and the Savior on
the cross, followed by the lamentation of the mother over her Son. Mary
at one point appeals to Pilate, but is interrupted by the chorus of
Jews, crying "Crucify him!" Many other "Lauds," however, were rather
more in the manner of short songs than in that of the subsequently
developed cantata. The music employed was without doubt that of the
popular songs of the time. It appears to have made no difference to the
Italians what kind of tune they employed. They "sang the same strambotti
to the Virgin and the lady of their love, to the rose of Jericho and the
red rose of the balcony."

Here, then, we find a significant difference between the liturgical
drama and the sacred representations. The chant, which was the musical
garb of the former appears to have had no position in the latter. We
shall perceive later that this difference marked a point of departure
from which the entire lyric drama of the fourteenth, fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, prior to the invention of dramatic recitative by
the Florentines, proceeded to move in a musical world of its own.

The sacred representations built up a method complex and pregnant
without chancing upon the defining element of opera. And this result was
reached chiefly, if not solely, because the ecclesiastic chant was not
employed. In its stead the musical forms practised by composers of
secular music and adopted by musicians of