War Letters of a Public-School Boy

by Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

Necessarily the opera must be more romantic than the symphony. "Composers who have given the world both opera and symphony such as Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, Spohr, Berlioz, always wrote Romantically in their operas and Classically in their symphonies." Of the development of opera he wrote:

Opera was fast degenerating into a sort of collection of ballads, with hardly any orchestration at all, when a strong man rose to check these abuses. Gluck was the forerunner of the earlier German school of opera composers, which includes such men as Beethoven, Mozart, Weber and Schubert. Gluck had studied carefully the progress of non-operatic music since Bach's time, and seeing what vast strides the art had made in this direction, tried to bring into line with the opera its improvements. He was the first composer to show the immense and inestimable necessity of properly orchestrated music in opera. Gluck's rich scoring, beautiful melodies combined with dramatic connection between action, voice and orchestra, entirely revolutionised the opera. Fortunately, he had a still greater contemporary to carry on his reforms. Gluck has himself explained how he set out to avoid any concession of music to the vocal abilities of the singer; how he had tried to bring music to its proper function, i.e., to go side by side with the poetry of the drama—a clear forecasting of Wagner's own reforms.

Whereas in Monteverde's operas the dramatic significance was kept, but only at the expense of the music, which had absolutely no signification at all, in the works of Gluck, Mozart and Scarlatti the musical part is elevated, but entirely at the expense of the dramatic idea, which is quite lost. A Mozart melody, rhythmic, square-cut, is as different as possible from a Wagner theme, for whereas the former suggests nothing the latter is very rich in suggestion. It is clear that Gluck and Mozart, though they performed an inestimable service to the musical art by the raising of the orchestra to its proper position with regard to the voice and the music, yet failed to keep in view the continuity of the drama in opera. Hence it was that Weber and Beethoven frankly abolished the recitative that joins the formal melodies of the arias and melodic passages and composed Singspiel, having their works built up of airs and melodies joined by spoken dialogue. Such is Weber's Der Freischütz and such Beethoven's Fidelio.

After discussing Meyerbeer, Scarlatti, and Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, my son comes to Wagner and the revolution in music he accomplished:

Wagner was a man of ripe culture, who was equally familiar with Beethoven's symphonies, Shakespeare's dramas, Kant's philosophic writings and Homer's epics. All the great works of literature and philosophy were well known to him. Thus he brought to bear on his music a mind singularly well equipped in every direction. He was, too, essentially a Teuton, with all the German massiveness of conception and depth of soul. A lesser man must have fallen before the prospect of attempting such a colossal reform. What was that reform in its essentials? It was this—to compose opera in which the idea of the drama was made the ruling conception; to attain this end by a wedding of suitable poetry to music of such a kind as should reflect by its themes what was happening on the stage or in the minds of the characters. There was to be no aria or fixed form of ballad, but continuous melody, in which the voices of the characters are regarded as extra instruments of the orchestra, with just that element of personality included....

To have succeeded entirely in this bold design he would have had to be a Shakespeare in poetry and knowledge of human nature, as well as a musician of equal ability. How could any one man fulfil both of these rôles? In the matter of the music Wagner is a very Shakespeare. But if we take his own writings as evidences of what he meant to do, then his librettos must necessarily be unsatisfactory. They keep the dramatic idea in sight so much as almost entirely to lose sight of poetic beauty. Wagner was pre-eminently a musician; he was not a poet, as he wished also to be. Whatever his poetical achievements, the main fact is unaltered. The dramatic idea and the musical expression are kept so indissolubly close by Wagner as to be one for all intents and purposes.

Of Wagner's treatment of the vocalist he says:

The melody sung is modelled upon the way in which the speaking voice rises and falls in accordance with the feelings of the moment. With marvellous skill the master of Bayreuth has made the music sung reflect as clearly as any oration what are the thoughts and feelings of the character. The orchestra makes, as it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner, floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy, Wagner makes the voice sing the leitmotif of some idea connected with the idea of the moment. This is constantly occurring in Die Meistersinger.

After scornful allusions to French and Italian opera, he shows how Wagner re-fashioned opera on new and nobler lines. Replying to those who say "You must have lightness sometimes," he wrote:

Yes, but never triviality. If we want lightness of touch and wittiness, have we not Die Meistersinger, the greatest comedy in the world, or a merry piece like Mozart's Nozze di Figaro? Here is all the wit that one wants, yet the level is kept high throughout. It is the same in literature. We have absurd, banal pieces, said to be humorous, such as The Glad Eye, which really contain not one-millionth the humour that there is in a noble comedy like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or As You Like It, or a Shavian play like John Bull's Other Island. Man is too great a thing ever to be of his nature low and banal. We have in life farce sometimes, comedy very often indeed, but never banality.