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Page 79
It now became the duty of the composer to foresee every
contingency of his work, and it lay with him to give directions
for every detail of it. As a result, the singers, having
no longer absolute control but still anxious to display
their technical acquirements, gradually changed into that
now almost obsolete abomination, the "Italian opera singer,"
an artist, who, shirking all responsibility for the music and
dramatic action, neglected the composer so far as possible,
and introduced vocal pyrotechnics wherever he or she dared--and
their daring was great.
In the meantime, as Gluck was bringing in his reforms, songs
were gradually introduced into the _Schauspiel_ or drama, the
ill-fated brother of opera in Germany; and just as the grand
opera reached its highest point with Gluck, so this species of
melodrama grew apace, until we see its culmination in Weber's
"Freisch�tz."
The good results of Gluck's innovations and also, to a certain
degree, its discrepancies, may be plainly seen in Mozart's
operas; for only too often in his operas Mozart was obliged to
introduce _fioriture_ of the poorest possible description in
situations where they were utterly out of place. This, however,
may not be entirely laid at the door of the exacting singer, for
we find these same _fioriture_ throughout his harpsichord music.
We may almost say that the union of drama and music was first
definitely given status by Mozart; for a number of his operas,
such as the "Schauspieldirektor," etc., were merely a form of
the German _Singspiel_, which, as I have said, culminated in
"Freisch�tz."
Thus, at the beginning of our century we find two art forms:
First, grand opera of a strange nationality, and second, the
small but rapidly developing form of comedy or drama with music.
In order to show how Wagner evolved his art theories from
this material, we must consider to some degree the general
conditions of this period.
As late as 1853, Riehl wrote that Mendelssohn was the only
composer who had the German public, whereas others had only
a small section of it. For example, Schumann, whose music he
did not like, was accepted as a new Messiah in the Elbe River
district; "but who," he asks, "knows anything about him in the
south or west of Germany?" And as for Richard Wagner, who, he
says, is a man of extravagant ideas and a kind of phenomenon
of no consequence artistically, he asks, "who really knows
anything about him outside of the little party of fanatics
who profess to like his music (so-called)?" Its only chance of
becoming known, he says, is in the public's curiosity to hear
works which are rarely given. This curiosity, he continues,
will be a much more potent factor in his chance of becoming
known than all his newspaper articles and the propaganda of
his friend, Franz Liszt.
For the German opera there were half a dozen
_Boersenpl�tze_--Berlin for the northwest, Hamburg for
the northeast, Frankfort for the southwest, Munich for the
southeast. As Riehl says, a success in Frankfort meant a
success in all the Frankfort clay deposit and sandstone systems,
but in the chalk formation of Munich it stood no chance. Thus
Germany had no musical centre. But after Meyerbeer found such
a centre in Paris, all other Germans, including Wagner, looked
to Paris for fame.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Vienna was the art centre;
nevertheless Gluck had to go to Paris for recognition.
Mendelssohn only succeeded by his _Salonf�higkeit_. Always
respectable in his forms, no one else could have made music
popular among the cultured classes as could Mendelssohn. This
also had its danger; for if Mendelssohn had written an opera
(the lack of which was so bewailed by the Philistines),
it would have taken root all over Germany, and put Wagner
back many years. At the death of Mendelssohn, the Philistines
heralded the coming of a new German national school, founded on
his principles (formalism), one that would clarify the artistic
atmosphere of the turgid and anarchistic excesses of Wagner and
Berlioz and their followers. These critics found already that
Beethoven's melodies were too long and his instrumentation too
involved. They declared that the further music departed from
its natural simplicity the more involved its utterance became,
the less clear, and consequently the poorer it was. Music was
compared to architecture, and thus the more Greek it was, the
better; forgetting that architecture was tied to utilitarianism
and poetry to word-symbols, and that painting is primarily an
art of externals.
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