The festal entertainments which had graced the marriages of princes had most of the machinery of opera, but they lacked the vital principle.

They failed to become living art entities solely because they wanted the medium for the adequate publication of individuality.

They made their march of a century on the very verge of the promised land, but they had to lose themselves in the bewitching wilderness of the madrigal drama before they found their Moses.

It was the gradual growth of skill in musical expression that brought the way into sight, and that growth had to be effected by natural and logical processes, not by the discovery or by the world-moving genius of any one composer.
The Doric architecture of the frottola had to be developed into the Italian Renaissance style of the madrigal by the ripening of the craft of composers in adapting the music of ecclesiastical polyphony to the communication of worldly thought.

Then the Renaissance style had to lose itself in the baroque struggles of the final period of the madrigal drama--struggles of artistic impulse against an impossible style of structure and the uncultivated taste of the auditors.