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Page 76
Until 1872, Bizet wrote but small and unimportant works, such
as "The Pearl Fisher," "The Fair Maid of Perth," and several
vaudeville operettas, some of which he wrote to order and
anonymously. He married a daughter of Hal�vy, the composer,
and in 1871-72 served in the National Guard. His first
important work was the incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's
"L'Arlesienne" and finally his "Carmen" was given (but without
success), at the Op�ra Comique, in March, 1875. He died June 3,
1875.
Camille Saint-Sa�ns was born in Paris, in 1835; he commenced
studying piano when only three years old. I believe it is
mostly through his piano concertos and his symphonic poems
that his name will live; for his operas have never attained
popularity, with perhaps the one exception of "Samson and
Delilah." His other operas are: "The Yellow Princess,"
"Proserpina," "Etienne Marcel," "Henry VIII," "Ascanio."
Jules Massenet was born in 1842, and at the age of twelve
became a pupil of Bezit at the Conservatoire, was rejected by
Bezit for want of talent, and afterward studied with Reber and
Thomas, and won the _Prix de Rome_ in 1863. Upon his return,
in 1866, he wrote a number of small orchestral works, including
two suites and several sacred dramas, "Marie Magdalen" and
"Eve and the Virgin," in which the general Meyerbeerian style
militated against any suggestion of religious feeling. His
first grand opera, "Le roi de Lahore," was given in 1881.
The second was "Herodiade," which was followed by "Manon,"
"The Cid," "Esclarmonde," "Le mage."
XVIII
OPERA (Continued)
One of the most disputed questions in modern music is that of
opera. Although we have many controversies as to what purely
instrumental or vocal music may do, the operatic art, if we
may call it so, always remains the same. In creating the music
drama, Wagner put forth a composite art, something which many
declare impossible, and as many others advocate as being the
most complete art form yet conceived. We are still in the
midst of the discussion, and a final verdict is therefore
as yet impossible. On one hand we have Wagner, and against
him we have the absolutists such as Brahms, the orthodox
thinkers represented by Anton Rubinstein and many others,
the new Russian school represented by Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Tchaikovsky, and the successors of the French school of
Meyerbeer, namely, Saint-Sa�ns, Massenet, etc.
In order to get a clear idea of the present state of the
matter we must review the question from the beginning of the
eighteenth century. For many reasons this is not an easy task,
first of all because very little of the music of the operas
of this period actually exists. We know the names of Hasse,
Pergolesi, Matheson, Graun, Alessandro Scarlatti (who was a much
greater man than his son the harpsichord player and composer,
Domenico), to name only a few. To be sure, a number of the
French operas of the period are preserved, owing to the custom
in France of engraving music. In Germany and Italy, however,
such operas were never printed, and one may safely say that
it was almost the rule for only one manuscript copy to be
available. Naturally this copy belonged to the composer, who
generally led the opera himself, improvising much of it on the
harpsichord, as we shall see later. As an instance of the danger
which operas, under such conditions, ran of being destroyed
and thus lost to the world, we may cite the total destruction
of over sixty of Hasse's operas in his extreme old age.
The second point which makes it difficult for us to get an
absolutely clear insight into the conditions of opera at the
beginning of the eighteenth century lies in the fact that
contemporary historians never brought their histories up
to their own times. Thus Marpurg, in his history, divides
music into four periods; first, that of Adam and Eve to
the flood; second, from the flood to the Argonauts; third,
to the beginning of the Olympiads; fourth, from thence to
Pythagoras. The same may be said of the celebrated histories
of Gerbert and Padre Martini.
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