But there is no denying that the imperative operatic convention requires
us to admit a very violent departure from the facts of life as we all
know them. We are now so accustomed to blank verse in Shakspere's plays,
tragic and comic, that we accept it almost without noticing it. By long
habit, we have come to consider blank verse as "natural" in a poetic
play, especially when that play sets before us heroic figures of the
remote past. And here is the danger in the operas which have been
composed on books made out of modern popular pieces, more or less
realistic in their atmosphere. The "naturalness" of the men and women in
these plays of to-day tends to draw attention to the "unnaturalness" of
their customary use of song to express their emotions.
This danger Wagner skilfully avoided in his later music-dramas derived
from the Nibelungen myth. He set before us shadowy creatures involved
in strange intrigues far back in the legendary past and wholly devoid
of any modern or realistic suggestion. As Tristan and Siegfried and
Brunhild are all idealized persons, taking part in poetic fictions, we
are willing enough to accept their exclusive use of song; and we
recognize at once the artistic inconsistency of Tolstoy's protest. To
beings so remote from our daily life, from our ordinary experience, the
standard of fact cannot fairly be applied. We acknowledge the full right
of such creatures to dwell eternally in the land of song alone.
But we are perhaps a little less willing to make this acknowledgment
when we find the composer asking us to believe that men and women of our
own time and of our own country, the characters of the 'Girl of the
Golden West,' for example, or even some of those of 'Madam Butterfly,'
should eschew the plain prose of ordinary speech and insist on
discussing their love-affairs in the obviously "unnatural" medium of
song. That is to say, there is a striking incongruity between musical
expression and the realistic characters of most modern plays. We enjoy
the opera partly because it is not "natural," not "real," in the
ordinary meaning of these words; and if the plot and the people are
aggressively modern and matter-of-fact, our attention is necessarily
called to the "unnaturalness" of their incessant vocalization. A certain
remoteness from real life, even a certain vaporous intangibility as to
time and place, seem to be a helpful element in our enjoyment of a
music-drama.
Perhaps it is due to this remoteness, to this unreality, that the
opera-goer is willing enough to have a story end unhappily, altho the
playgoer is now likely to be painfully affected by a tragic ending.
Whatever the reason, it is a fact that most of our popular plays end
merrily in a church, while most of our popular operas end sadly in a
churchyard. The calculation has been made that out of twoscore operas
sung in New York at the two opera-houses a season or so ago, only half a
dozen ended happily; the large majority of them culminated in the death
of the hero or of the heroine or of both together. Music is a sister of
poetry, and we need not wonder that the musicians are likely to prefer
the opera-book which has a tragic catastrophe.
(1910.)
X