The
names of Bernardo Tasso and Torquato Tasso might be added.
It is not impossible, also, that the musical debt of the world to Italy
is in a measure owing to Horace. Whether the music which accompanied the
_Odes_ as they emerged from the Middle Age was only the invention of
monks, or the survival of actual Horatian music from antiquity, is a
question hardly to be answered; but the setting of Horace to music in
the Renaissance was not without an influence. In 1507, Tritonius
composed four-voice parts for twenty-two different meters of Horace and
other poets. In 1526, Michael engaged in the same effort, and in 1534
Senfl developed the youthful compositions of Tritonius. All this was for
school purposes. With the beginnings of Italian opera, these
compositions, in which the music was without measure and held strictly
to the service of poetry, came to an end. It is not unreasonable to
suspect that in these early attempts at the union of ancient verse and
music there exist the beginnings of the musical drama.
_ii_. IN FRANCE
France, where the great majority of Horatian manuscripts were preserved,
was the first to produce a translation of the _Odes_.
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