"Up bubbles all his amorous breath"?
Right nobly, too, did Schiller hymn the lovers and two centuries of opera-writers—Italian, French, German, English, and Polish—have sought to weave their pitiful story into lyric dramas.
Boito, as I have said, wrote the book of "Ero e Leandro" for himself, but eventually gave it to others. I can only speculate as to the cause of Boito's abandonment of his intellectual child. Probably he concluded that it lacked the dramatic elements which the composers of the last few decades, paying tribute, willingly or unwillingly, to Wagner's genius, have felt to be necessary to the success of a lyric drama. But dramatic action need not always be summed up in movement. Wagner's greatest tragedy has scarcely more external incident than "Ero e Leandro," and, indeed, is like this opera, in that the interest in each of its three acts centers in a meeting of the lovers and their publication of the play enacting on the stage of their hearts. But it takes music like Wagner's, music surcharged with passion, to body forth the growth of the dramatic personages and make us blind to paucity of incident. When that cannot be had, then pictures and functions of all kinds, solemn and festive, must be relied on to hold the interest. Boito built up such pictures and grouped such functions about his simple tale with a great deal of ingenuity. The eye is charmed at once with his classic landscapes in the first act—the cypresses, myrtles, and blooming oleanders, the temple portico, the statues and altar with its votive offerings, the kneeling chorus of priestesses and sailors, Hero with her ravishing robes (think of Mme. Eames in the part), the gallant Leander and the stately archon Ariofarno. It is the scene of the lovers' meeting at the festival, and to heighten its interest and provide something else than hymns and rites, Boito has turned Leander into a victor in the Aphrodisian games, both as swordsman and cytharist. Hero crowns him with laurel, and he sings two odes, which Boito cleverly borrows from Anacreon, the first without, the second with implied, but not expressed credit. The odes are the most familiar of Anacreon's odes, however, and no one could think of moral obliquity in connection with Boito's use of them. They are the address to the lyre which the poet wishes to attune to heroic measures, but which answers only in accents of love; and the tale of how the poet took Eros, shivering, out of the cold night and received a heart wound in return. Charmingly, indeed, do the odes fit into the dramatic scheme and offer two set pieces as a contrast to the solemn pronouncements of the archon and the excessive hymning of the chorus.
The development of the plot is now begun. Boito has created Ariofarno to fill the place of the wicked nun of the German folk-tales. He is obsessed with guilty love for Hero and seeks to divert her service from the celestial Venus to the earthly. She scorns his offers of love, and he leaves her with threats of vengeance. Filled with forebodings, she seeks an omen in the voice of a sea shell which had been placed on the altar of Aphrodite, the Sea-born. The words are charming, and the occasion prettily prepared for a vocal show piece. She invokes the shell as the cradle of Aphrodite, hears in its murmurs the song of the sea nymphs, the humming of bees amid the oleander's aeolian whispers, and the soft confessions of a mermaid. Then the sounds grow wild, and stimulate her fancy to a picture of rushing waters, flying foam, and wrathful surge—the vision which is realized in the last act. Here the suggestion for musical delineation is obvious, and Signor Mancinelli has utilized it in such a manner as to make his song (which, for reasons that I shall not pursue, awakened memories of the ballatella in "Pagliacci") the first really triumphant thing in the opera. The rest of the act is chiefly devoted to a love duet, at the close of which Hero, kneeling before the statue of the god, invokes Apollo to admonish her of her fate. Ariofarno, in concealment, answers for the god: "Death!"
In the second act, which plays in the part of the temple of Aphrodite devoted to the mysteries, Ariofarno carries out his plan of vengeance against Hero. Professing to have received an oracular command to that effect, he restores a service in an ancient town by the sea and to it consecrates Hero, who is powerless to resist his will. The duty of the priestess is to give warning of approaching storms, so that by priestly rites the angry waters may be placated. While pronouncing her sentence he, in an aside, offers to save her if she will accept his love. Again he is spurned, and when he utters the words which condemn her to the vigil Leander seeks to attack him. For this he is seized and banished to the Asian shore. Hero takes the oath, the dancers rush in and begin a bacchanalian, or Aphrodisian, orgy, while the chorus sings the "Io paean." Here Signor Mancinelli has really written with a pen of fire. The music is tumultuously exciting, though built on the learned forms, and there is the happiest union of purpose and achievement. In the last act, somewhat clumsily set and unnecessarily ambitious in its strivings for spectacular realism, the dénoument is reached. Songs of sailors come up from the sea; Hero sings her love and longing and lights her lover to his fate. Their love duet is interrupted by the bursting of the tempest, which had come upon them without being observed. The warning trumpet which she should have sounded is heard from the vaults below, and the chant of the approaching priests. Leander throws himself into the sea; the archon upbraids Hero for neglect of duty and discovers its cause. Her punishment, death, will be his vengeance, but the lifeless body of Leander is hurled upon the rocks, and comes into view when a thunderbolt tears away a portion of the tower wall. Hero sinks dead to the ground; the archon rages at the escape of his victim, and an invisible choir sings of a reunion of the lovers in death.
As a composer Signor Mancinelli is an eclectic. It would not be easy to specify any particular master as a model. He admires Wagner and has proper appreciation of the dramatic values, the continuity of idea, and the effect of development which flow from the recurrent use of significant phrases; but his manner is not at all that of the later Wagner whose influence, if found at all, must be sought in a few harmonic progressions and in a belief in the potency of orchestral color. Nearer to him than the master poet-musician are Verdi, Ponchielli, Boito, and the eager spirits of Young Italy. His music is as free as the later Verdi's from the shackles of set forms, but he is, nevertheless, at his best when the book permits an extended piece of lyric writing. This being so, it is disappointing that he has done so little that is good in the opening scene where the book invited him to consult the wants of the Norwich festival and to write in the cantata style. In the first act, however, there is little to praise outside of the settings of the two Anacreonic odes and the song to the shell. There is much striving, but a paucity of plastic ideas. What might have been an unconstrained lyrical outpouring, the prologue, mere thundering in the index, because of the composer's mistaken impression that it ought to be tragic, and in the "Ercles vein." When the rites begin and a swelling paean is expected, there is much making of musical faces, but no real beginning. Matters improve in the second act, where the part of Ariofarno becomes dramatically puissant. Here there are noble passages and the duet has moments of passionate intensity; but all these things pale their ineffectual fires before the "Io paean," which is as thrilling and well applied as anything that I can recall in the operas of the decade which preceded "Ero e Leandro."
CHAPTER XX
NEW SINGERS AND OPERAS
There now remained four years of Mr. Grau's administration at the Metropolitan Opera House. They were years of great activity, during which the fortunes of the manager and the institution rose steadily. Mr. Grau was no more of a sentimentalist in art than Mr. Abbey had been. He was quiet, undemonstrative, alert, and wholly willing to let the public dictate the course of the establishment. Outwardly he was always calm, urbane, neither communicative nor secretive. I sat behind him during all the years of his divided and undivided directorship, and never failed of a pleasant greeting, no matter what the expression of The Tribune had been on the morning of the day. He accepted congratulations with a "Thank you!" which had cordiality in its timbre, and let the subject fall at once. He met expressions of condolence in the same unperturbed and uneffusive manner. Only once in all the years during which we sat neighbors can I recall that he volunteered a remark indicative of either satisfaction or disappointment. It was on the night of the first performance of Reyer's "Salammbô," in the season 1900-01. He appeared in his place early and extended his gloved hand in his ordinary manner, but this time his eyes took a survey of the audience-room the while. Then, still half turned, he remarked without a touch of feeling in the tone of his voice: "Encouraging, isn't it? Some say the public want novelties." He had expended a large sum on the production, and the public had met him with half a house.
If the public cared little for new things, it may occasionally have disturbed the solitary musings of Mr. Grau, but it only emphasized his public exhibitions of willingness to give the people the old things which they liked. A strongly popular favorite had a safe hold on a long tenure of service under him. Changes there had to be from year to year, but so long as the public manifested a desire to listen to a high-class singer, and there were no untoward circumstances to interfere, that singer was re-engaged. Hence there came to be at the Metropolitan in the higher ranks something like the theatrical stock companies of an earlier generation. New singers there had to be, from time to time, but year after year (the serious interruption is not yet) the subscribers were assured before one season was ended that in the next they would still be privileged to hear Mmes. Sembrich, Eames, Nordica, Schumann-Heink, Ternina, Homer, and (until he retired from his active stage career) Jean de Reszke, and Messrs. Édouard de Reszke, Van Dyck, Dippel, Scotti, Plançon, Journet, Campanari, Mühlmann, Bispham, and Albert Reiss. The presence of these artists of the first rank naturally determined the character of the repertory, which was also cut to a pattern, since the public always wanted to hear the artists whom they admired in the rôles in which they were most admirable. The German Contingent made the Wagnerian list inevitable, just as Mme. Sembrich made inevitable the operas of the florid Italian school, and Mme. Eames the two favorite operas of Gounod. These circumstances simplify the presentation of the significant incidents of the remainder of this history. I have only to take account of the entrance of a few stars into the Metropolitan system, and the first production of a few operas—some of which came only speedily to depart, others of which have remained in the establishment's repertory.