Iris is asleep upon a bed in the "Green House" of the district, which

needs no description. A song, accompanied by the twanging of a samisen

and the clanging of tamtams, is sung by three geishas. Kyoto brings in

Osaka to admire her beauty, and sets a high price upon it. Osaka sends

for jewels. Iris awakes and speculates in philosophical vein touching

the question of her existence. She cannot be dead, for death brings

knowledge and paradise joy; but she weeps. Osaka appears. He praises

her rapturously--her form, her hair, her eyes, her mouth, her smile.

Iris thinks him veritably Jor, but he says his name is "Pleasure." The

maiden recoils in terror. A priest had taught her in an allegory that

Pleasure and Death were one! Osaka loads her with jewels, fondles her,

draws her to his breast, kisses her passionately. Iris weeps. She knows

nothing of passion, and longs only for her father, her cottage, and her

garden. Osaka wearies of his guest, but Kyoto plans to play still

further upon his lust. He clothes her in richer robes, but more

transparent, places her upon a balcony, and, withdrawing a curtain,

exhibits her beauty to the multitude in the street. Amazed cries greet

the revelation. Osaka returns and pleads for her love.

"Iris!" It is the cry of the blind man hunting the child whom he thinks

has sold herself into disgraceful slavery. The crowd falls back before

him, while Iris rushes forward to the edge of the veranda and cries out

to him, that he may know her presence. He gathers a handful of mud from

the street and hurls it in the direction of her voice. "There! In your

face! In your forehead! In your mouth! In your eyes! Fango!" Under the

imprecations of her father the mind of Iris gives way. She rushes along

a corridor and hurls herself out of a window.

The third act is reached, and drama merges again into allegory. In the

wan light of the moon rag-pickers, men and women, are dragging their

hooks through the slimy muck that flows through the open sewer beneath

the fatal window. They sing mockingly to the moon. A flash of light

from Fujiyama awakens a glimmer in the filth. Again. They rush forward

and pull forth the body of Iris and begin to strip it of its

adornments. She moves and they fly in superstitious fear. She recovers

consciousness, and voices from invisible singers, tell her of the

selfish inspirations of Osaka, Kyoto, and her blind father; Osaka's

desire baffled by fate--such is life! Kyoto's slavery to pleasure and a

hangman's reward;--such is life! The blind man's dependence on his

child for creature comforts;--such is life! Iris bemoans her fate as

death comes gently to her. The sky grows rosy and the light brings

momentary life. She stretches out her arms to the sun and acclaims the

growing orb. As once upon Ida--

Glad earth perceives and from her bosom pours

Unbidden herbs and voluntary flow'rs!

A field of blossoms spreads around her, into which she sinks, while the

sun, again many-voiced and articulate, chants his glory as in the

beginning.

The story is perhaps prettier in the telling than in the performance.

What there is in its symbolism and its poetical suggestion that is

ingratiating is more effective in the fancy than in the experience.

There are fewer clogs, fewer stagnant pools, fewer eddies which whirl

to no purpose. In the modern school, with its distemper music put on in

splotches, there must be more merit and action. Psychological

delineation in music which stimulates action, or makes one forget the

want of outward movement, demands a different order of genius than that

which Signor Mascagni possesses. Mere talent for artful device will not

suffice. There are many effective bits of expressive writing in the

score of "Iris," but most of them are fugitive and aim at coloring a

word, a phrase, or at best a temporary situation. There is little flow

of natural, fervent melody. What the composer accomplished with tune,

characteristic but fluent, eloquent yet sustained, in "Cavalleria

rusticana," he tries to achieve in "Iris" with violent, disjointed,

shifting of keys and splashes of instrumental color. In this he is

seldom successful, for he is not a master of orchestral writing--that

technical facility which nearly all the young musicians have in the

same degree that all pianists have finger technic. His orchestral

stream is muddy; his effects generally crass and empty of euphony. He

throws the din of outlandish instruments of percussion, a battery of

gongs, big and little, drums, and cymbals into his score without

achieving local color. Once only does he utilize it so as to catch the

ears and stir the fancy of his listeners--in the beginning of the

second act, where there is a murmur of real Japanese melody. As a rule,

however, Signor Mascagni seems to have been careless in the matter of

local color, properly so, perhaps, for, strictly speaking, local color

in the lyric drama is for comedy with its petty limitations, not for

tragedy with its appeal to large and universal passions. Yet it is in

the lighter scenes, the scenes of comedy, like the marionette show, the

scenes of mild pathos, like the monologues of Iris, and the scenes of

mere accessory decoration, like that of the laundresses, the mousmes in

the first act, with its purling figure borrowed from "Les Huguenots"

and its unnecessarily uncanny col legno effect conveyed from

"L'Africaine" that it is most effective.

CHAPTER XII

"MADAMA BUTTERFLY"

This is the book of the generation of "Madama Butterfly": An adventure

in Japan begat Pierre Loti's "Madame Chrysantheme"; "Madame

Chrysantheme" begat John Luther Long's "Madame Butterfly," a story;

"Madame Butterfly," the story, begat "Madame Butterfly," a play by

David Belasco; "Madame Butterfly," the play, begat "Madama Butterfly,"

the opera by Giacomo Puccini. The heroine of the roving French

romanticist is therefore seen in her third incarnation in the heroine

of the opera book which L. Illica and G. Giacosa made for Puccini. But

in operatic essence she is still older, for, as Dr. Korngold, a

Viennese critic, pointed out, Selica is her grandmother and Lakme her

cousin.

Even this does not exhaust her family history; there is something like

a bar sinister in her escutcheon. Mr. Belasco's play was not so much

begotten, conceived, or born of admiration for Mr. Long's book as it

was of despair wrought by the failure of another play written by Mr.

Belasco. This play was a farce entitled "Naughty Anthony," created by

Mr. Belasco in a moment of aesthetic aberration for production at the

Herald Square Theatre, in New York, in the spring of 1900. Mr. Belasco

doesn't think so now, but at the time he had a notion that the public

would find something humorous and attractive in the spectacle of a

popular actress's leg swathed in several layers of stocking. So he made

a show of Blanche Bates. The public refused to be amused at the

farcical study in comparative anatomy, and when Mr. Belasco's friends

began to fault him for having pandered to a low taste, and he felt the

smart of failure in addition, he grew heartily ashamed of himself. His

affairs, moreover, began to take on a desperate aspect; the season

threatened to be a ruinous failure, and he had no play ready to

substitute for "Naughty Anthony." Some time before a friend had sent

him Mr. Long's book, but he had carelessly tossed it aside. In his

straits it came under his eyes again, and this time he saw a play in

it--a play and a promise of financial salvation. It was late at night

when he read the story, but he had come to a resolve by morning and in

his mind's eye had already seen his actors in Japanese dress. The drama

lay in the book snugly enough; it was only necessary to dig it out and

materialize it to the vision. That occupation is one in which Mr.

Belasco is at home. The dialogue went to his actors a few pages at a

time, and the pictures rose rapidly in his mind. Something different

from a stockinged leg now!

Glimpses of Nippon--its mountains, waters, bridges, flowers, gardens,

geishas; as a foil to their grace and color the prosaic figures of a

naval officer and an American Consul. All things tinged with the bright

light of day, the glories of sunset or the super-glories of sunrise. We

must saturate the fancy of the audience with the atmosphere of Japan,

mused Mr. Belasco. Therefore, Japanese scenes, my painter! Electrician,

your plot shall be worked out as carefully as the dialogue and action

of the play's people. "First drop discovered; house-lights down; white

foots with blue full work change of color at back of drop; white lens

on top of mountain; open light with white, straw, amber, and red on

lower part of drop; when full on lower footlights to blue," and so on.

Mr. Belasco's emotions, we know, find eloquent expression in stage

lights. But the ear must be carried off to the land of enchantment as

well as the eye. "Come, William Furst, recall your experiences on the

Western coast. For my first curtain I want a quaint, soft Japanese

melody, pp--you know how!"

And so "Madame Butterfly," the play, was made. In two weeks all was

ready, and a day after the first performance at the Herald Square

Theatre, on March 5, 1900, the city began to hum with eager comment on

the dramatic intensity of the scene of a Japanese woman's vigil, of the

enthralling eloquence of a motionless, voiceless figure, looking

steadily through a hole torn through a paper partition, with a sleeping

child and a nodding maid at her feet, while a mimic night wore on, the

lanterns on the floor flickered out one by one and the soft violins

crooned a melody to the arpeggios of a harp.

The season at the Herald Square Theatre was saved. Some time later,

when Mr. Belasco accompanied Mr. Charles Frohman to London to put on

"Zaza" at the Garrick Theatre, he took "Madame Butterfly" with him and

staged it at the Duke of York's Theatre, hard by. On the first night of

"Madame Butterfly" Mr. Frohman was at the latter playhouse, Mr. Belasco

at the former. The fall of the curtain on the little Japanese play was

followed by a scene of enthusiasm which endured so long that Mr.

Frohman had time to summon his colleague to take a curtain call. At a

stroke the pathetic play had made its fortune in London, and, as it

turned out, paved the way for a new and larger triumph for Mr. Long's

story. The musical critics of the London newspapers came to the house

and saw operatic possibilities in the drama. So did Mr. Francis

Nielson, at the time Covent Garden's stage manager, who sent word of

the discovery to Signor Puccini. The composer came from Milan, and

realized on the spot that the successor of "Tosca" had been found.

Signori Illica and Giacosa, librettists in ordinary to Ricordi & Co.,

took the work of making the opera book in hand. Signor Illica's fancy

had roamed in the Land of Flowers before; he had written the libretto

for Mascagni's "Iris." The ephemeral life of Cho-Cho-San was over in a

few months, but by that time "Madama Butterfly," glorified by music,

had lifted her wings for a new flight in Milan.

It is an old story that many operas which are recognized as

masterpieces later, fail to find appreciation or approval when they are

first produced. "Madama Butterfly" made a fiasco when brought forward

at La Scala on February 17, 1904.

[Footnote: At this premiere Campanini was the conductor and the cast

was as follows: Butterfly, Storchio; Suzuki, Giaconia; Pinkerton,

Zenatello; Sharpless, De Luca; Goro, Pini-Corsi; Bonzo, Venturini;

Yakuside, Wulmann. At the first performance in London, on July 10,

1905, at Covent Garden, the cast was: Butterfly, Destinn; Suzuki,

Lejeune; Pinkerton, Caruso; Sharpless, Scotti; Goro, Dufriche; Bonzo,

Cotreuil; Yakuside, Rossi. Conductor, Campanini. After the revision it

was produced at Brescia on May 28, 1904, with Zenatello, of the

original cast, Krusceniski as Butterfly, and Bellati as Sharpless. The

first American performances were in the English version, made by Mrs.

B. H. Elkin, by the Savage Opera Company, which came to the Garden

Theatre, New York, after a trial season in Washington, on November 12,

1906. It had a run of nearly three months before it reached the

Metropolitan Opera House, on February 11, 1907. Mr. Walter Rothwell

conducted the English performance, in which there were several changes

of casts, the original Butterfly being Elza Szamozy (a Hungarian

singer); Suzuki, Harriet Behne; Pinkerton, Joseph F. Sheehan, and

Sharpless, Winifred Goff. Arturo Vigna conducted the first Italian

performance at the Metropolitan, with Geraldine Farrar as Butterfly,

Louise Homer as Suzuki, Caruso as Pinkerton, Scotti as Sharpless, and

Albert Reiss as Goro.]

So complete was the fiasco that in his anxiety to withdraw the work

Signer Puccini is said to have offered to reimburse the management of

the theatre for the expenditures entailed by the production. Failures

of this kind are frequently inexplicable, but it is possible that the

unconventional character of the story and the insensibility of the

Italians to national musical color other than their own, had a great

deal to do with it in this case. Whatever the cause, the popular

attitude toward the opera was displayed in the manner peculiar to

Italy, the discontented majority whistling, shrilling on house keys,

grunting, roaring, bellowing, and laughing in the good old-fashioned

manner which might be set down as possessed of some virtuous merit if

reserved for obviously stupid creations.

"The Pall Mall Gazette" reported that at the time the composer told a

friend that on this fateful first night he was shut up in a small room

behind the scenes, where he could hear nothing of what was going on on

the stage or in the audience-room. On a similar occasion, nearly a

century before, when "The Barber of Seville" scored an equally

monumental failure, Rossini, in the conductor's chair, faced the mob,

shrugged his shoulders, and clapped his hands to show his contempt for

his judges, then went home and composedly to bed. Puccini, though he

could not see the discomfiture of his opera, was not permitted to

remain in ignorance of it. His son and his friends brought him the

news. His collaborator, Giacosa, rushed into the room with dishevelled

hair and staring eyes, crying: "I have suffered the passion of death!"

while Signorina Storchio burst into such a flood of tears and sobs that

it was feared she would be ill. Puccini was cut to the heart, but he

did not lose faith in the work. He had composed it in love and knew its

potentialities, His faith found justification when he produced it in

Brescia three months later and saw it start out at once on a triumphal

tour of the European theatres. His work of revision was not a large or

comprehensive one. He divided the second act into two acts, made some

condensations to relieve the long strain, wrote a few measures of

introduction for the final scene, but refused otherwise to change the

music. His fine sense of the dramatic had told him correctly when he

planned the work that there ought not to be a physical interruption of

the pathetic vigil out of which Blanche Bates in New York and Evelyn

Millard in London had made so powerful a scene, but he yielded to the

compulsion of practical considerations, trying to save respect for his

better judgment by refusing to call the final scene an act, though he

permitted the fall of the curtain; but nothing can make good the loss

entailed by the interruption. The mood of the play is admirably

preserved in the music of the intermezzo, but the mood of the listeners

is hopelessly dissipated with the fall of the curtain. When the scene

of the vigil is again disclosed, the charm and the pathos have

vanished, never to return. It is true that a rigid application of the

law of unities would seem to forbid that a vigil of an entire night

from eve till morning be compressed into a few minutes; but poetic

license also has rights, and they could have been pleaded with

convincing eloquence by music, with its marvellous capacity for

publishing the conflicting emotions of the waiting wife.

His ship having been ordered to the Asiatic station, Benjamin Franklin

Pinkerton, Lieutenant in the United States Navy, follows a custom (not

at all unusual among naval officers, if Pierre Loti is to be believed)

and for the summer sojourn in Japan leases a Japanese wife. (The word

"wife" is a euphemism for housekeeper, companion, play-fellow,

mistress, what not.) This is done in a manner involving little

ceremony, as is known to travellers and others familiar with the social

customs of Nippon, through a nakodo, a marriage broker or matrimonial

agent. M. Loti called his man Kangourou; Mr. Long gave his the name of

Goro. That, however, and the character of the simple proceeding before

a registrar is immaterial. M. Loti, who assures us that his book is

merely some pages from a veritable diary, entertains us with some

details preliminary to his launch into a singular kind of domestic

existence, which are interesting as bearing on the morals of the opera

and as indicative of the fact that he is a closer observer of Oriental

life than his American confrere. He lets us see how merchantable

"wives" are chosen, permits M. Kangourou to exhibit his wares and

expatiate on their merits. There is the daughter of a wealthy China

merchant, a young woman of great accomplishments who can write

"commercially" and has won a prize in a poetic contest with a sonnet.

She is, consequently, very dear--100 yen, say $100--but that is of no

consequence; what matters is that she has a disfiguring scar on her

cheek. She will not do. Then there is Mlle. Jasmin, a pretty girl of

fifteen years, who can be had for $18 or $20 a month (contract

cancellable at the end of any month for non-payment), a few dresses of

fashionable cut and a pleasant house to live in. Mlle. Jasmin comes to

be inspected with one old lady, two old ladies, three old ladies (mamma

and aunts), and a dozen friends and neighbors, big and little. Loti's

moral stomach revolts at the thought of buying for his uses a child who

looks like a doll, and is shocked at the public parade which has been

made of her as a commodity. He has not yet been initiated into some of

the extraordinary customs of Japan, nor yet into some of the

distinctions attendant upon those customs. He learns of one of the

latter when he suggests to the broker that he might marry a charming

geisha who had taken his fancy at a tea house. The manner in which the

suggestion was received convinced him that he might as well have

purposed to marry the devil himself as a professional dancer and

singer. Among the train of Mlle. Jasmin's friends is one less young

than Mlle. Jasmin, say about eighteen, and already more of a woman; and

when Loti says, "Why not her?" M. Kangourou trots her out for

inspection and, discreetly sending Loti away, concludes the arrangement

between night-fall and 10 o'clock, when he comes with the announcement:

"All is arranged, sir; her parents will give her up for $20 a

month--the same price as Mlle. Jasmin."

So Mlle. Chrysantheme became the wife of Pierre Loti during his stay at

Nagasaki, and then dutifully went home to her mother without breaking

her heart at all. But she was not a geisha, only a mousme--"one of the

prettiest words in the Nipponese language," comments M. Loti, "it seems

almost as if there must be a little moue in the very sound, as if a

pretty, taking little pout, such as they put on, and also a little pert

physiognomy, were described by it."

Lieutenant Pinkerton, equally ignorant with Lieutenant Loti but

uninstructed evidently, marries a geisha whose father had made the

happy dispatch at the request of the Son of Heaven after making a

blunder in his military command. She is Cio-Cio-San, also Madama

Butterfly, and she comes to her wedding with a bevy of geishas or

mousmes (I do not know which) and a retinue of relations. All enjoy the

hospitality of the American officer while picking him to pieces, but

turn from their kinswoman when they learn from an uncle, who is a

Buddhist priest and comes late to the wedding like the wicked fairy in

the stories, that she has attended the Mission school and changed her

religion. Wherefore the bonze curses her: "Hou, hou! Cio-Cio-San, hou,

hou!"

Sharpless, United States Consul at Nagasaki, had not approved of

Pinkerton's adventure, fearing that it might bring unhappiness to the

little woman; but Pinkerton had laughed at his scruples and emptied his

glass to the marriage with an American wife which he hoped to make some

day. Neither Loti nor Long troubles us with the details of so prosaic a

thing as the marriage ceremony; but Puccini and his librettists make

much of it, for it provides the only opportunity for a chorus and the

musician had found delightfully mellifluous Japanese gongs to add a

pretty touch of local color to the music. Cio-Cio-San has been

"outcasted" and Pinkerton comforts her and they make love in the

starlight (after Butterfly has changed her habiliments) like any pair

of lovers in Italy. "Dolce notte! Quante stelle! Vieni, vieni!" for

quantity.

This is the first act of the opera, and it is all expository to

Belasco's "Tragedy of Japan," which plays in one act, with the pathetic

vigil separating the two days which form its period of action. When

that, like the second act of the opera, opens, Pinkerton has been gone

from Nagasaki and his "wife" three years, and a baby boy of whom he has

never heard, but who has his eyes and hair has come to bear Butterfly

company in the little house on the hill. The money left by the male

butterfly when he flitted is all but exhausted. Madama Butterfly

appears to be lamentably ignorant of the customs of her country, for

she believes herself to be a wife in the American sense and is

fearfully wroth with Suzuki, her maid, when she hints that she never

knew a foreign husband to come back to a Japanese wife. But Pinkerton

when he sailed away had said that he would be back "when the robins

nest again," and that suffices Cio-Cio-San. But when Sharpless comes

with a letter to break the news that his friend is coming back with an

American wife, he loses courage to perform his mission at the

contemplation of the little woman's faith in the truant. Does he know

when the robins nest in America? In Japan they had nested three times

since Pinkerton went away. The consul quails at that and damns his

friend as a scoundrel. Now Goro, who knows Butterfly's pecuniary

plight, brings Yamadori to her. Yamadori is a wealthy Japanese citizen

of New York in the book and play and a prince in the opera, but in all

he is smitten with Butterfly's beauty and wants to add her name to the

list of wives he has conveniently married and as conveniently divorced

on his visits to his native land. Butterfly insists that she is an

American and cannot be divorced Japanese fashion, and is amazed when

Sharpless hints that Pinkerton might have forgotten her and she would

better accept Yamadori's hand.

First she orders him out of the house, but, repenting her of her

rudeness, brings in the child to show him something that no one is

likely to forget. She asks the consul to write to his friend and tell

him that he has a son, so fine a son, indeed, that she indulges in a

day dream of the Mikado stopping at the head of his troops to admire

him and make him a prince of the realm. Sharpless goes away with his

mission unfulfilled and Suzuki comes in dragging Goro with her, for

that he had been spreading scandalous tales about the treatment which

children born like this child receive in America. Butterfly is tempted

to kill the wretch, but at the last is content to spurn him with her

foot.

At this moment a cannon shot is heard. A man-of-war is entering the

harbor. Quick, the glasses! "Steady my hand, Suzuki, that I may read

the name." It is the Abraham Lincoln, Pinkerton's ship! Now the cherry

tree must give up its every blossom, every bush or vine its violets and

jessamines to garnish the room for his welcome! The garden is stripped

bare, vases are filled, the floor is strewn with petals. Perfumes

exhale from the voices of the women and the song of the orchestra. Here

local color loses its right; the music is all Occidental. Butterfly is

dressed again in her wedding gown of white and her pale cheeks are

touched up with carmine. The paper partitions are drawn against the

night. Butterfly punctures the shoji with three holes--one high up for

herself to look through, standing; one lower for the maid to look

through, sitting; one near the floor for the baby. And so Butterfly

stands in an all-night vigil. The lanterns flicker and go out. Maid and

babe sink down in sleep. The gray dawn creeps over the waters of the

harbor. Human voices, transformed into instruments, hum a barcarolle.

(We heard it when Sharpless tried to read the letter.) A Japanese tune

rises like a sailors' chanty from the band. Mariners chant their "Yo

ho!" Day is come. Suzuki awakes and begs her mistress to seek rest.

Butterfly puts the baby to bed, singing a lullaby. Sharpless and

Pinkerton come and learn of the vigil from Suzuki, who sees the form of

a lady in the garden and hears that it is the American wife of

Pinkerton. Pinkerton pours out his remorse melodiously. He will be

haunted forever by the picture of his once happy home and Cio-Cio-San's

reproachful eyes. He leaves money for Butterfly in the consul's hands

and runs away like a coward. Kate, the American wife, and Suzuki meet

in the garden. The maid is asked to tell her mistress the meaning of

the visit, but before she can do so Butterfly sees them. Her questions

bring out half the truth; her intuition tells her the rest. Kate (an

awful blot she is on the dramatic picture) begs forgiveness and asks

for the baby boy that her husband may rear him. Butterfly says he shall

have him in half an hour if he will come to fetch him. She goes to the

shrine of Buddha and takes from it a veil and a dagger, reading the

words engraved on its blade: "To die with honor when one can no longer

live with honor." It is the weapon which the Mikado had sent to her

father. She points the weapon at her throat, but at the moment Suzuki

pushes the baby into the room. Butterfly addresses it passionately;

then, telling it to play, seats it upon a stool, puts an American flag

into its hands, a bandage around its eyes. Again she takes dagger and

veil and goes behind a screen. The dagger is heard to fall. Butterfly

totters out from behind the screen with a veil wound round her neck.

She staggers to the child and falls, dying, at its feet. Pinkerton

rushes in with a cry of horror and falls on his knees, while Sharpless

gently takes up the child.

I have no desire to comment disparagingly upon the denouement of the

book of Mr. Long or the play of Mr. Belasco which Puccini and his

librettists followed; but in view of the origin of the play a bit of

comparative criticism seems to be imperative. Loti's "Madame

Chrysantheme" was turned into an opera by Andre Messager. What the

opera was like I do not know. It came, it went, and left no sign; yet

it would seem to be easy to guess at the reason for its quick

evanishment. If it followed the French story, as no doubt it did, it

was too faithful to the actualities of Japanese life to awaken a throb

of emotion in the Occidental heart. Without such a throb a drama is

naught--a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The charm of Loti's book

lies in its marvellously beautiful portrayal of a country, a people,

and a characteristic incident in the social life of that people. Its

interest as a story, outside of the charm of its telling, is like that

excited by inspection of an exotic curio. In his dedication of the book

the author begged Mme. la Duchesse de Richelieu not to look for any

meaning in it, but to receive it in the same spirit in which she would

receive "some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesque carved ivory idol,

or some preposterous trifle brought back from the fatherland of all

preposterousness." It is a record of a bit of the wandering life of a

poet who makes himself a part of every scene into which fortune throws

him. He has spent a summer with a Japanese mousme, whom he had married

Japanese fashion, and when he has divorced her, also in Japanese

fashion, with regard for all the conventions, and sailed away from her

forever, he is more troubled by thoughts of possible contamination to

his own nature than because of any consequences to the woman. Before

the final farewell he had felt a touch of pity for the "poor little

gypsy," but when he mounted the stairs to her room for the last time he

heard her singing, and mingled with her voice was a strange metallic

sound, dzinn, dzinn! as of coins ringing on the floor. Is she amusing

herself with quoits, or the jeu du crapaud, or pitch and toss? He

creeps in, and there, dressed for the departure to her mother's,

sitting on the floor is Chrysantheme; and spread out around her all the

fine silver dollars he had given her according to agreement the night

before. "With the competent dexterity of an old money changer she

fingers them, turns them over, throws them on the floor, and armed with

a little mallet ad hoc, rings them vigorously against her ear, singing

the while I know not what little pensive, birdlike song, which I dare

say she improvises as she goes along. Well, after all, it is even more

completely Japanese than I could possibly have imagined it--this last

scene of my married life! I feel inclined to laugh." And he commends

the little gypsy's worldly wisdom, offers to make good any counterfeit

piece which she may find, and refuses to permit her to see him go

aboard of his ship. She does, nevertheless, along with the Japanese

wives of four of his fellow officers, who peep at their flitting

husbands through the curtains of their sampans. But when he is far out

on the great Yellow Sea he throws the faded lotus flowers which she had

given him through the porthole of his cabin, making his best excuses

for "giving to them, natives of Japan, a grave so solemn and so vast";

and he utters a prayer: "O Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami, wash me clean from this

little marriage of mine in the waters of the river of Kamo!"

The story has no soul, and to give his story, which borrowed its motive

from Loti's, a soul, Mr. Long had to do violence to the verities of

Japanese life. Yet might not even a geisha feel a genuine passion?

The use of folk-tunes in opera is older than "Madama Butterfly," but

Puccini's score stands alone in the extent of the use and the

consistency with which Japanese melody has been made the foundation of

the music. When Signor Illica, one of the librettists, followed Sar

Peladan and d'Annunzio into Nippon seeking flowers for "Iris," he took

Mascagni with him--metaphorically, of course. But Mascagni was a timid

gleaner. Puccini plucked with a bolder hand, as indeed he might, for he

is an incomparably greater adept in the art of making musical nosegays.

In fact, I know of only one score that is comparable with that of

"Madama Butterfly" in respect of its use of national musical color, and

that is "Boris Godounoff." Moussorgsky, however, had more, richer, and

a greater variety of material to work with than Puccini. Japanese music

is arid and angular, and yet so great is Puccini's skill in combining

creative imagination and reflection that he knew how to make it blossom

like a rose. Pity that he could not wholly overcome its rhythmical

monotony. Japanese melody runs almost uninterruptedly through his

instrumental score, giving way at intervals to the Italian style of

lyricism when the characters and passions become universal rather than

local types. Structurally, his score rests on the Wagnerian method, in

that the vocal part floats on an uninterrupted instrumental current. In

the orchestral part the tunes which he borrowed from the popular music

of Japan are continuously recurrent, and fragments of them are used as

the connecting links of the whole fabric. He uses also a few typical

themes (Leitmotive) of his own invention, and to them it might be

possible, by ingenious study of their relation to text and situation,

to attach significances in the manner of the Wagnerian handbooks; but I

do not think that such processes occupied the composer's mind to any

considerable extent, and the themes are not appreciably characteristic.

His most persistent use of a connecting link, arbitrarily chosen, is

found in the case of the first motive of the theme, which he treats

fugally in the introduction, and which appears thereafter to the end of

the chapter (a, in the list of themes printed herewith). What might be

called personal themes are the opening notes of "The Star-Spangled

Banner" for Pinkerton and the melody (d) which comes in with Yamadori,

in which the Japanese tune used by Sir Arthur Sullivan in "The Mikado"

is echoed. The former fares badly throughout the score (for which no

blame need attach to Signor Puccini), but the latter is used with

capital effect, though not always in connection with the character.

If Signor Puccini had needed the suggestion that Japanese music was

necessary for a Japanese play (which of course he did not), he might

have received it when he saw Mr. Belasco's play in London. For the

incidental music in that play Mr. William Furst provided Japanese

tunes, or tunes made over the very convenient Japanese last. Through

Mr. Belasco's courtesy I am able to present here a relic of this

original "Butterfly" music. The first melody (a) was the theme of the

curtain-music; (b) that accompanying Cho-Cho-San, when discovered at

the beginning spraying flowers, presenting an offering at the shrine

and burning incense in the house at the foot of Higashi hill; (c) the

Yamadori music; (d) the music accompanying the first production of the

sword; (e) the music of the vigil. There were also two Occidental

pieces--the melody of a little song which Pinkerton had taught

Cho-Cho-San, "I Call Her the Belle of Japan," and "Rock-a-bye, Baby."

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

Themes from Puccini's "Butterfly" music By permission of Ricordi & Co.

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

Meiodies from Mr. Furst's "Butterfly" music By permission of Mr. David

Belasco.

CHAPTER XIII

"DER ROSENKAVALIER"

In the beginning there was "Guntram," of which we in America heard only

fragmentary echoes in our concert-rooms. Then came "Feuersnot," which

reached us in the same way, but between which and the subject which is

to occupy me in this chapter there is a kinship through a single

instrumental number, the meaning of which no commentator has dared more

than hint at. It is the music which accompanies the episode, politely

termed a "love scene," which occurs at the climax of the earlier opera,

but is supposed to take place before the opening of the curtain in the

later. Perhaps I shall recur to them again--if I have the courage.

These were the operas of Richard Strauss which no manager deemed it

necessary or advisable to produce in New York. Now came "Salome."

Popular neurasthenia was growing. Oscar Wilde thought France might

accept a glorification of necrophilism and wrote his delectable book in

French. France would have none of it, but when it was done into German,

and Richard Strauss accentuated its sexual perversity by his hysterical

music, lo! Berlin accepted it with avidity. The theatres of the

Prussian capital were keeping pace with the pathological spirit of the

day, and were far ahead of those of Paris, where, it had long been the

habit to think, moral obliquity made its residence. If Berlin, then why

not New York? So thought Mr. Conned, saturated with German

theatricalism, and seeing no likely difference in the appeal of a

"Parsifal" which he had successfully produced, and a "Salome," he

prepared to put the works of Wagner and Strauss on the same footing at

the Metropolitan Opera House. An influence which has not yet been

clearly defined, but which did not spring from the director of the

opera nor the gentlemen who were his financial backers, silenced the

maunderings of the lust-crazed Herod and paralyzed the contortions of

the lascivious dancer to whom he was willing to give one-half his

kingdom. [Footnote: For the story of "Salome" in New York, see my

"Chapters of Opera" (Henry Holt & Co., New York), p. 343 et seq.]

Now Mr. Hammerstein came to continue the artistic education which the

owners of the Metropolitan Opera House had so strangely and

unaccountably checked. Salome lived out her mad life in a short time,

dying, not by the command of Herod, but crushed under the shield of

popular opinion. The operation, though effective, was not as swift as

it might have been had operatic conditions been different than they are

in New York, and before it was accomplished a newer phase of Strauss's

pathological art had offered itself as a nervous, excitation. It was

"Elektra," and under the guise of an ancient religious ideal, awful but

pathetic, the people were asked to find artistic delight in the

contemplation of a woman's maniacal thirst for a mother's blood. It is

not necessary to recall the history of the opera at the Manhattan Opera

House to show that the artistic sanity of New York was proof against

the new poison.

Hugo von Hoffmannsthal had aided Strauss in this brew and collaborated

with him in the next, which, it was hoped, probably because of the

difference in its concoction and ingredients, would make his rein even

more taut than it had ever been on theatrical managers and their

public. From the Greek classics he turned to the comedy of the

Beaumarchais period. Putting their heads together, the two wrote "Der

Rosenkavalier." It was perhaps shrewd on their part that they avoided

all allusion to the opera buffa of the period and called their work a

"comedy for music." It enabled them, in the presence of the ignorant,

to assume a virtue which they did not possess; but it is questionable

if that circumstance will help them any. It is only the curious critic

nowadays who takes the trouble to look at the definition, or epithet,

on a title page. It is the work which puts the hallmark on itself; not

the whim of the composer. It would have been wise, very wise indeed,

had Hoffmannsthal avoided everything which might call up a comparison

between himself and Beaumarchais. It was simply fatal to Strauss that

he tried to avoid all comparison between his treatment of an eighteenth

century comedy and Mozart's. One of his devices was to make use of the

system of musical symbols which are irrevocably associated with

Wagner's method of composition. Mozart knew nothing of this system, but

he had a better one in his Beaumarchaisian comedy, which "Der

Rosenkavalier" recalls; it was that of thematic expression for each new

turn in the dramatic situation--a system which is carried out so

brilliantly in "Le Nozze di Figaro" that there is nothing, even in "Die

Meistersinger," which can hold a candle to it. Another was to build up

the vocal part of his comedy on orchestral waltzes. Evidently it was

his notion that at the time of Maria Theresa (in whose early reign the

opera is supposed to take place) the Viennese world was given over to

the dance. It was so given over a generation later, so completely,

indeed, that at the meetings in the ridotto, for which Mozart, Haydn,

Gyrowetz, Beethoven, and others wrote music, retiring rooms had to be

provided for ladies who were as unprepared for possible accidents as

was one of those described by Pepys as figuring in a court ball in his

time; but to put scarcely anything but waltz tunes under the dialogue

of "Der Rosenkavalier" is an anachronism which is just as disturbing to

the judicious as the fact that Herr Strauss, though he starts his

half-dozen or more of waltzes most insinuatingly, never lets them run

the natural course which Lanner and the Viennese Strauss, who suggested

their tunes, would have made them do. Always, the path which sets out

so prettily becomes a byway beset with dissonant thorns and thistles

and clogged with rocks.

All of this is by way of saying that "Der Rosenkavalier" reached New

York on December 9, 1913, after having endured two years or so in

Europe, under the management of Mr. Gatti-Casazza, and was treated with

the distinction which Mr. Conried gave "Parsifal" and had planned for

"Salome." It was set apart for a performance outside the subscription,

special prices were demanded, and the novelty dressed as sumptuously

and prepared with as lavish an expenditure of money and care as if it

were a work of the very highest importance. Is it that? The question is

not answered by the fact that its music was composed by Richard

Strauss, even though one be willing to admit that Strauss is the

greatest living master of technique in musical composition, the one

concerning whose doings the greatest curiosity is felt and certainly

the one whose doings are the best advertised. "Der Rosenkavalier," in

spite of all these things, must stand on its merits--as a comedy with

music. The author of its book has invited a comparison which has

already been suggested by making it a comedy of intrigue merely and

placing its time of action in Vienna and the middle of the eighteenth

century. He has gone further; he has invoked the spirit of Beaumarchais

to animate his people and his incidents. The one thing which he could

not do, or did not do, was to supply the satirical scourge which

justified the Figaro comedies of his great French prototype and which,

while it made their acceptance tardy, because of royal and courtly

opposition, made their popular triumph the more emphatic. "Le Nozze di

Figaro" gave us more than one figure and more than one scene in the

representation, and "Le Nozze di Figaro" is to those who understand its

text one of the most questionable operas on the current list. But there

is a moral purpose underlying the comedy which to some extent justifies

its frank salaciousness. It is to prevent the Count from exercising an

ancient seigniorial right over the heroine which he had voluntarily

resigned, that all the characters in the play unite in the intrigue

which makes up the comedy. Moreover, there are glimpses over and over

again of honest and virtuous love between the characters and beautiful

expressions of it in the music which makes the play delightful, despite

its salaciousness. Even Cherubino who seems to have come to life again

in Octavian, is a lovable youth if for no othe reason than that he

represents youth in its amorousness toward all womankind, with thought

of special mischief toward none.

"Der Rosenkavalier" is a comedy of lubricity merely, with what little

satirical scourge it has applied only to an old roue who is no more

deserving of it than most of the other people in the play. So much of

its story as will bear telling can be told very briefly. It begins,

assuming its instrumental introduction (played with the scene

discreetly hidden) to be a part of it, with a young nobleman locked in

the embraces of the middle-aged wife of a field marshal, who is

conveniently absent on a hunting expedition. The music is of a

passionate order, and the composer, seeking a little the odor of

virtue, but with an oracular wink in his eye, says in a descriptive

note that it is to be played in the spirit of parody (parodistisch).

Unfortunately the audience cannot see the printed direction, and there

is no parody in music except extravagance and ineptitude in the

utterance of simple things (like the faulty notes of the horns in

Mozart's joke on the village musicians, the cadenza for violin solo in

the same musical joke, or the twangling of Beckmesser's lute); so the

introduction is an honest musical description of things which the

composer is not willing to confess, and least of all the stage manager,

for when the curtain opens there is not presented even the picture

called for by the German libretto. Nevertheless, morn is dawning, birds

are twittering, and the young lover, kneeling before his mistress on a

divan, is bemoaning the fact that day is come and that he cannot

publish his happiness to the world. The tete-a-tete is interrupted by a

rude boor of a nobleman, who come to consult his cousin (the princess)

about a messenger to send with the conventional offering of a silver

rose to the daughter of a vulgar plebeian just elevated to the nobility

because of his wealth. The conversation between the two touches on

little more than old amours, and after the lady has held her levee

designed to introduce a variety of comedy effects in music as well as

action, the princess recommends her lover for the office of rosebearer.

Meanwhile the lover has donned the garments of a waiting maid and been

overwhelmed with the wicked attentions of the roue, Lerchenau. When the

lovers are again alone there is a confession of renunciation on the

part of the princess, based on the philosophical reflection that, after

all, her Octavian being so young would bring about the inevitable

parting sooner or later.

In the second act what the princess in her prescient abnegation had

foreseen takes place. Her lover carries the rose to the young woman

whom the roue had picked out for his bride and promptly falls in love

with her. She with equal promptness, following the example of Wagner's

heroines, bowls herself at his head. The noble vulgarian complicates

matters by insisting that he receive a dowry instead of paying one. The

young hot-blood adds to the difficulties by pinking him in the arm with

his sword, but restores order at the last by sending him a letter of

assignation in his first act guise of a maid servant of the princess.

This assignation is the background of the third act, which is farce of

the wildest and most vulgar order. Much of it is too silly for

description. Always, however, there is allusion to the purpose of the

meeting on the part of Lerchenau, whose plans are spoiled by

apparitions in all parts of the room, the entrance of the police, his

presumptive bride and her father, a woman who claims him as her

husband, four children who raise bedlam (and memories of the

contentious Jews in "Salome"); by shouting "Papa! papa!" until his mind

is in a whirl and he rushes out in despair. The princess leaves the

new-found lovers alone.

They hymn their happiness in Mozartian strains (the melody copied from

the second part of the music with which Papageno sets the blackamoors

to dancing in "Die Zauberflote"), the orchestra talks of the matronly

renunciation of the princess, enthusiastic Straussians of a musical

parallel with the quintet from Wagner's "Meistersinger," and the opera

comes to an end after three and one-half hours of more or less

unintelligible dialogue poised on waltz melodies.

I have said unintelligible dialogue. For this unintelligibility there

are two reasons-the chief one musical, the other literary. Though

Strauss treats his voices with more consideration in "Der

Rosenkavalier" than in his tragedies, he still so overburdens them that

the words are distinguishable only at intervals. Only too frequently he

crushes them with orchestral voices, which in themselves are not

overwhelming--the voices of his horns, for instance, for which he shows

a particular partiality. His style of declamation is melodic, though it

is only at the end of the opera that he rises to real vocal melody; but

it seems to be put over an orchestral part, and not the orchestral part

put under it. There is no moment in which he can say, as Wagner

truthfully and admiringly said of the wonderful orchestral music of the

third act of "Tristan und Isolde," that all this swelling instrumental

song existed only for the sake of what the dying Tristan was saying

upon his couch. All of Strauss's waltzes seem to exist for their own

sake, which makes the disappointment greater that they are not carried

through in the spirit in which they are begun; that is, the spirit of

the naive Viennese dance tune.

A second reason for the too frequent unintelligibility of the text is

its archaic character. Its idioms are eighteenth century as well as

Viennese, and its persistent use of the third person even among

individuals of quality, though it gives a tang to the libretto when

read in the study, is not welcome when heard with difficulty. Besides

this, there is use of dialect--vulgar when assumed by Octavian, mixed

when called for by such characters as Valzacchi and his partner in

scandal mongery, Annina. To be compelled to forego a knowledge of half

of what such a master of diction as Mr. Reiss was saying was a new

sensation to his admirers who understand German. Yet the fault was as

little his as it was Mr. Goritz's that so much of what he said went for

nothing; it was all his misfortune, including the fact that much of the

music is not adapted to his voice.

The music offers a pleasanter topic than the action and dialogue. It is

a relief to those listeners who go to the opera oppressed with memories

of "Salome" and "Elektra." It is not only that their ears are not so

often assaulted by rude sounds, they are frequently moved by phrases of

great and genuine beauty. Unfortunately the Straussian system of

composition demands that beauty be looked for in fragments. Continuity

of melodic flow is impossible to Strauss--a confession of his inability

either to continue Wagner's method, to improve on it, or invent

anything new in its place. The best that has been done in the Wagnerian

line belongs to Humperdinck.

[Footnote: "Der Rosenkavalier" had its first American production at the

Metropolitan Opera House, New York, on December 9, 1913, the cast being

as follows:--

Feldmarschallin Furstin Werdenberg............ Frieda Hempel

Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau...................... Otto Goritz

Octavian, genannt Quinquin.................... Margarete Ober

Herr von Faninal.............................. Hermann Weil

Sophie, seine Tochter......................... Anna Case

Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin................. Rita Fornia

Valzacchi, ein Intrigant...................... Albert Reiss

Annina, seine Begleiterin..................... Marie Mattfeld

Ein Polizeikommissar.......................... Carl Schlegel

Haushofmeister der Feldmarschalh'n............ Pietro Audisio

Haushofmeister bei Faninal.................... Lambert Murphy

Ein Notar..................................... Basil Ruysdael

Ein Wirt...................................... Julius Bayer

Ein Sanger.................................... Carl Jorn

Drei adelige Waisen........................... Louise Cox

Rosina Van Dyck

Sophie Braslau

Eine Modistin................................. Jeanne Maubourg

Ein Lakai..................................... Ludwig Burgstaller

Ein kleiner Neger............................. Ruth Weinstein

Conductor--Alfred Hertz]

CHAPTER XIV

"Konigskinder"

Once upon a time a witch cast a spell upon a king's daughter and held

her in servitude as a gooseherd. A prince found her in the forest and

loved her. She loved him in return, and would gladly have gone away

from her sordid surroundings with him, though she had spurned the crown

which he had offered her in exchange for her wreath of flowers; but

when she escaped from her jailer she found that she could not break the

charm which held her imprisoned in the forest. Then the prince left the

crown lying at her feet and continued his wanderings. Scarcely had he

gone when there came to the hut of the witch a broommaker and a

woodchopper, guided by a wandering minstrel. They were ambassadors from

the city of Hellabrunn, which had been so long without a king that its

boorish burghers themselves felt the need of a ruler in spite of their

boorishness. To the wise woman the ambassadors put the questions: Who

shall be this ruler and by what sign shall they recognize him? The

witch tells them that their sovereign shall be the first person who

enters their gates after the bells have rung the noon hour on the

morrow, which is the day of the Hella festival. Then the minstrel

catches sight of the lovely goose-girl, and through the prophetic gift

possessed by poets he recognizes in her a rightly born princess for his

people. By the power of his art he is enabled to put aside the

threatening spells of the witch and compel the hag to deliver the

maiden into his care. He persuades her to break the enchantment which

had held her bound hitherto and defy the wicked power.

Meanwhile, however, grievous misfortunes have befallen the prince, her

lover. He has gone to Hellabrunn, and desiring to learn to serve in

order that he might better know how to rule, he had taken service as a

swineherd. The daughter of the innkeeper becomes enamoured of the

shapely body of the prince, whose proud spirit she cannot understand,

and who has repulsed her advances. His thoughts go back to the

goosegirl whose wreath, with its fresh fragrance, reminds him of his

duty. He attempts to teach the burghers their own worth, but the wench

whose love he had repulsed accuses him of theffy and he is about to be

led off to prison when the bells peal forth the festal hour.

Joyfully the watchmen throw open the strong town gates and the

multitude and gathered councillors fall back to receive their king. But

through the doors enters the gooseherd, proudly wearing her crown and

followed by her flock and the minstrel The lovers fall into each

other's arms, but only the poet and a little child recognize them as of

royal blood. The boorish citizens, who had fancied that their king

would appear in regal splendor, drive the youth and maiden out with

contumely, burn the witch and cripple the minstrel by breaking one of

his legs on the wheel. Seeking his home, the prince and his love lose

their way in the forest during a snowstorm and die of a poisoned loaf

made by the witch, for which the prince had bartered his broken crown,

under the same tree which had sheltered them on their first meeting;

but the children of Hellabrunn, who had come out in search of them,

guided by a bird, find their bodies buried under the snow and give them

royal acclaim and burial. And the prescient minstrel hymns their

virtues.

This is the story of Engelbert Humperdinck's opera "Konigskinder,"

which had its first performance on any stage at the Metropolitan Opera

House, New York, on December 28,1910, with the following cast:

Der Konigssohn......................Herman Jadlowker

Die Gansemagd.......................Geraldine Farrar

Der Spielmann........................... Otto Goritz

Die Hexe................................Louise Homer

Der Holzhacker.......................... Adamo Didur

Der Besenbinder........................ Albert Reiss

Zwei Kinder..............Edna Walter and Lotte Engel

Der Ratsalteste....................... Marcel Reiner

Der Wirt..........................Antonio Pini-Corsi

Die Wirtstochter................... Florence Wickham

Der Schneider.......................... Julius Bayer

Die Stallmagd.........................Marie Mattfeld

Zwei Torwachter..... Ernst Maran and William Hinshaw

Conductor: Alfred Hertz

To some in the audience the drama was new only in the new operatic

dress with which Humperdinck had clothed it largely at the instance of

the Metropolitan management. It had been known as a spoken play for

twelve years and three of its musical numbers--the overture and two

pieces of between-acts music--had been in local concert-lists for the

same length of time. The play had been presented with incidental music

for many of the scenes as well as the overture and entr'actes in 1898

in an extremely interesting production at the Irving Place Theatre,

then under the direction of Heinrich Conried, in which Agnes Sorma and

Rudolf Christians had carried the principal parts. It came back four

years later in an English version at the Herald Square Theatre, but

neither in the German nor the English performance was it vouchsafed us

to realize what had been the purpose of the author of the play and the

composer of the music.

The author, who calls herself Ernst Rosmer, is a woman, daughter of

Heinrich Forges, for many years a factotum at the Bayreuth festivals.

It was her father's devotion to Wagner which gave her the name of Elsa.

She married a lawyer and litterateur in Munich named Bernstein, and has

written a number of plays besides "Konigskinder," which she published

in 1895, and afterward asked Herr Humperdinck (not yet a royal Prussian

professor, but a simple musician, who had made essays in criticisms and

tried to make a composer out of Siegfried Wagner) to provide with

incidental music. Mr. Humperdinck took his task seriously. The play,

with some incidental music, was two years old before Mr. Humperdinck

had his overture ready. He had tried a new experiment, which proved a

failure. The second and third acts had their preludes, and the songs of

the minstrel had their melodies and accompaniments, and all the

principal scenes had been provided with illustrative music in the

Wagnerian manner, with this difference, that the dialogue had been

"pointed," as a church musician would say--that is, the rhythm was

indicated with exactness, and even the variations of pitch, though it

was understood that the purpose was not to achieve song, but an

intensified utterance, halfway between speech and song. This was

melodrama, as Herr Humperdinck conceived it and as it had no doubt

existed for ages--ever since the primitive Greek drama, in fact. It is

easy to understand how Herr Humperdinck came to believe in the

possibility of an art-form which, though accepted, for temporary

effect, by Beethoven and Cherubini, and used for ballads with greater

or less success by Schumann, had been harshly rejected by his great

model and master, Wagner. Humperdinck lives in Germany, where in nearly

every theatre there is more or less of an amalgamation of the spoken

drama and the opera--where choristers play small parts and actors,

though not professional singers, sing when not too much is required of

them. And yet Herr Humperdinck found out that he had asked too much of

his actors with his "pointed" and at times intoned declamation, and

"Konigskinder" did not have to come to America to learn that the

compromise was a failure. No doubt Herr Humperdinck thought of turning

so beautiful a play into an opera then, but it seems to have required

the stimulus which finally came from New York to persuade him to carry

out the operatic idea, which is more than suggested in the score as it

lies before me in its original shape, into a thorough lyric drama. The

set pieces which had lived in the interim in the concert-room were

transferred into the opera-score with trifling alterations and

condensations and so were the set songs. As for the rest it needed only

that note-heads be supplied to some of the portions of the dialogue

which Humperdinck had designed for melodic declamation to have those

portions ready for the opera. Here an example:--

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

A German opera can generally stand severer criticism than one in

another language, because there is a more strict application of

principles in Germany when it comes to writing a lyric drama than in

any other country. So in the present instance there is no need to

conceal the fact that there are outbreaks of eroticism and offences

against the German language which are none the less flagrant and

censurable because they are, to some extent, concealed under the thin

veneer of the allegory and symbolism which every reader must have

recognized as running through the play. This is, in a manner,

Wagnerian, as so much of the music is Wagnerian--especially that of the

second act, which because it calls up scenes from the "Meistersinger"

must also necessarily call up music from the same comedy. But there is

little cause here for quarrel with Professor Humperdinck. He has

applied the poetical principle of Wagner to the fairy tale which is so

closely related to the myth, and he has with equal consistency applied

Wagner's constructive methods musically and dramatically. It is to his

great honor that, of all of Wagner's successors, he has been the only

one to do so successfully.

The story of "Konigskinder," though it belongs to the class of fairy

tales of which "Hansel und Gretel" is so striking and beautiful an

example, is not to be found as the author presents it in the literature

of German Marchen. Mme. Bernstein has drawn its elements from many

sources and blended them with the utmost freedom. To avoid a

misunderstanding Germans will insist that the title be used without the

article, for "Die Konigskinder" or "Zwei Konigskinder" both suggest the

simple German form of the old tale of Hero and Leander, with which

story, of course, it has nothing whatever to do. But if literary

criticism forbids association between Humperdinck's two operas, musical

criticism compels it. Many of the characters in the operas are close

relations, dramatically as well as musically--the royal children

themselves, the witches, of course, and the broom-makers. The rest of

the characters have been taken from Wagner's "Meistersinger" picture

book; the citizens of Hellabrunn are Nuremberg's burghers, the city's'

councillors, the old master singers. The musical idiom is

Humperdinck's, though its method of employment is Wagner's. But here

lies its charm: Though the composer hews to a theoretical line, he does

it freely, naturally, easily, and always with the principle of musical

beauty as well as that of dramatic truthfulness and propriety in view.

His people's voices float on a symphonic stream, but the voices of the

instruments, while they sing on in endless melody, use the idiom which

nature gave them. There is admirable characterization in the orchestral

music, but it is music for all that; it never descends to mere noise,

designed to keep up an irritation of the nerves.

CHAPTER XV

"BORIS GODOUNOFF"

From whatever point of view it may be considered Mossourgsky's opera

"Boris Godounoff" is an extraordinary work. It was brought to the

notice of the people of the United States by a first performance at the

Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, on March 19, 1913, but

intelligence concerning its character had come to observers of musical

doings abroad by reports touching performances in Paris and London. It

is possible, even likely, that at all the performances of the work

outside of Russia those who listened to it with the least amount of

intellectual sophistication derived the greatest pleasure from it,

though to them its artistic deficiencies must also have been most

obvious. Against these deficiencies, however, it presented itself,

first of all, as a historical play shot through and through with a

large theme, which, since it belongs to tragedy, is universal and

unhampered by time or place or people. To them it had something of the

sweep, dignity, and solemnity and also something of the dramatic

incongruity and lack of cohesion of a Shakespearian drama as

contradistinguished from the coherence of purpose and manner of a

modern drama.

To them also it had much strangeness of style, a style which was not

easily reconciled to anything with which the modern stage had made them

familiar. They saw and heard the chorus enter into the action, not for

the purpose of spectacular pageantry, nor as hymners of the

achievements of the principal actors in the story, but as participants.

They heard unwonted accents from these actors and saw them behave in

conduct which from moment to moment appeared strangely contradictory.

There were mutterings of popular discontent, which, under threats, gave

way to jubilant acclamation in the first great scenes in the beginning

of the opera. There were alternate mockeries and adulations in the next

scene in which the people figured; and running through other scenes

from invisible singers came ecclesiastical chants, against which were

projected, not operatic song in the old conception, but long passages

of heightened speech, half declamatory, half musical. A multitude

cringed before upraised knouts and fell on its knees before the

approach of a man whose agents swung the knotted cords; anon they

acclaimed the man who sought to usurp a throne and overwhelmed with

ridicule a village imbecile, who was yet supposed because of his mental

weakness to be possessed of miraculous prescience, and therefore to

have a prevision of what was to follow the usurpation. They saw the

incidents of the drama moving past their eyes within a framework of

barbaric splendor typical of a wonderful political past, an amazing

political present, and possibly prophetic of a still more amazing

political future.

These happily ingenuous spectators saw an historical personage racked

by conscience, nerve-torn by spectres, obsessed by superstitions,

strong in position achieved, yet pathetically sweet and moving in his

exhibition of paternal love, and going to destruction through remorse

for crime committed. They were troubled by no curious questionings as

to the accuracy of the historical representation. The Boris Godounoff

before them was a remorse-stricken regicide, whose good works, if he

did any, had to be summed up for their imagination in the fact that he

loved his son. In all this, and also in some of its music, the new

opera was of the opera operatic. But to the unhappily disingenuous (or

perhaps it would be better to say, to the instructed) there was much

more in the new opera; and it was this more which so often gave

judgment pause, even while it stimulated interest and irritated

curiosity. It was a pity that a recent extraordinary outburst of

enthusiasm about a composer and an opera should have had the effect of

distorting their vision and disturbing their judgment.

There was a reason to be suspicious touching this enthusiasm, because

of its origin. It came from France and not from the home land of the

author of the play or the composer of the music. Moreover, it was

largely based upon an element which has as little genuineness in France

as a basis of judgment (and which must therefore be set down largely as

an affectation) as in America. Loud hallelujahs have been raised in

praise of Moussorgsky because, discarding conventional law, he

vitalized the music of the lyric poem and also the dramatic line, by

making it the emotional flowering of the spoken word. When it became

necessary for the precious inner brotherhood of Frenchmen who hold

burning incense sticks under each others' noses to acclaim "Pelleas et

Melisande" as a new and beautiful thing in dramatic music, it was

announced that Moussorgsky was like Debussy in that he had demonstrated

in his songs and his operas that vocal melody should and could be

written in accordance with the rhythm and accents of the words. We had

supposed that we had learned that lesson not only from Gluck and

Wagner, but from every true musical dramatist that ever lived! And when

the Frenchmen (and their feeble echoers in England and America) began

to cry out that the world make obeisance to Moussorgsky on that score,

there was no wonder that those whose eagerness to enjoy led them to

absorb too much information should ask how this marvellous psychical

assonance between word and tone was to be conveyed to their unfortunate

sense and feeling after the original Russian word had been

transmogrified into French or English. In New York the opera, which we

know to be saturated in some respects with Muscovitism, or Slavicism,

and which we have every reason to believe is also so saturated in its

musico-verbal essence, was sung in Italian. With the change some of the

character that ought to make it dear to the Russian heart must have

evaporated. It is even likely that vigorous English would have been a

better vehicle than the "soft, bastard Latin" for the forceful

utterances of the operatic people.

It is a pity that a suspicion of disingenuousness and affectation

should force itself upon one's thoughts in connection with the French

enthusiasm over Moussorgsky; but it cannot be avoided. So far as

Moussorgsky reflects anything in his art, it is realism or naturalism,

and the latter element is not dominant in French music now, and is not

likely to be so long as the present tendency toward sublimated

subjectivism prevails. Debussy acclaimed Moussorgsky enthusiastically a

dozen years ago, but for all that Moussorgsky and Debussy are antipodes

in art--they represent extremes.

It is much more likely that outside of its purely literary aspect (a

large aspect in every respect in. France) the Moussorgsky cult of the

last few years was a mere outgrowth of the political affiliation

between France and Russia; as such it may be looked upon in the same

light as the sudden appreciation of Berlioz which was a product of the

Chauvinism which followed the Franco-Prussian War. It is easy even for

young people of the day in which I write to remember when a Wagner

opera at the Academie Nationale raised a riot, and when the dances at

the Moulin Rouge and such places could not begin until the band had

played the Russian national hymn.

Were it not for considerations of this sort it would be surprising to

contemplate the fact that Moussorgsky has been more written and talked

about in France than he was in his native Russia, and that even his

friend Rimsky-Korsakoff, to whose revision of the score "Boris

Godounoff" owes its continued existence, has been subjected to much

rude criticism because of his work, though we can only think of it as

taken up in a spirit of affection and admiration. He and the Russians,

with scarcely an exception, say that his labors were in the line of

purification and rectification; but the modern extremists will have it

that by remedying its crudities of harmonization and instrumentation he

weakened it--that what he thought its artistic blemishes were its

virtues. Of that we are in no position to speak, nor ought any one be

rash enough to make the proclamation until the original score is

published, and then only a Russian or a musician familiar with the

Russian tongue and its genius. The production of the opera outside of

Russia and in a foreign language ought to furnish an occasion to demand

a stay of the artistic cant which is all too common just now in every

country.

We are told that "Boris Godounoff" is the first real Russian opera that

America has ever heard. In a sense that may be true. The present

generation has heard little operatic music by Russian composers.

Rubinstein's "Nero" was not Russian music in any respect. "Pique Dame,"

by Tschaikowsky, also performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, had

little in it that could be recognized as characteristically Russian.

"Eugene Onegin" we know only from concert performances, and its

Muscovitism was a negligible quantity. The excerpts from other Russian

operas have been few and they demonstrated nothing, though in an

intermezzo from Tschaikowsky's "Mazeppa," descriptive of the battle of

Poltava, which has been heard here, we met with the strong choral tune

which gives great animation to the most stirring scene in "Boris"--the

acclamation of the Czar by the populace in the first act. Of this

something more presently. There were American representations, however,

of a Russian opera which in its day was more popular than "Boris" has

ever been; but that was so long ago that all memories of it have died,

and even the records are difficult to reach. Some fifty years ago a

Russian company came to these shores and performed Verstoffsky's

"Askold's Tomb," an opera which was republished as late as 1897 and

which within the first twenty-five years of its existence had 400

performances in Moscow and 200 in St. Petersburg. Some venturesome

critics have hailed Verstoffsky as even more distinctively a

predecessor of Moussorgsky than Glinka; but the clamor of those who are

preaching loudly that art must not exist for art's sake, and that the

ugly is justified by the beauty of ugliness, has silenced the voices of

these critical historians.

This may thus far have seemed a long and discursive disquisition on the

significance of the new opera; but the questions to which the

production of "Boris Godounoff" give rise are many and grave,

especially in the present state of our operatic activities. They have a

strong bearing on the problem of nationalism in opera, of which those

in charge of our operatic affairs appear to take a careless view. Aside

from all aesthetic questions, "Boris Godounoff" bears heavily on that

problem. It is a work crude and fragmentary in structure, but it is

tremendously puissant in its preachment of nationalism; and it is

strong there not so much because of its story and the splendid

barbarism of its external integument as because of its nationalism,

which is proclaimed in the use of Russian folk-song. All previous

experiments in this line become insignificant in comparison with it,

and it is questionable if any other body of folk-song offers such an

opportunity to the operatic composer as does the Russian. The hero of

the opera is in dramatic stature (or at least in emotional content) a

Macbeth or a Richard III; his utterances are frequently poignant and

heart searching in the extreme; his dramatic portrayal by M. Chaliapine

in Europe and Mr. Didur in America is so gripping as to call up

memories of some of the great English tragedians of the past. But we

cannot speak of the psychology of the musical setting of his words

because we have been warned that it roots deeply in the accents and

inflections of a language with which we are unfamiliar and which was

not used in the performance. But the music of the choral masses, the

songs sung in the intimacy of the Czar Boris's household, the chants of

the monks, needed not to be strange to any student of folk-song, nor

could their puissance be lost upon the musically unlettered. In the old

Kolyada Song "Slava" [Footnote: Lovers of chamber music know this

melody from its use in the allegretto in Beethoven's E minor Quartet

dedicated to Count Rasoumowski, where it appears thus:--] with which

Boris is greeted by the populace, as well as in the wild shoutings of

the Polish vagrom men and women in the scene before the last, it is

impossible not to hear an out-pouring of that spirit of which Tolstoi

wrote: "In it is yearning without end, without hope; also power

invincible, the fateful stamp of destiny, iron preordination, one of

the fundamental principles of our nationality with which it is possible

to explain much that in Russian life seems incomprehensible."

No other people have such a treasure of folk-song to draw on as that

thus characterized, and it is not likely that any other people will

develop a national school of opera on the lines which lie open to the

Russian composer, and which the Russian composer has been encouraged to

exploit by his government for the last twenty years or more.

It is possible that some critics, actuated by political rather than

artistic considerations, will find reasons

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

for the present condition of Moussorgsky's score in the attitude of the

Russian government. It is said that court intrigues had much to do with

the many changes which the score had to undergo before it became

entirely acceptable to the powers that be in the Czar's empire.

Possibly. But every change which has come under the notice of this

reviewer has been to its betterment and made for its practical

presentation. It is said that the popular scenes were curtailed because

they represented the voice of the democracy. But there is still so much

choral work in the opera that the judgment of the operatic audiences of

to-day is likely to pronounce against it measurably on that account.

For, splendid as the choral element in the work is, a chorus is not

looked upon with admiration as a dramatic element by the ordinary opera

lover. There was a lack of the feminine element in the opera, and to

remedy this Moussorgsky had to introduce the Polish bride of the False

Dmitri and give the pair a love scene, and incidentally a polonaise;

but the love scene is uninteresting until its concluding measures, and

these are too Meyerbeerian to call for comment beyond the fact that

Meyerbeer, the much contemned, would have done better. As for the

polonaise, Tschaikowsky has written a more brilliant one for his

"Eugene Onegin."

The various scores of the opera which have been printed show that

Moussorgsky, with all his genius, was at sea even when it came to

applying the principles of the Young Russian School, of which he is set

down as a strong prop, to dramatic composition. With all his additions,

emendations, and rearrangements, his opera still falls much short of

being a dramatic unit. It is a more loosely connected series of scenes,

from the drama of Boris Godounoff and the false Dmitri, than Boito's

"Mefistofele" is of Goethe's "Faust." Had he had his own way the opera

would have ended with the scene in which Dmitri proceeds to Moscow amid

the huzzas of a horde of Polish vagabonds, and we should have had

neither a Boris nor a Dmitri opera, despite the splendid opportunities

offered by both characters. It was made a Boris opera by bringing it to

an end with the death of Boris and leaving everything except the scenes

in which the Czar declines the imperial crown, then accepts it, and

finally dies of a tortured conscience, to serve simply as intermezzi,

in which for the moment the tide of tragedy is turned aside. This and

the glimpse into the paternal heart of the Czar is the only and

beautiful purpose of the domestic scene, in which the lighter and more

cheerful element of Russian folk-song is introduced.

At the first American performance of "Boris Godounoff" the cast was as

follows:--

Boris.....................................Adamo Didur

Theodore....................................Anna Case

Xenia..................................Lenora Sparkes

The Nurse...............................Maria Duchene

Marina...................................Louise Homer

Schouisky.................................Angelo Bada

Tchelkaloff......................Vincenzo Reschiglian

Pimenn...................................Leon Rothier

Dmitri......................Paul Althouse (his debut)

Varlaam....................... ....Andrea de Segurola

Missail............................... Pietro Audisio

The Innkeeper........................ Jeanne Maubourg

The Simpleton............................Albert Reiss

A Police Officer.........................Giulio Rossi

A Court Officer..................... Leopoldo Mariani

Lovitzky......).Two Jesuits..........( V. Reschiglian

Tcerniakowsky,) ( Louis Kreidler

Conductor: Arturo Toscanini

CHAPTER XVI

"MADAME SANS-GENE" AND OTHER OPERAS BY GIORDANO

The opera-goers of New York enjoyed a novel experience when Giordano's

"Madame Sans-Gene" had its first performance on any stage in their

presence at the Metropolitan Opera House on January 25, 1915. It was

the first time that a royal and imperial personage who may be said to

live freshly and vividly in the minds of the people of this generation

as well as in their imaginations appeared before them to sing his

thoughts and feelings in operatic fashion. At first blush it seemed as

if a singing Bonaparte was better calculated to stir their risibilities

than their interest or sympathies; and this may, indeed, have been the

case; but at any rate they had an opportunity to make the acquaintance

of Napoleon before he rose to imperial estate. But, in all seriousness,

it is easier to imagine the figure which William II of Germany would

cut on the operatic stage than the "grand, gloomy, and peculiar"

Corsican. The royal people with whom the operatic public is familiar as

a rule are sufficiently surrounded by the mists of antiquity and

obscurity that the contemplation of them arouse little thought of the

incongruity which their appearance as operatic heroes ought to create.

Henry the Fowler in "Lohengrin," Mark in "Tristan und Isolde," the

unnumbered Pharaoh in "Aida," Herod in "Salome" and "Herodiade," and

the few other kings, if there are any more with whom the present

generation of opera-goers have a personal acquaintance, so to speak,

are more or less merely poetical creations whom we seldom if ever think

of in connection with veritable history. Even Boris Godounoff is to us

more a picture out of a book, like the Macbeth whom he so strongly

resembles from a theatrical point of view, than the monarch who had a

large part in the making of the Russian people. The Roman censorship

prevented us long ago from making the acquaintance of the Gustavus of

Sweden whom Ankerstrom stabbed to death at a masked ball, by

transmogrifying him into the absurdly impossible figure of a Governor

of Boston; and the Claudius of Ambroise Thomas's opera is as much a

ghost as Hamlet's father, while Debussy's blind King is as much an

abstraction as is Melisande herself.

Operatic dukes we know in plenty, though most of them have come out of

the pages of romance and are more or less acceptable according to the

vocal ability of their representatives. When Caruso sings "La donna e

mobile" we care little for the profligacy of Verdi's Duke of Mantua and

do not inquire whether or not such an individual ever lived.

Moussorgsky's Czar Boris ought to interest us more, however. The great

bell-tower in the Kremlin which he built, and the great bell--a

shattered monument of one of his futile ambitions--have been seen by

thousands of travellers who never took the trouble to learn that the

tyrant who had the bell cast laid a serfdom upon the Russian people

which endured down to our day. Boris, by the way, picturesque and

dramatic figure that he is as presented to us in history, never got

upon the operatic stage until Moussorgsky took him in hand. Two hundred

years ago a great German musician, Mattheson, as much scholar as

composer if not more, set him to music, but the opera was never

performed. Peter the Great, who came a century after Boris, lived a

life more calculated to invite the attention of opera writers, but even

he escaped the clutches of dramatic composers except Lortzing, who took

advantage of the romantic episode of Peter's service as ship carpenter

in Holland to make him the hero of one of the most sparkling of German

comic operas. Lortzing had a successor in the Irishman T. S. Cooke, but

his opera found its way into the limbo of forgotten things more than a

generation ago, while Lortzing's still lives on the stage of Germany.

Peter deserved to be celebrated in music, for it was in his reign that

polyphonic music, albeit of the Italian order, was introduced into the

Russian church and modern instrumental music effected an entrance into

his empire. But I doubt if Peter was sincerely musical; in his youth he

heard only music of the rudest kind. He was partial to the bagpipes

and, like Nero, played upon that instrument.

To come back to Bonaparte and music. "Madame Sans-Gene" is an operatic

version of the drama which Sardou developed out of a little one-act

play dealing with a partly fictitious, partly historical story in which

Napoleon, his marshal Lefebvre, and a laundress were the principal

figures. Whether or not the great Corsican could be justified as a

character in a lyric drama was a mooted question when Giordano

conceived the idea of making an opera out of the play. It is said that

Verdi remarked something to the effect that the question depended upon

what he would be called upon to sing, and how he would be expected to

sing it. The problem was really not a very large or difficult one, for

all great people are turned into marionettes when transformed into

operatic heroes.

In the palmy days of bel canto no one would have raised the question at

all, for then the greatest characters in history moved about the stage

in stately robes and sang conventional arias in the conventional

manner. The change from old-fashioned opera to regenerated lyric drama

might have simplified the problem for Giordano, even if his librettist

had not already done so by reducing Napoleon to his lowest terms from a

dramatic as well as historical point of view. The heroes of

eighteenth-century opera were generally feeble-minded lovers and

nothing more; Giordano's Napoleon is only a jealous husband who helps

out in the denouement of a play which is concerned chiefly with other

people.

In turning Sardou's dramatic personages into operatic puppets a great

deal of bloodletting was necessary and a great deal of the

characteristic charm of the comedy was lost, especially in the cases of

Madame Sans-Gene herself and Napoleon's sister; but enough was left to

make a practicable opera. There were the pictures of all the plebeians

who became great folk later concerned in the historical incidents which

lifted them up. There were also the contrasted pictures which resulted

from the great transformation, and it was also the ingratiating

incident of the devotion of Lefebvre to the stout-hearted, honest

little woman of the people who had to try to be a duchess. All this was

fair operatic material, though music has a strange capacity for

refining stage characters as well as for making them colorless.

Giordano could not do himself justice as a composer without refining

the expression of Caterina Huebscher, and so his Duchess of Dantzic

talks a musical language at least which Sardou's washerwoman could not

talk and remain within the dramatic verities. Therefore we have "Madame

Sans-Gene" with a difference, but not one that gave any more offence

than operatic treatment of other fine plays have accustomed us to.

To dispose of the artistic merits of the opera as briefly as possible,

it may be said that in more ways than one Giordano has in this work

harked back to "Andrea Chenier," the first of his operas which had a

hearing in America. The parallel extends to some of the political

elements of the book as well as its musical investiture with its echoes

of the popular airs of the period of the French Revolution. The style

of writing is also there, though applied, possibly, with more mature

and refined skill. I cannot say with as much ingenuousness and

freshness of invention, however. Its spirit in the first act, and

largely in the second, is that of the opera bouffe, but there are many

pages of "Madame Sans-Gene" which I would gladly exchange for any one

of the melodies of Lecocq, let us say in "La Fille de Mme. Angot." Like

all good French music which uses and imitates them, it is full of crisp

rhythms largely developed from the old dances which, originally

innocent, were degraded to base uses by the sans-culottes; and so there

is an abundance of life and energy in the score though little of the

distinction, elegance, and grace that have always been characteristic

of French music, whether high-born or low. The best melody in the

modern Italian vein flows in the second act when the genuine affection

and fidelity of Caterina find expression and where a light touch is

combined with considerable warmth of feeling and a delightful

daintiness of orchestral color. Much of this is out of harmony with the

fundamental character of Sardou's woman, but music cannot deny its

nature. Only a Moussorgsky could make a drunken monk talk truthfully in

music.

If Giordano's opera failed to make a profound impression on the New

York public, it was not because that public had not had opportunity to

learn the quality of his music. His "Andrea Chenier" had been produced

at the Academy of Music as long before as November 13, 1896. With it

the redoubtable Colonel Mapleson went down to his destruction in

America. It was one of the many strange incidents in the career of Mr.

Oscar Hammerstein as I have related them in my book entitled "Chapters

of Opera" [Footnote: New York, Henry Holt & Co.] that it should have

been brought back by him twelve years later for a single performance at

the Manhattan Opera House. In the season of 1916-1917 it was

incorporated in the repertory of the Boston-National Opera Company and

carried to the principal cities of the country. On December 16, 1906,

Mr. Heinrich Conried thought that the peculiar charms of Madame

Cavalieri, combined with the popularity of Signor Caruso, might give

habitation to Giordano's setting of an opera book made out of Sardou's

"Fedora"; but it endured for only four performances in the season of

1906-1907 and three in the next, in which Conried's career came to an

end. In reviving "Andrea Chenier" Mr. Hammerstein may have had visions

of future triumphs for its composer, for a few weeks before (on

February 5, 1908) he had brought forward the same composer's "Siberia,"

which gave some promise of life, though it died with the season that

saw its birth.

The critical mind seems disposed to look with kindness upon new works

in proportion as they fall back in the corridors of memory; and so I am

inclined to think that of the four operas by Giordano which I have

heard "Andrea Chenier" gives greatest promise of a long life. The

attempt to put music to "Fedora" seemed to me utterly futile. Only

those moments were musical in the accepted sense of the word when the

action of the drama ceased, as in the case of the intermezzo, or when

the old principles of operatic construction waked into life again as in

the confession of the hero-lover. Here, moreover, there comes into the

score an element of novelty, for the confession is extorted from Lorris

while a virtuoso is entertaining a drawing-roomful of people with a set

pianoforte solo. As for the rest of the opera, it seems sadly deficient

in melody beautiful either in itself or as an expression of passion.

"Andrea Chenier" has more to commend it. To start with, there is a good

play back of it, though the verities of history were not permitted to

hamper the imagination of Signor Illica, the author of the book. The

hero of the opera is the patriotic poet who fell under the guillotine

in 1794 at the age of thirty-two. The place which Saint-Beuve gave him

in French letters is that of the greatest writer of classic verse after

Racine and Boileau. The operatic story is all fiction, more so, indeed,

than that of "Madame Sans-Gene." As a matter of fact, the veritable

Chenier was thrown into prison on the accusation of having sheltered a

political criminal, and was beheaded together with twenty-three others

on a charge of having engaged in a conspiracy while in prison. In the

opera he does not die for political reasons, though they are alleged as

a pretext, but because he has crossed the love-path of a leader of the

revolution.

When Giordano composed "Siberia," he followed the example of Mascagni

and Puccini (if he did not set the example for them) by seeking local

color and melodic material in the folk-songs of the country in which

his scene was laid. Puccini went to Japan for musical ideas and devices

to trick out his "Madama Butterfly" as Mascagni had done in "Iris."

Giordano, illustrating a story of political oppression in "Siberia,"

called in the aid of Russian melodies. His exiles sing the

heavy-hearted measures of the bargemen of the Volga, "Ay ouchnem," the

forceful charm of which few Russian composers have been able to resist.

He introduced also strains of Easter music from the Greek church, the

popular song known among the Germans as "Schone Minka" and the "Glory"

song (Slava) which Moussorgsky had forged into a choral thunderbolt in

his "Boris Godounoff." It is a stranger coincidence that the "Slava"

melody should have cropped up in the operas of Giordano and Moussorgsky

than that the same revolutionary airs should pepper the pages of

"Madame Sans-Gene" and "Andrea Chenier." These operas are allied in

subject and period and the same style of composition is followed in

both.

Chenier goes to his death in the opera to the tune of the

"Marseillaise" and the men march past the windows of Caterina

Huebscher's laundry singing the refrain of Roget de Lisle's hymn. But

Giordano does not make extensive use of the tune in "Madame Sans-Gene."

It appears literally at the place mentioned and surges up with fine

effect in a speech in which the Duchess of Dantzic overwhelms the proud

sisters of Napoleon; but that is practically all. The case is different

with two other revolutionary airs. The first crash of the orchestra

launches us into "La Carmagnole," whose melody provides the thematic

orchestral substratum for nearly the entire first scene. It is an

innocent enough tune, differing little from hundreds of French

vaudeville melodies of its period, but Giordano injects vitriol into

its veins by his harmonies and orchestration. With all its innocence

this was the tune which came from the raucous throats of politically

crazed men and women while noble heads tumbled into the bloody sawdust,

while the spoils of the churches were carried into the National

Convention in 1793, and to which "several members, quitting their

curule chairs, took the hands of girls flaunting in priests' vestures"

and danced a wild rout, as did other mad wretches when a dancer was

worshipped as the Goddess of Reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Caterina's account of the rude familiarity with which she is treated by

the soldiery (I must assume a knowledge of Sardou's play which the

opera follows) is set to a melody of a Russian folk-song cast in the

treatment of which Russian influences may also be felt; but with the

first shouts of the mob attacking the Tuileries in the distance the

characteristic rhythmical motif of the "Ca ira" is heard muttering in

the basses. Again a harmless tune which in its time was perverted to a

horrible use; a lively little contradance which graced many a cotillion

in its early days, but which was roared and howled by the mob as it

carried the beauteous head of the Lamballe through the streets of Paris

on a pike and thrust it almost into the face of Marie Antoinette.

Of such material and a pretty little dance ("La Fricassee") is the

music of the first act, punctuated by cannon shots, made. It is all

rhythmically stirring, it flows spiritedly, energetically along with

the current of the play, never retarding it for a moment, but,

unhappily, never sweetening it with a grain of pretty sentiment or

adorning it with a really graceful contour. There is some graciousness

in the court scene, some archness and humor in the scene in which the

Duchess of Dantzic submits to the adornment of her person, some

dramatically strong declamation in the speeches of Napoleon, some

simulation of passion in the love passages of Lefebvre and of Neipperg;

but as a rule the melodic flood never reaches high tide.

CHAPTER XVII

TWO OPERAS BY WOLF-FERRARI

When the operas of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari came to America (his beautiful

setting of the "Vita Nuova" was already quite widely known at the

time), it was thought singular and somewhat significant that though the

operas had all been composed to Italian texts they should have their

first Italian performances in this country. This was the case with "Le

Donne Curiose," heard at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, on

January 3, 1912; of "Il Segreto di Susanna," which the

Chicago-Philadelphia Opera Company brought to New York after giving it

a hearing in its home cities, in February, 1912; of "I Giojelli della

Madonna" first produced in Berlin in December, 1911, and in Chicago a

few weeks later. A fourth opera, "L'Amore Medico," had its first

representation at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, on March 25,

1914.

The circumstance to which I have alluded as worthy of comment was due,

I fancy, more to the business methods of modern publishers than to a

want of appreciation of the operas in Italy, though

[figure: a musical score excerpt. A page of the Score of the German

"Donne Curiose"]

Signor Wolf-Ferrari sought to meet the taste of his countrymen

(assuming that the son of a German father and a Venetian mother is to

be set down as an Italian) when he betrayed the true bent of his genius

and sought to join the ranks of the Italian veritists in his "Giojelli

della Madonna." However, that is not the question I am desirous to

discuss just now when the first impressions of "Le Donne Curiose" come

flocking back to my memory. The book is a paraphrase of Goldoni's

comedy of the same name, made (and very deftly made) for the composer

by Count Luigi Sugana. It turns on the curiosity of a group of women

concerning the doings of their husbands and sweethearts at a club from

which they are excluded. The action is merely a series of incidents in

which the women (the wives by rifling the pockets of their husbands,

the maidens by wheedling, cajoling, and playing upon the feelings of

their sweethearts) obtain the keys of the club-room, and effect an

entrance only to find that instead of gambling, harboring mistresses,

seeking the philosopher's stone, or digging for treasure, as is

variously suspected, the men are enjoying an innocent supper. In their

eagerness to see all that is going on, the women betray their presence.

Then there follow scoldings, contrition, forgiveness, a graceful

minuet, and the merriment runs out in a wild furlana.

Book and score of the opera hark back a century or more in their

methods of expression. The incidents of the old comedy are as loosely

strung together as those of "Le Nozze di Figaro," and the parallel is

carried further by the similarity between the instrumental apparatus of

Mozart and Wolf-Ferrari and the dependence of both on melody, rather

than orchestral or harmonic device, as the life-blood of the music upon

which the comedy floats. It is Mozart's orchestra that the modern

composer uses ("the only proper orchestra for comedy," as Berlioz

said), eschewing even those "epical instruments," the trombones. It

would not do to push the parallel too far, though a keen listener might

feel tempted also to see a point of semblance in the Teutonism which

tinctures the Italian music of both men; a Teutonism which adds an

ingredient more to the taste of other peoples than that of the people

whose language is employed. But while the Italianism of Mozart was

wholly the product of the art-spirit of his time, the Teutonism of

Wolf-Ferrari is a heritage from his German father and its Italianism

partakes somewhat of the nature of a reversion to old ideals from which

even his mother's countrymen have departed. There is an almost amusing

illustration of this in the paraphrase of Goldoni's comedy which the

composer took as a libretto. The Leporello of Da Ponte and Mozart has

his prototype in the Arlecchino of the classic Italian comedy, but he

has had to submit to so great a metamorphosis as to make him scarcely

recognizable. But in the modern "Donne Curiose" we have not only the

old figure down to his conventional dress and antics, but also his

companions Pantaloon and Columbine. All this, however, may be better

enjoyed by those who observe them in the representation than those who

will only read about them, no matter how deftly the analysis may be

made.

It is Mozart's media and Mozart's style which Wolf-Ferrari adopts, but

there are traces also of the idioms of others who have been universal

musicians rather than specifically Italian. Like Nicolai's "O susse

Anna!" (Shakespeare's "Oh, Sweet Anne Page"), Wolf-Ferrari's Florindo

breathes out his languishing "Ah, Rosaura!" And in the lively chatter

of the women there is frequently more than a suggestion of the lively

gossip of Verdi's merry wives in his incomparable "Falstaff."

Wolf-Ferrari is neither a Mozart nor a Verdi, not even a Nicolai, as a

melodist, but he is worthy of being bracketed with them, because as

frankly as they he has spoken the musical language which to him seemed

a proper investiture of his comedy, and like them has made that

language characteristic of the comedy's personages and illustrative of

its incidents. He has been brave enough not to fear being called a

reactionary, knowing that there is always progress in the successful

pursuit of beauty.

The advocates of opera sung in the language native to the hearers may

find an eloquent argument in "Le Donne Curiose," much of whose humor

lies in the text and is lost to those who cannot understand it despite

the obviousness of its farcical action. On the other hand, a feeling of

gratitude must have been felt by many others that they were not

compelled to hear the awkward commonplaces of the English translation

of the libretto. The German version, in which the opera had its first

hearing in Munich six years before, is in a vastly different

case--neither uncouth nor halting, even though it lacks the

characteristic fluency essential to Italian opera buffa; yet no more

than did the speech of most of the singers at the Metropolitan

performance. The ripple and rattle of the Italian parlando seem to be

possible only to Italian tongues.

The Mozartian type of music is illustrated not only in the character of

many of its melodies, but also in the use of motivi in what may be

called the dramatic portions--the fleet flood upon which the dialogue

dances with a light buoyancy that is delightfully refreshing. These

motivi are not used in the Wagnerian manner, but as every change of

situation or emotion is characterized in Mozart's marvellous ensembles

by the introduction of a new musical idea, so they are in his modern

disciple's. All of them are finely characteristic, none more so than

the comical cackle so often heard from the oboe in the scenes wherein

the women gossip about the imaginary doings of the men--an intentional

echo, it would almost seem, of the theme out of which Rameau made his

dainty harpsichord piece known as "La Poule." The motto of the club,

"Bandie xe le done," is frequently proclaimed with more or less

pomposity; Florindo's "Ah, Rosaura," with its dramatic descent, lends

sentimental feeling to the love music, and the sprightly rhythm which

accompanies the pranks of Colombina keeps much of the music bubbling

with merriment. In the beginning of the third act, not only the

instrumental introduction, but much of the delightful music which

follows, is permeated with atmosphere and local color derived from a

familiar Venetian barcarolle ("La biondina in gondoleta"), but the

musical loveliness reaches its climax in the sentimental scenes--a

quartet, a solo by Rosaura, and a duet, in which there breathes the

sympathetic spirit of Smetana as well as Mozart.

[Footnote: The cast at the first performance at the Metropolitan Opera

House was as follows:--

Ottavio.................................Adamo Dfdur

Beatrice........................... Jeanne Maubourg

Rosaura............................Geraldine Farrar

Florindo......................... Hermann Jadlowker

Pantalone....................... Antonio Pini-Corso

Lelio............................... Antonio Scotti

Leandro................................ Angelo Bada

Colombina...............................Bella Alten

Eleonora................................Rita Fornia

Arlechino....................... Andrea de Segurola

Asdrubale........................... Pietro Audisio

Almoro.............................. Lambert Murphy

Alviso.......................... Charles Hargreaves

Lunardo....................... Vincenzo Reschiglian

Momolo............................... Paolo Ananian

Menego................................ Giulio Rossi

Un Servitore....................... Stefen Buckreus

Conductor--Arturo Toscanini.]

In "Le Donne Curiose," the gondoliers sing their barcarolle and compel

even the cynic of the drama to break out into an enthusiastic

exclamation: "Oh, beautiful Venice!" The world has heard more of the

natural beauties of Naples than of the artificial ones of Venice, but

when Naples is made the scene of a drama of any kind it seems that its

attractions for librettist and composer lie in the vulgarity and vice,

libertinism and lust, the wickedness and wantonness, of a portion of

its people rather than in the loveliness of character which such a

place might or ought to inspire.

Perhaps it was not altogether surprising that when Wolf-Ferrari turned

from Venice and "Le Donne Curiose" to "I Giojelli della Madonna" with

Naples as a theatre for his drama he should not only change the style

of his music, but also revert to the kind of tale which his

predecessors in the field seem to have thought appropriate to the place

which we have been told all of us should see once and die out of sheer

ecstasy over its beauty. But why are only the slums of Naples deemed

appropriate for dramatic treatment?

How many stories of Neapolitan life have been told in operas since

Auber wrote his "La Muette di Portici" I do not know; doubtless many

whose existence ended with the stagione for which they were composed.

But it is a singular fact bearing on the present discussion that when

the young "veritists" of Italy broke loose after the success of

Mascagni's "Cavalleria rusticana" there came almost a universal desire

to rush to the Neapolitan shambles for subjects. New York has been

spared all of these operas which I have described in an earlier chapter

of this book, except the delectable "A Basso Porto" which Mr. Savage's

company gave to us in English sixteen years ago; but never since.

Whether or not Wolf-Ferrari got the subject of "I Giojelli della

Madonna" from the sources drawn on by his predecessors, I do not know.

I believe that, like Leoncavallo, he has said that the story of his

opera has a basis of fact. Be this as it may, it is certain that the

composer called on two versifiers to help him out in making the book of

the opera and that the story in its essence is not far removed from

that of the French opera "Aphrodite," by Baron Erlanger. In that opera

there is a rape of the adornments of a statue of Venus; in

Wolf-Ferrari's work of the jewels enriching an effigy of the Virgin

Mary. The story is not as filthy as the other plots rehearsed

elsewhere, but in it there is the same striving after sharp ("piquant,"

some will say) contrasts, the blending of things sacred and profane,

the mixture of ecclesiastical music and dances, and--what is most

significant--the generous use of the style of melody which came in with

Ponchielli and his pupils. In "I Giojelli della Madonna" a young woman

discards the love of an honest-hearted man to throw herself, out of

sheer wantonness, into the arms of a blackguard dandy. To win her heart

through her love of personal adornment the man of faithful mind (the

suggestion having come from his rival) does the desperate deed of

stealing for her the jewels of the Madonna. It is to be assumed that

she rewards him for the sacrilegious act, but without turning away from

the blackguard, to whom she grants a stolen interview during the time

when her true love is committing the crime. But even the vulgar and

wicked companions of the dandy, who is a leader among the Camorristi,

turn from her with horror when they discover the stolen jewels around

her neck, and she gives herself to death in the sea. Then the poor

lover, placing the jewels on the altar, invokes forgiveness, and,

seeing it in a ray of light which illumines them, thrusts a dagger into

his heart and dies at the feet of the effigy of the goddess whom he had

profaned.

The story would not take long in the telling were it not tricked out

with a multitude of incidents designed to illustrate the popular life

of Naples during a festival. Such things are old, familiar, and

unnecessary elements, in many cases not even understood by the

audience. But with them Signor Wolf-Ferrari manages to introduce most

successfully the atmosphere which he preserves even throughout his

tragical moments--the atmosphere of Neapolitan life and feeling. The

score is saturated with Neapolitan folk-song. I say Neapolitan rather

than Italian, because the mixed population of Naples has introduced the

elements which it would be rash to define as always Italian, or even

Latin. While doing this the composer surrendered himself unreservedly

and frankly to other influences. That is one of the things which make

him admirable in the estimation of latter-day critics. In "Le Donne

Curiose" he is most lovingly frank in his companionship with Mozart. In

"II Segreto" there is a combination of all the styles that prevailed

from Mozart to Donizetti. In "I Giojelli" no attempt seems to have been

made by him to avoid comparison with the composer who has made the most

successful attempt at giving musical expression to a drama which fifty

years ago the most farsighted of critics would have set down as too

rapid of movement to admit of adequate musical expression? Mascagni and

his "Cavalleria rusticana," of course. But I am tempted to say that the

most marvellous faculty of Wolf-Ferrari is to do all these things

without sacrifice of his individuality. He has gone further. In "La

Vita Nuova" there is again an entirely different man. Nothing in his

operas seems half so daring as everything in this cantata. How he could

produce a feeling of mediaevalism in the setting of Dante's sonnets and

yet make use of the most modern means of harmonization and

orchestration is still a mystery to this reviewer. Yet, having done it

long ago, he takes up the modern style of Italian melody and blends it

with the old church song, so that while you are made to think one

moment of Mascagni, you are set back a couple of centuries by the

cadences and harmonies of the hymns which find their way into the

merrymakings of the festa. But everything appeals to the ear? nothing

offends it, and for that, whatever our philosophical notions, we ought

to be grateful to the melodiousness, the euphony, and the rich

orchestration of the new opera. [The performances of "I Giojelli della

Madonna" by the Chicago-Philadelphia Opera Company, as it was called in

Chicago, the Philadelphia-Chicago Opera Company, as it was called in

Philadelphia, were conducted by Cleofonte Campanini and the principal

parts were in the hands of Carolina White, Louisa Barat, Amadeo Bassi,

and Mario Sammarco.]

End of Project Gutenberg's A Second Book of Operas, by Henry Edward Krehbiel