THE OPERA
I. WHAT IS OPERA?
The form of drama with music which we loosely call “opera” is such
a curious mixture of many elements--some of them closely related,
others nearly irreconcilable--that it is almost impossible to arrive
at any definite idea of its artistic value. A great picture or piece
of sculpture, a great book or a great symphony represents a perfectly
clear evolution of a well-defined art. You do not question the artistic
validity of “Pendennis” or of a portrait by Romney; they have their
roots in the earlier works of great writers and painters and they tend
toward those which follow. The arts they represent grew by a slow
process of evolution, absorbing everything that was useful to them and
rejecting everything useless, until they finally became consistent and
self-contained. The development of opera, on the other hand, has been
a continual compromise--with the whims of princes, with the even more
wayward whims of singers, and with social conventions.
Its increasing costliness (due sometimes to the composer’s
grandiloquence and sometimes to the demands of the public) has
necessitated producing it in huge opera houses entirely unsuited to
it; and, being a mixed art, it has been subject to two different
influences which have not by any means always been in agreement. Its
life-line has been crossed over and over again by daring innovators
who, forgetting the past, have sought to force it away from nature and
to make it an expression of excessive individualism. Methods which
would find oblivion quickly enough in any pure form of art have been
carried out in opera, and have been supported by an uncritical public
pleased by a gorgeous spectacle or entertained by fine singing. All
the other art-forms progress step by step; opera leaps first forward,
then backward; it becomes too reasonable, only to become immediately
afterward entirely unreasonable; it passes from objectivity to
subjectivity and back again, or employs both at the same time; it turns
a man into a woman, or a woman into a man; it thinks nothing of being
presented in two languages at once; it turns colloquial Bret Harte into
Italian without the slightest realization of having become, in the
process, essentially comic: in short, there seems no limit to the havoc
it can play with geography, science, language, costume, drama, music,
and human nature itself.
Any attempt, therefore, to deal here with the development of opera as
a whole would be an impossible undertaking. We should become at once
involved in a glossary of singers (now only names, then in effect
constituting the opera itself), an unsnarling of impossible plots, an
excursion into religion, into the ballet, into mythology, demonology,
pseudo-philosophy, mysticism, and Heaven knows what else. We should see
our first flock of canary birds,--released simply to make us gape,--and
we should hear a forest bird tell the hero (through the medium of a
singer off the stage) the way to a sleeping beauty; we should hear the
hero and the villain sing a delightful duet and then see them turn away
in different directions to seek and murder each other; we should find
the Pyramids and the Latin Quarter expressible in the same terms; our
heroines would include the mysterious and demoniac scoffer, Kundry,
the woman who doubts and questions, the woman who should have but did
not, and the woman who goes mad and turns the flute-player in the
orchestra to madness with her; we should see men and women, attired
in inappropriate and even unintelligible costumes, drink out of empty
cups, and a hero mortally wound a papier-mâché dragon; we should have
to shut our eyes in order to hear, or stop our ears in order to see; if
we cared for music, we should have to wait ten minutes for a domestic
quarrel in recitative to finish; if we cared for drama, we should have
to wait the same length of time while a prima donna tossed off birdling
trills and chirpings. We should, in short, find ourselves dealing with
a mixed art of quite extraordinary latitude in style, form, dramatic
purpose, and musical texture.
It will be sufficient for our purposes, therefore, to state that both
sacred and secular plays with music have existed from the earliest
times, and that their development has tended toward the form as we
now know it. The introduction of songs into plays was, in itself, so
agreeable and interesting that their use continually increased until
some vague operatic form was reached in which music predominated.
But there are two great revolutionary epochs to which proper attention
must be paid if we are to understand opera at all. The first of these
is the so-called “Florentine Revolution” in the years 1595 to 1600, and
the second is the Wagnerian reform in the middle of the last century.
II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE
The “Florentine Revolution” was an attempt to create an entirely new
type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To
“Eurydice,” the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer,
Peri, wrote a preface, from which we quote the following: “Therefore,
abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself
up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded
by this poem.” (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or
Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of
human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment,
for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and
live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it
undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up,
and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at
that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art _entirely
detached_ from an old one. Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith
without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance
without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely
illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it
because opera can subsist--it has, and does--without logic or even
reasonableness.
There had been composed before the year 1600 the most beautiful sacred
music the world possesses--that which culminated in the works of
Palestrina. A style or method of expression had been perfected, and
this style or method was gradually and naturally being applied to
secular and even to dramatic forms. There were at that time, also,
songs of the people which had been often used in plays with music, and
which might have supplied a basis for opera. But the creators of the
new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession
for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they
believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It
was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o’-the-wisp, which
has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant
bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music’s sake.
All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera
in existence, save alone “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Debussy, in which
the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy’s opera is unique
in its treatment and leads nowhere--or, if anywhere, away from opera).
Peri’s reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who
followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song
and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although
a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements
necessary to artistic completeness.
It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest
favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to
this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in
the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice
over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of
expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human
quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms
of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and
awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer
and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very
likely, called a “human nightingale”) is sure to attract an audience,
no matter what she sings or how little musical intelligence she shows.
(It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawing-room song,
the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the
public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies
with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than
any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But
it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will
always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who
sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills
and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely
unintelligible words. And, second, when this singing, which the public
dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama,
the appeal is irresistible.
I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has
made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this,
however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of
beauty in their own minds--although nature surrounds them with it, and
imaginative literature is in every library--the stage is a perpetual
delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and
vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant,
impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is
tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only
golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last.
These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they
embody the essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and Shakespeare
divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for
a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and
while those great dramatists imply the whole of life,--whereas the
ordinary play implies nothing,--they do not and cannot present it in
its actual and complete continuity.
Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public
taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the
other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any
such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if,
by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the
disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders
the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny.
“What is too silly to be said is sung,” says Voltaire.
Let us note also that when an art becomes detached from its own
past, when it is not based on natural human life, and does not obey
those general laws to which all art is subject, it is sure to evolve
conventions of one sort or another and to become artificial. This is
to be observed in what is called the “rococo” style of architecture,
as well as in the terrible objects perpetrated by the “futurists” and
“cubists” (anything that is of the future must also be of the past,
no matter whether it is a picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was
soon in the grip of these conventions from which, with a few notable
exceptions, it has never escaped. Even the common conventions of the
drama, which we accept readily enough, are in opera stretched to the
breaking point. For many generations operas were planned according
to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a woman took a man’s part (as
in Gounod’s “Faust”); characters were stereotyped; the position of
the chief _aria_ (solo) for the prima donna was exactly determined
so as to give to her entrance all possible impressiveness; the set
musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and so forth) were arranged
artificially and not to satisfy any dramatic necessity. There is some
justness in Wagner’s saying that the old conventional opera was “a
concert in costume.”
An example of this conventionality and lack of dramatic unity may be
found in the famous quartette scene in Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” an opera
which is typical of the Italian style (in which, in Meredith’s phrase,
“there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish”).
In this scene there are two persons in hiding to watch two others. The
concealment is the hinge upon which, for the moment, the story swings.
But the exigencies of the music are such that, before the piece has
progressed very far, all four are singing at the top of their lungs and
with no pretext of concealment--in a charming piece of music, indeed,
but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity. And then, naturally
enough, the thin veneer of drama having been pierced, they answer your
applause by joining hands and bowing, after which the two conceal
themselves again, the music strikes up as before, and the whole scene
is repeated.
But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the
ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and
great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It
had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful
in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera
seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinary unlucky
stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing
a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: “The very ballet girls,
with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of
miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and
then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right
great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety
degrees--as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their
points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly
jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open
blades, and stand still in the Devil’s name!”
One remembers, also, “War and Peace,” with its scene at the opera--and
Tolstoï’s reference to the chief male dancer as getting “sixty thousand
francs a year for cutting capers.” So, looking over the older operas
which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as
rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that to-day
opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art.
III. WAGNER AND AFTER
Then came the second great operatic reform,--that of Wagner,--which
was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a
reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner’s operas, at the outset,
bade fair to be. In “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Tannhäuser,” and
“Lohengrin” there is a reasonable correspondence between the action
and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption
of our faculties. Wagner’s librettos are, with one exception,
based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal
types--Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat,
Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He
adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in
his characters--such as Siegfried’s youth and fearlessness, Wotan’s
majesty, and so forth--were defined by short phrases of music called
_leit-motifs_; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of
his drama, instead of employing it as a “huge guitar”; he eliminated
the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept
his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called “authentic
cadence,” which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.
But by all these means Wagner imposed on his listener a constant strain
of attention: _leit-motifs_ recurring, developing, and disintegrating,
every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing
phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being
evolved,--as in an opera by Verdi,--but which are related to something
first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week
before in another drama): we have all this to strain every possibility
of our appreciative faculty, and _at the same time_ he asks us to watch
an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another
between two heroes half in the clouds with a God resplendent stretching
out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie
hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water,
with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks
to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more;
for he asks us to witness the end of the world--the waters rising,
the very heavens aflame--when our heart is so torn by the stupendous
_inner_ tragedy of Brunhilde’s immolation that the end of the world
seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.
After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same
time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera
house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful
music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state
of inner exaltation. An opera must be objective or subjective; it
cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of “Don Giovanni” is
due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the
action and of the musical expression--or, in other words, to the
complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The “Ring”
cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism
(and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively
profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that
Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between
means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His
own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the
natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very
nature of those beings for whom it was created. The “Ring” dramas
should be both _acted_ and _witnessed_ by gods and goddesses for whom
time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious
nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of
certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas,--every one recognizes
Wagner’s genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the
great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde,--but the intricate and
well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the
written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan
and Fricka in “Das Rheingold” and similar passages in the succeeding
dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)
One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of
the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of
the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its
predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene
is in a mining camp in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a
sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce
very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards,--an
“Outcast-of-Poker-Flat” opera,--and this translated, for the benefit
of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language? “I’m dead
gone on you, Minnie,” says Rance; “_Ti voglio bene, Minnie_,” sings his
Italian counterpart.
“Rigoletto” does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its
melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we
can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The
Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well
in literature--in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept
the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point
in the development of the opera. But after Wagner’s reforms, and the
influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians,
it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a “Girl of
the Golden West.”
Nearly all Puccini’s operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned
lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in “La Tosca,”
which leaves almost nothing to the imagination--one specially wishes
that it did in certain scenes. “Local color,” so-called, appears again
in all its arid deception--as in the Japanese effects in the music of
“Madame Butterfly”; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be
real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It
is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic
scene in Puccini’s operas with the last act of Verdi’s “Otello,” we
realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini
gives us beautiful lyric moments--as when Mimi, in “La Bohème,” tells
Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil
because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is
not for the purpose of decrying one at the expense of the other, but
to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and
the lesser is; that we get “La Bohème,” “Madame Butterfly,” and “La
Tosca” twenty times to “Otello’s” once, and that we thereby lose all
sense of operatic values.
The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic
sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the
method Strauss employs in “Electra.” In its original form “Electra”
is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics
are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas
and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as
belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good
translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated
to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see
the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents.
This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically.
Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed
with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its
artistic and its historical sense. The real “Electra” is an impersonal,
typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have
made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion.
The lead given by Strauss in “Salome,” “Electra,” and, in different
form or type, in “Der Rosenkavallier” has been quickly followed. “The
Jewels of the Madonna” is an “Electra” of the boulevard, in which the
worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted
openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the “Grand Guignol.” Let
any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form
an opinion, not of their morals,--for there is only one opinion about
that,--but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded
person.
I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them
stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth
wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of
it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep
a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme
limit, but on the other hand he is “a brother to his villains” and
he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in “The Idiot” is a
predominating and _overbalancing_ character. The object of all great
literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. “Tess of the
D’Urbervilles” is as moral as “Emma.” But the further one gets from
a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less
latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky
would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses
itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must
somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as
it is. “The Jewels of the Madonna” might serve as an episode in a novel
of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.
IV. WHEN MUSIC AND DRAMA ARE FITLY JOINED
I have referred to these various inconsistencies and absurdities of
opera, not with the idea of making out a case against it; on the
contrary, I want to make out a case for it. This obviously can be done
only by means of operas which are guiltless of absurdities and of
melodramatic exaggeration, which answer the requirements of artistic
reasonableness, and are, at the same time, beautiful. This cannot
be said of “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry--Heaven save the
mark!), “La Bohème,” “La Tosca,” “The Girl of the Golden West,” “Thaïs”
(poison, infidelity, suicide, sorcery, and religion mixed up in an
intolerable _mélange_), “Contes d’Hoffman” (a Don Juan telling his
adventures in detail)--these are bad art, not because they are immoral,
but because they are untrue, distorted, without sense of the value of
the material they employ.
Operas which are both beautiful and reasonable do exist, and one or
two of them are actually in our present-day repertoire. The questions
we have to ask are these: Can a highly imaginative and significant
drama, in which action and reflection hold a proper balance, in which
some great and moving passion or some elemental human motives find true
dramatic expression--can such a drama exist as opera? Is it possible
to preserve the body and the spirit of drama and at the same time to
preserve the body and spirit of music? Does not one of these have to
give way to the other? We want opera to be one thing, and not several.
We want the same unity which exists in other artistic forms. We want to
separate classic, romantic, and realistic. If opera changes from blank
verse to rhymed verse, so to speak, we want the change to be dictated
by an artistic necessity as it is in “As You Like It.” We want, above
all, such a reasonable correspondence between seeing and hearing
as shall make it possible for us to preserve each sense unimpaired
by the other. A few such operas have been composed. A considerable
number approach this ideal. From Gluck’s “Orfeo” (produced in 1762) to
Wagner’s “Tristan” (1865) the pure conception of opera has always been
kept alive. Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Verdi are the great names
that stand out above the general level.
Gluck’s “Orfeo” is even more interesting since the dark shadow of
Strauss’s “Electra” has appeared to throw it into relief. Once in
a decade or two “Orfeo” is revived to reveal anew how nobly Gluck
interpreted the old Greek story. And it must be remembered that Gluck
lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when music
was quite inflexible in the matter of those dissonances which are
considered by modern composers absolutely necessary to the expression
of dramatic passion.
After Gluck came Mozart with his “Don Giovanni,” preserving the same
balance between action and emotion, with an even greater unity of
style and the same sincerity of utterance. Mozart possessed a supreme
mastery over all his material, and a unique gift for creating pure
and lucid melody. In his operas there is no admixture: his tragedy
and his comedy are alike purely objective--_and it is chiefly this
quality which prevents our understanding them_. We, in our day and
age, cannot project ourselves into Mozart’s _milieu_; the tragedy at
the close of “Don Giovanni” moves us no whit because it is devoid of
shrieking dissonances and thunders of orchestral sound. Our nervous
systems are adjusted to instrumental cataclysms. (We are conscious
only of a _falling_ star; the serene and placid Heavens look down
on us in vain.) Could we hear “Don Giovanni” in a small opera house
sung in pure classic style, we should realize how beautiful it is; we
should no longer crave the over-excitement and unrestrained passion
of “La Tosca”; we should understand that the deepest passion is
expressible without tearing itself to tatters, and that music may be
unutterably tragic in simple major and minor mode. Don Giovanni is a
type of operatic hero,--he may be found in some modified form in half
the operas ever written,--but Mozart lifts him far above his petty
intrigues and makes him a great figure standing for certain elements
in human nature. (It is the failure of Gounod to accomplish this which
puts “Faust” on the lower plane it occupies.) The stage setting of “Don
Giovanni,”--the conventional rooms with gilt chairs, and the like,--the
costumes, the acting, the music (orchestral and vocal), are all unified
in one style. And this, coupled with the supreme mastery and the
melodic gift of its composer, makes it one of the most perfect, if not
the most perfect, of operas.
Beethoven’s “Fidelio” (produced in 1805) celebrates the devotion
and self-sacrifice of a woman--and that devotion and self-sacrifice
actually have for their object _her husband_! It is a noble opera,
but Beethoven’s mind and temperament were not suited to the operatic
problem, and “Fidelio” is not by any means a perfect work of art. The
Beethoven we hear there is the Beethoven of the slow movements of the
sonatas and symphonies; but we could well hear “Fidelio” often, for it
stands alone in its utter sincerity and grandeur.
The romantic operas of Weber tend toward that characterization
which is the essential equality of his great successor, Wagner,
for “Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe” are full of characteristic
music. Weber begins and ends romantic opera. (Romantic subjects
are common enough, but romantic treatment is exceedingly uncommon.
Scott’s “Bride of Lammermoor,” for example, in passing through the
hands of librettist and composer becomes--in Donizetti’s “Lucia di
Lammermoor”--considerably tinged with melodrama.) There is evidence
enough in “Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe” of Weber’s sincerity and
desire to make his operas artistic units. Each of them conveys a
definite impression of beauty and avoids those specious appeals so
common in opera.
Meanwhile, in the early part of the nineteenth century, _opéra
comique_ was flourishing in France. Auber, Hérold, Boieldieu, and other
composers were producing works in which the impossible happenings of
grand opera were made possible by humor and lightness of touch. The
words of these composers are full of delightful melody and are more
reasonable and true than are many better-known grand operas.
Then comes the Wagnerian period, with its preponderance of drama over
music. In “Tristan und Isolde” Wagner, by his own confession, turned
away from preconceived theories and composed as his inner spirit moved
him. “Tristan” is, therefore, the work of an artist rather than of a
theorist, and although it is based on the _leit-motif_ and on certain
other important structural ideas which belong to the Wagnerian scheme,
it rises far above their limitations and glows with the real light of
genius. In “Tristan” the action is suited to the psychology. It is a
great work of art and the most beautiful of all recantations. In it we
realize how finely means may be adjusted to ends, how clearly music
and text may be united, how reasonable is the use of the _leit-motif_
when it characterizes beings aflame with passion; how the song, under
the influence of great dramatic situations, can be expanded; how
vividly the orchestra can interpret and even further the actions; how
even the chorus can be fitted into the dramatic scheme--everywhere in
“Tristan” there is unity. This is not true of most of Wagner’s other
operas. “Die Meistersinger” comes nearest to “Tristan” in this respect.
May we not say that of all the music-dramas of Wagner, “Tristan” and
“Die Meistersinger” lay completely in his consciousness unmixed with
philosophical ideas and theories? In them the _leit-motif_ deals
chiefly with emotions or with characteristics of persons rather than
with inanimate objects, or ideas; in them is no grandiose scenic
display; no perversity of theory, but only beautiful music wedded to a
fitting text.
Wagner’s reforms were bound to bring about a reaction, which came in
due season and resulted in shorter and more direct works, such as those
of the modern Italians. No operas since Wagner, save Verdi’s “Otello”
and “Falstaff,” approach the greatness of his music-dramas, and the
tendency of many of these later works has been too much toward what we
mildly call “decadence.” But there is a great difference between the
truthfulness and artistic validity of “Carmen” and that of “La Bohème”
and “La Tosca.” The former is packed full of genuine passion, however
primitive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and its technical skill
is undoubted.
The most interesting phrase of modern opera is found in the works
of the Russians. It was inevitable that they should overturn our
delicately adjusted artistic mechanism. Dostoïevsky’s “The Brothers
Karamazov” is as though there never had been a Meredith or a Henry
James, and Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godounov” is as though there had never
been a Mozart or a Wagner. It has something of that amorphous quality
which seems to be a part of Russian life, but, on the other hand, it
has immense vitality. How refreshing to see a crowd of peasants look
like peasants, and to hear them sing their own peasant songs; and what
stability they give to the whole work! “Boris Godounov” gravitates, as
it were, around these folk-songs, which give to it a certain reality
and truthfulness.
V. OPERA AS A HUMAN INSTITUTION
These various works have long since been accepted by the musical
world as the great masterpieces in operatic form. Many of them are
practically out of the present repertoire of our opera houses. Were we
to assert ourselves--were the general public given an opportunity to
choose between good and bad--we should hear them often. And who shall
say what results might not come from a small and properly managed opera
house, with performances of fine works at reasonable prices?
Opera is controlled by a few rich men who think it a part of the
life of a great city that there should be an opera house with a fine
orchestra, fine scenery, and the greatest singers obtainable. It does
not exist for the good of the whole city, but rather for those of
plethoric purses. It does not make any attempt to become a sociological
force; it does not even dimly see what possibilities it possesses
in that direction. Opera houses and opera companies are sedulously
protected against any sociological scrutiny. They are persistently
reported to be hot-beds of intrigue; they trade on society and on the
love of highly paid singing; they surround themselves with an exotic
atmosphere in which the normal person finds difficulty in breathing,
and which often turns the opera singer into a strange specimen of the
_genus_ man or woman; they go to ruin about once in so often, and are
extricated by the unnecessarily rich; they are too little related to
the community that supports them save in the mediums of money and
social convention.
These artificial and false conditions are bound to bring evils in their
train, but these conditions and these evils are chiefly the result
of our own complacency. Were opera in any sense domestic; were opera
singers to some extent, at least, human beings like ourselves, moving
in a reasonable world; did we go to hear opera as we go to a symphony
concert, or to an art museum,--to satisfy our love of beauty, and
quicken our imagination by contact with beautiful objects; were the
conditions of performance such as to enable us to hear the words, then
would opera become a fine human institution, then would it take its
place among the noble dreams of humanity.
In my endeavor to make some distinctions between good and bad opera
I have drawn a somewhat arbitrary line. I do not wish to give the
impression that I think all opera on one side of the line is bad and
on the other good. I have tried to strike a just balance by applying
certain admitted principles of artistic construction and expression.
From these principles, which lie at the basis of life and, therefore,
of art, opera has unjustly claimed immunity.
And finally we come to that point in our argument where reasoning must
stop altogether. For opera is to many people a sort of fascination
entirely outside reason. They refuse to admit it as a subject of
discussion; they enjoy the spectacle on the stage and the spectacle
of which they are a part; the sight of three thousand people well
dressed like themselves comforts them; the fine singing, costumes, and
stage-setting, the gorgeous orchestra throbbing with passion entirely
unbridled--all these they enjoy in that mental lassitude which is dear
to them. They are, perhaps, slightly uncomfortable at a symphony
concert; here there are no obligations. Opera is, in short, to such
people a slightly illicit æsthetic adventure.