Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

FIG. 19-8 Caccini’s Aria di romanesca from Le nuove musiche (1601).
The birth of new music out of the spirit of old drama was (like everything else that seems sudden in
history) a gradual thing, with phases unrepresented in written sources. The first extant continuo songs that
were performed in the course of a stage spectacle were the ones in the 1589 intermedii. But they
undoubtedly had precedents. As early as the late fifteenth century we hear tell of musicalized dramatic
presentations at the northern Italian courts. A Fabula di Orfeo, a dramatic representation of the same tale
from Ovid that would form the basis of the earliest published musical plays, was composed by the Medici
court poet Angelo Poliziano and performed, at least partly sung, during the 1480 carnival season in
Mantua. Poliziano (or Politian, as humanistically Latinized) also collaborated with Lorenzo de’ Medici
on a sacred play (SS. Giovanni e Paolo) that was performed with music by Henricus Isaac, Lorenzo’s
Flemish-born music master, in Florence itself, the eventual hotbed of the “monodic revolution.” Between
the 1589 intermedii that he masterminded and his own Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo of 1600,