A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY--PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.
Though it sounds strange to speak of the "invention" of opera, that is
the word which may be applied to the work of Jacopo Peri and his
friends. They, however, thought of it rather as a revival of the manner
of the ancient Greek tragedy, which was, in a sense, a crude form of
Wagnerian recitation, with musical accompaniment.
As the English novel owes its origin to the commission given to Mr.
Samuel Richardson to prepare a Ready Letter Writer, which he decided to
put in the form of a story told in letters, so grand opera, which has
almost rivalled the novel in the world's favour, found its origin in a
conference among certain aristocratic gentlemen, of the city of
Florence, concerning the possibility of reviving part of Greek tragedy.
As an experiment, they prepared a small work called "Dafne" for private
presentation at the palace of the Corsi. Rinuccini was the first of a
long and usually incompetent lineage of librettists. The music was
written by Peri and Caccini. It was appropriate that they should have
chosen the love affairs of the first musician Orpheus and the coy
Daphne, seeing what a vast amount of love-making, pretended and real,
the school of opera has handed down upon the world. Reissman has
reckoned it out that twenty thousand lovers are joined or are parted
every night in the world's theatres.
Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-god by
his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fétis, Peri was
very avaricious. Of noble birth himself, he grew rich on the favour of
the Medicis, and added to his wealth by marrying a daughter of the house
of Fortini, who incidentally brought with her a very handsome dot. She
bore him a son, who won an early fame by his mathematics, his temper,
and his dissipations, which led his tutor, the famous Galileo, to call
him his demon. And this is all I know of the love affairs of the father
of modern opera.
His collaborator, Caccini, who was more famous among his contemporaries
than Peri, states in the preface to a book of his, that he was married
twice, both times to pupils. His former wife was a well-known singer,
and his daughters were musicians, the elder, Francesca, being also a
composer.
The name of Monteverde is immortal in the history of music, because,
although no one sings his songs now, or hears his operas, even the
strictest composers make constant use of certain musical procedures,
which were in his time forbidden, and which he fought for tooth and
nail. Irisi says that he entered the Church after the death of his wife,
and as he entered the priesthood in 1633, it would seem that she died
when he was about sixty-five years of age. He had two sons, the elder of
whom became a priest, and a tenor in his father's church; the younger
son became a physician--a good division of labour, for those patients
whom the doctor lost could send for the priest.
Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Schütz, a great
revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German
opera, was "Dafne," written to a libretto by Rinuccini, possibly the
same one used by Peri. When he was thirty-four, he married on June 1,
1619, a girl named Magdalena, who is described as "Christian Wildeck of
Saxony's land steward's bookkeeper's daughter," which description
Hawkins compares to that of "Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid's
sister's hat." She died six years later, having borne him two daughters.
He lived the rest of his eighty-seven years as a widower, and joined
the pathetic line of musicians who have gone deaf.
LULLY THE IMP
French opera, which was reformed by the Austrian Gluck, had been created
by the Italian Signor Lulli, who later, as Monsieur Lully, became most
French of the French. Though he was the son of a gentleman of Florence,
he was not gifted with wealth, and was taken to France to serve in the
kitchen of Mlle. de Montpensier, the chief princess of the French court.
The impishness which characterised his whole career inspired him to turn
a highly improper couplet on an accident that happened in public to
Mademoiselle,--and worst of all, he set it to music. She did not see the
fun of the joke, and dismissed him, but the king laughed so much at his
wit, that he had him presented, and interested himself in his musical
career.
The kitchen lad was a born courtier and revelled in the "atmosphere of
passion, love, and pleasure, that radiant aurora." He was always a very
dissipated man, but in July, 1662, "regularised" his life by marrying
Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the music-master of the court. "The
honour of the new family, and the dot of twenty thousand francs which he
received, made Lully a personage, and the second phase of his life
commenced." His wife bore him three sons and three daughters, who are
said to have shared his stinginess, though they built him a magnificent
monument.
It was a brilliant circle Lully moved in. He had the honour of being
hated by Boileau and La Fontaine, and of being first the friend and
collaborator, and later the enemy, of Molière. His contract of marriage
was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage,
Fétis says: "Never was a union better arranged, for if Lully was quick
to procure riches, his wife knew how to fructify them by the order and
the economy that reigned in her house. Lully reserved for his _menus
plaisirs_ only the price of the sale of his works, which amounted
annually to seven or eight thousand francs."
His dissipations, like those of Händel, were chiefly confined to
excesses in eating and drinking, but for all his doubtful fidelity to
his wife, he cannot have been an ideal husband, for he was of a miserly
disposition, and his temper was enforced by a ruthless brutality. On one
occasion the singer Rochis, being in a condition that compelled a
postponement of "Armide," he demanded, angrily, "_Qui t'a fait cela_?"
and gave her a kick _qui lui fit faire une fausse couche_. This poor
woman was revenged upon him by his own temper, for at the age of
fifty-four, while conducting his orchestra, he grew indignant, and in
wildly brandishing his bâton struck his own foot so fierce a blow that
gangrene set in and he died of the wound. While he was on his death-bed,
he was called upon by one of his old friends, whom his wife reproached
with having been the last to get him drunk. Whereupon the dying man
spoke up with the gaiety for which he was famous, "That's true, my dear,
and when I get well he shall be the first to get me drunk again."
In his will he named his wife as executrix, and took great care that she
and the children should preserve the royal monopoly in the Academy of
Music. Lully had been reconciled only eight days before his death, with
his son, whom he had previously disinherited. His wife outlived him
twenty-three years, and died May 3, 1720, at the age of seventy-seven.
When the superb mausoleum was built for Lully by his widow, some unknown
poet, who hated him for his _moeurs infames_, scrawled on his tomb these
terrific lines:
"Pourquoi, par un faste nouveau,
Nous rappeler la scandaleuse histoire
D'un libertin, indigne de memoire,
Peut-être même indigne du tombeau."
It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain rôles were sung by
Mlle. de Maupin, whose incredibly wild, scandalous, and ambiguous love
affairs, and duels in male costume, made the material for Gautier's
famous romance.
THE TACITURN RAMEAU
The next great master in French opera was Rameau (1683--1764), who
resembled Lully in his stinginess, but not in his brilliant social
qualities. As a boy he neglected his lessons in language for his
music-books. His parents' efforts were in vain, and his teachers gave
him up as hopeless; but at the age of sixteen or seventeen he fell in
love with a young widow, who was a neighbour of his. His letters to her,
brought from her the crushing statement:
"You spell like a scullion."
This rebuke woke him to his senses as far as orthography was concerned,
but his father did not approve of the widow as a teacher, and sent him
to Italy to break off the relation. Some years later he returned to the
town, but as he remained only a short time, he evidently did not
reillumine his first flame.
He did not wed until he was forty-three years old, and then on February
25, 1726, he married the eighteen-year-old Marie Louise Mangot. Of her
Maret says: "Madame Rameau is a virtuous woman, sweet and amiable, and
she has made her husband very happy. She has much talent for music, a
very pretty voice, and good taste in song." They had three children,
one a son, who became equerry to the king, a daughter who became a nun,
and another who married a musketeer.
Baron Grimm accuses Rameau of being "a savage, a stranger to every
sentiment of humanity." The great Diderot, in a book called "The Nephew
of Rameau," referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in
acoustics, and added:
"He is a philosopher in his way; he thinks only of himself, and the rest
of the universe is as the puff of a bellows. His daughter and his wife
have only to die when they please; provided the bells of the parish
which toll for them continue to sound the 12th and the 17th overtones,
all will be well."
Fétis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French
music. He paid a pension to his invalid sister. "Sombre and unsociable
he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost
absolute." I do not know whether or not Rameau's wife survived him.
PERGOLESI
In his old age Rameau said that if he were twenty years younger, he
would go to Italy and take Pergolesi for his master in harmony. This
brilliant genius, Pergolesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six. It
was consumption that carried him off, and I find no record of any love
of his. The saccharine romance-monger, Elise Polko, has a rather
mawkish story which she connects with his name, though on what
authority, I am ignorant. As Lincoln said, "For those that like that
sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like."
KEISER
A contemporary of his was Reinhard Keiser, who died three years later at
the age of sixty-six, and who wrote one hundred and sixteen operas for
the German stage. Like his contemporary, Händel, he attempted
management, and like Händel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but
quite unlike the woman-hater Händel, he married his way out of poverty.
In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership with the
daughter of an aristocratic town musician of Oldenburg, Hamburg. She was
a distinguished singer, and her talent brought new charm to the
production of his works, and restored prosperity. She seems to have died
before him, for twenty years after his marriage he went to Moscow with
his daughter, who was a prominent singer, and had an engagement there.
She married a Russian violinist, Verocai, and her father spent his last
years at her home.
BONONCINI AND THE SCARLATTIS
Of that exquisite and elegant scamp Bononcini, who was the great rival
of Händel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though
Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess of Marlborough, who
gave him a pension of £500 per year, and had him live in her home until
he was compelled to leave London, by various scandals attached to his
repute as an honest gentleman. He had been in his youth a great admirer
of the style of Alessandro Scarlatti, an eminent composer, both in opera
and sacred music, of whom little is known, except his work; he left a
son, Domenico, who was hardly less famous. But he was a confirmed
gambler, and left his family in great destitution, from which the famous
artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.