All art forms are conventions, and all conventions appear ridiculous
when they are superseded by new ones. The old Italian opera form is
laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep
bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the
Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at
by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention. It is
absolutely the first condition of the existence of an art that one
shall be prepared to tolerate things ludicrously unlike anything to be
found in real life; and when (for instance) you have swallowed the
camel of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes at all,
it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat of permitting them to
sing in this rather than in that way, when both ways are alike
preposterous. It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian opera, any more
than with the female dress of to-day before my eyes I should insist
that the women who wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I do, that the dress
of ten years ago was not--and could not be--more absurd than the dress
of to-day. The only reasonable objection that can be brought against
Italian opera is that when it is sincere it offers what no one wants,
and that when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not sincere.
I cannot quite understand what this means, but will endeavour to
explain.
Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before
whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the
beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the
opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs
for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and
finally Gluck, with his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical
invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling, and telling
it well, and inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations
where strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs
truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created which
would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of these three
periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for then the form
entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function of the story was to
provide a motive for song after song; so that no one was scandalised
or moved to laughter when the death of the hero was re-enacted because
his death-song pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story
was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext. The
characters were the merest puppets, or shadows of puppets; and there
was no reason why Julius Cæsar should not be a male soprano and sing
charmingly feminine florid airs. In a word, there was no drama nor
pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those who can accept
it as it is will find in many old Italian writers some perfect music
of its sort, and in the Italian operas of Handel the divinest songs
ever written--songs even more divine than Mozart's. But the childish
delight in lovely melodies and in absolute perfection of vocal art, at
its highest in the early part of the eighteenth century, died out
rapidly after 1750; and Italian opera became the medium of the
vulgarest instead of the most refined kind of ear-tickling. How Gluck
rebelled, and determined to "reform" the opera stage, and how in
reforming it he was impelled to a large extent by a desire to find a
medium through which he could express himself, are matters well enough
known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher, he left no
disciples; for Mozart, the next master of Italian opera, was a hundred
thousand miles away from him in intention, in method, and in
achievement. He commenced where Gluck ended his pre-Reformation
period; and all his life his intention was to please first, and only
in the second place to express himself. But so splendid were his
gifts, so inevitably did he fit the lovely word to the thrilling
thought, so lucky was he in the libretto of "Don Giovanni" (the
luckiest libretto ever devised), that he went clean ahead not only of
Gluck but of Beethoven and every composer who has written opera since.
His operas stand at the parting of the ways. In them we find the
fullest measure of dramatic truth combined with the most delicious
ear-tickling. But it is safe to say that Mozart is the only composer
of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining the two things thus,
for in Gluck there is short measure of sheer beauty, and in
Handel--who used the oldest form--no attempt at drama. Mozart, like
Gluck, had no disciples--only the second-rate men have disciples; but
their example, and the tendency which they represented, had a curious
result. Before their time all opera-writers had been avowed
ear-ticklers. But after them, and especially after Mozart, the old
line of composers may be observed to have split up into two lines, the
one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other trying to express
dramatic movement, and their thought and feeling, in the old medium.
The first of these lines has not been broken to this day: Rossini
came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, and
the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler unto this day. The
second line in its turn quickly split into those who, not content with
the form, sought to alter it, and those who, quite content with it,
went gaily on, turning out opera after opera, dealing with modern
subjects in the old-fashioned way. Of these last Gounod must be
reckoned the chief; and he began, not where Mozart left off, but with
the Mozartean method of the "Don Giovanni" period. Now, it is of the
very essence of the Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that
it enables a composer to represent moments. The drama does not unfold
gradually, as it does in the music-play, with its continuous flow of
music marking the subtlest changes. It unfolds in jerks, each number
advancing it a stage; so that Gluck never got any appearance of
continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by the consummate tact
with which he arranged his pictures, and by the exciting pace at which
he passes them before us. The figures seem to move, as in the
Kinetoscope, or its forerunner the Wheel of Life: the Mozartean opera,
when most dramatic, is a musical Wheel of Life. Gounod possessed
neither Mozart's tact nor his fiery energy. Neither was called for in
"Faust," which is not a drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial
moments, from a drama; and since the moments were moments charged with
the one feeling which Gounod appears to have felt very strongly or to
have had the faculty for expressing, he is here at his very best.
There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it--it was purely
animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains, and will
remain, as the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous
form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he attempted to do
again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and Juliet"; and here the
method which had served him so faithfully and so well in "Faust"
utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were virtually but two
characters, Faust and Marguerite, while in "Romeo" the stage was
encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would
have been Mozart's opportunity was his undoing. He could give none of
them pungent or characteristic language; they are the merest Italian
operatic puppets; and it is only when they are off the stage that the
opera shows any signs of life. In the story of "Romeo" the passion is
of a far more fiery quality than in that of "Faust"; and whereas in
"Faust" the passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the
finale, where it becomes a little more intense, in "Romeo" it is
passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony
scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly
forebodings of death. The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to
depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling. Mozart himself
would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only
method that might have enabled Gounod to do it,--the Wagnerian method
of continuous development of typical themes,--the unfolding of the
drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of
feeling than it began. The last scene of all, the scene where a more
sincere composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded
at least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed the
slightest sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with which
Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed
leading up to that fervour he could not give us--the mood which finds
the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears
beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its
strongest appeal. But it was not the subject which led to Gounod's
failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He failed in every opera excepting
"Faust," and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect
knowledge of his own powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had
never experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be
inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment. As
Gounod failed in "Romeo," and failed in every other opera, so every
modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old
undramatic form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera was well
enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as soon as
composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately worked-out
situations, and the gradual growth and change of human passion into
it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere.
Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age
wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and
art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.
But those who have heard "Romeo and Juliet" may possibly prefer even
the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian opera which it
represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind
represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I said, when Italian opera
is sincere it offers what no one wants--ear-tickling, and
ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort which is gone completely out of
fashion. Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line of
opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse, and he spent his life
in devising pleasant noises to make his patrons' evenings pass
agreeably. I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what "La
Favorita" is all about, or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It
is a series of songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a
single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful
regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is
merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from
Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual.
But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the
time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from
boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti
wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply
as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was no
music-hall, and the opera had to serve its purpose: hence the slight
confusion which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a
better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although
Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains
and invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I doubt
whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for the fact
that Donizetti was an opera-composer--and Mozart and Gluck were
opera-composers too!--it is pretty certain that not the united prayers
of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic
management to resurrect "La Favorita." Even up-to-date ear-tickling is
not popular now in the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it;
and we don't want to pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way
that arouses no pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and
dominant passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing
of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the
flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti
is amongst the dead whom no resurrection awaits.