II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE
The “Florentine Revolution” was an attempt to create an entirely new type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To “Eurydice,” the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote a preface, from which we quote the following: “Therefore, abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded by this poem.” (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment, for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up, and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art entirely detached from an old one. Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it because opera can subsist—it has, and does—without logic or even reasonableness.
There had been composed before the year 1600 the most beautiful sacred music the world possesses—that which culminated in the works of Palestrina. A style or method of expression had been perfected, and this style or method was gradually and naturally being applied to secular and even to dramatic forms. There were at that time, also, songs of the people which had been often used in plays with music, and which might have supplied a basis for opera. But the creators of the new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o’-the-wisp, which has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music’s sake. All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera in existence, save alone “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Debussy, in which the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy’s opera is unique in its treatment and leads nowhere—or, if anywhere, away from opera). Peri’s reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements necessary to artistic completeness.
It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a “human nightingale”) is sure to attract an audience, no matter what she sings or how little musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawing-room song, the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely unintelligible words. And, second, when this singing, which the public dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is irresistible.
I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this, however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of beauty in their own minds—although nature surrounds them with it, and imaginative literature is in every library—the stage is a perpetual delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last. These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they embody the essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and Shakespeare divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and while those great dramatists imply the whole of life,—whereas the ordinary play implies nothing,—they do not and cannot present it in its actual and complete continuity.
Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny. “What is too silly to be said is sung,” says Voltaire.
Let us note also that when an art becomes detached from its own past, when it is not based on natural human life, and does not obey those general laws to which all art is subject, it is sure to evolve conventions of one sort or another and to become artificial. This is to be observed in what is called the “rococo” style of architecture, as well as in the terrible objects perpetrated by the “futurists” and “cubists” (anything that is of the future must also be of the past, no matter whether it is a picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was soon in the grip of these conventions from which, with a few notable exceptions, it has never escaped. Even the common conventions of the drama, which we accept readily enough, are in opera stretched to the breaking point. For many generations operas were planned according to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a woman took a man’s part (as in Gounod’s “Faust”); characters were stereotyped; the position of the chief aria (solo) for the prima donna was exactly determined so as to give to her entrance all possible impressiveness; the set musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and so forth) were arranged artificially and not to satisfy any dramatic necessity. There is some justness in Wagner’s saying that the old conventional opera was “a concert in costume.”
An example of this conventionality and lack of dramatic unity may be found in the famous quartette scene in Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” an opera which is typical of the Italian style (in which, in Meredith’s phrase, “there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish”). In this scene there are two persons in hiding to watch two others. The concealment is the hinge upon which, for the moment, the story swings. But the exigencies of the music are such that, before the piece has progressed very far, all four are singing at the top of their lungs and with no pretext of concealment—in a charming piece of music, indeed, but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity. And then, naturally enough, the thin veneer of drama having been pierced, they answer your applause by joining hands and bowing, after which the two conceal themselves again, the music strikes up as before, and the whole scene is repeated.
But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinary unlucky stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: “The very ballet girls, with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees—as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still in the Devil’s name!”
One remembers, also, “War and Peace,” with its scene at the opera—and Tolstoï’s reference to the chief male dancer as getting “sixty thousand francs a year for cutting capers.” So, looking over the older operas which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that to-day opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art.