II
Italy has for three centuries been deficient in art-songs, but she has produced a certain amount of lyric music which the student will discover and sing gladly from time to time, and a few of her song-writers should be mentioned here. Giuseppe Mercadante (1795-1870) was primarily an opera composer, but, unlike most of the Italian opera writers, produced a goodly number of songs. These are simple and florid, possessed of a certain Italian charm, but on the one hand too thin to rank as true interpretative music, and on the other somewhat too operatic to convey a simple lyrical sentiment. However, his vogue was great and he may be considered the originator of the modern Italian song tradition. The continuer of the tradition was Luigi Gordigiani (1806-1860), a peasant boy who showed marked talent for music and carried into his work a feeling for folk-song which was new to Italian music at the time. He was one of the first native collectors of folk-music and one of the first to appreciate it. He is known almost solely as a song-writer, and so popular have his songs become and so firmly have they remained in people’s hearts that he has with some justice been called ‘the Italian Schubert.’ However, we must not be from this led to suppose that he had anything like Schubert’s richness of melodic inspiration, musical resource, or genuine dramatic power. His songs are in every case supplied with the simplest accompaniment and in form do not go much beyond the folk-songs which are their model. They have a certain freedom, a development which is typical of the art-song rather than the folk-song. But their materials are of the simplest, and with their technical sameness and their general melancholy tinge they tend toward monotony. Among the loveliest of his songs is La Bianchina, a melody of much sweetness cast in the strophic form. Il Tempo Passato shows more energy and passion than is usual in Gordigiani. Some of his religious songs are effective, especially O Sanctissima Vergine Maria, which is said to have been admired by Chopin. We should mention also Gordigiani’s waltz songs, which are brilliant and effective without becoming cheap. Another Italian song writer, and one better known in foreign lands than Gordigiani, is Ciro Pinsuti (1829-1888), whose output was immense. He exemplifies Italian grace and suavity and imparted to his part-songs in particular a beauty which has carried them to singing societies the world over.
In England in the first part of the nineteenth century song writing, as we have seen in another chapter,[27] was at a very low ebb. The chief output of songs was in the street ballad class and in the slightly superior opera ballad. The ballad opera of the nineteenth century was not that of the previous century, of which ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ was a type. The newer ballad opera was usually romantic, somewhat elaborate, and composed by one musician instead of ten. Of this opera ‘The Bohemian Girl’ by Michael Balfe (1808-1870) is an excellent example. Three of its ‘ballads’—‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,’ ‘The Heart Bowed Down,’ and ‘When Other Lips’—are among the best known of household songs. And if we except the omnipresent street ballad and ‘occasional’ song (such as cheap pæans of triumph over Napoleon) such lyrics were the chief item in English song. Their beauty is obvious to everybody. They deserve their long life and popularity. But it cannot be said that they are an interpretation of their text, as is the case in a song by Schubert. In addition to his opera ballads Balfe has at least one thoroughly fine song to his credit—‘Killarney,’ said to have been written on his deathbed. Rarely has a conscious composer caught the true Irish idiom and flavor as Balfe did here. Balfe’s once popular setting of Longfellow’s ‘The Day Is Done’ is admirably expressive. Sir Henry Bishop (1786-1855) and Julius Benedict (1804-1885) were popular composers of the time, known rather by their operas than by their songs. But of the group only William Vincent Wallace (1814-1865), in addition to Balfe, can be said to have lived. His ‘Maritana’ is still occasionally performed, and the song, ‘Scenes That Are Brightest,’ from that work, has a popularity analogous to that of ‘The Heart Bowed Down.’ But whatever occasional beauties may have lived from the England of the early nineteenth century, we must feel how dead the period was productively. Much of the English music of the time is gauche in the extreme, and none of it shows any of the creative vigor which goes to make history.