"An opera is a dramatic and lyrical spectacle, designed to combine the enchantments of all the fine arts by the representation of some passionate action through sensations so agreeable as to excite both interest and illusion.[45]
"The constituent parts of an opera are the poem, the music, and the decoration. By poetry, the spectacle speaks to the mind; by music, to the ear; and by painting, to the eye: all combining, through different organs, to make the same impression on the heart. Of these three parts, my subject only allows me to consider the first and last with reference to the second.
"The art of combining sounds agreeably may be regarded under two different aspects. As an institution of nature, music confines its effects to the senses, to the physical pleasure which results from melody, harmony, and rhythm. Such is usually the music of churches; such are the airs suited to dancing and songs. But as the essential part of a lyrical scene, aiming principally at imitation, music becomes one of the fine arts, and is capable of painting all pictures; of exciting all sentiments; of competing with poetry; of endowing her with new strength; of embellishing her with new charms; and of triumphing over her while placing the crown on her head.
"The sounds of a speaking voice, being neither harmonious nor sustained, are inappreciable, and cannot, consequently, connect themselves agreeably with the singing voice, or with instruments, at least in modern languages. It was different with the Greeks. Their language was so accentuated that its inflections, in a long declamation, formed, spontaneously as it were, musical intervals, distinctly appreciable. Thus it may be said that their theatrical pieces were a species of opera; and it was for this very reason that they could have no operas properly so called.
"But the difficulty of uniting song to declamation in modern languages explains how it is that the intervention of music has given to the lyric poem a character quite different from that of tragedy or comedy, and made it a third species of drama, having its particular rules. The differences alluded to cannot be determined without a perfect knowledge of music, of the means of identifying it with words, and of its natural relations to the human heart—details which belong less to the artist than to the philosopher.
GREEK MUSIC.
"Confining myself, therefore, on this subject to a few observations rather historical than didactic, I remark, first, that the Greek theatre had not, like ours, any lyrical feature, for that which they called so, had not the slightest resemblance to what we call so.
Their language had so much accent that, in a concert of voices, there was little noise, whilst all their poetry was musical, and all their music declamatory. Thus, song with them was hardly more than sustained discourse. They really sang their verses, as they declared at the head of their poems, a practice which gave the Romans, and afterwards the moderns, the ridiculous habit of saying, I sing, when nothing is sung. That which the Greeks called the lyric style was a pompous and florid strain of heroic poesy, accompanied by the lyre. It is certain, too, that their tragedies were recited in a manner very similar to singing, and that they were accompanied by instruments, and had choruses.
"But if, on that account, it should he inferred that they were operas like ours, then it must be supposed that their operas were without airs, for it appears to me unquestionable that the Greek music, without excepting even the instrumental, was a real recitative. It is true that this recitative, uniting the charm of musical sounds to all the harmony of poetry, and to all the force of declamation, must have had much more energy than the modern recitative, which can hardly acquire one of these advantages but at the expense of the others. In our living languages, which partake for the most part of the rudeness of their native climates, the application of music to speech is much less natural than it was with the Greeks. An uncertain prosody agrees ill with regularity of measure; deaf and dumb syllables, hard articulations, sounds not sonorous, with little variation, and no suppleness, cannot but with great difficulty be consorted with melody; and a poetry cadenced solely by the number of syllables, whilst it gets but a very faint harmony in musical rhythm, is constantly opposed to the diversity of that rhythm's values and movements. These are the difficulties which were to be overcome, or eluded, in the invention of the lyrical poem. The effort, therefore, of its inventors was to form, by a nice selection of words, by choice turns of expression, and by varied metres, a particular language; and this language, called lyrical, is rich or poor in proportion to the softness or harshness of that from which it is derived.
"Having thus prepared a language for music, the question was next to apply music to this language, and to render it so apt for the purposes of the lyrical scene that the whole, vocal and instrumental, should be taken for one and the same idiom. This produced the necessity of continuous singing,—a necessity the greater in proportion as the language employed should be unmusical, as the less a language has of softness and accentuation, the more the alternate change from song to speech shocks the ear.