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Page 25
But those who have heard "Romeo and Juliet" may possibly prefer even
the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian opera which it
represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind
represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I said, when Italian opera
is sincere it offers what no one wants--ear-tickling, and
ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort which is gone completely out of
fashion. Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line of
opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse, and he spent his life
in devising pleasant noises to make his patrons' evenings pass
agreeably. I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what "La
Favorita" is all about, or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It
is a series of songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a
single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful
regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is
merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from
Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual.
But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the
time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from
boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti
wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply
as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was no
music-hall, and the opera had to serve its purpose: hence the slight
confusion which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a
better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although
Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains
and invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I doubt
whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for the fact
that Donizetti was an opera-composer--and Mozart and Gluck were
opera-composers too!--it is pretty certain that not the united prayers
of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic
management to resurrect "La Favorita." Even up-to-date ear-tickling is
not popular now in the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it;
and we don't want to pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way
that arouses no pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and
dominant passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing
of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the
flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti
is amongst the dead whom no resurrection awaits.
VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER
And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La Traviata"
was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted
on the point, and "A�da" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not
young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the
composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period
one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not
his wisdom teeth. One finds it difficult to understand how ever the
thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find
a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can
understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal"
with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth
they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame and cash for its
composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the
music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over
living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and
without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled
every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when
Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and
immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to
please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the
time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth
master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never
sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of
Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted,
also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The
Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of
"Traviata"--the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of
retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when
that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets
again by making her give up his son. Far from condemning the story
myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly
to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality
of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this. Let us
see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid
model as Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian
opera, existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which
the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to combine
the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic impulse in the
modern manner. But the attempt is far less successful than in "Romeo";
and indeed it is a faint-hearted one. Whenever a song occurs, the
action is suspended, and all the actors save the lucky vocalist of the
minute are at their wits' end to know where to look, and what to do
with their hands, feet--their whole persons in fact--and the parts
they are playing. And the songs are far from being expressive of the
feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up. The
drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough; and
not much more can be said against Violetta's song, "Ah! fors' � lui,"
than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas are more than
rather absurd. But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his
life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by his sweetheart's
maid, who tells him that his joy is at an end, and then he howls "O
mio rimorso" to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind. Equally undramatic,
untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental ditties sung by
Alfredo's father. The last act is best; but I must say that I have
always found it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption.
At the production of the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite
as healthy played Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor
told how rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy
decease, the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I respect Madame
Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her pretence
of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the business is
over, although the music is more satisfactory here than in any other
portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at night with a friend down
with toothache or cholera will recognise the atmosphere of the
sickroom at once. But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest
of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama,
and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of "La Traviata." It
was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the
bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it
wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the
fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger Verdi
is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini.
His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with
which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they
occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which
those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on
the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a
degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most
part free.
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