Part 23

In speaking of Gretry, I quoted his opinion (given in one of his essays on music) as to what opera should be and cited his use of the leitmotiv in his "Richard Coeur de Lion" (which contains the air, une fievre brulante). If with this we quote his reasons for writing opera comique rather than grand opera, we have one of the reasons why French opera has, as yet, never developed beyond Massenet's "Roi de Lahore" on one side, and Delibes' "Lakme" on the other.

Gretry writes that he introduced lyric comedy on the stage because the public was tired of tragedy, and because he had heard so many lovers of dancing complain that their favourite art played only a subordinate role in grand opera. Also the public loved to hear short songs; therefore he introduced many such into his operas.

Even nowadays, this seeming contradiction between theory and practice is to be found, I think, in the French successors of Meyerbeer. The public needed dancing, and all theories must bend to that wish. Even Wagner succumbed to this influence in Paris; and when Weber's "Freischuetz" was first given at the grand opera, Berlioz was commissioned to arrange ballet music from Weber's piano works to supply the deficiency.

In France, even to-day, everything gives way to the public, a public whose intelligence from a poetic standpoint is, in my opinion, lower than that of any other country. The French composer is dependent on his country (Paris) as is no musician of other nationality. Berlioz' life was embittered by the want of recognition in Paris. Although he had been acclaimed as a great musician all over Europe, yet he returned again and again to Paris, preferring (as he admits) the approbation of its musically worthless public to his otherwise world-wide fame.

We remember that Auber never stirred out of Paris throughout his long life. It was an article in the Gazette Musicale of Paris which was instrumental in calling Gounod back into the world from his intended priestly vocation. And this influence of the admittedly ignorant and superficial French public is the more remarkable when one considers the fact that it was always the last to admit the value of the best work of its composers. Thus Berlioz' fame was gained in Russia and Germany while he was still derided and comparatively unknown in Paris.

The failure of Bizet's "Carmen" is said to have hastened the composer's death, which took place within three months after the first performance of the opera. As Saint-Saens wrote at the time, in his disgust at the French public: "The fat, ugly bourgeois ruminates in his padded stall, regretting separation from his kind. He half opens a glassy eye, munches a bonbon, then sleeps again, thinking that the orchestra is a-tuning." And yet, even Saint-Saens, whose name became known chiefly through Liszt's help, and whose operas and symphonies were given in Germany before they were known in France, even he is one of the most ardent adherents to the "anti-foreigner" cry in France. In my opinion, this respect for and attempt to please this grossly ignorant French public is and has been one of the great devitalizing influences which hamper the French composer.

Charles Gounod was born in 1818, in Paris. His father was an engraver and died when Gounod was very young. The boy received his first music lessons from his mother. He was admitted to the Conservatoire at sixteen, and studied with Halevy and Lesueur. In 1839 he gained the Prix de Rome, and spent three years in Rome, studying ecclesiastical music. In 1846 he contemplated becoming a priest, and wrote a number of religious vocal works, published under the name Abbe C. Gounod. In 1851 the article I referred to appeared, and such was its effect on Gounod, that within four months his first opera "Sapho" was given (April, 1851). A year later this was followed by some music for a tragedy (Poussard's "Ulysse" at the Comedie Francaise), and in 1854 by the five-act opera "La nonne sanglante." These were only very moderately successful; and so Gounod turned to the opera comique, and wrote music to an adaptation of Moliere's "Medecin malgre lui." This became very popular, and paved the way for his "Faust," which was produced at the Opera Comique in 1859. In the opera comique, as we know, the singing was always interspersed with spoken dialogue. Thus, this opera, as we know it, dates from its preparation for the Grand Opera ten years later, 1869. Ten months after "Faust" was given he used a fable of Lafontaine for a short light opera, "Philemon and Baucis."

In the meantime, "Faust" began to bring him encouragement, and his next opera was on the subject of the "Queen of Sheba" (1862). This being unsuccessful, he wrote two more light operas, "Mireille" and "La colombe" (1866). The next was "Romeo et Juliette" (1867). This was very successful, and marks the culmination of Gounod's success as an opera composer. In 1870 he went to London, where he made his home for a number of years. His later operas, "Cinq-Mars" (1877), "Polyeucte" (1878), and "Le tribut de Zamora" (1881), met with small success, and have rarely been given.

In his later years, as we know, he showed his early predilection for religious music; and his oratorios "The Redemption," "Mors et Vita," and several masses have been given with varying success. Perhaps one of the greatest points ever made in Gounod's favour by a critic was that by Pougin, who asks what other composer could have written two such operas as "Faust" and "Romeo et Juliette" and still have them essentially different musically. The "Garden Scene" in the one and the "Balcony Scene" in the other are identical, so far as the feeling of the play is concerned; also the duel of Faust and Valentine and Romeo and Tybalt.

Ambroise Thomas's better works, "Mignon" and "Hamlet," may be said to be more or less echoes of Gounod; and while his "Francesca da Rimini," which was brought out in 1882, was by far his most ambitious work, it never became known outside of Paris. Ambroise Thomas was born in 1811, and died within a year of Gounod. His chief merit was in his successful direction of the Conservatoire, to which he succeeded Auber in 1871.

Georges Bizet (his name was Alexander Cesar Leopold) was born in 1838, in Paris. His father was a poor singing teacher, and his mother a sister-in-law of Delsarte; she was a first-prize piano pupil of the Conservatoire. As a boy, Bizet was very precocious, and entered the Conservatoire as a pupil of Marmontel when he was ten. He took successively the first prizes for solfege, piano, organ, and fugue, and finally the Prix de Rome in 1857, when he was nineteen years old. The latter kept him in Rome until 1861, when he returned to Paris and gave piano and harmony lessons and arranged dance music for brass bands, a metier not unknown to either Wagner or Raff.

Until 1872, Bizet wrote but small and unimportant works, such as "The Pearl Fisher," "The Fair Maid of Perth," and several vaudeville operettas, some of which he wrote to order and anonymously. He married a daughter of Halevy, the composer, and in 1871-72 served in the National Guard. His first important work was the incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's "L'Arlesienne" and finally his "Carmen" was given (but without success), at the Opera Comique, in March, 1875. He died June 3, 1875.

Camille Saint-Saens was born in Paris, in 1835; he commenced studying piano when only three years old. I believe it is mostly through his piano concertos and his symphonic poems that his name will live; for his operas have never attained popularity, with perhaps the one exception of "Samson and Delilah." His other operas are: "The Yellow Princess," "Proserpina," "Etienne Marcel," "Henry VIII," "Ascanio."

Jules Massenet was born in 1842, and at the age of twelve became a pupil of Bezit at the Conservatoire, was rejected by Bezit for want of talent, and afterward studied with Reber and Thomas, and won the Prix de Rome in 1863. Upon his return, in 1866, he wrote a number of small orchestral works, including two suites and several sacred dramas, "Marie Magdalen" and "Eve and the Virgin," in which the general Meyerbeerian style militated against any suggestion of religious feeling. His first grand opera, "Le roi de Lahore," was given in 1881. The second was "Herodiade," which was followed by "Manon," "The Cid," "Esclarmonde," "Le mage."

XVIII

OPERA (Continued)

One of the most disputed questions in modern music is that of opera. Although we have many controversies as to what purely instrumental or vocal music may do, the operatic art, if we may call it so, always remains the same. In creating the music drama, Wagner put forth a composite art, something which many declare impossible, and as many others advocate as being the most complete art form yet conceived. We are still in the midst of the discussion, and a final verdict is therefore as yet impossible. On one hand we have Wagner, and against him we have the absolutists such as Brahms, the orthodox thinkers represented by Anton Rubinstein and many others, the new Russian school represented by Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and the successors of the French school of Meyerbeer, namely, Saint-Saens, Massenet, etc.

In order to get a clear idea of the present state of the matter we must review the question from the beginning of the eighteenth century. For many reasons this is not an easy task, first of all because very little of the music of the operas of this period actually exists. We know the names of Hasse, Pergolesi, Matheson, Graun, Alessandro Scarlatti (who was a much greater man than his son the harpsichord player and composer, Domenico), to name only a few. To be sure, a number of the French operas of the period are preserved, owing to the custom in France of engraving music. In Germany and Italy, however, such operas were never printed, and one may safely say that it was almost the rule for only one manuscript copy to be available. Naturally this copy belonged to the composer, who generally led the opera himself, improvising much of it on the harpsichord, as we shall see later. As an instance of the danger which operas, under such conditions, ran of being destroyed and thus lost to the world, we may cite the total destruction of over sixty of Hasse's operas in his extreme old age.

The second point which makes it difficult for us to get an absolutely clear insight into the conditions of opera at the beginning of the eighteenth century lies in the fact that contemporary historians never brought their histories up to their own times. Thus Marpurg, in his history, divides music into four periods; first, that of Adam and Eve to the flood; second, from the flood to the Argonauts; third, to the beginning of the Olympiads; fourth, from thence to Pythagoras. The same may be said of the celebrated histories of Gerbert and Padre Martini.

On the other hand, we are certain that much of the modern speculation was anticipated by these men. For instance, Matheson calls pantomime "dumb music," freed from melodic and harmonic forms. The idea was advanced that music owes its rhythmic regularity and form to dancing, and architecture was called frozen music, a metaphor which, in later days, was considered such an original conception of Goethe and Schlegel. This same inability of historians to bring their accounts up to the contemporary times may be noticed in the later works of Forkel (d. 1818) and Ambros (d. 1876).

Yet a third reason remains which tends to confuse the student as to what really constituted opera. This is owing to the fact that there existed the very important element of improvisation, of which I shall speak later.

In order to see what Gluck, Weber, and Wagner had to break away from, let us look at the condition of opera at the beginning of the eighteenth century. We remember that opera, having become emancipated from the Church long before any other music, developed apace, while instrumental (secular) music was still in its infancy. In Germany, even the drama was neglected for its kindred form of opera; therefore, in studying its development, we may well understand why the dramatic stage considered the opera its deadly enemy.

The life of the German dramatist and actor of the first half of the eighteenth century was one of the direst hardship and poverty. Eckhof, one of the greatest actors of his time, made his entry into Brunswick in a kind of miserable hay cart, in which, accompanied by his sick wife and several dogs, he had travelled over the rough roads. To keep warm they had filled part of the wagon with straw. The German actor and dramatist of that time often died in the hospital, despised by the richer classes; even the village priests and ministers refused to allow them to eat at their tables. Their scenery rarely consisted of more than three rough pieces: a landscape, a large room, and a peasant's hut interior. Many even had only two large cloths which were hung about the stage, one green, which was to be used when the scene was in the open air, and the other yellow, which was used to represent an interior. Shakespeare's "Poor Players" were certainly a stern reality in Germany. In order to attract the public the plays had to consist for the most part of the grossest subjects imaginable, it being barely possible to smuggle some small portion of serious drama into the entertainment.

With opera, however, it was vastly different; opera troupes were met at the city gates by the royal or ducal carriages, and the singers were feted everywhere. The prices paid them can only be compared with the salaries paid nowadays. They were often ennobled, and the different courts quarrelled for the honour of their presence. The accounts of the cost of the scenery used are incredible, amounting to many thousands of dollars for a single performance.

One of the earliest German kapellmeisters and opera composers was Johann Adolf Hasse, who was born in Dresden about 1700. To show the foundation upon which Gluck built, we will look at opera as it existed in Hasse's time. In 1727 Hasse married at Venice, Faustina Bordoni, the foremost singer of the time. He wrote over one hundred operas for her, and had a salary of thirty-six thousand marks, or nine thousand dollars, yearly. Now these operas were very different from those we know. The arias in them (and, of course, the whole opera was practically but a succession of arias) were only sketched in an extremely vague manner. Much was left to the singer, and the accompaniment was sparsely indicated by figures written above a bass. The recitative which separated one aria from another was improvised by the singer, and was accompanied on the harpsichord by the kapellmeister, who was naturally obliged to improvise his part on the spur of the moment, following the caprice of the singer. There was no creating an atmosphere for a tragic or dramatic situation by means of the accompaniment; as soon as the situation arrived, an aria was sung explaining it. Now, as the singer was given much latitude in regard to the melody, and absolute liberty in regard to the recitative, it is easy to see that, with the astounding technical perfection possessed by the singers of the time, this latitude would be used to astonish the hearers by wonderful vocal feats intermingled with more or less passionate declamation.

The composer was merely the excuse for the opera; but he needed to be a consummate musician to conduct and accompany this improvised music, of which his written score was but the nucleus. The wretched acting of opera singers in general has been rather humourously traced back to this epoch. Nowadays, in an opera, when, by way of example, a murder is to be committed, the orchestra paints the situation, and the act is accomplished without delay. In those olden days a singer would have indignantly refused to submit to such a usurpation of his rights; he would have raised his dagger, and then, before striking, would have sung an aria in the regular three parts, after which he would have stabbed his man. The necessity for doing something during this interim is said to be responsible for those idiotic gestures which used to be such a seemingly necessary part of the equipment of the opera singer.

In the ordinary opera of the time there was the custom of usually having about from twenty to thirty such arias (Hasse's one hundred operas contain about three thousand arias). Now these arias, although they were intended to paint a situation, rapidly became simply a means to display the singer's skill. The second part was a melody with plenty of vocal effects, and the third part a bravura piece, pure and simple. So there only remained the recitative in which true dramatic art could find place. As this, however, was invariably improvised by the singer, one can see that the composer of music had his cross as well as his brother the dramatist. The music having no vital connection with the text, it is easy to see how one opera could be set to several texts or vice-versa, as was often done.

Another factor also contributed to retard the artistic development of opera. All these arias had to be constructed and sung according to certain customs. Thus, the fiery, minor aria was always sung by the villain, the so-called colorature arias by the tall, majestic heroine, etc.