In France, as in Germany, the tendency of music during the last fifty years has been towards a greater and greater liberty of form; and most of the notable contemporary French composers—with the exception of Reyer, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet[141] (who represent, with modifications, the classic tradition), and two or three ardent disciples of Gluck—proceed, more or less directly, either from Wagner or from that other innovator, Hector Berlioz (sometimes called the French Wagner), who was not, it is true, a revolutionist in the political sense, but who was bitter to the last degree against the society that stupidly refused to acknowledge his power.
The writer is not enough of a musical connoisseur to trace the transformations wrought in musical forms by French composers since the time of Berlioz,—by César Franck (who in a sense, however, stood apart from the currents), by Pierre Lalo, Isidore de Lara, Emmanuel Chabrier, Vincent d’Indy, Camille Erlanger, DeBussy, Gabriel Fauré, Leroux, Le Borne, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Gustave Charpentier, and Alfred Bruneau; still less to point out where these changes have been co-ordinated, as they were in Wagner, with revolutionary thinking,—a task for which not only musical connoisseurship, but the temperament of a musician, the knowledge of an adept, and the intellect of a philosopher would be required. But in two of the composers just named, Alfred Bruneau and Gustave Charpentier, the co-ordination is so obvious that “he who runs” (he of the average lay intelligence) “may read,” since they are engaged in disseminating the idea of liberty among the people.
Both have been influenced by Wagner, but both depart from Wagner in taking their subjects, not from legends, but from contemporary life, and the most ordinary every-day sort of life at that.
Bruneau claims as large privileges for the composer of opera as are accorded to the author, the painter, and the dramatist; the same openness to passion, movement, and humanity, and the same range of choice as regards characters, language, and setting. “It is the right of the composer”—I quote from Bruneau’s Musique d’Hier et de Demain—“to unite in a piece of his choosing any beings he pleases, to place these beings in the human milieu to which he considers they belong, and to put in their mouths the words which he considers appropriate.... He must insist on liberty of the dialogue, developing itself, without constraint of any sort, upon the woof of the instrumentation, and forming one body with it; liberty of the symphony, never interrupted, trumpeting, rumbling, swelling, subsiding, with the necessities of the drama; liberty of expression, more important still,—justness in the word and precision in the term; liberty unlimited of the melody, tripping, alert, grave, proud, tender, vigorous, joyous, surely, at being able to escape from the imprisonment of the cadence and the rhyme; liberty of the phrase, liberty of inspiration, liberty of art, liberty of form, liberty complete, magnificent, and definitive!”
In Messidor[142] and L’Attaque du Moulin (prose librettos by Emile Zola) Bruneau deals with strikes and the labour question so frankly that it is not a little surprising that they were allowed a place on a national stage. These works are appreciated by the critics, but have not been, in spite of their popular subjects, signal popular successes.
On the other hand, Charpentier’s opera of Louise (produced at the Opéra Comique in 1899, and not yet banished from a prominent place in the répertoire) has rapidly made the tour of France and of Europe. Louise, which treats with a bizarre blending of realism and idealism the life of the Bohemians and labourers of Montmartre, may be said to mark an epoch in opera, in that it is the first work of the French school which, having combined innovation of musical form with innovation of subject and language, has achieved a striking and permanent artistic and popular success.
With Louise the modern music-drama becomes, like the simple drama, an appreciable force in direct revolutionary propaganda. It is true that everything savouring of politics is scrupulously excluded from the libretto of Louise, but this scrupulousness (absolutely indispensable in a piece prepared for a subsidised stage) does not prevent the opera from being an unmistakable protest against the social tyranny which is intrenched in the texts of the law. Indeed, Charpentier, whose fine social fervour has been evidenced in a variety of ways which may not be gone into here, has publicly proclaimed his belief “in the efficacy of revolutions well prepared.”
It is more than a coincidence that the revolutionary Zola should have been a zealous defender of the art of Courbet, of Manet, of Monet, Pissarro, and Cezanne, and that a pronounced anarchist like Octave Mirbeau should have been an early admirer of Wagner, the introducer to France of Maeterlinck, the chief champion of Monet, and an apotheosiser of Rodin,—should have been, in short, the foster-father of the irréguliers in every department of art. He would be a surpassingly subtle analyser and a masterful synthesiser who could establish the connection between polyphonic orchestration, impressionism in painting and sculpture and the vers libre, and between each and all of these and the anarchistic philosophy,—between revolt against academicism in the arts and revolt against the state; and yet no one who observes ever so little can doubt that the connection exists.
