REALISM IN OPERA

GIACOMO PUCCINI

Some of the first fruits of the tendency toward realism are plays whose plots can scarcely be narrated without moral and even physical nausea. Compared with them Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” (kah-vahl-lay-ree´-ah rus-tee-kah´-nah) and Leoncavallo’s (lay-own-kah-vahl´-o) “Pagliacci” (pahl-yah´-chee) are sweet and sane. After the taste for hot blood had been measurably satiated and the failure of scores of operas in which lurid orchestration, violent shriekings, and rough harmonies had supplanted the old national ideal there came back again the reign of dramatic melody, albeit in a new form, as we have it in the works of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Puccini (poot-chee´-nee).

Puccini’s operas are not entirely purged of artistic coarseness (as witness “Tosca” and “The Girl of the Golden West”); but he has been true to his Italian mission as a melodist, and has besides widened the Italian canvas to receive the new element of local color, which is an essential element in “Madame Butterfly,” the most extraordinary feature of which is the degree in which such stubborn material as Japanese melody has been made to yield up a charm which it does not at all possess in its native state.

GIACOMO MEYERBEER

1791-1864

Composer of Les Huguenots.

Fifty years ago, so far as Americans were concerned, French opera was practically summed up in “Les Huguenots” and “Faust.” Meyerbeer (my´-er-bare) was not a Frenchman, but the embodiment of merely sensuous tendencies which belonged no more to one people than to another, but which found its fittest expression in the glamour of Parisian life. That Gounod (goo-no´) should have prevailed against these tendencies is to the great credit of the man and the people from whose loins he was sprung.