Part 10

Chapter 104,012 wordsPublic domain

Bizet wrote other operas besides 'Carmen,' and if these other operas have vanished from the stage, the reason may be that the librettos to which they were composed were not as ingenious and not as interesting as the book of 'Carmen.' One of these forgotten operas of Bizet's was a dramatization of the 'Fair Maid of Perth,' and another was called the 'Pearl Fisher'; but neither of these books was devised by Meilhac and Halevy. And Scribe was not only the librettist of the 'Huguenots' and of the 'Africaine' for Meyerbeer; he also wrote the books of 'Fra Diavolo' and of 'Crown Diamonds' for Auber, the book of the 'Dame Blanche' for Boieldieu, and the book of the 'Juive' for Halevy. Indeed, it is evident that Wagner himself as a librettist must be considered as a direct disciple of Scribe; certainly his book of the 'Flying Dutchman' has its points of resemblance with the books Scribe invented for 'Robert the Devil,' and for the 'Prophet.' Even the libretto of Wagner's 'Master-Singers of Nuremberg,' altho it is far richer in tone than any of Scribe's librettos for Auber, is constructed in accord with principles already applied by the French playwright. In fact, the influence of Scribe is patent thruout the long history of opera in the nineteenth century; he was not only the most prolific of librettists himself, but the operatic formula he devised was borrowed by the best of the librettists who followed him. Scribe was not the writer of the books of 'Faust,' or of 'Romeo et Juliet,' or of 'Aida,' but all these librettos were carefully built in accord with the principles that he had practised for half a century.

Probably the average opera-goer is contemptuous of the libretto, because he thinks it is an easy task to write the mere words of an opera. To him, no doubt, the opera lives by its music, and by its music alone. But there is really no warrant for this uncomplimentary attitude. An opera is a music-drama, and if it is to achieve success, wide-spread and long-lasting, its drama must be as effective as its music. Experience proves that, so far from being as easy as it seems, the construction of a satisfactory libretto is really a difficult feat, to be achieved only by an expert in stage-craft. It is no task to be confided to an amateur play-maker, to a mere lyrist, ignorant of the art of the theater. First of all, a satisfactory book must contain the skeleton of a good play; and, second, this must be the special kind of play which will not only inspire the musician, but afford him a succession of special opportunities for the exercise of his own art. The book of an opera must be a good play; and more than once have we seen a libretto deprived of its music and written out again in prose for production in non-musical theaters. 'Carmen' is one example of this transformation. The late Sir Henry Irving was so taken with Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman' that he had it made over into a play for his own acting--'Vanderdecken.'

The book of an opera must be a good play, and therefore not a few successful operas have been composed on plots which had already won approval as plays on the stage. Indeed, many modern composers are so convinced of the necessity that librettos shall be attractive in themselves that they are continually borrowing popular plays to deck with melody. 'Salome' and 'Pelleas et Melisande,' 'Madam Butterfly' and 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' the 'Boheme' and the 'Tosca' were all successful without music before they were set to music to win a second success. The book of Verdi's 'Rigoletto' is based on Victor Hugo's drama, 'Le Roi s'Amuse'; and oddly enough it was the operatic libretto, rather than the original poetic drama, which suggested the English play on the same theme, Tom Taylor's blank-verse drama, the 'Fool's Revenge.' Another of Verdi's librettos was borrowed from Hugo's 'Hermani', while his 'Traviata,' as we all know, is taken from the play of the younger Dumas, long popular in America as 'Camille.' Two of Verdi's latest operas had Shaksperian themes, 'Otello' and 'Falstaff.'

It is instructive to note, so an American musical critic once asserted, that of all Gounod's dozen operas, "the only two which have survived are the two which are derived from Goethe's 'Faust' and from Shakspere's 'Romeo and Juliet'"; and he added a reminder that in these operas the music owes its success "not only to the aid derived from its associations with a favorite play, but also in part to the fact that the composer's creative imagination was fertilized by the splendid opportunities for dramatic composition offered by these plays. Gounod was moved by the joys and woes of Margaret and of Juliet, and it is only under the influence of deep feeling that such masterworks can be created." When Gounod set to music a poetic play by Goethe, and when Verdi set to music a group of characters created by Shakspere, the composers might well be inspired by the poets; and they were thus aided to attain the utmost of which they are capable as musicians.

But it may be doubted whether any musician could find any really helpful inspiration in dramas of vulgar violence, such as the 'Tosca' of Sardou, and the 'Salome' of Oscar Wilde; and it is extremely improbable that the operas composed to such unworthy themes will be able to achieve any durable popularity. In plots of so coarse a character there is neither beauty nor poetry, and the vogue of music-dramas having subjects so debased is likely to be fleeting. On the other hand, there was both poetry and beauty in the original plays of 'Madam Butterfly' and 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' and we need not be surprised if the operas composed on these themes prove to have a long life in the musical theaters. We may even go further and suggest that there was a haunting and ethereal grace about Maeterlinck's 'Pelleas et Melisande' which seemed almost to demand translation into the sister art of music.

The two most effective French comedies of the eighteenth century, the 'Barber of Seville' and the 'Marriage of Figaro,' supplied librettos, one for Rossini and the other for Mozart. We may be sure that sooner or later some other composer, Italian or American or German, will be tempted to undertake an opera based on Fulda's 'Two Sisters,' in which there could not help being a very effective part for the prima donna. And sooner or later again some musician with an appreciation of humor and sentiment will be moved to take for his libretto the comedy of 'Masks and Faces,' by Charles Reade and Tom Taylor, generally known by the name of its fascinating heroine, Peg Woffington. No doubt there are not a few other modern plays in which composers will discover musical possibilities.

III

The key to an understanding of the importance of the libretto lies in the term Wagner used to describe the art-work of the future; he called this a "music-drama." The exclusive lover of music is tempted to look down on opera because its music is contaminated with drama; and for a similar reason, the exclusive lover of the drama is not attracted to opera because the drama is there more or less sacrificed to the music. But there are many opera-goers who best relish music and the drama when they are presented in conjunction. In a music-drama of the highest type, in Wagner's 'Tannhaueser,' for example, the music and the drama are Siamese twins; they were brought forth at a single birth. Each helps the other, and neither calls upon the other for any undue sacrifice. They can be enjoyed together better than they can be enjoyed apart, since each depends upon the other; and united they stand or fall.

Mr. H. T. Finck was not overstating the case when he insisted that the ideal opera is one in which the book and the score are each of them of absorbing interest, "and yet make a doubly deep impression when heard together." The stories of 'Faust' and of 'Carmen' and of 'Lohengrin' are delightful in themselves, merely to read; and a musical expert can find pleasure in playing the music from them on the piano. "Yet how much more effective they are when we hear and see music and play together on the stage." And then the same writer goes on to point out that the best "libretto is one which tells its story to the eye," as in the case of 'Carmen,' for example. "No one with eyes to see can fail, for instance, to follow the career of 'Carmen,' from her flirtation with the young officer to the scene before the bullring where he stabs her."

It was an acute French dramatic critic who once asserted that "the skeleton of every good play is a pantomime," and the assertion is more emphatically true when applied to the skeleton of a libretto. Indeed, as the words are rarely heard distinctly, and as they are often in a foreign language, there is double need of a story so clear and so straightforward that it can be caught by the eye alone from the actions and gestures and facial expressions of the performers without the aid of the actual words. But the inventing and the constructing of a plot of this seemingly simple effectiveness is a task of extraordinary difficulty--if we may judge by the infrequency of its achievement. And undoubtedly it is this difficulty which has led so many musicians to compose their scores to books only slightly altered from plays which had already an attested popularity in the theater. By so doing it has seemed to them that they were minimizing the risk of finding their music handicapped by an ineffective story. The danger in this case lies in the temptation to set to music any play which may chance to be successful without considering sufficiently whether it is really worthy of the composer's labor.

There is another disadvantage also in this snatching at successful plays to serve as opera-librettos. Most successful plays nowadays deal with modern life, and they may owe much of their success to the skill with which the dramatist has been able to seize the external aspects of reality. Now, it is an interesting question whether a realistic piece of this sort can ever supply an entirely satisfactory book for an opera, since music is emotional and idealizing. To many persons the opera seems singularly unreal, strangely remote from actual life. Such persons are shocked that Tristan, for instance, should sing for half an hour when he is dying from physical weakness. Tolstoy sided with those who take this attitude, and he had no difficulty in showing up the absurd unreality of an operatic performance, if one insists upon applying to it the standard of our ordinary existence, since we do not burst into song ordinarily to express our every-day desires. Of course, there would be no great difficulty in showing up the absurd unreality of every other art, if the same standard is insisted upon. No art can justify itself for a moment unless we are willing to admit the essential conventions which alone permit it to exist.

Tolstoy might as well have pointed out that sculpture is ridiculous, since no human being is ever all of one color, body and clothes, as a statue must be, whether it is made of marble or of bronze. He could have declared that painting is equally untrue to the mere facts of life, since it represents nature absolutely without motion, as when it depicts a field of waving corn which does not really wave but stands fixed forever. If Tolstoy or any one else refuses to accept the conventions of any art, there is no possible reply, except to make it clear to him that he is thereby depriving himself of the delight which that art can give. A departure from the mere fact underlies every art; and it is only because of that departure that the art exists. By convention, that is to say, by tacit agreement between the artist and the public, the artist is allowed to deny certain of the facts of life in order to provide the public with the specific pleasure which only his art can afford.

In the Shaksperian drama the underlying convention is that the persons of the play belong to a race of people who always express themselves poetically in English blank verse. In opera this necessary agreement requires us to concede the existence of men and women to whom song is the natural means of communicating all their sentiments and all their thoughts. If we are willing to accept this implied contract, then there is no absurdity in Tristan's singing with his dying breath, since he belongs to a race of creatures who have no other method of speech. If we are unwilling to be parties to this agreement, if we deny the existence of any such creatures, then there is nothing for us to do but to keep out of the opera-house. It was this convention which Tolstoy rejected, and by this rejection he refused the enjoyment which the opera can give to those who are satisfied to accept its conditions.

But there is no denying that the imperative operatic convention requires us to admit a very violent departure from the facts of life as we all know them. We are now so accustomed to blank verse in Shakspere's plays, tragic and comic, that we accept it almost without noticing it. By long habit, we have come to consider blank verse as "natural" in a poetic play, especially when that play sets before us heroic figures of the remote past. And here is the danger in the operas which have been composed on books made out of modern popular pieces, more or less realistic in their atmosphere. The "naturalness" of the men and women in these plays of to-day tends to draw attention to the "unnaturalness" of their customary use of song to express their emotions.

This danger Wagner skilfully avoided in his later music-dramas derived from the Nibelungen myth. He set before us shadowy creatures involved in strange intrigues far back in the legendary past and wholly devoid of any modern or realistic suggestion. As Tristan and Siegfried and Brunhild are all idealized persons, taking part in poetic fictions, we are willing enough to accept their exclusive use of song; and we recognize at once the artistic inconsistency of Tolstoy's protest. To beings so remote from our daily life, from our ordinary experience, the standard of fact cannot fairly be applied. We acknowledge the full right of such creatures to dwell eternally in the land of song alone.

But we are perhaps a little less willing to make this acknowledgment when we find the composer asking us to believe that men and women of our own time and of our own country, the characters of the 'Girl of the Golden West,' for example, or even some of those of 'Madam Butterfly,' should eschew the plain prose of ordinary speech and insist on discussing their love-affairs in the obviously "unnatural" medium of song. That is to say, there is a striking incongruity between musical expression and the realistic characters of most modern plays. We enjoy the opera partly because it is not "natural," not "real," in the ordinary meaning of these words; and if the plot and the people are aggressively modern and matter-of-fact, our attention is necessarily called to the "unnaturalness" of their incessant vocalization. A certain remoteness from real life, even a certain vaporous intangibility as to time and place, seem to be a helpful element in our enjoyment of a music-drama.

Perhaps it is due to this remoteness, to this unreality, that the opera-goer is willing enough to have a story end unhappily, altho the playgoer is now likely to be painfully affected by a tragic ending. Whatever the reason, it is a fact that most of our popular plays end merrily in a church, while most of our popular operas end sadly in a churchyard. The calculation has been made that out of twoscore operas sung in New York at the two opera-houses a season or so ago, only half a dozen ended happily; the large majority of them culminated in the death of the hero or of the heroine or of both together. Music is a sister of poetry, and we need not wonder that the musicians are likely to prefer the opera-book which has a tragic catastrophe.

(1910.)

THE POETRY OF THE DANCE

The Greek of old was wise in his generation and poetic as was his habit, when he imagined nine muses and when he feigned that each of them was to watch over a separate art, and to inspire those who might strive to excel in this. It is true that nowadays we cannot help feeling that the sister-muses of Tragedy and of Comedy have been a little derelict to their duty, if they are really responsible for all the plays of our time, not a few of which seem to be sadly lacking in inspiration. But of late another of the sacred nine appears to have aroused herself out of her lethargy and to have awakened to a fuller realization of her opportunity. At least, there are many evidences now visible in the United States that Terpsichore has been attending strictly to business, and sending out travelers with many diverse specimens of her wares. Indeed, there has probably never been a time when so many different varieties of the dance have been on exhibition before the American people. It was once remarked by a shrewd observer that there were only three kinds of dancing, the graceful, the ungraceful, and the disgraceful. And in the United States we have had presented to us in the past few years specimens of all three kinds.

In the middle of September, 1910, the Playground Association of America held an outdoor session in Van Cortlandt Park, in New York, and three hundred persons, mostly children, took part in the exercises. The most interesting feature of the program was a series of national folk-dances executed by boys and girls from the public schools. New York is the huge melting-pot where all nationalities of Europe meet to be fused into Americans; and these children were, most of them, executing the dances of the countries their parents had come from--dances for which they had, therefore, a traditional and hereditary predilection. German girls in the costumes of the Rhine, gave a peasant dance to the simple tune of 'Ach, du lieber Augustin'; and colored children, in perfect rhythm, moved thru a reel to the music of the 'Suwanee River.' The wild Hungarian _czardas_ was carried off with a splendid swing by men and women born on the banks of the Danube; and an Irish quartet displayed their agility and their precision of time-keeping in a four-handed country-dance. And at the end, all the participants in the several national dances took part in a general harvest-dance. This was an effective spectacle, possible only here in America, where representatives of many peoples come to mingle, even tho each of them retains a sentiment of loyalty to the old home it has left forever.

Here in the open air, in a public park, at this meeting of the Playground Association, there was this joyous and wholesome revival of the folk-dances of a dozen different races; and at the same time, in one or another of half a score of the theaters of the great city, ill-trained and half-clothed women were vainly capering about the stage in doubtful efforts to suggest the Oriental contortions of Salome. These were, most of them, consciously and deliberately inartistic, appealing directly to the baser instincts and to the lower curiosities of man. Nothing could have been in sharper contrast with the folk-dances of the foreign-born children, which were gay and healthy and spontaneous. The exercises in the park were examples of the kind of dancing which cannot help being graceful, while most of the performances in the theaters were specimens of the kind of dancing which can fairly be described as ungraceful, even if they cannot all of them be dismissed as disgraceful. While the folk-dances of the children would fill the heart with a pure delight, the sorry spectacle presented in some of the theaters was not to be witnessed without a certain loss of self-respect; it recalled the gross pantomimes of the later Roman theater, righteously denounced by the Fathers of the Church.

Yet it is only just to record that in other theaters there were then other spectacles to make amends for these sorry exhibitions. There were several interesting attempts to recall the severe beauty of Greek dancing. Lithe figures with free and floating draperies sought to recapture the irreclaimable charm that lives for us in the lovely Tanagra figurines, or that flits elusively around the sides of Attic vases. Ambitious efforts were made by one dancer and by another to translate into step and posture and gesture the intangible poetry of Shelley and the haunting music of Mendelssohn. Unfortunately, the result was rarely commensurate with the effort; and, in fact, a complete success was not possible. The muse of dancing has no right to endeavor to annex the territory of her sisters, who are charged with the care of poetry and music. The several arts are strongest when each remains strictly within its own limitations. For example, program-music is not yet assured of its welcome, and program-dancing is far more difficult to follow with complete comprehension.

And there was a further defect in these efforts to revive the classic dances and to devise more modern interpretations of poetry and music. Success, if possible at all, would be possible only to a highly trained performer, mistress of every device of the terpsichorean art and elaborately schooled in pantomimic expression. Now, it is not unfair to say that no one of the performers of these so-called classic dances had undergone this severe schooling. No one of them had the lightness, the ease, the perfect mastery of method, the floating grace of the true dancer, who has been taught from childhood, until all the tricks of the craft are second nature. Without this arduous training any one who attempts an ambitious display can scarcely fail to reveal instantly the lamentable fact that she is not mistress of the technic of the art she has undertaken to practise. She does not know how to get her effects; she does not even know what effects are possible. She is almost certain to appear amateurish, and she is likely to seem awkward also, not to say ungainly. As Pope put it tersely: "Those move easiest who have learned to dance."

These well-meant attempts to link dancing with poetry and music could be entirely satisfactory only to those who have given little consideration to dancing as an art, or who have small opportunity to see any really beautiful dancing. There is no wonder that any effort to spiritualize dancing, to give it a soul, to elevate it to the lofty level of the lyric, should be welcomed by those who have been disgusted by the ugly and vulgar high-kicking of the so-called pony ballets. The acrobatic contortions of these athletic performers were wholly without charm, as unalluring as they were violent. And equally unacceptable are the frequent exhibitions of toe-dancing, sheer gymnastic feats, difficult, indeed, but essentially uninteresting. Of a truth, these pony ballets on the one hand, and these toe-dancers on the other, are exponents of eccentricity. What they accomplish lies outside the true art of dancing. It is not inspired by Terpsichore, and the saddened muse must veil her face when she is forced to behold these crude exhibitions of misplaced energy.