Giulio Caccini in the preface of his Le nuove musiche emphasizes that music is not meant to be “preventing any clear understanding of the words, shatters both their form and content, now lengthening and now shortening the syllables to accommodate the counterpoint...” but to “conform to that manner so lauded by Plato and other philosophers (who declared that music is naught but speech, with rhythm and tone coming after; not vice versa) with the aim that it enter into the minds of men and have those wonderful effects admired by the great writers.”[1] He therefore introduces a kind of music in which one could almost speak in tones, employing in it “a certain noble negligence of song [sprezzatura], sometimes transgressing by [allowing] several dissonances while maintaining the bass note...”. And then he goes on to speak at considerable length about vocal ornamentation. However it should be taken into consideration that while discussing ornamentation Caccini speaks from the viewpoints of three different kinds of persons – composer, singer and voice teacher. Thus, as Hitchcock puts it, “to understand the nature and application of Cassini’s principles of vocal ornamentation, we must separate these alter egos, for we must be clear about when Caccini is explaining what he has composed, when he is explaining how to interpret what he as composed, ad when he is describing how her trains the voice.”[2]In his preface to Le nuove musiche Caccini complained that other singers had not followed his precepts for improvised ornamentation and that his songs had been ‘tattered and torn’ by them. Accordingly, although his essay is full of enlightening advice on how gracefully to elaborate a song, he actually wrote out in the music of Le nuove musiche most of the embellishments formerly improvised. The incorporation into writing of much of the vocal ornaments that used to be improvised was one of the greatest innovations of Caccini, although he emphasized it only in his collection of 1614 – “the ‘new way of writing it’ of the title meaning ‘exactly as it is sung’.”[3]
Although Caccini’s name is inextricably linked to the creation of the first Florentine operas and although his setting of Euridice was the first such opera ever to be published, Caccini should primarily be viewed as a composer of songs. Limiting himself for the most part to ‘music for a solo voice, to a simple string instrument’, Caccini shaped the vocal part so as to ‘almost speak in tones’, partly through a somewhat declamatory setting of the words, partly through a very sensitive reflection of the poem's structure, and partly through a very flexible approach to rhythm and tempo. The accompanying instrumental part he indicated as a bass line but one conceived more as an underpinning of the voice than as a melodic counterpart: in all three of his publications he explained this indirectly in terms of allowing ‘false’ intervals (i.e. dissonances) between the voice part and the bass to go unresolved. The bass was to be harmonized in an improvisatory manner. Caccini indicated the harmonies with the shorthand method of figures that organists had developed earlier as a means of doubling accurately the vocal parts of motets and other choral works. But in Caccini's songs there is only one vocal part, and the bass is largely independent of it; thus he was one of the first to write a true basso continuo, and in his songs the ‘pseudo-monody’ gave way to true monody, with the vocal line largely sprung from its contrapuntal framework.
One of Caccini's proudest boasts was that his new style had more power to ‘move the affect of the soul’ than others – to achieve, that is, the highest aim of music according to the thought of the Camerata (and thereafter of the whole Baroque era). Another aim, however, was to ‘delight the senses’, and in late 16th-century vocal music this was often sought through various kinds of improvised ornamentation. Caccini incorporated the most spectacular of these – passaggi (divisions, diminutions) – into his monody but limited them mostly to accented syllables of the verse and to cadences at the ends of lines of text. He thus brought the virtuoso's art of embellishment into line with the Camerata's ideals of a speech-dominated song, ‘speech’ in this case being equated with the accentual and structural integrity of the poem.
In Le nuove musiche, Caccini speaks only once about teaching when he discusses the trillo and the gruppo (his terms for the tremolo and the trill respectively). The rule for the tremolo that he observes is the one that “begins with the first quarter-note, then restrike each note with the throat on the vowel a, up to the final double whole-note; and likewise the trill.”[4] This passage is obviously that of a teacher, not that of a composer or a singer. Caccini is illustrating a rule by which he trains his students’ voices to achieve the proper speedy articulation of the two ornaments.
Tremolos and trills are basically cadential ornaments. In one of the two model songs Caccini includes in his preface (a setting of Chiabrera’s madrigal “Deh, dov son fuggiti”), which he furnishes liberally with indications of ornamentation (unlike the songs of the collection proper), tremolos are suggested at three or four cadences in which the voice falls by step to the tonic note. In the body of the collection, however, not a single cadential tremolo is indicated, and the interpreter may add one whenever the voice fall from the second degree to the tonic. Cadential trills, on the other hand, are written into the music – in fact, at every single cadence where the voice rises from the leading note to the tonic. This difference in the treatment of the two cadential ornaments – one left for the interpreter to add and the other indicated explicitly (if symbolically) by the composer – leads us to inquire which of the many other ornaments discussed, illustrated or mentioned in the preface to Nuove musiche may be read in his songs and which must be read into them. Caccini speaks of several devices involving sonorous expressivity, as would a vocal coach. However, they are almost never indicated in his songs, and the interpreter must add them. They are l’intonazione della voce, l’escamazione, and il crescere e scemare della voce. Caccini discusses a number of other vocal ornamental devices in his preface. The question that arises here is whether they are written into his songs or whether they are to be added.
In his preface, Caccini explained at least four principal ways in which his strophic arias were new and differed from those of his contemporaries. In the first place, Caccini claimed that he set better poetry than most other composers of canzonettas. The majority of his arias are based on poems by either of Rinuccini or Chiabrera. Secondly, he claimed that he coordinated his embellishments with the words and with the ideas behind the words much more skillfully than his contemporaries did. Thirdly, he explained that he sometimes moved his melodies in dissonance against the bass, so that the bass lines were no longer so closely tied to the rhythms of the melody. In his strophic arias, Caccini did write more independent bass lines than his contemporaries. But in fact, there is scarcely a place for expressive dissonances or a really independent bass in most of Caccini’s strophic arias, which are set for the most part to cheerful and emotionally neutral poetry. When he needed to, especially in his madrigals, Caccini went to far greater lengths than he did in his arias to make the bass more independent of the melody and to violate the rules of 16th-century counterpoint for expressive reasons. And finally, Caccini claimed that his Nuove musiche exemplified a new manner of notating songs. He must simply have meant that he wrote out all his embellishments and that he published his monodies with a basso continuo and without inner parts. He boasted that with his new way of writing out music, “all the delicacies of this art can be learned without having to hear the composer sing.”[5]
One of the Le nuove musiche songs published in the Brussels 704 manuscript, Perfidissimo volto, seems to confirm Caccini’s complaint that singers were ruining his songs primarily by adding excessive ornamentation. Similarly, the final cadence of Dovro dunque morire is more ornamented in Brussels 704 than in the print. In fact, the Brussels 704 versions of Caccini’s songs are actually much simpler than those published. Caccini’s claim to have improved upon earlier ornamentation practices must therefore be examined carefully. He may have paid attention to the ideals of Bardi’s camerata, but he was first and foremost a singer, and apparently one who delighted in showing off his talents to an appreciative audience. Thus he seems to have sought a compromise between the camerata’s asceticism and his own natural flamboyance. To be fair to Caccini, however, he employs ornamentation much more discriminately than may have been the norm, usually reserving it for the appropriate (long) syllables with due regard for the presentation of the text. His patterns of ornamentation are also more refined and more subtle than those to be found in most earlier ornamentation treatises. Finally, it must be said that although most of the Brussels 704 songs are much simpler than their printed counterparts, there is no guarantee that they would have been so in performance, given a singer seeking to add ornamentation whenever and wherever possible.
Many of the differences between the versions of a song in Brussels 704 and Le nuove musiche can be seen as examples of how Caccini might have tidied up his compositions for publication. In the print, the delivery of the text is much tauter (through the speeding up the short syllables and using dotted rhythms) and the rather four-square rhythmic patterns found in the manuscript are more elegantly shaped to give a subtler grace, or sprezzatura, to the melody. Similarly, Caccini generally adds written embellishments and provides long notes for esclamazioni and other such vocal effects that he expected the singer to employ. The vocal line is often estranged from the bass, whereas in the manuscript they are, most of the time, moving closely together – a tendency that might have been inherited from earlier solo songs. The more obvious consecutives are avoided. The bass lines themselves are more effective, particularly through increased use of first inversion chords. Caccini also gives some interest to the bass at cadences to emphasize their importance to the whole structure. In addition, in Le nuove musiche Caccini often writes out a repeat of the second section, whereas in the manuscript the repeat is only indicated by a sign or omitted altogether. Sometimes, and especially in Amarilli mia bella to marvelous effect, he also adds an extended final cadence.
One conclusion that might be drawn from the above arguments is that Caccini’s songs would hardly allow for further ornamentations than what is written out. Such additions merely destroy the subtle balance between decoration and declamation achieved by Caccini; they also deny the composer his “new way” of writing music, “as it is sung.” Another conclusion to be drawn relates to the puzzling plain character of most of the manuscript versions of his songs. Most of them are virtually bare of any decorations, merely skeletons. This might be explained by the fact that most of these manuscripts left the improvisational ornamentations to the singers, and they performed the songs badly, according to Caccini, with a multitude of passaggi and using other ornaments indiscriminately, which possibly prompted Caccini to his “new way of writing music” and to the embodiment in print of his new kind of virtuoso song.
[2] H. Wiley Hitchcock, Vocal Ornamentation in Caccini’s Nuove Musiche
[3] Hitchcock, Caccini’s “Other” Nuove musiche
[4] Grove Music Online, Works of Giulio Romolo Caccini
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