Uloga glazbe u dubrovackom pastoralnom teatru u 16. stoljecu. (The Role of the Music in the Pastoral Theatre in Dubrovnik during the Sixteenth Century)

The 16th-century pastoral plays in Dubrovnik (Ragusa), like the Italian ones which inspired them, are marked by the strong presence of sounds, songs and choruses to increase the fantastical and sentimental emphasis of the performances. Their evolution, from Dzore Drzic eclogues to the pastorals of Antun Sasin, and through Mauro Vetranovic's "Orfeo", is characterized by the acquisition of a Petrarchian language in the Croatian pieces of Nikola Naljeskovic. In the Dubrovnik pastoral plays, unlike the Italian ones, the presence of shepherds, nymphs, and rustic men (the "vlasi", Engl. Walachians or Morlacks) as well as the fantastic and comic elements, is constant. Music supports a narrative function, in the form of comment, or a decorative one, in the form of "intermedio". It also serves as a guide through the development of the plot in certain pieces written by Naljeskovic and Marin Drzic, who, at salient points, insert choral, solo or mimic passages like the "moresca". Only rarely instruments are cited in courtly form: the use of terms taken from Slavic folklore is common, even though it was certainly the consort that accompanied music on stage. The Croatian lemma "intermedj" appears at the end of the 16th century in Sasin's pastorals "Flora" and "Filide". The normative importance of the "intermedio" is enhanced by the fact that until c. 1640, operas based on the Italian libretti use "arie" and incidental music, regressing to the level of the earlier pastorals.