In comparison with painting and sculpture, music and the literature of the theatre are not self-sufficing arts. They require an interpreter. Before a dramatic work can exist completely, scenery, and actors to give it voice and gesture, are necessary; before music can be anything more than hieroglyphics, the signs must be transmuted into sound by singers or instrumentalists. Wagner embodied this truth in his pathetic reference to Lohengrin: “When ill, miserable and despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin, which I had totally forgotten. Suddenly I felt something like compassion lest the music might never sound from off the death-pale paper.” In other words, Lohengrin, though finished in every detail, was merely potential music. To make it anything more, the aid of singers and orchestra are essential.
Composers and dramatic authors, in fact, create their art-works; but it is their interpreters—actors, singers, instrumentalists—who animate them, who breathe life into them. One of the inevitable consequences is, that the composer’s ideal can never be fully attained.
But changes in performance from the printed text of a composition are frequently the work of the composer himself. If really an artist, he is rarely perfectly satisfied with his completed work. The difference between his ideal and his materialization of it, is a source of anguish for him. The journey made by a vision of art from the brain that conceives it to the hand that imprisons it in marble, or depicts it in colour, or pens it in words or music, is a long one. And much grace or power, beauty or grandeur, is inevitably lost on the way. This is the explanation of the disappointment of all true artists with their creations. This is the origin of their endless strivings to perfect their works; the first embodiment is not a perfect interpretation of the artist’s inspiration, and further reflection has revealed to him an improvement. The process is endless.
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what is Heaven for?
If one wishes to surprise genius labouring to give birth to perfection, one should consult the later editions of Victor Hugo’s works and note the countless emendations he made after their first publication—here a more fitting word substituted, there a line recast, elsewhere an entire verse added, or excised, or remodelled.
This work of incessant revision is not restricted to poets. Composers of genius are also inveterate strivers after perfection, are continually occupied in polishing and revising their music. And not all the modifications they make, or sanction, are recorded in the printed versions. For many are the outcome of after-thoughts, of ideas suggested during the process of what I have called transmuting musical hieroglyphics into sound. Such modifications, usually decided upon in the course of a rehearsal—I am now considering particularly operatic works—are frequently jotted down, a mere scanty memorandum, on the singer’s part or the conductor’s score. But they are the work of the composer, or have received his approval, and, although not noted in the printed editions of his compositions, are transmitted orally from conductor to conductor, singer to singer, master to pupil. And thus a tradition is perpetuated.
But the question of changes goes even further.
Prior to the advent of Wagner, the singer was allowed great license in operatic works. This license was principally manifested in a two-fold form. The first is called pointage (French), puntatura (Italian), and means the changing of the notes or contour of a musical phrase; the second is termed changements or variantes (Fr.), abbellimenti or fioriture (It.), and refers to the interpolation and addition of ornaments, i.e., embellishments and cadenzas.