How To Listen To Music Part 14

[Sidenote: _"Il Trovatore."_]

I, myself, have known an ardent lover of music who resolutely refused to look into a libretto because, being of a lively and imaginative temperament, she preferred to construct her own plots and put her own words in the mouths of the singers. Though a constant attendant on the opera, she never knew what "Il Trovatore" was about, which, perhaps, is not so surprising after all. Doubtless the play which she had fashioned in her own mind was more comprehensible than Verdi's medley of burnt children and asthmatic dance rhythms. Madame de Stael went so far as to condemn the German composers because they "follow too closely the sense of the words," whereas the Italians, "who are truly the musicians of nature, make the air and the words conform to each other only in a general way."

[Sidenote: _The opera defended as an art-form._]

[Sidenote: _The cla.s.sic tragedy._]

Now the present generation has witnessed a revolution in operatic ideas which has lifted the poetical elements upon a plane not dreamed of when opera was merely a concert in costume, and it is no longer tolerable that it be set down as an absurdity. On the contrary, I believe that, looked at in the light thrown upon it by the history of the drama and the origin of music, the opera is completely justified as an art-form, and, in its best estate, is an entirely reasonable and highly effective entertainment. No mean place, surely, should be given in the estimation of the judicious to an art-form which aims in an equal degree to charm the senses, stimulate the emotions, and persuade the reason. This, the opera, or, perhaps I would better say the lyric drama, can be made to do as efficiently as the Greek tragedy did it, so far as the differences between the civilizations of ancient h.e.l.las and the nineteenth century will permit. The Greek tragedy was the original opera, a fact which literary study would alone have made plain even if it were not clearly of record that it was an effort to restore the ancient plays in their integrity that gave rise to the Italian opera three centuries ago.

[Sidenote: _Genesis of the Greek plays._]

Every school-boy knows now that the h.e.l.lenic plays were simply the final evolution of the dances with which the people of h.e.l.las celebrated their religious festivals. At the rustic Bacchic feasts of the early Greeks they sang hymns in honor of the wine-G.o.d, and danced on goat-skins filled with wine. He who held his footing best on the treacherous surface carried home the wine as a reward. They contended in athletic games and songs for a goat, and from this circ.u.mstance scholars have surmised we have the word tragedy, which means "goat-song." The choric songs and dances grew in variety and beauty.

Finally, somebody (tradition preserves the name of Thespis as the man) conceived the idea of introducing a simple dialogue between the strophes of the choric song. Generally this dialogue took the form of a recital of some story concerning the G.o.d whose festival was celebrating. Then when the dithyrambic song returned, it would either continue the narrative or comment on its ethical features.

[Sidenote: _Mimicry and dress._]

The merry-makers, or worshippers, as one chooses to look upon them, manifested their enthusiasm by imitating the appearance as well as the actions of the G.o.d and his votaries. They smeared themselves with wine-lees, colored their bodies black and red, put on masks, covered themselves with the skins of beasts, enacted the parts of nymphs, fauns, and satyrs, those creatures of primitive fancy, half men and half goats, who were the representatives of natural sensuality untrammelled by conventionality.

[Sidenote: _Melodrama._]

Next, somebody (Archilocus) sought to heighten the effect of the story or the dialogue by consorting it with instrumental music; and thus we find the germ of what musicians--not newspaper writers--call melodrama, in the very early stages of the drama's development.

Gradually these simple rustic entertainments were taken in hand by the poets who drew on the legendary stores of the people for subjects, branching out from the doings of G.o.ds to the doings of G.o.d-like men, the popular heroes, and developed out of them the masterpieces of dramatic poetry which are still studied with amazement, admiration, and love.

[Sidenote: _Factors in ancient tragedy._]

The dramatic factors which have been mustered in this outline are these:

1. The choric dance and song with a religious purpose.

2. Recitation and dialogue.

3. Characterization by means of imitative gestures--pantomime, that is--and dress.

4. Instrumental music to accompany the song and also the action.

[Sidenote: _Operatic elements._]

[Sidenote: _Words and music united._]

All these have been retained in the modern opera, which may be said to differ chiefly from its ancient model in the more important and more independent part which music plays in it. It will appear later in our study that the importance and independence achieved by one of the elements consorted in a work by nature composite, led the way to a revolution having for its object a restoration of something like the ancient drama. In this ancient drama and its precursor, the dithyrambic song and dance, is found a union of words and music which scientific investigation proves to be not only entirely natural but inevitable. In a general way most people are in the habit of speaking of music as the language of the emotions. The elements which enter into vocal music (of necessity the earliest form of music) are unvolitional products which we must conceive as co-existent with the beginnings of human life. Do they then antedate articulate speech? Did man sing before he spoke? I shall not quarrel with anybody who chooses so to put it.

[Sidenote: _Physiology of singing._]

Think a moment about the mechanism of vocal music. Something occurs to stir up your emotional nature--a great joy, a great sorrow, a great fear; instantly, involuntarily, in spite of your efforts to prevent it, maybe, muscular actions set in which proclaim the emotion which fills you. The muscles and organs of the chest, throat, and mouth contract or relax in obedience to the emotion. You utter a cry, and according to the state of feeling which you are in, that cry has pitch, quality (_timbre_ the singing teachers call it), and dynamic intensity. You attempt to speak, and no matter what the words you utter, the emotional drama playing on the stage of your heart is divulged.

[Sidenote: _Herbert Spencer's laws._]

The man of science observes the phenomenon and formulates its laws, saying, for instance, as Herbert Spencer has said: "All feelings are muscular stimuli;" and, "Variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling." It was the recognition of this extraordinary intimacy between the voice and the emotions which brought music all the world over into the service of religion, and provided the phenomenon, which we may still observe if we be but minded to do so, that mere tones have sometimes the sanct.i.ty of words, and must as little be changed as ancient hymns and prayers.

[Sidenote: _Invention of Italian opera._]

[Sidenote: _Musical declamation._]

The end of the sixteenth century saw a coterie of scholars, art-lovers, and amateur musicians in Florence who desired to re-establish the relationship which they knew had once existed between music and the drama. The revival of learning had made the cla.s.sic tragedy dear to their hearts. They knew that in the olden time tragedy, of which the words only have come down to us, had been musical throughout. In their efforts to bring about an intimacy between dramatic poetry and music they found that nothing could be done with the polite music of their time. It was the period of highest development in ecclesiastical music, and the climax of artificiality.

The professional musicians to whom they turned scorned their theories and would not help them; so they fell back on their own resources.

They cut the Gordian knot and invented a new style of music, which they fancied was like that used by the ancients in their stage-plays.

They abolished polyphony, or contrapuntal music, in everything except their choruses, and created a sort of musical declamation, using variations of pitch and harmonies built up on a simple ba.s.s to give emotional life to their words. In choosing their tones they were guided by observation of the vocal inflections produced in speech under stress of feeling, showing thus a recognition of the law which Herbert Spencer formulated two hundred and fifty years later.

[Sidenote: _The music of the Florentine reformers._]

[Sidenote: _The solo style, harmony, and declamation._]

[Sidenote: _Fluent recitatives._]

The music which these men produced and admired sounds to us monotonous in the extreme, for what little melody there is in it is in the choruses, which they failed to emanc.i.p.ate from the ecclesiastical art, and which for that reason were as stiff and inelastic as the music which in their controversies with the musicians they condemned with vigor. Yet within their invention there lay an entirely new world of music. Out of it came the solo style, a song with instrumental accompaniment of a kind unknown to the church composers. Out of it, too, came harmony as an independent factor in music instead of an accident of the simultaneous flow of melodies; and out of it came declamation, which drew its life from the text. The recitatives which they wrote had the fluency of spoken words and were not r.e.t.a.r.ded by melodic forms. The new style did not accomplish what its creators hoped for, but it gave birth to Italian opera and emanc.i.p.ated music in a large measure from the formalism that dominated it so long as it belonged exclusively to the composers for the church.

[Sidenote: _Predecessors of Wagner._]

[Sidenote: _Old operatic distinctions._]

[Sidenote: _Opera buffa._]

[Sidenote: _Opera seria._]

[Sidenote: _Recitative._]

Detailed study of the progress of opera from the first efforts of the Florentines to Wagner's dramas would carry us too far afield to serve the purposes of this book. My aim is to fix the att.i.tude proper, or at least useful, to the opera audience of to-day. The excursion into history which I have made has but the purpose to give the art-form a reputable standing in court, and to explain the motives which prompted the revolution accomplished by Wagner. As to the elements which compose an opera, only those need particular attention which are ill.u.s.trated in the current repertory. Unlike the opera audiences of two centuries ago, we are not required to distinguish carefully between the various styles of opera in order to understand why the composer adopted a particular manner, and certain fixed forms in each.

The old distinctions between _Opera seria_, _Opera buffa_, and _Opera semiseria_ perplex us no more. Only because of the perversion of the time-honored Italian epithet _buffa_ by the French mongrel _Opera bouffe_ is it necessary to explain that the cla.s.sic _Opera buffa_ was a polite comedy, whose musical integument did not of necessity differ from that of _Opera seria_ except in this--that the dialogue was carried on in "dry" recitative (_recitativo secco_, or _parlante_) in the former, and a more measured declamation with orchestral accompaniment (_recitativo stromentato_) in the latter. So far as subject-matter was concerned the cla.s.sic distinction between tragedy and comedy served. The dry recitative was supported by chords played by a double-ba.s.s and harpsichord or pianoforte. In London, at a later period, for reasons of doubtful validity, these chords came to be played on a double-ba.s.s and violoncello, as we occasionally hear them to-day.

[Sidenote: _Opera semiseria._]

[Sidenote: _"Don Giovanni."_]

Shakespeare has taught us to accept an infusion of the comic element in plays of a serious cast, but Shakespeare was an innovator, a Romanticist, and, measured by old standards, his dramas are irregular.

The Italians, who followed cla.s.sic models, for a reason amply explained by the genesis of the art-form, rigorously excluded comedy from serious operas, except as _intermezzi_, until they hit upon a third cla.s.sification, which they called _Opera semiseria_, in which a serious subject was enlivened with comic episodes. Our dramatic tastes being grounded in Shakespeare, we should be inclined to put down "Don Giovanni" as a musical tragedy; or, haunted by the Italian terminology, as _Opera semiseria_; but Mozart calls it _Opera buffa_, more in deference to the librettist's work, I fancy, than his own, for, as I have suggested elsewhere,[E] the musician's imagination in the fire of composition went far beyond the conventional fancy of the librettist in the finale of that most wonderful work.

[Sidenote: _An Opera buffa._]

[Sidenote: _French Grand Opera._]

[Sidenote: _Opera comique._]

[Sidenote: _"Mignon."_]

[Sidenote: _"Faust."_]

It is well to remember that "Don Giovanni" is an _Opera buffa_ when watching the buffooneries of _Leporello_, for that alone justifies them. The French have _Grand Opera_, in which everything is sung to orchestra accompaniment, there being neither spoken dialogue nor dry recitative, and _Opera comique_, in which the dialogue is spoken. The latter corresponds with the honorable German term _Singspiel_, and one will not go far astray if he a.s.sociate both terms with the English operas of Wallace and Balfe, save that the French and Germans have generally been more deft in bridging over the chasm between speech and song than their British rivals. _Opera comique_ has another characteristic, its _denouement_ must be happy. Formerly the _Theatre national de l'Opera-Comique_ in Paris was devoted exclusively to _Opera comique_ as thus defined (it has since abolished the distinction and _Grand Opera_ may be heard there now), and, therefore, when Ambroise Thomas brought forward his "Mignon," Goethe's story was found to be changed so that _Mignon_ recovered and was married to _Wilhelm Meister_ at the end. The Germans are seldom pleased with the transformations which their literary masterpieces are forced to undergo at the hands of French librettists. They still refuse to call Gounod's "Faust" by that name; if you wish to hear it in Germany you must go to the theatre when "Margarethe" is performed. Naturally they fell indignantly afoul of "Mignon," and to placate them we have a second finale, a _denouement allemand_, provided by the authors, in which _Mignon_ dies as she ought.

[Sidenote: _Grosse Oper._]