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Updated: June 6, 2025
The famous vocalist and teacher, Caccini, although he taught his pupils how to sing trills and roulades, declared that they were not essential to good singing, but merely a means of tickling the ear, and, therefore, generally to be avoided.
This was founded upon the same basis as the theory of Caccini, which condemned emphatically the indiscriminate employment of swelled tones, exclamatory emphases and other vocal devices. Caccini desired that the employment of all these factors in song should be regulated by the significance of the text. In other words these reformers were fighting a fight not unlike that of Wagner.
Caccini also showed that he was not averse to the lascivious allurements of two female voices moving in elementary harmonies. Here is a passage from a scene between two nymphs upon which rest many hundreds of pages in later Italian operas. This was the immediate predecessor of the well-known "Saliam cantando" in Monteverde's "Orfeo."
In its stead the musical forms practised by composers of secular music and adopted by musicians of such small education as hardly to be worthy of the title of composers, makers of carnival songs and frottole, predominated and determined the musical character not only of the Sacre Rappresentazioni, but also of the secular lyric plays which succeeded them and which continued to exist in Italy even after the "stile rappresentativo" had been introduced in the primitive dramma per musica of Caccini and Peri.
Francesca Caccini was an exponent of the first growth of opera. After her comes a gap, and we find no women at work during the time of Scarlatti, for example, and few in the era when the early conventional opera saw its palmy days in the hands of Cimarosa and his compeers.
If they had paused for a moment to consider that Peri and Caccini chose the same story for the book of their operas, in which the musical departure was even more significant than the dramatic innovation of Poliziano had been, that Monteverde utilized the same theme in his epoch-making "Orfeo," and that for nearly two centuries the poetic and musical suggestiveness of the Orpheus legend made it hold its grip on the affections of composers, they might have realized better the relative value of the achievement of Poliziano.
The opening measures of one of the numbers in the "Nuove Musiche" will serve to show in what manner Caccini developed his theories in practice and equally what close relation this style had to that of the new dramatic recitative. In the preface to his score of "Euridice" Peri has set forth his ideas about recitative.
Here, then, we have a clear statement of the artistic ideals cherished by Caccini, and these, we may take it, were shared by the other members of the camerata who were engaged in the pursuit of a method of direct, eloquent, dramatic solo expression.
His collaborator, Caccini, who was more famous among his contemporaries than Peri, states in the preface to a book of his, that he was married twice, both times to pupils. His former wife was a well-known singer, and his daughters were musicians, the elder, Francesca, being also a composer.
Lorini, a monk of the Dominican order, had already denounced to this body Galileo's letter to Castelli; and Caccini, bribed by the mastership of the convent of St Mary of Minerva, was invited to settle at Rome for the purpose of embodying the evidence against Galileo.
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