All art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to be foregone
must be left somewhat to the discretion of nature. When the sculptor
foregoes colour, when the painter foregoes relief, when the poet
foregoes the music which soars beyond words and the musician that
precise meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind of
necessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready-made for him.
But there will always be those who are discontented with no matter what
fixed limits, who dream, like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarmé,
of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves
a compromise which has not yet come into the world, a gain without loss,
a re-adjustment in which the scales shall bear so much additional weight
without trembling. But nature is not always obedient to this too
autocratic command. Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the art
of the voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The same note
is produced in the same way; the expression given to that note, the
syllable which that note renders, are quite different things. Song does
not in itself require words in order to realise even the utmost of its
capacities. The voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more in
need of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the ideal of
singing would be attained when a marvellous voice, which had absorbed
into itself all that temperament and training had to give it, sang
inarticulate music, like a violin which could play itself. There is
nothing which such an instrument could not express, nothing which exists
as pure music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice,
with the least possible compromise.
The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come into
the song. Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained,
but how much is lost? Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the
voice lose something also, in its directness of appeal? Add acting to
voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in which
other arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have us
see the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more and
more, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, in
order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are
written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For the
sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we
have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in
the gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss,
not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has
been found.
An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a
singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter
between poetry and the world.
Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs.
Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small,
exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by masses of loosely twisted
blonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or
passionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquent
mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure
vaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old,
high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When I
heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to
her; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herself
to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of that
image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror: it was
herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she
was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice is
strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer;
her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the
temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and
sets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes a
drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her
rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much
with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the
melody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all
its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it?
tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who
takes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all her
senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of
Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one
looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of
the music or of the music than of the words. One took them
simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a
flower. I understood why Mallarmé had seemed to see in her the
realisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a new
mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarmé it
was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general
appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.
This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less
completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid,
into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its
rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their
tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of
their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist,
and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it
is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration.
What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once
instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural
instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to
be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always
recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to
what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted
communion with herself.