Character of the Music It becomes now the duty of the author to make some examination of the music of this first lyric drama.

But here we unfortunately find ourselves adrift upon a windless ocean.

We are driven to the necessity of deducing our information from the results of analogical reconstruction.

Nothing indeed can be more fascinating than the attempt to arrive at a comprehension of the music of Poliziano's "Orfeo." All record of it appears to be lost and the Italian savants who have given us illuminating studies of the literary structure of the work, of its environment and its performance, have hazarded scarcely a remote conjecture as to the style of its music.
But we are not without a considerable amount of knowledge of the kinds of music in use at the time when this work was produced and we can therefore arrive at some idea of the nature of the lyric elements of the "Orfeo." First of all we may fairly conclude that some portions of the text were spoken.

It seems, for instance, improbable that the prologue delivered by Mercury could have been set to music.