Part 9

Chapter 93,714 wordsPublic domain

A similar development took place also in the landscape scenes; the foreground was raised irregularly, so that the persons of the play might climb up. Practicable bridges were swung across torrents, and the earlier formality of pastoral scenes began to disappear. Apparently the scene-painters were influenced at this time by the landscape-painters, more especially by Poussin. The interrelation of painting and scene-painting, each in turn affecting the other, is far closer than most historians of art have perceived. It is not unlikely, for example, that Gainsborough and Constable, who were the fathers of the Barbizon men, had been stimulated by the stage-pictures of De Lutherbourg. David Garrick profited by the innovating art of De Lutherbourg, a pupil of Vanloo, who came to England in 1771. Apparently it was De Lutherbourg who invented "raking-pieces"--as the scene-painters term the low fragments of scenery which mask the inclines of mounds. To him also is credited the first use of transparent scenes to reproduce the effect of moonlight upon water, and to suggest the flames of volcanoes. Thus to him must be ascribed the beginnings of that complicated realism by which our latter-day scene-painters are enabled to create an appropriate atmosphere for poetic episodes.

The next step in advance, and one of the most important in the slow development of the scene-painter's art, took place in France early in the nineteenth century, and simultaneous with the romanticist movement, which modified the aims and ambitions of the artists as much as it did those of the poets. The severe stateliness of the stage-set which was adequate for the classicist tragedies of Racine and Voltaire, generally a vague interior of an indefinite palace, stiff and empty, was hopelessly unsuitable for the fiery dramas of Victor Hugo and the elder Dumas. An even greater opportunity for spectacular regeneration was afforded, in these same early decades of the nineteenth century, by the bold and moving librettos which Scribe constructed for Meyerbeer and Halevy at the Opera, and for Auber at the Opera-Comique. The exciting cause of the scenic complexities that we find in Wagner's music-dramas can be discovered in these librettos of Scribe's, from 'Robert the Devil' to the 'Africaine.' For one act of 'Robert the Devil,' that in which the spectral nuns dance among the tombs under the rays of the moon, Ciceri invented the most striking and novel setting yet exhibited on any stage--a setting not surpassed in poetic glamor by any since seen in the theater, altho its eery beauty may have been rivaled by one scene in the 'Source,' a ballet produced also at the Opera forty-five years ago--a moon-lit tarn in a forest-glade, with half-seen sylphs floating lightly over its silvered surface. This exquisitely poetic set was imported from Paris to New York and inserted in the brilliant spectacle of the 'White Fawn.'

The ample effect of these scenes was made possible only by the immense improvement in the illumination of the stage due to the introduction of gas. Up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century the stage-decorator had been dependent upon lamps--a few of these arranged at the rim of the curving apron which jutted out into the auditorium far beyond the proscenium, and a few more hidden here and there in the flies and wings. Early in the nineteenth century gas supplanted oil; and a little later than the middle of the century gas was powerfully supplemented by the calcium light. Toward the end of the century gas in its turn gave way to the far more useful electric light, which could be directed anywhere in any quantity, and which could be controlled and colored at will. It was Henry Irving, more especially in his marvelous mounting of a rather tawdry version of 'Faust,' who revealed the delicate artistic possibilities of our modern facilities for stage illumination.

In France the romanticist movement of Hugo was swiftly succeeded by the realistic movement of Balzac, who was the earliest novelist to relate the leading personages of his studies from life to a characteristic background and to bring out the intimate association of persons and places. From prose fiction this evocation of characteristic surroundings was taken over by the drama; and a persistent effort was made to have the successive sets of a play suggestive and significant in themselves, and also representative of the main theme of the piece. The actors were no longer dependent upon the "float," as the footlights were called; they did not need to advance out on the apron to let the spectators follow the changing expression of their faces, and in time the apron was cut back to the line of the proscenium, and the curtain rose and fell in a picture-frame which cut the actors off from their proximity to the audience--a proximity forever tempting the dramatic poet to the purely oratorical effects proper enough on a platform.

When the modern play calls for an interior this interior now takes on the semblance of an actual room. Apparently the "box-set," as it is called, the closed-in room with its walls and its ceiling, was first seen in England in 1841, when 'London Assurance' was produced; but very likely it had earlier made its appearance in Paris at the Gymnase. To supply a room with walls of a seeming solidity, with doors and with windows, appears natural enough to us, but it was a startling innovation fourscore years ago. When the 'School for Scandal' had been originally produced at Drury Lane in 1775, the library of Joseph Surface, where Lady Teazle hides behind the screen, was represented by a drop at the back, on which a window was painted, and by wings set starkly parallel to this back-drop and painted to represent columns. There were no doors; and Joseph and Charles, Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, walked on thru the openings between the wings, very much as tho they were passing thru the non-existent walls. To us, this would be shocking; but it was perfectly acceptable to English playgoers then; and to them it seemed natural, since they were familiar with no other way of getting into a room on the stage.

The invention of the box-set, of a room with walls and ceilings, doors and windows, led inevitably to the appropriate furnishing of this room with tangible tables and chairs. Even in the eighteenth century the stage had been very empty; it was adorned only with the furniture actually demanded by the action of the drama; and the rest of the furniture, bookcases and sideboards, chairs and tables, was frankly painted on the wings and on the back-drop by the side of the painted mantelpieces, the painted windows, and the painted doors. In the plays of the twentieth century characters sit down and change from seat to seat; but in the plays produced in England and in France before the first quarter of the nineteenth century all the actors stood all the time--or at least they were allowed to sit only under the stress of dramatic necessity--as in the fourth act of 'Tartuffe,' for instance. In all of Moliere's comedies there are scarcely half a dozen characters who have occasion to sit down; and this sitting-down is limited to three or four of his more than thirty pieces. Nowadays every effort is made to capture the external realities of life. Sardou was not more careful in composing his stage-sittings in his fashion than was Ibsen in prescribing the scenic environment that he needed. The author's minute descriptions of the scenes where the action of the 'Doll's House' and of 'Ghosts' passes prove that Ibsen had visualized sharply the precise interior which was, in his mind, the only possible home for the creatures of his imagination. And Mr. Belasco has recently bestowed upon the winning personality of his 'Peter Grimm' the exact habitation to which that appealing creature would return in his desire to undo after death what in life he had rashly commanded.

While the scene-painter of our time is most often called upon to realize the actual in an interior and to delight us with a room the dominant quality of which is that it looks as tho it was really lived in by the personages we see moving around in it, he is not confined to those domestic scenes. There are other plays than the modern social dramas; and these other plays make other demands upon the artist. On occasion he has to supply a gorgeous scenic accompaniment for the Roman and Egyptian episodes of 'Antony and Cleopatra,' to suggest the blasted heath where Macbeth may meet the weird sisters, and to call up before our delighted eyes the placid charm of the Forest of Arden. The awkward and inconsistent sky-borders, strips of pendent canvas wholly unsatisfactory as substitutes for the vast depths of the starry heavens, he is able to dispense with by lowering a little the hangings at the top edge of the picture-frame, and by thus limiting the upward gaze of the spectators, so that he can forgo the impossible attempt to imitate the changing sky. He can achieve an effect of limitless space, as in the last act of the 'Garden of Allah' (which brings before us the endless vision of Sahara), by the use of a cyclorama background, the drop being suspended from a semicircular rod which runs around the top of the stage, shutting in the view absolutely, and yet yielding itself to a representation of sand and sky meeting afar off on the faint horizon.

In the past half-century, and more especially since the improvement of the electric light, scene-painting has become very elaborate and very expensive. Instead of being kept in its proper place as the decoration of the drama, as a beautiful accessory of the action, it has often been pushed to the front, so as to attract attention to itself, and thereby to distract attention from the play which it was supposed to illuminate. Sometimes Shakspere has been smothered in scenery, and sometimes the art of the actor has been subordinated to the art of the scene-painter. Now, it must be admitted that nothing is too good for the masterpieces of the drama, and that Sophocles no less than Shakspere ought to be presented to the public with all the pomp that his lofty themes and his marvelous workmanship may demand. But the plays of the mighty dramatic poets ought not to be used merely as pegs on which to hang gorgeous apparel. After all, the play's the thing; and whenever the scene-painter and his invading partner, the stage-manager, are prompted to oust the drama from its pre-eminence, and to substitute an exhibition of their accessory arts, the result is a betrayal of the playwright.

A well-known British art critic once told me that when the curtain rose at a certain London revival of 'Twelfth Night,' and disclosed Olivia's garden, he sat entranced at the beauty of the spectacle before his eyes, with its subtle harmonies of color, so entranced, indeed, that he found himself distinctly annoyed when the actors came on the stage and began to talk. For the moment, at least, he wished them away, as disturbers of his esthetic delight in the lovely picture on which his eyes were feasting. But even a stage-setting as captivating as this might very well be justified if it had been employed to fill a gap in the action, and to buttress up the interest of an episode where the dramatist had allowed the appeal of his story to relax. Perrin, the manager of the Comedie-Francaise thirty years ago, declined to produce a French version of 'Othello' because he found a certain dramatic emptiness in the scenes at Cyprus at the opening of the second act, which he felt he would have to mask by the beauty of spectacular decoration, too costly an expedient in his opinion for the finances of the theater just then.

It was Perrin, however, who produced the French version of the 'OEdipus the King' of Sophocles, and who bestowed upon it a single set of wonderful charm and power, at once dignified, appropriate, and beautiful in itself. It represented an open space between a temple and the palace of the ill-fated OEdipus, with an altar in the center, and with the profile of another temple projected against the distant sky and relieved by the tall, thin outline of poplar-trees. The monotony of this rectangular architectural construction was avoided by placing all the buildings on a slant, the whole elevation of the temple being visible on the left of the spectators, whereas only a corner of the colonnade of the palace on the right was displayed. This set at the Theatre-Francais was the absolute antithesis of the original scenic surroundings in the theater of Dionysus more than two thousand years ago, when the masterpiece of Sophocles had been performed in the open-air orchestra, with only a hut of skins or a temporary wooden building to serve as a background for the bas-reliefs of the action.

So elaborate, complicated, and costly have stage-sets become in the past half-century, that there are already signs of the violent reaction that might be expected. Mr. Gordon Craig, an artist of remarkable individuality, has gone so far as to propose what is almost an abolition of scene-painting. He seeks to attain effects of massive simplicity by the use of unadorned hangings and of undecorated screens, thus substituting vast spaces for the realistic details of the modern scene-painter. No doubt, there are a few plays for which this method of mounting would be appropriate enough--M. Maeterlinck's 'Intruder,' for one, and his 'Sightless' for another, plays which are independent of time and space, and in which the action appears to pass in some undiscovered limbo. As yet the advanced and iconoclastic theories of Mr. Craig have made few adherents, the most notable being the German, "Professor" Reinhardt, who lacks Mr. Craig's fine feeling for form and color, and who is continually tempted into rather ugly eccentricities of design, being apparently moved by the desire to be different from his predecessors rather than by the wish to be superior to them.

Interesting as are Mr. Craig's suggestions, and wellfounded as may be his protest against the excessive ornamentation to which we are too prone nowadays, there is no reason to fear that his principles will prevail. The art of the scene-painter is too welcome, it is too plainly in accord with the predilections of the twentieth century, for it to be annihilated by the fiat of a daring and reckless innovator. It will be wise if the producers should harken to Mr. Craig's warnings and curb their tendency to needless extravagance; but we may rest assured that a return to the bareness of the Attic theater or of the English theater in the time of the Tudors is frankly unthinkable now that the art of scene-painting has been developed to its present possibilities. In fact, the probability is rather that the scene-painters will continue to enlarge the boundaries of their territory and to discover new means and new methods of delighting our eyes by their evocations of interesting places.

Perhaps they would be more encouraged to go on and conquer new worlds if there was a wider recognition of the artistic value of their work. Altho De Lutherbourg and Clarkson Stanfield won honorable positions in the history of painting by their easel-pictures, the art of scene-painting does not hold the place in the public esteem that many of its practitioners deserve. Theophile Gautier, often negligible as a critic of the acted drama, was always worth listening to when he turned to pictorial art; and he was frequent in praise of the scene-painters of his time and of scene-painting itself as a craft of exceeding difficulty and of inadequate appreciation. Probably one reason why the scene-painter has not received his due meed of praise is because his work is not preserved. It exists only during the run of the play which it decorates. When the piece disappears from the boards, the scenes which adorned it vanish from sight. They linger only in the memory of those who happened to see this one play--and even then, in fact, only in the memory of such spectators as have trained themselves to pay attention to stage-pictures. For the scene-painter there is no Luxembourg; still less is there any Louvre. As Gautier sympathetically declared, "it is sad to think that nothing survives of those masterpieces destined to live a few evenings only, and disappearing from the washed canvas to give place to other marvels, equally fugitive. How much invention, talent, and genius may be lost--and not always leaving even a name!"

It is pleasant to know that at the Opera in Paris a formal order of the government has for now a half-century prescribed the preservation of the original models--the little miniature sets which the scene-painter submits for the approval of the manager and the dramatist before he begins work upon the actual scene. These models are always upon the same scale, and in the gallery connected with the library of the Opera a dozen of these models are set up to be viewed by visitors. Of course no tiny model, however cleverly fashioned, can give the full effect of the scene which has been conceived in terms of a huge stage; and yet the miniature reproductions do not betray the scene-painter as much as an engraving or a photograph often betrays the painter. Whatever its limitations, and they are obvious enough, the collection of models at the Opera is at least an attempt to retard the oblivion that Theophile Gautier deplored, and to provide for the scene-painter a substitute, however inadequate, for the Louvre and the Luxembourg.

(1912.)

THE BOOK OF THE OPERA

A few years ago _Punch_ had a satirical drawing representing a British matron conveying a bevy of youthful daughters to the French play in London. To a friend who called her attention to the rather risky atmosphere of the very Parisian comedy which they were about to behold, the worthy mother promptly explained that she was not bringing her daughters to see the play itself; she was bringing them to see only the acting. Probably a great many opera-goers would make a similar explanation if they were asked whether they were interested in the book of the opera or only in the music. They would be likely to protest that they cared little or nothing for the libretto, and that they were attracted solely by the score. But, as a matter of fact, the opera-goers who might make this reply would be self-deceived. Whether they are aware of it or not, they are unlikely to be attracted to any opera unless it happens to have an interesting story, built up into a coherent and captivating plot. When the libretto is unintelligible or uninteresting, the most delightful music fails to allure them into the opera-house. This is one of the reasons why the 'Magic Flute,' which contains much of Mozart's most beautiful melodic invention, is so rarely heard in our opera-houses, and why it is so sparsely attended when it is presented. The libretto of the 'Magic Flute' is dull and ineffective, and even Mozart's genius proved unable to overcome this initial handicap.

The ordinary opera-goer is likely to treat the libretto with calm contempt. He is prone to assert that nobody cares about the words, and he does not reflect that behind and beneath the words is the supporting structure of the story. After all, an opera is a play, it is a music-drama, and the plot is as important in a play the words of which are to be sung as in a play the words of which are to be spoken. True it is, of course, that in an opera the words may not be heard distinctly, and perhaps they need not be seized with certainty, since the emotion they set forth is more amply conveyed by the music. But the musician cannot express emotion musically, unless there is emotion for him to express, unless he has characters immeshed in a series of situations which evoke vivid and contrasting sentiments for him to translate into music. As the music-drama is a drama, it must obey the laws of the drama; it must represent a conflict of contending desires; it must be carried on by characters firm of purpose and resolute in achieving their several aims. These characters must be sharply individualized and boldly contrasted; and the story in which they take part must be at once strong and simple, calling for no elaborate explanation and moving forward steadily and irresistibly. It must have a lyric aspect, lending itself naturally to song; and it ought also to afford opportunity for the spectacular effects appropriate to the large stage of the opera-house.

So contemptuous of the libretto is the ordinary opera-goer that he rarely inquires as to the name of the author of the book, altho he is generally familiar with the name of the composer of the score. He may or he may not be aware that Wagner was his own librettist, and quite possibly he supposes that it is the ordinary custom of the composers to write the words for their own music. He knows that 'Carmen' was composed by Bizet, and that the 'Huguenots' was composed by Meyerbeer; but he would be greatly puzzled if he was asked to name the librettists of these two operas, the adroit playwrights who devised the skeletons of dramatic action which sustained the composers and provided them with ample opportunities for the exercise of their melodic gift. As a matter of fact, the book of 'Carmen' was written in collaboration by two of the most distinguished French dramatists of the nineteenth century, Meilhac and Halevy, the authors of 'Froufrou' and of the librettos of Offenbach's 'Belle Helene,' 'Grand Duchess of Gerolstein,' and 'Perichole.' And the book of the 'Huguenots' was the work of the master stage-craftsman, Scribe, the author of 'Adrienne Lecouvreur' and of the 'Ladies' Battle,' and of countless other plays performed in every modern language, and in all the countries of the world.