OTELLO: FURTHER REFORMS IN OPERA SERIA.
While Rossini was still at Rome the San Carlo theatre was destroyed by
fire, but Barbaja's fortune was not invested in one opera-house alone.
He had two theatres in hand, and the principal one being burnt down,
nothing was easier than for his composer to fulfil the conditions of his
engagement by working for the minor establishment.
First, however, Rossini had to write a piece for the Teatro dei
Fiorentini--also at Naples--where two celebrated buffo singers,
Pellegrini and Cassaccia, were performing with great success. He
composed for them an operetta called "La Gazzetta," which was produced
without much result in the summer of 1816.
Rossini now commenced an important work, which he had promised to
Barbaja for the winter season of the Teatro del Fondo. The company
included all the best of the burnt-out singers from the San Carlo
Theatre, Mademoiselle Colbran, Davide and Nozzare, the two tenors, and
Benedetti, a newly-engaged bass.
Here the bass again moves a little step forward, but Benedetti was
nothing by the side of the two brilliant tenors. _Iago_, in the operatic
version of "Othello," is only a secondary character. _Otello_ and
_Roderigo_ are two leading parts, and we may be sure that Barbaja, as an
enterprising manager, having two popular tenors like Davide and Nozzare
at his theatre, willing to appear together in the same opera, would have
been very much shocked if his composer had objected to turn such a
combination of talent to the best possible account.
Davide, as _Otello_, displayed much power; and his acting, equally with
his singing, was praised by all who saw him. A French critic, M. Edouard
Bertin, gives the following account of his performance in a letter dated
1823; the celebrated tenor had then been playing the part seven years:--
"Davide excites among the dilettanti of this town an enthusiasm and
delight which could scarcely be conceived without having been
witnessed. He is a singer of the new school, full of mannerism,
affectation, and display, abusing, like Martin, his magnificent voice,
with its prodigious compass (three octaves comprised between four B
flats). He crushes the principal motive of an air beneath the luxuriance
of his ornamentation, and which has no other merit than that of
difficulty conquered. But he is also a singer full of warmth, verve,
expression, energy, and musical sentiment; alone he can fill up and give
life to a scene; it is impossible for another singer to carry away an
audience as he does, and when he will only be simple he is admirable; he
is the Rossini of song. He is a great singer; the greatest I have ever
heard. Doubtless the manner in which Garcia sings and plays the part of
_Otello_ is preferable, taking it altogether, to that of Davide. It is
purer, more severe, more constantly dramatic; but, with all his faults,
Davide produces more effect, a great deal more effect. There is
something in him, I cannot say what, which, even when he is ridiculous,
commands, entrances attention. He never leaves you cold, and when he
does not move you he astonishes you; in a word, before hearing him, I
did not know what the power of singing really was. The enthusiasm he
excites is without limits. In fact, his faults are not faults for
Italians, who, in their opera seria, do not employ what the French call
the tragic style, and who scarcely understand us when we tell them that
a waltz or quadrille movement is out of place in the mouth of a _Cæsar_,
an _Assur_, or an _Otello_. With them the essential thing is to please;
they are only difficult on this point, and their indifference as to all
the rest is really inconceivable; here is an example of it. Davide,
considering apparently that the final duet of "Otello" did not
sufficiently show off his voice, determined to substitute for it a duet
from "Armida" ("Amor possente nome"), which is very pretty, but anything
rather than severe. As it was impossible to kill _Desdemona_ to such a
tune, the Moor, after giving way to the most violent jealousy, sheathes
his dagger, and begins in the most tender and graceful manner his duet
with _Desdemona_, at the conclusion of which he takes her politely by
the hand and retires, amidst the applause and bravos of the public, who
seem to think it quite natural that the piece should finish in this
manner, or, rather that it should not finish at all; for after this
beautiful dénouement the action is about as far advanced as it was in
the first scene. We do not in France carry our love of music so far as
to tolerate such absurdities as these, and perhaps we are right."
* * * * *
Lord Byron saw "Otello" at Venice soon after its first production. He
speaks of it in one of his letters dated 1818, condemning and ridiculing
the libretto, but praising the music and singing.
* * * * *
The chorus gains increased importance in "Otello." The successive entry
of two choruses, each with a fine crescendo effect, in the finale to the
first act, is one of the striking features in this magnificent musical
scene. But, full of beautiful and very dramatic music as Rossini's opera
decidedly is, it has the great disadvantage of reminding us constantly
of what it does not resemble,--the "Othello" of Shakspeare. _Roderigo_
is too much brought forward, _Iago_ too much kept in the background; it
is only when the part of _Iago_ is given to such an actor as Ronconi
that it regains its true dramatic importance.
However, "Otello" is one of Rossini's finest works in the serious style.
Each dramatic scene is one continuous piece of music, and the
recitative, as in "Elisabetta," is accompanied by the orchestra.
"Otello" marks the end of the interminable recitatives with an
accompaniment of piano or piano and double bass by which the rare
musical pieces were separated in the serious works of Rossini's
predecessors. The Germans had abolished the pianoforte as an orchestral
instrument long before, and Gluck had expelled it from the orchestra of
the French Opera in the year 1774.
* * * * *
Instrumentation has of late years kept pace closely enough with the
invention of new instruments, and orchestras are now similarly composed
in Italy, France, Germany, and England--in short, throughout Europe.
This was by no means the case when Rossini began to write for the stage,
Italian orchestras by their constitution, if not by the skill of the
executants, being at that time inferior to those of Germany, and even
(in regard to the variety of instruments) to those of France.
The modern orchestra, if we reckon the military band which is often
introduced on the stage, and the organ which is sometimes heard at the
back of the stage, includes every available instrument that is known
except the piano; which is an orchestra on a reduced scale, but
ineffective and useless as an orchestral unit in the midst of so many
instruments of superior sonority. The piano, employed in France until
the time of Gluck, in Italy until that of Rossini, for accompanying
recitative, is now banished generally from the orchestra, though it
occasionally figures as a sort of non-combatant at the conductor's desk,
where it may serve at need to bring back an erring vocalist to the sense
of musical propriety. Even in the "Barber of Seville" the piano to which
_Rosina_ sings her music lesson is dumb. _Almaviva_ goes through the
pantomime of a pianist, but the sound is the sound of the orchestra.
The history of some individual instruments has been written, notably
that of the violin. But I know of no history of the orchestra,--say from
the day of Nebuchadnezzar to that of _Nabuchodonosore_,[21]--from
sackbuts and psalteries to trombones and opheicleides, cornets,
saxhorns, saxotubas, and all kinds of saxophonous instruments.
However, up to about the middle of the eighteenth century the Italian
orchestra, to judge by Pergolese's "Serva Padrona," as executed in 1862
in Paris, consisted entirely of stringed instruments. Few of the wind
instruments now used in orchestras were known, and of those that were
known fewer still had been sufficiently perfected for artistic purposes.
Hautboys and bassoons were the first wind instruments admitted into
Italian orchestras to vary the monotony inseparable from the use of
stringed instruments alone.
The clarinet was not invented until the end of the seventeenth century,
and was not recognised until long afterwards, even in Germany, as an
orchestral instrument. It was introduced into French orchestras towards
the end of the eighteenth century. In Italy it was sparingly used, and
never as a solo instrument until Rossini's time.
With the exception of hautboys and bassoons, no wind instrument seems to
have come from the Italians. The so-called "German flute," as
distinguished from the old flute with a mouth-piece, a sort of large
flageolet, was perfected by the celebrated Quantz, the friend and
music-master of Frederick the Great; and, like all wind instruments, it
has been much improved during the present century.
The horn, known in England as the "French horn," in France, as the _cor
de chasse_, was at first looked upon as an instrument to be sounded only
in the woods and plains among dogs and horses. The Germans, not the
French, made it available for orchestral purposes; but in Italy brass
instruments of every description were long regarded as fit only for the
use of sportsmen and soldiers. Wind instruments in wood were thought
more tolerable, and after hautboys and bassoons, flutes and clarinets
crept in,--the flute to be in time followed by its direct descendant,
the piccolo.
Gluck invaded the orchestra of the French Opera with trombones, cymbals,
and the big drum in the year 1774, when he at the same time ejected the
harpsichord, the piano of the period. Thirteen years later Mozart's
trombones in "Don Giovanni" were considered a novelty at the Italian
Opera of Vienna.
With the exception of opheicleides, cornets-à-piston, and the large and
constantly increasing family of saxhorns, Rossini, in his latest Italian
Operas, used all the instruments that are known in the present day, and
used them freely with all sorts of new combinations. It was not for
nothing that he and his father had played the horn together when the
young Rossini was gaining his earliest experience of orchestral effects.
He was always faithful to his first instrument. "The art," says M.
Fétis, "of writing parts for the horn, with the development of all its
resources, is quite a new art, which Rossini, in some sort, created."
* * * * *
In looking over the score of "Otello," with Donizetti, 'Sigismondi,' the
librarian of the Conservatory at Naples, is said to have complained of
the prominence given to the clarinets, and to have exclaimed with
horror at the employment of horns and trombones without number. "Third
and fourth horns!" he cried; "what does the man want? The greatest of
our composers have always been content with two. Shades of Pergolese, of
Leo, of Jomelli! How they must shudder at the bare mention of such a
thing! Four horns! Are we at a hunting party? Four horns! Enough to blow
us to perdition!" The old professor was still more shocked by "1º, 2º,
3º _tromboni_," which, according to an anecdote, the authenticity of
which can scarcely be guaranteed, he mistook for "123" trombones.
The instrumentation of "Otello" is far more sonorous than that of
"Tancredi;" but Rossini made a still more liberal use of the brass
instruments in the "Gazza Ladra" overture, which again is surpassed by
the march and chorus (with the military band on the stage) in the first
act of "Semiramide."
Rossini must have been on the watch for new instruments, whereas, if his
predecessors in Italy looked out for them, it was only with the view of
keeping them out of the orchestra.
In "Semiramide," under the auspices of the composer, the key-bugle made
its _début_ at the Fenice of Venice in 1823. In 1829, in "Guillaume
Tell," the same composer brought out the cornet-à-piston at the French
Opera.
Since "Guillaume Tell," there has been no progress in dramatic music,
but there has been further progress in instrumentation. At one moment
the continued invasion of "the brass" seems to have startled Rossini
himself. In 1834, when his young friend Bellini had just produced "I
Puritani," Rossini, writing an account of the first performance to a
friend at Milan, said of the celebrated duet for Tamburini and Lablache,
with its highly military accompaniments, "I need not describe the duet
for the two basses. You must have heard it at Milan." But neither
Bellini nor Donizetti brought forward any new instruments.
In "Robert le Diable," Meyerbeer introduced a melody for four
kettledrums. Kettledrums were never so treated before! In "Le Juif
Errant," Halévy employed saxhorns to announce the Day of Judgment.
Nevertheless, the saxhorn turned out not to be the last trump. The
ingenious inventor had saxophones, saxotubes, and other instruments of
sounding brass, with names beginning in Sax, to offer to Meyerbeer, the
Belgian Guides, and the musical and military world in general. Perhaps
there is no more splendid example of modern instrumentation than the
march in the "Prophète," wherein every possible brass instrument is
employed. If the benign Pergolese could hear it as executed by Mr.
Costa's band or bands (for one is not enough), he would fancy himself in
Jericho, with the walls coming down.