For material for new compositions in which the new creed could be exploited, ballet-master, musician and painter turned unanimously to the legendary lore of Russia and Persia, the intervening land of the Caucasus, and the near-by realm of Egypt. Strange new plots they found; plots of savagery, passion, and mystery. While dancers translated lofty motives into choral and solo steps, musicians worked with mad zeal to render them into tone and tempo. New music was composed, old was seized with avid hand and pounded into its appointed place in the new romantic structure. Bakst—and other painters allied with him—revelled, now in a deep and ominous palette that should spell mystery, again in ardent and seemingly impossible harmonies that sang wild opulence.
In short, the secessionists had attained to a point that marked nothing less, and something more, than a re-creation of the mimetic drama of the best days of Athens. They had achieved that at which the early patrons of opera had consciously but unsuccessfully aimed. The Russian achievement is not to be measured except by a glance back into history.
In the great spaces of the Greek outdoor theatres, actors found their voices inadequate. In consequence, we must accept as essentially true the belief that dramatic representation underwent a more or less definite division into two forms. One body, complying with the world-old demand for explanatory statement to accompany dramatic action, adopted a device to magnify the voice; that device was a small megaphone, concealed by means of a mask. To the unimaginative audience, the resulting falsification of the voice was not objectionable. That species of audience, to this day, is deaf and blind to the message of quality or to delight in it. Its interest centres on narrative and it welcomes diagrammatic aid to its understanding of that narrative. The mask, therefore, was rather satisfying than otherwise to the patrons of the drama that it typified. In labelling character, it was a boon to the intellectually toothless; to whom, moreover, its immobility of expression would not be offensive. That the spoken drama was the popular form, the mimo-drama the aristocrat, seems an unavoidable inference.
To artists and audience versed in the language of symbol, as opposed to imitation; of suggestion, as opposed to diagram; of abstraction, as opposed to material fact—to such performers and connoisseurs the vastness of stage and auditorium presented no inconvenience whatever. To both performer and auditor, the eloquence of pose, step and gesture was sufficient. Indeed, we may suppose that they regarded the spoken word as limiting, rather than amplifying, the meaning of the action it accompanied. The high-heeled cothurnus the pantomimist avoided, for the sake of perfect freedom of foot. To him was open the full resource of facial expression, posture and dance. All of these means, in whole or in part, were denied the wearer of mask and cothurnus.
Rome, consistent with its own level of artistic mentality, chose the less imaginative of the Greek forms. It follows that Greek popular drama is identical with the so-called classic Roman drama.
When the originators of opera set themselves, in the seventeenth century, to the task of recreating a classic form, it is a matter of record that they turned to Rome for their model.