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Updated: May 20, 2025
Caterina was singing the very air from the Orfeo which we heard her singing so many months ago at the beginning of her sorrows. It was 'Ho perduto', Sir Christopher's favourite, and its notes seemed to carry on their wings all the tenderest memories of her life, when Cheverel Manor was still an untroubled home.
This kind of solo was considerably older than Sileno and the performance of Baccio Ugolino in Poliziano's "Orfeo" was unquestionably of the same type. And this manner of delivering a solo, which Castiglione called "recitar alla lira," was a descendant of the art of singing with lute accompaniment which was well known in the fourteenth century.
The rôle of Orpheus in this score was written for a contralto and was designed for the eunuch Quadagni. The Venetian engravers of that day were either incompetent or, perhaps, there were none, for the scores of Gluck's Alceste in Italian and Haydn's Seasons were printed from type. However that may be the score of Orfeo was engraved in Paris. The composer Philidor corrected the proofs.
He little thought that Orfeo would ever get so far as Paris, so he appropriated the romanza in the first act and introduced it with but slight modifications into his opéra-comique Le Sorcier. Later on Marie Antoinette called Gluck to Paris and thus afforded him the opportunity for the complete development of his genius.
A year or two later she was dancing in Paris to the accompaniment of the Colonne Orchestra, a good deal of the music of Gluck's Orfeo and the very lovely dances from Iphigénie en Aulide. In these she remained faithful to her original ideal, the beauty of abstract movement, the rhythm of exquisite gesture.
In spite, however, of occasional weaknesses, 'Orfeo' is a work of consummate loveliness.
The oldest of the entertainments which ripened into Italian opera belongs to the last years of the fifteenth century, and was the work of the brilliant Politian, known as one of the revivalists of Greek learning attached to the court of Cosmo de' Medici and his son Lorenzo. This was the musical drama of "Orfeo."
There was also a concert of voices which did not come off quite so well, in my opinion, as other parts of the music." This confusion of Poliziano's "Orfeo" with spoken drama interspersed with intermezzi is unfortunate. There were no intermezzi at the representation of this lyric drama.
Haydn, in his first attempts, took advantage of the beautiful heavy tones, "chalumeau," and the flexibility and marvellous range of a beautiful instrument. During his stay in London Haydn sketched an Orfeo which he never completed, as the theatre which ordered it failed before it was finished.
In Vienna, twelve years earlier, he had already produced his "Orfeo," whose calm, classic grandeur seemed the embodiment of the Greek art spirit. His choice of subjects indicates the enterprise on which he had embarked. He sought simplicity, subjugation of music to poetic sentiment, dramatic sincerity and organic unity.
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