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ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA
_Estimates and Inquiries_
BY
LAWRENCE GILMAN
AUTHOR OF
"The Music of To-morrow," "Phases of Modern Music," "Stories of
Symphonic Music," "Edward MacDowell: A Study," "Strauss' 'Salome': A
Guide to the Opera," "Debussy's 'Pelleas et Melisande': A Guide to the
Opera," etc.
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
MCMIX
COPYRIGHT, 1908,
JOHN LANE COMPANY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO
ERNEST NEWMAN
A CRITIC OF
BREADTH, WISDOM, AND INDEPENDENCE
THESE STUDIES
ARE APPRECIATIVELY INSCRIBED
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY: THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH 1
A VIEW OF PUCCINI 31
STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS 65
A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA 107
INTRODUCTORY
THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH
Since that day when, a quarter of a century ago, Richard Wagner ceased
to be a dynamic figure in the life of the world, the history of
operatic art has been, save for a few conspicuous exceptions, a barren
and unprofitable page; and it has been so, in a considerable degree,
because of him. When Mr. William F. Apthorp, in his admirable history
of the opera--a book written with unflagging gusto and vividness--observed
that Wagner's style has been, since his death, little imitated, he
made an astonishing assertion. "If by Wagner's influence," he went on,
"is meant the influence of his individuality, it may fairly be said to
have been null. In this respect Wagner has had no more followers than
Mozart or Beethoven; he has founded no school." Again one must
exclaim: An astonishing affirmation! and it is not the first time that
it has been made, nor will it be the last. Yet how it can have seemed
a reasonable thing to say is one of the insoluble mysteries. The
influence of Wagner--the influence of his individuality as well as of
his principles--upon the musical art of the past twenty-five years has
been simply incalculable. It has tinged, when it has not dyed and
saturated, every phase and form of creative music, from the opera to
the sonata and string quartet.
It is not easy to understand how anyone who is at all familiar with
the products of musical art in Europe and America since the death of
the tyrant of Bayreuth can be disposed to question the fact. No
composer who ever lived influenced so deeply the music that came
after him as did Wagner. It is an influence that is, of course,
waning; and to the definite good of creative art, for it has been in a
large degree pernicious and oppressive in its effect. The shadow of
the most pervasive of modern masters has laid a sinister and
paralysing magic upon almost all of his successors. They have sought
to exert his spells, they have muttered what they imagined were his
incantations; yet the thing which they had hoped to raise up in glory
and in strength has stubbornly refused to breathe with any save an
artificial and feeble life. None has escaped the contagion of his
genius, though some, whom we shall later discuss, have opposed against
it a genius and a creative passion of their own. Yet in the domain of
the opera, wherewith we are here especially concerned, it is an
exceedingly curious and interesting fact that out of the soil which he
enriched with his own genius have sprung, paradoxically, the only
living and independent forces in the lyrico-dramatic art of our time.
Let us consider, first, those aspects of the operatic situation which,
by reason of the paucity of creative vitality that they connote, are,
to-day, most striking; and here we shall be obliged to turn at once to
Germany. The more one hears of the new music that is being put forth
by Teutonic composers, the stronger grows one's conviction of the
lack, with a single exception, of any genuine creative impulse in that
country to-day. It is doubtless a little unreasonable to expect to be
able to agree in this matter with the amiable lady who told Matthew
Arnold that she liked to think that aesthetic excellence was "common
and abundant." As the sagacious Arnold pointed out, it is not in the
nature of aesthetic excellence that it should be "common and
abundant"; on the contrary, he observed, excellence dwells among rocks
hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear out his heart before he
can reach her. All of this is quite unanswerable; yet, so far as
musical Germany is concerned, is not the situation rather singular?
Germany--the Germany which yielded the royal line founded by Bach and
continued by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and
Brahms--can show us to-day, save for that exception which we shall
later discuss, only a strenuous flock of Lilliputians (whom it would
be fatuous to discuss with particularity), each one of whom is
confidently aware that the majestic mantle of the author of "Tristan"
has descended upon himself. They write music in which one grows weary
of finding the same delinquency--the invariable fault of emptiness, of
poverty of idea, allied with an extreme elaboration in the manner of
presentation. And it is most deliberate and determined in address. One
would think that the message about to be delivered were of the utmost
consequence, the deepest moment: the pose and the manner of the bearer
of great tidings are admirably simulated. Yet the actual deliverance
is futile and dull, pathetically meagre, causing us to wonder how
often we must remind ourselves that it is as impossible to achieve
salient or distinguished or noble music without salient,
distinguished, and noble ideas as it is to create fire without flame.
In France there are--again with an exception to which we shall later
advert--Saint-Saens, d'Indy, Massenet, Charpentier, and--_les autres_.
Now Saint-Saens is very far from being a Wagnerian. He is, indeed,
nothing very definite and determinable. He is M. Saint-Saens, an
abstraction, a brain without a personality. It is almost forty years
since Hector Berlioz called him "one of the greatest musicians of our
epoch," and since then the lustre of his fame has waxed steadily,
until to-day one must recognise him as one of the three or four most
distinguished living composers. Venerable and urbane, M. Saint-Saens,
at the New York opening of the American tour which he made in his
seventy-second year, sat at the piano before the audience whom he had
travelled three thousand miles to meet, and played a virtuoso piece
with orchestral accompaniment, and two shorter pieces for piano and
orchestra: a valse-caprice called "Wedding Cake," and an "Allegro
Appassionato." That is to say, M. Camille Saint-Saens, the bearer of
an internationally famous and most dignified name, braved the tragic
perils of the deep to exhibit himself before a representative American
audience as the composer of the "Wedding Cake" valse-caprice, an
entertaining fantasy on exotic folk-themes, and a _jeu d'esprit_ with
a pleasant tune and some pretty orchestral embroidery.
No one could have it in his heart to chide M. Saint-Saens for these
things, for he is very venerable and very famous. Yet is not the
occurrence indicative, in a way, of M. Saint-Saens's own attitude
toward his art?--that facile, brilliant, admirably competent,
chameleon-like art of his, so adroit in its external fashioning, yet
so thin and worn in its inner substance! One wonders if, in the entire
history of music, there is the record of a composer more completely
accomplished in his art, so exquisite a master of the difficult trick
of spinning a musical web, so superb a mechanician, who has less to
say to the world: whose discourse is so meagre and so negligible. One
remembers that unfortunate encomium of Gounod's, which has been so
often turned into a justified reproach: "Saint-Saens," said the
composer of "Faust," "will write at will a work in the style of
Rossini, of Verdi, of Schumann, of Wagner." The pity of his case is
that, when he writes pure Saint-Saens, one does not greatly care to
listen. He has spoken no musical thought, in all his long and
scintillant career, that the world will long remember. His dozen
operas, his symphonic poems, his symphonies, his concertos, the best
of his chamber works--is there in them an accent which one can
soberly call either eloquent or deeply beautiful? Do they not excel
solely by reason of their symmetry and solidity of structure, their
deft and ingenious delivery of ideas which at their worst are banal
and at their best mediocre or derivative? "A name always to be
remembered with respect!" cries one of his most sane and just
admirers: since "in the face of practical difficulties,
discouragements, misunderstandings, sneers, he has worked constantly
to the best of his unusual ability for musical righteousness in its
pure form." "A name to be remembered with respect," beyond dispute:
with the respect that is due the man of supereminent intelligence, the
fastidious artisan, the tireless and honourable workman--with respect,
yes; but scarcely with enthusiasm. He never, as has been truly said,
bores one; it is just as true that he never stimulates, moves,
transports, or delights one, in the deeper sense of the term. At its
best, it is a hard and dry light that shines out of his music: a
radiance without magic and without warmth. His work is an impressive
monument to the futility of art without impulse: to the immeasurable
distance that separates the most exquisite talent from the merest
genius. For all its brilliancy of investiture, his thought, as the
most liberal of his appreciators has said, "can never wander through
eternity"--a truth which scarcely needed the invocation of the
Miltonic line to enforce. It may be true, as Mr. Philip Hale has
asserted, that "the success of d'Indy, Faure, Debussy, was made
possible by the labor and the talent of Saint-Saens"; yet it is one of
the pities of his case that when Saint-Saens's name shall have become
faint and fugitive in the corridors of time, the chief glories of
French art in our day will be held to be, one may venture, the
legacies of the composers of "Pelleas et Melisande" and the "Jour
d'ete a la montagne," rather than of the author of "Samson et Dalila"
and "Le Rouet d'Omphale." Which brings one to M. Vincent d'Indy.
Now M. d'Indy offers a curious spectacle to the inquisitive observer,
in that he is, in one regard, the very symbol of independence, of
artistic emancipation, whereas, in another phase of his activity, he
is a mere echo and simulacrum. As a writer for the concert room, as a
composer of imaginative orchestral works and of chamber music, he is
one of the most inflexibly original and self-guided composers known to
the contemporary world of music. With his aloofness and astringency of
style, his persistent austerity of temper, his invincible hatred of
the sensuous, his detestation of the kind of "felicity" which is a
goal for lesser men, this remarkable musician--who, far more
deservingly than the incontinent Chopin, deserves the title of "the
proudest poetic spirit of our time"--this remarkable musician, one
must repeat, is the sort of creative artist who is writing, not for
his day, but for a surprised and apprehending futurity. He is at once
a man of singularly devout and simple nature, and an entire mystic.
For him the spectacle of the living earth, in lovely or forbidding
guise, evokes reverend and exalted moods. His approach to its wonders
is Wordsworthian in its deep and awe-struck reverence and its
fundamental sincerity. He does not, like his younger artistic kinsman,
Debussy, see in it all manner of fantastic and mist-enwrapped visions;
it is not for him a pageant of delicate and shining dreams.
Mallarme's lazy and indulgent Faun in amorous woodland reverie would
not have suggested to him, as to Debussy, music whose sensuousness is
as exquisitely concealed as it is marvellously transfigured. The
mysticism of d'Indy is pre-eminently religious; it has no tinge of
sensuousness; it is large and benign rather than intimate and intense.
He is absolutely himself, absolutely characteristic, for example, in
his tripartite tone-poem, "Jour d'ete a la montagne." This music is a
hymn the grave ecstasy and the utter sincerity of which are as
evident as they are impressive. In its art it is remarkable--not so
monumental in plan, so astoundingly complex in detail, as his superb
B-minor symphony, yet a work that is full of his peculiar traits.
Now it would seem as if so fastidious and individual a musician as
this might do something of very uncommon quality if he once turned his
hand to opera-making. Yet in his "L'Etranger," completed only a year
before he began work on his astonishing B-minor symphony, and in his
"Fervaal" (1889-95), we have the melancholy spectacle of M. d'Indy
concealing his own admirable and expressive countenance behind an
ill-fitting mask modelled imperfectly after the lineaments of Richard
Wagner. In these operas (d'Indy calls them, by the way, an _action
dramatique_ and an _action musicale_: evident derivations from the
"Tristan"-esque _Handlung_)--in these operas, the speech, from first
to last, is the speech of Wagner. The themes, the harmonic structure,
the use of the voice, the plots (d'Indy, like Wagner, is his own
librettist)--all is uncommuted Wagnerism, with some of the Teutonic
cumbrousness deleted and some of the Gallic balance and measure
infused. These scores have occasional beauty, but it is seldom the
beauty that is peculiar to d'Indy's own genius: it is an imported and
alien beauty, a beauty that has in it an element of betrayal.
We find ourselves confronting a situation that is equally dispiriting
to the seeker after valuable achievements in contemporary French opera
when we view the performances of such minor personages as Massenet,
Bruneau, Reyer, Erlanger, and Charpentier. They are all tarred, in a
great or small degree, with the Wagnerian stick. When they speak out
of their own hearts and understandings they are far from commanding:
they are vulgarly sentimental or prettily lascivious, like the amiable
Massenet, or pretentious and banal, like Bruneau, or incredibly dull,
like Reyer, or picturesquely superficial, like Charpentier--though the
author of "Louise" disports himself with a beguiling grace and verve
which almost causes one to forgive his essential emptiness.
Modern Italy discloses a single dominant and vivid figure. In none of
his compatriots is there any distinction of speech, of character. In
that country the memory of Wagner is less imperious in its control;
yet not one of its living music-makers, with the exception that I have
made, has that atmosphere and quality of his own which there is no
mistaking.
* * * * *
I have referred by implication and reservation to three personalities
in the art of the modern lyric-drama who stand out as salient figures
from the confused and amorphous background against which they are to
be observed: who seem to me to represent the only significant and
important manifestations of the creative spirit which have thus far
come to the surface in the post-Wagnerian music-drama. They are, it
need scarcely be said, Puccini in Italy, Richard Strauss in Germany,
and Debussy in France. Yet these men built upon the foundations laid
by Wagner; they took many leaves from his vast book of instructions,
in some cases stopping short of the full reach of his plans as
imagined by himself, in other cases carrying his schemes to a point of
development far beyond any result of which he dreamed. But they have
not attempted to say the things which they had to say in the way that
he would have said them. They have been content with their own
eloquence; and it has not betrayed them. No one is writing music for
the stage which has the profile, the saliency, the vitality, the
personal flavour, which distinguish the productions of these men. So
far as it is possible to discern from the present vantage-ground, the
future--at least the immediate future--of the lyric stage is theirs.
In no other quarters may one observe any manifestations that are not
either negligible by reason of their own quality, or mere dilutions,
with or without adulterous admixtures, of the Wagnerian brew.
A VIEW OF PUCCINI
A plain-spoken and not too reverent observer of contemporary musical
manners, discussing the melodic style of the Young Italian
opera-makers, has observed that it is fortunate in that it "gives the
singers opportunity to pour out their voices in that lavish volume and
intensity which provoke applause as infallibly as horseradish provokes
tears." The comment has a good deal of what Sir Willoughby Patterne
would have called "rough truth." It is fairly obvious that there is
nothing in the entire range of opera so inevitably calculated to
produce an instant effect as a certain kind of frank and sweeping
lyricism allied with swiftness of dramatic emotion; and it is because
the young lions of modern Italy--Puccini and his lesser brethren--have
profoundly appreciated this elemental truth, that they address their
generation with so immediate an effect.
In those days when the impetus of a pristine enthusiasm drove the more
intelligent order of opera-goers to performances of Wagner, it was a
labour of love to learn to know and understand the texts of his
obscure and laboured dramas; and even the guide-books, which were as
leaves in Vallombrosa, were prayerfully studied. But to-day there are
no Wagnerites. We are no longer impelled by an apostolic fervour to
delve curiously into the complex genealogy and elaborate ethics of the
"Ring," and it is no longer quite clear to many slothful intelligences
just what Tristan and Isolde are talking about in the dusk of King
Mark's garden. There will always be a small group of the faithful who,
through invincible and loving study, will have learned by heart every
secret of these dramas. But for the casual opera-goer, granting him
all possible intelligence and intellectual curiosity, they cannot but
seem the reverse of crystal-clear, logical, and compact. A score of
years ago those who cared at all for the dramatic element in opera,
and the measure of whose delight was not filled up by the vocal
pyrotechny which was the mainstay of the operas of the older
repertoire, found in these music-dramas their chief solace and
satisfaction. Wagner reigned then virtually alone over his kingdom.
The dignity, the imaginative power, and the impressive emotional sweep
of his dramas, as dramas, offset their obscurity and their inordinate
bulk; and always their splendid investiture of music exerted, in and
of itself, an enthralling fascination. And that condition of affairs
might have continued for much longer had not certain impetuous young
men of modern Italy demonstrated the possibility of writing operas
which were both engrossing on their purely dramatic side and, in their
music, eloquent with the eloquence that had come to be expected of the
modern opera-maker. Moreover, these music-dramas had the incalculable
merit, for our time and environment, of being both swift in movement
and unimpeachably obvious in meaning. Thereupon began the reign of
young Italy in contemporary opera. It was inaugurated with the
"Cavalleria Rusticana" of Mascagni and the "I Pagliacci" of
Leoncavallo; and it is continued to-day, with immense vigour and
persistence, by Puccini with all his later works. The sway of the
composer of "Tosca," "Boheme," and "Madame Butterfly" is triumphant
and wellnigh absolute; and the reasons for it are not elusive. He has
selected for musical treatment dramas that are terse and rapid in
action and intelligible in detail, and he has underscored them with
music that is impassioned, incisive, highly spiced, rhetorical,
sometimes poetic and ingenious, and pervadingly sentimental. Moreover,
he possesses, as his most prosperous attribute, that facility in
writing fervid and often banal melodies to the immediate and unfailing
effect of which, in the words of Mr. Henry T. Finck, I have alluded.
As a sensitive English critic, Mr. Vernon Blackburn, once very
happily observed, Puccini is "essentially a man of his own generation
... the one who has caught up the spirit of his time, and has made his
compact with that time, in order that he should not lose anything
which a contemporary generation might give him."
It is a curious and striking truth that the chief trouble with the
representative musical dramatists who have built, from the standpoint
of system, upon the foundational stones that Wagner laid, is not, as
the enemies and opponents of Bayreuth used to charge, an excess of
drama at the expense of the music, but--as was the case with Wagner
himself (a fact which I have elsewhere in this volume attempted to
demonstrate)--an excess of music at the expense of the drama: in
short, the precise defect against which reformers of the opera have
inveighed since the days of Gluck. With Richard Strauss this musical
excess is orchestral; with the modern Italians it implicates the
voice-parts, and is manifested in a lingering devotion to full-blown
melodic expression achieved at the expense of dramatic truth, logic,
and consistency. In this, Puccini has simply, in the candid phrase of
Mr. Blackburn, "caught up the spirit of his time, and made his compact
with that time." That is to say, he has, with undoubted artistic
sincerity, played upon the insatiable desire of the modern ear for an
ardent and elemental kind of melodic effect, and upon the acquired
desire of the modern intelligence for a terse and dynamic substratum
of drama. His fault, from what I hold to be the ideal standpoint in
these matters, is that he has not perfectly fused his music and his
drama. There is a sufficiently concrete example of what I mean--an
example which points both his strength and his weakness--in the second
act of "Tosca," where he halts the cumulative movement of the scene
between _Scarpia_ and _Tosca_, which he has up to that point developed
with superb dramatic logic, in order to placate those who may not
over-long be debarred from their lyrical sweetmeats; but also--for it
would be absurd to charge him with insincerity or time-serving in this
matter--in order that he may satisfy his own ineluctable tendency
toward a periodical effusion of lyric energy, which he must yield to
even when dramatic consistency and logic go by the board in the
process; when, in short, lyrical expression is supererogatory and
impertinent. So he writes the sentimental and facilely pathetic
prayer, "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore," _dolcissimo con grande
sentimento_: a perfectly superfluous, not to say intrusive, thing
dramatically, and a piece of arrant musical vulgarity; after which the
current of the drama is resumed. We have here, in fact, nothing more
nor less respectable than the old-fashioned Italian aria of unsavoury
fame: it is merely couched in more modern terms.
The offence is aggravated by the fact that Puccini, in common with the
rest of the Neo-Italians, is at his best in the expression of dramatic
emotion and movement, and at his worst in his voicing of purely lyric
emotion, meditative or passionate. In its lyric portions his music is
almost invariably banal, without distinction, without beauty or
restraint--when the modern Italian music-maker dons his singing-robes
he becomes clothed with commonness and vulgarity. Thus in its scenes
of amorous exaltation the music of "Tosca," of "Madame Butterfly"
(recall, in the latter work, the flamboyant commonness of the exultant
duet which closes the first act), is blatant and rhetorical, rather
than searching and poignant. Puccini's strength lies in the truly
impressive manner in which he is able to intensify and underscore the
more dramatic moments in the action. At such times his music possesses
an uncommon sureness, swiftness, and incisiveness; especially in
passages of tragic foreboding, of mounting excitement, it is gripping
and intense in a quite irresistible degree. Often, at such moments,
it has an electric quality of vigour, a curious nervous strength. That
is its cardinal merit: its spare, lithe, closely-knit, clean-cut,
immensely energetic orchestral enforcement of those portions of the
drama where the action is swift, tense, cumulative, rather than of
sentimental or amorous connotation. Puccini has, indeed, an almost
unparalleled capacity for a kind of orchestral commentary which is
both forceful and succinct. He wastes no words, he makes no
superfluous gestures: he is masterfully direct, pregnant, expeditious,
compact. Could anything be more admirable, in what it attempts and
brilliantly contrives to do, than almost the entire second act of
"Tosca," with the exception of the sentimental and obstructive Prayer?
How closely, with what unswerving fidelity, the music clings to the
contours of the play; and with what an economy of effort its effects
are made! Puccini is thus, at his best, a Wagnerian in the truest
sense--a far more consistent Wagnerian than was Wagner himself.
It is in "Tosca" that he should be studied. He is not elsewhere so
sincere, direct, pungent, telling. And it is in "Tosca," also, that
his melodic vein, which is generally broad and copious rather than
fine and deep, yields some of the true and individual beauty which is
its occasional, its very rare, possession--for example, to name it at
its best, the poetic and exceedingly personal music which accompanies
the advancing of dawn over the house-tops of Rome, at the beginning of
the last act: a passage the melancholy beauty and sincere emotion of
which it would be difficult to overpraise.
In Puccini's later and much more elaborate and meticulous "Madame
Butterfly," there is less that one can unreservedly delight in or
definitely deplore, so far as the music itself is concerned. It is
from a somewhat different angle that one is moved to consider the
work.
In choosing the subject for this music-drama, Puccini set himself a
task to which even his extraordinary competency as a lyric-dramatist
has not quite been equal. As every one knows, the story for which
Puccini has here sought a lyrico-dramatic expression is that of an
American naval officer who marries little "Madame Butterfly" in
Japan, deserts her, and cheerfully calls upon her three years later
with the "real" wife whom he has married in America. The name of this
amiable gentleman is Pinkerton--B.F. Pinkerton--or, in full, Benjamin
Franklin Pinkerton. Now it would scarcely seem to require elaborate
argument to demonstrate that the presence in a highly emotional
lyric-drama of a gentleman named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton--a
gentleman who is, moreover, the hero of the piece--is, to put it
briefly, a little inharmonious. The matter is not helped by the fact
that the action is of to-day, and that one bears away from the
performance the recollection of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton asking his
friend, the United States consul at Nagasaki, if he will have some
whiskys-and-soda. There lingers also a vaguer memory of the consul
declaring, in a more or less lyrical phrase, that he "is not a student
of ornithology."
Let no one find in these remarks a disposition to cast a doubt upon
the seriousness with which Puccini has completed his work, or to
ignore those features of "Madame Butterfly" which compel sincere
admiration. But recognition and acknowledgment of these things must be
conditioned by an insistence upon the fact that such a task as Puccini
has attempted here, and as others have attempted, is foredoomed to a
greater or less degree of artistic futility. One refers, of course, to
the attempt to transfer bodily to the lyric stage, for purposes of
serious expression, a contemporary subject, with all its inevitable
dross of prosaic and trivially familiar detail. To put it concretely,
the sense of humour and the emotional sympathies will tolerate the
spectacle of a _Tristan_ or a _Tannhaeuser_ or a _Don Giovanni_ or a
_Pelleas_ or a _Faust_ uttering his longings and his woes in opera;
but they will not tolerate the spectacle of a _Benjamin Franklin
Pinkerton_ of our own time and day telling us, in song, that he is not
a student of ornithology. The thing simply cannot be done--Wagner
himself could not impress us in such circumstances. The chief glory of
Wagner's texts--no matter what one may think of them as viable and
effective dramas--is their ideal suitability for musical translation.
Take, for example, the text of "Tristan und Isolde": there is not a
sentence, scarcely a word, in it, which is not fit for musical
utterance--nothing that is incongruous, pedestrian, inept. All that is
foreign to the essential emotions of the play has been eliminated. So
unsparingly has it been subjected to the alembic of the
poet-dramatist's imagination that it has been wholly purged of all
that is superfluous and distracting, all that cannot be gratefully
assimilated by the music. That is the especial excellence of his
texts. Opera, though it rests, like the other arts, heavily upon
convention, yet offers at bottom a reasonable and defensible vehicle
for the communication of human experience and emotion. But it is not a
convincing form, and no genius, living or potential, can make it a
convincing form, save when it deals with matters removed from our
quotidian life and environment: save when it presents a heightened and
alembicated image of human experience. Thus we accept, with sympathy
and approval, "Siegfried," "Lohengrin," "Die Meistersinger," "Don
Giovanni"--even, at a pinch, "Tosca"; but we cannot, if we allow our
understanding and our sense of humour free play, accept "Madame
Butterfly," with its naval lieutenant of to-day, its American consul
in his tan-coloured "spats," and its whiskys-and-soda.
This, then, was the prime disadvantage under which Puccini laboured.
He was, as a necessary incident of his task, confronted with the
problem of setting to music a great deal of prosaic and altogether
unlovely dialogue, essential to the unfolding of the action, no doubt,
but quite fatal to lyric inspiration. Under these circumstances, the
music is often surprisingly successful; but it is significant that the
most poetic and moving passages in the score are those which enforce
emotions and occasions which have no necessary connection with time or
place; which are, from their nature, fit subjects for musical
treatment,--for example, such a passage as that at the end of the
second act, where _Madame Butterfly_ and her child wait through the
long night for the coming of the faithless _Pinkerton_; for here the
moment and the mood to be expressed have a dignity and a pathos
entirely outside of date or circumstance.
The score, as a whole, compares unfavourably with that of "Tosca,"
which still, as it seems to me, represents Puccini at his most
effective and sincere. In "Madame Butterfly" one misses the salient
characterisation, the gripping intensity, the sharpness and boldness
of outline that make "Tosca" so notable an accomplishment. "Tosca,"
for all its occasional commonness, its melodic banality, is a work of
immense vigour and unquestionable individuality. In it Puccini has
saturated almost every page of the music with his own extremely vivid
personality: a personality that is exceedingly impressive in its crude
strength and directness; he has, in this score, exploded the strange
critical legend that his style is little more than a blended echo of
the later Verdi, Ponchielli, and Massenet. The music of "Tosca" is not
often distinguished, but it is singularly striking, potent, and
original; no one save Puccini could possibly have written it. But
since then this composer has, artistically speaking, visited Paris. He
has appreciated the value of certain harmonic experiments which such
adventurous Frenchmen as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others,
are making; he has appreciated them so sincerely that certain pages in
"Madame Butterfly," as, for instance, the lovely interlude between the
second and third acts, sound almost as if they had been contrived by
Debussy himself--a Latinised Debussy, of course. Puccini, in short,
has become intellectually sophisticated, and he has learned gentler
artistic manners, in the interval between the composition of "Tosca"
and of "Madame Butterfly." The music of the latter work is far more
delicately structured and subtle than anything he had previously given
us, and it has moments of conquering beauty, of great tenderness, of
superlative sweetness. It is, beyond question, a charming and
brilliant score, exceedingly adroit in workmanship and almost
invariably effective. Yet, after such excellences have been gladly
acknowledged, one is disturbingly conscious that the real, the
essential, Puccini has, for the most part, evaporated. There are other
voices speaking through this music, voices that, for all their charm
and distinction of accent, seem alien and a little insincere. Has the
vital, if crude, imagination which gave issue to the music of "Tosca"
acquired finesse and delicacy at a cost of independent impulse?
STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS
That Richard Strauss the opera-maker is, for the present, summed up in
Richard Strauss the composer of "Salome," would scarcely, I think, be
disputed by any one who is sympathetically cognisant of his
achievements in that role. Neither in "Guntram" nor in the later and
far more characteristic "Feuersnot" is his essential quality as a
musical dramatist so fully and clearly revealed as in his setting of
the play of Wilde to which he has given a fugacious immortality. Yet
in discussing this astonishing work, I prefer to consider it in and
for itself rather than as a touchstone whereby to form a general
estimate of Strauss the dramatical tone-poet; for I believe that, if
he lives and produces for another decade, it will be seen that
"Salome" does not furnish a just or adequate measure of Strauss'
indisputable genius as a writer of music for the stage. I believe that
he has not given us here a valid or completely representative account
of himself in that capacity. So remarkable, though, is the work in
itself, so assertive in its challenge to contemporary criticism, that
it imperatively compels some attempt at appraisement in any deliberate
survey of modern operatic art.
For any one who is not convinced that those ancient though
occasionally reconciled adversaries, Art and Ethics, are necessarily
antipodal, such a task, it must be confessed, is not one to be
approached in a jaunty or easeful spirit, for it means that one must
be willing, apparently, to enter the lists ranged with the
hypocrites, the prudes, the short-sighted and the unwise; with
frenzied and myopic champions of respectability; with all those who
are as inflexible in their allegiance to the moralities as they are
resourceful and tireless in their pursuit of impudicity in art. Yet
that there are two standpoints from which this extraordinary work must
be regarded by any candid observer I do not think is open to question:
it has its purely aesthetic aspect, and its--I shall not say moral, but
social--aspect. To separate them in any conscientious discussion is
impossible.
Let us, to begin with, consider, in and by itself, the quality of the
music which the incomparable Strauss--Strauss, the most conquering
musical personality since Wagner--has conceived as a fit embodiment in
tones of the tragic and maleficent and haunting tale of the Dancing
Daughter of Herodias and her part in the career of the prophet John,
as recounted--with non-Scriptural variations--by Oscar Wilde. We may
consider, first, whether or not it achieves the prime requisite of
music in its organic relation to a dramatic subject: an enforcement
and heightening of the effect of the play; setting aside, for the
present, those other aspects of it which have so absorbed critical
attention, and of which we have heard overmuch: its remorseless
complexity, its unflagging ingenuity, its superb and miraculous
orchestration. These are matters of importance, but of secondary
importance. The point at issue is, has Strauss, through his music,
intensified and italicised the moods and situations of the drama; and,
secondly, has he achieved this end through music which is in itself
notable and important?
Never was music so avid in its search for the eloquent word as is the
music of Strauss in this work. We are amazed at the audacity, the
resourcefulness, of the expressional apparatus that is cumulatively
reared in this unprecedented score. The alphabet of music is ransacked
for new and undreamt-of combinations of tone: never were effects so
elaborate, so cunning, so fertilely contrived, offered to the ears of
men since the voice of music was heard in its pristine estate. This
score challenges the music of the days that shall follow after it.
For the most part, the atmosphere of horror, of ominous suspense, of
oppressive and bodeful gloom, in which the tragedy of Wilde is
enwrapped, is wonderfully rendered in the music. There are beyond
question overmastering pages in the score--music which has the kind of
superb audacity and power of effect that Dr. Johnson discerned in the
style of Sir Thomas Browne: "forcible expressions which he would never
have used but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and
flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very
little fear of the shame of falling." Of such quality is the passage
which portrays the agonised suspense of _Salome_ during the beheading
of _John_; the passage, titanic in its expression of malignly exultant
triumph, which accentuates the delivery of the head to the insensate
princess; the few measures before _Herod's_ patibulary order at the
close: these things are products of genius, of the same order of
genius which impelled the music of "Don Quixote," of "Ein
Heldenleben," of "Zarathustra"; they are true and vital in
imagination, marvellous in intensity of vision, of great and subduing
potency as dramatic enforcement and as sheer music.
But when one has said that much, one comes face to face with the chief
weakness of the score--its failure in the expression of the governing
motive of the play: the consuming and inappeasable lust of _Salome_
for the white body and scarlet lips of _John_.
"Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my
passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a
virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was
chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire.... Ah! ah!
wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan?..."
That is the note which is sounded from beginning to end of the
play--that is its focal emotion. And Strauss has not made it sound, as
it should sound, in his music. When it should be wildly, barbarically,
ungovernably erotic, as for the enforcement of _Salome's_ fervid
supplications in her first interview with _John_, the music is merely
conventional in its sensuousness. It should here be febrile,
vertiginous. But what, actually, do we get? We get a scene built upon
a phrase in which is crystallised the desire of _Salome_ for the lips
of the Prophet; and this theme is saccharinely ardent and sentimental,
rather than feverish and unbridled; a phrase which might have been a
product of the amiably voluptuous inspiration of the composer of
"Faust." The "Tannhaeuser" Bacchanale, even in its original form, is
more truly expressive of venereous abandon than is this strangely
sentimentalised music. It has, no doubt, a certain effectiveness, a
certain expressiveness; but the effect that is produced, and the
emotion that is expressed, are far removed from the field of sensation
inhabited by Wilde's remarkable Princess. Yet it would seem to be a
point needing but the lightest emphasis that if the passion of
_Salome_ is not fitly and eloquently rendered by the music, the
cardinal impulse, the very heart of Wilde's drama, is left
unexpressed.
So it is in the music of the final scene, _Salome's_ mad apostrophe to
the severed head. Here we get, not the note of lustful abandonment
which would alone remove _Salome's_ horrible appetite from the region
of the perverted and the incredible, but a kind of musical utterance
which simulates the noble rapture of Wagner's dying _Isolde_. The
discrepancy of the music in this regard has been recognised by those
who praise most warmly Strauss' score. It has been said in
extenuation, on the one hand, that music is incapable of expressing
what are called "base" emotions, and, on the other hand, that Strauss
wished to exalt, to idealise and transfigure, this scene. To the first
objection it may be said simply that it is based upon an argument that
is at least open to serious question. It is by no means an evident or
settled truth that music is incapable of uttering anything but worthy
emotions, ideas, concepts. There is music by Berlioz, by Liszt, by
Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, by Strauss himself, which is, in its
emotional substance, sinister, demonic, even pornographic in
suggestion; and not simply by reason of a key furnished by text,
motto, or dramatic subject, but in itself--in its quality and
character as music. But the claim need not be elaborated, or even
demonstrated, since it is beside the point. One quarrels with the
music of the final scene of "Salome" on the broad ground of its
inappropriateness: because the emotional note which it strikes and
sustains is one of nobility, whereas the plain requirement of the
scene, of the psychological moment, demands music that should be
anything but noble. And here we encounter the objections of those who
hold that _Salome_ herself, at the moment of her apostrophe to the
dead head, becomes transfigured, uplifted through the power of a great
and purifying love. But to argue in this manner is to indulge in a
particularly egregious kind of fatuity. To conceive Wilde's lubricious
princess as a kind of Oriental _Isolde_ is grotesquely to distort the
vivid and wholly consistent woman of his imagining; and it is to
renounce at once all possibility of justifying her culminating
actions. For the only ground upon which it might be remotely possible
to account for _Salome's_ remarkable behaviour, except by regarding
her as a necrophilistic maniac, is that supplied by the conditions and
the environment of a lustful, decadent, and bloodshot age. Only when
one conceives her as frankly and spontaneously a barbarian, nourished
on blood and lechery, does she become at all comprehensible to others
than pathologists, even if she does not cease to impress us as
noisome, monstrous, and horrible.
The music of "Salome," then, judging it in its entirety, is deficient
as an exposition, as a translation into tone, of the drama upon which
it is based; for it is inadequate in its expression of the play's
central and informing emotion. One listens to this music, it must be
granted, with the nerves in an excessive state of tension--it is
enormously exciting; but so is, under certain conditions, a determined
beating upon a drum. An assault upon the nerve-centres is a vastly
different thing from an emotional persuasion; yet there are many who,
in listening to "Salome," will need to be convinced of it.
It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many ways
a noteworthy and brilliant--and, for the curious student of musical
evolution--a fascinating work. Its musicianship--the sheer technical
artistry which contrived it--is stupefying in its enormous and
inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a
musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime considerations
in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most
exacting standards--by the standards set in other and greater works of
Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in
vitality, sincerity, and importance. In at least one respect,
however, it compels the most unreserved praise; and that is in the
case of its superlative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a
huge and complicated body of instruments, and he has set them an
appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation
found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his
performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to
the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful
distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its
total effect, and the almost uncanny art with which it is
accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative
achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic
feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment.
The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gorgeous fabric of
strange and novel and obsessing colours--for in such orchestral
writing as this, sound becomes colour, and colour sound: it is not a
single sense which is engaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex
of all the senses; one not only hears, one also imagines that one
sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their
possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It
is when one turns from the bewildering magnificence of its orchestral
surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the
fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope,
that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined
admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by
Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this
music, its marvellous witchery, are incurably external. It is a
gorgeous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and
glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality,
little true substance, within this dazzling instrumental envelope; and
for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and
who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems
but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times
cacophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which
is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and
deliberately hideous; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of
post-Wagnerian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any
possible musical means that will appropriately express it: to-day we
cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another
character that his body is "like the body of a leper, like a plastered
wall where vipers crawl ... like a whitened sepulchre, full of
loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of
Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so
often vulgarly sentimental, when it should be terrible and unbridled
in its passion, that it seems to some a defective performance. For
sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse
for being inflated in expression, it would be hard to find, in any
score of the rank of "Salome," the equal of the two themes which
Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant
motives in the score: the theme which is associated with _Salome's_
desire to kiss the lips of _John_, and that other theme--it has been
called that of "Ecstasy"--which begins like the _cantabile_ subject in
the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic" Symphony, and
ends--well, like Strauss at his worst.
An astounding score!--music that is by turns gorgeous, banal,
delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, sentimental, insinuating, tornadic:
music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is
overwhelming in its occasional triumphs.
We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the
candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work.