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You love madrigals, and whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So do I. Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare: but oh that you could hear this madrigal! If you must have 'four parts, then there they are.
Thus were attained the motet forms and the Mass, and, when the method was applied to secular words, the madrigal. The earlier instrumental pieces were built after the same fashion see the "fancies" and organ compositions of the time; but in these there were no words either to give the impulse or hold the bits together.
Alas! before a woman who is cold, how mad a man must appear when desire renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal; when he enacts with more or less sprightliness the scene where, in Venice Preserved, the genius of Orway has represented the senator Antonio, repeating a hundred times over at the feet of Aquilina: "Aquilina, Quilina, Lina, Aqui, Nacki!" without winning from her aught save the stroke of her whip, inasmuch as he has undertaken to fawn upon her like a dog.
With all the subtle design there is no sense of the lamp, in the gentle murmur of quicker figure or melodious flow of upper theme. Moving is the lyric power and sweetness of this multiple song. As to themal relation, one feels like regarding it all as inspired madrigal, where the maze and medley is the thing, where the tunes are not meant to be distinguished.
A musical ear may, however, be much improved by its possessor. With even the smallest of voices she should join a choir or madrigal society and learn to sing at sight. She should, when listening to a musical performance, try to guess its key. She should endeavour to know, without seeing, the sound and name of single notes on the piano, practising herself with her eyes shut.
Berlioz says that it takes a long time to discover musical Mediterraneans and still longer to learn to navigate them. The madrigal was a musical Mediterranean. It was the song of the people touched by the culture of the church. It was the priestly art of cathedral music transferred to the service of human emotion. The Italian madrigal had a specifically Italian character.
It was discovered that a madrigal brought out by him was pirated from another Italian composer; whereupon Bononcini left England, humiliated to the dust, and finally died obscure and alone, the victim of a charlatan alchemist, who succeeded in obtaining all his savings. Another powerful rival of Handel was Porpora, or, as Handel used to call him, "old Borbora."
Alas, that love and poetry should be checked by anything so commonplace as syllables! Let wet yet, one can fit in the sense easily when the proper rhyme has been decided upon; and who knows but that Gifford, lying there in the grass, with the old lichen-covered step for a desk, might have written a sonnet or a madrigal which would have given him his heart's desire before the moon rose!
Strangely, after the full returning dance, an epilogue of the ballad appears over a drone, as of bagpipe, through all the harmony of the madrigal. Strangest of all is the playful last refrain in the high piccolo over the constant soft strumming strings. The Andante, in pure lyric mood, is heavily charged with a certain Oriental languor. The clarinet
Nothing was farther from his thoughts than his birthday, and when the singers in the dining-room commenced their madrigal, he rapped on the door, exclaiming: "We are busy; find another place for your singing." The melody was interrupted for a moment, and Barbara said: "People picking apples don't think of fishing-nets. He has no idea it is his birthday. Let the children go in first."
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