“Those who have genius will make opéra-comique like mine; those who have talent will write opera like Gluck’s; while those who have neither genius nor talent, will write symphonies like Haydn’s.”
However, he tried to make an opera like Gluck’s and in spite of his great efforts and his interesting inventions, he could not equal the work of his formidable rival.
Although he was not a great musician, Offenbach had a surprising natural instinct and made here and there curious discoveries in harmony. In speaking of these discoveries I must go slightly into the theory of harmony and resign myself to being understood only by those of my readers who are more or less musicians. In a slight work, Daphnis et Chloé, Offenbach risked a dominant eleventh without either introduction or conclusion—an extraordinary audacity at the time. A short course in harmony is necessary for the understanding of this. We must start with the fact that, theoretically, all dissonances must be introduced and concluded, which we cannot explain here, but this leading up to and away from have for their purpose softening the harshness of the dissonance which was greatly feared in bygone times. Take if you please, the simple key of C natural. Do is the keynote, sol is the dominant. Place on this dominant two-thirds—si-re—and you have the perfect dominant chord. Add a third fa and you have the famous dominant seventh, a dissonance which to-day seems actually agreeable. Not so long ago they thought that they ought to prepare for the dissonance. In the Sixteenth Century it was not regarded as admissible at all, for one hears the two notes si and fa simultaneously and this seems intolerable to the ear. They used to call it the Diabolus in musica.
Palestrina was the first to employ it in an anthem. Opinions differ on this, and certain students of harmony pretend that the chord which Palestrina used only has the appearance of the dominant seventh. I do not concur in this view. But however the case may be, the glory of unchaining the devil in music belongs to Montreverde. That was the beginning of modern music.
Later, a new third was superimposed and they dared the chord sol-si-re-fa-la. The inventor is unknown, but Beethoven seems to have been the first to make any considerable use of it. He used the chord in such a way that, in spite of its current use to-day, in his works it appears like something new and strange. This chord imposes its characteristics on the second motif of the first part of the Symphony in C minor. This is what gives such amazing charm to the long colloquy between the flute, the oboe and the clarinets, which always surprises and arouses the listener, in the andante of the same symphony. Fétis in his Traité d’Harmonie inveighed against this delightful passage. He admits that people like it, but, according to him, the author had no right to write it and the listener has no right to admire it. Scholars often have strange ideas.
Then Richard Wagner came along and the reign of the ninth dominant took the place of the seventh. That is what gives Tannhauser, and Lohengrin their exciting character, which is dear to those who demand in music above everything else the pleasure due to shocks to the nervous system. Imitators have fallen foul of this easy procedure, and with a laughable naïveté imagine that in this way they can easily equal Wagner. And they have succeeded in making this valuable chord absolutely banal.
Jacques Offenbach