A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music

by Henry Edward Krehbiel

which is a slightly varied form of four measures from Simon's song in the first part of "The Seasons":—

[Musical excerpt—"With eagerness the husbandman his tilling work begins.">[

With these four measures the likeness begins and ends. A venial offence, if it be an offence at all. Composers were not held to so strict and scrupulous an accountability touching melodic meum and tuum a century ago as they are now; yet there was then a thousand-fold more melodic inventiveness. Another case of "conveyance" by Rossini has also been pointed out; the air of the duenna in the third act beginning "Il vecchiotto cerca moglie" is said to be that of a song which Rossini heard a Russian lady sing in Rome. I have searched much in Russian song literature and failed to find the alleged original. To finish the story: the notary summoned by Bartolo arrives on the scene, but is persuaded by Figaro to draw up an attestation of a marriage agreement between Count Almaviva and Rosina, and Bartolo, finding at the last that all his precautions have been in vain, comforted not a little by the gift of his ward's dower, which the Count relinquishes, gives his blessing to the lovers.

I have told the story of "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" as it appears in the book. It has grown to be the custom to omit in performance several of the incidents which are essential to the development and understanding of the plot. Some day—soon, it is to be hoped—managers, singers, and public will awake to a realization that, even in the old operas in which beautiful singing is supposed to be the be-all and end-all, the action ought to be kept coherent. In that happy day Rossini's effervescent lyrical arrangement of Beaumarchais's vivacious comedy will be restored to its rights.

CHAPTER II

"LE NOZZE DI FIGARO"

Beaumarchais wrote a trilogy of Figaro comedies, and if the tastes and methods of a century or so ago had been like those of the present, we might have had also a trilogy of Figaro operas—"Le Barbier de Seville," "Le Mariage de Figaro," and "La Mère coupable." As it is, we have operatic versions of the first two of the comedies, Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" being a sequel to Rossini's "Il Barbiere," its action beginning at a period not long after the precautions of Dr. Bartolo had been rendered inutile by Figaro's cunning schemes and Almaviva had installed Rosina as his countess. "Le Nozze" was composed a whole generation before Rossini's opera. Mozart and his public could keep the sequence of incidents in view, however, from the fact that Paisiello had acquainted them with the beginning of the story. Paisiello's opera is dead, but Rossini's is very much alive, and it might prove interesting, some day, to have the two living operas brought together in performance in order to note the effect produced upon each other by comparison of their scores. One effect, I fancy, would be to make the elder of the operas sound younger than its companion, because of the greater variety and freshness, as well as dramatic vigor, of its music. But though the names of many of the characters would be the same, we should scarcely recognize their musical physiognomies. We should find the sprightly Rosina of "Il Barbiere" changed into a mature lady with a countenance sicklied o'er with the pale cast of a gentle melancholy; the Count's tenor would, in the short interval, have changed into barytone; Figaro's barytone into a bass, while the buffo-bass of Don Basilio would have reversed the process with age and gone upward into the tenor region. We should meet with some new characters, of which two at least would supply the element of dramatic freshness and vivacity which we should miss from the company of the first opera—Susanna and Cherubino.

We should also, in all likelihood, be struck by the difference in the moral atmosphere of the two works. It took Beaumarchais three years to secure a public performance of his "Mariage de Figaro" because of the opposition of the French court, with Louis XVI at its head, to its too frank libertinism. This opposition spread also to other royal and imperial personages, who did not relish the manner in which the poet had castigated the nobility, exalted the intellectuality of menials, and satirized the social and political conditions which were generally prevalent a short time before the French Revolution. Neither of the operas, however, met the obstacles which blocked the progress of the comedies on which they are founded, because Da Ponte, who wrote the book for Mozart, and Sterbini, who was Rossini's librettist, judiciously and deftly elided the objectionable political element. "Le Nozze" is by far the more ingeniously constructed play of the two (though a trifle too involved for popular comprehension in the original language), but "Il Barbiere" has the advantage of freedom from the moral grossness which pollutes its companion. For the unspoiled taste of the better class of opera patrons, there is a livelier as well as a lovelier charm in the story of Almaviva's adventures while outwitting Dr. Bartolo and carrying off the winsome Rosina to be his countess than in the depiction of his amatory intrigues after marriage. In fact, there is something especially repellent in the Count's lustful pursuit of the bride of the man to whose intellectual resourcefulness he owed the successful outcome of his own wooing.

It is, indeed, a fortunate thing for Mozart's music that so few opera-goers understand Italian nowadays. The play is a moral blister, and the less intelligible it is made by excisions in its dialogue, the better, in one respect, for the virtuous sensibilities of its auditors. One point which can be sacrificed without detriment to the music and at only a trifling cost to the comedy (even when it is looked upon from the viewpoint which prevailed in Europe at the period of its creation) is that which Beaumarchais relied on chiefly to add piquancy to the conduct of the Count. Almaviva, we are given to understand, on his marriage with Rosina had voluntarily abandoned an ancient seignorial right, described by Susanna as "certe mezz' ore che il diritto feudale," but is desirous of reviving the practice in the case of the Countess's bewitching maid on the eve of her marriage to his valet. It is this discovery which induces Figaro to invent his scheme for expediting the wedding, and lends a touch of humor to the scene in which Figaro asks that he and his bride enjoy the first-fruits of the reform while the villagers lustily hymn the merits of their "virtuous" lord; but the too frank discussion of the subject with which the dialogue teems might easily be avoided. The opera, like all the old works of the lyrical stage, is in sad need of intelligent revision and thorough study, so that its dramatic as well as its musical beauties may be preserved. There is no lovelier merit in Mozart's music than the depth and tenderness with which the honest love of Susanna for Figaro and the Countess for her lord are published; and it is no demerit that the volatile passion of the adolescent Cherubino and the frolicsome, scintillant, vivacious spirit of the plotters are also given voice. Mozart's music could not be all that it is if it did not enter fully and unreservedly into the spirit of the comedy; it is what it is because whenever the opportunity presented itself, he raised it into the realm of the ideal. Yet Mozart was no Puritan. He swam along gayly and contentedly on the careless current of life as it was lived in Vienna and elsewhere in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and was not averse, merely for the fun of the thing, to go even a step beyond his librettist when the chance offered. Here is an instance in point: The plotters have been working a little at cross-purposes, each seeking his own advantages, and their plans are about to be put to the test when Figaro temporarily loses confidence in the honesty of Susanna. With his trust in her falls to the ground his faith in all woman-kind. He rails against the whole sex in the air, beginning: "Aprite un po' quegl' occhi?" in the last act. Enumerating the moral blemishes of women, he at length seems to be fairly choked by his own spleen, and bursts out at the end with "Il resto nol dico, gia ognuno lo sa" ("The rest I'll not tell you—everybody knows it"). The orchestra stops, all but the horns, which with the phrase

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