of lines of the text as syllables on which to hang cadenzas. They
have wiped out the empty colorature song, designed solely for the
amazement of groundlings and for the glorification of the prima
donna. They have almost terminated the career of the prima donna
herself, and substituted for her, if not the singing actress of
Wagner, at least an acting songstress. They have placed Italian opera
beside French in its honest search after theatric directness. Italian
opera is no longer music and nothing else: it is what its early
fathers intended it should be, _drama per musica_.
The movement of the young Italians toward dramatic verity, as already
noted, did not originate in a weak surrender to the conquest of
Europe by Wagner. The "Gioconda" of Ponchielli, produced in 1876,
shows not a single trace of Wagnerian influence; and yet to that work
as much as to any other are the young Italians indebted. They have
travelled the path on which Ponchielli was moving, but they have gone
much farther than he did. Ponchielli utilized the orchestral forces
with high skill, and his dramatic recitative was far ahead of that
found in Verdi's earlier works. For a second-rate master he attained
extraordinary influence over his successors. Alas! that suggests that
they are even less than second-rate, and it is quite possible that
the near future will decide that they were less than third-rate. But
we of the present must take them as they appear to us, and endeavor
to learn from their works whither operatic music is tending.
Boito's "Mefistofele," which is as old as 1868, gave these young
Italians much to think of, so much indeed that one can trace a good
deal more than a family resemblance between the introduction of
Mascagni's "Iris" and the prologue in heaven in the Boito work. But
the young men have striven again to make advances. That they have
endeavored to introduce into their music an Italianized Wagnerism is
the fault for which they must be most severely blamed, for in doing
this they have wandered away from true nationalism and have betrayed
their birthright.
It is not possible in a brief essay to point out the details of the
methods of these young men. It may be said, however, that what they
have apparently striven to do is to rear a distorted vocal structure,
composed of the elements of the older Italian singing style, upon
a foundation of acrid, restless, changeful, distressful harmonies.
It may perhaps be injudicious to find fault with them for this, for
no thoughtful observer of musical progress can fail to see that
toward something new and strange in harmonic sequences all music is
advancing. One needs only to think of the French operas of Bruneau
and Charpentier, the piano music of the young Russians, the vast
orchestral tone-riddles of Richard Strauss. If the use of strictly
technical terms may be allowed, the harmony of to-day is no longer
diatonic; it is not even chromatic; it is the harmony of the minor
second. In other words, it is the harmony in which the sharpest
of all dissonances, that of two tones only a semitone apart, is
prevalent. In the presence of this style of harmony the chord of the
diminished seventh becomes as gentle as the tonic triad, for music is
filled with what the eloquent and witty James Huneker once happily
called "diseased chords of the twenty-sixth."
This style of harmony is not natural to Italian music. The genius
of Italian song is utterly opposed to it. The proclivities of the
Italian people are inimical to it. It is not adapted to the methods
and traditions of the Italian lyric drama, and it has not been found
necessary by the writers of the greatest masterpieces of Italian
opera. Verdi and Boito were able to construct their notable works
without it. Mascagni, on the other hand, has forced his music into
this uncongenial way. His "Iris" teems with harsh and discordant
harmonies, and in order to set the melodic voice-parts on this uneasy
basis he has been compelled to twist the melodic curves of Italian
song into unseemly angles.
Now these are facts. Just what they are to signify in the progress
of musical art only a very confident person would venture to predict.
Where is Italian opera? That question we may answer. Whither is it
going? To that we can only hazard a reply. We may, too, be wholly
wrong in supposing that it is an evil day for art when Italian opera
sacrifices anything of its intense nationality for the sake of
rivalling the drastic music-drama of Richard Wagner. Critics are not
prophets. They can only study the conditions of art in their own day,
and try to reconcile them with those standards which the experience
of time has shown to be the highest. As Mr. Webster once intimated,
the only way to judge of the future is by the past. That method
points to the conclusion that nothing good will come of the effort to
dethrone the national genius. On the other hand, this effort looks
amazingly like a confession of weakness.
It looks as if the young Italians were not of fruitful inventiveness
in the production of thematic ideas. All the good tunes have not
been written yet. John Stuart Mill confessed that for a time he was
troubled with a fear that because there were only seven tones in the
scale all the possible melodic ideas were nearly exhausted. But it
has been noted that in spite of the immense drain made on the scale
by Bach and Mozart and Weber and Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann
there were still tunes enough to make a Dvorak, a Tschaïkowsky, a
Brahms, and a Wagner.
II.--THE CLASSIC OF THE UNPROGRESSIVE
But how may he find Arcady
Who hath nor youth nor melody?
H. C. BUNNER, _The Way to Arcady_.
In these tumultuous times of Strauss and Wagner, with the furies
of intellectual realism pursuing us and the sirens of seductive
emotionalism panting before us, the persistence with which
Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" clings to the lyric stage impels us
toward the complacent conclusion that this work is become the classic
of the musically unprogressive. This seems a hazardous statement,
yet it may be shown without undue effort to enjoy a substantial and
definite basis. The names of Racine and Molière, of Gluck and Lully,
rise before the memory when the term "classic" is employed, but one
should also not forget that there are thousands of well-intentioned
persons to whom that is classic which is just far enough above the
level of their ordinary thought to command respect. To the whistler
of operetta jingles all music not to be whistled is classic.
Stendahl said, in making a distinction too often made arbitrarily:
"Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works
which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable
of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the
contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest
possible pleasure to their grandfathers."
If this demarcation of Stendahl's be correct, then "Lucia" is
twice blessed in that it is both classic and romantic. For there
is no doubt that it gave much pleasure to our grandfathers, nor
is there any room for suspicion that it is not congenial to a
"popular" audience in the actual state of its habits and beliefs.
No doubt, indeed, there is a sort of gentle romanticism in "Lucia."
The personages are of the class of lords and ladies, and there is
something quite imposing in the strut of their boots and the waving
of their feathers. One must even be impressed by the sight of the
noble Scotch maiden wandering in the forest in a long-trained gown
accompanied by a companion who wears low neck and short sleeves. We
realize that we are in fashionable company, and we prepare for the
worst. When Edgardo marches upon the scene just as Lucia has signed
the futile contract, our expectations are realized, and we gaze upon
the revelation of the secrets of high life with an interest almost
as direct and eloquent as that of the chorus itself. The madness of
Lucy, accompanied by the winsome and ingenuous accents of the flute,
touches us deeply, and when Edgardo, wandering among the tombs of
his sainted fathers, learns that Lucy has ceased to live, and stabs
himself, breathing out his life in that sweet melody (with chorus),
"A te vengo," we are dissolved in tears.
This is romanticism in truth, and unless he be of those who preserve
in middle age the intellectual grasp of childhood, one cannot find in
this work any qualities of the classic beyond its familiarity to our
grandfathers, except in the meaning of the dictum of Sainte-Beuve,
"Les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parce qu'ils sont vieux,
mais parce qu'ils sont energiques, frais, dispos." Now this last word
is open to misconstruction. It may mean "cheerful" and it may mean
"disposed" or "orderly." In the case of "Lucia" either meaning will
answer, for it is the "energique" rather than the "dispos" that makes
us trouble in the application of the definition of Sainte-Beuve.
There are fuss and fury in the strenuous utterances of the tenor in
the scene of the tearing of the contract, but these can hardly be
called energy in the meaning in which the French author was using the
word. Youthful and cheerful, innocent and ingenuous,--these, indeed,
are adjectives which may well be applied to the masterpiece of the
composer of "Il Castello di Kenilworth" and other operas. For those
who are living in the past of musical art "Lucia" is a classic, and
it is also a living romance. It gave joy to their grandfathers, and
it sends through their own nerves mild thrills, not discomforting,
and not impeded by intellectual problems in tone.
When one comes beyond the "Lucia" period in operatic art, he may
fairly enroll himself in the ranks of those whom Walter Pater calls
"spiritual adventurers,"--those who are ready to put out on unknown
seas of art experience and who are notable for their active mistrust
of the teachings of their grandfathers. Some of these are fools, but
this fact only serves to remind one of a wise saying of that very
wise man, Robert Louis Stevenson: "Shelley was a young fool, and so
are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool
than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a
theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities
of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity."
It is seldom that men take things as they come in music in this
"forlorn stupidity," for they set themselves stubbornly against
the new. Yet the attitude of those who sit in amiable comfort at
performances of "Lucia" and who go away saying, "Now that's the kind
of music I like," with a tremendous accent on the "I,"--an accent
which is plainly the thank-offering of the Pharisee,--they are surely
insensible to the jars, if not to the incongruities, of the modern
musical world. And the spiritual adventurers will presently say to
them: "We are at the parting of our ways. Linger you, if you will, in
the valley with your Donizetti and his three-four ditties and his big
guitar. We are for the mountain with Wagner and Tschaïkowsky and the
thunder-storms."
But perchance it may occur to you to question whether they are not
happier in their serene movelessness than those who are continually
scaling heights. There is even some doubt about this, for they
experience occasional twinges of discomfort when they hear of
persons enjoying exclusive satisfaction in such works as "Falstaff"
or "Otello" or "Die Meistersinger," which are to them poppy and
mandragora. But there is something more pitiable than this in their
sad state. That is their inability to enjoy the classics of the
musically progressive.
The man or woman who is not subservient to a factitious taste
in music, who has not habituated the intellectual palate to the
enjoyment of Wagner alone, or of Rossini alone,--he it is whose soul
is enriched by a wider range of impressions. For him no flower of
music blooms in vain. For him there is some very special loveliness
in the operas written before the flood-gates of modern romanticism
were opened. For him there is still edification in the stately
measures of Gluck's "Orfeo," and there is a fountain of inexhaustible
pleasure in the immortal "Don Giovanni" of Mozart. To him the latter,
in particular, is a perennial "Fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro."
Ability to penetrate to the heart of these works is an evidence of
musical aristocracy. They are not for the common herd. The children
of melodic and harmonic darkness are not enlightened by them. They
shine for the few, the chosen few, who march with Music herself as
their leader. To hear "Lucia" after one of these is like drinking
iced water after eating ice-cream. The Donizettian masterpiece
becomes suddenly lukewarm.
It has been said that in art there is no such thing as standing
still. But the appreciation of art is surely a different matter.
Music, the youngest of the arts, is in the very press of her first
forward march. She is in the possession of the priceless gift of
unwearied strength. Her technical resources have not as yet been
fully explored. She has mines of mere matter which have not yet been
opened up. Her future is big with promise. But whatever that future
may be, it will be the direct product of her past. She will never be
able to cut the chains that bind her to Bach any more than poetry can
break the bonds which tie her to David, the son of Jesse. Some of us
are prone to forget this, and to think that we are of the army of
progress when we neglect Bach and Beethoven and the prophets for the
preachers of our own era. But there would have been no Brahms without
a Haydn, and there would have been no Wagner without a Mozart.
It requires an æsthetic immobility unfortunately none too rare to
stand still and enjoy "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "La Sonnambula" in
a period when the whole spirit and outward form of musical art are
tending directly away from them. The fact that so many persons can
do it is but an evidence of what we know to our regret; namely, that
most men and women refuse to take these things seriously. They hold
that the opera is only a form of amusement and that it is absurd to
fall into disputes about it. Art is a pretty word to them; but if its
meaning includes a command that they are to regard their "amusements"
with grave eyes and to exercise the faculties of their minds upon
them, away with it to the realms of outer darkness!
This is not an attitude which history encourages. Men have always
been stern in the defence of their playthings, and they have always
taken their pleasures very seriously. The whole Trojan war was about
a man's passing fancy for a woman. More bitter wars than that have
been waged for the sake of acquiring wealth and power, and to what
end? That the possessors might buy playthings therewith. Grown-up
children have their toys, but they wear graver aspects than the dolls
and Noah's Arks of childhood. Sometimes the dolls become soldiers and
the arks battleships in the nursery of a German Emperor. And so the
world suddenly realizes that the pursuit of amusements is a large
game, while his Majesty, perchance, practises a little music now and
then, that some day he may fiddle while Rome burns.
Some of us are content to remain awake to the fact that, as Taine
says, "At bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in life
but our dreams," and to feel that this lovely art of music is a
chief among these dreams. Those of us who are of this mind naturally
enough plume ourselves on our relationship to the kings who have
made wars for playthings. But we have a secret satisfaction in the
assurance that when the kings are forgotten and the boundaries of
their kingdoms blotted from the maps of the world, the art of music
will still be in the possession of the hearts of men. And then we
wonder if the musically unprogressive will still be clinging to their
jingling classic, "Lucia di Lammermoor"?
It is not a question to be answered lightly, for in these days the
number of the lovers of "Lucia" is not to be estimated by the size
of the audiences in the great opera-houses. There the fashion of the
hour rules, and the mellow thunders of Wagner are enjoyed even with
the lights turned down and the gowns in the gloom of a very precious
manifestation of musical progress. It is in the unfashionable
theatres that we must look for the evidences of the continued
popularity of the masterpiece of the incontinent Donizetti. For the
audiences of these houses are distinguished by a noble independence
of thought. They like what they like, and they do not care who
disapproves of it. And they adore "Lucia" even unto this day. But
they do not love Mozart on the one hand, nor Wagner and the senescent
Verdi on the other. And for that reason they are at a standstill.
They are the inglorious army of the musically unprogressive.
Out of this conclusion may come an inference as false as it is
unattractive. If the lovers of "Lucia" are unprogressive, is, then,
a great singer who still sings this part their leader? One may be
tempted for a moment to utilize an apt jest and say with one of Mr.
Gilbert's most delightful personages, "Bless you, it all depends."
If the great artist is great only by reason of the manner in which
she sings Lucia, then she is a star of the unprogressive. But if she
chance to be Marcella Sembrich and to sing Mozart as beautifully
as she sings Donizetti and with the added understanding which is
essential to the interpretation of the classic of the progressive,
then she is a leader of progress, although she still finds a field
for the exercise of her talents in the world of the complacent.
And if the artist be a tenor and be called Caruso, then he may sing
Edgardo and die of an aromatic melody in the moonlight amid general
blessings.
THE ORATORIO OF TO-DAY
Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery
and an instrument of ten strings. Sing unto Him a new song:
play skilfully with a loud noise.
_Psalms_ xxxiii. 2, 3.
England, where, as Mr. Gilbert was good enough to tell us in
"Iolanthe," every child is born either a Liberal or a Conservative,
leans both ways within the comfortable domain of oratorio. Chorus
answers unto chorus and fugues pursue the even tenor (or bass, as
the case may be) of their way, as they did in the brave days of old,
when the Saxon sputtered in the Haymarket and threatened to pitch
recalcitrant prima donnas out of windows. The festival of the three
choirs preserves for the edification of a prosaic and stiffnecked
generation the majestic sonorities of Handel and the subtle
intimacies of the introspective Bach.
The prancing of Elgar into this peaceful world with his pocket full
of leading motives, with a dramatization of the very throne of the
Invisible, and a suggestion of the Mary Magdalen of Wagner, neither
astonishes nor stirs the critics. The harsh yell of the shofar
disturbs them no more than the profound rumble of the contrabassoon.
And since Mendelssohn left his "Elijah" ceaselessly clamoring for the
costumes, the action, and the footlights of the stage, no Englishman
is to be set staring by the projection of a sacred drama upon his
field of vision.
After all, it was only in the day of Handel that the Bishop of London
decided for us that oratorios should no more be acted. How do we know
that, if things continue to go forward along the present lines, we
shall not have a later bishop determining that the oratorio ought
to be acted and thereby excluded from the hallowed precincts of
famous cathedral towns? Then the censorious throng which has looked
askance upon the New World performances of "Parsifal" would find that
panorama of a young pilgrim's progress as innocuous as one of the
"Four Serious Songs" of Brahms.
To those who watch with some solicitude the march of musical
progress, it looks as if we were in the midst of a transition in
the world of oratorio. A very peaceful transition, indeed, it is;
for we are no longer to be excited by a comparison of Handel with
other masters. We care not a pinch of snuff whether Coleridge-Taylor
be a genius or not. We go once a year to hear "The Messiah," and
occasionally we remember with a sort of mild surprise that Handel
also wrote "Israel in Egypt." When Mr. Elgar comes along with his
revolutionary notions, compounded of Carissimi, Handel, Mendelssohn,
and Wagner, we view them with a placidity which would be amusing were
it not so stupid. The times have changed, indeed, since Gray wrote to
Swift, on Feb. 23, 1723:--
"As for the reigning amusement of the town, it is entirely
music; real fiddles, bass viols and hautboys; not poetical
harps, lyres and reeds. There's nobody allowed to say 'I
sing' but an eunuch or an Italian woman. Everybody is grown
now as great a judge of music as they were in your time of
poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from
another now daily dispute about the different styles of
Handel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have forgot Homer and
Virgil and Cæsar; or at least, they have lost their ranks.
For in London and Westminster, in all polite conversations,
Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever
lived."
True, this pother was all anent opera, which even to this day
evokes a considerable gush of invalid comment about glorified tenors
and sopranos. At least the men of the opera to-day are actually
masculine, but there is an echo of the Handelian period in the
adoration of tenors. But that, as the pleasant Mr. Kipling was wont
to say in his pleasantest tales, is another story. It was but a
flight of years till London town cackled as busily about Handel's
oratorios as it had about his operas. A private letter from London,
printed in Faulkner's Journal (Dublin) of March 12, 1743, said:--
"Our friend, Mr. Handel, is very well, and things have taken
quite a different turn here from what they did some time
past; for the publick will no longer be imposed on by Italian
singers and wrong-headed undertakers of bad operas, but
find out the merit of Mr. Handel's compositions and English
performances. The new oratorio (called Samson) which he
composed since he left Ireland, has been performed four times
to more crowded audiences than ever were seen; more people
being turned away for want of room each night than hath been
at the Italian opera."
Nevertheless, even in those days there was little enough distinction
between the styles of the opera and the oratorio, and not many
years before Handel's day there had been none at all. Both opera
and oratorio sprang from the same soil and were nurtured by the
same fount, the drama of Greece. Cavaliere's "Anima e Corpo" was
a delectable theatrical performance, prepared under the direction
of a very good man, St. Philip Neri, with the laudable aim of
drawing young persons away from the vulgar secular shows of Rome in
the dawn of the seventeenth century. Like "Die Zauberflöte" this
oratorio ended with a chorus, "to be sung, accompanied sedately and
reverentially by the dance." How deep was the reverence and how
reposeful the sedateness may be gathered from the fact that the
ballet was "enlivened with capers or _entrechats_."
A religious drama it was, this early oratorio, and it battled its way
into popularity by the mighty power of music. Its arch-enemy was the
old mystery and miracle play, which made of every religious story
something more lively than even an oratorio with a ballet enriched
with capers. To combat the attractiveness of the popular religious
play the oratorio had to cling to the stage, the costume, and the
footlights, and it would have been little stranger to read in the
time of Carissimi (1582-1672) than it was, in the century before his
birth, the famous Coventry bill of expenses, which contains these
items.
Paid for a pair of gloves for God 2d.
Paid for four pairs of angels' wings 2s. 8d.
Paid for mending of hell head 6d.
Paid for a pound of hemp to mend the angels' heads 4d.