The Art of Music :A Comprehensive Ilbrar

1wmm H?mi BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT or Hetirg W, Sage 1891 A36:66^a, ' ?>/m7^7 9306 Cornell University Library ML 100.M39 V.9 The art of music :a comprehensive ilbrar 3 1924 022 385 342 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022385342 THE ART OF MUSIC The Art of Music A Comprehensive Library of Information for Music Lovers and Musicians Editor-in-Chief DANIEL GREGORY MASON Columbia UniveTsity Associate Editors EDWARD B. HILL LELAND HALL Harvard University Past Professor, Univ. of Wisconsin Managing Editor CESAR SAERCHINGER Modem Music Society of New Yoric In Fourteen Volumes Profusely Illustrated NEW YORK THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC Lillian Nordica as Briinnhilde After a pholo from life THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME NINE The Opera Department Editor: CESAR SAERCHINGER Secretary Modern Music Society of New York Author, 'The Opera Since Wagner,' etc. Introduction by ALFRED HERTZ Conductor San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Formerly Conductor Metropolitan Opera House, New York NEW YORK THE NASTIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC i\.3(ft(fliji Copyright, 1918. by THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc. [All Bights Reserved] THE OPERA INTRODUCTION The opera is a problem—a problem to the composer • and to the audience. The composer's problem has been in the course of solution for over three centuries and the problem of the audience is fresh with every performance. In a measure the audience's difficulty cre- ates that of the composer, for it is the audience to which his appeal is directed. On the other hand, it is the composer who sets the problem to his audience, and the easier he makes it the better the audience will like it. The audience comes to be amused, and the composer—the serious composer—would educate it, impress it, inspire it. Between them lies a gulf to be bridged. Now the composer's problem is a matter of history. Through the whole of this volume it is an ever-present quantity. It is a legacy from generation to generation. It is inherent in the very nature of the art-form. It is this: the opera is a drama and the opera is music. The drama appeals to our emotion by way of the intellect and music by way of the senses ; the one applies the test of logic, the other, that of sesthetics, propor- tions; the ideal of one is truth, the other beauty. How shall a perfect balance between them be maintained? Now in nature truth and beauty are one. A naturally evolved art-form—the statue, the song, or the symphony —therefore is true if it is beautiful. But the opera is not so evolved. It is an arbitrary creation of human vii THE OPERA ingenuity or whim. It started, not as a fact, but as a theory. And there lies the difficulty. The inventors of opera were a few Florentine gentle- men who, in the year 1600, tried to resurrect an art of two thousand years before. They knew that such an art had existed, the Renaissance had left them its shadow: the tragedies of the classic age. In place of the substance they devised a formula, and upon that formula—a certain kind of poetry and a certain kind of music—they constructed the opera. Primarily that opera was a drama, its music was merely the hand- maiden of poetry. But presently that particular kind of music, being more direct in its appeal (via the senses) than that certain kind of poetry (via the intellect), usurped the major portion of the audience's attention; they cared more about melody than about words and action (such as it was), the actor was regarded as a singer, the opera as a concert. The inevitable hap- pened: the declamation (calculated to be realistic) leaned to the side of pure melody; melody, a thing of beauty, conformed to the aesthetic laws and defied the laws of logic. Form was set above the spirit. But the spirit would not die. Again and again it de- manded the right to determine the form. Composers leaned now to this side, now to that, according to their lightSj and the conflict went on. On the one side, the drama, the word; on the other, the music. Meantime another element made itself felt more and more: the scene. Stage pictures became ever more sumptu- ous. Having, like the music, a sensuous appeal, the scene managed to arrogate to itself a goodly share of the attention. Moreover, the pictures were animated, and so yet another element—the dance—^was developed (which, by the way, had formed an element of the an- cient Greek 'model'). Lovers of the opera—and their name was legion—now fondly argued that it was the combination of all the arts: poetry, music, and dance viii INTRODUCTION —even painting. To which critics replied that opera music was the worst music, opera poetry the worst poetry, and opera pictures the worst pictures. Critics, indeed, began to speculate about the whole philosophy of the thing. Why, they said, should actors sing? People do not sing what they say to each other in real life. To which might be replied that dramatic poetry is no more unnatural than musical speech, for people do not speak to each other in metre and rhyme. Music in opera is merely heightened declamation, idealized speech. Very well, even idealized speech should be understood; but vocalization, florid passages, high registers, endless repetitions, are confusing; one cannot understand the words. Moreover, repetition may be well enough, but one does not declaim—even in a poetic drama—in perfectly symmetrical form, in arias, in songs. Worse still, two people do not speak simultane- ously in real life, much less three or more (as in oper- atic ensemble), and as for choruses—mobs do not break into song with a regularity that can only be attained by drilling and maintained by a conductor in the pit. And finally the orchestra—^why an orchestra indeed?—does it not cover up what little one might understand of that 'idealized' articulation? To each of these objections the opera-lover has an answer. A soliloquy, in real drama, must be poetic, beautiful in rhythm, in metre, interesting in an aesthetic sense. A musical soliloquy, in order not to tire the listener, must conform to the laws of symmetry, of proportion. People whose sentiments are known to the audience may well indulge in simultaneous soliloquies or lyric commentaries, while the beauties of harmony help to heighten the atmosphere of the scene. Here, indeed, is one of the great virtues of opera : people can be made to speak at the same time with beautiful effect rather than an ugly confusion as the result. And in so doing they may be understood, for music is the language ix THE OPERA of the heart, and their very tones will betray the mean- ing of their words. All these arguments are justified; only they are not logical—they are not in line 'with the original ideal of opera—the dramatic ideal. Now from time to time reformers have arisen that have brought opera back into line with these ideals, but the fundamental contra- diction, the non-logic, cannot be overcome by reform —hence each successive reform represents a com- promise with the ideal, and incidentally furnishes a starting point for fresh abuses. The problem was not solved, and, it seems, never will be. It is a problem based on a misunderstanding—a most magnificent ab- surdity. Opera, as we know it and enjoy it to-day, dates from the first of these reforms—that of Gluck, at about the middle of the eighteenth century. All that lies before is technical development, groping around, degeneration and the triumph of decadence; a hundred and fifty years of seething activity from which there remains hardly a note. It was the age of the singers' domina- tion over the composer. Two distinct species germi- nated in this period: the tragic and the comic, opera seria and opera huffa. Florence, Mantua, Venice and Naples had been the seed-ground of the new art; Ger- many produced the first great fruits : Gluck in the opera seria, Mozart in the opera huffa. In France, meanwhile, the scenically magnificent French ballet-opera of LuUy and Rameau had attained to a monumental glory, while Germany and England were raising native works in close imitation of the Italian model. The next half-century saw the internationalization of opera, the fusion of national elements in the reform species of Gluck, and the growth of a new vitality. The Italian opera had gone through the world. In 1752 the Italian buffonists gave their historic performance in Paris of the first independent opera butfa—the Serva INTRODUCTION Padrona of Pergolesi—and from that spark a new flame was kindled: the French opera comique, which substituted scenes of everyday Ufe for the strutting heroics of Classicism, dialogue for recitative, and which with its naturalistic vigor and rhythmic verve influ- enced both Gluck and Mozart. Gluck proclaimed the ideal of dramatic truth in the medium of classic simplicity; he became the point of departure for the Grand Opera of France and of all the schools whose first concern was the theatre. Mo- zart, in his own field, demonstrated the inherent power of music to characterize and ideaUze in conventional forms the living truths of human existence; profound humanity and transcendent beauty became one in his world of sounds.

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