Overtones, a book of temperaments

by James Huneker

And with what a light hand and vivacity of speech Verdi has done it! Miracles of construction there are, but the grim bones of theory are never exposed. Even the fugue is jaunty. The love element peeps archly out behind the puffed mask of humor; the note is never deep, just a sigh, and it has departed before you can fairly grasp its beauty. The duos are all charming, and—but what boots idle cataloguing? Its beauties should have become patent to our opera-going public and the work a favorite long ago. “Après moi, le deluge,” said the Wagnerites of the great Richard. “After Wagner, Verdi!” some may explain. Falstaff suggests, of course, Victor Maurel, and our debt of gratitude for his vital and sympathetic interpretations is great. Is there an actor on any stage to-day who can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago? I doubt it. Making all due allowances for the different art medium the singing actor must work in, despite the slight exaggeration of pose and gesture, Maurel had no superior, if indeed an equal, in these two rôles. And then the man’s astonishing versatility! What method, what manner of training has he had? Of what school or schools is he the crystallized product? His voice, worn and siccant, seemed to take on any hue he desired. In Falstaff, you may remember, it was bullying, blandishing, defiant, tender, and gross; full of impure suggestiveness, as jolly as a boon companion. And when he sang “Quando ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk,” how his vocal horizon lighted up!

The brainlessness of Verdi’s music previous to the time when Aïda was composed should not close our eyes to the promise and potency of that same early music. It is the music of a passionate Italian temperament—music hastily conceived, still more speedily jotted down, and tumbled anyhow on the stage. Musical Italy before 1880 was devoted to the voice. Give it a plank, a dramatic situation, an aria, and success pursued the composer. As for the dramatic unities, the orchestral commentary, the welding of action, story, and music—why, they could all go hang. Melody, irrelevant, fatuous, trivial melody, and again melody, was the shibboleth. The wonder is that an orchestra was ever employed—except that it made more noise than a piano player; that costumes were ever worn—only because they looked braver, gayer, in the flare of the footlights than street attire. And most wonderful of all was the expense of a theatre, for to those melomaniacs anything but a tune was a deterrent factor. The singer and the song sung composed an opera. All the rest was sheer waste of material—or Teutonic madness.

Verdi’s acquaintance with Arrigo Boïto was the turning-point in his career. He knew Boïto’s far better than he knew Wagner’s scores. If he was affected at all by Wagnerism, it was by way of Boïto and not at first hand. I am not prepared to deny that Verdi ever listened to the Ring, to Tristan, or to Die Meistersinger in its entirety sung by competent throats; yet I sincerely doubt it. The Italian’s early music is full of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Meyerbeer. He could not, being of a receptive nature, have escaped Wagner had he known him thoroughly. He was a very suspicious, proud old man,—as proud of I Due Foscari as of Aïda,—and almost to the day of his death deprecated Wagner’s influence on modern opera. To see, then, as do many wise men of music, Wagner peering sardonically from behind the lively and exciting bars of Verdi’s later scores, is to claim a clairvoyance to which I dare not pretend.

Take any of Verdi’s operas previous to those of 1850, and what do we get? A string of passionate tunes bracketed in the conventional cavatina-cabaletta style; little attempt at following the book—such awful books!—and the orchestra, a huge strumming machine, strumming without color, appositeness, rhyme, or reason. And then the febrile, simian-like restlessness of the music. It was written for people of little musical intelligence, people who must hum a tune or ever after view it with contempt. Verdi could furnish tunes by the hundred—real, vital, dramatic ones. Think of the waste, the saddening waste, of material made by the young maestro in Oberto, Nabucco, I Lombardi, Ernani, I Due Foscari, Attila, Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and I Masnadieri! If he could have but saved them for his latter days—for his so-called third period! I know that your early Verdian refuses to consider the later music. He even listens to Aïda under protest. In it lurks the Wagnerian Wurm that in Otello and Falstaff stings to death the melodic genius of the venerable master. Now, I quarrel with no man’s artistic tastes. It were a futile proceeding. If you love Rigoletto better than Otello, I have no objection to make. I cannot bring any argument to bear upon you, for I am not a special pleader in matters musical. As well try to convince a man who asserts that Dumas père is a greater novelist than Flaubert. Yet I enjoy certain moments in Rigoletto, just as I think The Three Guardsmen rattling good reading. But to call either the opera or the romance great art is to mix your critical values.

Verdi was not by nature a reformer. A man of sensual gifts in the way of music-making, a born dramatizer of anything from an antique ruin to a murder, he took up the operatic form as he found it and did not seek to develop it. But he poured into its ancient, honorable, and somewhat shaky mould stuff of a stirring nature—and also an amazing amount of it. Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love, fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical pot-boilers. I have always admired Rossini’s musical laziness. Once rich, he refused to compose any more. As his facility was on a par with his lack of artistic conscience, the thought of the amount he might have left makes one shudder. But luckily he was content to give us—not to mention any of the others—The Barber of Seville, a masterpiece pure and undefiled.

Verdi, also lacking an artistic conscience, and without high artistic ideals, produced operas as indefatigably as incubators chickens. Naturally such music perished early, and his failures more than balance his successes. He made money, an enormous amount; he was probably the richest composer that ever drove a pen. The usual fate has overtaken the early music, while even Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata no longer draw unless sung by an “all star” cast. I pass over the Manzoni Requiem of 1874. It was too near the Aïda epoch to make a great forward step. Otello, in 1887, set the musical world mad with surprise, curiosity, delight. It reveals little or none of the narrow, noisy, vulgar, and violent Verdi of 1850. The character-drawing is done by a man who is master of his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor, and the musical psychology is often subtle. At last Verdi has flowered. His other music, smelling ranker of the soil, showing more thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello all musical provincialisms have vanished; the writing is clear, the passion more controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The master craft of Iago is set over against the fiery, nerve-shaking passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested, withal a very Italian one.

Falstaff was a second surprise. How an old graybeard of eighty could have conceived such music is only to be explained by the young heart of the man, by his sweetly healthy nature, his Latin frugality in living. He was ever a taciturn man, a stoic, not an epicurean. As an index to his character his music is often misleading. Add to these qualities the beautiful friendship of Arrigo Boïto, from which came a libretto, and the sum total is a setting of Shakespeare’s comedy such as the world has never seen. Here again Wagner had less to do with the matter than is supposed. In the musical dialogue Verdi patterned after Die Meistersinger, for the emotion ever follows the text. From Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville he absorbed no little of gay sunshine and effervescence. But his form is his own; it grew out of the situations of the play, and was not a procrustean bed of theory upon which the composer stretched his characters. It is laughing and joyous, this comedy of an octogenarian. It fairly ripples with the humor of the Fat Knight. There are no leading motives in the Wagnerian sense, though every character is outlined with precision.

Now, I assert that Arrigo Boïto helped all this, stimulated a young-old man to conquer new and more fruitful provinces. And Boïto, who built two of the best librettos we know, certainly influenced Verdi in his study of instrumentation. Compare Rigoletto and Otello orchestrally! The advance is remarkable, all things being considered. And at Verdi’s years! I suspect that Verdi made the sketches, which Boïto transformed into painted pictures; just as I discern, as can any one with ears, the intellectual characteristics in common between Mefistofele and Iago’s monologues. Yet Verdi is true Verdi to the last.

Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata have one cardinal merit, in addition to their miracles of mellifluousness—they prefigure the later Verdi, the thinking Verdi, the truer musical dramatist. In regarding these we again encounter critical superciliousness of the most pronounced type. The neo-Verdians will have none of the middle-century Verdi—forgetting that no man may lift himself to the stars by his own bootstraps. Verdi offers a fine picture of crawling, creeping evolution. I confess that I believe the man would have stuck at Don Carlos, Sicilian Vespers, Araldo, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and the rest of the reactionary stuff, had it not been for the masterful influence of Boïto, himself a composer. Boïto helped Verdi to scramble upon the shoulders of Verdi, compelled the Verdi of 1887 to forget the Verdi of 1871.

Aïda is pointed out as the great turn in the style of the composer. It is fuller of Meyerbeerisms than any opera composed since L’Africaine, as full as is Rienzi. Indeed, I doubt if Aïda would have been born had not L’Africaine preceded it. The resemblance to Meyerbeer does not stop at the libretto; there is the same flamboyancy in color, the same barbaric taste for full-blown harmony and exotic tunes—not to mention the similarities in the stories. Wagner had far less to do with Aïda than Meyerbeer, though many believe the contrary. To Rigoletto, in 1851, must we go in the search for the roots of the mature Verdi. In the declamatory monologues of the hunchback jester are the germs of the more intellectual and subtle monologues of Iago and of Falstaff. Il Trovatore contains strong dramatic situations, and if the tower scene is become hackneyed, yet how well devised! In this much-admired, much-sung composition are to be found harmonic straws which indicate to the keen observer the way the musical wind was bound to blow nearly a half-century later. With Traviata Verdi made his first attempt at musical psychologizing. Banal as is the book, there is no denying the power of some of its situations. No, decidedly it will not do to overlook the Verdi of 1850. It would be building musical history without straw.