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Though obliged to retire to the south of France for his health's sake, he founded, in November, 1905, the Schola of Montpellier. This Schola has given about fifteen concerts a year, and has performed some of Bach's cantatas, scenes from Rameau's and Gluck's operas, Franck's oratorios, and Monteverde's Orfeo. In 1906 M. Bordes organised an open-air performance of Rameau's Guirlande.
Formerly all discords were prepared, and Monteverde's innovation of taking the dominant seventh unprepared was held to be cataclysmic, but in modern music almost any conceivable discord may be taken unprepared.
The dry declamation of the first Italian operas, however, was not supported by a sufficiently rich accompaniment to be enjoyable after the first sense of novelty had passed away; and even the gifted Monteverde's ingenious innovations in instrumental coloring and in the free use of expressive discords, could not ward off a second reaction, in favor of song pure and simple, which set in with Scarlatti, the founder of the Neapolitan school, whose first opera was produced a little over two centuries ago.
Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Schütz, a great revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German opera, was "Dafne," written to a libretto by Rinuccini, possibly the same one used by Peri.
To make up for this, she had read Monteverde's book over and over, and she recommended this wonderful work to her lady friends, who in matters of reading never went beyond the novels in popular magazines. "He is a scholar," said the countess one afternoon while talking alone with Renovales. "He's just beginning now, but I will push him ahead and he will turn out to be a genius.
Encouraged by his success, and embittered by the brutalities of the enemy, as he pressed forward he issued his noted proclamation of "War to the death." He soon routed Monteverde's army at Lastoguanes, forcing him to take refuge in Puerto Cabello, while Bolivar pushed forward, entering Caracas in triumph August 4, 1813. But the tide of battle soon turned.
He was a scholar and what made her admire him was the fact that all his learning did not keep him from dressing well and being as fair as an angel. "For pretty teeth, look at Monteverde's," she would say, looking at him in the crowded room, through her lorgnette. At other times, following the course of her ideas, she would interrupt the conversation, without noticing the irrelevancy of her words.
They have revived Monteverde's Orfeo and his Incoronazione di Poppea, which had been forgotten these three centuries; and it was following an interest created by repeated performances of Rameau at the Schola that Dardanus was performed at Dijon under M. d'Indy's direction, Castor et Pollux at Montpellier under M. Charles Bordes' direction, and that in 1908 the Opera at Paris gave Hippolyte et Aricie.
It was enough to have means of comfortable livelihood to be denounced as an enemy of Spain. The most peaceful men were dragged from their homes, and the tears of wives and children never moved to pity Monteverde's agents. Miranda, a prisoner in Puerto Cabello, appealed in vain to the audiencia against these crimes.
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."
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