Mozart has written the two melodramas of love--the one a melo-tragedy,
the other a melo-comedy. But in really noble art, Comedy and Tragedy
have faces of equal serenity and beauty. In the Vatican there
are marble busts of the two Muses, differing chiefly in their
head-dresses: that of Tragedy is an elaborately built-up structure of
fillets and flowing hair, piled high above the forehead and descending
in long curls upon the shoulders; while Comedy wears a similar
adornment, with the addition of a wreath of vine-leaves and
grape-bunches. The expression of the sister goddesses is no less
finely discriminated. Over the mouth of Comedy plays a subtle smile,
and her eyes are relaxed in a half-merriment. A shadow rests upon
the slightly heavier brows of Tragedy, and her lips, though not
compressed, are graver. So delicately did the Greek artist indicate
the division between two branches of one dramatic art. And since all
great art is classical, Mozart's two melodramas, _Don Giovanni_
and the _Nozze di Figaro_, though the one is tragic and the other
comic, are twin-sisters, similar in form and feature.
The central figure of the melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the hero
of unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuous
interminable labyrinths, eager in appetite yet never satisfied, 'for
ever following and for ever foiled.' He is the incarnation of lust
that has become a habit of the soul--rebellious, licentious, selfish,
even cruel. His nature, originally noble and brave, has assumed the
qualities peculiar to lust--rebellion, license, cruelty, defiant
egotism. Yet, such as he is, doomed to punishment and execration,
Don Juan remains a fit subject for poetry and music, because he is
complete, because he is impelled by some demonic influence, spurred on
by yearnings after an unsearchable delight. In his death, the spirit
of chivalry survives, metamorphosed, it is true, into the spirit of
revolt, yet still tragic, such as might animate the desperate sinner
of a haughty breed.
The central figure of the melo-comedy is Cherubino, the genius of
love, no less insatiable, but undetermined to virtue or to vice. This
is the point of Cherubino, that the ethical capacities in him are
still potential. His passion still hovers on the borderland of good
and bad. And this undetermined passion is beautiful because of extreme
freshness; of infinite, immeasurable expansibility. Cherubino is the
epitome of all that belongs to the amorous temperament in a state of
still ascendant adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age--a boy
yesterday, a man to-morrow--to-day both and neither--something
beyond boyhood, but not yet limited by man's responsibility and man's
absorbing passions. He partakes of both ages in the primal awakening
to self-consciousness. Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend,
hovers before him like a fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of a
Northern climate, but of Spain or Italy, where manhood appears in a
flash, and overtakes the child with sudden sunrise of new faculties.
_Nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quaerebam quod amarem, amans
amare_--'I loved not yet, but was in love with loving; I sought
what I should love, being in love with loving.' That sentence, penned
by S. Augustine and consecrated by Shelley, describes the mood of
Cherubino. He loves at every moment of his life, with every pulse of
his being. His object is not a beloved being, but love itself--the
satisfaction of an irresistible desire, the paradise of bliss which
merely loving has become for him. What love means he hardly knows. He
only knows that he must love. And women love him--half as a plaything
to be trifled with, half as a young god to be wounded by. This rising
of the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy,
is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall we
describe their potency? Who shall translate those curiously perfect
words to which tone and rhythm have been indissolubly wedded? _E
pur mi piace languir cosi.... E se non ho chi m' oda, parlo d'amor con
me._
But if this be so, it may be asked, Who shall be found worthy to act
Cherubino on the stage? You cannot have seen and heard Pauline Lucca,
or you would not ask this question.
Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the
_Nozze_. But he strikes the keynote of the opera. His love is the
standard by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love of
the Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband. By Cherubino
we measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Juan
without cruelty, and the humorous love of Figaro and his sprightly
bride Susanna. Each of these characters typifies one of the many
species of love. But Cherubino anticipates and harmonises all. They
are conscious, experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial. He is
all love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love,
diffused through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; all
love, merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret,
jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian
sunrise. What will Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, a
Lovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist,
an effete fop, a romantic lover? He may become any one of these, for
he contains the possibilities of all. As yet, he is the dear glad
angel of the May of love, the nightingale of orient emotion.
This moment in the unfolding of character Mozart has arrested and
eternalised for us in Cherubino's melodies; for it is the privilege of
art to render things most fugitive and evanescent fixed imperishably
in immortal form.