ABSTRACT
The development of music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more homogenous and comprehensive than that of its sister arts. In music, a single paradigm—the one associated with the birth of opera—came to dominate the whole scene. Music's begotten illusion, as it turns out, took the communicative power of musical signs for granted, but not what they came to symbolize. In music, however, the change was much more comprehensive. Illusion, fiction, expression, and an anchored point of view became significant in music simultaneously and determined its very nature. From a symbolic point of view, the penetration into the hero's psychic life is impossible without assuming a point of view, that of the composer, what E. T. Cone calls "the composer's voice." The instrumental accompaniment was to reveal to the hearer something in relationship to which the explicit articulation of the protagonist stood as the tip of an iceberg.
