something of the kind is made unavoidable by the position assigned to
Liszt in our pianoforte recitals. He is relied upon to provide a
scintillant close. The pianists, then, even those who are his
professed admirers, are responsible if he is set down in our scheme as
the exemplar of the technical cult. Technique having its unquestioned
value, we are bound to admire the marvellous gifts which enabled Liszt
practically to sum up all the possibilities of pianoforte mechanism in
its present stage of construction, but we need not look with unalloyed
gratitude upon his influence as a composer. There were, I fear, two
sides to Liszt's artistic character as well as his moral. I believe he
had in him a touch of charlatanism as well as a magnificent amount of
artistic sincerity--just as he blended a laxity of moral ideas with a
profound religious mysticism. It would have been strange indeed,
growing up as he did in the whited sepulchre of Parisian salon life,
if he had not accustomed himself to sacrifice a little of the soul of
art for the sake of vainglory, and a little of its poetry and feeling
to make display of those dazzling digital feats which he invented.
But, be it said to his honor, he never played mountebank tricks in the
presence of the masters whom he revered. It was when he approached the
music of Beethoven that he sank all thought of self and rose to a
peerless height as an interpreting artist.
[Sidenote: _Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies._]
[Sidenote: _Gypsies and Magyars._]
Liszt's place as a composer of original music has not yet been
determined, but as a transcriber of the music of others the givers of
pianoforte recitals keep him always before us. The showy Hungarian
Rhapsodies with which the majority of pianoforte recitals end are,
however, more than mere transcriptions. They are constructed out of
the folk-songs of the Magyars, and in their treatment the composer has
frequently reproduced the characteristic performances which they
receive at the hands of the Gypsies from whom he learned them. This
fact and the belief to which Liszt gave currency in his book "Des
Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie" have given rise to the
almost universal belief that the Magyar melodies are of Gypsy origin.
This belief is erroneous. The Gypsies have for centuries been the
musical practitioners of Hungary, but they are not the composers of
the music of the Magyars, though they have put a marked impress not
only on the melodies, but also on popular taste. The Hungarian
folk-songs are a perfect reflex of the national character of the
Magyars, and some have been traced back centuries in their literature.
Though their most marked melodic peculiarity, the frequent use of a
minor scale containing one or even two superfluous seconds, as thus:
[Sidenote: _Magyar scales._]
[Music illustration]
may be said to belong to Oriental music as a whole (and the Magyars
are Orientals), the songs have a rhythmical peculiarity which is a
direct product of the Magyar language. This peculiarity consists of a
figure in which the emphasis is shifted from the strong to the weak
part by making the first take only a fraction of the time of the
second, thus:
[Music illustration]
[Sidenote: _The Scotch snap._]
[Sidenote: _Gypsy epics._]
In Scottish music this rhythm also plays a prominent part, but there
it falls into the beginning of a measure, whereas in Hungarian it
forms the middle or end. The result is an effect of syncopation which
is peculiarly forceful. There is an indubitable Oriental relic in the
profuse embellishments which the Gypsies weave around the Hungarian
melodies when playing them; but the fact that they thrust the same
embellishments upon Spanish and Russian music, in fact upon all the
music which they play, indicates plainly enough that the impulse to do
so is native to them, and has nothing to do with the national taste of
the countries for which they provide music. Liszt's confessed purpose
in writing the Hungarian Rhapsodies was to create what he called
"Gypsy epics." He had gathered a large number of the melodies without
a definite purpose, and was pondering what to do with them, when it
occurred to him that
"These fragmentary, scattered melodies were the wandering,
floating, nebulous part of a great whole, that they fully
answered the conditions for the production of an harmonious
unity which would comprehend the very flower of their
essential properties, their most unique beauties," and
"might be united in one homogeneous body, a complete work,
its divisions to be so arranged that each song would form at
once a whole and a part, which might be severed from the
rest and be examined and enjoyed by and for itself; but
which would, none the less, belong to the whole through the
close affinity of subject matter, the similarity of its
inner nature and unity in development."[D]
[Sidenote: _The Czardas._]
The basis of Liszt's Rhapsodies being thus distinctively national, he
has in a manner imitated in their character and tempo the dual
character of the Hungarian national dance, the Czardas, which consists
of two movements, a _Lassu_, or slow movement, followed by a _Friss_.
These alternate at the will of the dancer, who gives a sign to the
band when he wishes to change from one to the other.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] Weitzmann, "Geschichte des Clavierspiels," p. 197.
VII
_At the Opera_
[Sidenote: _Instability of taste._]
[Sidenote: _The age of operas._]
Popular taste in respect of the opera is curiously unstable. It is
surprising that the canons of judgment touching it have such feeble
and fleeting authority in view of the popularity of the art-form and
the despotic hold which it has had on fashion for two centuries. No
form of popular entertainment is acclaimed so enthusiastically as a
new opera by an admired composer; none forgotten so quickly. For the
spoken drama we go back to Shakespeare in the vernacular, and, on
occasions, we revive the masterpieces of the Attic poets who
flourished more than two millenniums ago; but for opera we are bounded
by less than a century, unless occasional performances of Gluck's
"Orfeo" and Mozart's "Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Magic Flute" be
counted as submissions to popular demand, which, unhappily, we know
they are not. There is no one who has attended the opera for
twenty-five years who might not bewail the loss of operas from the
current list which appealed to his younger fancy as works of real
loveliness. In the season of 1895-96 the audiences at the Metropolitan
Opera House in New York heard twenty-six different operas. The oldest
were Gluck's "Orfeo" and Beethoven's "Fidelio," which had a single
experimental representation each. After them in seniority came
Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," which is sixty-one years old, and
has overpassed the average age of "immortal" operas by from ten to
twenty years, assuming Dr. Hanslick's calculation to be correct.
[Sidenote: _Decimation of the operatic list._]
[Sidenote: _Dependence on singers._]
The composers who wrote operas for the generation that witnessed
Adelina Patti's _début_ at the Academy of Music, in New York, were
Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Meyerbeer. Thanks to his progressive
genius, Verdi is still alive on the stage, though nine-tenths of the
operas which made his fame and fortune have already sunk into
oblivion; Meyerbeer, too, is still a more or less potent factor with
his "Huguenots," which, like "Lucia," has endured from ten to twenty
years longer than the average "immortal;" but the continued existence
of Bellini and Donizetti seems to be as closely bound up with that of
two or three singers as was Meleager's life with the burning billet
which his mother snatched from the flames. So far as the people of
London and New York are concerned whether or not they shall hear
Donizetti more, rests with Mesdames Patti and Melba, for Donizetti
spells "Lucia;" Bellini pleads piteously in "Sonnambula," but only
Madame Nevada will play the mediator between him and our stiff-necked
generation.
[Sidenote: _An unstable art-form._]
[Sidenote: _Carelessness of the public._]
[Sidenote: _Addison's criticism._]
[Sidenote: _Indifference to the words._]
Opera is a mixed art-form and has ever been, and perhaps must ever be,
in a state of flux, subject to the changes of taste in music, the
drama, singing, acting, and even politics and morals; but in one
particular the public has shown no change for a century and a half,
and it is not quite clear why this has not given greater fixity to
popular appreciation. The people of to-day are as blithely
indifferent to the fact that their operas are all presented in a
foreign tongue as they were two centuries ago in England. The
influence of Wagner has done much to stimulate a serious attitude
toward the lyric drama, but this is seldom found outside of the
audiences in attendance on German representations. The devotees of the
Latin exotic, whether it blend French or Italian (or both, as is the
rule in New York and London) with its melodic perfume, enjoy the music
and ignore the words with the same nonchalance that Addison made merry
over. Addison proves to have been a poor prophet. The
great-grandchildren of his contemporaries are not at all curious to
know "why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of
foreigners in their own country, and to hear whole plays acted before
them in a tongue which they did not understand." What their
great-grandparents did was also done by their grandparents and their
parents, and may be done by their children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren after them, unless Englishmen and Americans shall
take to heart the lessons which Wagner essayed to teach his own
people. For the present, though we have abolished many absurdities
which grew out of a conception of opera that was based upon the
simple, sensuous delight which singing gave, the charm of music is
still supreme, and we can sit out an opera without giving a thought to
the words uttered by the singers. The popular attitude is fairly
represented by that of Boileau, when he went to hear "Atys" and
requested the box-keeper to put him in a place where he could hear
Lully's music, which he loved, but not Quinault's words, which he
despised.
[Sidenote: _Past and present._]
It is interesting to note that in this respect the condition of
affairs in London in the early part of the eighteenth century, which
seemed so monstrously diverting to Addison, was like that in Hamburg
in the latter part of the seventeenth, and in New York at the end of
the nineteenth. There were three years in London when Italian and
English were mixed in the operatic representations.
"The king or hero of the play generally spoke in Italian and
his slaves answered him in English; the lover frequently
made his court and gained the heart of his princess in a
language which she did not understand."
[Sidenote: _Polyglot opera._]
At length, says Addison, the audience got tired of understanding half
the opera, "and to ease themselves entirely of the fatigue of
thinking, so ordered it that the whole opera was performed in an
unknown tongue."
[Sidenote: _Perversions of texts._]
There is this difference, however, between New York and London and
Hamburg at the period referred to: while the operatic ragout was
compounded of Italian and English in London, Italian and German in
Hamburg, the ingredients here are Italian, French, and German, with no
admixture of the vernacular. Strictly speaking, our case is more
desperate than that of our foreign predecessors, for the development
of the lyric drama has lifted its verbal and dramatic elements into a
position not dreamed of two hundred years ago. We might endure with
equanimity to hear the chorus sing
[Sidenote: _"Robert le Diable."_]
"_La soupe aux choux se fait dans la marmite,
Dans la marmite on fait la soupe aux choux_"
at the beginning of "Robert le Diable," as tradition says used to be
done in Paris, but we surely ought to rise in rebellion when the
chorus of guards change their muttered comments on Pizarro's furious
aria in "Fidelio" from
[Sidenote: _"Fidelio."_]
_"Er spricht von Tod und Wunde!"_
to
_"Er spricht vom todten Hunde!"_
as is a prevalent custom among the irreverent choristers of Germany.
Addison confesses that he was often afraid when seeing the Italian
performers "chattering in the vehemence of action," that they were
calling the audience names and abusing them among themselves. I do not
know how to measure the morals and manners of our Italian singers
against those of Addison's time, but I do know that many of the things
which they say before our very faces for their own diversion are not
complimentary to our intelligence. I hope I have a proper respect for
Mr. Gilbert's "bashful young potato," but I do not think it right
while we are sympathizing with the gentle passion of _Siebel_ to have
his representative bring an offering of flowers and, looking us full
in the face, sing:
_"Le patate d'amor,
O cari fior!"_
[Sidenote: _"Faust."_]
[Sidenote: _Porpora's "Credo."_]
It isn't respectful, and it enables the cynics of to-day to say, with
the poetasters and fiddlers of Addison's day, that nothing is capable
of being well set to music that is not nonsense. Operatic words were
once merely stalking-horses for tunes, but that day is past. We used
to smile at Brignoli's "_Ah si! ah si! ah si!_" which did service for
any text in high passages; but if a composer should, for the
accommodation of his music, change the wording of the creed into
"_Credo, non credo, non credo in unum Deum_," as Porpora once did, we
should all cry out for his excommunication.
As an art-form the opera has frequently been criticised as an
absurdity, and it is doubtless owing to such a conviction that many
people are equally indifferent to the language employed and the
sentiments embodied in the words. Even so serious a writer as George
Hogarth does not hesitate in his "Memoirs of the Opera" to defend this
careless attitude.
[Sidenote: _Are words unessential?_]
"The words of an air are of small importance to the
comprehension of the business of the piece," he says; "they
merely express a sentiment, a reflection, a feeling; it is
quite enough if their general import is known, and this may
most frequently be gathered from the situation, aided by the
character and expression of the music."
[Sidenote: _"Il Trovatore."_]
I, myself, have known an ardent lover of music who resolutely refused
to look into a libretto because, being of a lively and imaginative
temperament, she preferred to construct her own plots and put her own
words in the mouths of the singers. Though a constant attendant on the
opera, she never knew what "Il Trovatore" was about, which, perhaps,
is not so surprising after all. Doubtless the play which she had
fashioned in her own mind was more comprehensible than Verdi's medley
of burnt children and asthmatic dance rhythms. Madame de Staël went so
far as to condemn the German composers because they "follow too
closely the sense of the words," whereas the Italians, "who are truly
the musicians of nature, make the air and the words conform to each
other only in a general way."
[Sidenote: _The opera defended as an art-form._]
[Sidenote: _The classic tragedy._]
Now the present generation has witnessed a revolution in operatic
ideas which has lifted the poetical elements upon a plane not dreamed
of when opera was merely a concert in costume, and it is no longer
tolerable that it be set down as an absurdity. On the contrary, I
believe that, looked at in the light thrown upon it by the history of
the drama and the origin of music, the opera is completely justified
as an art-form, and, in its best estate, is an entirely reasonable and
highly effective entertainment. No mean place, surely, should be given
in the estimation of the judicious to an art-form which aims in an
equal degree to charm the senses, stimulate the emotions, and persuade
the reason. This, the opera, or, perhaps I would better say the lyric
drama, can be made to do as efficiently as the Greek tragedy did it,
so far as the differences between the civilizations of ancient Hellas
and the nineteenth century will permit. The Greek tragedy was the
original opera, a fact which literary study would alone have made
plain even if it were not clearly of record that it was an effort to
restore the ancient plays in their integrity that gave rise to the
Italian opera three centuries ago.
[Sidenote: _Genesis of the Greek plays._]
Every school-boy knows now that the Hellenic plays were simply the
final evolution of the dances with which the people of Hellas
celebrated their religious festivals. At the rustic Bacchic feasts of
the early Greeks they sang hymns in honor of the wine-god, and danced
on goat-skins filled with wine. He who held his footing best on the
treacherous surface carried home the wine as a reward. They contended
in athletic games and songs for a goat, and from this circumstance
scholars have surmised we have the word tragedy, which means
"goat-song." The choric songs and dances grew in variety and beauty.
Finally, somebody (tradition preserves the name of Thespis as the man)
conceived the idea of introducing a simple dialogue between the
strophes of the choric song. Generally this dialogue took the form of
a recital of some story concerning the god whose festival was
celebrating. Then when the dithyrambic song returned, it would either
continue the narrative or comment on its ethical features.
[Sidenote: _Mimicry and dress._]
The merry-makers, or worshippers, as one chooses to look upon them,
manifested their enthusiasm by imitating the appearance as well as the
actions of the god and his votaries. They smeared themselves with
wine-lees, colored their bodies black and red, put on masks, covered
themselves with the skins of beasts, enacted the parts of nymphs,
fauns, and satyrs, those creatures of primitive fancy, half men and
half goats, who were the representatives of natural sensuality
untrammelled by conventionality.
[Sidenote: _Melodrama._]
Next, somebody (Archilocus) sought to heighten the effect of the story
or the dialogue by consorting it with instrumental music; and thus we
find the germ of what musicians--not newspaper writers--call
melodrama, in the very early stages of the drama's development.
Gradually these simple rustic entertainments were taken in hand by the
poets who drew on the legendary stores of the people for subjects,
branching out from the doings of gods to the doings of god-like men,
the popular heroes, and developed out of them the masterpieces of
dramatic poetry which are still studied with amazement, admiration,
and love.
[Sidenote: _Factors in ancient tragedy._]
The dramatic factors which have been mustered in this outline are
these:
1. The choric dance and song with a religious purpose.
2. Recitation and dialogue.
3. Characterization by means of imitative gestures--pantomime, that
is--and dress.
4. Instrumental music to accompany the song and also the action.
[Sidenote: _Operatic elements._]
[Sidenote: _Words and music united._]
All these have been retained in the modern opera, which may be said to
differ chiefly from its ancient model in the more important and more
independent part which music plays in it. It will appear later in our
study that the importance and independence achieved by one of the
elements consorted in a work by nature composite, led the way to a
revolution having for its object a restoration of something like the
ancient drama. In this ancient drama and its precursor, the
dithyrambic song and dance, is found a union of words and music which
scientific investigation proves to be not only entirely natural but
inevitable. In a general way most people are in the habit of speaking
of music as the language of the emotions. The elements which enter
into vocal music (of necessity the earliest form of music) are
unvolitional products which we must conceive as co-existent with the
beginnings of human life. Do they then antedate articulate speech? Did
man sing before he spoke? I shall not quarrel with anybody who chooses
so to put it.
[Sidenote: _Physiology of singing._]
Think a moment about the mechanism of vocal music. Something occurs to
stir up your emotional nature--a great joy, a great sorrow, a great
fear; instantly, involuntarily, in spite of your efforts to prevent
it, maybe, muscular actions set in which proclaim the emotion which
fills you. The muscles and organs of the chest, throat, and mouth
contract or relax in obedience to the emotion. You utter a cry, and
according to the state of feeling which you are in, that cry has
pitch, quality (_timbre_ the singing teachers call it), and dynamic
intensity. You attempt to speak, and no matter what the words you
utter, the emotional drama playing on the stage of your heart is
divulged.
[Sidenote: _Herbert Spencer's laws._]
The man of science observes the phenomenon and formulates its laws,
saying, for instance, as Herbert Spencer has said: "All feelings are
muscular stimuli;" and, "Variations of voice are the physiological
results of variations of feeling." It was the recognition of this
extraordinary intimacy between the voice and the emotions which
brought music all the world over into the service of religion, and
provided the phenomenon, which we may still observe if we be but
minded to do so, that mere tones have sometimes the sanctity of words,
and must as little be changed as ancient hymns and prayers.
[Sidenote: _Invention of Italian opera._]
[Sidenote: _Musical declamation._]
The end of the sixteenth century saw a coterie of scholars,
art-lovers, and amateur musicians in Florence who desired to
re-establish the relationship which they knew had once existed between
music and the drama. The revival of learning had made the classic
tragedy dear to their hearts. They knew that in the olden time
tragedy, of which the words only have come down to us, had been
musical throughout. In their efforts to bring about an intimacy
between dramatic poetry and music they found that nothing could be
done with the polite music of their time. It was the period of highest
development in ecclesiastical music, and the climax of artificiality.
The professional musicians to whom they turned scorned their theories
and would not help them; so they fell back on their own resources.
They cut the Gordian knot and invented a new style of music, which
they fancied was like that used by the ancients in their stage-plays.
They abolished polyphony, or contrapuntal music, in everything except
their choruses, and created a sort of musical declamation, using
variations of pitch and harmonies built up on a simple bass to give
emotional life to their words. In choosing their tones they were
guided by observation of the vocal inflections produced in speech
under stress of feeling, showing thus a recognition of the law which
Herbert Spencer formulated two hundred and fifty years later.
[Sidenote: _The music of the Florentine reformers._]
[Sidenote: _The solo style, harmony, and declamation._]
[Sidenote: _Fluent recitatives._]
The music which these men produced and admired sounds to us monotonous
in the extreme, for what little melody there is in it is in the
choruses, which they failed to emancipate from the ecclesiastical art,
and which for that reason were as stiff and inelastic as the music
which in their controversies with the musicians they condemned with
vigor. Yet within their invention there lay an entirely new world of
music. Out of it came the solo style, a song with instrumental
accompaniment of a kind unknown to the church composers. Out of it,
too, came harmony as an independent factor in music instead of an
accident of the simultaneous flow of melodies; and out of it came
declamation, which drew its life from the text. The recitatives which
they wrote had the fluency of spoken words and were not retarded by
melodic forms. The new style did not accomplish what its creators
hoped for, but it gave birth to Italian opera and emancipated music in
a large measure from the formalism that dominated it so long as it
belonged exclusively to the composers for the church.
[Sidenote: _Predecessors of Wagner._]
[Sidenote: _Old operatic distinctions._]
[Sidenote: _Opera buffa._]
[Sidenote: _Opera seria._]
[Sidenote: _Recitative._]