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Updated: June 4, 2025
It was at Mantua that Angelo Poliziano's "Orfeo," the first lyric drama with a secular subject, was produced, and it must be our next business to examine this work and set forth the conditions under which it was made known. The Artistic Impulse The non-existence of the drama in the Middle Ages is one of the strikingly significant deficiencies of the period.
It is best to return to the surface. The lyric 'sequences' published towards the close of the sixteenth century frequently contain more or less pastoral matter. Poliziano's Latin translation of Moschus was commended by E. K. in his notes to the Shepherd's Calender, and the same original supplied Tasso with the subject of his Amore fuggitivo, which served as epilogue to the Aminta.
This, however, is not essential to an appreciation of the precise nature of the step from the sacred representation to the lyric drama and its importance in laying the foundations of opera. This momentous step was taken late in the fifteenth century with the performance of Angelo Poliziano's "Favola di Orfeo" at the Court of Mantua to celebrate the return of the Cardinal Gonzaga.
The dialogues were connected by a series of dramatic actions, and the music was composed by Alfonso della Viola, a pupil of Willaert. Among the personages was a high priest who sang, like Poliziano's Orpheus, to the accompaniment of his own lyre.
It is closely imitated from the corresponding passage in Ovid, but the lyrical perfection and passionate crescendo of the stanzas are Poliziano's own. Addressing Pluto, Orfeo discovers the object of his quest: May not love penetrate even the forbidden bounds of hell? Why should death grudge the few years at most which complete the span of human life?
The class of productions known as mythological plays, which powerfully influenced the character of the pastoral drama, sprang from the union of classical tradition with the machinery of native religious representations, in Poliziano's Favola d' Orfeo. This was the first non-religious play in the vernacular, and its dependence on the earlier religious drama is striking.
His elegy on the death of Lorenzo has real feeling in it and proves him to have esteemed that friend and patron. Like Pico, he survived Lorenzo only two years, and he also was buried in Dominican robes. Perhaps the finest feat of Poliziano's life was his action in slamming the sacristy doors in the face of Lorenzo's pursuers on that fatal day in the Duomo when Giuliano de' Medici was stabbed.
The fact that he was located at Ferrara makes it seem likely that he was related to Poliziano's interpreter, who might thus have belonged to a musical family. At any rate Baccio Ugolino possessed some skill in improvisation, and was also accomplished in the art of singing and accompanying himself upon the lute or viol.
In these madrigal dramas, as we shall see, the attempts to overcome the musical unsuitability of polyphonic music to the purposes of dramatic dialogue led composers further and further from the truth which had stood at the elbows of Poliziano's contemporaries and immediate successors.
It is of course impossible to say exactly to what extent the fame of the Italian pastoral drama may have penetrated to England the Aminta was first printed the year of the production of Peele's play, and waited a decade before the first English translation and the first English edition appeared but no influence of Tasso's masterpiece can be detected in the Arraignment; still less is it possible to trace any acquaintance with Poliziano's work.
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