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Page 18
The pervading note of the whole work is struck at the beginning of
the first number. Had Mozart seen death as Handel and Bach saw it, as
the only beautiful completion of life, or even as the last opportunity
given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be found wanting, he
might have written a sweetly breathed prayer for eternal rest, like
the final chorus of the "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal
or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But
he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem
�ternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear
begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the
fifth bar seems to have given him the relief gained by cutting oneself
when in severe pain; and how intense Mozart's pain was may be
estimated by the vigour of the reaction when the reaction comes; for
though the "Te decet hymnus" is like a gleam of sweet sunshine on
black waters, the melody is immediately snatched up, as it were, and,
by the furious energy of the accompaniment, powerful harmonic
progressions, and movement of the inner parts (note the tenor
ascending to the high G on "orationem"), made expressive of abnormal
glowing ecstasy. To know Mozart's mood when he wrote the Requiem is to
have the key to the "Kyrie." His artistic sense compelled him to veil
the acuteness of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue; but
here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling triumphs over the
artistic sense; and by a chromatic change, of which none but a Mozart
or a Bach would have dreamed, the inexpressive formality of the
counter-subject is altered into a passionate appeal for mercy. In no
other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become hysterical, and
in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this number, where the
sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen
the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that scholastic
cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance, though we should
observe that the raucous final chord with the third omitted is in
keeping with the colour of the whole number, and not dragged in as a
mere display of pedantic knowledge. The "Dies Ir�" is magnificent
music, but the effect is enormously intensified by Mozart first (in
the "Kyrie") making us guess at the picture by the agitation of mind
into which it throws him, and then suddenly opening the curtain and
letting us view for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no more
awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here in
the "Dies Ir�," "Tuba minim," "Rex tremend�," and the "Confutatis."
The method of showing the obverse of the medal first, and then
astonishing us with the sudden magnificence of the other side, is an
old one, and was an old one even in Mozart's time, but he uses it with
supreme mastery, and results that have never been equalled. The most
astonishing part of the "Confutatis" is the prayer at the finish,
where strange cadence upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn
sigh, and the last, longer drawn than the rest, "gere curam mei
finis," followed by a hushed pause, is indeed awful as the silence of
the finish. Quite as great is the effect of the same kind in the
"Agnus Dei," which was either written by Mozart, or by Sussmayer with
Mozart's spirit looking over him. Written by Mozart, the Requiem
necessarily abounds in tender touches: the trebles at "Dona eis"
immediately after their first entry; the altos at the same words
towards the end of the number, and at the twenty-eighth bar of the
"Kyrie"; the first part of the "Hostias," the "Agnus Dei," the
wonderful "Ne me perdas" in the "Recordare." And if one wants sheer
strength and majesty, turn to the fugue on "Quam olim Abrah�," or the
C natural of the basses in the "Sanctus." But the prevailing mood is
one of depressing sadness, which would become intolerable by reason of
its monotony were it possible to listen to the Requiem as a work of
art merely, and not as the tearful confessions of one of the most
beautiful spirits ever born into the world.
"FIDELIO"
As an enthusiastic lover of "Fidelio" I may perhaps be permitted to
put one or two questions to certain other of its lovers. Is it an
opera at all?--does it not consist of one wonderfully touching
situation, padded out before and behind,--before with some
particularly fatuous reminiscences of the old comedy of intrigue,
behind with some purely formal business and a pompous final chorus?
"Fidelio" exists by reason of that one tremendous scene: there is
nothing else dramatic in it: however fine the music is, one cannot
forget that the libretto is fustian and superfluous nonsense. Had
Beethoven possessed the slightest genius for opera, had he possessed
anything like Mozart's dramatic instinct (and of course his own
determination to touch nothing but fitting subjects), he would have
felt that no meaner story than the "Flying Dutchman" would serve as an
opportunity to say all that was aroused in his heart and in his mind
by the tale of Leonora. As he had no genius whatever for opera, no
sense of the dramatic in life, the tale of Leonora seemed to him good
enough; and, after all, in its essence it is the same as the tale of
Senta. The Dutchman himself happens to be more interesting than
Florestan because of his weird fate; but he is no more the principal
character in Wagner's opera than Florestan is the principal character
in Beethoven's opera. The principal character in each case is the
woman who takes her fate into her own hands and fearlessly chances
every risk for the sake of the man she loves. And just as Wagner wrote
the best passage in the "Dutchman" for the moment when Senta promises
to be faithful through life and death, so Beethoven in the prison
scene of "Fidelio" wrote as tremendous a passage as even he ever
conceived for the moment when Leonora makes up her mind at all costs
to save the life of the wretched prisoner whose grave she is helping
to dig. The tale is simple enough--there is scarcely enough of it to
call a tale. Leonora's husband, Florestan, has somehow fallen into the
power of his enemy Pizarro, who imprisons him and then says he is
dead. Leonora disbelieves this, and, disguising herself as a boy and
taking the name of Fidelio, hires herself as an assistant to Rocco,
the jailer of the fortress in which Florestan is confined. At that
time the news arrives that an envoy of the king is coming to see that
no injustice is being done by Pizarro. Pizarro has been hoping to
starve Florestan slowly to death; but now he sees the necessity of
more rapid action. He therefore tells Rocco to dig a grave in
Florestan's cell, and he himself will do the necessary murder. This
brings about the great prison scene. Florestan lies asleep in a
corner; Leonora is not sure whether she is helping to dig his grave or
the grave of some other unlucky wretch; but while she works she takes
her resolution--whoever he may be, she will risk all consequences and
save him. Pizarro arrives, and is about to kill Florestan, when
Leonora presents a pistol to his head; and, before he has quite had
time to recover, a trumpet call is heard, signalling the arrival of
the envoy. Pizarro knows the game is up, and Florestan that his wife
has saved him. This, I declare, is the only dramatic scene in the
play--here the thing ends: excepting it, there is no real incident.
The business at the beginning, about the jailer's daughter refusing to
have anything more to do with her former sweetheart, and falling in
love with the supposed Fidelio, is merely silly; Rocco's song,
elegantly translated in one edition, "Life is nothing without
money"--Heaven knows whether it was intended to be humorous--is
stupid; Pizarro's stage-villainous song of vengeance is unnecessary;
the arrangement of the crime is a worry. These, and in fact all that
comes before the great scene, are entirely superfluous, the purest
piffle, very tiresome. Most exasperating of all is the stupid
dialogue, which makes one hope that the man who wrote it died a
painful, lingering death. But, in spite of it all, Beethoven, by
writing some very beautiful music in the first act, and by rising to
an astonishing height in the prison scene and the succeeding duet, has
created one of the wonders of the music-world.
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