Musical Memories Part 13

So Scribe should not be blamed for making a poor piece when he had so many difficulties to contend with. He must have lost his head a little for Robert's mother was called Berthe in the first act and Rosalie in the third. However, the answer might be that she changed her name when she became religious.

Later, Scribe was put to another no less difficult test with _L'Etoile du Nord_. When Meyerbeer was the conductor at the Berlin Opera, he wrote on command _Le Camp de Silesie_ with Frederick the Great as the hero and Jenny Lind as the musical star. As we know, Frederick was a musician, for he both composed music and played the flute, while Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, was a great singer. A contest between the nightingale and the flute was sure to follow or theatrical instinct is a vain phrase. But in the piece Scribe created, Peter the Great took Frederick the Great's place and to give a motive for the grace notes in the last act it was necessary for the terrible Tsar, a half savage barbarian, to learn to play the flute.

It is not worth while telling how the Tsar took lessons on the flute from a young pastry cook who came on the stage with a basket of cakes on his head; how the cook later became a lord, and many other details of this absurd play. It is permitted to be absurd on the stage, if it is done so that the absurdity is forgotten. But in this instance it was impossible to forget the absurdities. The extravagance of the libretto led the musician into many unfortunate things. This extremely interesting score is very uneven, but there are a thousand details worth the attention of the professional musician. Beauty even appears in the score at moments, and there are charming and picturesque bits, as well as puerilities and shocking vulgarities.

Public curiosity was aroused for a long time by clever advance notices and had reached a high pitch when _L'Etoile du Nord_ appeared. The work was carried by the exceptional talents of Bataille and Caroline Duprez and was enormously successful at the start, but this success has grown steadily less. Faure and Madame Patti gave some fine performances in London. We shall probably never see their equal again, and it is not desirable that we should either from the standpoint of art or of the author.

_Les Huguenots_ was not an opera pieced together out of others, but it did not reach the public as the author wrote it. At the beginning of the first act there was a game of cup and ball on which the author had set his heart. But the b.a.l.l.s had to strike at the exact moment indicated in the score and the players never succeeded in accomplishing that. The pa.s.sage had to be suppressed but it is preserved in the library at the Opera. They also had to suppress the part of Catherine de Medici who should preside at the conference where the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew was planned. Her part was merged with that of St. Pris. They also suppressed the first scene in the last act, where Raoul, disheveled and covered with blood, interrupted the ball and upset the merriment by announcing the ma.s.sacre to the astonished dancers.

But it is a question whether we should believe the legend that the great duet, the climax of the whole work, was improvised during the rehearsals at the request of Norritt and Madame Falcon. It is hard to believe that.

The work, as is well known, was taken from Merimee's _Chronique du regne de Charles IX_. This scene is in the romance and it is almost impossible that Meyerbeer had no idea of putting it into his opera. More probably the people at the theatre wanted the act to end with the blessing of the daggers, and the author with his duet in his portfolio only had to take it out to satisfy his interpreters. A beautiful scene like this with its sweep and pleasing innovation is not written hastily. This duet should be heard when the author's intentions and the nuances which make a part of the idea are respected and not replaced by inventions in bad taste which they dare to call traditions. The real traditions have been lost and this admirable scene has lost its beauty.

The manner in which the duet ends has not been noted sufficiently.

Raoul's phrase, _G.o.d guard our days. G.o.d of our refuge!_ remains in suspense and the orchestra brings it to an end, the first example of a practice used frequently in modern works.

We do not know how Meyerbeer got his idea of putting the schismatic John Huss on the stage under the name of John of Leyden. Whether this idea was original with him or was suggested by Scribe, who made a fantastic person out of John, we do not know. We only know that the role of the prophet's mother was originally intended for Madame Stoltz, but she had left the Opera. Meyerbeer heard Madame Pauline Viardot at Vienna and found in her his ideal, so he created the redoubtable role of Fides for her. The part of Jean was given to the tenor Roger, the star of the Opera-Comique, and he played and sang it well. Leva.s.seur, the Marcel of _Les Huguenots_ and the Bertram of _Robert_, played the part of Zacharie.

_Le Prophete_ was enormously successful in spite of the then powerful censer-bearers of the Italian school. We now see its defects rather than its merits. Meyerbeer is criticised for not putting into practice theories he did not know and no account is taken of his fearlessness, which was great for that period. No one else could have drawn the cathedral scene with such breadth of stroke and extraordinary brilliancy. The paraphrase of _Domine salvum fac regem_ reveals great ingenuity. His method of treating the organ is wonderful, and his idea of the ritournello _Sur le Jeu de hautbois_ is charming. This precedes and introduces the children's chorus, and is constructed on a novel theme which is developed brilliantly by the choruses, the orchestra and the organ combined. The repet.i.tion of the _Domine Salvum_ at the end of the scene, which bursts forth abruptly in a different key, is full of color and character.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Meyerbeer, Composer of _Les Huguenots_]

III

The story of _Le Pardon de Ploermel_ is interesting. It was first called _Dinorah_, a name which Meyerbeer picked up abroad. But Meyerbeer liked to change the t.i.tles of his operas several times in the course of the rehearsals in order to keep public curiosity at fever heat. He had the notion of writing an opera-comique in one act, and he asked his favorite collaborators, Jules Barbier and Michael Carre, for a libretto. They produced _Dinorah_ in three scenes and with but three characters. The music was written promptly and was given to Perrin, the famous director, whose unfortunate influence soon made itself felt. A director's first idea at that time was to demand changes in the piece given him. "A single act by you, Master? Is that permissible? What can we put on after that? A new work by Meyerbeer should take up the entire evening." That was the way the insidious director talked, and there was all the more chance of his being listened to as the author was possessed by a mania for retouching and making changes. So Meyerbeer took the score to the Mediterranean where he spent the winter. The next spring he brought back the work developed into three acts with choruses and minor characters.

Besides these additions he had written the words which Barbier and Carre should have done.

The rehearsals were tedious. Meyerbeer wanted Faure and Madame Carvalho in the leading roles but one was at the Opera-Comique and the other at her own house, the Theatre-Lyrique. The work went back and forth from the Place Favart to the Place du Chatelet. But the author's hesitancy was at bottom only a pretext. What he wanted was to secure a postponement of Limnander's opera _Les Blancs et les Bleus_. The action of this work and of _Dinorah_, as well, took place in Brittany. In the hope of being Meyerbeer's choice, both theatres turned poor Limnander away. Finally, _Dinorah_ fell to the Opera-Comique. After long hard work, which the author demanded, Madame Cabel and MM. Faure and Sainte-Foix gave a perfect performance.

There was a good deal of criticism of having the hunter, the reaper, and the shepherd sing a prayer together at the beginning of the third act.

This was not considered theatrical; to-day that is a virtue.

There was a good deal of talk about _L'Africanne_, which had been looked for for a long time and which seemed to be almost legendary and mysterious; it still is for that matter. The subject of the opera was unknown. All that was known was that the author was trying to find an interpreter and could get none to his liking.

Then Marie Cruvelli, a German singer with an Italian training, appeared.

With her beauty and prodigious voice she shone like a meteor in the theatrical firmament. Meyerbeer found his Africanne realized in her and at his request she was engaged at the Opera. Her engagement was made the occasion for a brilliant revival of _Les Huguenots_ and Meyerbeer wrote new ballet music for it. To-day we have no idea of what _Les Huguenots_ was then. Then the author went back to his Africanne and went to work again. He used to go to see the brilliant singer about it nearly every day, when she suddenly announced that she was going to leave the stage to become the Comtesse Vigier! Meyerbeer was discouraged and he threw his unfinished ma.n.u.script into a drawer where it stayed until Marie Sa.s.s had so developed her voice and talent that he made up his mind to entrust the role of Selika to her. He wanted Faure for the role of Nelusko and he was already at the Opera, so he had the management engage Naudin, the Italian tenor, as well.

But Scribe had died during the long period which had elapsed since the marriage of the Comtesse Vigier. Meyerbeer was now left to himself, and too much inclined to revisions of every kind as he was, re-made the piece to his fancy. When it was completed--it didn't resemble anything and the author planned to finish it at the rehearsals.

As we know, Meyerbeer died suddenly. He realized that he was dying and as he knew how necessary his presence was for a performance of _L'Africanne_ he forbade its appearance. But his prohibition was only verbal as he could no longer write. The public was impatiently awaiting _L'Africanne_, so they went ahead with it.

When Perrin and his nephew du Locle opened the package of ma.n.u.scripts Meyerbeer had left, they were stupefied at finding no _L'Africanne_.

"Never mind," said Perrin, "the public wants an _Africanne_ and it shall have one."

He summoned Fetis, Meyerbeer's enthusiastic admirer, and the three, Fetis, Perrin and du Locle, managed to evolve the opera we know from the sc.r.a.ps the author had left in disorder. They did not accomplish this, however, without considerable difficulty, without some incoherences, numerous suppressions and even additions. Perrin was the inventor of the wonderful map on which Selika recognized Madagascar. They took the characters there in order to justify the term Africanne applied to the heroine. They also introduced the Brahmin religion to Madagascar in order to avoid moving the characters to India where the fourth act should take place. The first performance was imminent when they found that the work was too long. So they cut out an original ballet where a savage beat a tom-tom, and they cut and fitted together mercilessly. In the last act Selika, alone and dying, should see the paradise of the Brahmins appear as in a vision. But Faure wanted to appear again at the finale, so they had to adapt a bit taken from the third act and suppress the vision. This is the reason why Nelusko succ.u.mbs so quickly to the deadly perfume of the poisonous flowers, while Selika resists so long.

The riturnello of Selika's aria, which should be performed with lowered curtain as the queen gazes over the sea and at the departing vessel far away on the horizon, became a vehicle for encores--the last thing that was ever in Meyerbeer's mind. But the worst was the liberty Fetis took in retouching the orchestration. As a compliment to Adolph Sax he subst.i.tuted a saxaphone for the ba.s.s clarinet which the author indicated. This resulted in the suppression of that part of the aria beginning _O Paradis sorti de l'onde_ as the saxophone did not produce a good effect. Fetis also allowed Perrin to make over a ba.s.s solo into a chorus, the Bishop's Chorus. The great vocal range in this is poorly adapted for a chorus. Some barbarous modulations are certainly apocryphal....

We are unable to imagine what _L'Africanne_ would have been if Scribe had lived and the authors had put it into shape. The work we have is illogical and incomplete. The words are simply monstrous and Scribe certainly would not have kept them. This is the case in the pa.s.sage in the great duet:

O ma Selika, vous regnez sur mon ame!

--Ah! ne dis pas ces mots brulante!

Ils m'egarent moi-meme....

The music st.i.tched to this impossible piece, however, had its admirers--even fanatical admirers--so great was the prestige of the author's name at the time of its appearance. We must not forget that there are, indeed, some beautiful pages in this chaos. The religious ceremony in the fourth act and the Brahmin recitative accompanied by the _pizzicati_ of the ba.s.s may be mentioned as an indication of this. The latter pa.s.sage is not in favor, however; they play it down without conviction and so deprive it of all its strength and majesty.

I said, at the beginning of this study, that we were ungrateful to Meyerbeer, and this ingrat.i.tude is double on the part of France, for he loved her. He only had to say the word to have any theatre in Europe opened to him, yet he preferred to them all the Opera at Paris and even the Opera-Comique where the choruses and orchestra left much to be desired. When he did work for Paris after he had given _Margherita d'Anjou_ and _Le Crociato_ in Italy, he was forced to accommodate himself to French taste just as Rossini and Donizetti were. The latter wrote for the Opera-Comique _La Fille du Regiment_, a military and patriotic work, and its dashing and glorious _Salut a la France_ has resounded through the whole world. Foreigners do not take so much pains in our day, and France applauds _Die Meistersinger_ which ends with a hymn to German art. Such is progress!

Something must be said of a little known score, _Struensee_, which was written for a drama which was so weak that it prevented the music gaining the success it deserved. The composer showed himself in this more artistic than in anything else he did. It should have been heard at the Odeon with another piece written by Jules Barbier on the same subject. The overture used to appear in the concerts as did the polonnaise, but like the overture to _Guillaume Tell_, they have disappeared. These overtures are not negligible. The overture to _Guillaume Tell_ is notable for the unusual invention of the five violoncellos and its storm with its original beginning, to say nothing of its pretty pastoral. The fine depth of tone in the exordium of _Struensee_ and the fugue development in the main theme are also not to be despised. But all that, we are told, is lacking in elevation and depth. Possibly; but it is not always necessary to descend to h.e.l.l and go up to Heaven. There is certainly more music in these overtures than in Grieg's _Peer Gynt_ which has been dinned into our ears so much.

But enough of this. I must stop with the operas, for to consider the rest of his music would necessitate a study of its own and that would take us too far afield. My hope is that these lines may repair an unnecessary injustice and redirect the fastidious who may read them to a great musician whom the general public has never ceased to listen to and applaud.

CHAPTER XXI

JACQUES OFFENBACH

It is dangerous to prophesy. Not long ago I was speaking of Offenbach, trying to do justice to his marvellous natural gifts and deploring his squandering them. And I was imprudent enough to say that posterity would never know him. Now posterity is proving that I was wrong, for Offenbach is coming back into fashion. Our contemporaneous composers forget that Mozart, Beethoven and Sebastian Bach knew how to laugh at times. They distrust all gaiety and declare it unesthetic. As the good public cannot resign itself to getting along without gaiety, it goes to operetta and turns naturally to Offenbach who created it and furnished an inexhaustible supply. My phrase is not exaggerated, for Offenbach hardly dreamed of creating an art. He was endowed with a genius for the comic and an abundance of melody, but he had no thought of doing anything beyond providing material for the theatre he managed at the time. As a matter of fact he was almost its only author.

He was unable to rid himself of his Germanic influences and so corrupted the taste of an entire generation by his false prosody, which has been incorrectly considered originality. In addition he was lacking in taste.

At the time they affected a dreadful mannerism of always stopping on the next to the last note of a pa.s.sage, whether or not it was a.s.sociated with a mute syllable. This mannerism had no purpose beyond indicating to the audience the end of a pa.s.sage and giving the claque the signal to applaud. Offenbach did not belong to that heroic strain to which success is the least of its cares. So he adopted this mannerism, and often his ingeniously turned and charming couplets are ruined by this silly absurdity now gone out of fashion.

Furthermore, he wrote badly, for his early education was neglected. If the _Tales of Hoffman_ shows traces of a practised pen, it is because Guiraud finished the score and went out of his way to remedy some of the author's mistakes. Leaving aside the bad prosody and the minor defects in taste, we have left a work which shows a wealth of invention, melody, and sparkling fancy comparable to Gretry's.

Gretry was no more a great musician than Offenbach, for he also wrote badly. The essential difference between the two was the care, not only in his prosody but also in his declamation, which Gretry tried to reproduce musically with all possible exactness. He overshot the mark in this for he did not see that in singing the expression of a note is modified by the harmonic scheme which accompanies it. It must be recognized, in addition, that many times Gretry was carried away by his melodic inventiveness and forgot his own principles so that he relegated his care for declamation to second place.

What hurt Gretry was his unbounded conceit, with which Offenbach, to his credit, was never afflicted. As an indication of this, he dared to write in his advice to young musicians:

"Those who have genius will make opera-comique like mine; those who have talent will write opera like Gluck's; while those who have neither genius nor talent, will write symphonies like Haydn's."

However, he tried to make an opera like Gluck's and in spite of his great efforts and his interesting inventions, he could not equal the work of his formidable rival.

Although he was not a great musician, Offenbach had a surprising natural instinct and made here and there curious discoveries in harmony. In speaking of these discoveries I must go slightly into the theory of harmony and resign myself to being understood only by those of my readers who are more or less musicians. In a slight work, _Daphnis et Chloe_, Offenbach risked a dominant eleventh without either introduction or conclusion--an extraordinary audacity at the time. A short course in harmony is necessary for the understanding of this. We must start with the fact that, theoretically, all dissonances must be introduced and concluded, which we cannot explain here, but this leading up to and away from have for their purpose softening the harshness of the dissonance which was greatly feared in bygone times. Take if you please, the simple key of C natural. _Do_ is the keynote, _sol_ is the dominant. Place on this dominant two-thirds--_si-re_--and you have the perfect dominant chord. Add a third _fa_ and you have the famous dominant seventh, a dissonance which to-day seems actually agreeable. Not so long ago they thought that they ought to prepare for the dissonance. In the Sixteenth Century it was not regarded as admissible at all, for one hears the two notes _si_ and _fa_ simultaneously and this seems intolerable to the ear. They used to call it the _Diabolus in musica_.

Palestrina was the first to employ it in an anthem. Opinions differ on this, and certain students of harmony pretend that the chord which Palestrina used only has the appearance of the dominant seventh. I do not concur in this view. But however the case may be, the glory of unchaining the devil in music belongs to Montreverde. That was the beginning of modern music.

Later, a new third was superimposed and they dared the chord _sol-si-re-fa-la_. The inventor is unknown, but Beethoven seems to have been the first to make any considerable use of it. He used the chord in such a way that, in spite of its current use to-day, in his works it appears like something new and strange. This chord imposes its characteristics on the second _motif_ of the first part of the _Symphony in C minor_. This is what gives such amazing charm to the long colloquy between the flute, the oboe and the clarinets, which always surprises and arouses the listener, in the _andante_ of the same symphony. Fetis in his _Traite d'Harmonie_ inveighed against this delightful pa.s.sage. He admits that people like it, but, according to him, the author had no right to write it and the listener has no right to admire it. Scholars often have strange ideas.

Then Richard Wagner came along and the reign of the ninth dominant took the place of the seventh. That is what gives _Tannhauser_, and _Lohengrin_ their exciting character, which is dear to those who demand in music above everything else the pleasure due to shocks to the nervous system. Imitators have fallen foul of this easy procedure, and with a laughable navete imagine that in this way they can easily equal Wagner.

And they have succeeded in making this valuable chord absolutely ba.n.a.l.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jacques Offenbach]