of dramatic music, are merely names to our general public. Present-day
audiences have become conditioned to grand opera -- super-grand opera,
if you will -- and for the majority the attraction of the form lies in its
melodramatic and spectacular elements.

The three centuries from the time of Jacopo Peri to the best productive
years of Richard Strauss -- the period with which MAKERS OF OPERA deals
-- mark a distinct era in the history of musical culture. This began with
the discovery of the human voice as a solo rather than a choral vehicle,
passed through the art of bel canto, which enabled composers to portray
human feeling with an expressiveness hitherto unsuspected, and wound
up in the present conception of the voice as something akin to an orches-
tral instrument. And just as music printing was perfected by Petrucci
around 1500, in the earliest years of the art, so did lyric drama reach
lofty heights during the first decade of its existence, when Monteverdi
invested the aria with an eloquence that gave rise to the term musica par-
lante and devised such techniques as pizzicato and tremolo, which became
standard effects of the orchestra.

When solo voices and instruments were combined to produce dramma
per musica, opera was born. From the beginning, the performances were
lavish and the patrons necessarily affluent, for opera was staged as much
to enhance the glory of the backer -- usually a king, nobleman or prince
of the church -- as for his personal pleasure. At the same time, the upper
classes of Baroque society were eager to display their power, and the peo-
ple were sometimes invited to attend operatic productions. By the mid-
seventeenth century, public opera houses had opened in Venice. Soon
afterward, they appeared in Naples.

Alessandro Scarlatti developed the Neapolitan school which perfected
the aria and crystallized the da capo convention. This Sicilian genius
thoroughly understood the voice and treated it as idiomatically as Chopin
did the piano -- a point that may well be stressed. The vocal parts of Bach
and Beethoven are often ungrateful. Musically, the ideas are justified;
practically, they are unsuited to the human instrument. Scarlatti never
wrote a passage that did not "sound," though without sacrificing musical
values.

Lully was the musical incarnation of Louis XIV. His was a truly regal
style, of which his overtures are the perfect manifestation. His supreme

-viii-