A Second Book of Operas Part 3

She awaits him whom pa.s.sion has made her slave in full confidence of her hold upon him.

Samson, recherchant ma presence, Ce soir doit venir en ces lieux.

Voici l'heure de la vengeance Qui doit satisfaire nos dieux!

Amour! viens aider ma faiblesse!

The vengeance of her G.o.ds shall be glutted; it is to that end she invokes the power of love to strengthen her weakness. A pa.s.sion like his will not down--that she knows. To her comes the High Priest: Samson's strength, he says, is supernatural and flows from a vow with which he was consecrated to effect the glory of Israel. Once while he lay in her arms that strength had deserted him, but now, it is said, he flouts her love and doubts his own pa.s.sion. There is no need to try to awaken

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

jealousy in the heart of Dalila; she hates Samson more bitterly than the leader of his enemies. She is not mercenary, like the Biblical woman; she scorns the promise of riches which the High Priest offers so she obtain the secret of the Hebrew's strength. Thrice had she essayed to learn that secret and thrice had he set her spell at naught. Now she will a.s.sail him with tears--a woman's weapon.

The rumblings of thunder are heard; the scene is lit up by flashes of lightning. Running before the storm, which is only a precursor and a symbol of the tempest which is soon to rend his soul, Samson comes.

Dalila upbraids her lover, rebukes his fears, protests her grief.

Samson cannot withstand her tears. He confesses his love, but he must obey the will of a higher power. "What G.o.d is mightier than Love?" Let him but doubt her constancy and she will die. And she plays her trump card: "Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix," while the fluttering strings and cooing wood-winds insinuate themselves into the crevices of Samson's moral harness and loosen the rivets that hold it together:--

[figure: a musical score excerpt to the words "My heart, at thy dear voice"]

Herein lies the strength and the weakness of music: it must fain be truthful. Dalila's words may be hypocritical, but the music speaks the speech of genuine pa.s.sion. Not until we hear the refrain echoed mockingly in the last scene of the drama can we believe that the pa.s.sion hymned in this song is feigned. And we almost deplore hat the composer put it to such disgraceful use. Samson hears the voice of his G.o.d in the growing and again hesitates. The storm bursts as Dalila shrieks out the hate that fills her and runs toward her dwelling.

Beethoven sought to suggest external as well as internal peace in the "Dona n.o.bis" of his Ma.s.s in D by mingling the sounds of war with the prayer for peace; Saint-Saens pictures the storm in nature and in Samson's soul by the music which accompanies the hero as he raises his hands mutely in prayer; then follows the temptress with faltering steps and enters her dwelling. The tempest reaches its climax; Dalila appears at the window with a shout to the waiting Philistine soldiery below.

The voice of Samson cuts through the stormy night: "Trahison!"

Act III.--First scene: A prison in Gaza. Samson, shorn of his flowing locks, which as a Nazarite he had vowed should never be touched by shears, labors at the mill. He has been robbed of his eyes and darkness has settled down upon him; darkness, too, upon the people whom his momentary weakness had given back into slavery.

"Total eclipse!" Saint-Saens has won our admiration for the solemn dignity with which he has invested the penitent confession of the blind hero. But who shall hymn the blindness of Manoah's son after Milton and Handel? From a crowd of captive Hebrews outside the prison walls come taunting accusations, mingled with supplications to G.o.d. We recognize again the national mood of the psalmody of the first act. The entire scene is finely conceived. It is dramatic in a lofty sense, for its action plays on the stage of the heart. Samson, contrite, humble, broken in spirit, with a prayer for his people's deliverance, is led away to be made sport of in the temple of Dagon. There, before the statue of the G.o.d, grouped among the columns and before the altar the High Priest and the lords of the Philistines. Dalila, too, with maidens clad for the lascivious dance, and the mult.i.tude of Philistia. The women's choral song to spring which charmed us in the first act is echoed by mixed voices. The ballet which follows is a prettily exotic one, with an introductory cadence marked by the Oriental scale, out of which the second dance melody is constructed--a scale which has the peculiarity of an interval composed of three semitones, and which we know from the song of the priestesses in Verdi's "Aida":--

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

The High Priest makes mock of the Judge of Israel: Let him empty the wine cup and sing the praise of his vanquisher! Dalila, in the pride of her triumph, tauntingly tells him how simulated love had been made to serve her G.o.ds, her hate, and her nation. Samson answers only in contrite prayer. Together in canonic imitation (the erudite form does not offend, but only gives dignity to the scene) priest and siren offer a libation on the altar of the Fish G.o.d.

[figure: a musical score excerpt]

The flames flash upward from the altar. Now a supreme act of insolent impiety; Samson, too, shall sacrifice to Dagon. A boy is told to lead him where all can witness his humiliation. Samson feels that the time for retribution upon his enemies is come. He asks to be led between the marble pillars that support the roof of the temple. Priests and people, the traitress and her dancing women, the lords of the Philistines, the rout of banqueters and worshippers--all hymn the praise of Dagon. A brief supplication to Israel's G.o.d--

"And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand and of the other with his left.

"And Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines.' And he bowed himself with all his might: and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life."

CHAPTER V

"DIE KONIGIN VON SABA"

The most obvious reason why Goldmark's "Konigin von Saba" should be seen and heard with pleasure lies in its book and scenic invest.i.ture.

Thoughtfully considered the book is not one of great worth, but in the handling of things which give pleasure to the superficial observer it is admirable. In the first place it presents a dramatic story which is rational; which strongly enlists the interest if not the sympathies of the observer; which is unhackneyed; which abounds with imposing spectacles with which the imagination of childhood already had made play, that are not only intrinsically brilliant and fascinating but occur as necessary adjuncts of the story. Viewed from its ethical side and considered with reference to the sources whence its elements sprang, it falls under a considerable measure of condemnation, as will more plainly appear after its incidents have been rehea.r.s.ed.

The t.i.tle of the opera indicates that the Biblical story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon had been drawn on for the plot. This is true, but only in a slight degree. Sheba's Queen comes to Solomon in the opera, but that is the end of the draft on the Scriptural legend so far as she is concerned. Sulamith, who figures in the drama, owes her name to the Canticles, from which it was borrowed by the librettist, but no element of her character nor any of the incidents in which she is involved. The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's" contributes a few lines of poetry to the book, and a ritualistic service which is celebrated in the temple finds its original text in the opening verses of Psalms lxvii and cxvii, but with this I have enumerated all that the opera owes to the Bible. It is not a Biblical opera, in the degree that Mehul's "Joseph," Rossini's "Moses," or Rubinstein's "Maccabees" is Biblical, to say nothing of Saint-Saens's "Samson et Dalila." Solomon's magnificent reign and marvellous wisdom, which contribute a few factors to the sum of the production, belong to profane as well as to sacred history and it will be found most agreeable to deeply rooted preconceptions to think of some other than the Scriptural Solomon as the prototype of the Solomon of Mosenthal and Goldmark, who, at the best, is a sorry sort of sentimentalist. The local color has been borrowed from the old story; the dramatic motive comes plainly from Wagner's "Tannhauser."

a.s.sad, a favorite courtier, is sent by Solomon to extend greetings and a welcome to the Queen of Sheba, who is on the way to visit the king, whose fame for wealth and wisdom has reached her ears in far Arabia.

a.s.sad is the type (though a milk-and-watery one, it must be confessed) of manhood struggling between the things that are of the earth and the things which are of heaven--between a gross, sensual pa.s.sion and a pure, exalting love. He is betrothed to Sulamith, the daughter of the High Priest of the temple, who awaits his return from Solomon's palace and leads her companions in songs of gladness. a.s.sad meets the Queen at Gath, performs his mission, and sets out to return, but, exhausted by the heat of the day, enters the forest on Mount Lebanon and lies down on a bank of moss to rest. There the sound of plashing waters arrests his ear. He seeks the cause of the grateful noise and comes upon a transportingly beautiful woman bathing. The nymph, finding herself observed, does not, like another Diana, cause the death of her admirer, but discloses herself to be a veritable Wagnerian Venus. She clips him in her arms and he falls at her feet; but a reed rustles and the charmer flees. These incidents we do not see. They precede the opening of the opera, and we learn of them from a.s.sad's narration. a.s.sad returns to Jerusalem, where, conscience stricken, he seeks to avoid his chaste bride. To Solomon, however, he confesses his adventure, and the king sets the morrow as his wedding day with Sulamith.

The Queen of Sheba arrives, and when she raises her veil, ostensibly to show unto Solomon the first view of her features that mortal man has ever had vouchsafed him, a.s.sad recognizes the heroine of his adventure in the woods on Lebanon. His mind is in a maze; bewilderingly he addresses her, and haughtily he is repulsed. But the woman has felt the dart no less than a.s.sad; she seeks him at night in the palace garden; whither she had gone to brood over her love and the loss which threatens her on the morrow, and the luring song of her slave draws him again into her arms.

Before the altar in the temple, just as a.s.sad is about to p.r.o.nounce the words which are to bind him to Sulamith, she confronts him again, on the specious pretext that she brings gifts for the bride. a.s.sad again addresses her. Again he is denied. Delirium seizes upon his brain; he loudly proclaims the Queen as the G.o.ddess of his devotion. The people are panic-stricken at the sacrilege and rush from the temple; the priests cry anathema; Sulamith bemoans her fate; Solomon essays words of comfort; the High Priest intercedes with heaven; the soldiery, led by Baal-Hanan, overseer of the palace, enter to lead the profaner to death. Now Solomon claims the right to fix his punishment. The Queen, fearful that her prey may escape her, begs his life as a boon, but Solomon rejects her appeal; a.s.sad must work out his salvation by overcoming temptation and mastering his wicked pa.s.sion. Sulamith approaches amid the wailings of her companions. She is about to enter a retreat on the edge of the Syrian desert, but she, too, prays for the life of a.s.sad. Solomon, in a prophetic ecstasy, foretells a.s.sad's deliverance from sin and in a vision sees a meeting between him and his pure love under a palm tree in the desert. a.s.sad is banished to the sandy waste; there a simoom sweeps down upon him; he falls at the foot of a lonely palm to die, after calling on Sulamith with his fleeting breath. She comes with her wailing maidens, sees the fulfilment of Solomon's prophecy, and a.s.sad dies in her arms. "Thy beloved is thine, in love's eternal realm," sing the maidens, while a mirage shows the wicked Queen, with her caravan of camels and elephants, returning to her home.

The parallel between this story and the immeasurably more poetical and beautiful one of "Tannhauser" is apparent to half an eye. Sulamith is Elizabeth, the Queen is Venus, a.s.sad is Tannhauser, Solomon is Wolfram von Eschenbach. The ethical force of the drama--it has some, though very little--was weakened at the performances at the Metropolitan Opera House [footnote: Goldmark's opera was presented for the first time in America at the Metropolitan Opera House on December 2, 1885. Cast: Sulamith, Fraulein Lilli Lehmann; die Konigin von Saba, Frau Kramer-Wiedl; Astaroth, Fraulein Marianne Brandt; Solomon, Herr Adolph Robinson; a.s.sad, Herr Stritt; Der Hohe Priester, Herr Emil Fischer; Baal-Hanan, Herr-Alexi. Anton Seidl conducted, and the opera had fifteen representations in the season. These performances were in the original German. On April 3, 1888, an English version was presented at the Academy of Music by the National Opera Company, then in its death throes. The opera was revived at the Metropolitan Opera House by Mr.

Conried in the season 1905-1906 and had five performances.] in New York by the excision from the last act of a scene in which the Queen attempts to persuade a.s.sad to go with her to Arabia. Now a.s.sad rises superior to his grosser nature and drives the temptress away, thus performing the saving act demanded by Solomon.

Herr Mosenthal, who made the libretto of "Die Konigin von Saba,"

treated this material, not with great poetic skill, but with a cunning appreciation of the opportunities which it offers for dramatic effect.

The opera opens with a gorgeous picture of the interior of Solomon's palace, decked in honor of the coming guest. There is an air of joyous expectancy over everything. Sulamith's entrance introduces the element of female charm to brighten the brilliancy of the picture, and her bridal song--in which the refrain is an excerpt from the Canticles, "Thy beloved is thine, who feeds among the roses"--enables the composer to indulge his strong predilection and fecund gift for Oriental melody.

The action hurries to a thrilling climax. One glittering pageant treads on the heels of another, each more gorgeous and resplendent than the last, until the stage, set to represent a fantastical hall with a bewildering vista of carved columns, golden lions, and rich draperies, is filled with such a kaleidoscopic ma.s.s of colors and groupings as only an Oriental mind could conceive. Finally all the preceding strokes are eclipsed by the coming of the Queen. But no time is lost; the spectacle does not make the action halt for a moment. Sheba makes her gifts and uncovers her face, and at once we are confronted by the tragical element, and the action rushes on toward its legitimate and mournful end.

In this ingenious blending of play and spectacle one rare opportunity after another is presented to the composer. Sulamith's epithalamium, a.s.sad's narrative, the choral greeting to the Queen, the fateful recognition--all these things are made for music of the inspiring, swelling, pa.s.sionate kind. In the second act, the Queen's monologue, her duet with a.s.sad, and, most striking of all, the unaccompanied bit of singing with which Astaroth lures a.s.sad into the presence of the Queen, who is hiding in the shadow of broad-leaved palms behind a running fountain--a melodic phrase saturated with the mystical color of the East--these are gifts of the rarest kind to the composer, which he has enriched to give them in turn to the public. That relief from their stress of pa.s.sion is necessary is not forgotten, but is provided in the ballet music and the solemn ceremonial in the temple, which takes place amid surroundings that call into active operation one's childhood fancies touching the sacred fane on Mount Moriah and the pompous liturgical functions of which it was the theatre.

Goldmark's music is highly spiced. He was an eclectic, and his first aim seems to have been to give the drama a tonal invest.i.ture which should be in keeping with its character, external as well as internal.

At times his music rushes along like a lava stream of pa.s.sion, every measure pulsating with eager, excited, and exciting life. He revels in instrumental color. The language of his orchestra is as glowing as the poetry attributed to the royal poet whom his operatic story celebrates.

Many composers before him made use of Oriental cadences, rhythms, and idioms, but to none do they seem to have come so like native language as to Goldmark. It is romantic music, against which the strongest objection that can be urged is that it is so unvaryingly stimulated that it wearies the mind and makes the listener long for a change to a fresher and healthier musical atmosphere.

CHAPTER VI

"HERODIADE"

In the ballet scene of Gounod's most popular opera Mephistopheles conjures up visions of Phryne, Lais, Aspasia, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy to beguile the jaded interest of Faust. The list reads almost like a catalogue of the operas of Ma.s.senet whose fine talent was largely given to the celebration of the famous courtesans of the ancient world.

With the addition of a few more names from the roster of antiquity (Thais, Dalila, and Aphrodite), and some less ancient but no less immoral creatures of modern fancy, like Violetta, Manon Lescaut, Zaza, and Louise, we might make a pretty complete list of representatives of the female type in which modern dramatists and composers seem to think the interest of humanity centres.

When Ma.s.senet's "Herodiade" was announced as the first opera to be given at the Manhattan Opera House in New York for the season of 1909-1910 it looked to some observers as if the dominant note of the year was to be sounded by the Scarlet Woman; but the representation brought a revelation and a surprise. The names of the princ.i.p.al characters were those which for a few years had been filling the lyric theatres of Germany with a moral stench; but their bearers in Ma.s.senet's opera did little or nothing that was especially shocking to good taste or proper morals. Herod was a love-sick man of l.u.s.t, who gazed with longing eyes upon the physical charms of Salome and pleaded for her smiles like any sentimental milksop; but he did not offer her Capernaum for a dance. Salome may have known how, but she did not dance for either half a kingdom or the whole of a man's head. Instead, though there were intimations that her reputation was not all that a good maiden's ought to be, she sang pious hosannahs and waved a palm branch conspicuously in honor of the prophet at whose head she had bowled herself in the desert, the public streets, and king's palaces. At the end she killed herself when she found that the vengeful pa.s.sion of Herodias and the jealous hatred of Herod had compa.s.sed the death of the saintly man whom she had loved. Herodias was a wicked woman, no doubt, for John the Baptist denounced her publicly as a Jezebel, but her jealousy of Salome had reached a point beyond her control before she learned that her rival was her own daughter whom she had deserted for love of the Tetrarch. As for John the Baptist the camel's hair with which he was clothed must have cost as pretty a penny as any of the modern kind, and if he wore a girdle of skins about his loins it was concealed under a really regal cloak. He was a voice; but not one crying in the wilderness. He was in fact an operatic tenor comme il faut, who needed only to be shut up in a subterranean jail with the young woman who had pursued him up hill and down dale, in and out of season to make love to her in the most approved fashion of the Paris Grand Opera.

What shall we think of the morals of this French opera, after we have seen and heard that compounded by the Englishman Oscar Wilde and the German Richard Strauss? No wonder that England's Lord Chamberlain asked nothing more than an elimination of the Biblical names when he licensed a performance of "Herodiade" at Covent Garden. There was no loss of dramatic quality in calling Herod, Moriame, and Herodias, Hesotade, and changing the scene from Jerusalem to Azoum in Ethiopia; though it must have been a trifle diverting to hear fair-skinned Ethiopians singing Schma Yisroel, Adonai Elohenu in a temple which could only be that of Jerusalem. John the Baptist was only Jean in the original and needed not to be changed, and Salome is not in the Bible, though Salome, a very different woman is--a fact which the Lord Chamberlain seems to have overlooked when he changed the t.i.tle of the opera from "Herodiade"

to "Salome."

Where does Salome come from, anyway? And where did she get her chameleonlike nature? Was she an innocent child, as Flaubert represents her, who could but lisp the name of the prophet when her mother told her to ask for his head? Had she taken dancing lessons from one of the women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have danced to excite such l.u.s.t in Herod? Was she a monster, a worse than vampire as she is represented by Wilde and Strauss? Was she an "Israelitish grisette" as Pougin called the heroine of the opera which it took one Italian (Zanardini) and three Frenchmen (Milliet, Gremont, and Ma.s.senet) to concoct? No wonder that the brain of Saint-Saens reeled when he went to hear "Herodiade" at its first performance in Brussels and found that the woman whom he had looked upon as a type of lasciviousness and monstrous cruelty had become metamorphosed into a penitent Magdalen.

Read the plot of the opera and wonder!

Salome is a maiden in search of her mother whom John the Baptist finds in his wanderings and befriends. She clings to him when he becomes a political as well as a religious power among the Jews, though he preaches unctuously to her touching the vanity of earthly love.

Herodias demands his death of her husband for that he had publicly insulted her, but Herod schemes to use his influence over the Jews to further his plan to become a real monarch instead of a Roman Tetrarch.

But when the pro-consul Vitellius wins the support of the people and Herod learns that the maiden who has spurned him is in love with the prophet, he decrees his decapitation. Salome, baffled in her effort to save her lover, attempts to kill Herodias; but the wicked woman discloses herself as the maiden's mother and Salome turns the dagger against her own breast.

This is all of the story one needs to know. It is richly garnished with incident, made gorgeous with pageantry, and clothed with much charming music. Melodies which may be echoes of synagogal hymns of great antiquity resound in the walls of the temple at Jerusalem, in which respect the opera recalls Goldmark's "Queen of Sheba." Curved Roman trumpets mix their loud clangors with the instruments of the modern bra.s.s band and compel us to think of "Aida." There are dances of Egyptians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians, and if the movements of the women make us deplore the decay of the ch.o.r.eographic art, the music warms us almost as much as the Spanish measures in "Le Cid." Eyes and ears are deluged with Oriental color until at the last there comes a longing for the graciously insinuating sentimentalities of which the earlier Ma.s.senet was a master. Two of the opera's airs had long been familiar to the public from performance in the concert-room--Salome's "Il est doux" and Herod's "Vision fugitive"--and they stand out as the brightest jewels in the opera's musical crown; but there is much else which woos the ear delightfully, for Ma.s.senet was ever a gracious if not a profound melodist and a master of construction and theatrical orchestration. When he strives for ma.s.sive effects, however, he sometimes becomes futile, ba.n.a.l where he would be imposing; but he commands a charm which is insinuating in its moments of intimacy.