Part 10

The other works for the most part seem to wander along in endless stretches of melodious phrases, which have no closely organized relation to each other. They sound well, for these Italians have the trick of writing well for the singer. But they are open confessions of a fear of becoming tuneful in the old Italian style of Donizetti and Rossini. These young men seem to be constantly on the verge of writing in the aria form and of avoiding it only by thrusting in some unnatural modulation or some unexpected cadence. They seem to be striving for an endless melody, like Wagner's, which is not congenial to them. They forget that when the emotional conditions of the scene pointed to melodious music Wagner was frankly melodic, and that he wrote as lyrically as Schubert himself, though naturally constructing his melodies on a larger frame. Think of the joyous carol of the Rhine maidens in the water-woven vision of the first scene of the great trilogy; of the hard-wrung tribute of the crafty Loge to "Weibes Wonne und Werth"; of the love song of Siegmund, the duet between him and Sieglinde, the heart-rending farewell of the stricken god in the last scene; of Siegfried's Titanic cradle song to his infant sword; of the nightingale twitter of the forest bird, of the throbbing love duet of the third act of "Siegfried"; of the ebullient duet in the first scene of "Götterdämmerung"; of the chorus of Gunther's men, of the narrative of Siegfried, and of the stupendous threnody of Brünnhilde's immolation. Wagner was not afraid to write songs when he needed them in his art.

It is a grave mistake to sell the Italian birthright of vocal melody for a mess of orchestral pottage. And it is altogether unnecessary. These young Italians must let alone their attempts to set reason to music. Their latest librettos contain too much philosophizing and not enough passion. Zanetto is altogether too sophisticated to be typical. Sylvia thinks too much. Osaka in "Iris" is altogether too much a man of the world. Iris is a human doll. Kyoto is an accomplished speculator in human folly. These are not figures to be animated with great music. They forbid its presence. These young Italians must get back to a realization of the fundamental truth that music is the speech of emotion. Love, hate, fear, elation, depression, grief,--these are for music to interpret. But you cannot discuss Christianity and positivism in lyrics, nor make intelligent comment in six-eight time on the causes of poverty. The limitations of music are far smaller even than those of lyric poetry, yet its field is as large as that of the true drama, for it is that of all human emotion.

Do they need a model? Well, there is one of whom they seemingly know not. Away back in the years before even Rossini assailed flaccid Paris with the strenuous peal of "William Tell," a German boy of seventeen wrote in 1814 a song called "Gretchen am Spinnrade," and the following year he cast upon the waters that marvellous condensed drama "Der Erl-König." In the five minutes of that one song by Franz Peter Schubert lies the history of a human soul. It is an epitome of emotion, and the piano does quite as much as the voice--but not more--in the expression. If the young Italians would like to learn something more than they already know about the way to build condensed opera, let them study the songs of Schubert. There they will find a solution of the problem of how to combine perfect vocal melody with a dramatic accompaniment without sacrificing one iota of dramatic verity.

An additional question of high import is whether these young firebrands are not setting the torch to the roots of nationality in their art. It is useless for theoreticians to argue that there is no nationality in music. There is nationality in all art, and the "Virgin" painted by Rubens is a Flemish woman just as surely as she is Italian when limned by Michael Angelo. There never was a German who could have conceived the lilt of "Funiculi, funicula," nor an Italian who could have composed "Schwesterlein." No Russian could have penned the dainty "Pierre et sa Mie," nor could a Frenchman have imagined "Ay Ouchnem." Only an Englishman could have written "Rule Britannia," of which Wagner said that the first four measures contained the whole character of the English people.

Nationality shows itself most conspicuously in song. Instrumental music is at best an artificial species. Its forms, its methods, are handed from one nation to another, and the Harvard graduate builds his symphony upon the Viennese model of Papa Haydn. But the musical idioms of a people cannot be kept out of their songs. The folk song was ignored successfully for a thousand years, but in certain happy days of the Middle Ages it wooed and won the fugue, and modern music, strong with the strength of musical science, beautiful with the beauty of spontaneous emotional utterance, was the fruit of this union. But for all time the idiom of the folk song colored the vocal art. The musical idioms imposed themselves on the scientific basis, and when a German or a Frenchman or an Italian composed a song, he composed it with a counterpoint common through all Europe, but with the melodic idiom of the songs of his own people.

The Italians of to-day have not wholly forgotten the essentials of their native melody. Indeed, their composing betrays a deep self-consciousness. They see the character of their own music and try to escape it, and it is of this very act that complaint is here made. But the fundamentals of Italian melody are not entirely lost. The pages of Puccini's "Manon," "La Bohème," and "Tosca" are not completely devoid of song which is indisputably Italian. No one would ever mistake it for French or German. But it is no longer the melody of Donizetti and Bellini. That is well. The Italian masters of the beginning of this century wrote tunes for their own sake without thought of their dramatic expressiveness, and Donizetti did not hesitate to stop the entire action of his "Lucia" at one of the most critical points in order that the famous sextet might be sung.

The modern Italians do not fall into that sort of error. They are striving with all their power to compose dramatically. They are striving, too, to preserve Italian music, and for this all honor should be shown them. More than that, they have shown plainly the path along which Italian music should advance. They have demonstrated beyond question that the aria, which was the central sun of the old Neapolitan system of opera, is wholly unessential. They have shown that the dialogue of the lyric drama can be carried on in a musical speech which is melodious, but not dominated by musical patterns. They have illustrated to the full the possibilities of a flexible and eloquent recitative. They have carried to a high degree of excellence the art of fitting the musical accent to the word, and the contour of the phrase to the natural inflection of the speech. This they have done, too, in the full knowledge that their art in this detail is quite lost upon the general public and appeals only to a few studious critics of their music.

They have abolished from the Italian stage the foolish repetitions of lines of the text as syllables on which to hang cadenzas. They have wiped out the empty colorature song, designed solely for the amazement of groundlings and for the glorification of the prima donna. They have almost terminated the career of the prima donna herself, and substituted for her, if not the singing actress of Wagner, at least an acting songstress. They have placed Italian opera beside French in its honest search after theatric directness. Italian opera is no longer music and nothing else: it is what its early fathers intended it should be, _drama per musica_.

The movement of the young Italians toward dramatic verity, as already noted, did not originate in a weak surrender to the conquest of Europe by Wagner. The "Gioconda" of Ponchielli, produced in 1876, shows not a single trace of Wagnerian influence; and yet to that work as much as to any other are the young Italians indebted. They have travelled the path on which Ponchielli was moving, but they have gone much farther than he did. Ponchielli utilized the orchestral forces with high skill, and his dramatic recitative was far ahead of that found in Verdi's earlier works. For a second-rate master he attained extraordinary influence over his successors. Alas! that suggests that they are even less than second-rate, and it is quite possible that the near future will decide that they were less than third-rate. But we of the present must take them as they appear to us, and endeavor to learn from their works whither operatic music is tending.

Boito's "Mefistofele," which is as old as 1868, gave these young Italians much to think of, so much indeed that one can trace a good deal more than a family resemblance between the introduction of Mascagni's "Iris" and the prologue in heaven in the Boito work. But the young men have striven again to make advances. That they have endeavored to introduce into their music an Italianized Wagnerism is the fault for which they must be most severely blamed, for in doing this they have wandered away from true nationalism and have betrayed their birthright.

It is not possible in a brief essay to point out the details of the methods of these young men. It may be said, however, that what they have apparently striven to do is to rear a distorted vocal structure, composed of the elements of the older Italian singing style, upon a foundation of acrid, restless, changeful, distressful harmonies. It may perhaps be injudicious to find fault with them for this, for no thoughtful observer of musical progress can fail to see that toward something new and strange in harmonic sequences all music is advancing. One needs only to think of the French operas of Bruneau and Charpentier, the piano music of the young Russians, the vast orchestral tone-riddles of Richard Strauss. If the use of strictly technical terms may be allowed, the harmony of to-day is no longer diatonic; it is not even chromatic; it is the harmony of the minor second. In other words, it is the harmony in which the sharpest of all dissonances, that of two tones only a semitone apart, is prevalent. In the presence of this style of harmony the chord of the diminished seventh becomes as gentle as the tonic triad, for music is filled with what the eloquent and witty James Huneker once happily called "diseased chords of the twenty-sixth."

This style of harmony is not natural to Italian music. The genius of Italian song is utterly opposed to it. The proclivities of the Italian people are inimical to it. It is not adapted to the methods and traditions of the Italian lyric drama, and it has not been found necessary by the writers of the greatest masterpieces of Italian opera. Verdi and Boito were able to construct their notable works without it. Mascagni, on the other hand, has forced his music into this uncongenial way. His "Iris" teems with harsh and discordant harmonies, and in order to set the melodic voice-parts on this uneasy basis he has been compelled to twist the melodic curves of Italian song into unseemly angles.

Now these are facts. Just what they are to signify in the progress of musical art only a very confident person would venture to predict. Where is Italian opera? That question we may answer. Whither is it going? To that we can only hazard a reply. We may, too, be wholly wrong in supposing that it is an evil day for art when Italian opera sacrifices anything of its intense nationality for the sake of rivalling the drastic music-drama of Richard Wagner. Critics are not prophets. They can only study the conditions of art in their own day, and try to reconcile them with those standards which the experience of time has shown to be the highest. As Mr. Webster once intimated, the only way to judge of the future is by the past. That method points to the conclusion that nothing good will come of the effort to dethrone the national genius. On the other hand, this effort looks amazingly like a confession of weakness.

It looks as if the young Italians were not of fruitful inventiveness in the production of thematic ideas. All the good tunes have not been written yet. John Stuart Mill confessed that for a time he was troubled with a fear that because there were only seven tones in the scale all the possible melodic ideas were nearly exhausted. But it has been noted that in spite of the immense drain made on the scale by Bach and Mozart and Weber and Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann there were still tunes enough to make a Dvorak, a Tschaïkowsky, a Brahms, and a Wagner.

II.--THE CLASSIC OF THE UNPROGRESSIVE

But how may he find Arcady Who hath nor youth nor melody?

H. C. BUNNER, _The Way to Arcady_.

In these tumultuous times of Strauss and Wagner, with the furies of intellectual realism pursuing us and the sirens of seductive emotionalism panting before us, the persistence with which Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" clings to the lyric stage impels us toward the complacent conclusion that this work is become the classic of the musically unprogressive. This seems a hazardous statement, yet it may be shown without undue effort to enjoy a substantial and definite basis. The names of Racine and Molière, of Gluck and Lully, rise before the memory when the term "classic" is employed, but one should also not forget that there are thousands of well-intentioned persons to whom that is classic which is just far enough above the level of their ordinary thought to command respect. To the whistler of operetta jingles all music not to be whistled is classic. Stendahl said, in making a distinction too often made arbitrarily: "Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers."

If this demarcation of Stendahl's be correct, then "Lucia" is twice blessed in that it is both classic and romantic. For there is no doubt that it gave much pleasure to our grandfathers, nor is there any room for suspicion that it is not congenial to a "popular" audience in the actual state of its habits and beliefs. No doubt, indeed, there is a sort of gentle romanticism in "Lucia." The personages are of the class of lords and ladies, and there is something quite imposing in the strut of their boots and the waving of their feathers. One must even be impressed by the sight of the noble Scotch maiden wandering in the forest in a long-trained gown accompanied by a companion who wears low neck and short sleeves. We realize that we are in fashionable company, and we prepare for the worst. When Edgardo marches upon the scene just as Lucia has signed the futile contract, our expectations are realized, and we gaze upon the revelation of the secrets of high life with an interest almost as direct and eloquent as that of the chorus itself. The madness of Lucy, accompanied by the winsome and ingenuous accents of the flute, touches us deeply, and when Edgardo, wandering among the tombs of his sainted fathers, learns that Lucy has ceased to live, and stabs himself, breathing out his life in that sweet melody (with chorus), "A te vengo," we are dissolved in tears.

This is romanticism in truth, and unless he be of those who preserve in middle age the intellectual grasp of childhood, one cannot find in this work any qualities of the classic beyond its familiarity to our grandfathers, except in the meaning of the dictum of Sainte-Beuve, "Les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parce qu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont energiques, frais, dispos." Now this last word is open to misconstruction. It may mean "cheerful" and it may mean "disposed" or "orderly." In the case of "Lucia" either meaning will answer, for it is the "energique" rather than the "dispos" that makes us trouble in the application of the definition of Sainte-Beuve. There are fuss and fury in the strenuous utterances of the tenor in the scene of the tearing of the contract, but these can hardly be called energy in the meaning in which the French author was using the word. Youthful and cheerful, innocent and ingenuous,--these, indeed, are adjectives which may well be applied to the masterpiece of the composer of "Il Castello di Kenilworth" and other operas. For those who are living in the past of musical art "Lucia" is a classic, and it is also a living romance. It gave joy to their grandfathers, and it sends through their own nerves mild thrills, not discomforting, and not impeded by intellectual problems in tone.

When one comes beyond the "Lucia" period in operatic art, he may fairly enroll himself in the ranks of those whom Walter Pater calls "spiritual adventurers,"--those who are ready to put out on unknown seas of art experience and who are notable for their active mistrust of the teachings of their grandfathers. Some of these are fools, but this fact only serves to remind one of a wise saying of that very wise man, Robert Louis Stevenson: "Shelley was a young fool, and so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity."

It is seldom that men take things as they come in music in this "forlorn stupidity," for they set themselves stubbornly against the new. Yet the attitude of those who sit in amiable comfort at performances of "Lucia" and who go away saying, "Now that's the kind of music I like," with a tremendous accent on the "I,"--an accent which is plainly the thank-offering of the Pharisee,--they are surely insensible to the jars, if not to the incongruities, of the modern musical world. And the spiritual adventurers will presently say to them: "We are at the parting of our ways. Linger you, if you will, in the valley with your Donizetti and his three-four ditties and his big guitar. We are for the mountain with Wagner and Tschaïkowsky and the thunder-storms."

But perchance it may occur to you to question whether they are not happier in their serene movelessness than those who are continually scaling heights. There is even some doubt about this, for they experience occasional twinges of discomfort when they hear of persons enjoying exclusive satisfaction in such works as "Falstaff" or "Otello" or "Die Meistersinger," which are to them poppy and mandragora. But there is something more pitiable than this in their sad state. That is their inability to enjoy the classics of the musically progressive.

The man or woman who is not subservient to a factitious taste in music, who has not habituated the intellectual palate to the enjoyment of Wagner alone, or of Rossini alone,--he it is whose soul is enriched by a wider range of impressions. For him no flower of music blooms in vain. For him there is some very special loveliness in the operas written before the flood-gates of modern romanticism were opened. For him there is still edification in the stately measures of Gluck's "Orfeo," and there is a fountain of inexhaustible pleasure in the immortal "Don Giovanni" of Mozart. To him the latter, in particular, is a perennial "Fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro." Ability to penetrate to the heart of these works is an evidence of musical aristocracy. They are not for the common herd. The children of melodic and harmonic darkness are not enlightened by them. They shine for the few, the chosen few, who march with Music herself as their leader. To hear "Lucia" after one of these is like drinking iced water after eating ice-cream. The Donizettian masterpiece becomes suddenly lukewarm.

It has been said that in art there is no such thing as standing still. But the appreciation of art is surely a different matter. Music, the youngest of the arts, is in the very press of her first forward march. She is in the possession of the priceless gift of unwearied strength. Her technical resources have not as yet been fully explored. She has mines of mere matter which have not yet been opened up. Her future is big with promise. But whatever that future may be, it will be the direct product of her past. She will never be able to cut the chains that bind her to Bach any more than poetry can break the bonds which tie her to David, the son of Jesse. Some of us are prone to forget this, and to think that we are of the army of progress when we neglect Bach and Beethoven and the prophets for the preachers of our own era. But there would have been no Brahms without a Haydn, and there would have been no Wagner without a Mozart.

It requires an æsthetic immobility unfortunately none too rare to stand still and enjoy "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "La Sonnambula" in a period when the whole spirit and outward form of musical art are tending directly away from them. The fact that so many persons can do it is but an evidence of what we know to our regret; namely, that most men and women refuse to take these things seriously. They hold that the opera is only a form of amusement and that it is absurd to fall into disputes about it. Art is a pretty word to them; but if its meaning includes a command that they are to regard their "amusements" with grave eyes and to exercise the faculties of their minds upon them, away with it to the realms of outer darkness!

This is not an attitude which history encourages. Men have always been stern in the defence of their playthings, and they have always taken their pleasures very seriously. The whole Trojan war was about a man's passing fancy for a woman. More bitter wars than that have been waged for the sake of acquiring wealth and power, and to what end? That the possessors might buy playthings therewith. Grown-up children have their toys, but they wear graver aspects than the dolls and Noah's Arks of childhood. Sometimes the dolls become soldiers and the arks battleships in the nursery of a German Emperor. And so the world suddenly realizes that the pursuit of amusements is a large game, while his Majesty, perchance, practises a little music now and then, that some day he may fiddle while Rome burns.

Some of us are content to remain awake to the fact that, as Taine says, "At bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in life but our dreams," and to feel that this lovely art of music is a chief among these dreams. Those of us who are of this mind naturally enough plume ourselves on our relationship to the kings who have made wars for playthings. But we have a secret satisfaction in the assurance that when the kings are forgotten and the boundaries of their kingdoms blotted from the maps of the world, the art of music will still be in the possession of the hearts of men. And then we wonder if the musically unprogressive will still be clinging to their jingling classic, "Lucia di Lammermoor"?