[63] Arthur Symons, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
[64] Dannreuther, ‘Beethoven,’ Macmillan’s Magazine, July, 1876.
[65] Richard Wagner, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
CHAPTER V
OPERATIC DEVELOPMENT IN ITALY AND FRANCE
Italian opera at the advent of Rossini—Rossini and the Italian operatic renaissance; Guillaume Tell—Donizetti and Bellini—Spontini and the historical opera—Meyerbeer’s life and works—His influence and followers—Development of opéra comique; Auber, Hérold, Adam.
Operatic development in Italy and France during the first half of the nineteenth century represents, broadly speaking, the development of the romantic ideal by Rossini and Meyerbeer; a breaking away from classic and traditional forms; and the growth of individual freedom in musical expression. Rossini, as shown by subsequent detailed consideration of his works and the reforms they introduced, overthrows the time-honored operatic conventions of his day and breathes new life into Italian dramatic art. Spontini, ‘the last great classicist of the lyric stage,’ nevertheless forecasts French grand opera in his extensive historical scores. And French grand opera (as will be shown) is established as a definite type, and given shape and coherence by Rossini in Tell, by Meyerbeer in Robert, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, and l’Africaine.
In this period the classical movement, interpreting in a manner the general trend of musical feeling in the eighteenth century, merges into the romantic movement, expressing that of the nineteenth. A widespread, independent rather than interdependent, musical activity in many directions at one and the same time explains such apparent contradictions as Beethoven and Rossini, Schubert, Cherubini, Spontini, Weber and Meyerbeer, all creating simultaneously. To understand the operatic reforms of Rossini and their later development a résumé of the leading characteristics of the Italian opera of his day is necessary.
As is usually the case when an art-form has in the course of time crystallized into conventional formulas, a revolution of some sort was imminent in Italian opera at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In France Gluck had already banished from his scores the dreary recitativo secco, and extended the use of the chorus. The opéra comique had come to stay, finding its most notable exponents in Grétry, Méhul, and Boieldieu. Cherubini’s nobly classic but cold and formal scores gave enjoyment to a capital which has at nearly all times been independent and self-sufficient. Mozart, in Zauberflöte, had already unlocked for Germany the sacred treasures of national art, and Weber,[66] following the general trend of German poetry and fiction, had inaugurated the romantic opera, a musical complement of the romantic literary movement, to which he gave its finest and fullest expression. Utilizing fairy tale and legend, he had secured for opera ‘a wider stage and an ampler air,’ and no longer relegating the beauties of Nature to the background, but treating them as an integral part of his artistic scheme, he laid the foundation upon which was eventually to rise the modern lyric drama.
But in Italy, beyond innate refinement of thought and grace of style, the composers whose names are identified with what was best in opera during the closing years of the eighteenth century had nothing to say. Cimarosa, Paesiello, Piccini (the one-time rival of Gluck) were prolific writers of the sort of melodious opera which had once delighted all Europe and still enchanted the opera-mad populace of Naples, Florence, Rome, and Venice. They had need to be prolific at a time when, as Burney says, an opera already heard was ‘like a last year’s almanac,’ and when Venice alone could boast thirteen opera houses, public and private. Each had to compose unremittingly, sometimes three or even four operas a year, and it is hardly surprising that their works, for all their charm, were thin and conventional in orchestration, and had but scant variety of melodic line. The development of the symphonic forms of aria and ensemble by Mozart, the enlargement of the orchestra, and the exaggerated fondness for virtuoso singing encouraged these defects, and gave these Italian composers ‘prosaically golden opportunities of lifting spectators and singers to the seventh heaven of flattered vanity.’ There was little or no connection between the music and its drama. Speaking generally, the operatic ideals of Italy were those of old Galuppi, who, when asked to define good music, replied: ‘Vaghezza, chiarezza e buona modulazione’ (vagueness, tenderness, and good modulation).