immediately appeared at the door. For example, the contemporaries of
Sophie Arnould, the "creator" of _Iphigenie en Aulide_, are agreed
that she was greater as an actress than she was as a singer. David
Garrick, indeed, pronounced her a finer actress than Clairon. From
that day to this there has been a continual triangular conflict
between critic, composer, and singer, which up to date, it must be
admitted, has been won by the academic pundits, for, although the
singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the
critical knout, thereby holding the lyric drama more or less in the
state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every
composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to
the laws of _bel canto_ and enough singers exist, unfortunately, to
justify this assertion) save that the music is not so well sung,
according to the old standards, as it was then. No singer has had
quite the courage to entirely defy tradition, to refuse to study with
a teacher, to embody her own natural ideas in the performance of
music, to found a new school ... but there have been many rebells.
The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, as a whole, do
not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a
time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every
requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action was
demanded than in Handel's day the newer music, in compensation, was
easier to sing. But even early in the Nineteenth Century we observe
that those artists who strove to be actors as well as singers lost
something in vocal facility (really they were pushing on to the new
technique). I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. The lady was
admittedly the greatest lyric artist of her day although it is
recorded that her slips from true intonation were frequent. When she
could no longer command a steady tone the _beaux restes_ of her art
and her authoritative style caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing
her then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ronconi's voice,
according to Chorley, barely exceeded an octave; it was weak and
habitually out of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal
agility and he was monotonous in his use of ornament. Nevertheless
this same Chorley admits that Ronconi afforded him more pleasure in
the theatre than almost any other singer he ever heard! If this critic
did not rise to the occasion here and point the way to the future in
another place he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution:
"There might, there _should_ be yet, a new _Medea_ as an opera.
Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's
setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs.
Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible
to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who
is to present the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's
Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is
topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is
suggestive.
The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools.
Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate
feeling, over a great body of sound, nay, in many instances, _against_
a great body of sound. (It is significant that Wagner himself admitted
that it was a singer [Madame Schroeder-Devrient] who revealed to him
the possibilities of dramatic singing. He boasted that he was the only
one to learn the lesson. "She was the first artist," writes H. T.
Finck, "who fully revealed the fact that in a dramatic opera there may
be situations where _characteristic_ singing is of more importance
than _beautiful_ singing.") It is small occasion for wonder that
singers began to bark. Indeed they nearly expired under the strain of
trying successfully to mingle Porpora and passion. According to W. F.
Apthorp, Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional
intensity of music and situations, the constant co-operation of the
surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the
reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go
stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like
Tristan or Siegfried.... The critics, however, were inexorable; they
stood by their guns. There was but one way to sing the new music and
that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In time, by dint of
persevering, talking night and day, writing day and night, they
convinced the singer. The music drama developed but the singer was
held in his place. Some artists, great geniuses, of course, made the
compromise successfully.... Jean de Reszke, for example, and Lilli
Lehmann, who said to H. E. Krehbiel ("Chapters of Opera"): "It is
easier to sing all three Brunnhildes than one Norma. You are so
carried away by the dramatic emotion, the action, and the scene, that
you do not have to think how to sing the words. That comes of itself"
... but they made the further progress of the composer more difficult
thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple
singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena
effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of _Madama Butterfly_ a
Japanese once asked why the singers were producing those nice round
tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?
Will any composer arise with the courage to write an opera which
_cannot_ be sung? Stravinsky almost did this in _The Nightingale_ but
the break must be more complete. Think of the range of sounds made by
the Japanese, the gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk-singers. The
newest composer may ask for shrieks, squeaks, groans, screams, a
thousand delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal tones from his
interpreters. Why should the gamut of expression on our opera stage be
so much more limited than it is in our music halls? Why should the
Hottentots be able to make so many delightful noises that we are
incapable of producing? Composers up to date have taken into account a
singer's apparent inability to bridge difficult intervals. It is only
by ignoring all such limitations that the new music will definitely
emerge, the new art of the singer be born. What marvellous effects
might be achieved by skipping from octave to octave in the human
voice! When will the obfusc pundits stop shouting for what Avery
Hopwood calls "ascending and descending tetrarchs!"
But, some one will argue, with the passing of _bel canto_ what will
become of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti? Who
will sing them? Fear not, lover of the golden age of song, _bel canto_
is not passing as swiftly as that. Singers will continue to be born
into this world who are able to cope with the floridity of this music,
for they are born, not made. Amelita Galli-Curci will have her
successors, just as Adelina Patti had hers. Singers of this kind begin
to sing naturally in their infancy and they continue to sing, just
sing.... One touch of drama or emotion and their voices disappear.
Remember Nellie Melba's sad experience with _Siegfried_. The great
Mario had scarcely studied singing (one authority says that he had
taken a few lessons of Meyerbeer!) when he made his debut in _Robert,
le Diable_ and there is no evidence that he studied very much
afterwards. Melba, herself, spent less than a year with Mme. Marchesi
in preparation for her opera career. Mme. Galli-Curci asserts that she
has had very little to do with professors and I do not think Mme.
Tetrazzini passed her youth in mastering _vocalizzi_. As a matter of
fact she studied singing only six months. Adelina Patti told Dr.
Hanslick that she had sung _Una voce poco fa_ at the age of seven with
the same embellishments which she used later when she appeared in the
opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are freaks of nature
like tortoise-shell cats and like those rare felines they are usually
females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind
us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But when this
type of singer finally becomes extinct naturally the operas which
depend on it will disappear too for the same reason that the works of
Monteverde and Handel have dropped out of the repertory, that the
Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan interludes are no longer current
on our stage. None of our actors understands the style of Chinese
plays; consequently it would be impossible to present one of them in
our theatre. As Deirdre says in Synge's great play, "It's a heartbreak
to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only."
We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the plays of
AEschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas; the operas I have
just referred to can also be admired in the closet and probably they
will be. Even today no more than two works of Rossini, the most
popular composer of the early Nineteenth Century, are to be heard.
What has become of _Semiramide_, _La Cenerentola_, and the others?
There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from
the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum
_Di Tanti Palpiti_? You know they cannot. I doubt if you can find two
girls in New York (and I mean girls with a musical education) who can
tell you in what opera the air belongs and yet in the early Twenties
this tune was as popular as _Un Bel Di_ is today.
Coloratura singing has been called heartless, not altogether without
reason. At one time its exemplars fired composers to their best
efforts. That day has passed. That day passed seventy years ago. It
may occur to you that there is something wrong when singers of a
certain type can only find the proper means to exploit their voices in
works of the past, operas which are dead. It is to be noted that
Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely unfitted to sing
in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas,
Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti
and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of
importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here
is an entirely paradoxical situation; a set of interpreters who exist,
it would seem, only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the
past. What would we think of an actor who could make no effect save in
the tragedies of Corneille? It is such as these who have kept Leo
Ornstein from writing an opera. Berlioz forewarned us in his
"Memoirs." He was one of the first to foresee the coming day: "We
shall always find a fair number of female singers, popular from their
brilliant singing of brilliant trifles, and odious to the great
masters because utterly incapable of properly interpreting them. They
have voices, a certain knowledge of music, and flexible throats: they
are lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women are regular monsters
and all the more formidable to composers because they are often
charming monsters. This explains the weakness of certain masters in
writing falsely sentimental parts, which attract the public by their
brilliancy. It also explains the number of degenerate works, the
gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of
expression, the neglect of dramatic properties, the contempt for the
true, the grand, and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude
of art in certain countries."
So, even if, as the ponderous criticasters are continually pointing
out, the age of _bel canto_ is really passing there is no actual
occasion for grief. All fashions in art pass and what is known as _bel
canto_ is just as much a fashion as the bombastic style of acting that
prevailed in Victor Hugo's day or the "realistic" style of acting we
prefer today. All interpretative art is based primarily on the
material with which it deals and with contemporary public taste. This
kind of singing is a direct derivative of a certain school of opera
and as that school of opera is fading more expressive methods of
singing are coming to the fore. The very first principle of _bel
canto_, an equalized scale, is a false one. With an equalized scale a
singer can produce a perfectly ordered series of notes, a charming
string of matched pearls, but nothing else. It is worthy of note that
it is impossible to sing Spanish or negro folk-songs with an equalized
scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a vocal method of its
interpreter quite distinct from that of the art song.
We know now that true beauty lies deeper than in the emission of
"perfect tone." Beauty is truth and expressiveness. The new art of the
singer should develop to the highest degree the significance of the
text. Calve once said that she did not become a real artist until she
forgot that she had a beautiful voice and thought only of the proper
expression the music demanded.
Of the old method of singing only one quality will persist in the late
Twentieth Century (mind you, this is deliberate prophecy but it is
about as safe as it would be to predict that Sarah Bernhardt will live
to give several hundred more performances of _La Dame aux Camelias_)
and that is style. The performance of any work demands a knowledge of
and a feeling for its style but style is about the last thing a singer
ever studies. When, however, you find a singer who understands style,
there you have an artist!
Style is the quality which endures long after the singer has lost the
power to produce a pure tone or to contrive accurate phrasing and so
makes it possible for artists to hold their places on the stage long
after their voices have become partially defective or, indeed, have
actually departed. It is knowledge of style that accounts for the long
careers of Marcella Sembrich and Lilli Lehmann or of Yvette Guilbert
and Maggie Cline for that matter. It is knowledge of style that makes
De Wolf Hopper a great artist in his interpretation of the music of
Sullivan and the words of Gilbert. Some artists, indeed, with barely a
shred of voice, have managed to maintain their positions on the stage
for many years through a knowledge of style. I might mention Victor
Maurel, Max Heinrich (not on the opera stage, of course), Antonio
Scotti, and Maurice Renaud.
A singer may be born with the ability to produce pure tones (I doubt
if Mme. Melba learned much about tone production from her teachers),
she may even phrase naturally, although this is more doubtful, but the
acquirement of style is a long and tedious process and one which
generally requires specialization. For style is elusive. An auditor, a
critic, will recognize it at once but very few can tell of what it
consists. Nevertheless it is fairly obvious to the casual listener
that Olive Fremstad is more at home in the music dramas of Gluck and
Wagner than she is in _Carmen_ and _Tosca_, and that Marcella Sembrich
is happier when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart singer she has had
no equal in the past three decades) than when she is singing _Lakme_.
Mme. Melba sings _Lucia_ in excellent style but she probably could not
convince us that she knows how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know
she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria
Marco, the Spanish soprano, who sings music of her own country in her
own language with absolutely irresistible effect, but on one occasion
when she attempted _Vissi d'Arte_ she was transformed immediately into
a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily fully of
grace and meaning, had become conventionalized.
If this quality of style (which after all means an understanding of
both the surface manner and underlying purpose of a composition and an
ability to transmit this understanding across the footlights) is of
such manifest importance in the field of art music it is doubly so in
the field of popular or folk-music. A foreigner had best think twice
before attempting to sing a Swedish song, a Hungarian song, or a
Polish song, popular or folk. (According to no less an authority than
Cecil J. Sharp, the peasants themselves differentiate between the two
and devote to each a _special vocal method_. Here are his words
["English Folk-Song"]: "But, it must be remembered that the vocal
method of the folk-singer is inseparable from the folk-song. It is a
cult which has grown up side by side with the folk-song, and is, no
doubt, part and parcel of the same tradition. When, for instance, an
old singing man sings a modern popular song, he will sing it in quite
another way. The tone of his voice will change and he will slur his
intervals, after the approved manner of the street-singer. Indeed, it
is usually quite possible to detect a genuine folk-song simply by
paying attention to the way in which it is sung.") Strangers as a rule
do not attempt such matters although we have before us at the present
time the very interesting case of Ratan Devi. It is a question,
however, if Ratan Devi would be so much admired if her songs or their
traditional manner of performance were more familiar to us.
On our music hall stage there are not more than ten singers who
understand how to sing American popular songs (and these, as I have
said elsewhere at some length,[33] constitute America's best claim in
the art of music). It is very difficult to sing them well. Tone and
phrasing have nothing to do with the matter; it is all a question of
style (leaving aside for the moment the important matter of
personality which enters into an accounting for any artist's
popularity or standing). Elsie Janis, a very clever mimic, a
delightful dancer, and perhaps the most deservedly popular artist on
our music hall stage, is not a good interpreter of popular songs. She
cannot be compared in this respect with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring,
Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Fannie
Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all the good ones. The
spirit, the very conscious liberties taken with the text (the
vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations as the singer of
early opera embroidered on the score of the composer) are not matters
that just happen. They require any amount of work and experience with
audiences. None of the singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you
find novices who are able to sing Schumann and Franz _lieder_,
although they may be blessed with well-nigh perfect vocal organs.
Still the music critics with strange persistence continue to adjudge a
singer by the old formulae and standards: has she an equalized scale?
Has she taste in ornament? Does she overdo the use of _portamento_,
_messa di voce_, and such devices? How is her shake? etc., etc. But
how false, how ridiculous, this is! Fancy the result if new writers
and composers were criticized by the old laws (so they are, my son,
but not for long)! Creative artists always smash the old tablets of
commandments and it does not seem to me that interpretative artists
need be more unprogressive. Acting changes. Judged by the standards by
which Edwin Booth was assessed John Drew is not an actor. But we know
now that it is a different kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant,
extravagant, and intensely emotional, something quite different from
real life. The present craze for counterfeiting the semblance of
ordinary existence on the stage will also die out for the stage is not
life and representing life on the stage (except in a conventionalized
or decorative form) is not art. Our new actors (with our new
playwrights) will develop a new and fantastic mode of expression
which will supersede the present fashion.... Rubinstein certainly did
not play the piano like Chopin. Presently a _virtuoso_ will appear who
will refuse to play the piano at all and a new instrument without a
tempered scale will be invented so that he may indulge in all the
subtleties between half-tones which are denied to the pianist.
It's all very well to cry, "Halt!" and "Who goes there?" but you can't
stop progress any more than you can stop the passing of time. The old
technique of the singer breaks down before the new technique of the
composer and the musician with daring will go still further if the
singer will but follow. Would that some singer would have the complete
courage to lead! But do not misunderstand me. The road to Parnassus is
no shorter because it has been newly paved. Indeed I think it is
longer. Caffarelli studied six years before he made his debut as "the
greatest singer in the world" but I imagine that Waslav Nijinsky
studied ten before he set foot on the stage. The new music drama,
combining as it does principles from all the arts is all-demanding of
its interpreters. The new singer must learn how to move gracefully and
awkwardly, how to make both fantastic and realistic gestures, always
unconventional gestures, because conventions stamp the imitator. She
must peer into every period, glance at every nation. Every nerve
centre must be prepared to express any adumbration of plasticity. Many
of the new operas, _Carmen_, _La Dolores_, _Salome_, _Elektra_, to
name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order.
_Madama Butterfly_ and _Lakme_ demand a knowledge of national
characteristics. _Pelleas et Melisande_ and _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_
require of the interpreter absolutely distinct enunciation. In
Handel's operas the phrases were repeated so many times that the
singer was excused if he proclaimed the meaning of the line once.
After that he could alter the vowels and consonants to suit his vocal
convenience. _Monna Vanna_ and _Tristan und Isolde_ exact of their
interpreters acting of the highest poetic and imaginative scope....
It is a question whether certain singers of our day have not solved
these problems with greater success than that for which they are given
credit.... Yvette Guilbert has announced publicly that she never had a
teacher, that she would not trust her voice to a teacher. The
enchanting Yvette practises a sound by herself until she is able to
make it; she repeats a phrase until she can deliver it without an
interrupting breath, and is there a singer on the stage more
expressive than Yvette Guilbert? She sings a little tenor, a little
baritone, and a little bass. She can succeed almost invariably in
making the effect she sets out to make. And Yvette Guilbert is the
answer to the statement often made that unorthodox methods of singing
ruin the voice. Ruin it for performances of _Linda di Chaminoux_ and
_La Sonnambula_ very possibly, but if young singers sit about saving
their voices for performances of these operas they are more than
likely to die unheard. It is a fact that good singing in the
old-fashioned sense will help nobody out in _Elektra_, _Ariane et
Barbe-Bleue_, _Pelleas et Melisande_, or _The Nightingale_. These
works are written in new styles and they demand a new technique. Put
Mme. Melba, Mme. Destinn, Mme. Sembrich, or Mme. Galli-Curci to work
on these scores and you will simply have a sad mess.
We have, I think, but a faint glimmering of what vocal expressiveness
may become. Such torch-bearers as Mariette Mazarin and Feodor
Chaliapine have been procaciously excoriated by the critics. Until
recently Mary Garden, who of all artists on the lyric stage, is the
most nearly in touch with the singing of the future, has been treated
as a charlatan and a fraud. W. J. Henderson once called her the "Queen
of Unsong." Well, perhaps she is, but she is certainly better able to
cope artistically with the problems of the modern music drama than
such Queens of Song as Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti would be.
Perhaps Unsong is the name of the new art.
I do not think I have ever been backward in expressing my appreciation
of this artist. My essay devoted to her in "Interpreters and
Interpretations" will certainly testify eloquently as to my previous
attitude in regard to her. But it has not always been so with some of
my colleagues. Since she has been away from us they have learned
something; they have watched and listened to others and so when Mary
Garden came back to New York in _Monna Vanna_ in January, 1918, they
were ready to sing choruses of praise in her honour. They have been
encomiastic even in regard to her voice and her manner of singing.