Orphic Influences in the Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
The Renaissance came after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. It was the era of the Great Famine (1315-1317); Black Death (1347-1351); the Western Schism of 1378; the Decline of the Holy Roman Empire (the Great Interrugnum of 1250-1273); and the first popular uprisings (14th and 15th centuries).
At this time the acquisition and translation of Greek and Arabic Neoplatonic texts from Africa and Spain led to a revival of Neoplatonic thought. The Humanist philosophers of the Renaissance traced their ideas to what they knew of ancient Greek philosophy, primarily these writings. Various aspects of classical Greek culture and philosophy appealed to them, such as the emphasis on human reason, natural law, the arts, literature, and the humanities (grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy). During a time of extraordinary transition, the humanist philosophers sought to create a citizenry able to speak and write and engage in civic life.
The House of Medici
The Renaissance began in Tuscany and centered in the cities of Florence and Siena. Until the late fourteenth century, Florence’s leading family were the House of Albizzi. Their main challengers were the House Medici, first under Giovanni de’ Medici, later under his son Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici. The Medici controlled the Medici bank, the largest and most respected bank in Europe during the 15th century, and were the bankers to the pope. From this base they acquired political power initially in Florence and later in wider Italy and Europe. In 1434 the Medici became the leading family, a position they would hold for the next three centuries. They rarely held official posts, but they were the unquestioned leaders, and the instruments of government were under their control.
Cosimo de’ Medici was highly popular, mainly for bringing an era of stability and prosperity to Florence, having negotiated the end to decades of war with Milan and bringing stability to Northern Italy. He was also an important patron of the arts.
The Platonic Academy at Florence and Marsilio Ficino
1438-1445 the Council of Ferrara-Florence met in a failed attempt to heal the schism of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. The Byzantine Emperor and Patriarch John VIII Palaeologus was accompanied to the Council by the Neoplatonic philosopher Georgios Gemistos (later known as Plethon or Pletho).
As a young man Plethon studied Plato at Adrianopolis, and admired the philosopher so much that late in life he took the name "Plethon." In 1407 he left Adrianopolis and travelled through Cyprus, Palestine, and other places, finally settling in Mistra, where he taught and wrote philosophy, astronomy, history and geography, and compiled digests of many classical writers. On his return to the Peloponnese, Gemistos founded a Mystery school. In the dying years of the Byzantine Empire he advocated a return to the Olympian Gods.
Plethon was one of the chief pioneers of the revival of Greek learning in the west. In Florence he wrote De Differentiis, a detailed comparison between Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of Deity. Few of Plato’s writings were studied in the Latin west at that time, and Plethon essentially reintroduced much of Plato to the Western world, shaking the domination which Aristotle had come to exercise over Western thought in the high and later middle ages.
Plethon often was not needed at the council in Ferrara. Instead, at the invitation of some of the Florentine humanists, he set up a temporary school to lecture on the differences between Plato and Aristotle. Plethon’s discourses upon Plato and the Alexandrian mystics so fascinated the learned society of Florence that they named him the second Plato. Cosimo de' Medici attended Plethon’s lectures and was inspired to found the Accademia Platonica in Florence, where Italian students of Plethon continued to teach after the conclusion of the council. Because of this, Plethon was one of the most important influences on the Italian Renaissance.
Marsilio Ficino
Cosimo’s choice to head the Academy was Marsilio Ficino, whose father was a physician under Cosimo’s patronage. Marsilio was also a doctor, and his skill was such that many, including the Medici, preferred to call upon his services before any other's.
Ficino was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance, a reviver of Neoplatonism who was in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day. Through the meetings at the Academy, Ficino taught philosophy to its illustrious members, a spiritual community bound together by a common bond of love for each other and for Ficino. He was their center, and they were the center of the Renaissance.
Ficino was the first translator of Plato's complete works from Greek into Latin, of the “Corpus Hermeticum”, and of the writings of many of the Neoplatonists (for example Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plotinus). He also translated the sayings of Zoroaster. He did this at amazing speed and so well that his translations remained the standard editions until those published in national languages in the nineteenth century.
Ficino was not the first to revive the study of Plato and his followers. This had developed with the rediscovery of antiquity, which had begun at the time of Dante (1265 – 1321) or earlier, and had increased in scope and depth with the growing knowledge of Greek and the accumulation of new classical manuscripts. However, it was Ficino more than anyone who took from Plato, Plotinus and the Hermetic writings the concept that part of the individual soul was immortal and divine, a concept that was all-important to the Renaissance.
Following suggestions of Plethon, Ficino tried to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. His major work was a treatise on the immortality of the soul (The Platonic Theology or The Immortality of Souls), in eighteen books. In the Middle Ages this doctrine had been neglected by Christian theologians. Ficino became a priest in 1473. When he himself preached in the Cathedral people flocked to hear him speak. Through Ficino the immortality of the soul again became central to Christian thought, and by decree of the Lateran Council in 1512 it was made part of the dogma of the Catholic Church. This was particularly important in the revival of religion in the century that followed, because it led to the devotional step of a personal relationship with God, which became characteristic of the reformers both within and outside of the Catholic Church.
For Ficino the immortality and divinity of the soul was the basis of ‘the dignity of Man’, which the artists and writers of the Renaissance thought should be reflected in every aspect of life. In time the expression of this ideal meant the adoption of a code of conduct by which consideration for others became a custom of western society.
More than anyone else, Ficino attempted to show that two fundamental elements of western civilization – Greek philosophy and Judaic religion – had a single source, which he believed stretched back to Moses, Zoroaster, and Hermes Trismegistus. However, this was based on an erroneous presumption that the Corpus Hermeticum predated Plato. Nevertheless, Renaissance philosophers (and many others since) advanced the erroneous notion of a prisci theologia based on a supposed lineage of ancient sages including Abraham, Zoroaster, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato – all leading to the arrival of Christ.
Many of the ancient Greek spiritual traditions were suppressed by the Christian Church during the Middle Ages. The rediscovery of classic sources spearheaded by Cosimo de’ Medici made a number of original sources available to the West for the first time in over a thousand years.
This led to a deep appreciation of Orpheus as the earliest source in Greek tradition. The first work that Ficino chose to translate was the Hymns of Orpheus. Ficino gave great importance to the Orphic hymns, listing their revival among the great achievements of fifteenth-century Florence saying, “This age, like a golden age, has brought back to the light those liberal disciplines that were practically extinguished: grammar, poetry, oratory, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic lyre.” Ficino sung and studied the hymns, played an Orphic lyre with an image of Orpheus painted on it, and was compared to Orpheus by those who knew him.
As a musician Ficino’s main object was to arouse devotion, and in this his contemporaries recognized him as extraordinarily effective. Although we have no record of his music, we know Ficino’s performances were striking and profoundly inspirational. In one eyewitness account a bishop said, “. . . then his eyes burn, then he leaps to his feet, and he discovers music which he never learnt by rote.” Ficino’s biographer, Corsi, wrote, “He set forth the hymns of Orpheus and sang them to the lyre in the ancient manner with incredible sweetness, so people say.” Johannes Pannonius said, “You restored to the light the ancient sound of the lyre and the style of singing and the Orphic songs which had previously been consigned to oblivion.” Lorenzo de’ Medici said of Ficino: “I thought that Orpheus had returned to the world.” Another writer said of him: “He soothes the unyielding oaks with his lyre and softens once more the hearts of wild beasts.”
The revival of Orpheus by Ficino and other Renaissance scholars gave inspiration to artists who used Orpheus as a model for new forms of artistic expression in music, sculpture, and painting. In particular, we see Orpheus present at the birth of opera, which began as a conscious imitation of Greek tragedy.
Ficino saw music, medicine, and theology as intimately linked and worthy of study and practice. He recommended singing the Orphic hymns as a method for aligning the human soul with the cosmic soul, thus bringing about good health and relief from melancholy and other afflictions of the spirit:
"Our spiritus is in conformity with the rays of the heavenly spiritus, which penetrates everything either secretly or obviously. It shows a far greater kinship… if we make use of song and light and the perfume appropriate to the deity like the hymns that Orpheus consecrated to the cosmic deities… Music was given to us by God to subdue the body, temper the mind, and render praise. I know that David and Pythagoras taught this above all else and I believe they put it into practice."
To Ficino the visual arts were also especially important. Their function was to remind the soul of its origin in the divine world by creating resemblances to that world. It was largely through Ficino's insistence on the importance of art that the painter's position in Florentine society was raised nearer to that of the poet than that of the carpenter, where it had been previously.
In 1469 the reins of power passed to Cosimo’s twenty-one-year-old grandson, Lorenzo, who would become known as “Lorenzo the Magnificent.” Lorenzo was the first of the family to be educated from an early age in the humanist tradition and is best known as one of the Renaissance’s most important patrons of the arts, commissioning works by Michelangelo, da Vinci and Botticelli. Lorenzo was also an accomplished musician and brought some of the most famous composers and singers of his day to Florence.
The Florentine Camerata
In late Renaissance Florence, a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals known as the “Florentine Camerata” gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama. The apex of their influence was between 1577 and 1582, gaining influence before this time, and dying off afterward. One of the most revolutionary turning points in music history was a revitalized interest in solo song, which resulted from their purposeful effort to restore the aesthetic effect of ancient Greek music to contemporary practice. They were intrigued by ancient descriptions of the emotional and moral effect of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy, and attracted to the ideal of Greek music, which had been accorded near magical powers in Greco-Roman myths and legends. Orpheus had been able to charm the gods themselves with song to such an extent that he saved his beloved Eurydice from death. They were unified in the belief that music had become corrupt, and by returning to the forms and style of the ancient Greeks, the art of music could be improved, and thereby society could be improved as well.
Around 1563 Bardi became the patron of Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer, Galileo Galilei), whom Bardi sponsored in studies with Zarlino. In the 1570s Galilei and Bardi made concentrated efforts to define Greek music and to contrast it with their perceived weakness of contemporary works. They were greatly aided in these endeavors by contacts with Girolamo Mei (1519-1594).
The Influence of Girolamo Mei
Girolamo Mei, formerly from Florence, was an Italian historian and humanist, and the foremost scholar of ancient Greece at the time. He edited and annotated the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, as well as many other works by classical writers. He was the first European after Boethius (480-524) to do a detailed study of ancient Greek music theory. Mei compiled his findings in a major treatise, De modis musicis antiquorum (written 1568 to 1573). He had spent some thirty years in Rome pursuing archival research in ancient Greek sources. He held that ancient Greek drama was predominantly sung rather than spoken. Foundational for this belief was the writing of the Greek thinker and music theorist Aristoxenus, who proposed that speech should set the pattern for song.
Mei communicated many of his findings through an extensive correspondence. Both Bardi and Galilei, in realizing Mei’s authority, quickly bombarded him with questions. Between 1572 and 1581 he wrote more than thirty letters to Galilei and Bardi, which were the primary source of Galilei’s and Bardi’s understanding of how Greek music differed from modern practice.
Mei’s first letter to Gelilei has pivotal significance in the development of Baroque musical concepts, because it gave Bardi and those connected with the Camerata the first solid evidence as to the nature of Greek music. Little was known of the specifics of ancient Greek music, but Mei concluded that it was monadic (a single line of melody, supported by regular accompaniment), and that for this reason ancient Greek music was more effective in its ability to express the emotions from composer to listener than the polyphonic music of contemporary composers. The Camerata objected to the dense textures arising from the interweaving patterns and excessive counterpoint of polyphonic music (in particular the polyphonic madrigal), at the expense of the sung text's intelligibility. They believed that excessive counterpoint muddled the affetto (“affection”), and that music had thus lost its visceral force. This was decisive in the formation of the new recitative style that was developing in Florence at the end of the 16th century, and from which developed monody , the first music dramas, and eventually opera. In A History of Baroque Music George J. Buelow writes:
The experiments in Florence led at first by count Giovanni de’ Bardi (1534-1612) and a small group of aristocrats, professional musicians, and amateur musicians aimed for a rediscovery of a style of solo singing older than modern Western civilization. It was from ancient Greek culture that the Camerate sought to reinvent this type of song. And their pursuit of an idea influenced by the humanistic studies of the late Renaissance is among the more remarkable and successful experiments in the history of music.
The Camerata’s Experiment – “Seconda Prattica”
The Camerata got the chance to put its ideas, the new style termed “seconda prattica”, into action when Bardi was commissioned to write musical intermedi for La Pellegrina, a play to be performed at the wedding of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici to Christin of Lorraine May 2, 1589. Intermedi were loosely connected musical numbers performed between the scenes of a theatrical play; usually based on allegorical and moral themes with eclectic references to classical mythology. They are considered as the forerunners of musical opera. There was usually no particular connection between intermedi and the play. However, the six Pellegrina intermedi were united by a common theme: the power of music:
1) “L’armonia delle sfere”: a rendering of Plato’s myth of Er.
2) Singing contest between the 9 Muses and the Pierides, the daughters of Pierus.
3) Apollo slaying the python at Delphi.
4) A sorceress summons up demonic spirits with her song and foretells the return of the Golden Age.
5) The poet Arion is rescued from murderous sailors by a music-loving dolphin that was attracted to his singing (from Pythagorean legend)
6) “Il dono di Giove ai mortali di Ritmo e Armonia” Jove’s gift to mortals of rhythm and harmony (also inspired by Plato)
To illustrate his theme Bardi employed the best composers and poets in Tuscany: Emilio de Cavalieri, Giulio Caccini (1545-1618), Luca Marenzio (1553-1599), Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), and Cristofano Malvezzi (1547-1599). The Pellegrina Intermedi were composed for voices and instruments, which was nothing new. However, the instruments did not play melodies. Rather, they provided a simple, steady, pulsing undercurrent over which the singers preformed. This new style, seconda prattica, was called nuova maniera di canto.
The Greater Significance of Seconda Prattica
The experiment of the Florentine Camerata is only a surface level, stylistic event if taken by itself. For music in general it was a main cause in the ascendancy of the triad and the tonal harmony built on it. The adoption of the triad was a pragmatic solution to the technical problems involved in the new genre. For a single vocal line to predominate, if the accompaniment was to not become its own melody (as with counterpoint), the notes would have to change infrequently. If the accompaniment stayed the same however, the melody, which changed frequently, would invariably clash with the static accompaniment at some point, as the intervals between melody and accompaniment became dissonant. The triad proved to be the ideal solution to the problem because any nearly any note can be played over it without making it sound dissonant. The steady, instrumental, harmonic nature of the accompaniment, or basso continuo, contrasted nicely with the fluid, vocal nature of the melody, throwing it into relief, and not competing with it.
With this solution having been discovered, opera and the seconda prattica techniques on which it was based were free to explode onto Europe. This brought about the rise of virtuosity and the position of the artist in society, because the melody was no longer constrained by counterpoint, but only by the abilities of the player or singer. In the early Renaissance artists were seen as craftsmen with little prestige or recognition. By the later Renaissance the top figures wielded great influence and could charge great fees. A flourishing trade in Renaissance art developed. While in the early Renaissance many of the leading artists were of lower- or middle-class origins, increasingly they became aristocrats.
The Choice of Orpheus
Two of the first operas were written by composers of the Florentine Camerata: Jacopo Peri’s Eurydice premiered October 6, 1600. Caccini’s Eurydice in 1600 was based largely on Peri’s Eurydice. He composed a second Eurydice in 1602. The same story in a version told by the Mantuan poet Striggio was performed with Monteverdi's music in Mantua in 1607. These composers chose the story of Orpheus to represent the astonishing power of ancient Greek music, which they sought to restore. Professor Ralph Abraham points out, “There are at least twenty-six operas in the 1600s concerning Orpheus, and twenty-nine in the 1700s, including classics by Telemann, Gluck, Handel, and Haydn.”
(Revised 2022-05-06)