Geographical considerations made it impossible for me to be present at
the performance of _La Traviata_, which opened the Covent Garden season.
I solaced myself by going to hear, on that very night, another and
better opera of Verdi’s, _Aida_, in a theatre certainly more capacious
than Covent Garden, namely, the Politeamo Fiorentino, at Florence.
Florence is a city of huge theatres, which seem to be generally empty,
even during performances, and often on sale. In the majority of them the
weather is little by little getting the better of the ceiling; and the
multifarious attendants, young and old, go about their casual vague
business of letting cushions or selling cigars in raiment that has the
rich, storied interest of antiquity. But on this particular occasion
prosperity attended a Florentine theatrical enterprise. I was one of
three thousand or so excited and crowded beings, most of whom had paid a
fair price for admission to hear the brassiest opera ever composed.
Once I used to condescend to Verdi. That was in the early nineties,
when, at an impressionable and violent age, I got caught in the first
genuine Wagner craze that attacked this country. We used to go to the
special German seasons at Drury Lane, as it were to High Mass. And
although Max Alvary and Frau Klafsky would be singing in _Tristan_, you
might comfortably have put all the occupants of the upper circle into a
Pullman car. Once a cat walked across the stage during a solemn moment
in the career of Isolde, and nearly everybody laughed; a few tittered,
which was even more odious. Only a handful, of such as myself, scowled
angrily--not at the cat, which was really rather fine in the garden,
completing it--but at the infantile unseriousness of these sniggering
so-called Wagnerians. I felt that laughter would have been very well at
a Verdi performance, might even have enhanced it. Meanwhile, over the
way at Convent Garden, Verdi performances were being given to the usual
full houses. It never occurred to me to attend them. Verdi was vulgar.
I cannot explain my conviction that Verdi was vulgar, because I had not
heard a single opera of Verdi’s, save his Wagnerian imitations. No doubt
it arose out of the deep human instinct to intensify the pleasure of
admiring one thing by simultaneously disparaging another thing.
Then, a long time afterwards, in the comparatively calm interval between
the first and the second Wagner crazes, I heard the real Verdi. It was
_La Traviata_, in a little town in Italy, and it was the first operatic
performance I had attended in Italy. I adored it, when I was not
privately laughing at it; and there are one or two airs in it, which
I would sit through the whole opera to hear, if I could not hear them
otherwise. (Happily they occur in the first act.) Yes, Verdi’s name
does not begin with W; but it very nearly does. I stuck him up at once
a little lower than the angels, and I have never pulled him down. It is
certain, however, that _La Traviata_ at any rate cannot live, unless as
a comic opera. I personally did not laugh aloud, because the English are
seldom cruel in a theatre; but the tragical parts are undoubtedly very
funny indeed, funnier even than the tragical parts of the exquisitely
absurd play, _La Dame aux Camélias_, upon which the opera is founded.
When _La Traviata_ was first produced, about fifty-five years ago, in
Venice, its unconscious humour brought about an absolute, a disastrous
failure. The performance ended amid roars of laughter. Unhappily the
enormous proportions of Signora Donatelli, who sang Violetta, aided
the fiasco. When the doctor announced that this lady was in an advanced
stage of consumption and had but a few hours to live, Harry Lauder
himself could not have had a greater success of hilarity with the mob.
Italians are like that. They may be devoted to music--though there are
reasons for doubting it--but as opera-goers and concert-goers they are
a godless crew. An Englishman would have laughed at Violetta’s
unconsumptive waist, but he would have laughed in the street, or the
next morning. The English have reverence, and when they go to the opera,
they go to hear the opera.
*****
When Italians go to the opera, they are apparently out for a lark, and
they have some of the qualities of the Roman multitude enjoying wild
beasts in the amphitheatre. I think I have never been to an operatic
performance in Italy without acutely noticing this. When I went to hear
_Aida_, the colossal interior of the Politeamo Fiorentino had the very
look of an amphitheatre, with its row of heads and hats stretching away
smaller and smaller into a haze. There were notices about appealing to
the gentleness of the public not to smoke. But do you suppose the public
did not smoke? Especially considering that the management thoughtfully
offered cigars, cigarettes, and matches for sale! In a very large
assemblage of tightly-packed people, unauthorised noises are bound to
occur from time to time. Now, an Italian audience will never leave
an unauthorised noise alone. If a chair creaks, or a glass on the bar
tinkles, an Italian audience will hiss savagely and loudly for several
seconds--which seem like several minutes. Not in the hope of stopping
the noise, for the noise has stopped! Not because it wishes not to miss
a note of the music, for it misses about twenty-five per cent, of
the notes through its own fugal hissing! But from simple, truculent
savagery! It cares naught for the susceptibilities of the artists.
Whether a singer is in the midst of a tender pianissimo, or the band
is blaring its best, if an Italian audience hears a noise, however
innocent, it will multiply that noise by a hundred. Yet the individual
politeness of the Italian people is perfectly delightful.
Further: In the middle of the performance a shabby gentleman came on
to the stage and begged indulgence for an artist who was “gravely
indisposed.” The audience received him with cynical laughter; he made
a gesture of cynical resignation and departed. The artist received no
indulgence. The artist was silly enough to hold on powerfully to a high
note at the end of a long solo; and that solo had to be given again--and
let there be no mistake about it!--despite the protests of a minority
against such insistence. The Latin temperament! If you sing in opera in
Italy, your career may be unremunerative, but it will be exciting.
You may be deified, or you may be half-killed. But be assured that the
audience is sincere, as sincere as a tiger.
*****
Composers also must beware. When Pasini’s new opera, _Don Quixote_,
was produced lately, it had a glorious run of two performances. It was,
indeed, received with execration. After the second night the leading
newspaper appeared with a few brief, barbed remarks: “The season of
the Teatro Verdi is ended. It would have been better if it had never
started.. . . The maestro Pasini has written an opera which may be very
pleasing--to deaf mutes.” Yet _Don Quixote_ was not worse than many
other operas which people pay to see. Imagine these manners in unmusical
England.
France is less crude, but not always very much less crude. The most
musical city in France is Toulouse. An extraordinary number of singers,
composers, and poets seem to be born in Toulouse.
But the _debuts_ of an operatic artist at the Toulouse municipal opera
are among the most dangerous and terrible experiences that can fall to a
singer. The audience is merciless, and recks not of youth nor sex. If
it is not satisfied, it expresses its opinion frankly, and for the more
frank and effective expression of its opinion it goes to the performance
suitably provided with decayed vegetables. And I am told that Marseilles
candour is carried even further. As for Naples--.
Perhaps, after all, our admirable politeness and the solemnity of
our attitude towards the whole subject of opera merely prove that
Continental nations are right in regarding us as fundamentally
unmusical. With us opera is a cultivated exotic. In Italy, what does it
matter if you ruin a composer’s career, or even kill a young soprano
who has not reached your standard! There are quantities of composers and
sopranos all over Italy. You can see them active in the very streets.
You can’t keep them down. We say Miss -----------, the English soprano,
in startled accents of pride. Italians don’t say Signorina ----------‘,
the Italian soprano. In Italy you get a new opera about once a
month. The last English grand opera that held the English stage was
_Artaxeræes_, and it is so long ago that not one person in a hundred who
reads these lines will be able to give the name of the composer. Can any
nation be musical which does not listen chiefly to its own music?