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Page 23
The precise provocation of this essay was a certain performance of
"Lohengrin." During the first act the drama proceeded with charming,
almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was surprised to find that the
smoother it went the more irresistibly the music reminded me of Weber,
until I remembered that "Lohengrin" is Wagner's most Weberish opera,
and that in his youth Wagner heard Weber sung, not as he is sung
now--that is, like an early Wagner music-drama--but as Weber intended
it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera. For Weber stood very near to
Mozart, modern as he often seems. He was born before Mozart died; he
worshipped him, and absolutely refused to speak to Salieri because
Salieri had been Mozart's enemy; and it is easy to see, when once we
rid ourselves of the idea that he was a rudimentary music-dramatist,
that in his music he adhered as closely to Mozartean simplicity as his
very different genius would permit. Perhaps, after all, it is his
greatest glory that he is the connecting link between Mozart and
Wagner, between the greatest composer born into the eighteenth century
and the greatest born into the nineteenth; for the musical-pictorial
art which he evolved from Mozart's technique was used by Wagner with
only the slightest modifications in the making of his music-dramas.
But whereas Weber was a factor in the Romantic movement when it was
most magnificently unreasonable, Wagner came later, and, though he
felt the force of the current, it did not carry him into the
absurdities that weaken--for they do weaken--much of Weber's work.
Wagner has been described as Weber, as Weber might have become; but
the truth is that he was Weber's younger brother, who took Weber's art
and used it to nobler ends with a degree of intellect, dramatic power,
invention, and passion which Weber did not possess. To Weber the
scenery was the important thing, and humanity almost seemed to be
dragged in because the human voice was indispensable; but Wagner,
going back to Mozart, restored humanity to its proper place, thus
making his opera into real drama, and kept the fantastic creatures who
haunted Weber's woods and glens and streams only as emblems of the
natural forces that war for or against humanity. Above all, he got rid
of Weber's stage villains--for Samiel is merely the stage villain of
commerce; and, instead of the dusk and shadow in which Weber's fancy
loved to roam, he gives us sunlight and the sweet air. "Lohengrin" is
full of sunlight and freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery than
ever Weber dreamed of--the mystery with which the most delicate German
imagination invested the broad rivers that flowed through the black
forests from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness and beauty,
some "land of eternal dawn," as Wagner calls it. No more Mozartean
music is in existence, save Mozart's own, than that first act of
"Lohengrin," where Wagner, by dint of being Weberish, came nearer to
Mozart than ever Weber came; for Weber never wrote anything which,
regarded as absolute music, apart from its emotional significance, or
the picture it suggests to the inner eye, is so purely beautiful as,
for instance, the bit of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his
little arrangement with Elsa. Both the first and the second acts are
full of such melodies, any two of which would prove Wagner to be the
greatest melody-writer of the century; and those critics who say that
Verdi is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart's in form,
would have said, had they lived last century, that Salieri was greater
than Mozart because Salieri's melodies were more like Hasse's in form.
Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite on the stage, for it
is even more exquisite in the score; but that we shall not know until
our operatic singers abandon their vanity and their melodrama, and by
reading an occasional book, and sometimes going out into the world,
learn how much they themselves would gain if they always worked with
artistic sincerity.
ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING
All art forms are conventions, and all conventions appear ridiculous
when they are superseded by new ones. The old Italian opera form is
laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep
bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the
Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at
by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention. It is
absolutely the first condition of the existence of an art that one
shall be prepared to tolerate things ludicrously unlike anything to be
found in real life; and when (for instance) you have swallowed the
camel of allowing the heroes and heroines to sing their woes at all,
it is a little foolish to strain at the gnat of permitting them to
sing in this rather than in that way, when both ways are alike
preposterous. It is not, therefore, on the score of its inherent
absurdity that I should throw brickbats at Italian opera, any more
than with the female dress of to-day before my eyes I should insist
that the women who wore the fashions of ten years ago were only fit to
be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; knowing, as I do, that the dress
of ten years ago was not--and could not be--more absurd than the dress
of to-day. The only reasonable objection that can be brought against
Italian opera is that when it is sincere it offers what no one wants,
and that when it tries to offer what everyone wants it is not sincere.
I cannot quite understand what this means, but will endeavour to
explain.
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