History of the Opera from its Origin in Italy to the present Time / With Anecdotes of the Most Celebrated Composers and Vocalists of Europe

by H. Sutherland Edwards

ROSSINI.

BELLINI and Donizetti were contemporaries of Rossini; so were Paisiello and Cimarosa; so are M. Verdi and M. Meyerbeer; but Rossini has outlived most of them, and will certainly outlive them all. It is now forty-eight years since Tancredi, forty-five since Otello, and forty-five since Il Barbiere di Siviglia were written. With the exception of Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segretto, which at long intervals may still occasionally be heard, the works of Rossini's Italian predecessors have been thrown into utter obscurity by the light of his superior genius. Let us make all due allowances for such change of taste as must result in music, as in all things, from the natural changeableness of the human disposition; still no variation has taken place in the estimation in which Rossini's works are held. It was to be expected that a musician of equal genius, coming after Paisiello and his compeers, young and vigorous, when they were old and exhausted, would in time completely eclipse them, even in respect to those works which they had written in their best days; but the remarkable thing is, that Rossini so re-modelled Italian opera, and gave to the world so many admirable examples of his own new style, that to opera-goers of the last thirty years he may be said to be the most ancient of those Italian composers who are not absolutely forgotten. At the same time, after hearing William Tell, it is impossible to deny that Rossini is also the most modern of operatic composers. That is to say, that since William Tell was produced, upwards of thirty years ago, the art of writing dramatic music has not advanced a step. Other composers have written admirable operas during Rossini's time; but if no Italian opera seria, produced prior to Otello, can be compared to Otello; if no opera, subsequent to William Tell, can be ranked on a level with William Tell; if rivals have arisen, and Rossini's operas of five-and-forty years ago still continue to be admired and applauded; above all, if a singer,[103] the favourite heroine of a composer[104] who is so boastfully modern that he fancies he belongs to the next age, and who is nothing if not an innovator; if even this ultra modern heroine appears, when she wishes really to distinguish herself in a Rossinian opera of 1813;[105] then it follows that of our actual operatic period, and dating from the early part of the present century, Rossini is simply the Alpha and the Omega. Undoubtedly his works are full of beauty, gaiety, life, and of much poetry of a positive, passionate kind, but they are wanting in spiritualism, or rather they do not possess spirituality, and exhibit none of the poetry of romance. It would be difficult to say precisely in what the "romantic" consists;—and I am here reminded that several French writers have spoken of Rossini as a composer of the "romantic school," simply (as I imagine) because his works attained great popularity in France at the same time as those of Victor Hugo and his followers, and because he gave the same extension to the opera which the cultivators and naturalisers in France of the Shakspearian drama gave, after Rossini, to their plays.[106] I may safely say, however, that with the "romantic," as an element of poetry, we always associate somewhat of melancholy and vagueness, and of dreaminess, if not of actual mystery. A bright passionate love-song of Rossini's is no more "romantic" than is a magnificent summer's day under an Italian sky; but Schubert's well known Serenade is essentially "romantic;" and Schubert, as well as Hoffmann, (a composer of whom I shall afterwards have a few words to say), is decidedly of the same school as Weber, who is again of the same school, or rather of the same class, as Schubert and Beethoven, in so far that not one of the three ever visited Italy, or was influenced, further than was absolutely inevitable, by Italian composers.

SPOHR.

As a romantic composer Weber may almost be said to stand alone. As a thoroughly German composer he belongs to the same class as Beethoven and Spohr. Spohr, greatly as his symphonies and chamber compositions are admired, has yet never established himself in public favour as an operatic composer—at least not in England, nor indeed anywhere out of Germany. I may add, that in Germany itself, the land above all others of scientific music, the works which keep possession of the stage are, for the most part, those which the public also love to applaud in other countries. The truth is, that the success of an opera is seldom in proportion to its abstract musical merit, just as the success of a drama does not depend, or depends but very little, on the manner in which it is written. We have seen plays by Browning, Taylor (I mean the author of Philip Von Artevelde), Leigh Hunt, and other most distinguished writers, prove failures; while dramas and comedies put together by actors and playwrights have met with great success. This success is not to be undervalued; all I mean to say is, that it is not necessarily gained by the best writers in the drama, or by the best composers in the opera; though the best composers and the best writers ought to take care to achieve it in every department in which they present themselves. In the meanwhile, Spohr's dramatic works, with all their beauties, have never taken root in this country; while even Beethoven's Fidelio, one of the greatest of operas, does not occupy any clearly marked space in the history of opera; nor is it as an operatic composer that Beethoven has gained his immense celebrity.

BEETHOVEN.

All London opera-goers remember Mademoiselle Sophie Cruvelli's admirable performance in Fidelio; and like Mademoiselle Cruvelli (or Cruwel), all the great German singers who have visited England—with the single exception of Mademoiselle Titiens—have some time or other played the part of the heroine in Beethoven's famous dramatic work: but Fidelio has never been translated into English or French,—has never been played by any thoroughly Italian company, and admired, as it must always be by musicians—nor has ever excited any great enthusiasm among the English public, except when it has been executed by an entire company of Germans,—the only people who can do justice to its magnificent choruses. It is a work apart in more than one sense, and it has not had that perceptible influence on the works which have succeeded it, either in Germany or in other countries, that has been exercised by Weber's operas in Germany, and by Rossini's everywhere. For full particulars respecting Beethoven and his three styles, and Fidelio and its three overtures, the reader may be referred to the works published at St. Petersburgh by M. Lenz in 1852 (Beethoven et ses trois styles), at Coblentz, by Dr. Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries in 1838, and at Munster, by Schindler (that friend of Beethoven's, who, according to the malicious Heine, wrote "Ami de Beethoven" on his card), in 1845. Schindler's book is the sourse of nearly all the biographical particulars since published respecting Beethoven; that of M. Lenz is chiefly remarkable for the inflated nonsense it contains in the shape of criticism. Thus Beethoven's third style is said to be "un jugement porté sur le cosmos humain, et non plus une participation à ses impressions,"—words which, I confess, I do not know how to render into intelligible English. His symphonies in general are "events of universal history rather than musical productions of more or less merit." Those who have read M. Lenz's extravagant production, will remember that he attacks here and there M. Oulibicheff, author of the "Life of Mozart," published at Moscow in 1844. M. Oulibicheff replied in a work devoted specially to Beethoven (and to M. Lenz), published at St. Petersburgh in 1854;[107] in which he is said by our best critics not to have done full justice to Beethoven, though he well maintains his assertion; an assertion which appears to me quite unassailable, that the composer of Don Juan combined all the merits of all the schools which had preceded him. I have already endeavoured, in more than one place, to impress this truth upon such of my readers as might not be sufficiently sensible of it, and moreover, that all the important operatic reforms attributed to the successors of Mozart, and especially to Rossini, belong to Mozart himself, who from his eminence dominates equally over the present and the past.

BORROWED THEMES.

Karl Maria von Weber has had a very different influence on the opera from that exercised by Beethoven and Spohr; and so much of his method of operatic composition as could easily be imitated has found abundance of imitators. Thus Weber's plan of taking the principal melodies for his overtures from the operas which they are to precede, has been very generally followed; so also has his system of introducing national airs, more or less modified, when his great object is to give to his work a national colour.[108] This process, which produces admirable results in the hands of a composer of intelligence and taste, becomes, when adopted by inferior musicians, simply a convenient mode of plagiarism. Without for one moment ranking Rossini, Bellini, or Donizetti in the latter class, I may nevertheless observe, that the cavatina of La Gazza Ladra is founded on an air sung by the peasants of Sicily; that the melody of the trio in the Barber of Seville (Zitti, Zitti), is Simon's air in the Seasons, note for note; that Di tanti palpiti was originally a Roman Catholic hymn; that the music of La Sonnambula is full of reminiscences of the popular music of Sicily; and that Donizetti has also had recourse to national airs for the tunes of his choruses in La Favorite. In the above instances, which might easily be multiplied the composers seem to me rather to have suited their own personal convenience, than to have aimed at giving any particular "colour" to their works. However that may be, I feel obliged to them for my part for having brought to light beautiful melodies, which but for them might have remained in obscurity, as I also do to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, for the admirable use they also have occasionally made of popular themes. It appears to me, however, (to speak now of operatic composers alone) that there is a great difference between borrowing an air from an oratorio, a collection of national music, or any other source, simply because it happens to be beautiful, and doing so because it is appropriate to a particular personage or scene. We may not blame, but we cannot praise Rossini for taking a melody of Haydn's for his Zitti, Zitti, instead of inventing one for himself; nor was there any particular merit, except that of civility, in giving "Berta," in the same opera, a Russian air to sing, which Rossini had heard at the house of a Russian lady residing at Rome, for whom he had a certain admiration. But the Ranz des Vaches, introduced with such admirable effect into Guillaume Tell, where it is marvellously embellished, and yet loses nothing of its original character; this Ranz des Vaches at once transports us amongst the Swiss mountains. So Luther's hymn is in its proper place in the Huguenots;[109] so is the Persian air, made the subject of a chorus of Persian beauties by the Russian composer Glinka, in his Rouslan e Loudmila; so also is the Arabian march (first published by Niebuhr in his "Travels in Arabia"), played behind the scenes by the guards of the seraglio in Oberon, and the old Spanish romance employed as the foundation to the overture of Preciosa.

WEBER.

Weber had a fondness not only for certain instrumental combinations and harmonic effects, but also for particular instruments, such as the clarionet and the horn, and particular chords (which caused Beethoven to say that Weber's Euryanthe was a collection of diminished sevenths). There are certain rhythms too, which, if Weber did not absolutely invent, he has employed so happily, and has shown such a marked liking for them (not only in his operas, but also in his pianoforte compositions, and other instrumental works), that they may almost be said to belong to him. With regard to the orchestral portion of his operas generally, I may remark that Weber, though too high-souled a poet to fall into the error of direct imitation of external noises, has yet been able to suggest most charmingly and poetically, such vague natural sounds as the rustling of the leaves of the forest, and the murmuring of the waves of the sea. Finally, to speak of what defies analysis, but to assert what every one who has listened to Weber's music will I think admit, his music is full of that ideality and spirituality which in literature is regarded in the present day, if not as the absolute essence of poetry, at least, as one of its most essential elements. Read Weber's life, study his letters, listen again and again to his music, and you will find that he was a conscientious, dutiful, religious man, with a thoroughly musical organization, great imaginative powers, inexhaustible tenderness, and a deep, intuitive appreciation of all that is most beautiful in popular legends. He was an artist of the highest order, and with him art was truly a religion. He believed in its ennobling effect, and that it was to be used only for ennobling purposes. Thus, to have departed from the poetic exigencies of a subject to gratify the caprice of a singer, or to attain the momentary applause of the public would, to Weber, with the faith he held, have been a heresy and a crime.