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Page 24
Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before
whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the
beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the
opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs
for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and
finally Gluck, with his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical
invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling, and telling
it well, and inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations
where strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs
truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created which
would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of these three
periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for then the form
entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function of the story was to
provide a motive for song after song; so that no one was scandalised
or moved to laughter when the death of the hero was re-enacted because
his death-song pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story
was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext. The
characters were the merest puppets, or shadows of puppets; and there
was no reason why Julius C�sar should not be a male soprano and sing
charmingly feminine florid airs. In a word, there was no drama nor
pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those who can accept
it as it is will find in many old Italian writers some perfect music
of its sort, and in the Italian operas of Handel the divinest songs
ever written--songs even more divine than Mozart's. But the childish
delight in lovely melodies and in absolute perfection of vocal art, at
its highest in the early part of the eighteenth century, died out
rapidly after 1750; and Italian opera became the medium of the
vulgarest instead of the most refined kind of ear-tickling. How Gluck
rebelled, and determined to "reform" the opera stage, and how in
reforming it he was impelled to a large extent by a desire to find a
medium through which he could express himself, are matters well enough
known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher, he left no
disciples; for Mozart, the next master of Italian opera, was a hundred
thousand miles away from him in intention, in method, and in
achievement. He commenced where Gluck ended his pre-Reformation
period; and all his life his intention was to please first, and only
in the second place to express himself. But so splendid were his
gifts, so inevitably did he fit the lovely word to the thrilling
thought, so lucky was he in the libretto of "Don Giovanni" (the
luckiest libretto ever devised), that he went clean ahead not only of
Gluck but of Beethoven and every composer who has written opera since.
His operas stand at the parting of the ways. In them we find the
fullest measure of dramatic truth combined with the most delicious
ear-tickling. But it is safe to say that Mozart is the only composer
of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining the two things thus,
for in Gluck there is short measure of sheer beauty, and in
Handel--who used the oldest form--no attempt at drama. Mozart, like
Gluck, had no disciples--only the second-rate men have disciples; but
their example, and the tendency which they represented, had a curious
result. Before their time all opera-writers had been avowed
ear-ticklers. But after them, and especially after Mozart, the old
line of composers may be observed to have split up into two lines, the
one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other trying to express
dramatic movement, and their thought and feeling, in the old medium.
The first of these lines has not been broken to this day: Rossini
came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, and
the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler unto this day. The
second line in its turn quickly split into those who, not content with
the form, sought to alter it, and those who, quite content with it,
went gaily on, turning out opera after opera, dealing with modern
subjects in the old-fashioned way. Of these last Gounod must be
reckoned the chief; and he began, not where Mozart left off, but with
the Mozartean method of the "Don Giovanni" period. Now, it is of the
very essence of the Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that
it enables a composer to represent moments. The drama does not unfold
gradually, as it does in the music-play, with its continuous flow of
music marking the subtlest changes. It unfolds in jerks, each number
advancing it a stage; so that Gluck never got any appearance of
continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by the consummate tact
with which he arranged his pictures, and by the exciting pace at which
he passes them before us. The figures seem to move, as in the
Kinetoscope, or its forerunner the Wheel of Life: the Mozartean opera,
when most dramatic, is a musical Wheel of Life. Gounod possessed
neither Mozart's tact nor his fiery energy. Neither was called for in
"Faust," which is not a drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial
moments, from a drama; and since the moments were moments charged with
the one feeling which Gounod appears to have felt very strongly or to
have had the faculty for expressing, he is here at his very best.
There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it--it was purely
animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains, and will
remain, as the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous
form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he attempted to do
again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and Juliet"; and here the
method which had served him so faithfully and so well in "Faust"
utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were virtually but two
characters, Faust and Marguerite, while in "Romeo" the stage was
encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would
have been Mozart's opportunity was his undoing. He could give none of
them pungent or characteristic language; they are the merest Italian
operatic puppets; and it is only when they are off the stage that the
opera shows any signs of life. In the story of "Romeo" the passion is
of a far more fiery quality than in that of "Faust"; and whereas in
"Faust" the passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the
finale, where it becomes a little more intense, in "Romeo" it is
passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony
scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly
forebodings of death. The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to
depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling. Mozart himself
would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only
method that might have enabled Gounod to do it,--the Wagnerian method
of continuous development of typical themes,--the unfolding of the
drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of
feeling than it began. The last scene of all, the scene where a more
sincere composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded
at least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed the
slightest sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with which
Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed
leading up to that fervour he could not give us--the mood which finds
the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears
beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its
strongest appeal. But it was not the subject which led to Gounod's
failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He failed in every opera excepting
"Faust," and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect
knowledge of his own powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had
never experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be
inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment. As
Gounod failed in "Romeo," and failed in every other opera, so every
modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old
undramatic form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera was well
enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as soon as
composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately worked-out
situations, and the gradual growth and change of human passion into
it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere.
Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age
wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and
art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.
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