The least reparation for this neglect that the French Government can offer is the purchase and preservation of the little house in which Madame Bovary was composed with such painful travail. It still stands, though fast crumbling into decay, on the bank of the Seine at Croisset about half an hour below Rouen. The paternal house has vanished, and occupying part of the little park is a dismantled manufactory. Abbé Prévost is said to have written Manon Lescaut in the old house—at least, Flaubert believed the story.
The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert household, keeps a small café near his former home, and is always ready to talk of the master and of his mother, Madame Flaubert. For two seasons I vainly tried to get from Colange a photograph of this mother. To me the mothers of great men are of extraordinary interest. No money could tempt the old man, though he might have had the picture reproduced and sold the copies.
With his phrase uttered at Flaubert’s grave, M. François Coppée fastened more firmly to history the name of that noble artist, “The Beethoven of French Prose.”
VII
VERDI AND BOÏTO
Drama is relentlessly encroaching upon the domain of music. In Falstaff, the most noteworthy achievement since Die Meistersinger, we get something which for want of a better title one may call lyric comedy. But in form it is novel. It is not opera buffa; nor yet is it opèra comique in the French sense; in fact it shows a marked deviation from its prototypes; even the elaborate system of Wagnerian leading motives is not employed. It is a new Verdi we hear; not the Verdi of Il Trovatore, La Traviata, or Aïda, but a Verdi brimful of the joy of life, sophisticated, yet naïve. A marvellous compound is this musical comedy, in which the music follows the text, and no concessions are made to the singers or to the time-honored conventions of the operatic stage. Verdi has thrown overboard old forms and planted his victorious standard in the country discovered by Mozart and conquered by Wagner. A marvellous old man indeed!
The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the composer to-day. The action in Falstaff is almost as rapid as if the text were spoken; and the orchestra, the wittiest and most sparkling riant orchestra I ever heard,—comments upon the monologue and dialogue of the book. When the speech becomes rhetorical, so does the orchestra. It is heightened speech, and instead of melody of the antique, formal pattern we hear the endless melody which Wagner employs. But Verdi’s speech is his own and does not savor of Wagner. If the ideas are not developed or do not assume vaster proportions, it is because of their character. They could not be so treated without doing violence to the sense of proportion. Classic purity in expression, Latin exuberance, joyfulness, and an inexpressibly delightful atmosphere of irresponsible youthfulness and gayety are all in this charming score.
We get a touch of the older style in the concerted numbers, but the handling is very free and the content Verdian and modern. Here are variety, color, freshness, earnestness, insouciance, and numberless quaint conceits. The tempo is like an arrow-shot from the bow of a classic-featured archer, whose arrows have been steeped in the burning lake of romanticism. There is melodic repetition of phrases, but it is more in the manner of Grétry than Wagner. I have called Falstaff a pendant to Die Meistersinger, and the two works, directly antithetical, are both supreme products of the Gallic and Teutonic lyric genius. And how Verdi escaped the current of his younger years! What wonderful adaptability, what receptivity, what powers of assimilation! Some future biographer will write of The Three Styles of Verdi as did de Lenz of Beethoven’s styles; perhaps he will even increase the number.
Wagner did not shed his musical skin as absolutely as this Italian. Compare the young and the old Verdi. In style to-day Falstaff is younger than Il Trovatore half a century ago. Think of La donna è mobile and then of the fugued finale to Falstaff. And remember, it is not a fugato with imitative passages, nor the fugal treatment of an ensemble finale, but a well-constructed fugue in eight real parts, with episodes, inversions of the subject, stretti, and even a pedal point. It is not so pleasing in effect as the magnificent polyphonic close of Die Meistersinger, because of its severely formal construction. It sounds as if Verdi had said, “Go to; after all this mumming and masking I will show ye that I, too, can be serious.” So he fugues the words “Tutto nel mondo è burlo,” of all words in the world for such a form! What a gay old dog he must have been! And heaven knows what jokes he had in store for us, hidden in the capacious sleeves of his genius. I am sorry that an important engagement in the Lethean fields prevented von Bülow from being present at this Falstaff performance. He had to recant his opinion of the Manzoni Requiem; but after this fugue he would have surely bent the stubborn knee of pride and prostrated himself before the Italian god of music.
No one can reproach Verdi with lack of ideas in Falstaff. They are never ending. The orchestra flows furiously, like a stream of quicksilver, tossing up repartee, argument, facts, amplifying, developing, and strengthening the text. No melody? Why, the opera is one long, merry tune—jocund, blithe, sweet, dulcet, and sunny. Few moods of melancholy, no moods of madness, but all gracious folly and fantasy.
The Honor soliloquy from Henry IV, with its pizzicati accompaniment and its No! punctuated by a drum tap, is changed into strength and sarcastic humor. When I Was a Page is another gem, and so is the chattering quartet. But why enumerate details? It is a work of which one cannot say “this and this,” it is so rich, so exuberant, so novel, and yet so learned; little wonder then that we marvel. Verdi’s musical scholarship is enormous. He paints delicate, fairylike pictures, using the most delicate pigments and with the daintiest touch imaginable; and then he pens a severe and truthful canon in the second which excites the admiration of the scholar. The minuet is an echo of old time, but how superlatives pale before the wealth of rhythms, modes, subtle tonalities, simple diatonic effects contrasted with gorgeous, sonorous orchestral bursts! And it must not be forgotten that both composer and librettist have caught the true Shakespearean note. The corpulent knight, despite his braggadocio humor, lechery, and gluttony, is a gentleman born, although sadly run to seed because of sack and petticoats. The glamour of the revel at Herne’s Oak, the street scene at dusk, with the gossiping of the women, and the clear, fresh air,—and there is no attempt at Purcell madrigals, English local color,—all these prove Verdi’s sympathy; also that music is a universal language and that an Italian poet-composer may faithfully frame the story of an English dramatist.