I
Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though, Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and "sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.
Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained (despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it—not a drama with auxiliary music, but a dramma per musica—a drama for (the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing, despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves and him.