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PORTRAITS AND SILHOUETTES
OF
MUSICIANS
PALESTRINA.

PORTRAITS
AND
SILHOUETTES OF MUSICIANS
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF CAMILLE BELLAIGUE
.”
**
EY &
E L L E N O RR
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1897
§Ušić - X
NAL
390
, B443
Copyright, 1897,
BY DODD, MEAD AND ComPANY.
Gärtigersity 39tegg:
John WILSON AND SoN, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
43
//€2.
24/~ 3.2 -33'ſ
TABLE OF CONTENTS,
Qſìjrtr Iftalian ſtilagterg.
I. PALESTRINA
II. MARCELLO .
III. PERGOLESE .
CHARLES GOUNOD .
PAGE
67
I31
167
II.
III.
IV.
. ROSSINI
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
XI.
XII.
$ilijouettes of ſºlugitimmg.
HAYDN
MOZART .
GLUCK
BEETHOVEN .
WEBER
MENDELSSOHN .
SCHUMANN .
AUBER
BERLIOZ .
MEYERBEER
WAGNER . . . . . . . .
237
243
249
253
258
264
269
275
281
286
292
298
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PALESTRINA .
GOUNOD
HAYDN
MOZART
GLUCK .
BEETHOVEN .
ROSSINI
WEBER .
Afrontispiece.
To face 167
{ {
MENDELSSOHN .
SCHUMANN
AUBER .
BERLIOz
MEYERBEER .
WAGNER .
237
243
249
253
258
264
269
275
28I
286
292
298
PALESTRINA.
TO THE REv. FATHER DOM MocquEREAU OF THE
BENEDICTINES OF SOLESMES..
Complete works of Palestrina; Breitkopf and Haer-
tel, Leipzig. – “Anthologie des maitres religieux primi-
tifs,” published by M. Charles Bordes, director of the “As-
sociation des chanteurs de Saint-Gervais.” – “Memorie
storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni
Pierluigi da Palestrina,” compiled by Giuseppe Baini,
Rome, I828. – “ Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch,” edited
by Dr. Fr. X. Haberl; Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg;
passim.
PALESTRINA.
Puissant Palestrina | Vieux maitre, vieux génie,
Je vous salue ici, père de l'harmonie ;
Car ainsi qu'un grand fleuve ou boivent les humains,
Toute cette musique a coulé de vos mains.
VICTOR HUGO.
I.
IN I $24, according to the already antiquated
testimony of Abbé Baini, or in 1526, after
Dr. Haberl's more recent researches, Clement
VII. being pope, and Charles V. emperor,
there was born at Palestrina, near the foot of
the Sabine hills, the child who was one day
to take the name of his native town as his
own, and thereby make it famous. He was
baptised Giovanni Pierluigi, his parents, Santi
Pierluigi and Maria Ghismondi, being plain
country people in possession of a small property,
— a little house surrounded by chestnut-trees
and perched on the steep slopes from which
the borough, then called Praeneste, still looks
toward the Roman horizon.
From his earliest years Giovanni, or Gianetto,
as he was familiarly called, loved and studied
4 Palestrina.
music. In after days the dedication of one
of his works to Pope Gregory XIII. read :
Cui quidem Scientia totum me a puero dedi.
Little is known of his childhood. We may
only surmise that from time to time the young
mountaineer would go down to Rome; espe-
cially to be present at the church festivals.
To-day the country people still do so, - the
contadini of Tivoli, Frascati, and Albano. One
morning, so runs the story, as the child, cantando
secondo l'uso dei giovanelli, was crossing the
piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore, the master of
the chapel heard his singing and at once took
the boy into his scuola. At the time the Gallo-
Belgian school of musicians reigned supreme
in Rome, and indeed throughout Italy. All
the great chapels were directed by the Flemish.
“It is they,” writes Guichardin, “who have
restored and perfected music. It comes to
them so naturally that, men and women, they
sing as though by instinct, con grandissima
grazia e melodie.” One of the most famous of
these Northern artists, Claude Goudimel of
France, had a school in Rome, and Palestrina
seems to have been his pupil during the four
years from 1540 to I 544.
On October 28, 1544, by contract signed
with the cathedral-chapter of Palestrina, “Gio-
Palesłrina. 5
panni, musicien, fils de Santi Pierluigi" obtained
the revenue of a canonry, but upon the follow-
ing conditions: that he should play the organ
on feast days, take part in the daily singing of
the mass, vespers, and complines, and that he
should instruct the canons and children in
music. He did not, however, exercise these
modest functions for long. It may be that
he grew independent of the “revenue,” for
he had married a young girl of the town, Lu-
crezia de Goris, who shortly afterwards in-
herited from her mother a few acres of wine-
yard and meadow ; and in 155 I, Giovanni del
Monte, the bishop cardinal of Palestrina, be-
coming pope under the title of Julius III.,
called his young fellow citizen to Rome, con-
ferring upon him the directorship of the chapel
of St. Peter*. Here Palestrina's artistic ca-
reer really began. Three years later, in 1554,
he dedicated to Julius III. his first volume of
masses; the first work of sacred music that
had yet been offered by an Italian to a sover-
eign pontiff.
The pope, sensible of this homage, and still
more sensible of Palestrina's dawning renown,
1 The Chapel of St. Peter (in the Vatican) must not
be confounded with the papal chapel, - the private
chapel of the sovereign pontiffs.
6 Palesirina.
resolved to attach the musician more securely
to himself. Withdrawing him from the director-
ship of St. Peter's, he appointed him to the
position of singer in his own chapel, giving the
directorship of St. Peter's to a Florentine,
Animuccia, a former fellow-disciple of Pales-
trina's in Goudimel's school. This appointment
to the pontifical chapel, however, was not with-
out its difficulties, as it infringed upon certain
rules established by the pope himself concern-
ing the recruiting of the singers. Palestrina's
future colleagues bestirred themselves and pro-
tested at the encroachment, but the pope held
his ground and annulled the rules in question,
so that on January 13, 1555, Palestrina, in spite
of the papal choir, and perhaps a little in spite
of himself, -for he loved his Vatican basilica, –
was admitted into the corporation of the pon-
tifical singers.
He remained there, however, only six months.
Julius III. died and was replaced by Marcellus
II., who, in his turn, died after a brief reign of
three weeks, to be succeeded by Paul IV., the
reformer, — Paul IV., the terrible. During the
first days of his succession, in the beginning of
July, 1555, the new pontiff called before him
deputies from the Apostolic College of singers,
and demanded of them if all was carried on in
Palestrina. 7
their chapel according to the rules for the
charges and offices of the Roman court, which
had been fixed by the fifth Cecumenical council
of the Lateran.” When the deputies replied in
the affirmative, the pope reminded them of a
certain decree of Leo X. enjoining upon the
singers, under the most severe penalties, “to
live modestly and according to the scrupulous
morality which becomes good priests.” Had
he not learned, however, that several of them
not only were not priests, but were not even
presbyters * The deputies acknowledged that
in fact three among their number were married :
Leonardo Bari, Domenico Ferrabosco, and
Giovanni Pierluigi, but that these three had,
none the less, been expressly nominated by pre-
ceding pontiffs. To which Paul IV. replied
that his predecessors had done as they chose,
and that he, for his part, should do as he
chose ; he denounced the slackness of dis-
cipline, and insisted upon the necessity for its
restoration. In vain did the deputies respect-
fully urge the rights of the apostolic singers,
not to mention the indignity which would be
put upon them and the recognised perpetuity of
their positions. The pope dismissed his visitors
with his benediction and the assurance that he
1 Baini.
8 Palestrina.
would regulate everything for the greatest good
of all ; and on July 30, a rigorous pontifical
brief, accusing Palestrina and his two colleagues
of being married men, deprived the three of .
their charge, giving them, by way of compensa-
tion, or of consolation, a pension of six gold
scudi a month.
This blow was keenly felt by Palestrina.
“All cares,” he says, in one of his dedications,
“are the enemies of the Muses, but above all,
those which domestic necessities bring upon
us.” Such cares pressed upon him at that
time, but fortunately, on October 1, 1555, two
months only after his exclusion from the papal
chapel, he was elected chapel-master of St.
John Lateran. He remained there for six
melancholy and laborious years, writing his
first works, among others the “Improperia,” and
buying now and then a few feet of vineyard on
the slopes of his native hills; but ever did his
thoughts turn to St. Peter's, his beloved basilica
from which he had been expelled. Still young,
he had already proved the caprices of fortune,
and on those rare days of liberty when, leaving
Rome as the sun rose, he would arrive towards
the sun-setting before his own modest domain,
many a time must he have repeated those words
of the prophet, which he has so eloquently
Palestrina. 9
sung: “Oh, my chosen Vineyard, how art thou
turned unto me into bitterness.”
However, he worked incessantly, many of his
madrigals dating from this time. In 1561 he
left the poorly paid directorship of St. John
Lateran for that of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Two years later, after a session of eighteen
years, the Council of Trent dissolved, and on
August 2, 1564, Pius IV., who had succeeded
Paul IV. on the pontifical throne, nominated a
committee of eight cardinals, among whom were
Vitellozzo and Charles Borromeo, to oversee
the execution of the Council's decrees.
We come now to the most important period
in Palestrina's life, but a fog of legend has long
obscured its principal events, – a fog which
to-day German erudition seems to be dissipat-
ing. What were the details of the Council's
decrees relating to sacred music 2 What were
the prerogatives and functions of the committee
of cardinals, and what were the circumstances
connected with the composition of the Marcel-
line mass 2 There is no subject upon which
the world has been longer and more diversely
deceived than the subject of the reform of re-
ligious music in the sixteenth century, its origin,
its promoters or patrons, its accomplishments,
and finally the part taken in it by the author of
IO Palesłrina.
the famous “Mass of Pope Marcellus.” The
abundant and often most veracious mémoires
of Abbé Baini have, until recently, been con-
sidered an authority. But, for perhaps twenty
years past, this unqualified reliance upon them
has been shaken. New light came from Ger-
many through the school and review of sacred
music, both of which are under the direction of
the scholar Dr. Haberl, chapel-master of the
cathedral of Ratisbon, and editor of Pales—
trina. Baini had, in old days, the merit of hav-
ing rectified more than one error concerning
the points which just, now arrest our attention,
but Dr. Haberl comes with authentic docu-
ments sometimes to confirm, sometimes to
confute, Baini's dicta. Perhaps it will not be
without interest to review the question, first in
the light of Baini’s memoirs, and then with the
assistance of M. Haberl's more authenticated
researches. -
Of the many reproaches commonly passed
upon sacred music prior to Palestrina, Abbé
Baini rejects some and justifies others. He has
demonstrated, in the first place, that music dating
from before Palestrina's time did not sin either
by the abuse of ornament and fioritures or by
the confusion of the voices with the instruments.
Musical ornamentation is posterior to Pales-
Palestrina. II
trina's epoch, – the trill, notably, dating no
earlier than the end of the sixteenth century,
and the instrumental accompaniment of the
voices in church music, not before the middle of
the same century. Thus it was by other, by
two other, vices that sacred music was cor-
rupted and menaced with destruction. Of
these two vices, one was the complication of
technicalities, pushed to such an extreme that
in the chaos of imitations, canons, and artifices
of all kinds, the words sung were inaudible.
The other corruption was the introduction into
sacred music of elements which were pro-
fane, at times impure. The examples of these
abuses and scandals are numerous and well
known. The scholasticism of the Middle Ages
had put to the torture all musical thought, and,
as a result, the latter was now setting itself to
the reproducing of all manner of puerile fanta-
sies and unnatural inversions, by means of the
most improper figures, – as, for instance, the
canon of the cross and that of the crab. As
for the text, suffocated under a mass of notes and
imprisoned in this barbarous gangue, it had long
since ceased to signify in the least. The differ-
ent voices habitually sang different words; thus,
in a mass of Hobrecht's, while one of the parts
Sang the “Incarnatus" the others accompanied
I2 Palestrina.
with “O clavis David et sceptrum domſs Israel.”
The Middle Ages, not content with thus com-
plicating the music of the Church, had actually
profaned it. Masses originally written from the
“plain-songs " from which they took their
name, such for instance as the masses of “Ave
Maria,” “Wiri Galilaei,” and “Ecce Sacerdos
Magnus,” were now composed upon popular
themes, which were anything but canonical, and
which, indeed, were most unseemly. In Italy
we find “ Mio marito mi ha infamato,” or
“Baciate mi, o cara ; ” in France, “A l'ombre
d’un buyssonet,” or the famous song of
“L’Homme armé,” of which even Palestrina
himself made use. In one of Hobrecht's masses
the tenor at the “Kyrie" sang, “Je ne vis
onclues la pareille; ” at the “Sanctus,” “Gra-
cieuse gente meunyère ; ” at the “Benedictus,”
“Madame, faites-moi savoir.” At times they
went so far as to parody the Sacred text, and in
order to recall to Louis XII. a promise which he
had not kept, Josquin des Près composed, so it
is said, and dedicated to the king a psalm upon
these words : “Memoresto verbi tui servo tuo.”
(Remember thou the word given to thy servant.)
These, then, are the two vices of which it was
necessary to purge religious music ; such a con-
fusion of the different parts as prevented the
Palestrina. I3
hearing of the text by the congregation, and the
use of profane themes.
As to the accomplishment of this double re-
form, we shall first seek for the romance of
the story in Baini's memoirs; later Dr. Haberl's
“Annals "will furnish us with its history.
Pius IV., having at heart the execution of the
decrees issued by the Council of Trent, just
dissolved, named for that purpose, as we have
already seen, a committee of eight cardinals.
Pius was of the Medici family and a sumptuous
pontiff, the friend of elegance and luxury. It
was he who persuaded his cardinals to leave to
women the use of carriages and to reinstate in
honour the old custom of riding upon richly
caparisoned horses, in brilliant equipage. He
loved music, toward which, indeed, he had al-
ways a feeling of gratitude, as, in his earlier
days, it had been a lute-player who had pre-
dicted his high destinies. Baini gives the fol-
lowing recital of the incident, a tale painted
in true Renaissance colours. Cardinal Pisano,
by way of fêting his anniversary, was in the
habit of uniting his brethren of the Sacred Col-
lege about his table and entertaining them with
great magnificence. Now there was in Rome
at that time a marvellous child, little Silvio
Antoniano, who excelled in lute-playing and the
I4. Palestrina.
improvisation of songs. One day when Cardi-
nal Pisano was giving one of his banquets,
Silvio was brought in, toward the close of the
festivities, that he might charm the illustrious
guests, col fanciullo cantore Suonatore e poeta.
The cardinals fêted the boy, and one of them,
Ranuccio Farnese, taking up a bouquet of
flowers, gave it to him, with the direction to
lay it down before that one of the porporati who
should one day have the tiara placed upon his
head. After running his eyes over the assembly,
the innocente garzoncello stepped towards the
Cardinal Giovanni Angelo de' Medici, and let
the perfumed promise fall upon the knees of
the prelate. Then, taking in his hands the lute
which hung from his neck, he sang, with an ex-
quisite grace, the praises of the pontiff whom
the flowers had chosen. When Pius IV., in
I 564, instituted the committee of cardinals, he
had doubtless not forgotten this event.
The cardinals hastened to delegate two of
their number, Vitellozzo and Borromeo, to or—
ganise a musical reform.” The two prelates, in
agreement with a certain number of pontifical
singers, whom they had added to their commit-
tee, decided upon the proscription of profane
melody and of words which were capricciose,
! Baini.
Palestrina. I5
that is, not in the liturgy. As to the intelligibil-
ity of the text, it was strenuously insisted upon
by the cardinals, but the singers saw in that
a serious obstacle to the polyphonic system
of vocal counterpoint and imitations. Their
Eminences then cited the “Improperia” of
Palestrina in support of their demands, but
the singers would not admit that, in works
of greater length, a like result could be
obtained.
It was at last resolved upon to confide to
Palestrina the composition of a mass, which
should be subject to the required conditions.
The work, in case of success, should reinstate
religious music, for which, in future, it should
be the model and pattern ; but in case of failure,
it should decide the condemnation and banish-
ment of Palestrina's beloved art, whose fate
he now held in his own hand. Our Italian bi-
ographer tells us of the masses composed by the
master, three in number for greater security
against failure, and how, on April 28, 1565, all
three were given before the committee, gath-
ered for this purpose, in the palace of Cardinal
Vitellozzo. The third was judged to be su-
perior to the others, and admirably perfect
at all points. The pontifical singers were
charged to perform henceforth none but works
I6 Palesłrina
of this style, and the music of the Church was
saved.
The prelates having rendered an account of
their decision to Pius IV., the pontiff desired
himself to hear the masterpiece which they
praised so highly, and on Tuesday, June 19,
1565, Palestrina's mass was given, for the first
time before the pope, in the Sistine Chapel,
Cardinal Borromeo officiating with great so-
lemnity. The pontiff, so say the memoirs of
the time, thought it so beautiful that he cried,
“These are the harmonies heard by the Apostle
John in the heavenly Jerusalem, and which this
later John has in his turn awakened in this our
earthly Jerusalem I ?”
Legendary as is this version, it was long held
to be an authentic account of this episode,
which was, indeed, one of great importance,
both in the life of Palestrina and in the musi-
cal history of the sixteenth century; but Dr.
Haberl has formally contradicted it, and, text in
hand, has convinced the world of its inaccuracy.”
He has proved, in the first place, that the com-
mittee — the famous committee of 1564 — was
not in the least formed for the purpose of es-
1 Căcilien-Kalender und Fortsetzung desselben als
“Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch,” edited by Dr. Fr. X.
Haberl; xviies Jahrgang, 1892.
Palestrina. 17
pecially occupying itself with the musical reform
which had been ordered by the Council of Trent.
Moreover, that the Council, as its minutes at-
test, was but incidentally, and in the most
general terms, occupied with the aforesaid
reforms." It appears that Baini based his story
upon a certain pontifical brief or motu proprio
of August 2, 1564, which nominated the com-
mittee of cardinals. Now this motu proprio
which Doctor Haberl also cites word for word,
contains not a syllable on the subject of music.
It simply enjoins upon the cardinals to reform,
according to the spirit of the Council of Trent,
certain charges or offices of the Holy See, and
amongst these offices is the Camera Apostolica,
— to which the pontifical singers belonged.
The cardinals, Vitellozzo and Borromeo, who
had in charge the examination of the Camera,
did, indeed, take certain steps with regard to
the singers, but these were exclusively disci-
plinary in their character, relating to questions
of treatment, fines, and benefices, and utterly
foreign to the subject of music. Not a trace
“Ab ecclesiis vero musicas eas, ubi sive organo, sive
cantu lascivum aut impurum aliquid miscetur, item saecu-
lares omnes actiones, vana atque adeo profana colloquia,
deambulationes, strepitus, clamores arceant, ut domus
Dei vere domus orationis videatur ac dici possit (22nd
session, 17 September, I 562).”
2
I8 Palestrina.
is to be found of the committee ordering Pales-
trina to write a mass. The journal of the ponti-
fical chapel does, indeed, report that on April 28,
1565, the singers, meeting at the house of Cardi-
nal Vitellozzo, did there perform certain masses,
ad probandum si verba inlelligerentur prout Rep-
erendissimis placuil, but nothing is said as to
which works these were, nor whether Palestrina
was even present at the trial; nor, in fact,
whether the cardinals ever declared themselves
as satisfied with the latter's composition ; and
lastly the same journal registers, on that nine-
teenth day of June, 1565, only the celebration of
a mass in the Sistine Chapel before the pope,
Cardinal Borromeo officiating. But it reports
no solemn rendering, on that day, of a mass
written by Palestrina.
But which, then, were the masses executed
on that occasion before the cardinals P From
certain documents, which, apparently, were un-
known to Baini, Dr. Haberl concludes that they
must have been a number of masses com-
posed by different musicians; by Animuccia,
for example, or Palestrina, it may be, but, at all
events, masses complying as fully with the re-
quirements of the Council as did the Marcelline
mass to which has always been given, most
unjustly, the whole honour of the reform. It is
Palestrina. I9
possible that this grand work of Palestrina was
given before the cardinals on that day, but it
is certain that its performance was not ordered
by them. Dr. Haberl supposes that it was
composed at an earlier date, between 155 I and
1554, before the pontificate of that Marcellus
II. whose name it was to bear. At all events,
it was not published under this title until 1567,
and it is to be found previously to this publica-
tion, and without any dedication, in the ar-
chives both of Santa Maria Maggiore and the
Sistine Chapel. Why, then, did Palestrina dedi-
cate his work thus in retrospect, as it were, to
Pope Marcellus * Because the latter, when noth-
ing more than the very artistic and lettered
cardinal, Marcello Cervino, had often conversed
with Palestrina, whose patron he was, upon the
subject of those reforms long since become so
necessary and demanded by religion. Risen to
the pontifical throne, Marcellus would have
accomplished them, had death but left him time,
and Palestrina never forgot that his patron, at
least, had desired them. Therefore if he himself,
a dozen years later, dedicated one of his masses
to Marcellus II., it was that he might render a
faithful and grateful homage to noble intentions.
Are we, then, to conclude from all this later
information that Palestrina had nothing to do
2O Palestrina.
with the reform with which his name remains
associated P By no means. This reform, whose
two features or two principal virtues were sim-
plicity and purity, was, in great part, the work
of the master, but less of a personal work than
has been thought ; a work, too, not exclusively
represented by the Marcelline mass ; and, lastly,
one less sudden and more slowly accomplished
than any pontifical order or official command
could have sufficed to realise.
However this may have been, Palestrina, in
this same year of 1564, saw created for himself,
by the pope, the office and title of Composer
to the Pontifical Chapel, and, moreover, a set-
tlement of nine gold scudi made upon him, in
consideration of the various compositions which
he had edited and of those which he should
edit in the future, for the service of the afore-
said chapel.” He did not abandon, on ac-
count of this appointment, the directorship of
Santa Maria Maggiore, which he retained until
1571, when Animuccia, who had formerly taken
his place at St. Peter's, having died, Palestrina
re-entered his beloved basilica, never again to
leave it. At the same time he was chosen by
Filippo Neri, and again in Animuccia's place,
as master of the chapel and titled composer to
1 Haberl, Jahrbuch, 1894.
Palestrina. 2 I
the Oratory. Filippo's love for music is well
known, and what rank he would be likely to give
it in the exercises of the order. It is written,
in the rules of the Oratory, that it was the will
of the Saintly old man “that his fathers, joined
to the faithful, should stimulate themselves to
the contemplation of celestial things by the means
of musical harmonies (Musico concentu excilentur
ad calestia contemplanda).” Filippo felt the
tenderest friendship for Animuccia and Pales-
trina. He was their spiritual director, and, with
an interval of twenty-three years, he stood by
the dying bedside of both his friends.
Animuccia possessed a soul all candour, full of
poetry and faith. It is said that his wife and
himself gave to Rome an example which had
been set to men in former days by St. Paulin
de Nole and his wife, who lived together united
only in spirit. “When they felt themselves to
be disentangled from all the pleasures of this
world,” says an eminent biographer, “they lived
joined in spirit, that most beautiful and most di-
vine part of man, and contented themselves with
the sweet and heavenly communion of affection
and prayer.””
1 Vie de Saint Philippe de Neri, by his Eminence Car-
dinal Capecelatro, Archbishop of Capua, vol. ii.; transla-
tion by P. Bezin of the Oratory. Paris: Poussielgue.
22 Palestrina.
Animuccia, a fellow disciple, as we have seen,
of Palestrina's, in the school of Goudimel, him-
self also influenced the Palestrinian reform ; so
much, at least, may be inferred from the preface
to his masses, in which he writes: “Among the
sacred songs which are sung to-day in the Di-
vine Mysteries, are many composed with rare
artifice, which, by their suavity give to their
hearers a marvellous pleasure. There are always,
however, some who desire, with reason, that
words intended to excite piety towards God
should be heard and understood with clearness.
On the contrary, employed in a certain manner,
as the words are, they seem not to be adorned
by the song, but almost to be oppressed and
covered by roulades; and this is why, moved
by the judgment of these persons, I have forced
myself to adorn these prayers and praises to
God with songs which do not prevent the hear-
ers from understanding the text, but which, still,
are not entirely denuded of art, and fail not to
give pleasure to the ear.”” Such was Animuc-
cia, – a master in his art and held in such honour
that Palestrina, the illustrious biographer goes
on to say, “did not drive him from his nest.”
From the time of his return to St. Peter's and
his appointment in the Oratory until his death,
1 Vie de Saint Philippe de Neri.
Palesłrina. 23
Palestrina's life offers little of especial interest,
flowing calmly on as it did under the shadow
of the immense basilica, through twenty-three
years of work and piety. From time to time
some great lord possessed of a love of music–
a Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, a Prince Giacomo
Buoncompagni, or a Cardinal Aldobrandini —
would confide to the master the directing of the
music in his private chapel, and the artist, in his
turn, would express his thanks by dedicating to
his patron some one of his masterpieces.
The popes succeeded one another, all admir-
ing and protecting the great artist. These were
beautiful years for him, - years of genius and
of glory. In 1575, a solemn jubilee was granted
to Christendom, and celebrated by Pope Gregory
XIII. In the chronicles of the time one can
read the story of the arrival in Rome of the
inhabitants of Palestrina, coming on a pilgrim-
age to attend the jubilee ; more than fifteen
hundred strong, they descended from their
mountain home. An immense black cross led
them, reverently escorted by fifty couples of
little children, dressed as angels, a guisa d'an-
geli, and holding in their hands olive branches.
Then followed the brotherhoods, carrying enor-
mous crucifixes, veiled in black and white;
then monks, priests in their surplices, canons in
24. Palestrina.
furred hoods, and lastly women, non senza bell'
ordine e con gran modestia. Three choruses of
musicians sang as they marched along, and their
songs were Palestrina's." In such pious equi-
page did the cortège cross the Roman campagna,
the waves of music spreading slowly and sol-
emnly through the chill atmosphere, while the
great, grey cattle pushed their heads over the
hedges that lined the way, and listened, wonder-
ing. As the pilgrims approached the city, so
the chronicle reads, beneath the sacred ground
which they trod, the dead, in the catacombs,
awakened by the new psalmodies, responded
from the depths of their tombs.
In 1580, Palestrina became a widower, and in
1581, when over fifty years of age, married again.
Doubtless neither St. Paulin de Nole nor Ani-
muccia would have approved of this course I
Henceforth the chronology of his life, verified
by Dr. Haberl,” marks little but the dates of
his innumerable works, – masses, motets, lam-
entations, madrigals, hymns to the Virgin, or
the Canticle of canticles, and from time to time,
between two such notices, the mention of the
1 See “Narrazioni delle opere piu memorabili fatte
in Roma l'anno del Giubileo I 575, composte dal M. R. P. F. '
Angelo Pientini, delle compagnie di Palestrina; ” quoted
by Baini.
* Haberl, Jahrbuch, 1894.
Palestrina. 25
purchase of some little vineyard, or an olive
orchard.
At last on January 26, 1594, Palestrina,
stricken with pleurisy, took to his bed, receiv-
ing the communion and extreme unction from
Filippo Neri, who was constantly with him dur-
ing his last days. On the morning of February
2, writes the biographer, Palestrina bethought
himself, not without pleasure, of having, a
little time before, set to music the Hymns of
Mary. “This thought increased his fervour and
his hope, and Filippo, perceiving his good in-
clinations and desiring further to excite them,
said to his beloved ‘son in the spirit' with that
lowing air of benediction which was always his,
‘Wouldst thou go to-day to enjoy the feasts
that the saints and angels in heaven are making
in honour of the Queen º' Palestrina, who was
very pious and had many times, by the sweet
power of his music, honoured the gentle Mother
of God, was much moved by this invitation.
‘Yes, I ardently desire it; may Mary, my ad-
vocate, obtain it of her divine Son for me.”
Scarcely had Palestrina, still fully conscious,
breathed these words when, quite tranquilly and
full of confidence in the mercy of the Lord, he
peacefully gave up his soul to God and as-
cended, as one loves to hope, by the intercession
26 Palestrina.
of the Virgin Mary and the prayers of his holy
confessor Filippo, to that home where souls
shall sing to all eternity.”
II.
Thus lived Palestrina. Exempt as it is from
agitation, even from animation, destitute of dra-
matic or passionate incidents, calm within the
peace of the basilicas, this life is simple, I
had almost said mediocre, beside the pathetic
fate of a Michael Angelo or the more than ad-
venturous career of a Benvenuto Cellini; but
Palestrina's career, simple as it seems, was sur-
rounded by grave circumstances; insignificant
in itself, it was contemporaneous with an emi-
nently significant “moment” and “environ-
ment.” It coincides with the movement of the
spirit and genius of Italy which may be defined,
briefly, as the reaction from the Renaissance.
This reaction roused the solicitude and ceaseless
efforts of all, or nearly all, the popes under
whom Palestrina lived. In it was summed up
their common work, and into this, their duty
and mission resolved themselves. New con-
tingencies and new perils imposed upon the
Church new rules of conduct. The dreams of
the Renaissance — dreams divine and ever to be
Palestrina. 27
regretted—vanished before the terrible voice of
Luther ; the German monk saw only the ex-
cesses, – but too visible, alas, – and the devia-
tions from that principle of the Renaissance
which may be called truly catholic, that is,
universal, that noble hope and generous desire
for peace and harmony. If the first cry of the
Church, almost nineteen centuries ago, was for
penitence and mortification, it was because that
cry was sounding out through a world perishing
in voluptuous corruption and the abuse of enjoy-
ments. But when above a thousand grievous
years had passed, when the long distress of the
Middle Ages had weighed its full punishment
upon the earth, which Dante, with a sigh,
called the terra lagrimosa, – the earth which
weeps, – God's vicars believed themselves au-
thorized in giving a little abatement to human
misery, and some few traces of beauty appeared,
to brighten the eyes blinded by many tears.
The popes made themselves the interpreters
and dispensers of a spirit of indulgence and joy,
which seemed to have descended from heaven.
They remembered, or allowed themselves to be
reminded by Christian platonism, taught by
such men as Sadoleto and Marsilius Ficinus,
that Christ “did not refuse his presence at joy-
ous feasts. At Cana he changed the water
28 Palestrina.
into wine ; and was it not at the table that he
revealed to his disciples the mystery of the
eucharist P”* Alas, the feast soon degenerated
into an orgy, the miracle into a Scandal, and
popedom was the first to be intoxicated with
the new wine which she had poured forth. The
Reformation denounced, with justice, this alli-
ance, or this alloying, of the spirit with the
flesh, in which the latter was far in excess ; and
the Church, rudely brought to her senses, had
barely time to dissolve the marriage from which
she had hoped to receive such glorious fruit.
She repudiated the Renaissance, and, in order
to save from wreck the ship of St. Peter, she
Sacrificed the treasures with which the vessel
had been freighted. Popes who were guardians
of the faith, succeeded popes who had been
friends of the arts, and the Smile faded from the
face of Rome.
Poor Rome, in what mourning was she
clothed, and with what ruin was she covered,
when the child of Praeneste saw her for the
first time ! Men had assailed her double
dowry; they had outraged her beauty and her
truth. Against the latter the Reformation had
raised a cry which already half Europe seemed
to be on the brink of obeying, and against her
1 Le Prince Vitale, by M. Victor Cherbuliez.
Palestrina. 29
Roman beauty the hordes of Charles V. and the
Bourbons had raised their barbarous hands.
“Churches, palaces, convents, even the most
humble dwellings,” writes an eloquent biogra-
pher of Michael Angelo, “were sacked. Man-
uscripts and precious pictures were soiled, torn
and scattered. . . . The Bourbon soldiers had
turned the Stanza of the Vatican into a guard-
room, and had rested their halberds against the
École d'Athènes. Not Huns nor Goths nor
Vandals would have committed such horrors ;
Turks and Moors would have been less inhu-
man. And this, Rome endured for nine months
. . . while famine and the plague came to com-
plete the work of devastation. More than thirty
thousand persons perished, and the population,
from eighty-five thousand, was reduced to thirty-
two thousand.” ". Like frightened swallows the
artists had flown in all directions before this
winter of barbarism. “We have passed through
fire and water,” said Sebastiano del Piombo,
“ and we have suffered unimaginable things.”
Then indeed was Rome the city wept by the
prophet; the city over which, thirty years later,
the writer of the “Improperia,” mindful still of
such sorrow, weeps in his turn.
Paul III., under whose pontificate Palestrina
1 Michel-Ange, by M. Emile Ollivier.
3O Palestrina.
studied with Goudimel, strove to raise faith
above art. Truth to tell, he loved Michael
Angelo, and was loved by the great artist in his
turn. He confirmed the order for the Last
Judgment, which had been given by his prede-
cessor Clement VII. to the painter of the ceil-
ing of the Sistine Chapel, and he hastened the
completion of the terrible fresco upon the altar
wall, a spot which, till then, had never been
saddened by the picturing of eternal punish-
ment ; but, as M. Cherbuliez says, “Paul III.
was the Janus of the popes ; that Farnese had
two faces, the one turned toward the past, the
other toward the future.”” And even while
protecting Michael Angelo he was organising
the Brotherhood of Jesus and the Inquisition.
Under his reign even the public fetes bore a
character of rigorous orthodoxy, and on the car-
nival chariots of 1545 Popery was to be seen
treading Heresy beneath her feet.
Julius III., Palestrina's first patron, stepped
aside from the path marked out for the Church
by his predecessor. He was, according to a
writer of that period,” un uomo inetto e tutto in-
tenlo ai Suoi riposi. But Paul IV. took up once
more the reactionary work, and the spirit of
rigour breathed more ardently than ever over the
1 Le Prince Vitale. 2 Pietro Nores.
Palestrina. 3 I
city of God. “The Dominican Ghislieri (after-
wards Pius V.) was appointed inquisitor-gen-
eral to all Christendom. Any accidental rela-
tionship with the heretics was punished, - the
first offence with a fine, the second with impris–
onment, the third with exile or death. A con–
temporary maintains that, if all the books which
were burned had been gathered into one pyre,
there would have been a conflagration as great as
that of Troy.” Paul IV. would have destroyed
as indecent the fresco of the Last Judgment,
but, upon the importunities of certain friends, he
contented himself with having its nudities cow-
ered by Daniel de Volterre, who, thereby,
gained for himself the title of Braghellone, – the
breeches-maker. History bears witness to
the ferocious and implacable nature of the old
pontiff, whose soul seems to have been, as it
were, consumed with wrath, collerica e adusla.”
When Giovanni Pietro Carafa, the “ Theatin
cardinal,” at the age of seventy-nine, placed the
tiara on his head, the times had never been more
difficult to cope with.” Both the creeds and the
1 M. Emile Ollivier, op. cit.
2 Navagero.
* We borrow the greater part of the following details
from the remarkable work of M. George Duruy, “Le
Cardinal Carlo Carafa (1519–1561). Étude sur le Pon-
tificat de Paul IV.” Paris: Hachette.
32 Palestrina.
earthly possessions of the Church continued to
be menaced. She was subjected to every anxi-
ety, political and religious, while Italy was both
the theatre and the stake of a perpetual battle.
She was now not simply submitting to foreign
masters, she was calling for them. And as to
Orthodoxy—the Council of Trent, the Order of
Jesus, and the Inquisition, scarcely sufficed to
defend it. The reform gained ground daily,
and day by day some new portion of her flock
forsook the shepherd. Half Germany belonged
to Luther. Little by little Switzerland had
given herself to Calvin, and suspicious symp-
toms began to make their appearance in France
and the Low Countries; both the temporal
power and the spiritual were the goal and the
prey of the disease.
Paul IV. essayed to stem the tide of these
two perils. From being a warlike and political
pontiff he resolved to turn his thoughts solely
toward religion. One sees suddenly reappear-
ing in him the former inquisitor, the founder of
the order of the Theatins, that austere priest
whose zeal for the cause of religion began its
career at the Council of Trent." He repented
of having coveted the kingdoms of this earth and
henceforth sought only the advancement of the
1 M. G. Duruy, op. cat.
Palestrina. 33
kingdom of God and His justice. The latter was,
indeed, at that time, infamously abused ; it was
the scandals in his own family and the shameful
excesses of his nephews which urged Paul IV.
to his severity. To appreciate the disgraceful
facts, one must read, in M. Duruy's book, the
story of a certain banquet, at which a cardinal
drew his sword in defence of a courtesan. A
few days later the pope, before the congregation
of the Holy Office, “condemned with vehe-
mence the conduct of the cardinal.”* Upon
one of his fellow cardinals, Pacheco, venturing
to defend the culprit, the pontiff grew pale with
anger, and cried out again and again with all his
strength, “Reform I Reform 1" till, as the Car-
dinal Pacheco murmured, “In that case, Holy
Father, it is for us to give the example,” the
pope bowed his head and sank into silence.
Read also the account of the consistory in which
Paul IV. denounced before the Sacred College
the disgrace of his worthless nephew. Listen,
and picture to yourself that harangue, – the
imprecations of the enraged old man, accusing
and cursing, amidst his tears and sobs, – and you
will comprehend what a pope was he who drove
Palestrina from the Sistine Chapel because he
was a married man.
1 M. G. Duruy, op. cit.
3
34 Palestrina.
Less terrible, but scarcely less severe, were
the successors of Paul IV. : Pius V., who
caused the removal of the statues from the Vat-
ican, and Gregory XIII., under whose reign, as
we read in the “Prince Vitale,” poor Tasso, that
tardy child of the Renaissance, suffered so cru-
elly. Indeed, well may we say, changing but
one word of Musset's line, –
“Then came the unhappy days of Art.”
In those days many paintings were exiled
from the churches, – paintings for which men of
the day, and above all, many women, had served
as models. The greater part of the treatises
on painting, published during the latter half of
the sixteenth century — that, for instance, of
Cardinal Paleotti and of Borghini (Riposo), or
those of Romano Alberti, Armenini, and Co-
manini — are treatises upon morals and virtues,
rather than upon the beautiful in art." Pope
Gregory XIII., in founding the Academy of
Rome, declared that only artists eminent for
Science, piety, and good habits would be
admitted.
“Jerusalem Delivered,” when submitted to
ecclesiastical censure, underwent all the rigours
1 See “ De l’Influence du Concile de Trente sur la
Littérature et les beaux arts chez les peuples Catho-
liques,” by M. Charles Dejob.
Palestrina. 35
of the Church. There was no pardon for the
poet who had allowed to miscreants any virtues,
who had sung the love of Tancred for the
daughter of an infidel, and, greatest sin of all,
who had ventured into fairyland, with its charms
and enchantment. “I would that your desire
were not so much to be read by people of the
world as to be enjoyed by monks and nuns’’
(Che il poema fosse lello non tanlo da cavalieri
quanto da religiosi e monache"). The writer of
those words, one of Tasso's most severe cen–
sors, was a future cardinal, and the editor of
the briefs of Sixtus V., being already a man of
importance in the Church. “To pure morals
and Sweet and insinuating manners he joined a
rigid orthodoxy and an unrelenting severity of
opinion ; with a cultivated mind he indulged
himself in the composition of verses, but his
thought turned only to devotional poetry.””
And who was this person 2 Silvio Antoniano
Behold into what the amiable youth has devel-
oped, - the courtly lute-player of the festivals
of former days
They had passed away, those happy, smiling
days of indulgence. The Reformation had de-
spoiled the genius of Italy, and the Church, con-
1 M. V. Cherbuliez, op. cit.
2 Zbid. "
36 Palestrina.
strained for her own salvation to rein herself in,
did so with a terribly rough hand. For the bet-
ter assurance of her safety, she thought it neces-
sary to weigh down with punishments that yoke
which the gentle Nazarene had said should be
light. The arts dared look nowhere but toward
heaven, and their heaven was not that of the
“Theology,” radiant with a multitude of cher-
ubs, but that terrible scene of the Last Judg-
ment, dark with storm, as the hand of Christ
falls to crush the earth.
Years of sorrow followed; years of penitence
in which Palestrina regretted as sins the less
austere songs of his youth. Read the dedica-
tion of his “Song of Songs,” addressed to
Gregory XIII. in 1584. “There are too
many poems which sing of loves, which are
strange to the profession, and even to the name,
of Christianity. To these poems, the works of
erring men, a great number of musicians have
consecrated all their talent and all their study.
I blush at the thought of having been of their
number, and daily do I grieve therefor; but
that which is done cannot be undone, and as
the past cannot be changed, I have, instead,
changed the purpose of my life.”"
* “Extant nimis multa poetarum carmina nullo alio
nisi amorum a christiana professione et nomine alienorum
Palestrina. 37
For many years this spirit reigned throughout
the church. Under its influence, Sixtus V.
ordered the removal from the Capitol, under
penalty of their demolition, of the antique gods
which had profaned it, and by his order apostles
replaced the emperors who had crowned the
Roman columns.
So closed the sixteenth century, burning with
too much ardour that which, with too much
ardour, it had worshipped. Italy lay spoiled,
grieving at the violence which she had done
herself; weeping for that dream of serenity and
joy with which the Renaissance, appealing to
her eyes and soul, had enchanted both her
senses and her faith ; and now that sadness
which she had but rarely known, and only
through such geniuses as Dante, Savonarola, or
Michael Angelo, appeared before her as the
rule of life, as her duty and her Salvation.
She who, according to the happy expression
of one of those who have best understood
argumento. Ea vero ipsa carmina hominum vere furore
correptorum magna musicorum pars artificii industriaeque
Suae materiam esse voluerunt, qui, quantum ingenii laude
floruerunt, tantum materiae vitio apud bonos et graves
viros offenderunt. Ex eo numero aliquando fuisse me et
erubesco et doleo. Sed quando praeterita mutari non
possunt, nec reddi infecta quae facta sunt, consilium
mutavi.”
38 Palestrina.
and loved her,” seemed “to have added a
beatitude to the Sermon on the Mount : Beali
qui rident,” — she must unlearn and disavow
all smiles. Dies irae, dies illa 1 “On that
day,” says M. Gebhart, and no words could
be truer, “On that day when the Church, men-
aced and tottering, turned upon herself that she
might not altogether perish, and imperiously
dragged Christianity back to austere discipline
and dogmatic rigour, – on that day Italy lost half
her soul.”
III.
Such a moment could not but produce and
favour the growth of a music which was both re-
ligious and severe ; and such was the character
of Palestrina's work and that of his contempo-
raries. Worldly and such as may be called
secular compositions occupied but a secondary
place in the master's thought. The greater part
of his madrigals, those called spirituel, are only
pious canticles, and the others are treated al-
most in the same style and with the same feeling
as the Church pieces. For instance, only the
words constitute any perceptible difference be-
tween his celebrated madrigal “Alla Riva del
Tebro" and any one of his motets composed for
1 M. Gebhart.
Palestrina. 39
the festivals of the Church, – that is, of course,
the festivals of joy.
And nevertheless the piety of Palestrina's
work has been disputed. M. Félix Clément
in his “Histoire de la Musique religieuse,” calls
Raphael and Palestrina “the great destroyers
of piety among the faithful.” That one could
cast such a reproach upon Raphael, I can per-
haps understand, although, indeed, without sub-
scribing to it; but upon Palestrina | He who
connects those two names can be neither an
enlightened historian nor a judicious critic,
for if there be but a few years between the
master of the Stanze and that of the “Impro-
peria,” there is still a great distance; little time
divides them, but much thought. Raphael was
the issue of the Renaissance, and may, perhaps,
be said to have summed up its work and spirit,
while Palestrina was in no way connected with
it. The Renaissance did nothing and could do
nothing for music, for the great movement was
but the re-birth of the antique, and the music of
the ancients had perished. No, - not abso-
lutely all : there remained in the plain-song (the
old Gregorian chant) a trace of it, more than
half effaced, a scarcely recognisable vestige.
Now, it is for having substituted polyphonic
counterpoint for the old plain-song that M.
4O Palestrina.
Clément accuses Palestrina of corruption and
impiety. But stop a moment. Shall we say
that the most appropriate music, -the only music
suitable to the Christian religion, is it to be the
débris and echo of that music now called an-
cient — once called heathen P. We shall soon
be suspected, and convicted indeed, of sacri-
legious irreverence, because, forsooth, we pray
not to the true God after the patterns set us by
the ancient worshippers of the false deities I
wonder at the exceptional character of the re-
proach, and as it is addressed to both Raphael
and Palestrina, I wonder at its inconsistency.
For if Raphael is culpable in having introduced
the element of the antique into Christian art,
then Palestrina is not to be blamed for having
once again banished it. Antiquity cannot at
the same time profane painting and invest music
with an added holiness. But may it perhaps be
said that, in spite of the heathen origin of the
plain-song, save for it sacred music never has
and never could have existed ; that, though
the dogmas of faith change, the nature and
essence of religious sentiment changes not ; and
that of this immutable Idea the plain-song
remains the one simple, true expression, pure
above all others, the most noble and the most
beautiful ? If this conception were true, we
Palestrina. 4. I
should then have to absolve Raphael, for he has
transferred the divine idea through the most
absolutely simple and pure forms. But it is not
true. It was the work of Christianity, after
having learned what she could from the heathen
arts, to transform them according to her great
Ideal. Thus it was that the Romanesque in
architecture, followed by the Gothic, a double
polyphony in stone, succeeded to the primitive
basilica, the plain-Song of architecture. Who,
then, will take umbrage at the architects of the
world's greatest cathedrals and accuse them of
impiety Will M. Clément himself? Let us be-
ware of narrowness and intolerance. Let us
admire and, as far as it is possible, restore the
plain-Song, that grand old form of Sacred music.
But let not that restoration be to the prejudice,
much less to the exclusion of the Palestrinian
form; for this last, though its spirituality is in
another style, is no less profoundly religious
than its predecessor.
Palestrinian music, by its two essential, inva-
riable characteristics, may be defined in brief as
a voice-polyphony. Always written in several
parts, it is never accompanied by any instru-
ment whatsoever. From these two character-
istics, we would endeavor to deduce the various
qualities which it possesses.
42 Palestrina.
In the first place, because it is exclusively
vocal the music of Palestrina is more than simply
religious; it is essentially a music for the Church.
With the exception of the plain-song, it is the
only form which subordinates itself entirely to
the worship ; which scrupulously respects the
text, and which does not attempt to alter the
length or arrangement of the religious ceremony.
It is modern music which has unlearned this sub-
mission and deference. Open the mass in D
of Beethoven himself. You will find therein
much licence, if only in the changing of the
text. This, for example: O, miserere nobis,
instead of the simple Miserere nobis. But there
are greater irregularities to be found than this
supernumerary “O.” Whereas, immediately
after the intoning of the Gloria in excelsis Deo,
the choir should reply, Et in terra pax hominibus
bonae voluntaiis 1 it is the orchestra which
responds in a passage of four measures, after
which the voices, instead of continuing the
proper text, take up again the words Gloria in
excelsis, and repeat them during thirty-four
measures | * All modern masses, stabats, and re-
quiems — and we refer only to the most beautiful
1 “Besprechungen und Kritiken. Kirchlich und welt-
lich. Eine Polemik und Replik,” by M. Paul Krutschek;
Haberl, Jahrbuch, 1894.
Palesłrina. 43
compositions of classic music — are filled with
such infringements upon the text of the liturgy.
Preludes and symphonic epilogues, soli for the
instruments and tuba mirum prolong and enlarge
the liturgical ceremony beyond all bounds.
The art of to-day, an art it is true which is
often sublime, exists only for and in itself.
Instead of being absorbed in, it absorbs the
religious idea. Quite another is the art of
Palestrina. Its existence is in and for the
ceremonies of the Church. Here music effaces
herself in the presence of thought, above all,
before the sacred text, without which she would
not have dared to make herself heard. Here,
truly, is she the servant of the Lord, one
in whom nothing is accomplished but by the
Divine Word. Palestrinian music, necessarily
liturgical by its adaptation to the Church services,
is rendered still more so by the slight show and
equipage which it permits. A few voices, and
those softly modulated, suffice. It neither dis-
tracts the attention nor troubles piety by any
material spectacle. It interposes neither a group
of strangers nor a mass of instruments between
the altar and the nave. Nor does it suffer the
agitated silhouette of a conductor to break the
noble perspective of the church, and conceal
from sight those sacred rites which bestow
44 Palestrina.
blessing and consecration upon the beholder.
“By the exclusive use of the human voice,” it
has been said, “Rome sought to recall some
shadow of those heroic days when the earnest
choruses of the faithful could dispense with all
hired talent.”* Nothing could be more true.
That theory, dear to the heart of the Renais-
sance, is not to be found here, — the theory
of art for art's sake, of beauty in itself and for
itself alone. Here one finds only men who
pray, and God who listens.
They prayed with all their hearts, those men,
and the dominating quality of their music is its
depth, or rather its inwardness, - that psycho-
logical characteristic which the Greeks called
its #60s. Palestrinian polyphony speaks to the
soul of God only, and only of the soul to God.
Victor Hugo, in his romantic spirit, has
imagined a Palestrina who has little in common
with the old master. Doubtless the great poet
knew nothing more than the name of the great
musician, and, while admiring him much by
hearsay, he admires him somewhat at cross
purposes. He fails to comprehend, not only
the genius of the time, but also that of the
artist, claiming for the latter an origin most
foreign to the truth. g
1 M. Dejob, op. cit.
Palestrina. 45
Comme il s'est promené tout enfant, tout pensif,
Dans les champs, et dès l'aube, au fond du bois massif,
Et près du précipice, épouvante des mères
Tour à tour, noyé d'ombre, ébloui de chimères,
Comme il ouvrait son âme alors que le printemps
Trempe la berge en fleurs, dans l’eau des clairs étangs,
Que le lierre remonte aux branches favorites,
Que l’herbe aux boutons d'or mêle les marguerites. . .
This page of beautiful poetry and bad criti-
cism should be read to the end. It is indeed
quite probable that the master of Praeneste
felt his senses quickened by the springtime of
his Italy; that he gathered the April flowers
on the Roman campagna, and listened to the
nestlings and the running waters and at even-
tide to the bells “weeping,” as Dante says, for
the dying day. Doubtless he understood and
loved nature, but nevertheless nature is not the
mother of his genius, and absolutely, not a ray,
not a smile has passed from her into his work,
that work from which the outer world is
banished. One never finds in it those land-
scapes which serve as backgrounds to the
pictures of the Renaissance ; indeed, which,
two centuries before that, had served as a
background to those open-air homilies, the
springtime canticles of St. Francis. Alas, the
1 Victor Hugo, Les Rayons et les Ombres. (Music
dating from the sixteenth century.)
46 Palestrina.
Renaissance had brought a curse upon the
nature that she loved. Men no longer praised
a sun of which they were afraid. They shunned
the flowers among which the serpent hides, and
no longer did they dare to preach to the birds
under those trees whose sweet shadow they
must flee.
Thus the music of Palestrina searches, as for
a spiritual marrow, into the essence of the sacred
text which it interprets. It expresses the idea
and not the figure, and when Vincentio Galilei
called Palestrina quel grande imilatore della
natura he intended to do homage to the inter-
preter of that human nature within us which is
made in the likeness of God. The inwardness
or subjectivity of this music arises, in great
measure, from the fact that it is exclusively
vocal ; indeed of all organs of musical expres-
sion, the voice is the most direct and intimate,
the nearest to the heart, and that which resembles
it the most ; and thus it is that the Palestrinian
music justifies, beyond any other form, the defi-
nition given to the art of music by a German
theorist : Kunst der Innerlichkeit, — the art of
the inner life. It is, in its very constitution,
more an art of reflection than of action and
drama, and is much less the representative of
facts and things than of sentiments; rather a
Palesłrina. 47
sweetness that penetrates than a force that
works; it is the music of prayer, and, above all,
of meditation. This is because of two of its
essential elements. In the first place its tempo
is equal and for the most part slow, and again
the lines of thought are unbroken, almost hori-
zontal, as it were. Listen, and look too at a bit
of Palestrina. What do you hear and see : A
tempo, now moderate, now slow, even very
slow ; occasionally an allegro, but never a
presto. Prolonged round notes follow, without
haste, the calm rhythms; quarter notes are rare,
while as to eighth notes there is not one in the
Marcelline mass, and probably not four which
are contiguous, certainly not a full measure of
them, in an entire volume of motets.
In a book, far too little read, by M. Sully-
Prudhomme,” there is a page on the comparison
of the beautiful in art, of which I was reminded
one day, while at St. Gervais in Paris, listening
to Palestrina's fine responses for Holy Week.
“Each note,” writes the poet-philosopher,
“creates upon the mind, by its depth and in-
tensity, a sensation incalculably more vivid than
does any point of rhythm or measure in the
lines. The element of sound-perception is
therefore much more sensuous than the element
1 L'expression dans les Beaux-arts: Lemerre.
48 PaleStrina.
of linear perception, and, for that reason alone
the musical expression should be more passion-
ate than the plastic. . . . Finally, whilst the
line is continuous and therefore perceptible
without any very sensible effort of the eye, the
musical phrase is a composition of distinct
notes, separated by varying intervals, and the
passage from one note to another cannot
effect itself insensibly to the mind.” It would
seem that, by comparing the style of Palestrina
with these principles, one might gather a fairly
just idea of the effects which it produces, and of
their causes. He delighted in lengthening out
and softening down all that which gives vivacity
to the musical feeling, or which agitates and
kindles the passions. Employing as he does
the voice only, he uses but four qualities of
tone, and guards against exaggeration in the in-
tensity of the sound. As to force and effect,
he prefers mezza voce and half-tints, and, finally
and above all, he restricts the space between the
successive notes, instead of spreading it out. His
music does not permit wide intervals. The dif-
ferent parts move on step by step, crossing one
after another the diatonic degrees, each note
reaching out toward but one other note, and
that near at hand, if not contiguous. The pas-
sage from one to the other is effected with no
Palestrina. 49
great surprise to the ear, and with a continuity,
which is linear, even horizontal. Neither bril-
liancy nor lyrical effect must be demanded from
this style ; nor fusees nor Gothic spires nor the
Saintly folly of the ogive are to be found in it;
no excitements nor transports of the imagination;
but, on the contrary, to taste its beauty to the
full, the thoughts must be concentrated and gath-
ered within one's self. The following is the
subject and text of one of Palestrina's most pro-
found musical meditations : —
“In monte Oliveti oravit ad Patrem : Pater,
si fieri potest, transeat a me calix iste. Spiritus
quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma.
“Vigilate et orate, ut non intretis in tenta-
tionem.”
“Upon the Mount of Olives Jesus prayed to
his Father, O my Father, if it be possible let
this cup pass from me. The spirit truly is ready,
but the flesh is weak.”
“Watch and pray lest ye enter into tempta-
tion.” +
These words are sung by four voices, exceed-
ingly piano at first, and very slowly ; medium
1 “Anthologie des maitres religieux primitifs,” by M.
Charles Bordes, founder and director of the “Association
des Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais,” Ist year volume of
Motets, p. 25. *>
4.
5O Palestrina.
and rather deep tones composing the elementary
harmonies. The subject and scene are deter-
mined by the first six words and the first eight
measures, with no attempt whatever at descrip-
tion. At oravil and ad Patrem the modulation
sinks down slowly and heavily ; from Paler, si
fieri potest, the movement retards, as the slow,
lingering notes appeal to our devotion with
each word of the agonised prayer. Transeat a
me, moans the soprano voice high above the
others; transeat a me, they respond in soft-
ened union ; and on the dominant — the note
of uncertainty — the plaint expires with the
response, Spiritus quidem promptus est, caro
aulem infirma. These words utter nothing
else than a moral maxim; and this, with a kind
of impassibility, the music expresses, not with-
out marking at the same time rather naïvely, by
two opposed movements, the willingness of
the spirit and the weakness or languor of the
flesh.
As to the verse Vigilale et orate, it is a mar-
vel. The art of Palestrina, as has been said
above, never bears a trace of the picturesque
or external ; and indeed, this arrangement of
chords—for it is a simple chord passage — is to
be found on many of the master's pages, which
certainly are not to be interpreted in the light
Palestrina. 5.I
of the picturesque.” But here, entirely by way
of an exception, one seems to hear stealing
through the music, whether or no it was sought
for by the artist, a feeling of the country and of
nature. Having felt this, one may at least sug-
gest it to others. The conception adds a little
of nature's beauty to the nobility of thought.
It opens, as it were, a window upon the night
of Gethsemane. Vigilate et orate, – watch
and pray. Here we find a precept, which the
music illustrates. That counsel — who gave it
for the first time To whom was it given, and
at what moment By the Divine One in his
agony; to his disciples under the stars of the
Orient, in the silence of nature's sleep. How,
then, does Palestrina treat his theme * This
Vigilate, so melodious in itself, above all when
sung in the soft Italian accents, he confides to
three female voices of the sweetest and ten-
derest tone ; and these three, one by one, rest
it on the three descending notes of a perfect
chord. Passing thus from one to another, it
floats through the sad watch like some word or
signal exchanged by divine sentinels; then the
vision so gently called up, fades away, and the
1 For example, in the response following the words
“Ecce appropinquat hora ; ” and again in an antiphon
for Palm Sunday, “Pueri Hebræorum.”
52 PaleSirina:
last measures, ul non intrelis in tentationem, ad-
dress themselves to the soul alone. Sensation
has been joined to sentiment, though but for a
moment, and, therefore, in these few lines is to
be found one of the rarest of Palestrina's mas-
terpieces.
Another is of the purely subjective order into
which there creeps nothing of the outer world :
“Peccantem me quotidie et non me poeniten-
tem, timor mortis conturbat me, quia in inferno
nulla est redemptio. Miserere mei, Deus, et
salva me ! ”
“Sinning each day and unrepentant, the fear
of death terrifies me, because in hell there is no
redemption. Have pity, Lord, and save me.” "
Such a prayer touches only upon the abstract,
and if we feel, with Baini, that this motet far
excels all others in its sentiment, pathos, and
“imitation of nature,” it is the spiritual nature
only whose imitation we may admire and study.
The voices, confessing thus the daily habit of
sinning, begin by repeating three times the
introductory words, very low at first, the idea
scarcely awakened, then louder, and, finally,
with a threefold energy of a mea maxima culpa.
The et non me poenitentem, strongly accented,
* “Anthologie des maitres religieux primitifs,” 1st
year book of Motets, p. 4.
Palesłrina. 53
marks the apogee of the musical crescendo, as it
expresses also the climax of feeling, the failure
to repent, more criminal than the crime itself;
the hard-heartedness of desiring, committing,
and continuing in sin. Then the timor morlis
bursts forth in richer chords of superb fulness,
the resonant notes vibrating as though hurled
out by trombones; and suddenly to this burst
there responds a plaint that is not even a cry, but
a sigh of misery and desertion, a wail of fear as
weak as a child's. In inferno nulla est redemptio.
What is this hell of which they sing, and how
does the music represent it In the penitential
days, when Palestrina's motet was sung in the
Sistine Chapel, before Michael Angelo's fresco,
the latter portrayed the image of hell, the
former but the abstract idea; yes, the idea
alone. These four voices sing despairing sad-
ness and eternal punishment, but they imagine
no pain ; no material penalty, no violence is
here, no weeping and gnashing of teeth, no
limbs writhing in torture. Body and flesh are
absent from this art; the soul alone is present
and sensible of sorrow, - the soul eternally
unhappy, alienated from God and weeping for
the separation which is to have no end.
Then there reigns a long silence, as though in
truth there were no salvation ; but there is a
54 Palestrina.
word which will procure redemption, and with
what humility the miserere rests on the high
soprano note. Et Salva me, the voices re-
peat, becoming tender, even caressing, as they
ascend and descend the scales in exquisite
sweetness, their breath at last expiring upon a
note of uncertainty, as the Soul, in hope and
fear, awaits the response of Divine mercy.
After having heard such passages, let the
thoughts move forward, not even as far as the
deafening Tuba Mirum and the dramatic “Dies
Irae" of our modern works, but pause at the
“Passion selon Saint Mathieu,” or Sebastian
Bach's Mass in B minor. Think of the roll of
those thundering fugues; of the fervid chorus
filling the sonorous air; remember the sacred
peals of sound, the movement and the excite-
ment. Then come back to the motets of the
old Roman master, to the few slow and solemn
notes; and having admired action you will love
repose. You will feel that it is beautiful to
praise the Lord with dramatic strength and
enthusiasm, but that it is sweet to adore him
in contemplation, and in the aspiring worship
of the praying Soul.
As we shall see, the liturgical art of Pales-
trina, inner and subjective as it is, possesses
two other characteristics, austerity and imper-
Palestrina. 55
sonality. His music is austere because, if not
harmony alone, it is harmony above all else, and
harmony is music's most serious and severe ele-
ment. Is it possible, then, to isolate melody and
harmony, and to conceive of them independently
the one from the other P Assuredly, yes. Noth-
ing is more evident than that melody may dis-
pense with harmony, but the latter too may
possess its own existence and its individual
beauty, without unfolding from its progressions
any melody or song, as it is called. For instance,
the first prelude in Bach’s “Well-tempered
Clavichord ” was already beautiful, by the sim-
ple blending of its chords, before Gounod
came, to add to it,or rather to extract from it,
the melody which lay sleeping within.
In the same way, in one of Beethoven's most
sublime and best known passages — the adagio
from his Sonata in C# minor, one can easily
distinguish and admire, separately, the melody
and the harmony. Berlioz understood this per-
fectly. Speaking of the adagio he says, “The
method is very simple ; the left hand very
Softly brings out broad chords of a solemn
mournfulness, the long duration of which per-
mits the vibrations of the piano to slowly die
away. In the treble, the lower fingers of the
right hand carry a sustained arpeggio accompa-
56 Palestrina.
niment, the form of which scarcely varies from
the first measure to the last, while the other
fingers utter a sort of lamentation, the melodious
efflorescence of this sombre harmony.””
Finally, and still nearer us in time, Wagner's
work, more clearly than any other, offers num-
erous examples of beauties which are exquisitely
harmonic. In “Die Walküre,” for instance, as
Wotan presses upon the eyes of Brünnhilde the
kiss which dispossesses her of her divinity, listen
to the sublime descent of chords that accompan-
ies the fateful embrace. Certainly there is no
melody, so called, in this chromatic sequence
of isochronous chords. Harmony, then, may
have an existence of its own, act alone, – as the
Italians say, fare da Se; and, having seen the
proof of this, we may again safely assert that it
is of harmony, almost solely, that the music of
Palestrina is composed. It is seldom that one
can detach any individual musical idea from this
polyphony, in which the parts depend, above all,
upon their reciprocal relationship, upon opposi-
tion and symmetry, imitations, response, and the
interweaving of the counterpoint. The music
of the old master knows no solo; its melody is
constantly enveloped and involved in the har-
mony. Never does one voice sing accompanied
1 Berlioz, A travers chants.
Palestrina. 57
by the others, but all sing together, and accom-
pany one another. The polyphonic style was
the inheritance left to the sixteenth century by
the Middle Ages, and the Roman master ex-
tracted all that was good in it for his own uses.
“Palestrina himself,” Vitet has well said, “was
no innovator because he swept away pedantry,
and lighted, by the pure rays of his genius, the
latter part of the sixteenth century; he neither
proposed to invent, nor was it his thought to
take a step in advance. His object was to re-
establish that which had been altered. To use,
exclusively, means which had been employed
before his day, but to use them for the best
that was in them, and to their utmost. He
knew how to create master-works while con-
forming to the laws and exigencies of consum-
mate harmony, permitting none but artificial
dissonances, and, at the same time, drawing
from the ancient system all that there was in it
— and its last utterance.””
But if, further, it is asked why polyphony is
more grave and austere in its form than melody,
the answer is, because the former presupposes
in the author, and requires from the hearer,
more attention and effort ; a combination of
notes gives us a less natural pleasure, and one
i Vitet, Études sur l’Histoire de l'Art, vol. iv.
58 Palestrina.
more difficult to appreciate, than does a simple
succession of tones. Melody, doubtless, is the
primitive element of music, the one most acces-
sible to the simple and ignorant, the music of
children and of the people. Many popular mel-
odies are to be found, but of popular harmonies
not one. Melody is the form which awakens
the senses, the external form, as it were, of art ;
while harmony is the inward and reasoning idea.
And if it be not true that all melody is light and
frivolous, on the other hand it is certain that
all light and frivolous music is melody.
Finally, the genius of Palestrina, liturgical,
subjective, and austere, is likewise impersonal ;
not that he lacks character, but that, on the
contrary, he possesses universality, that distinct-
ive mark of the highest genius. Polyphonic as it
is, and consequently collective, vocal and intrin-
sically human, the music of Palestrina is not for
some one of us, it is for the world ; it is not this
or that soul which it voices, it is the Soul of the
universe. Soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass
— in their union the four voices embrace the
strength of man, the grace of woman, and the
purity of the child. All the passion and peace
of existence vibrates through them all the joy
and misery, all the energy and the weakness.
All there is to be said they say, nothing exists
Palesłrina. 59
beyond them, and it is through them that hu-
manity thinks, prays and worships, – not only
all humanity, but the individual.
Above any other music, the polyphony of
Palestrina realises that beautiful desire for una–
nimity, for which men's hearts eternally long, —
the vision of universal accord in one Father,
one spirit, one love. His is, indeed, the music
of the universe, catholic in the true sense of the
word ; the music of the great multitude whom
Jesus pitied. All other sacred music, from that
of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, to Verdi and
Gounod, seems to recognise certain Solo parts
as the privileged interpreters of common thought
and prayer; but the music of Palestrina admits
no distinctions nor prerogatives. In its frater-
nal union no voice disdains the others or domi-
nates them. Here pride and self-importance
are effaced. No one voice sings “My Father
which art in Heaven; ” all sing together,
“Our Father ; ” and therefore it is that the
Palestrinian polyphony is one of the most beau-
tiful expressions in music, not only of faith, but
of charity.
Palestrinian art, impersonal in its object, is
equally so as regards its composer. In short,
there is in this music, as there is in Gothic
architecture, a general abstract, it might almost
6O Palestrina.
be said, an anonymous character. The master
of Praeneste is less an isolated than a represen-
tative genius; not easily and still less clearly is
he to be distinguished from some one of his pre-
decessors, such as Josquin des Prés, or from
Orlando di Lasso or Vittoria, his two great con-
temporaries. Though we recognise the virtues
by which he excels these brother artists, the one
by his fervour, the others by his broader, warmer
and more religious, if not more pathetic style,
though we well understand and aver the impor-
tance and efficacy of the reform accomplished
by him, it is none the less true that this reform
was not a revolution, and that Palestrina, while
he purified and simplified the tradition of the
Middle Ages, did not join issue with it. He
was, indeed, a great Italian, but among great
Italians he was an exception, and this by reason
of the foreign origin of the polyphonic style,
and the times, already studied by us, in which
he lived. Italy had not given birth to the art
which Palestrina carried forward even while
changing it. Vocal counterpoint is not a prod-
uct of Latin soil, and though it flourished, and
with splendour, in Rome, it did not germinate
there. The characteristics of Palestrina's music,
its subjectivity and austerity, its profound and, ,
as it were, canonical piety, are not essential
Palestrina. 6I
features of the Italian genius; the latter does
not possess them as a rule, merely at times
touching upon them, as though by accident. It
did, indeed, encounter them, however, in Pales-
trina's century, as in Dante's, and by an equally
glorious chance.
In this great musician, one studies less the
concourse than the conflict of the three primor-
dial forces which Taine considers the genera-
tors of art : the race, the environment, and the
moment. In the last half of the sixteenth cen-
tury, a time the gravity of which we have con-
sidered, the moment created an environment
not in accord with the Italian race, or rather the
Italian soul, and which affected the genius of
the nation for years. Of this altered soul, de-
pressed by the influence of the Gallo-Belgian
Soul and the severity of the times, Palestrina
was the grandest interpreter, and thus it is that
he is less a witness to his race, than to his
time. It was of a certain Italy that he was the
musician, and not of the Italy which preceded, or
which followed, the sixteenth century. “Their
music,” says Taine of the Italians, “their rhyth-
mically clear, singing music, agreeable even
when tragic, opposes its symmetries and smooth
cadences, its theatrical, eloquent, brilliant ge-
nius, limpid but limited, to the instrumental
62 Palestrina.
music of Germany, - that genius So grandiose
and free, even vague at times, so fitted to voice
the most evanescent dream, the most secret
emotion, and that ever unslaked thirst of the
serious soul, which, in its mysticism and lonely
inspiration, looks forward into the infinite and
the beyond.”"
In this double criticism is it not the second
part, referring to Germany, which, with the ex-
ception of two or three words, will apply most
fittingly to the music of Palestrina P And again,
when Taine writes of the Italian imagination
“It engages itself less with the foundation than
with the exterior, it prefers the outer decoration
to the inner life ; it is more idolatrous and less
religious, more picturesque and less philosophi-
cal, more limited and more beautiful,” then
over against this definition, too narrow by
reason of its nationality, against this reproach
and this praise, do you not seem to hear, off
there in the last echo of the Roman basilica,
that more human than picturesque genius of
Palestrina, – that genius, which was inward
and not decorative, purified from all idolatry,
and profoundly religious
But if, in some lights, the master of Praeneste
1 Taine, Philosophie de l'art, vol. i. (La Peinture de'
la Renaissance en Italie).
Palesłrina. 63
is outside of and perhaps above his race, in
others his race speaks through his voice ; his
work was Italian, for he laboured with simplicity
and clearness. He was the first to break
through the crust of ice under which the
Middle Ages had imprisoned music from the
rays of the Italian sun. Then it was that air
and light clarified and brightened polyphony,
and, slowly, melody disengaged herself from
harmony. Vague still, but perceptible, she ap-
peared in the masses, but above all, in the
motets, of Palestrina. On the surface of the
Sonorous waves she blossomed and smiled, that
melody which is the soul of Italian music, which
is, indeed, the music itself of Italy.
Born of Palestrina, in the sixteenth century,
melody develops in the centuries which follow.
The masters whom we are about to study,
Marcello, Pergolese, and their disciples, make
melody more and more Italian or Latin. That
is to say, they give to it form and character.
Then comes the Golden Age of melody, and
two centuries after the Renaissance of the other
arts, the tardy but brilliant Renaissance of mu-
sic. Yes, in this new birth of music are to be
found again the chief characteristics of the great
revival, the emancipation of the individual and
the conception of art for art's sake. Melody
64 Palestrina.
usurped the place of polyphony, because it was
individual and the representative of the personal
in music. Moreover, it was admired and wor-
shipped for itself and its beauty, and from its
birth was adored, as it soared above all control.
Then from one end of the peninsula to the
other the famous “Com' é bello 1 '' was the uni-
versal cry. And then music, less religious and
less serious, became external, ornamental, and
joyous, and that half of her soul which Italy
had lost in Palestrina's time, she found again in
the days of Marcello.
MARCELLO.
To MonsLEUR TADDEO WIEL, LIBRARIAN OF SAINT-
MARK’s, VENICE.
Marcello: Two sonatas for the violoncello with piano
accompaniment by Alfredo Piatti; Simrock, Berlin. –
Four sonatas for piano and violoncello, transcribed from
the original by M. A. Moffat; Schott – “Arianna, intrec-
cio scenico-musicale”; vol. iv. of the “Biblioteca di
Rarità musicali,” per cura di Oscar Chilesotti; Ricordi.
– “Estro poetico-armonico, Parafrasi sopra li Salmi ; ”
poesia di Girolamo-Ascanio Giustiniani; musica di Bene-
detto Marcello, Patrizi Veneti; ” 2 vols., Venice, 18o3;
Sebastiano Valle. – “Il Teatro alla moda,” fac-simile edi-
tion from the 3rd edition; Ricordi, 1883. – “Le Théâtre
à la mode,” translation, preceded by a study on the life
and works of Marcello, by Ernest David, and a preface
by L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray, professor of the Conser-
vatory of Music, Paris; Paris, Fishbacher, 189o. – P. D.
Francesco Fontana: “Vita di Benedetto Marcello.” (At
the beginning of the first volume of the Venetian edition
of the “ Psalms” above mentioned there is to be found
an Italian translation of this Biography, which is written
in Latin. – Caffi : “ Storia della musica sacra nella gia
cappella ducale di S. Marco in Venezia, dal 1318 al
1797.” Venice, 1856. – Zaccaria Morosini: “ Benedetto
Marcello e la sua etè; ” Venice, 1882, – L. Busi: “Bene-
detto Marcello, musicista del secolo xviiº; sua vita e
sue opere; ” Bologna, N. Zanichelli, 1884. – P. G. Mol-
menti: “ la Storia di Venezia nella vita privata; Turin,
Roux & Favale, 188o.
MARCELLO.
IN studying any form of art it is well not to
limit one's thoughts to the strictly individual
life of any one master, but to consider the de-
velopment of the art itself through his life who
has best realised its most complete representa-
tion. That form of art which we shall now
study may be defined in two words as Italian
melody ; the artist in whom it is personified is
Benedetto Marcello. But why choose the
genius of this old master as typical of our sub-
ject 2 For many reasons, some of which, I ad-
mit, reason herself would disavow ; chiefly,
perhaps, because of a far-away but still charm-
ing romance which haunts the thoughts. When
Consuelo filled the vaulted arches of the Vene-
tian church “with that unequalled voice and
the victorious pure accents " which George
Sand gave to her, she sang before old Mar-
cello, and it was Marcello's famous psalm which
she sang: “I cieli immensi narrano.” “My
child,” said the old man to her when she had
68 Marcello.
finished, “accept the gratitude and the benedic-
tion of a dying man. In one moment thou hast
made me forget years of mortal suffering. If
the angels sing as thou dost, then is it my aspira-
tion to leave this earth, to feast upon an eternity
of such delights as these of which thou hast
given me a foretaste.” How many times, lin-
gering on a summer night near Marcello's old
palace on the Grand Canal, have we hoped for
— almost expected — such another voice to rise
and send towards heaven the glorious canticle.
On such a night, more than five hundred years
ago, there came in truth a poor daughter of the
lagoons, Rosanna Scalfi, singing under the win-
dow of the young maestro. From his balcony
he called her, for he fain would see her whose
voice had charmed him ; and for the lovely face,
linked with such marvellously sweet tones, he
made the nocturnal songstress, first, his pupil,
then his wife.
But there are more serious reasons than those
of romance or reverie for choosing Marcello from
among so many. He was born nearly a century
1 The Marcello Palace is at present occupied by Bia-
lotto & Co. (cabinet-makers and wood-carvers). It over- .
looks the garden of the magnificent Vendramin-Calergi,
where Richard Wagner died on February 13, 1883.
(M. Busi, op. cit.)
Marcello. 69
after the death of Palestrina, and during that
period the Italian genius had created melody.
Thus the great Venetian represented a time, not
of formation, but of perfection, a unique moment
of beauty achieved ; less a ray than a focus of
light, he represents the perfection of melody,
which is summed up in his works. His genius
is the apogee of maturity and of bloom.
Nor is this all ; he alone amongst his contem-
poraries and fellow-citizens has left us something
more than fragments of his genius; works wor-
thy of immortality, of which, at least one, his
“Psalms,” is stupendous; and, finally, the
great composer was not a composer only.
Grand seigneur, poet, critic, member of the
Councils of the Republic, Overseer of Istria,
Camerlingo of Brescia, – uomo universale, as the
Italy of the Renaissance used to call her most
illustrious children, - none is more worthy
of remembrance and honor than Benedetto
Marcello, patrician of Venice, and prince
of musicians.
I.
He was born on July 24, 1686, of a noble
race and to a noble life. His name, as the
family fain would have believed, could not,
7O Marcello.
perhaps, trace itself back to the gens Claudia,
and yet Marcello could boast of a long and il-
lustrious line, dating as far back as the eighth
century, according to an historian of the Vene-
tian aristocracy. It was in 1473, when a Mar-
cello was doge, that the Bellini painted the
story of Frederick Barbarossa in the Grand
Council Hall of the Ducal Palace, and it was
likewise under a Marcello, that the doges were
forbidden to have their own figures struck upon
coins in any other attitude than that of kneeling
before St. Mark. Marcello's parents, both of
them illustrious as to their blood, were no less
distinguished in mind. His mother, a Catello,
left manuscripts of poetry, which, unhappily,
perished by fire in the library where they had
been preserved ; and his father was a dilettante
in the deepest sense of the word, possessing a
love for beauty, and all the tastes, with some of
the talent, of an artist. He, too, wrote verses
as well as played upon the violin. He brought
up his three sons, Benedetto, Alessandro, and
Girolamo, with the true spirit of an artist, early
demanding of them elegance and urbanity in
manners and language; carefully guarding their
childhood from everything low and vulgar, he
suffered nothing but politeness, grace, and dis-,
tinction in their daily conversation.
Marcello. 7I
One of the three brothers, Alessandro,
studied the violin with the illustrious Tartini,
and Benedetto himself took lessons for a time
of the master, but he was soon disheartened,
by the mechanical difficulties of the instrument.
One of his biographers, with little susceptibility,
apparently, to the beauties of symphonic music,
declared that Benedetto was destined all' altezza
della musica vocale, and not to semplici sinfonie
istrumentali prive d' anima. Prive d' animal
Instrumental music destitute of soul | With
relief may we appeal from such a strange judg-
ment to the sonatas for piano and violoncello
of Marcello himself. Soon, then, abandoning
the violin for composition, which, with all its
absorbing attraction, little by little took entire
possession of him, Benedetto became the pupil
of Gastarini, then chapel-master of the Pietà
in Venice, who, when he died, occupied the
same position at St. John Lateran in Rome.
Marcello, a zealous pupil from the first, Soon
became impassioned, almost to folly, with his
work. It is said that, during the three seasons,
from his seventeenth to his twentieth year, the
future author of the “Psalms ” gave ten hours
a day to the study of harmony and counterpoint.
A scholar with the strength to endure such an
apprenticeship should issue from it a master,
72 Marcello.
and such, indeed, was Marcello's achievement.
But although much had been done for his
genius by this ardent work, still more had
it been fostered by the good fortune of high
birth and a privileged education. Predisposed
by a favorable heredity, brought up in the
noble luxury of his father's palace, early familiar
with the masterpieces with which its libraries
were filled, and brought always in contact with
men eminent in all branches of learning, follow-
ing his vocation without obstacle, and screened
by his position and fortune from dishearten-
ing trials and degrading struggles, – the young
Benedetto breathed into his soul a spirit of
magnificence and dreams of beauty from the
atmosphere of his brilliant Venice.
In those days, when the human plant, as
Taine says, “overflowed with sap,” one indi-
vidual might fill many places of duty ; and Mar-
cello, called by his high birth to the discharge
of public functions, not only did not shirk the
responsibility, but filled the positions most
worthily. The great artist lived and died a
good servant of the State ; to the end he de-
ducted first his portion of work and duty from
the life in which his genius was a luxury only,
its ornament and flower, as it were. On De-
cember 4, 1706, by a special act of favour, and
Marcello. 73
before he had arrived at the customary age, he
was allowed to draw from the urn the golden
ball — the barbarella 1– which made him a mem-
ber of the Grand Council. His first musical
compositions were already being given, with
success, at the Casino dei Nobili, in the concerts
which had in those days a great reputation;
and it was about this time that he published
many works of vocal polyphony, in the form
of madrigals and church compositions, one of
which gained his admittance into the famous
Philharmonic Academy of Bologna. There ex-
isted between himself and one of the most
distinguished women in Venice, Madonna
Isabella Renier-Lombria, an attachment which
was affectionate, if nothing more, — a relation-
ship, at all events, which united them in their
love of things intellectual and artistic; at her
house, as in former days in his father's palace,
he was in daily intercourse with the first musi-
cians and the first poets of a city where all was
poetry and music. Musician and poet himself,
he constantly gave proof of his double talent.
Now he would write a cantata, “ Calisto in Orsa,”
for example, or “Timoteo,” the subject of which,
taken from Dryden, has been treated by
* So called because it was annually drawn by lot on
St. Barbara’s day.
74 Marcello.
Händel also, in his “ Alexander's Feast.” Or,
again, it would be a volume of Sacred sonnets,
or of less pious verses perhaps, accompanied
by some such profound epigram as the follow-
ing, which contains within itself a theory which
is artistic, even moral, and the rarest promises
of natural and of holy faith. Pianger cercai e
non del pianlo onore, “I have sought for tears
and not for the honour of weeping.” The beauti-
ful, sane, almost holy words are a fitting motto
for sincere grief, condemning as they do those
martyred grimaces which are feigned sorrow's
lies. Happy they who weep in simplicity, but
wretched those who, contemplating their own
grief, draw only vanity from their tears.
But Marcello was far more the friend of
good cheer and gaiety than of tears. The
great artist was a great jester, and the spirit
of criticism and banter pervaded his creative
genius. No one doubts to-day that he was the
author of an anonymous treatise which appeared
under the title of “Lettera famigliare d' un Ac-
cademico Filarmonico ed Arcade, discorsiva
Sopra un libro di duetti, terzetti e madrigali a piu
voci.” The duos, trios, and madrigals which it
so severely criticised were the work of the great
Antonio Lotti, a confrère of Marcello. Those
not informed on the subject have thought the
Marcello. 75
paper a bitter and envious criticism, doing little
credit to the character of the writer; but, in
truth, the work, though sometimes severe, is
just, and, in the place of jealousy and resent-
ment, it simply raises a standard to be fixed
by science and conscience, unassailable princi-
ples and purity of taste.” “I hope,” Marcello
began, “herein to discourse and reason with
such clearness that the author himself will re-
joice in my praise ; and that my blame — if
blame I must — will leave him convinced if not
persuaded of his own faults. I say convinced,
for you know well that to accomplish so much,
one need appeal only to the intelligence, while
to persuade one must have the will of him who
is addressed. Now the will, being a faculty
distinct from the intelligence, may refuse to con-
fess its defeat; but it will not be able, by such
indocile refusal, to prevent the intelligence from
surrendering to the truth.”
Surely this is not an unkind criticism. How-
ever, courteous as were his arms, Marcello has-
tened to lay them down, when petitioned by a
third party, and rather than wound or even
annoy such a master as Lotti, he abandoned his
half-accomplished work.
But he did not accord and, indeed, did not
1 M. Busi, op. cit.
76 Marcello.
owe such regard to all men. Once, merely to
embarrass the singers, many of whom were but
indifferent musicians even in his time, he de-
vised an Ensemble, some parts of which were
written in D; and some in Eb. Another time
he set to music a letter supposed to have been
written from Bologna to the celebrated canta-
trice Vittoria Tisi, which read as follows :
BOLOGNA, Dec. 6, 1718.
“My DEAR GIRL, - By reason of all my occupa-
tions, past and present, I am enjoying very poor
health, and for days past have been fairly beside my-
self. Fortunately for us the opera season closed
last Sunday. Ambreville left the same night for
Turin, Muzzia departed yesterday for Mantua,
Spagnuola, for her part, is off to Leghorn, and to-
night Coralla and Sartina leave for Brescia. Heaven
be praised, I shall enjoy a little repose, and recover
from so much fatigue. . . .
It is said that Marcello embroidered this pre-
tended letter from an impresario with the most
absurd music, in which he cleverly parodied the
style, manners, and faults, even to the smallest
eccentricities, of his contemporary composers
and virtuosi.”
But of all virtuosi it was the eunuchs who .
most excited Marcello's spirit of raillery. One
* Fontana, Busi, op. cit.
Marcello. 77
day he gathered together in his home the singers
of St. Mark's, under pretext of having them de-
cipher the two following madrigals for four
voices, which he had composed expressly for
them :
MADRIGALE PRIMO.
(Per due tenori e due bassi.)
I.
No, che lassù ne' cori almi e beati
Non entrano castrati,
Perche è scritto in quel loco.
Here the sopranos interrupted with
Dite che è scritto mai!
The tenor and basses reply:
“ Arbor che non fa frutto arda nel fuoco.”
Whereupon the sopranos screamed at the tops
of their voices,
Ahi! ahi! ahi!
MADRIGALE SECONDO.
(Per due soprani e due contralti.)
II.
Si, che laggiù nell' Erebo profondo
Ove alle fiamme vassi,
Cadran tenori e bassi;
Perche scritto gia fu da sacri vati:
“ Quei che castrati son saran beati ! ”
78 Marcello.
To such a use does the future author of the
“Psalms ” turn the sacred text; and yet with-
out displeasing his readers, for his work is the
evidence of an unshackled genius, whose free-
dom is not the dupe even of its own art. It
does not suggest the pedant, but, as Pascal says,
“an honest man" and a patrician. Such always
was Marcello. Such we find him again in “Il
Teatro alla Moda,” his masterpiece in criticism,
and one of the most biting satires in existence
on the theatre and theatrical people, on charla-
tanism and charlatans.
His youth and fancy had roamed at will over
the stones and waters of Venice. “He lived,”
writes Fontana, “in great honour, which was
well merited by his poetical and musical talents;
continually were sweet praises sounded in his
ears, as daily he took part in feasts, spectacles,
and all kinds of fêtes and gay assemblies. With-
out doubt this sort of life is full of danger, and
still he never abandoned himself to his passions
so far as to compromise his genius. The sacred
truths of his faith had taken deep root in his
mind, and he fulfilled in a most exemplary manner
all the duties of religion; and yet, carried away
continually by the blind instincts of nature, ,
which were importunate and violent within him,
it is not to be wondered at that the fear of
Marcello. 79
future punishment did not suffice to check
him.”
If, up to this time, Marcello had not conse-
crated his genius to God, the moment was fast
approaching when he would do so unreservedly
and in all the brilliancy of his maturity. He
had a friend, Girolamo-Ascanio Giustiniani,
like himself a gentleman, musician, and poet,
who having attempted the translating or rather the
paraphrasing of the Psalms of David, submitted
a fragment of his work to Marcello's criticism.
The latter, according to Fontana, praised the
elegance and easy strength of his friend's genius.
“Then,” said Giustiniani, “as you do not dis-
dain to approve of my modest poetry, why do
you not clothe it in music, which shall be suited
to the gravity and sacredness of the subject 2
The effort is worthy of you, and will be received
with the enthusiastic gratitude of all men.”
And immediately Marcello set himself to the
task which has proved the admiration of the
world. Highly praised first at Venice, later in
other Italian cities, solemn performances of the
“Psalms ” were soon instituted at Rome ; and
abroad the success of the work was no less
speedy and brilliant : in England, but espe-
cially in Germany. A German Kapellmeister,
named Telemann, wrote to Marcello, -
8O Marcello.
“In your sublime and imperishable ‘ Psalms’
there reigns a majesty which all masters before
you have failed to enthrone. Harmony, mel-
ody, unaffected symmetry — one cannot but
admire all !” And again Matheson, Kapell-
meister at Hamburg, thanked Marcello for the
“Psalms,” which he had just received, in these
words: “Your Excellency, uniting firmness to
Sweetness and pleasure with edification, has
found new and untrodden paths in lieu of the
disjointed and fatiguing counterpoint, which
up to to-day has constituted our church singing ;
and whereas heretofore men have said, ‘Hail
Palestrina l ' ' Hail Marcello l now will be
their cry 1” +
But many writers of those days go further
than these Germans in their praise, for they
assure us that these “Psalms ” worked pious
as well as artistic conversions, and led souls to
the true Faith. In any case they were the first
means of converting their author, and of com-
pletely changing his manner of life. “Having
undertaken this task,” writes Fontana, “ salutary
thoughts and desires awoke within him, goading
him on by day and by night. ... When he sang his
‘Psalms,’ for he joined his voice with the others, .
his face and eyes seemed to kindle with light.”
1 Caffi, op. cit.
Marcello. 8 I
He himself has said in the first of his “Sonetti
a Dio ": “Already have I lived eight lustres —
Alas! How shall I write it 2 To have lived such a
life as mine — I might rather write it down a
veritable death ; — plunged, as it has been,
in mire and deprived of Thy favour.”
“Otto lustri gia vissi; ahil come scrivo
Che vissi, e vissi tanto anzi degg'io
Morte vera chiamar quel viver mio
Nel fango involto, e di tua grazia privo.”
Accusing himself, elsewhere, of having de-
based his genius to low and earthly uses, he
cries: “How many notes — profane notes —
this hand has traced, when the strength of my
best years was mine ! And what remains to me
of it all, -what fruit of those long hours,
spent in vain?”
“Ma quante, quante ancor note profane
Questa man non Segno, quando mi prese
Musica a miglior anni! E qual rimane
Frutto d’ore si lunghe invano spese !”
His hand refused, henceforth, to trace these
“profane notes,” — a slight accident, in which
he thought that he received a supernatural
warning, completing the change begun within
him. On August 16, 1728, as he was hearing
6
82 Marcello.
mass in the church of the Holy Apostles, a
gravestone gave way beneath his feet and he
fell to his waist in the opened tomb. At the
time he felt no uneasiness from the incident, but,
that night, as he lay in bed, he could not sleep,
and all through the long hours the thought
haunted him : “Where should I be now, if I
had been laid to-day, not living but dead,
beneath that gravestone And yet some day
it must come — and alas ! I know not when l "
All the sins of his life passed and repassed be-
fore his eyes, till for the first time he felt pangs
of true contrition, then repentance; and recover-
ing on a sudden his inward peace, he fell asleep.
Rising with the dawn, he cried : “Behold a
transformation, accomplished by the hand of the
Most High (Haec mutatio dexterae Excelsi) / "
and from that moment he gave himself body and
soul to God. “I have had the honour,” wrote
a contemporary, “ of meeting his excellency,
Benedetto Marcello. He paid me every civility
and desired me to dine with him ; but he is
entirely different from his old self, leading the
life of a saint. He gave me a book of sacred
poetry, which is truly sublime, written by
himself.” "
1 Letter of Gio-Antonio Riccieri to P. Martini (April
24, 1733) in the “Cartiggio inedito del P. Martine coi più
Marcello. 83
This latter may have been the last book on
which Marcello worked, - his poem on the
Redemption, which he left unfinished. The
work, divided into three parts, – The Expecta-
tion of the Messiah, His Coming, and His As-
cension, — treats also of Letters, Science, and
Art, in their relations to the Faith. His, doubt-
less, was an analogy which merely anticipated
that one which was afforded to the world later
in the ‘‘ Génie du christianisme.” It bore on
its title-page the following lines, in memory of
the author's conversion : —
“Eduxit me de lacu miseria, de luto fascis,
et immisit in Os meum canticum novum, carmen
Deo nostro.”
In 1733, Marcello, who for a long time had
been a member of the Council of the Quarantie,
was appointed overseer of the Venetian Re-
public at Pola, in Istria. He suffered much
from the unhealthy climate of the latter place,
and in three years returned to Venice, much
broken in health. He was then sent as Camer-
lingo (treasurer) to Brescia, at the foot of the
Alps, and under these soft skies he lived the
last three years of his life, dividing his time
between the discharge of his duties and the
celebri musicisti del Suo tempo;” Bologna, Zanichelli,
I888. -
84 Marcello.
practices of his “ardent piety.” During this
time he went on a pilgrimage to Caravaggio to
obtain or rather to ask for a cure which would
have been nothing less than a miracle. But he
prayed in vain ; death awaited him on his re-
turn to Brescia. When his last moment arrived,
he received the messenger calmly, and even, so
say his biographers, with the sweetness of an
angel. He died in sanctity on July 24, 1739,
and was buried at Brescia, in the church of St.
Joseph of the Franciscans, where his tomb may
still be seen.
And who then raised the stone above the
remains of this Prince of Musicians, – Philolo-
gist, Poet, Questor of Brescia, and Patrician
of Venice – for the inscription gives him all
these titles. His confrères in music or poetry,
his colleagues in dignities and offices, his equals
by fortune and birth No. It was, so the
inscription testifies, but a poor woman, his wife,
— uxor mastissima, she whom we have elimi-
nated from his biography as he eliminated
her from his life, though not perhaps from his
heart.
The Venice of the old days forbade to her
children a mésalliance, and Marcello could only
unite himself to the humble Rosanna in a
clandestine marriage. But he honoured her, for
Marcello. 85
she was as virtuous as she was beautiful, and
established her, with her mother, in a retired
palace, where she lacked nothing of the consid-
eration and state of which she was worthy.
Thither he carried to her secretly the master-
pieces of his genius and his love. She was the
first to sing for him his psalms and cantatas,
with the voice which had won him years before,
— her voice, “which,” says a biographer, “was
flexible and brilliant as a pearl (nilida come la
perla) and which filled the soul with peace.”
But always he had been obliged to leave her,
called by duties and by pleasures which she
might not share — death alone could give him
to her eternally. Though she could not be his
radiant wife, she might be his grief-stricken
widow, and the title which in his lifetime had
been refused to her, she could assume by his
tomb."
II.
As we have already said, Marcello, no less
than Palestrina, was a representative genius. It
* “Se un nobile sposava una schiava, una fantesca o
femina da villa overo qualunque altra de abieta e vil
condizione, decadeva, insieme coi figli, dal benefizio della
nobiltà, e diveniva soltanto cittadino originario.” — P. C.
Molmenti, op. cit.
86 Marcello.
was because he was as much a type as a per-
sonality that his life may be chosen as the bril-
liant record of that form of art, that beautiful
Ideal, which has been christened Italian melody.
An Ideal which is abolished, and a beauty
which is dead | So the younger generation,
drunk with new wine, cry to-day, in their blind
ingratitude I For blind are they in very truth,
who do not see that the true life of works, as of .
men, begins but at their death. Doubtless the
music of the future will manifest itself less and
less in simple melody; and in that sense it
might be said that Italian melody is dead. One
does not hear in these days the “Psalms ” of
Marcello, nor his Sonatas, any more than one
sees students copying Veronese’s “Marriage at
Cana.” Such makers of the gods as was old
Phidias are seen no more, nor such architects
as they of the Parthenon or the Gothic cathe-
drals, nor, indeed, such writers as Racine or
the author of “Don Juan"; but are these styles
of beauty, then, – all these grand art-forms, –
dead? Yes, doubtless they are dead; and yet
they are immortal, and in spite of time will live
for ever. Nothing of their beauty shall fade
away, nothing of their life can die, – and it is
in this sense that Italian melody lives and shall
live through all time.
Marcello. 87
“We shall never see it again I" say they.
Without doubt, and therefore must we love it
the more. “Love,” the poet said in his
wisdom,
“Love that which you will never more see.”
But, in fact, we already see something that
closely resembles the old Italian form. Does
it not reappear, modified, perhaps, but still re-
cognisable, in the works of that most worthy
inheritor of the old Italian masters P “Torniamo
all' antico,” said the musician of “Othello '' and
of “Falstaff,” suiting his work to his words.
These two operas look toward the past no less
than toward the future, and the old blood of the
Latin race pulses through each page of the two
works which are, at the same time, so modern
and yet so classically Italian.
But the renegades from Latin melody are
worse than blind and ungrateful, for they attack
their nursing-mother, their Alma-parens, “who
comes to us from Italy, and who came to her
from Heaven.” Musset should have so written
of melody rather than of harmony, for it was in-
deed from Italy that the former came to France,
— to all northern races, including the Germans
themselves, whose genius even to the first works
of Beethoven was ever half Italian. With the
88 Marcello.
exception of Bach, and we must not ignore the
depth and height of that exception, the breath
of the South stirred all the music of Germany.
We cannot but see, for instance, how closely
Händel follows along Marcello's lines, and that
all the power and splendour of the Anglo-Saxon
is first to be met with in the works of the old
Venetian master. And though we know that
Haydn thought as a German, we feel that the
inspiration of his songs came from Italy. Mo-
zart was the brother of Virgil, and the young
Beethoven promised to be nothing but a second
Mozart, though in his mature genius he gave to .
music an imperishable form, which has become
the characteristic art-form of his Fatherland.
Each day the Germany of Weber, Schubert,
Mendelssohn, and Schumann widens the dis-
tance between herself and Italy. The last few
decades have beheld the violence with which
Wagner consummated the irrevocable rupture;
but it is but just to keep in our memories the
sacred glory of the primitive alliance.
With the reservations always necessary in the
use of general formulas, we may divide all music
into two parts, giving the symphony to Ger-
many, and to Italy melody. Germany pos-
sesses the symphonic soul: her motto is the
“Symphonialis est anima" of the saint of the
Marcello. 89
Middle Ages. Italy, on the other hand, has
been inspired from all time with the soul of
Song: the one people retires within itself to
the chorus of secret harmonies; the other pours
forth its melody to the world.
It was Italy who freed the first line of song
from the counterpoint of the Middle Ages.
Having received the polyphonic form from the
countries of the North, she carried it to its per-
fection, then shattered the creation and drew out
from the debris a new musical genius. Remem-
ber the “Peccantem me quotidie” of Palestrina,
that master doubly great by virtue of the past
which he buried and the future which he ushered
in. Truly, the sublime beauty of this page is
still in its concerted harmony, and yet there lies
within it a charm of song and a unity of design,
from which one day melody would issue. Little
by little, melody detached itself from the re-
straint so gradually relaxed, and, as music passed
from the church to the theatre, lyric action
necessitated the abandoning of polyphony for
the recitatives of a single voice. The dramatic
pastorals performed in Florence during the last
ten years of the sixteenth century, were nothing
less than such recitatives. In February, 1600,
some ten years after Palestrina's death, a “Mys-
tery" of Emilio del Cavaliere's was given in the
90 Marcello.
Oratorian Church of Santa Maria in Valicella
at Rome ; at Florence, in October of the same
year, the first operas were given on the occa-
sion of the marriage of Maria de' Medici with
Henry IV. Thus in the “Orfeo" of Peri and
Caccini, and the “Cephalus ” of Caccini, the
last months of the great polyphonic century be-
held the birth of melody, - a birth which, dur-
ing the two succeeding centuries, developed
into splendour.
The names, far too much ignored, of many
masters of genius, punctuate the records of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, men who
left to the world great works, which, alas, are still
less known than the lives of their authors. In
those days lived and worked Carissimi, Cesti,
Carvalli, Caldara, Lotti, and last, and perhaps
greatest of all, Marcello. How noble and pure
was melody in the flower of her youth At
Mantua, Ferrara, Venice, —throughout all Italy,
in joy and in grief, men sang, and their songs,
pouring from full, open throats, grew daily more
beautiful in their glad freedom. Without har-
mony, almost without accompaniment, song was
sufficient unto itself, as it gave voice unstintingly
to the genius of the Italian soul; it lived and
moved in itself alone — faceva dé se.
Melody could not but result from such a
Marcello. 9I
soul and genius ; she was the necessary and
natural product of her native land, resembling,
and voicing the Italian people. Above all else, the
new form was simple, existing by successions
and not by combination ; without being as ele-
mentary as the note, it is the pure musical form;
far more so than harmony, and above all, than
symphony, of which it forms the subject-matter.
But more than this, melody seems to possess a
more concrete character than harmony; a some-
thing which is more plastic and sensuous. It
is through the ear that it first gives pleasure ;
and if the intelligence partakes in the enjoy-
ment, it is by some elementary operation which
costs but little effort.
Now those characteristics of simplicity, defi-
nite realism, and personality are, in the highest
degree, characteristics also of the Italian spirit,
or shall we not rather say of the classical Latin
spirit, — the soul of antiquity Therefore it
was that ancient music was almost exclusively
melodic, and that melody must and did reap-
pear in Italy. As marbles and bronzes slept
beneath the ancient soil, so melody, but in a
slumber of more than two hundred years, lay
floating in the air. One day, by I know not
what divine interposition, there was a mustering
of those millions of Sonorous atoms, of the innum-
92 Marcello.
erable sighs which had escaped from Grecian lyres
in the olden times; once again all human joy and
sorrow crystallised itself into Song, and melody
awoke to usher in the Renaissance of music.
That Renaissance, though tardy, as all the
great events in musical history have been, took
complete possession of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. And with the true spirit of
the Renaissance, — that universality which ex-
pressed itself in a desire to study all science
and in a love for all things beautiful, -with
such a spirit was Marcello imbued, - the musi-
cian who was a Statesman, the patrician who
was a poet. His preface to the “Psalms ” reveals
a profound knowledge of and fervent admiration
for antiquity. Not only are Cicero, Aristotle,
and Plato, “the divine philosopher,” quoted
at each page, but even the principles of the
ancient music were revivified and honoured by
the Venetian. Throughout his work Marcello
sought to demonstrate the superiority of mel-
ody over harmony; for him melody is the no-
blest part, — the head, or the heart, rather, of
music; she is the supreme means of expression,
the sovereign and sole dispenser of emotion.
It was because she was melody and melody
exclusively that music had power, of old, to
work miracles, never failing in her mission
Marcello. 93
of moving the inner chords of the soul (l’effetto
suo proprio d' internamente commovere.) “It
is a grave error,” says Marcello, “to imagine
that the simplicity of ancient music was an
imperfection ; on the contrary, therein lay one
of its greatest virtues. It is true, that in
later times, tones and voices have multiplied,
from which fact our songs, no doubt, are be-
come more replete with elegance and passion ;
more studied, too, because containing more
thought and harmony by reason of the diversity
of voices and the mingling of dissonances with
consonances; — and more brilliant by the varied
accompaniment of instruments.” But any de-
velopment of music in such a direction is no
enhancement of her intrinsic beauty; and if
masterpieces of musical art are produced to-day
which touch the soul most profoundly, it is
always through the melody within them rather
than by reason of a brilliant polyphony (piul-
tosto per opera della melodia, che dello strepiloso
concerto). Therefore it was, so Marcello tells
us, that having undertaken the “Psalms,” which
demanded above all a forceful expression of
word and sentiment, he resolved to write the
music so far as possible for two voices only,
thus allowing the expression more Scope and
beauty. -
94. Marcello.
In passing he makes a criticism upon the
music of his day, accusing it of vagueness, and
thus characterising his contemporary art as
opposed to the ancient. If in Marcello's time
this criticism was just, it is far more so to-day :
indeed, it may well be used to describe one as-
pect of modern musical evolution. Music, infi-
nite in her aspirations flatters herself more and
more each day that she may become infinite in
form. Think of all that she has lost in the way
of breadth and form, since the classics of Bach,
or even since the death of Beethoven. How
are her contours weakened and her barriers
effaced Far from affirming and defining, as was
her wont, she now glories in faint indications
and suggestions. Her strong reality, her being,
formerly so present and tangible, resolves itself
more and more into an illusive and ever reced-
ing vision.
Therein lies her progress, say some, while
there are others who fear for her peril; in any
case, that the change exists, is incontestable.
And quite to the contrary of all this, what
formal personality and what an objectivity the
music of Marcello possesses It is almost su-
perfluous to call attention to the fact that the
development of the individual was one of the
principal characteristics of the Renaissance.
Marcello. 95
Perhaps no one has better expressed this idea
than Burkhardt : “In the Middle Ages,” he
says,” “man recognised existence only in the
light of race, people, party, corporation, family,
or, in fine, under some general and collective
form.” He learned through the Renaissance
to know himself, to develop his individual ex-
istence, and under this new form, a new
art must necessarily arise to represent his
emotions.
“In Italy the society of the higher circles
loved song, . . . but not music written for many
voices, because a single voice could be better
heard, enjoyed, and judged. In other words,
because — notwithstanding the conventional
modesty professed by every one, – singing is in
reality nothing but the exhibition of the indi-
vidual in society, and each one may be heard
and seen best when alone.”” Thus, as in all
important aesthetic phenomena, it is possible
to find at the base of Italian melody an im-
portant psychologic phenomenon : the reign of
melody is nothing else than the manifestation
in and through music of Renaissance individu-
alism. The music of our day, instrumental and
symphonic, has been described by Amiel as a
1 Italian Civilisation during the Renaissance.
* Burkhardt. Ibid. -
96 Marcello.
music for the crowd, while that of two centuries
ago was, on the contrary, the voice of the
individual.
Such a musical individuality was noble, proud,
and vigorous; in every particular, that being of
force and beauty which the Renaissance created
throughout all art. To be convinced of this, one
has but to read a certain sonata in F major,
written by Marcello, for piano and violoncello ;
we cannot but feel that it is full of strength,
pride, and nobility, nothing doubting that they
who most contest the power of music to express
feeling, must agree with us. Psychological
terms come instinctively to the lips of one who
attempts to analyse even the first measure of the
sonata's first Largo. It is impossible to praise
this work, which seems possessed of a veri-
table person and Soul, in any other than per-
Sonal words. Will it be averred then that it is
thus that praise loses its value 2 Quite the
contrary is true. M. Paul Bourget has well
answered the adversaries of the existence of
moral or ethical beauty in art, when he asserts
that in literature, as in painting, architecture,
and music, he only sees varying but equal mani-
festations of “the degrees of human sensibility.
Now whether it be transmitted through written
words or orchestrated sounds, by stone carv-
Marcello. 97
ings, tones, or colours, this sensibility is one and
the same. The one question beyond the mere
technical cleverness is that of Soul.””
Let us then follow this “Soul" through the
old master's sonata. Beginning with the first
measure, why is it that this well-marked rhythm
seems so natural to our ears P Because we
have long known and loved it in a modern
work familiar to all musicians, – Schumann's
“Etudes symphoniques.” But in the latter
work we find the passage modified by altera-
tions which are moral, as well as musical ; from
the major it is become minor ; pathetic triplets
quiver through it, in place of the former sus-
tained accompaniment, in such a way that in
these two measures, at once analogous and
contradictory, two points of view and two souls
appear in the music: the one firm and exact, the
other vague and troubled. The former was
the Latin classic soul, that spirit which, to
again quote M. Bourget, in those periods of
time which were both broad and restricted,
gave to the best Italian music, as it did to the
great poetry of Italy, “that charm of definite
conclusiveness which is the true mark of the
Latin genius. It is at the same time grave and
1 M. Paul Bourget, Études et Portraits.
* Etude, No. 2.
7
98 Marcello.
grand, retaining its strict traditions and still
never unlovely or conventional. When we
come in contact with this Latin genius at its
best, the old expression of taste, unperverted
by conventional criticism, regains its true sig-
nificance, and we understand what intellectual
virtue it possesses. It has, indeed, other and
more touching traits, but these are its sovereign
characteristics.” "
The Venice of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was a fitting frame for the melody of
the Renaissance. The beautiful old city was in
the full enjoyment of her riches—and of her
decadence. The magnificence and pomp of the
Venetian civilisation, the national appetite for
ceremonies, assemblies and feasts, and the
innate spirit of the people all favoured the growth
of music ; — everything in nature itself, even to
that ever-present, silent, Venetian water, which
seems to quiet into silence only that the Queen
of the waters may hear her people sing.
Since the last half of the sixteenth century dra-
matic and musical allegories had been presented
at the palace of the Doges. On St. Stephen's
Day, 1571, for example, “Il trionfo di Cristo per
la Vittoria contra i Turchi,” was given before the
Doge Aloíse Mocenigo. “Already,” says
1 M. Paul Bourget, Sensations d’Italie.
Marcello. 99
Molmenti,” “already quegli uomini allegri non
aveyano tempo per annoiarsi (this joyous people
never found time to be bored).” In another
representation, during 1581, the retiring year
was to be seen, with divertissements and fêtes,
taking leave of the Doge, and, as they did him
homage, the voices sang: “Where shall we
find so happy a reception ? Here the gay and
merry days bring with them naught but glad
pleasure. Here — as in Paradise — with Vir-
tue reign peace, fêtes, and smiles.”.” Then
there arose, in the play, a philosophical debate
between a Stoic and an Epicurean, which was
interrupted by the entrance of a Sibyl, who
silenced the argument with a hymn in honour of
voluptuous Venice.
Less than a century later, in 1669, Sanso-
vino wrote: che la musica aveya la propria sede
in questa città. Music and music alone tri-
umphed, in the midst of the decadence of the
other arts. Sixteen theatres opened in Venice
1 La Storia di Venezia nella vita privata.
2 E in qual loco mai
Troviam miglior ricetto
Ch’ in questo P Giorni qui felici e gai,
Rendon doppio diletto;
Qui come in Paradiso
Con virtù regna pace e festa e riso.
(Quoted by M. Molmenti, op. cit.)
IOO Marcello.
between 1637–1699 ; and at the beginning of
the eighteenth century there existed in that city
four of those famous girls' conservatories, or
“Hospitals,” of which such travellers as de
Brosses and Burney wrote with such enthusiasm,
— the Institutions of the Mendicanti, Incurabili,
Pietà, and Ospedaletto. “The music which
transcends all other here in Venice,” writes
President de Brosses in 1739, the year of Mar-
cello's death, “is that of the hospitals. There
are four of these homes for girls who either are
orphans, or whose parents are unable to rear
them ; educated and cared for at the expense of
the State, the children are especially taught to
excel in music. They sing like angels, and play
as well upon violin, flute, organ, oboe, violon-
cello, bassoon, — in short, there is no instrument
large enough to frighten them. They live clois-
tered like little nuns, and are quite unassisted
when they perform in public, making amongst
themselves an orchestra of forty girls. I assure
you, there can be nothing more lovely than to
see one of these pretty young sisters, in her
white robe, with a cluster of pomegranate blos-
soms behind her ear, conducting her orchestra
and beating time with all the grace and pre-
cision imaginable. Their voices are adorable
in poise and flexibility — our French fashion
Marcello. IOI
of drawing out the tones seems quite unknown
among them. One Zabetta at the Incurabili is es-
pecially wonderful for the compass of her voice
and her resonant, string-like notes; for my part
I made no doubt that she had swallowed Somis’
violin I + She it is who receives all the applause
of the populace, and it is as much as one's head
is worth to compare any one else with her; but
listen, my friend, while no one is within hearing,
and I will whisper in your ear, that a certain
Margarita, of the Mendicanti, is well worthy of
praise, and pleases me the best.”
But this music was official as it were, the
property of the State, and it did not suffice; the
people too, the crowd, must have its music.
“On this piazza which looks over the sea,”
writes P. Fontana, “where the people assemble
to gossip and breathe the fresh air, – on this
piazza, which they call the most beautiful in the
world, songs are for ever to be heard. The
Venetian women who sing them have such a
delicate ear, and such is the grace and elegance
of their mother tongue, that one would believe
the humblest and most ignorant among them to be
not only exquisite singers [pulilissime di canto]
but daughters of a noble race.”
Burney writes: “One hears nothing but
* Celebrated violinist of the day.
IO2 Marcello.
songs everywhere ; if two persons only walk
together arm in arm, they seem to sing as they
talk; and it is quite the same if they are on the
water in a gondola.” It was in those days that
the beautiful Anzoleto met Consuelo, “the lit-
tle Spanish girl, singing devout canticles before
the shrine ; and he, for the pure love of using
his voice, sang with her under the stars, the
long evening through.” Such a crowd made its
way into the Mendicanti and the Pietà on Sun-
days and feast-days, that the Seignory was
forced to make special rules concerning the
hours and form of the services. Every evening
during the fine weather there was a concert, so
that by day and by night the whole melodious
city Sang.
And now, looking back for a moment, let us
carry our eyes to the Rome of Palestrina's day.
We are in the sombre Sistine chapel ; above sit
the wrathful prophets, below a group of old
men listen to the sad psalmody of the “Impro-
peria,” seated about a pontiff who, enthroned
beneath the menace of Michael Angelo's Christ,
himself menaces the Roman people. Sad
voices sing of man's sorrow, of sin, – the cause
of all suffering, — and of the Divine death.' The
terrible fresco threatens the world through the
1 Consuelo: George Sand.
Marcello. IO3
gathering gloom, as, one by one, the wax tapers
die out, and in the lowering shadows, where
no sound, no ray from the outer world may
penetrate, those sad voices follow the Sacred
plaint of that century of penitence and rigour.
One hundred and fifty years later, in Venice,
it is a century of joy that sings. Let us enter the
accademia della Cavallerizza, So named because
it once served as a hall for the equestrian exer-
cises, in the athletic games of the Renaissance.
In one of its beautiful salons Marcello once a
week gathers together an audience worthy of
his masterpieces, – artists, gentlemen, and the
loveliest of Venetian women, dazzling in their
beauty and elegance. To-day a “Psalm ’’ of
the master is to be performed : the choir con-
sisting of four Sopranos, six altos, six tenors, and
four basses; the orchestra of eight counter-
basses, some 'cellos, and a cembalo (harpsi-
chord), before which Marcello himself is seated
in gala attire. Instead of the old austere verses,
joyous canticles ring through the hall. Little
by little, towards the sunsetting, a crowd
gathers about the windows from which such
melodies escape, and the gondoliers, pausing to
listen, stand leaning upon their oars. Without
a strong touch of Sanctity — free from liturgy
and less sublime, without doubt, than the Sad
IO4 Marcello.
accents of the Sistine Chapel — still it is a beau-
tiful vesper-song, this of Marcello's, and grandly
religious: “I cieli immensi narrano | " Through
the open windows, the voices borne on the winds
of the Adriatic rise into the blue immensity of
the Venetian sky, carrying the homage of a glo-
rious lyric art to the God to whom the very
blue itself bears witness.
III
The music of Marcello was essentially lyric.
Indeed, most of the music of his time may be
described as such, for that of the theatre was but
newly born, and an opera in those days consisted
simply of a series of airs, or lyric monologues,
connected by some insignificant recitative. “All
the scenes are in recitative,” wrote President de
Brosses, “ending always in Some grand air, at
the close of which he who has rendered it, be-
cause he has sung his song, retires, and another,
because his is yet to be sung, remains. I find
that they [the Italians] do not understand in the
least the connecting of the different scenes.”
Certain it is that the Italians have been among
the last to comprehend the necessity of unity
in their dramas. To bind together the scenes,
thus establishing a connection between parts
Marcello. IO5
heretofore independent of one another; to
make one body of the separate members, en-
veloping it with a tissue of homogeneous flesh,
through which might circulate the life-giving
blood; to close up the gulf which lay between
the recitative and the melodies, or as M. de
Brosses says, – between the weak and the
strong, — was a work reserved for the nineteenth
century, and of the labourers therein, the most
prominent have been the German and the
French.
And yet, in spite of modern development, the
“strong places” in those old operas, those lyr-
ical rhapsodies, were beautiful, often sublime ;
such, for instance, as are to be found in Mar-
cello’s “Arianna,” a work little known, but
well worthy of study. “Ariadne, my sister,
with what love wounded.” — Such is the sub-
ject; but in Marcello's opera, the royal damozel
(regal donzella) is careful not to die, as she lies
forsaken. The Italian libretto, which lacks
neither poetry nor passion, is not wanting in
gaiety. It turns Theseus into something of the
hero of a modern operetta, and Ariadne, mad in
his pursuit, emulates in turn the Elviras, who
were equally in love, but not equally noble, of
“Don Juan,” and “M. Cryptogame.” Theseus,
to rid himself of Ariadne, that he may fly with
IO6 Marcello.
Phèdre, finds no better means of escape than
to make a gift of his pursuer to Bacchus, charg—
ing him to console her. Bacchus accepts, and
being successful in his efforts, this novel ar-
rangement is most satisfactory to all, including
that acolyte and confidant of Bacchus, the
counsellor of optimistic philosophy, fat old
Silenus, whose laugh breaks out all through
the tragi-comedy.
If one discovers a trace of “La Belle Hélène ''
in “Arianna " it is only in the libretto; the
music bears not a semblance of parody, and
suggests Gluck rather than Offenbach. It sug-
gests him and more than once equals him in
its strength and grandeur, and its conclusive
and striking truth of expression. I know a
plaint of Ariadne's — Come mai puoi — Veder
mi piangere 2 — which the cries of Alceste
scarcely surpass. It would be interesting and
not difficult to rewrite this page with two
or three chosen instruments; a flute à la grec-
que, a moaning oboe, and a mysterious horn
should envelope without stifling the lovely
melody I Here we are once more with the
antique Ariadne of the Vatican, - Racine's
heroine, – Ariane aux rochers contant ses' in-
justices.
The musician's phrasing is as beautiful as the
Marcello. Ioy
poet's verses, in the same strong, grave beauty,
without ornament or figures.
Two of the Silenus airs also are fine : the one
in which the jocose god wonders to find his
master so susceptible to love's temptations : —
“E piu tenace
Di vischio o rete
Il crine, il guardo
D'una belta ?? —
“More strength to hold than line or lacing
hath the hair — the very glance of beauty 1"
The song is superb in its irony; through it
there falls again and again an avalanche of
thundering violins, while the basses rumble
beneath in mocking thirds. Imagine some
bassoons in their proper place, and you have
all that a modern master — the Verdi of “Fal-
staff,” for instance — might add to rejuvenate
this old-time product of the Italian genius, a
masterpiece of truth and life.
Again we find the same breadth and heroi-
comic grandeur in another air, in which Silenus
vaunts the exploits of his master to Ariadne : —
“Nel paese ove il solesce fuora,
Migliaia d’uomini
Col forte braccio
Fece in pezzi, abbatté, sconquasso.”
IO8 Marcello.
* In the land of the rising sun, thousands of
men, by his strong hand, have been broken,
beaten, and crushed." Whilst an extraordinary
vocal tremolando gives to the º sconquasso " an
accent of wild buffoonery, the minor tonality
of the first verse evokes the poetry and mystery
of the far-off Orient. In the lines of André
Chénier we find a picture of this god-conqueror
of the Orient.
* Viens, ô divin Bacchus, ô jeune Thyonée,
O Dionyse, Évan, Iacchus et Lénée ;
Viens, tel que tu parus aux déserts de Naxos,
Quand tu vins rassurer la fille de Minos.
Le superbe éléphant, en proie à ta victoire,
Avait de ses débris formé ton char d'ivoire.
De pampres, de raisins mollement enchaîné,
Le tigre aux larges flancs de taches sillonné,
Et le lynx étoilé, la panthère sauvage,
Promenaient avec toi ta cour sur ce rivage.
L'or reluisait partout aux axes de tes chars.
Les Ménades couraient en longs cheveux épars,
Et chantaient Évoé, Bacchus et Thyonée,
Et Dionyse, Évan, Iacchus et Lénée,
Et tout ce que pour toi la Grèce eut de beaux noms."1
It is such a gracious young god, who comes
forth at the voice of the musician, more glorious
even than the divine hero of the poet. In
what magnificent equipage does he appear, and
with what acclamations is he saluted ! Grand
l André Chénier.
Marcello. IO9
sonorous cortège from which Händel might have
drawn the triumphant gladness, the sump-
tuous resonances, even the diatonic accent of
his famous Alleluia. But one thing even the
colossal Anglo-Saxon could not borrow from
the Italian, – the grace that followed upon
the strength ; the second chorus supplement-
ing the first ; the three or ſour pages, no longer
in honour of the warlike god, but of the mystic
deity who married the vine to the young elm.
“Viva dell’olmo e della vite
L'almo fecondo sostentator l’”
It is Italy alone who may sing of the wed-
lock of the tree with the sacred vine, giving to
the festoons of her melody that exquisite curve
of the delicate tendrils, which in the late summer
days run riot over the trees, down there in the
sweet Venetian country.
And lastly, if, as I hope, you care to study
this work to the end, read the last chorus, in
which Ariadne receives from Venus that crown
of stars which still gleams through the night
sky in her name. This chorus is antique and
verily god-like in the purity of its line, the
simplicity of its modulations, and the gravity
of harmony and ornament. Amiel speaks some-
where of a certain transient point, at which the
I IO Marcello.
poet-thinker must seize his idea and sentiment
to fix it eternally, for, says he, “it is the Supreme
point, it is the moment of his Ideal.”
As inevitably does this point come in the
history of an art, or of a form of art, as in the
life of an artist, and in the history of Italian
melody it arrived with the birth of Marcello.
IV.
The opera of “Ariadne" is an exception in
Marcello's life-work ; he had but little esteem
for dramatic music, suffering with bad grace its
conditions, necessities, and compromises. And
as for the people and the environments of the
theatres, no one has cast more ridicule upon the
petty vanities and absurdities of both ; he was
not deceived as to the inferiority of plays and
players.
What harm is poetry not capable of doing to
music P “Empty poems,” writes Marcello,"
“are those to which the music of our day is
obliged to subject itself | Such poetry, far from
making music our worthy and majestic guide to-
ward philosophical speculations, degrades it and
renders it unworthy of our esteem. (And yet,
1 In the preface to his “Psalms.”
Marcello. III
alas ! — there are those who rejoice in it !)
Such music is capable only of exciting the weak
and voluptuous passions of men. (If only it
were confined to the theatres, and never ad-
mitted into the House of God () It no longer
serves to bring us honest and calm delight, in
the building of our characters, the awakening of
our courage, or the inspiring of our respect to—
ward the Almighty and toward lovely things.”
Above all other poetry, the old master de-
plores that of the opera ; a satirical prologue *
has recently been published, which was written
by him at the expense of a certain “Pastor fido,”
given in 1721, in the San Angelo theatre, at
Venice. It was arranged by Pasqualigo after
Guarini's “Pastor fido,” and set to music by
Carlo Pietragrua. Then, as to-day, the works
of poets were arranged to suit the music, and
the following shows Marcello's ideas upon the
subject. It is the shade of Guarini who speaks:
“So I shall hear a silly, vain people sing, in
corrupt scenes, the labour of so many weary
nights and days I O ill-spent days and nights
O ye paths of the Greeks and Latins, so
1 “Un prologo e un sometto satirici di Benedetto Mar-
cello,” edited at Venice (Fontana, 1894) by M. Taddeo
Wiel, librarian of St. Mark’s, on the occasion of the mar-
riage of Count Andrea Marcello with the Countess Maria
Grimani-Giustiniani.
II 2 Marcello.
vainly followed 1 O Tuscan flowers gathered
unworthily from sacred Parnassus, for they are
making of you useless, shameful garlands where-
with they deck profane brows And thou,
whoever thou mayst be, who dost rejoice in
my punishment, poet — I must, indeed, acclaim
thee a poet, impious and inhuman 1 Alas I must I
be destroyed 2 Is it indeed necessary that my
sacred songs be defamed by sorcery and witch-
craft, for the pleasure of vulgar fools P’’’
What do our modern libretto-makers think of
such a protestation ? Are they secure in the
conviction that the shades of Dante, Shakes-
* Ma sentiro da sciocca e vana gente
Cantarsi ad uso di corrotte scene
Quella di tanti giorni
Ed altrettante notti ardua fatica.
Oh I giorni 1 oh! notti adunque
Mal spesi ! Oh! invan seguite
Greche scorte e Latine ! Oh toschi fiori
Indegnamente colti
Nel sacro, Parnaso,
Se formarne dovean si
Inutili ghirlande e vergognose
A tempie si profane !
Etu, Chiunque sia
Che del mio strazio esulti,
Poeta (il diro pur) empio, inumano,
Deh I perche lacerarmi,
Deh ! perche ad allettar l'insano volgo
Formi incanti e malie con sacri carmil
Marcello. II 3
peare, Goethe, or Schiller, if they should linger
in opera-house or theatre to-day, would not cry
out in the words of the old Italian poet 2
Again it is to the poets of the opera that
Marcello, in his pamphlet, “Il Teatro alla
Moda,” gives the first place and aims his first
arrows. From his first chapter, devoted to them,
and in the one following, addressed to com-
posers, one may extract perhaps not a phi-
losophy — a word too ambitious and pedantic
here — but abundant, fine, and profound ideas
upon music and poetry.
There is not a question of importance among
those discussed to-day which Marcello does
not review : what subjects do or do not lend
themselves to music ; the abuse in musical
dramas of incidents and sudden changes, and a
too complicated action ; the inconveniences of
an exaggerated scenery ; the necessity of a
librettist being a true poet, but a poet who is
musical or capable of musical feeling. Upon
many such subjects, Marcello casts a look and
says a word: a word always ironical, and a
look of mockery. Here, for instance, are some
of the counsels which he bestows upon the
poets : —
“In the first place, the modern poet should
never have read and must never read the old
8
II.4. Marcello.
Greek and Latin authors, for the simple reason
that the ancient Greeks and Latins have never
read the moderns.
“Neither should he be well acquainted with
the metre of Italian verse, but may possess
simply a superficial notion that it consists of
seven or eleven syllables, and with this rule, he
can cómpose, as he likes, lines of three, five,
nine, thirteen, and even fifteen syllables.
“The modern poet will pay no heed to the
style of his drama, reflecting that it is to be
heard by the vile multitude. . . . He may trans-
port his dramas from the French to the Italian,
and change prose into verse, turning the tragic
into the comic, adding or subtracting from the
rôle, according to the will of the director. . . .
“He may lend to his piece, as accessories,
prisons, poignards, poisons, letters, bear-hunts,
bull-fights, earthquakes, arrows, Sacrifices, etc.,
in order that the public may be well stirred up
by such novel spectacles. . . . .”
Passing from the poet to the composer, Mar-
cello treats them no less severely : —
“The modern maestro should cut short the
sense of the words, especially in the great airs,
letting the artist separate any one verse from its
fellows, – though in itself alone it may have
no meaning, — and immediately after it intro-
Marcello. II 5
ducing a long flourish for violins or violas. . . .
He shall accelerate or retard the movement
of an air, according to the caprice of the singers,
and shall hide the dissatisfaction which their
insolence causes him by telling them that his
reputation, his credit, and his interests are in
their hands, and that therefore he must alter,
without demur, airs, recitatives, Sharps, flats, or
naturals. . .
“When the singers shall have arrived at a ca-
denza, the director shall silence all instruments
and leave the virtuoso free to prolong his
cadenza at his will. The master shall pay
but little attention to the duetti and choruses,
and shall endeavour to write his piece so that
they may be suppressed at the will of the
performers.
“If such words as Padre, Impero, Amore,
Arena, Regno, Beltà, Lena, Core, etc., or adverbs
such as no, Senza, gid, etc., should chance to
come in a song, the modern composer shall
write for them long roulades; so that they may
be pronounced thus: Paaaadre, Impeeeero,
Amoooore, Areeeena, Reeeegno, Beltääää .
Leeeena, Coooore, noooo, seeeenza, giddāā.””
Marcello pursues to the bitter end the theatre
1 This is what President de Brosses called “plays on
vowels.”
II6 Marcello.
of his day. He denounces the aesthetic anarchy
against fundamental laws; the constant sac-
rifice of principal to accessory, of the end to
the means, of truth to convention, — in one
word all the abuses and vices through which the
Italian opera of the old days was doomed to
perish.
But it is not to poets and composers alone that
Marcello addresses his satires. His book, as
its title announces, is for the benefit of “singers
of both sexes, directors, instrumentalists, me-
chanics, painters, buffoons, costumers, pages,
Supernumeraries, prompters, copyists, guardians
and mothers of the actresses and other persons
attached to the theatre,” — a nomenclature
which is a satire in itself; and yet — alas ! — all
these are necessary to the representation of a
lyric drama. To this work of art, all these peo-
ple, – unless perhaps the two last — all this me-
diocre crowd is indispensable. In such a con-
course of the arts, some have imagined that they
saw the highest dignity of the theatre, not to
speak of the trades; but Marcello, and perhaps
with more reason, saw therein only inferiority
and degradation. He doubted the genius of the
crowd of intermediaries and interpreters; know-
ing that musical thought is but a reed which the
world only too often rises to crush. It was
Marcello. II 7
for this reason that no object or creature in
that world of the theatre found grace in his
sight; the two chapters, or epistles rather, to
singers of both sexes, are masterpieces of inso-
lent irony: —
“The modern virtuose,” he says, “should
never study his sol-fa, in order that he may
escape the danger of placing his voice well and
of singing truly, and in tempo, etc., all of which
are contrary to modern usage.
“It is not necessary that he should know
how to read or write, that he should pronounce
his vowels well, utter his consonants, simple or
double, distinctly, or understand the meaning of
the text. He should on the contrary confound
words, letters, and syllables to be successful in
creating tricks which are in good taste, such
as trills, appoggiature, cadenzas, etc.
“He must pronounce in such a way that, in
the ensemble parts, it will be impossible to dis-
tinguish a syllable. . . .
“He shall pay no attention to other actors,
who, following the words of the drama, address
him.”
So much for what may be termed artistic
satire ; but the pitiless author of “Il Teatro alla
Moda" adds yet a moral sarcasm. According to
him the psychology of lyric comedy had reduced
II8 Marcello.
itself to vanity, pretension, petty rivalry, and low
jealousies. “The singer shall continually com-
plain of his rôle, asserting that it is not written
to suit his talents, or he should cite an air by
some other composer, telling at what court and
before what great lord he has sung it and with
what applause (to the winds with modesty) his
hearers called him back as many as seventeen
times in one evening. . . .
“For fear of taking cold he should always
keep his hat on his head even when in the pres-
ence of Some person of quality; and when Salut-
ing the latter, he should not uncover, reflecting
that he himself acts the parts of princes, kings,
and emperors.”
As to the cantatrice, still less does Marcello
spare her and her retinue of Madame sa mère, il
Signor Procolo, - her guardian, her cat, two
dogs, and the rest of the menagerie to which
Signor Procolo gives food and drink.
Gain an audience with the Prima Donna,
“She will tell you that as soon as the carnival
season is over, she intends to be married ; that,
indeed, she has long since promised her hand to
a man of quality. If, in her ingenuousness, the
cantatrice refuses to accept a watch, Madame sa
mère hastens to scold her, saying: ‘It is easy to
be seen that you do not understand common
Marcello. II9
politeness How can you act with such rude-
ness to a gentleman of so much courtesy l’ She,
herself, will accept the gift from the stranger, in
the name of the young lady, exclaiming : ‘Par-
don her, most illustrious sir, for it is the first
time that the little fool has ever left her own
country.’”
Read, read it all ! The character study is
worth as much as that upon art, — more perhaps,
— and will certainly survive the latter. Things
have changed since Marcello's time, but only
things; the theatre has reformed but not the
comedians; and these will not reform sooner
than the rest of mankind. Some features of this
double satire of “Il Teatro alla Moda,” may not
be applicable to-day to our theatres, but others
still touch and will for ever touch upon all that
is lasting in the whims and absurdities of certain
characters and conditions of life.
V.
Disdaining the theatre and disgusted with the
world, the pious old aristocrat had now no other
resource but to take refuge in sacred lyrics;
and for the inspiration and subject of his mas-
terpiece, — of his fifty masterpieces, I may well
say, -he turned to the Psalms. We have seen
I2O Marcello.
how the subject was first presented to him. He
took it up with an enthusiasm, and something,
too, of religious awe; but above all, with the
noble ambition of bringing his art back to that
ideal that it seemed about to betray. “I have
chosen a holy labour and a divine subject,” he
says in the preface to the “Psalms,” “which is
none other than the poetical translation of the
Holy Psalms, that I may furnish to music a
worthy subject in which she may make herself
heard in the real efficacy of her serious beauty;
and that she may be used in the worship of
Divinity ; not as an equal of ancient music, for
forms and times are changed, but, at least, ac-
cording to the rules of consecrated custom.” "
We have fifty of Marcello's “ Psalms,” not
translated literally, but paraphrased after the
text of the Prophet-King. They, with Bach's
cantatas, are perhaps the strongest and grandest
examples of classical music in lyric art. What
the Lyric is in art we should be at no pains to
know since M. Brunetière's Sorbonne lectures:
1 “Per renderle adunque un degno argomento, di farsi
udire nella sempre utile sua gravità naturale, e se non
efficace al pari dell’ antica per la differenza delle leggie
dei tempi, almeno conforme nell’ uso consacrato al' culto
della Divinità, si è cercato un lavoro di sacra e divina
materia, quale si è la presente poetica traduzione dei
“Salmi.’”
*
e
è
Marcello. I2 I
“Of all branches of art the most intimate and
personal; not only in its essential being and
expression, but also in the Strong external,
almost material, form which it wears.””
Quite as much in music does the lyric art
strongly assert the personality of the artist.
Schumann has proved this in our century, but
more than a century ago Marcello bore witness
to the same truth ; and if, as M. Brunetière *
further shows: “In all places and in all epochs
of history, lyric art has needed for its develop-
ment the growth of individualism,” then it may
be that the composer of the “Psalms ” was a
great lyrist, if only because he was a master of
melody, - the individualism of music.
In the “Psalms ” melody reigns triumphant;
it is the one interpreter of the soul, and through
it alone is treated the grand, unique theme of
the work, - the Idea of God. Is M. Brune-
tière, then, justified in his complaint” that this
theme is not sufficiently resourceful for lyric
art Doubtless there are but two ways in
which man may conceive of or represent God :
either the idea of the Almighty must be personi-
fied, or His name must be accepted as the syno-
* Evolution de la poésie lyrique en France au xix"
siècle : M. Brunetière. Paris: Hachette.
* /a, op. cit. 8 Op. cit.
I22 Marcello.
nym of the Awful and the Unknowable ; 1 and
of these two conceptions, while the latter might
be more that of the philosopher, only the former
can be adopted by the artist. But infinite
variety lies in this first conception. Art has
been able to create countless representations of
a personal God, – at once Creator and Saviour,
a God of the humble and the strong, of the Law
and of the Gospel; a God Who punishes and
Who pardons; Christian dogma is wide enough
to recognise, comprehend, and authorise all.
And here we see how Marcello's God was not
the God of Palestrina, or, rather, how differently
the two masters understood the Deity. In that
House of many Mansions great Saints and great
artists shall not serve the Father with virtues
and with masterpieces which are identical in
their nature. A cell was Palestrina's home,
while a Venetian palace was necessary to Mar-
cello ; the music of the one was full of contem-
plation and ecstasy, that of the other all action,
sacred transport. The motets and responses of
Palestrina meditate here below upon that God
Whom men adore ; while the “Psalms" of Mar-
cello pour themselves out towards the same
God from heights glorified with admiration and
devotion.
1 Op. cit.
Marcello. “ I23
There is little of intimate inward thought in
these “Psalms,” Marcello being no master of
the inner life. He has been named the Michael
Angelo of music because there is so little of the
tender and gracious in his work, and yet, after
all, there is much sweetness. When the Psalm-
ist, turning his eyes from the Lord and from
himself, lets them fall, for a moment, upon the
earth ; when he seeks in the flower and the
water-course a poetic emblem of his soul, or
the fragile image of his own weakness, then the
music becomes modest and humble ; it breathes
forth the freshness and the peace of nature, and
falls into accents of kindly emotion. Such a
psalm, naïve as a canticle, expresses alluringly
the perfect abandon of the soul in the hands of
God, - an abandon which Fénelon believed to
be that of a little child.
But to me, Marcello's power is more to be
admired than his Sweetness, – now in the assur-
ance of his faith and the impetuosity of his
prayer, now in the tragic emotion of his repent-
ance. Treated thus, in pathetic cantatas and
grand, bold recitative, religious music must
come forth from the church out into the world ;
though still Sacred, it ceases to be liturgical,
and requiring applause it creates enthusiasm.
The glowing and triumphant “Psalms ” are the
I24 * Marcello.
most characteristic works of Marcello's genius.
Veritable odes of music, how clear and high
they rise in their beauty, and, above all, with
what sudden bursts of emotion do they spring
forth The great masters of melody alone have
possessed the secret of these tremendous at-
tacks, – the débuts, which are real explosions
of sound ; a Palestrina never knew them.
“I cieli immensi narrano
Del grande Iddio la gloria.”
Every one knows the striking beauty of this
most famous of Marcello’s “Psalms.” Whose
heart has not been stirred by the uplifting attack
of the first movements, – that àports, as the
Greeks would say, with which almost every
page of the heroic music opens P First a single
voice pierces the air, tracing the flash of melody
through the tonic and dominant, and immediately
the chorus responds with the same melody,
more beautiful in its repetition and develop-
ment ; a second time it reaches the dominant
and seems to break there, the brilliant flashes
detaching themselves only to sink together
anew into their former orbit.
This music was the rough draught, as it were,
of what was to be, in days to come, the sym-
phony. In many different positions, now major,
Marcello. I25
now minor, the motive reappears again and
again. Il firmamento lucido — It was well-
named the Psalm of the Firmament. One of
the voices seems to place the notes like the
golden nails of the constellations; another,
motionless in the centre, is the pivot upon
which the whole harmony turns, as turns the
vault of heaven upon its divinely given axis.
This is the visible heaven, – a heaven not of
Souls but of stars, chanting their sublime can-
ticle. Verily never before was it sung with
such grandeur ! The Marcello of the “Psalms,”
and especially of this “Psalm " which we have
been studying, appears to us for the last time
as he was from the beginning to the end of his
work. We must see in this radiant external
beauty — this splendid apotheosis — not only a
great Italian, but a great Venetian. Is there
then a Venetian school of music as there is of
painting 2 Is there as evident and close a tie
between Marcello and Venice, as between
Venice and Titian, for example 2 Is it possible
to disengage or deduce an ideal of sound as of
colour from the climate, atmosphere, aspect, and
character of a city P Can it be demonstrated
that this music of Venice is as thoroughly a
daughter of those skies and waters as is her
painting Assuredly no ; the affiliation, less
I26 Marcello.
direct, is likewise less apparent; and yet it
exists, and music, though a less faithful mirror
than painting, is nevertheless a mirror.
In one of Veronese's pictures, it is as though one
contemplates the face of Venice; in a “Psalm "
of Marcello's, one hears her soul speak. The one
shows her living in the fair light of her soft skies,
the other sings the joy that she has in so living.
Let us recall certain lines of Taine's on the
Venetian landscapes, – the light and rainbow
tints of her lagoons, the new world which she
opens to the eyes: “A reflecting, softening,
never-ending brilliance of blending tints. . . .
One can pass hours watching these gradations
and shades, this undulating, voluptuous, external
life.” ". It is not, however, this picturesque
Venice, appealing with such fascination to the
senses, which one finds in Marcello's firm, free
music; but another Venice, whose genius Taine
comprehended no less completely; he felt “her
joyous strength, full and abandoned, but always
noble, which ever strikes forth boldly in the sea
of prosperity and happiness.”” It is by right of
this same nobility and abandon, and this air
of full happiness and prosperity, in an equal
strength and by reason of just such a joy, that
the master of the “Psalms ” is a true Venetian,
1 Voyage en Italie: Taine. 2 /ö/ø.
Marcello. ' 127
— in the same robust passionate spirit which
makes the painter of the “Assumption ” so es-
sentially a child of the Queen of the Adriatic.
“I cieli immensi narrano " is Titian’s “As-
sumption " in music ; Taine has unconsciously
described the “Psalms,” in his praise of the
painting: “An intense reddish-purple tint per-
wades the entire picture ; a vigorous colour which
seems to emit a healthy energy throughout the
whole. Below are the apostles, above them,
in the air, rises the Virgin in an ardent glory ;
she is of the race of the apostles, healthy and
strong, without exaltation or mystic Smile,
proudly arrayed in her red robe, over which is
draped a blue mantle. The stuff falls in a
thousand folds about the curves of the beautiful
figure, her attitude is athletic, her expression
grave. There is no suggestion of softness or
languor, but a something that is virile in her
grace. . . . A lovely pagan ideal, of Serious
strength and brilliant youth ; in this painting
Venice reaches the centre and perhaps the sum-
mit of her art.”
All is as true of the canticle as of the paint-
ing if we except the one word “pagan,” which
certainly cannot apply to the musical work,
nor—if we may venture the criticism — to
Titian's masterpiece. *
I28 Marcello.
Yes — from the music there emanates the same
healthful energy; in the centre of the “Psalm,”
above the accompanying harmony, proudly rises
the melody, robust, and, if not without exalta-
tion, at least with no mystic smile. Gravity
of expression, virile grace, serious strength,
brilliant youth ; no charm of the graceful
creature of colour and tone is wanting in the
lovely creation of Sound, as she rises with a
movement more impetuous than that of tone
and in a more ardent glory than that of colour.
And as to the red robe enveloped in blue,
— the two tones so boldly united, – would it
be impossible to find their counterpart in the
modulation from the tonic to the dominant, the
strong opposition and the affinity, which is at
once elementary and vigorous The two mas-
terpieces of one country, they resemble one
another not only in inspiration but in execu-
tion, — I had almost said in technique. They
betray the touch of a common hand, il vero
colpo veneziano. It has been said that Raphael's
virgins, could they sing, would attune their
thoughts to the melodies of Mozart I — If the
apostles of Titian should burst into song, they
would chant the “Psalms ” of Marcello.
PER GOLESE.
To M. PAGLIARA, LIBRARIAN OF THE NAPLES
CONSERVATORY.
PER GOLESE.
THE story of Pergolese's life and blighted
genius is brief and sad, and few are the
words necessary to tell of his life-work. Giovane
e moribondo, is the inscription over his grave in
Pozzuoli ; “ young and dying ” — it is thus that
we see, pity, and love him. His two master-
pieces, equally great and yet so unlike, “La
Serva Padrona,” and the “Stabat Mater,” are
each pervaded with a subtle charm, the one of his
youth, the other of his death. He was not,
like Marcello, great, rich, and happy, and never
under the Neapolitan skies did twenty such
years die out in greater misery and sadness.
After Marcello in his strength, Pergolese
personifies a furtive, evanescent grace. Here
—after the grandiose Master — we meet the
charming Lover of Italian melody; the dainty
flower which sprang up at the foot of the tree,
and in its shadow, - withering, alas ! before the
night. So though we know little of him as a
man, let us not seek for more ; and, above all,
let us mingle nothing dry nor abstract with
I 32 Pergolese.
his memory, redolent of poetry. Let us elimi-
nate everything that would seem to weigh
heavily on this simple, almost frail genius,
saying with Perdican before another flower: “I
care nothing for all that ; I only know how
Sweet is its perfume, and it is enough.”
I.
It is as a youth of sixteen that we see Per-
golese entering Naples for the first time. He
comes from Jesi, the little pontifical village
of his birth, where his grandfather lived by the
trade of shoemaking and his father as a surveyor
(agrimensore). The slender, frail boy wears the
red soutane and blue cloak of the Poveri di Gesù.
Christo, for upon the recommendation of the
“lord ” of his country home, he has been
admitted into the conservatory of the Poveri.
There Naples gathered her children, even the
most abandoned and unhappy among them, ed-
ucating them gratuitously, and training them
to different trades according to the diversity
of their tastes. With instruction in religion
and morality the children received likewise
a good musical education; thus everywhere
— at Naples as at Venice — liberal, melody-
lowing Italy gave to her sons, with a little of her
Pergolese. I33
gold, a little too of her genius, and each asylum
for the unfortunate became a school for the
development of the beautiful.
Such a pupil as Pergolese soon astonished his
teachers, especially his master on the violin ;
like the singer in the fable he performed trills and
roulades which were the marvel of all who heard
them. From Greco, Durante, Feo, one after
the other, he learned harmony and counter-
point ; but melody was taught him by no one.
Often he and his fellow-pupils would wander out
into the lovely Campagna, and wend their way
— sorry little monks that they were — like a
scarlet and blue ribbon along the slopes of the
Neapolitan hills. As they returned towards
evening, along Posilipo, they would listen to
the fishermen's songs as they turned the prom-
ontory nearing home, or to the country people
singing along the road. Songs of the land and
songs of the sea, – the child heard them all :
madly joyous or Sad as death, as they are still
to-day, but ever sincere and true to life, per-
chance it was from them that there passed into
Pergolese's work — into his “Serva Padrona”
or the “Tre giorni son che Nina " — that inde-
scribable touch of the world and of people, that
accent of life and truth.
But much as he loved the songs of the people,
I 34 Pergolese.
the music of the Church was no less dear to him.
When the Carnival days arrived, the little Poyero
di Gesù Christo found a grave pleasure in turning
the hours to a holy use. Leaving the city to
its folly, he would go into the Oratorian
chapel near his conservatory and play upon the
organ the music which San Filippo had ordained
to be alternated with the homilies of the service.
Thus it was that the boy used those hours of
pleasure, those “forty hours,” which the world
profaned, for a season of piety and prayer.
His first work was an oratorio, “San Gu-
glielmo d'Aquitania,” given at the convent of
Sant' Agnello Maggiore in 1731, and exciting
much admiration. He was then twenty-one,
and had but five more years to live, – years
teeming with genius and misfortune. Two or
three unfortunate operas turned him for a time
from dramatic music, and, resolved to abandon
it altogether, he wrote thirty trios for two vio-
lins and a bass viol, besides several masses,
Vespers, and cantatas. But soon the charm of
the drama drew him back ; and “La Serva
Padrona,” brought out, with great acclamations,
on the little stage of San Bartolomeo, was the
young maestro's glory. And yet, two years later,
at Rome, his “Olympiade " was most unjustly
hissed ; while Duni’s ‘‘Neroni’’ was still more
Pergolese. I 35
unjustly applauded. It is said that while the
poor young composer was seated at a harpsi-
chord conducting this unfortunate performance
of his “Olympiade,” some one from the ex-
cited, jeering crowd threw an orange directly in
his face. Filled with grief and shame, the disap-
pointed man fled to Loreto, where he had been
appointed chapel-master, carrying there far more
than an insulted forehead, – a heart wounded to
death. This twenty-fifth year, the last of his life,
had been fatal to his love as well as to his
popularity. One day, so the best informed of
Pergolese's biographers tells the story, Maria
Spinelli, a young girl of noble family, was sur-
prised in her room by the entrance of her three
brothers. Drawing their swords, they swore
that if, in three days' time, she had not chosen
for her husband a man of equal birth with her-
self, by that steel which they clasped, Pergo-
lese, the musician, should perish ; for it was
known that he loved her, and that she accepted
his love.
At the end of three days the brothers returned
to find that their sister had obeyed them ; she
had indeed affianced herself — but to God —
and had hidden her love and her sorrow beneath
the veil of the “Povere Donne.”
One year later, on March I I, 1735, the bell
136 Pergolese.
of the convent of Santa Clara tolled the knell of
the dying ; and in the chapel Pergolese himself,
with the shadow of death already on his brow,
directed the funeral service of his beloved
dead.*
From Loreto, where he had begun his “Stabat
Mater,” the young maestro returned to Naples to
finish the work and to die ; for consumption had
fixed its fatal grasp upon his vitality. He was
advised to try a milder air, and the Franciscans
of Pozzuoli received into their monastery him
who was destined to be, till the end, a “Povero
di Gesù Christo.” But their kindness could not
heal him; racked with coughing and trembling
with fever, he weakened and faded away, still
writing upon the “Stabat,” which some pious
men had ordered and had, indeed, paid for in ad-
vance (ten ducats 1). One day when Feo, Pergo-
lese's former master, begged him to suspend his
work, the dying man murmured : “Alas! I have
no time to lose, if I would keep my promise. A
sad, miserable work is this I God knows how
posterity will judge of it; they have paid me ten
1 Concerning this incident, and others touching upon
the life and work of Pergolese, see, “La Scuola musi-
cale di Napoli e i Suoi Conservatorii, con uno sguardo
sulla storia della musica in Italia,” by Francesco Florimo.
Naples, 1882.
Pergolese. 137
ducats for it, and I verily believe that it is not
worth ten baiocchi l’” He at least had the conso-
lation of living to finish his “Stabat.” We are
told that it was with hands already chilled with
the last agony, that he wrote for the violin,
which he loved so well, the beautiful ritornello,
“Quando Corpus Morietur,” and then died.
He was buried quietly in the cathedral of Poz-
zuoli, where, on his tomb, one would love to see
inscribed Voltaire's parting words to that other
artist, Vauvenargues, dying in the very flower
of his youth and charm. “Farewell, beautiful
soul and beautiful genius.”
II.
Pergolese's work divides itself naturally under
his two masterpieces, “La Serva Padrona” and
the “Stabat Mater.” Each are products of the
same genius; but the second comes from a
changed soul, - one which has been awakened,
stirred, and softened by suffering. Let us en-
deavour to watch that development; let us go as
did Pergolese, or rather let us rise with him,
from irony to 'piety, from laughter to prayer,
from this earth to heaven.
“La Serva Padrona" possesses a twofold ex-
ternal beauty, - in the clear movement of its
•º.
138 Pergolese.
spirit, the vivacity and transport of an insolent,
triumphant youth, and secondly, - and more
deeply, -in its moral insight into character. It
is a marvel at once of dramatic music and of
musical psychology. The French opéra-comique
and the Italian opera-bouffa were born from this
little intermezzo," as though from a germ or
drop of life; and both of the more modern ideas
having lost, perhaps, in depth what they may
have gained in extent, are but dilutions, as it
were, of the work which was so essentially
Pergolese's. The “Barbiere di Seviglia"
seems superficial after the “Serva Padrona,”
the “Dame Blanche,” sentimental, and the
“ Domino Noir" Savours too much of the vaude-
ville. Nowhere can one find a strength so con-
centrated and intact as in this little operetta;
a strength somewhat primitive and rude, – at
times even harsh, – which the melody of France
and of Italy was not long in softening away.
In his sinewy acumen, the Pergolese of “La
Serva Padrona” resembles Marcello, for if he
had not the great Venetian's breadth and mag-
nificence, yet he possessed the same firmness,
the same melody of right angles and keen edges;
* The Italians called any lighter work, given between
the acts of a more serious opera, an “Intermezzo,” “per
Solleware l’uditorio dalla soverchia attenzione.”
Pergolese. I 39
and this melodic breadth of physique lends a
rigorous vitality to the entire work. It is
charming, exquisite, but it leaves a bitter after-
taste ; and if not the creation of a moralist, it
at least comes from an ironical psychologist,
who knows no indulgence. Before raising her
to the divine heights of the “Stabat,” how did
Pergolese debase woman I It would be impos-
sible to ridicule with more severity, not to say
scorn, the pitiable adventures of ancillary love.
“La Serva Padrona " represents in music one of
the most vulgar forms of the eternal struggle,
the meeting together of man and woman ; ter-
rible — or ridiculous, it may be, when from a
duo it becomes, a duel. The duel here is be-
tween amorous old age and impudent youth.
Uberto may take his place in the group of
classic graybeards, beside Arnolfo and Bartolo;
no, not beside them, - beneath, rather, for his
soul is more mediocre than theirs. As for Ser-
pina, beside her Rosine is an ingénue ; she is
not the sly ward, nor the roguish soubrelle, but
in the full sense of the word she is a servant.
Still more, she is the woman, the enemy;
not the tragic enemy, that “she-ape of the
Land of Nod,” as Alexandre Dumas, fils, has
called her, but the charming and melodious
enemy, the immortal siren, who does not, of
I4O Pergolese.
necessity, dwell in the blue waves, but at times
is to be found within-doors, – nay, even in the
kitchen, in “simple petticoat and flat shoes.”
There is a suggestion of harshness at every
page of the “Serva Padrona; ” constantly one is
wounded by some passing prick. It is impos-
sible for the ear not to catch the asperity of
Uberto's first air, for instance ; and as for Ser-
pina's rôle, it is a marvel of imperious irony,
made up of incisive rhythms, stinging notes,
and short irritated and irritating phrases. It is
nothing less than a Swarm of wasps, winged and
armed, this swarm of melodies ; and melodies
alone, for the melodic genius was never more
sufficient unto itself than here, where all expres-
sion, all truth, all beauty, lies in the song.
Scarcely one accompaniment, and consequently
but little harmony, is to be found in the work;
the first violin is constantly in unison with the
voice, and the basses serve but to mark the
measure. Pergolese's melody has followed the
example of Serpina : it has clothed itself in
short skirts for the sake of more agility.
The great page of “La Serva Padrona,”
the masterpiece of the masterpiece, beyond all
doubt, is the famous duo which was the admira-
tion of Rousseau. It is just here that musical
comedy attains its centre and Summit, — at the
Pergolese. I4 I
decisive pass in the duel between the two most
prominent characters. Serpina first makes the
attack, and she strikes straight from the shoul-
der. “You will marry me; I see it in your
little knavish, thievish, malicious eyes; your
lips, indeed, said ‘no,” but your eyes tell me
‘yes.’” + Bold even to impudence, the phrase
is musical as well as expressive ; it sings and
talks at the same time, detaching the words
for better effect : ‘‘ furbi’ — ‘‘ ladri” — ‘‘ mali-
gnetti; ” and while it glides over the “no, no,
no,” marking the “si, si, si,” on the contrary,
with brilliant tones. Uberto's retort, “Signor-
ina, Wingannate l"—“You deceive yourself, my
young lady,”—imitates the first attack, the domi-
nant responding to the tonic, in the classic modu-
lation by which the symmetry of the duo is
established. Then a second phrase deduces
itself from the first, no longer imperious, but co-
quettish and ready to parry any thrust, its synco-
pated notes emphasised with an ingenious bril-
liancy, and then pining away in a rallenlando.
Uberto no longer offers any retort to Ser-
pina's enticements and the young insolence of
* Loconosco a quegli occhietti
Furbi, ladri, malignetti,
Che, Sebben voi dite no,
Pur accennano di si.
I42 Pergolese.
her victory, other than by scolding along in a
sort of senile grumbling, which is both ashamed
and pleased. Thus the duo runs on, always
melodious and rhythmical, almost symphonic at
times, to the end ; in spite of very free bits and
exquisite incidents, the alternating clash of the
“no " and the “si "giving a dry precision and
Something of the logical rigour of a discussion.
Half a century later another duet was to be
sung, whose “si" and “no "would answer one
another in much the same way, - a duet between
another master and a soubrelle, in th; place
of Serpina. Yet quite another thing is the
“Figaro" duo between the count and Suzanne.
Once more the woman commands and triumphs
in mockery and laughter, and again is the man
her dupe, but with what a difference In place
of the vivacity of “La Serva Padrona,” notice
the languor of “Perche, crudel, fin'ora Farmi
languir cosiſ" “Languir” is, indeed, the word
that indicates the sentimental diapason of the
entire passage. Apropos of “Figaro,” M. Cher-
buliez once spoke of the “enchantments of a
music which melts the heart,” — words eminently
appropriate here, for assuredly something had
“melted " in music between Pergolese and
Mozart. Do not imagine that this is trans-
porting into music ideas which should pertain
Pergolese. I43
only to things literary. The chief points of
difference between the Italian interlude and
Beaumarchais' comedy are, in fact, essentially
literary, lying between the two subjects and the
two situations. However “sharp,” as Figaro
said, Suzanne may be, she is less highly coloured
than Serpina, and has something about her less
hard and aggressive : she, too, would wed, but
not her master; and, more than that, this master,
the handsome Almaviva, is not a ‘‘ bonhomme
Cassandre ; ” and this evening, Suzanne, under
the big chestnut-trees, is not so much to be
pitied as is Serpina in her graybeard's alcove.
The words, of course, tell us all this, and yet,
in their way, the notes speak the same story. If
we listen to them alone, forgetting, if possible,
the stage and the actors, – even the words, -
we shall hear the same idea, less precise, it may
be, but more profound. We shall hear that it is
not only with two duos and two comedies that
we are occupied, but with two different condi-
tions of the senses; recognising that over mu-
sic there has passed a mild breath and a divine
sweetness, which has insinuated itself into the
mysterious soul of Sound to renew and soften it.
I44 Pergolese.
III.
But we may find the foretaste of this new
sweetness even in Pergolese himself. Among
his works there are three canzones, in which
one seems to feel the melody of “La Serva
Padrona” unbending in a new suppleness. The
first words are: “This afflicted, grieved soul
could endure the most cruel pain, if she might
caress even the hope of consolation. But alas !
all hope fails; there is no way nor place in
which to hope longer.”” And the second can-
zone reads: “If thou lovest me, gentle shepherd,
and if thou sighest for me alone, I pity thy mar-
tyrdom and love thy love ; but if thou dost think
that I should love thee alone in return, – oh,
then, dear shepherd, thou art in danger of a sad
mistake. Behold, the beautiful red rose which
Sylvia plucks to-day, to-morrow she will cast
aside for the tiny thorn upon it ! But as for me,
I shall never follow the world's advice ; because
1 Ogni pena più spietata
Soffrinia quest' alma afflitta,
Desolata,
Segodesse la speranza
Di potersi consolar.
Ma, ohime ! cade ogni speme,
Non c'è luogo, non c'è vita,
Non c'è modo disperar !
Pergolese. I45
I love the lily, I shall not therefore disdain all
other flowers ! ” º
The two romances have the same intrinsic
charm. Over his melody Pergolese seems to
have spread a shadow ; the style has changed,
and a lingering minor succeeds to the brilliant
major. But this is not all : the melody, so direct
and firm in “ La Serva Padrona,” undulates and
bends itself to adornment. But a light and mel-
ancholy decoration verily, but still an adornment.
Thus attired, though very natural still, dreamy but
smiling, it is doubly delicious. Notice especially
º Se tu m'ami, se tu sospiri
Sol per me, gentil pastor,
Ho dolor dei tuoi martiri,
Ho diletto del tuo amor.
Ma se pensi che soletto
Io ti debbo riamar,
Pastorello, sei soggetto,
Facilmente a t'ingannar.
Bella rosa porporina
Oggi Silvia sceglierà,
Colla scusa della spina
Doman poi la sprezzerà;
Ma degli uomini il consiglio
Io per me non seguiro :
Non perche mi piace il giglio,
Gli altri fiori sprezzero.
These two romanzas are found in an admirable collec-
tion of old Italian airs: “Arie antiche, raccolte per cura
di A. Parisotti; ” Ricordi, Milan.
IO
I46 Pergolese.
the declaration or warning to the shepherd lad.
This bit stands, in the collection from which I took
it, side by side with an air of Serpina's ; but how
separated from it in sentiment What a distance
is there between the souls of these two women,
and how far one travels from that rudeness to this
compassion | There, all is brought out in high
relief; here, all is veiled and nothing clashes.
The unknown singer will betray the pastorello ;
she accuses herself of it quite frankly, but she
excuses herself too, and there is such a pretty
regret in the feminine apology, such a charming
chagrin in the avowal of a fragility which is
powerless to remain faithful, that, with an indul-
gent sorrow, one cannot but smile and pardon.
Pergolese possessed grace not only in melan-
choly, but even in grief. He has left us one of
those songs which seem to contain within them-
selves the beauty of all the centuries, – one of
those compositions which would suffice to bear
witness to the glory of an art, if it alone re-
mained to speak. We should still know all of
the sadness which had once pulsated through
Italian melody if nothing remained to us but
“Tre giorni son che Nina,” even as we should
know its joy through Marcello's “I cieli’ im-
mensi narrano.”
“For three days has Nina been sleeping on
Pergolese. I47
her couch. Fifes, cymbals, timbals, awake my
Ninetta, that she sleep no more.””
This is all : three lines of poetry, eight lines
of music, - and yet a masterpiece | I know of
no other so brief or so purely melodious. No-
where does Italian melody offer anything less
harmonised, – anything more linear and bare,
— but the three lines are lovely in design, and
the contours of the melodic nudity are divinely
fair. We even find here, as in all perfect
beauty, reason and logic, and we needs must
admire even the syntax of this musical phrase.
Though so short, with what genius is it com-
posed, and with what smooth symmetry does it
maintain its equilibrium l There is scarcely a
modulation in it, for though it slips for a mo-
ment into the relative major, the melody passes
quickly through simple chords without pause.
It is scarcely necessary to point out the lyrical
force of the apostrophe, “Pifferi, cembali, tim-
pani;” and how evidently the second motive de-
duces itself from the first and leads back to it
What man, indeed, who has heard — if only
once — the heart-rending ascent of the Scale,
“Svegliate mi Ninetta,” does not bear in all after
1 Tre giorni son che Nina a letto se ne sta.
Pifferi, cembali, timpani,
Svegliate mi Ninetta, accio non dorma più.
I48 Pergolese.
time a furrow of sadness, cut, as it were, into his
soul ? A mystery hovers over this wonderful
music, a mystery of love and mourning. Who
shall Say what she was, – this lost Ninetta, – or
by what deserted balcony, beneath what win-
dow, closed for ever, this sad serenade was
sung P For its accents suggest a funeral dirge ;
it was not a sleeper that the music was to waken
— but the dead. As we listen, our thoughts
turn back to all maidens of poetry and history
who have lain pale in death ; above all, to that
young maid of the Evangel whom Jesus raised.
For her, too, had ‘‘the musicians and the flute-
players already come,” — Pifferi, cembali. Such
is the ardour of the appeal that so great sorrow
seems almost to demand another miracle. Per-
chance before some well-beloved lifeless form,
this song will rise in your heart, with the wild
hope, almost the expectation, of beholding the
loved one arise before your enraptured eyes.
IV.
Pergolese's “Stabat Mater" is no more beau-
tiful than the sad little serenade, which lingers
in our memories. The master sang with such
nobility and tender purity of human suffering
Pergolese. I49
that his genius can rise no higher in singing the
sorrows of the Divine One.
It will not be without interest, in closing these
three studies upon Italian music, to consider a
subject which the genius of Italy has treated at
four different times during the period including
the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries, after
the form and peculiar ideal of each epoch. The
liturgical “Stabat,” the “Stabat” of Palestrina,
and those of Pergolese and Rossini, - the cycle
of these four works completes an evolution and
follows the course of the Italian genius.
The “Stabat Mater" of the liturgy has been
ascribed to various authors, – St. Gregory the
Great, St. Bonaventura, Innocent III., and the
Blessed Jacopone di Todi ; but, according to
the most received and best defended opinion of
the day, it seems, without doubt, to be the work
of Jacopone, the fiery and yet tender Franciscan,
the writer of pitiless pamphlets and delicious
poetry.”
1 Concerning the ascription of the “ Stabat’ to Jaco-
pone di Todi, see : —
B. Hauréau, of the Institute, “ Notices et extraits de
quelques manuscrits latins,” vol. vi. p. 188; analysis of
manuscript, 333, year 1893.
Ulysse Chevalier, “Poésie liturgique traditionnelle.”
Desclée, Tournai, 1894, p. 277; — “Poésie liturgique du
moyen äge.” Lyon, Emmanuel Vitte, 1892.
Concerning Fra Jacopone's peculiar character, Con-
I5O Pergolese.
At all events, no copy of the “Stabat’ is ex-
tant prior to the thirteenth century; and whether
or no Jacopone was the first to sing it, certain it
is that this subject of the Compassion of the Vir-
gin haunted the air which he breathed. Again
and again we find it in those song-dialogues
which were so often given by religious brother-
hoods. The following is the substance of a
Laud, written for the Passion season, which has
been translated by M. Gebhart.” The Virgin,
Christ, the people, even the poet himself take
part : “Oh, Pilate, torment not my son I I can
prove to thee that he is wrongfully accused. —
Crucify him 1 Crucify him — the man who calls
himself our king I According to our law he has
sinned against the Senate. —Woman, look 1 They
have taken him by the arm, have stretched him
on the cross, have nailed his hands. – Mother,
why hast thou come 2 Thy tears inflict upon
me a mortal blow ! — My son, I was called.
My child, my father and husband, my child,
who has thus despoiled thee P My son, thou
hast given up the Soul — my son all white and
red, and so thou hast left me — my son white
sult: A-F. Ozanam, “Les Poètes franciscains, en Italie
au XIIIe siècle,” Paris, Lecoffre; M. Emile Gebhart,
“L’Italie mystique,” Paris, Hachette.
1 Op. cit.
Pergolese. I5 I
and fair— my son with lovely face — my son,
why have they thus so cruelly outraged thee
Oh, John, son just given me, thy brother is dead,
and that knife which was prophesied has, with
one blow, killed the mother and the child.”
This is the dramatic form of which the Latin
sequence was the lyrical. But as to the music
of the “Stabat,” was it, as well as the text, the
work of Jacopone * Without being able to
prove it, we may be permitted the supposition,
as the old “ Brother ” was a musician and a
composer of music. Yet this work may have
been adapted by him to the words of the
“Stabat’ from some melody popular at that
time in Italy. We all know the liturgical
“Stabat ; ” but to know it at its best, one must
hear it sung by nuns’ voices at Notre Dame,
during some Good Friday service, while to its
solemn music the holy relics are borne through
the great nave of the church, – the thorns, the
nail, even the sacred wood against which the
sorrowing Brother leaned. “The Roman
Catholic liturgy,” writes Ozanam,” “contains
nothing more touching than this said plaint,
whose monotonous strophes fall like tears; so
gentle are they that one recognises in them a
grief which is divine and which angels must
1 Op. cit.
I52 Pergolese.
console, and so simple in the popular Latin
that women and children understand it, half by
reason of the simplicity of the words, and half
through the music, which reaches the very
heart.” Ozanam is right: the “Stabat.” is
simple, sad, and gentle ; perhaps even a little
too gentle, – the homage of pious respect
rather than of stricken tenderness. This psal-
mody, all in the major key, lacks that touch of
pathos, the tender minor note which makes its
contemporary, the “Dies Irae,” so tragic. The
two resemble each other in their freedom from the
laws of prosody, as well as in their rhythm and
the long isochronous notation. But while the
melody of the “Dies Irae" begins by descending,
that of the “Stabat,” on the contrary, rises as
though to climb to the very foot of the cross ;
and, finally, the most pronounced peculiarity of
the liturgical “Stabat,” and the one by which it
is most distinguished from the others, is its divi-
sion into strophes of the same length and value.
This gives a remarkable character of unity,
something even of the supernatural, and of
superiority to the mobility of our human grief, -
a suggestion of Sorrow eternally inconsolable.
Palestrina's “Stabat" is no less gréat than
the liturgical work, but its beauty lies along
other lines, – those of continuity rather than of
Pergolese. I 53
repetition. Without pause, or any retracing of
its course, it develops all the beauty of that
art which makes Palestrina's the religious music
par excellence, — the music of the Divine.
For myself, I confess that after the enchant-
ment of that melody, grand above all other, — the
music of Marcello and Pergolese, – I turn with
pleasure for a moment to the old master of har-
mony, and taste the infinite sweetness of unal-
tered consonances. Palestrina’s “Stabat’ is
written for two choirs of four voices each, which
are sometimes alternated, sometimes united.
From the first verse, they answer one another in
chords upon chords, -always perfect, and linked
together in a succession that seems to raise
itself to the very Infinite. The harmonies float
long in the air, and descend slowly, like light
veiled mists and shadows. They create about
them an atmosphere, a refuge in which the soul
in the secure repose of solitude wraps itself in
tender melancholy. Even while this melan-
choly and tenderness is sustained to the end,
Palestrina has interrupted such a monotony as
that of the liturgical “Stabat.” by introducing
into the long plaint every variety and liberty
even, which vocal polyphony permits.
We have seen, in earlier pages, that the work
of the old Roman master was inward and con-
I54 Pergolese.
templative above all else ; and this character-
istic should be emphasised in the light of this
last masterpiece of the soul, - secret medita-
tion. Without even being carried outside itself,
without quitting the inviolate domain of prayer
and self-contemplation, this music attains and is
sensitive to the slightest movements and the
most delicate shades. Let us open it at the
tiercet : —
* Vidit suum dulcem natum
Moriendo desolatum,
Dum emisit spiritum.”
We find an explosion that is almost dramatic on
the last words, the two choirs interchanging
chords which are rung out with full voice and
uniting at the finale in a brilliant major.
Again, read, –
“Eial Mater, fons amoris,
Me sentire vim doloris
Facut tecum lugeam.”
“O Mother l source of love, let me feel the
depth of thy sorrow ; let me weep with thee . "
What do we find here 2– A slight alteration in
rhyme from four time to three, and the breadth
of the effect destroyed thereby, the moyement
suddenly slackened, and the burst of song
brusquely stified. Neither did the genius of
Palestrina falter in the delicious passage from
Pergolese. I 55
the recitative to the prayer. The gaze leaves
the cross and lowers itself to the ground ; the
soul falls back and draws within herself in an
adoring humility and a mystical shame. She is
applying to herself the terrible lesson, appropri-
ating the merits of the divine blood and of the
divine tears. This tiercet — the mysterious after
the tragic—is as it were the practical conclusion
to the sacred spectacle; it shows the moral
birth of faith ; and, last mark as it is of a religious
work that had been wrought in those old days
within the soul, it is so profound and so fine
that beside it all others seem but superficial and
transient.
All others but those of Pergolese. In an occa-
sional verse of the one or the other “Stabat "
we find the same perfection realised through
the two different kinds of procedure, — poly-
phony and melody. Here, at last, in the work
of the young maestro of Naples, is the ideal
melody, glorious in the twofold beauty of grace
and truth, – Italy's lovely creation, which, alas !
she herself was to mar so soon. While listen-
ing to the first strophe of Pergolese's “Stabat,”
recall the “Psalms ” of Marcello, and you will
feel that if the Venetian master's melody lacked
in feeling and love, henceforth nothing is want-
ing. Melody is not only softened, but it is
156 Pergolese.
prolonged, and its breath is become at the same
time more lasting and more sweet. In what
work of Marcello's do we find such linear flexi-
bility, such pliable contours, and so lingering a
grace It is true that Pergolese's phrase dares
yet to go only from the tonic to the dominant,
following the primitive modulation, and, as it
were, the elementary reasoning of musical logic,
but following it in untrammelled freedom, and
arriving at the same goal as does Marcello's
phrase, but by a pleasanter path, along which
one begins to linger now and again among the
wayside flowers. Melody may not yet be orna-
mented, but she is no longer nude ; and with a
thoughtful touch that is a refinement of tender
respect, Pergolese has confided the most femi-
nine of sacred songs to two female voices; the
masculine notes seem to him too rough to
sympathise with maternal grief.
But the Neapolitan’s “Stabat’ marks not
only a point of arrival, but one of departure like-
wise, in the history of Italian music. For
though we here see melody in the full perfection
of her being, we seem also to foresee her in-
clination towards that fatal abyss into which she
is one day to fall.
One or another strophe, the “Quae moerebat
or the “Inflammatus,” contain the germ of an evil,
$ 9 S
Pergolese. I 57
the principle of a decadence, which, though bril-
liant and even sumptuous, is nevertheless a de-
cadence. “Qua, marebat el dolebal, -she who
suffers and is afflicted.” By what strange contra-
diction have these sorrowful words provoked in
Pergolese and even in Palestrina this movement
of transport. For Palestrina himself was the first
to invest them not only with force, but with
actual cheerfulness I He marked them with a
brilliant syncopation in two or three measure,
which heralds, two centuries in advance, the
syncopation of Pergolese's equally brilliant air.
It is true that the timbre of the contralto voice,
for which this melody is written, lends it some
gravity; but with the latter, and in spite of it,
what an accent of festivity we catch | What a
triumphal re-entrance of joy into the religious
art of the Italian Soul, - that recovered soul,
hungering for joy, and incapable of the con-
straint of too prolonged a sorrow ! It is beauty
that we must admire here, — beauty in and of
itself, and no longer the handmaid of faith.
Such a strophe may suggest the concert-room,
even the Salon, but no longer the church. It
was in a Salon that I heard for the first time the
“Stabat’ of Pergolese, and his strains seemed
in no wise out of accord with their surround-
ings. I was one of an attentive, thoughtful
158 Pergolese.
group, for we were gathered together during the
Lenten season. The audience was well chosen,
but perhaps a trifle worldly ; the two singers
— contraltos — were in subdued toilet, and
yet nevertheless distinctly en toiletle ; and still,
in spite of artists and accessories, the work
seemed in perfect harmony with its surroundings.
Let us turn now, if but for a moment, from
Pergolese's “Stabat’ to that of Rossini, to find
there this strangely inappropriate germ of feli-
city in an alarming state of fruition. Not here,
as in Pergolese, do we now and then find
touches of what Strikes us as unseemly gayety,
but, rather, one continued burst of brilliancy,
which often wounds in its intensity. It is a
work which resounds with joy from beginning
to end, characterised by an utter absence of
piety, all sorrow disowned, prayer turned into
an operatic aria, and the cross hidden in flowers.
Corruption, we cry, and decadence But are
we right 2 Is this not, after all, the necessary
termination of the evolution of the Italian soul
carried beyond itself, - the exaltation of the
genius of a race which submitted to an idea,
in place of conquering it 2 Is it not ever thus
For which are the greater artists, – those who
efface themselves, or those who are self-asser-
tive P And, elsewhere than in Italy, do you not
Pergolese. I 59
remember with what a flourish of colour, and
with what triumphal Symphonies, the Son of that
sorrowing Mother expires on the canvas of the
Flemish Rubens P Think of a certain “Montée
au calvaire " in the Brussels Museum. “The
Christ is dying of fatigue, while St. Veronica
wipes his brow ; the weeping Virgin throws her
arms out towards Him, and Simon the Cyrenian
upholds the cross ; and yet, in spite of that sym-
bol of infamy, of the weeping women and the
sinking Victim, whose panting mouth, humid
temples, and wild eyes stir the pity, - notwith-
standing the fear and cries, with death immi-
ment, — it is quite clear to him who reads aright
that the agony of the cross is eclipsed by all this
equestrian pomp ; by these floating banners and
the grandeur of that armed centurion, in whose
features we recognise those of Rubens himself,
as he turns in his saddle with a graceful gesture,
— the whole display giving a most evident idea
of triumph to the scene. Such is the curious
logic of the master's brilliant mind. One would
say that the picture is conceived in quite the
wrong sense, that it is melodramatic, almost
theatrical, and lacking in majesty, beauty, and
august dignity. But it is just this element of
the picturesque which might have been the ruin
of the painting that has, in reality, Saved it.
I6O Pergolese.
The fancy seizes gladly upon the artist's concep-
tion, for it is a ray of true feeling, which en-
nobles the scene. Something like a burst of
eloquence elevates the style; and an inexpressible
rapture of happiness, an inspired transport,
makes of this painting just what it should be,
— the picture of a death which is but transient,
the depicting of an apotheosis.” "
Let us endeavour to listen to certain pages of
Italian music — to the “Quae moerebat” of Ros-
sini, for instance, or even that of Pergolese—in
the same spirit with which Fromentin read Ru-
bens' picture. Let us, too, extract what there is
of good from the inspired rapture, from these
dashes of eloquence and feeling, and this melody
which is the saviour of what it might have
ruined, and which changes the stroke of the
dread angel into an apotheosis. And, after
all, is this glad genius of Italy so greatly in the
wrong 2 What is it that was accomplished on
Calvary P A mystery of horror, indeed, but of
benediction also ; a crime, but an unutterable
good to the world. From a passing death there
was born there on Calvary life eternal ; and it
may be that Pergolese, lighting his sad subject
with some rays of joy, has but made it the better
1 “Les Maitres d’Autrefois,” by Eugène Fromentin.
Pergolese. - I6I
understood, and has revealed its more profound
depths.
Above all, let us not envy the dying boy this
furtive Smile, – a ray of light which was soon to
vanish. One day, - and in the Naples of Pergo-
lese how beautiful a day may be 1 — perhaps, as
he looked out from his monastery asylum over
the skies and waters which were so pure and so
blue, he thought himself healed and believed
that he would live. Then, his heart beating
with hope, he would sing out the glad illusion
in rapturous melody, forgetful of the sad words
of his text; and surely the Mother of Sorrow
would pardon this one moment of forgetfulness.
For truly this moment was but short-lived.
“When Hope, too slow in coming, began to
soothe his pain, Death was already at the door.””
The last tiercet of his “Stabat’ is sublime.
“Quando corpus morietur, − When the body
dies, may the soul enter the glory of Paradise.”
I know of no other page of music where death
is thus accepted, even asked from Heaven, as it
were. This is even more beautiful, more divine
than the “Eial Mater" of Palestrina ; the turn-
ing of the composer's thought to himself is more
direct and more sorrowful. Poor boy, who sang
at the same time the Divine Agony — and his
1 Vauvenargues.
I I
I62 Pergolese.
º
own “Quando corpus morietur;” what poi-
gnant sweetness lies in this final strophel The
words Séem to pray, vaguely and from a dis-
tance, for these our bodies, which must one
day die; but the notes pray with what an imme-
diate personal petition For one poor body,
which, alas ! must die to-day !
Here do we take leave of Italian melody.
After having perceived, or rather suspected, its
presence in the polyphony of Palestrina, we
have followed its development and growth as it
acquired in Marcello its strength, and its grace
in Pergolese, – bearing, as it were, in one season
flowers and fruit. However illustrious are the
masters which follow, they are no greater than
the composer of the “Psalms,” or the Pergolese
of the “Stabat; ” a song by Mozart, and Mozart
alone, may surpass the beauty of Pergolese's
melody, and Mozart was not an Italian, or at
best but half a one. Twice — at the close of
the sixteenth century and in the middle of the
eighteenth — did the Italian genius of music
realise its ideal, carrying to their perfection two
forms of art : vocal polyphony and melody. A
third ideal was to be born, but not of the Italian
soul. It was elaborated upon the kéy-board *
1 The first part of the “Well-tempered Clavichord,”
dated 1722.
Pergolese. I63
of Sebastian Bach, more than ten years before
the death of Pergolese and that of Marcello :
beneath his fingers it is only the fugue; but let
Haydn come, and it shall be the symphony, and
through the Symphony music was once again
revivified.
CHARLES GOUNOD.
TO MADAME GOUNOD.
GOUNOD.

CHARLES GOUNOD.
Liebe sei vor allen Dingen
Unser Thema, wenn wir singen.
GOETHE.
BEFoRE beginning our study of Charles
Gounod, I would extend a grateful ac-
knowledgment to those faithful guardians of his
memory, who, fulfilling their trust with such an
entire absence of miserliness or jealousy, have
kindly confided manuscripts, notes, letters, – all,
in fact, which remained of the master,”—to hands
which, indeed, they knew would touch their
treasures only with reverence. It is through
their kindness that I have been enabled to
come closer than during his lifetime, even,
to their friend and mine. While turning the
leaves of his manuscripts and letters, I have
seemed to hear him, almost to see him once
more in that study, so dark and silent to-day,
1 Since the writing of these papers the “Revue de
Paris” has published, under the title of “Mémoires d'un
Artiste,” fragments of M. Gounod's autobiography. We
shall occasionally refer the reader to these “Mémoires,”
which close with the year 1859.
I68 Charles Gounod.
but which was once harmonious with his songs
and illumined with that glance which justified
the poet's words: “It is our eye which tells
how much of the man there is within us.” ". I
seemed to be with him again, in his own home and
once more ; and for the last time, he was, in his
death, what he had always been in life, my mas-
ter and my friend, lo mio maestro e lo mio autore.
He seemed to live his life again, and his work,
in the order of his years. May this study,
which I approach with a feeling of melancholy
and of apprehension, show forth in some faint
way the strength and beauty of that life and
work. In a critical work, and especially in a
musical criticism, there is ever an element of
sadness in the passing from emotion to analysis.
One ceases the eager poring over what the dead
has left us only to begin writing with fearful
heart. The voices are indeed dead, and we
may speak only of what was once so sweet to
hear; but courage fails us and words falter be-
fore the memory of those mysterious sounds.
1 Victor Hugo.
Charles Gounod. I69
I.
“His character is open and gay, quick almost
to petulance, — rather restless, but excellent.
Everything considered, he is an amiable child,
who will give satisfaction to his masters, and
who will become the consolation and pride of
his mother.” This is the earliest portrait left
us of Gounod. It is dated May 30, 1829, and
signed by Hallays-Dabot, director of the board-
ing-School which the young scholar of eleven
years was about to leave for entrance into the
“Lycée St.-Louis" of Paris.
A few months later, one evening of St.-Charle-
magne's Day, the little fellow, after a long two
hours' wait in the January snow, made his way
for the first time into the “Théâtre-Italien.” It
was at this performance of “Otello” that music
seems to have first revealed herself to the future
master. At what page of the work One loves
to think that it was at that lovely and immortal
plaint which Gounod was one day to recall, as he
invoked, in memory of Rossini, the “Sad, Sweet
gondolier of Desdemona.”
That the love of music developed rapidly in
the ardent heart of the young collegian, we see
by portions of a letter which the child — for he
17O Charles Gounod.
was but thirteen — wrote to his mother, declar-
ing his new-found love : —
“There is an age when, without failing in the
prescribed submission and obedience, one begins
to think for oneself, finding it impossible to
leave to the cruel indecision of parents all
thought for the future of their child. Such is
my position. In the inexperience of my age I
could never judge of the utilities or disadvan-
tages of the many careers which open before
me; but I will say that a very pronounced taste
for the career of the Arts is awakened within
II] e.
“I believe that there exists a real and unfail-
ing happiness in Such a career, and an inward
consolation which must compensate for all trials
which may come to one. As far as I am able to
judge, he who can be happy alone with his art,
his science, and his thought, is the man whose lot
is to be envied. For there are many kinds of
happiness; a man may be rich in equipages and
wealth, possessing all that fortune can heap
upon its most favoured child, but let him lose
his places, honours, and dignities, and adieu to
happiness | When a man, however, has acquired
superior talents and a science which he has
studied to its depths, it is a fortune which he is
Sure of keeping ; it is his own creation, and de-
Charles Gounod. 17I
pends upon himself alone. I realise, indeed,
that changes in the state may influence the arts;
but I believe, too, that a man who has won for
himself an honoured position by his genius will
be enabled to maintain it before the eyes of his
fellow-men. When I speak thus, it is not, be-
lieve me, that I would assert myself to be one
born for the arts alone, who must launch out
upon such a career, at all hazards. Indeed, I
pretend to no such honour; but I do believe that
a man who does not prefer a knowledge which
may one day bring him ease, to the simple ac-
quirement of the ease itself, should not embrace
the career of the arts. Achilles, we see, pre-
ferred glory to a long life passed in adding no
lustre to his name ; why may not one prefer
glory in the pursuit of the art to a position which
money alone renders brilliant . . .
“It has been said that music has power to calm
the fiercest and touch the least sensitive heart ;
and, indeed, I am not incredulous. In my eyes,
the man who is not susceptible to the charm of
music is lacking in sentiment and heart, — not
that he may not be a good man, but, neverthe-
less, one who is capable of being touched by a
beautiful melody which speaks to the very
depths of his Soul, gains not a little in my
eyes; for I see nothing in creation more im–
172 Charles Gounod.
posing and more touching than a grand musical
work. Music is so Sweet a companion to me
that were she excluded from my life I should be
deprived of a very great happiness. Oh, how
happy are they who understand the divine lan-
guage It is a treasure which I would not ex-
change for many others, and a joy which I hope
will fill all the moments of my life.”
Gounod's mother, an excellent musician her-
self, understood the child’s letter ; but she was
wise and resolved to wait. A few days later
the young collegian was called before the head-
master of his school. Gounod himself has given
an account of this decisive interview ; of the
trial to which he was subjected, and from which
he came forth conqueror. He was ordered to
compose an air on the words from “Joseph,”
“A peine au sortir de l'enfance.” In less than
an hour the boy who knew nothing of Méhul's
romance had written his own. It was so lovely
that the head-master was not only amazed as he
heard it, but completely overcome. When the
little fellow had finished singing his air, the mas-
ter burst into tears, and, taking the young brow
which was destined to earn so great laurels be-
tween his hands, he exclaimed, “Go, go, my
child, and make thy music.”
And thenceforth the child “made " his music,
Charles Gounod. I73
though always without neglecting other duties, for
Madame Gounod insisted upon the continuance
of his classical studies. She took him one evening
to the “Theatre-Italien,” where they were giving
not “Otello,” but the “Don Juan" that the boy
came to love so much. Scarcely was the over-
ture finished, when, leaning his head on his
mother's shoulder, he whispered : “Oh, mamma,
this is truly music.” Confided to Reicha's in-
struction, then to Halévy, and later to Berton,
Gounod obtained the Prix de Rome in 1839. Not
long after this, he turned his steps towards Italy,
and from the moment that his eyes rested upon
her he loved her; scarcely arrived at the Mé-
dicis villa, he felt the peace, that wide, deep
peace of Rome, stealing over his soul ; the
great city, whose equal this earth cannot boast,
spoke to him in the words with which the God
of the Scriptures quiets the soul: “Behold, I
will bring her into the solitudes, and will speak
comfortably to her heart.” So Rome spoke, and
he heard ; it was she who inspired him to write
‘‘ Le Soir" and “Le Vallon,” even as it was
while wandering one evening about the Coliseum
that there came to him that lovely melody which
developed later into Faust’s “O nuit d'amour.”
It may be that it was of this hour — one lovely
1. Mémoires d’un Artiste.
I74 Charles Gounod.
evening of May — that Fanny Mendelssohn
speaks in one of her letters. She, with her
husband and Félix, her brother, had gone with
their young friends to see the Coliseum by
moonlight; and Gounod, climbing into a flower-
ing acacia-tree, sang for a long time to the
stars, while he rained down flowers and melo-
dies upon his companions.
Of the two notes which the great voice of
Rome rings out over the world, the antique
and the Christian, the latter at first struck most
forcibly upon Gounod's ear. On his return to
France, while chapel-master of the Missions
Etrangères, he resolved to take orders, influ-
enced, doubtless, by the example of one whose
friendship he had lately renewed ; a companion
of his childhood, who was destined to be among
the dearest and most faithful friends of his after-
life.”
“Towards the third year of my duties as
chapel-master,” Gounod writes in his “Mé-
moires d’un Artiste,” “I felt a desire to enter
an ecclesiastical career. I had added philo-
sophical and theological studies to my musical
1 This friend was at that time the Abbé, later Mon-
seigneur Gay, - an excellent musician : “more of a musi-
cian than I,” said Gounod, and the eminent prelate
replied, “I am less of a theologian than hel ”
Charles Gounod. 175
occupations, and for an entire winter I followed
the Seminary course of St. Sulpice, clad in
an ecclesiastical gown. But in all this I had
Strangely overlooked my own nature and my
true vocation ; and, in time, realising that it
would be impossible for me to live without my
art, I left the order for which I was not fitted,
and once more entered the world.”
It was about this time that another descended
the steps of the Seminary never again to ascend
them in a cassock. But, happier than he, Gou-
nod descended them without a struggle and
with no heart-break. He had but laid aside a
mantle which was too heavy for his shoulders,
and he carried away with him all his soul and
all his faith.
The talents of the young musician were not
long in finding illustrious patrons. In 1849 he
was introduced to Madame Viardat, whom he
had met ten years before in Rome. This great
arlisle, in '49, had but just created her rôle in
“Le Prophète,” and possessed great influence
in the musical world ; she desired Gounod to
write an opera for her, and “Sapho” was the
result (1851).
Such is the immortal prestige of the art, or
rather, of the soul of Greece, that to have once
understood it is to be always great ; it is to be
176 Charles Gounod.
Gluck or André Chénier, the Goethe of “Iphi-
genia,” the painter of the “Apotheosis of
Homer,” or the musician of “Sapho"; no hand,
if reverent, can touch these divine forms without
bearing away some trace or perfume, as it were,
of beauty. In the last fifty years more than
one fragment has been broken away from this
“Sapho’’ of Gounod, - his initial work ; but
the pure beauty of the grand, central figure
stands, never to fall. Taine, as he gazed at the
antique statues, seemed to see their gestures
consummated, their robes move, and their long-
sealed lips open in speech. “What would one
not give to hear them " he cries. “With what
sonorous accents would their slow melodies
reverberate through the palace of the gods "
Their discourse is not like to ours. It is “a
solemn chant whose rhythm spreads and repeats
itself around the thought which it sustains, as
did the old Athenian processions about the
sacred image which they escorted.” Such, in-
deed, is Sappho's song, or rather, are her songs,
for her rôle is varied, and the statue has more
than one pose, – and still not one which is not
nobly beautiful in its grave symmetry. At the
first, behold the goddess appear before the
judges; one seems to catch, from the very be-
ginning of the Salute to Phaon, a suggestion of
Charles Gounod. 177
Gluck's decorum, and of his sovereign dignity.
Then Sappho begins her prelude, singing the
story of Hero and Leander and their loves
separated by the rough waves, or of the brave
swimmer crossing the Hellespont by night.
Here do we find, for the first time, the melody
which bears the characteristic trace of Gounod's
genius, - the broad, pure phrase, so freely de-
veloped and so magnificently determined. This
song is more popularly known as “Le Soir,” be-
ing most daintily adapted to Lamartine's verses.
But it is more beautiful in the opera, as it rings
out above the sustained roll of the orchestra, or
hovers, entranced and spell-bound, like — I know
not what burning Melopoeia — some free-Soaring
improvisation of love.
After the passionate ode comes the fresh,
sweet “Aimons, mes socurs, aimons,” and this
is yet another light upon the love of the an-
cients ; this is Theocritus after Pindar, – aſter
straight and statuesque folds, lightly falling
drapery, and the pagan leisure and ease of
dwelling by shores that are fraught with hap-
piness.
And, finally, the last act, in which Gounod
raised himself to the heights of the great mas-
ters, the act which in itself alone sufficed to
crown him a genius. Such was Berlioz' opin-
I 2
178 Charles Gounod.
ion, from the first appearance of the opera.
Gounod writes of the effect produced on so
severe a judge by the dénouement of his work.
“My mother, naturally, was present at the first
representation. As I left the scenes to join her
in the audience-room, where she was awaiting
me, after the crowd had gone, I came upon
Berlioz in the corridor of the Opera House.
He was weeping, and I threw my arms about
his neck, crying: ‘Oh, my dear Berlioz, come
and show those eyes to my mother ; they will
be the happiest criticism of my work that she
can possibly read l’” +
These tears of Berlioz were not ill-timed. He
who had every right to be hypercritical as to a
dénouement of this kind, – for he was an adorer
of Gluck, and truly Gluck had known how
heroines should die; he who had perhaps
already conceived the noble farewell of Dido,
might greet in Sappho the sister of those hearts
so brave in death.
One always quotes the stanzas of “Sapho,”
but men do wrong to forget all which comes
before those stanzas, of which they are but the
crown. Never has music better sung the sad-
ness of that hour of which Dante writes, – the
hour So Sad to those who embark and to those
1 Mémoires d’un Artiste.
Charles Gounod. I79
who watch the loved one go forth upon the sea.
Nothing in Gluck is grander or more mournful
than the melody which, with an even accompani-
ment of deep basses, lingers over each syllable of
these two lines, –
“La mer et le vaisseau vont emporter ma vie,
Et je viens assister a ma propre agonie.”
Again, listen to Phaon's anathema upon the
mistress whom he believes to be faithless : “O
Sapho, sois trois fois maudite l’ and Sappho's
beautiful response: “Sois béni I " The musi-
cian, with a touch of genius, has made of the two
monosyllables a benediction which is sublime in
its mercy and love.
Taine might have said of Gounod's “Sapho,”
as he did of Goethe's “Iphigenia,” she is
“the antique statue, an Ariadne or a Pallas,
with great, fixed eyes; not a touch of softening
refinement has disarranged a fold of her stole ;
neither culture nor civilisation have lessened
ever so faintly the strength of her statuesque
beauty, . . . but a smile of ineffable sweetness
has stirred her lips; resignation, self-abnegation,
all noble incentives, have exalted the meaning
of her eyes.”
And whence comes this new expression and
the moral beauty heretofore ignored From
I8O Charles Gounod.
the simplest thing imaginable, – the sudden reso-
lution into an unexpected chord of the seventh.
But how beautiful is this use of the chord which
Bettina Brentano once defined as the “libera-
tor.” How it does, in truth, liberate this
woman's soul, freeing it from all hate and an-
ger | What a course does it open within her
heart for the flow of a tenderness which was
nevermore to ebb
All these last pages, including the stanzas,
prove most clearly a truth which was dear to
Gounod ; namely, that the progress, or rather,
the evolution of art, though it often follows a
course which is quite apart from and even con-
trary to tradition, may, nevertheless, operate in
conformity with the latter. At times it abolishes
the past, and again it respects and seeks but to
rejuvenate it. It is thus that Gounod in the
last act of ‘‘Sapho " salutes his illustrious an-
cestors in art. George Sand once wrote to him
concerning a work for which she hoped that he
would compose the music : “Inasmuch as we
are here setting up an altar, insignificant though
it be, to Mozart, Handel, or some other of
your old-time gods, they are well worthy of
the garland with which you may dress it.”
His third act of “Sapho" is a garland hung
upon antique altars. Doubtless strange new
Charles Gounod. I8 I
perfumes exhale therefrom : there is a certain
novelty in the harmony and in the quality of
Sound ; as, for instance, in the English horn
before the “Sois béni,” and in the co-opera-
tion of the orchestra with the voices, as in
the contre-chant of the second stanza. Quite
new, too, was the element of the picturesque
introduced, as the shepherd's song, con-
trasted with the stanzas, emphasises calm in-
difference of nature to the accomplishment of
the most tragic destiny. However, at bottom
all is serenity; how well they carry their name,
those grand strophes, – stanza I A Something
which holds itself in stately dignity, which re-
mains and endures, – a proud halt before death
Never did woman die like this one ; neither
Selika nor Dido, nor the fair Iseult, nor
the heroic Walkyrie herself. Brünnhild and
Sappho How one would love to call them
forth, the one upon her granite cliff, the other
to her sombre pyre Sovereign simplicity and
infinite complexity, - the two represent and sym-
bolise the two poles of sentiment and beauty.
What has not that Walkyrie to think upon as
she expires | The Rhine and Walhalla, Sieg-
mund and pity, Siegfried and love ; gods,
heroes, and men ; her father, her sisters, even
her war-horse I Chaos presses and dashes
I82 Charles Gounod.
upon the resisting soul, which has the strength
to dominate what it alone could be subjected to.
On the contrary, the soul of Sappho is filled
only with thoughts of its love ; her glance
follows but one faint sail to the horizon ; her
golden lyre breathes but one name. She re-
members nothing of the past, which she has
vanquished, and which vainly breaks upon this
rock, her pedestal of death. Thus it is that
these two heroines, the Grecian lyrist and
the daughter of Walhalla, expire in their oppos-
ing world of aestheticism and morality, - the
one in a conflict of innumerable and vehement
thoughts, the other in the unity of serene and
profound ideas.
II.
In the last act of “Sapho,” Gounod is already
great; but it is in “Faust” that he is for the
first time himself.
“Ne permettrez-vous pas, ma belle demoiselle.”
It is at this page that Gounod's first masterpiece
should be opened, for it marks, as it were, the
entrance of his true genius. One has but to
read in the libretto the division between the two
voices of this dialogue in four verses to under-
Charles Gounod. 183
stand what the notes add to the words ; what a
grace and elegance of melody, a beauty which
is serious and yet familiar in the repetition of
the equal, slow values. It is a single musical
phrase which envelops Faust's demand and Mar-
guerite's reply, and yet how perſectly it inter-
prets both ; what a demand there is in it and
what a response, and how appropriate are the
two movements, – the one rising, the other fall-
ing “Qu'on vous offre le bras pour faire le
chemin ; ” at the last word the tonality seems to
open, but closes immediately at Marguerite's
refusal. This refusal is chaste and sweet ; it is
without severity or affectation, and there is a
tinge of melancholy in it. “Demoiselle ni
belle,” she repeats; and this repetition, which
the music alone makes possible, adds to the
sense of the text a delicate suggestion of a
humility which is almost bitter. Nor is that all :
this repetition, so characteristic of the expression
of deep sentiment, is equally so of pure music.
It is, as it were, the last turn of the phrase prepar-
ing and demanding the end. And this end so
carefully developed, this harmonious, gentle fall-
ing away of the music, is peculiarly character-
istic of Gounod's melody; so falls the last
phrase of Faust’s “oil se devine la présence
d'une âme innocente et divine ; " so, too, the
I84 Charles Gounod.
“Roi de Thulé : ses yeux remplissaient de
larmes; ” and so the exquisite melodies which
bloom and die in the moonlight of the garden.
The garden-scene of “Faust” I This act,
or picture, rather, was the first of its race ; for,
before Gounod, France had ignored this phase
of art, which is so appealing and yet so pro-
found. Save for Siebel's couplets and the
“jewel song,” nothing detracts from the perfect
beauty of these pages; and the silliest reproach
which it would have been in the power of ped-
ants to cast upon them is that of pettiness and
frivolity. Superficial music I say they. When
in reality there is not a trace of the external
world in its notes, nothing but a voice which
speaks of sentiment and the soul. “Every
feeling in my breast which urged me on,” says
Goethe's Gretchen, “was so good and so
lovely.” And with Gounod, too, all is serious;
it was many years ago that I first realised the
tenderness of this music, but it seems to me
that I have never yet fully comprehended its
solemnity. Recall for a moment the orchestral
prelude to Siebel's romance, and, later, the
strange fourths and the solemn recitative which
prepares us for Faust's cavatina, “que l'amour
d’une vierge estune piété.” How sadly the mu-
sic tells of more than the piety, - of the pity of
Charles Gounod. I85
that love l No less of sorrow than of sweetness
distils itself from the harmonies and interludes
of the entire act; for much of Marguerite's
rôle is bathed in shadow, - the shadow of
sin, shame, and death ; and yet, far from making
the character unnatural, the dark shade elevates
it to greatness. No | Gounod's Marguerite is
no coquette; the “jewel song" is but a faint
blemish in the rôle, and not the rôle itself.
Listen as the tonality pales and the Sonorous
notes die away, after Faust’s brilliant cavatina.
Is this a laughing child whom the pensive sym-
phony of grave fifths accompanies with its
sombre tones No, truly It is a child wounded
to the heart, and with a mortal blow I Hear it
in the unvarying low note of the first recita-
tive : “Je voudrais bien savoir quel était ce
jeune homme; ” hear it in the sad cadence of
each couplet of the “Roi de Thulé,” in the
sinister, “Oh, calamité !” and even in the
startled uneasiness which makes itself felt be-
neath the exquisitely sweet chords of the
duet.
No ; there is nothing petty or frivolous in this
music. It is scarcely necessary to recall the
pages the beauty of which is so familiar to all;
the quartet, a masterpiece of musical causerie,
which, as Gounod himself says, has its “quiet
I86 Charles Gounod.
corners,” through which there breathes a calm
spirit which neither blasts nor consumes, and
through which even in its languor no feverish
emotion stains the spotless purity of the exqui-
site art, — exquisite, but broad when need be.
Read Marguerite's confidences in Goethe's text,
and then in Gounod's music, Mon frère est sol-
dat, and all the story of the little sister, and you
will feel that the poetry merely indicates, – that
it is the music which develops, striking life and
feeling from the dry words. And the final en-
semble of the quartet ! Never since the days
of Mozart have four voices joined in such har-
monies. The night comes, and all nature is
drawing within herself; the circle of melodies
and chords contracts more and more, and under
their soft pressure we seem to go down into the
mystery of the story. We approach the centre
and the hearthstone, and are about to surprise
the last secret of beauty, to behold the beating
of a loving heart. And here, in truth, do we
find the heart of hearts, – this love duet, which
itself alone would prove what was this “Faust”
of Gounod, if all besides it should have perished.
“Laisse-moi contempler ton visage
Sous la pāle clarté dont l'astre de la nuit,
Comme dans un nuage,
Caresse ta beauté.”
Charles Gounod. 187
The poetry perhaps is open to criticism, but
what music | The indefinable charm is so strong
that it seems to assume a form of sublimity,
for this phrase is truly sublime in the strength
of its charm alone. Like Faust's first salutation
to Marguerite, it rises on regularly repeated
chords and prolonged bass notes, being divided
into four periods, each having a logical value of
its own, - one of movement, another of repose.
The first note rises as the young man's eyes lift
towards those of the listening maiden; while the
tones which follow seem to float in suspense :
now the melancholy is suppressed, and again it
breaks forth in the last Soaring flight and final
descent. All endings, men say, are Sad l Not
those of Gounod's phrases, for in dying they
reach the fulness of their being and a supreme
bloom of beauty. Suddenly the duet is more
animated, as though in haste to arrive at the
lovely resting-place: “O nuit d'amour, ciel
radieux.” The few measures which precede
this, the one word álernelle breathed twice
through the stified harmonies as they fail and
die, are priceless beyond compare.
As for the melody itself, we have seen how it
was born one night within the shadows of the
Coliseum. What a strange metamorphosis I
The loveliness of a landscape is changed into
I88 Charles Gounod.
the beauty of a musical thought ; and what men
saw, is become that which they hear. What
emotion must it have been which stirred such a
Song of ecstasy from the soul of the master in
that evening hour ! Doubtless some ardent but
vague sympathy with the splendour of the things
which spread before his view ; but how was it
that twenty years later this phrase, and this alone,
should impose itself, as it were, upon the musi-
cian seeking for a love-melody ? Because in
music, as in every mode of expression, there is
but one utterance for the true and the beautiful;
there is but one love in music, or rather, pure
music sings but the unity and essence of love.
That which seems to particularise this melody is
the dramatic situation, — the literary and sce-
nic contribution, — in a word, all which tells us
that the melody is sung by a young man and a
maiden, – Faust and Marguerite. But if we
eliminate all this, retaining only its Sonorous
form, the melody — and it is this quality which
is its greatest beauty — will remain a symbol, the
expression no longer of a concrete identified
love, but of that faculty or affection of the soul
which is the virtual strength of love. “There is
an element of chance in music,” Alexandre Du-
mas once wrote to Gounod ; “you do not call
things by their names | " And nothing could be
Charles Gounod. I89
truer. It is not the mission of music to name
things, but to reveal them, awakening within us
the nameless mysteries and the ineffable realities
of life. It says to us in Faust’s words to Mar-
guerite, “When thou art happy, very happy,
thou mayst call the feeling what thou wilt, —
happiness, heart, love, God, - I find no name
for it ! The sentiment is everything, the name
but noise and smoke, enveloping and obscuring
the burning splendour of the sky 1’’
It is not true, though often so asserted, that
the genius of Goethe is despised and disfigured
by that of Gounod. Doubtless the latter's
“Faust” is not precisely the ideal of Goethe,
or, at all events, the poet's first conception of
the subject. The musician has winnowed, as
it were, the drama of passion from the stupen-
dous poem, and one must look at his work from
this point of view to understand it. If the con-
ceptions of Faust and Mephistopheles seem to
lack the character and strength with which they
have been invested by Schumann and Berlioz, it
is because of Gounod's indifference to the phi-
losophy and irony of the subject-matter. He
desired nothing more of his Mephistopheles than
that he should be a devil ; his Faust was to
be a lover — and what a lover ! the sorry hero
of a most ordinary love-adventure.
I90 Charles Gounod.
And yet this adventure, ordinary as it is, and
therefore human, is the surest gage of immortal-
ity for Goethe's Faust. It has been said that
the death of Marguerite, in the first part of the
poem, reduces the second portion to “tradition
and philosophical speculations, – that Marguer-
ite, as though to revenge herself upon her faithless
lover, condemns Faust to shadows and sterility.
Where she is not, life is not. Henceforth it
is the self-tortured brain, that seeks rest and
finds none ; the heart has ceased to beat.
“The poet, indeed, seems to have died with
his heroine. Nothing remains but philosophy,
— German philosophy | Faust is reduced to an
aesthetic love, to academical nuptials, and to
the embraces of a corpse. He disinters Helen
and weds her, under the pretext of uniting mod-
ern poetry with the antique, in the worship
of the Beautiful, - the sole generator of the
Good,” etc. We quote once more from Alex-
andre Dumas,” and his words doubtless voice
the thoughts of Gounod, for the musician be-
lieved that he had chosen the better part of
Goethe's poem, - that “better part" which, I
think, will never be taken from him, in the judg-
ment of wiser critics. If, therefore, cavillers'
1 Preface to M. H. Bacharach's translation of “Faust.”
M. Levy, 1873.
Charles Gounod. I9 I
insist that Gounod's music is not adapted to his
subject, and that the lovers to whose songs we
listen are not Faust and Marguerite, we an-
Swer that such reproach is in reality praise, for
it proves that the master himself rose above
the particular to the impersonal and absolute;
that above Goethe's Faust and Marguerite,
Gounod saw humanity, and that he raised the
Love of the Universe above some transient
affection.
III.
If Gounod's “Faust” is not altogether the
“Faust” of Goethe, neither is his “Philémon"
that of the old poets, nor his “Mireille’” that of
Mistral. The fault is greatly with the librettists,
who touch these fragile subjects with far too
heavy a hand, and still more with the pretended
exigencies of the theatre, — those so-called pro-
prieties, which are often only conventional pre-
judices. Neither “Philémon" nor “Mireille.”
could fail to lose something of their original
unity under such disastrous reproduction and
retouching.
The more pleasing the first act of “Philé-
mon,” the more disappointing is the second.
This rejuvenated Baucis coquetting with a Jupi-
I92 Charles Gounod.
ter, borrowed from the stage of some comic
opera, spoils for us the true Baucis, – the white-
haired Baucis of the first act, and of the lovely ro-
manza: Ah! si je redevenais belle / Melancholy
desire, whose satisfaction we cannot but regret.
In Gounod's pagan repertory, the first act of
“Philémon" seems but a charming sketch, while
“Sapho" is the completed statue. The cho-
ruses of “Ulysse ’’ throw a brilliant colour over
Ponsard's pale tragedy, - dazzling tints of pur-
ple and gold gleam from the chorus of the “Pré-
tendants,” or that of the “Servantes Infidèles; ”
but “Philémon et Baucis" is of a lighter fancy,
and wrought in with a less powerful stroke ; it
is but a silhouette, a profile, moving with an
exquisite grace through the glades of an antique
landscape, where bacchantes sing and play along
the slopes.
But it is Mireille which has suffered more
than any one of Gounod's works from the repe-
titions and reproductions of the theatre. The
musician never imagined save in spirit his ideal
Mireille, – the gentle, proud magnanarelle,"
whom, in his admiring love, he sought out in her
country, almost within her own home. It was
not only after the poem, but in the spirit of the
* A girl who cultivates and gathers silkworms.
Charles Gounod. I93
poet himself, that Gounod sought to compose his
music.
“I have him at last,” he wrote on March 12,
1863, − “I have him at last, the good Mistral, so
long dreamed of and sought and longed for.
Maillane In days to come Maillane will mean
to the world — Mistral, as to-day Les Char-
mettes or Vevey mean for us — Jean Jacques. I
find in Mistral all that I had hoped for, the poet
in the shepherd — in nature’s man — in the child
of the country and the sky.”
And such a man was Gounod himself during
two of those spring months. Hidden away in
the village inn of St. Rémy, near Maillane, he
occupied a clean, white little room which looked
toward the sun-setting. With the exception of
the young organist of the church, whom he had
taken into his confidence, all the village knew
him only as “M. Charles.” From early morn-
ing till night he was out of doors, seeking the
first perfumes and the earliest sunbeams, learning
the lesson of the valleys, mountains, and meadow.
He prayed the rich Provençal nature to talk to him
and sing to him of Mireille ; then, after a week
of such communion, he set himself to his task.
“After much grazing over the country,” he said,
“I must now milk my cow.” And the labour
was but a joy to him in the quiet of his retreat.
I3
194 Charles Gounod.
“I know not,” he wrote, “whether the char-
acter of my work has changed ; I do not sup-
pose that its nature can be different, for, my
faculties remaining the same, that which ema-
nates from them must surely be unchanged ; and
yet I am struck with the quite new way in which
my thoughts work. I think and search as ever,
but ideas seem to be engendered within me in a
gentle tranquillity which I have not felt since my
earliest youth. It is labour, but no painful effort;
there is, indeed, reflection, observation, and
meditation in my work, but no longer those
overwhelming crises of disappointment. In fact,
if I mistake not, no such tranquil thoughts have
ever possessed me as those of which I now write.
The instrumentation itself seems to me to be
clear and precise. I try to hear all that is need-
ful, and to write only that which I hear; and I
seem to have a better, surer ear, in this peace
with which I am surrounded.” “Peace ’’ is
one of the oftenest recurring words in the letters
of that Provençal spring-time.
“Oh, the happiness of peace,” he writes, one
day, “and the peace of happiness l’’
And again, -
“Evidently it is talk which does not agree
with me. I can do anything — anything which
I can hear — while there is no noise around me,
Charles Gounod. I95
— no agitation of mind or body. But the whirl,
the constant coming and going of the city,
kills my ideas, and in Paris they talk so much
and so often I It seems to me that the Parisians
never do anything but talk, looking upon silence
as a tomb. A tomb Why, silence is Para-
dise; it speaks to us all Wisdom and all Good,
whilst our tongues are silent.”
And so the master sat silent in the life of
Provence, and all nature sang around him and
within him.
“The country is charming. The day before
yesterday I installed myself by the border of a
brook and wrote Mireille's ‘Heureux Petit
Berger.' All was profoundly still about me ;
the smooth, shining bark of the slender trees,
which bordered the tiny river, actually seemed
to Smile. I had no doubt that the birds were
celebrating some great föte in the neighbouring
branches, for I perceived that I was assisting at
a concert given by virtuosi. . . . Long, supple
weeds carpeted the bottom of the stream, gleam-
ing like velvet beneath diamonds. . . . I can
give thee no idea of the purity and youth of that
morning sky; the breath of fifteen was in the
transparent, limpid air; and the hawthorn is
now in such an exuberance of bloom that the
country-side is arrayed as though for its first
196 Charles Gounod.
communion. One would say that all the angels
of heaven and the young, pure Souls of earth had
transformed themselves into a guard of flowers
to wish God-speed to the passers-by.”
Young and pure as that morning sky is the
first act of “Mireille.” The youth of fifteen is
in the limpid transparency of this music and the
slender grace of its form ; the bloom of fifteen
in the chorus of the magnanarelles who spoil the
mulberry-trees; in Mireille's first avowal, and in
the duet with Vincent, which crowns the move-
ment with a graceful musical gesture, which is a
bit of plastic art; and the tenderness of fifteen
in the lovely song of Magali. Surely Gounod
must have written this, too, by the brook which
sparkled over floating seaweeds, for the agile
dialogue itself seems to flow, and the long holds
of the chorus to spread a velvet carpet beneath
the notes of liquid melody.
Gounod had an intense desire to see the spot,
at Saintes Maries de la Mer, where Mireille
died.
“The sight meant much to me,” he writes.
“I have trod with my own feet that high ter-
race of the upper chapel from which the dying
Mireille cast a last, long look across the beau-
tiful sea, whose horizon was to her the path to
heaven. . . . In the blending of a dramatic situa-
Charles Gounod. I97
tion with this view, there is a legendary gran-
deur which is intensely affecting. It lends a last
beautiful illustration to the final act of the
drama, and I can assure thee that in its pres-
ence the beholder has no desire but that Mi-
reille may evermore live only with the angels
above.”
But, alas ! they have brought her back to
earth, that the sensibilities of the public might
be spared a funereal finale, and in spite of
Mistral and Gounod, Mireille is borne back to
life that she may wed Vincent.
The work has suffered other injuries; as, for
instance, in the omission of the pretty fantastic
episode, “Le Rhône,” which appears in the
printed edition, and should be re-established
upon the stage. Also Gounod, in his corre-
spondence, speaks of certain fragments of the
work, which are not to be found even in his
autograph copy ; among others, a certain finale
for the duet, “Oh I c' Vincent,” in the first
aCt.
“I rebelled against writing this finale, recoil-
ing before the wonderful culminating situation,
which seemed to me one of those flowers of
opportunity, such as confronts one as Mar-
guerite appears at her window, or Juliet on her
balcony. I felt that, through Mireille's swoon
I98 Charles Gounod.
as well as in her avowal there pulsates one
of those waves of emotion which characterise
the decisive moments of life, – of the heart and
of love. At such a juncture, the thought of
submitting to conventional forms was repellent
to me ; but I have found that which I sought,
and I believe that the finale of this act will be in
its own way the companion Scene of Marguerite
at her window. Mireille and Vincent no longer
have the power to speak; happiness Suffocates
them. Mireille's faint, broken words alternate
with Vincent's breathless whispers; while the
violins pour out a song which vibrates in ex-
planation of the lovers' lost power to sing.”
This page, and still others which Gounod
speaks of in his letters, either were never finally
composed by him, or have not been preserved ;
and thus “Mireille " is not all which it might
have been. The work is unequal, a blending of
sun and shadow, not unlike the April days dur-
ing which it was born. It is less a drama or a
melodic poem than the music of various distinct
pictures; an idyl in the first act and in the last,
a painting of earth and sky and sea. One may
question whether the music of the episode of
La Crau — of the herdsman's song, and of
Mireille's halt in that hot desert beside the
sleeping child — is, after all, the music of that
Charles Gounod. I99
real Provence in which Mireille lived and lowed.
I know not ; but beyond all doubt it is the
music of space and light and heat, — of “Midi
Roi des Étés,”— and its loveliness will dwell in
our memories through all time.
As the traveller treads the stony soil of the
Arlesian country, it will ever be the song of
Andreloun that he hears while the grasshoppers
spring up with a whirr from the ruddy herbage
about his feet; the beauty of that spring-time in
which Gounod surprised, though but for an
instant, the Soul of those burning Solitudes, was
not born in vain.
IV.
It was spring once again, – the spring of
1865, – and again in Provence, that Gounod
composed at St. Raphaël the greater part of his
“Roméo et Juliette.” Written lightly in pencil,
the manuscript nearly fills the quaint old album.
Within the sweet-smelling binding of faded
leather, the small, fine notes — those exquisite
notes — grow fainter and fainter on the yellow-
ing paper. All is there, from the madrigal to the
scene by the tomb : here is the page on which
the voice of Romeo first joins itself with that
of Juliet, and here the lark's song. Through
2OO Charles Gounod.
these pages one follows with ease Gounod's
method of work, or rather, of creating. The
balcony duet — and that is virtually the entire
second act — is written in one inspired breath ;
the line of song, without break or erasure, ac-
companies, often runs ahead of, the text. Now
and then the latter is missing altogether beneath
the last notes of a phrase, because the melody
has burst forth beyond the bounds, not of word,
but of sentiment. Here and there an indica-
tion of harmony and instrumentation shows
the accord established from the beginning, in
the artist's imagination, between the various ele-
ments of the work as a whole. He has uncon-
sciously shown us the facility and spontaneity
with which the opera was composed.
“I seat myself,” he wrote from St. Raphaël,
“beneath the balcony, or else out by the sea,
where all is beautiful ; and there, drawing into
my lungs the breath of these lovely mornings, I
begin my day's work. It is beyond my power
to paint for thee a word-picture of what happens
then. . . . In the midst of the silence I seem
to hear speaking within me something very
great and yet clear, simple, and child-like. I
seem to go back to my own childhood, and yet
to be raised to some strange power which en-
tirely possesses my being. I feel my thoughts
Charles Gounod. 2O I
expanding in an atmosphere which has always
been the incentive to my deepest impressions
and of my happiest remembrances. And it is
under its influence that I hear coming to me
the music of “Roméo.” However darkly the
agitation of the world has gathered about me,
solitude and reflection bring light. I hear the
characters of my drama sing as clearly as my
eyes behold the objects about me, and this
clearness falls upon me like a beatitude.”
One word here should especially be remem-
bered : “Something very child-like,” said Gou-
nod, and he said well. “Childhood raised to
Some strange power; ” it is almost a defini-
tion of genius; above all, of his own genius.
Man enters the kingdom of the soul and of
the mind only by becoming like to “one of
these little ones.” Painter, sculptor, or mu-
sician, whether he meditate or whether he
listen, must become a child again in the pres-
ence of nature and of truth. Sense, intelligence,
imagination, all must be fresh and virgin-pure
within him ; all which he sees and hears, he
must seem to hear and see for the first time,
and laying aside the old man, he must leave no
habit or conventionality between himself and
things as they are. Then, and then alone, does
he receive a profound and direct impression;
2O2 Charles Gounod.
seeking for more than reflections and shadow,
the immediate vision — that face-to-face Vision
which enraptured Gounod — will be his.
To an artist such as Gounod, for whom there
existed nothing but love in Goethe's poem,
the subject of “Romeo and Juliet" appeared
grander and at once more united and more
varied than that of “Faust.” Shakespeare's
drama, though concerning itself with love alone,
demanded of the musician a more profound and
finer analysis of two souls which were richer
and more complex than those of Faust and
Marguerite. For what, in truth, was the Ger-
man lover but a common Seducer, — a rascal, to
speak plainly, -and, moreover, the first comer ?
and what was Marguerite P “Ein gar un-
schuldiges Ding,” — an innocent creature, a
“thing,” literally, - and the word expresses in
pitying indulgence, not only the simplicity but
all that was elementary and passive in the child,
even in the midst of her love and of her sin.
Juliet, too, is but a child ; but with what a dif-
ference does she wear the innocence of her
fifteen summers l Her girl's soul is broader
and less passive than the German maiden's. .
Juliet is a perfect creature, the ideal type of
feminine love; possessing all its graces with all
its vigour, – even violence; as chaste as she is
Charles Gounod. 2O3
ardent, I know of nothing equal to her frank-
ness but her reserve, and nothing but her pu-
rity, which is so beautiful as her passion. As
to “fair Montagu,” who would venture to com-
pare, though ever so slightly, the pale German
doctor with this young hero, - this god of
love 2 The eminent translator and commenta-
tor upon Shakespeare has well said: “Other
lovers of poetry merely represent various forms
of love. Romeo and Juliet personify Love in
truth and completeness.
“Shakespeare has expressed, through them,
all which the sentiment of love contains, and all
that which it is capable of pouring forth upon
that human soul of which it takes possession.
The love of these two hearts is the exaction of
the absolute; it seizes upon the entire being,
body and soul, -ideal and real. Thus has
Shakespeare bound in one sheaf the different
elements which make perfect love; his Romeo
and Juliet is more than a great drama, it is the
living metaphysics of love.”"
Or rather, this drama is the living psychology
of love ; and Gounod in his “Roméo et Juliette,”
even more than in his “Faust,” has created a
psychology of music. The difference existing
between these two subjects could not have
1 Roméo et Juliette, by Émile Montégut.
2O4. Charles Gounod.
escaped such a thinker as Gounod, and so great
an artist could never have failed to make the
contrast obvious in his work. But his success
in this effort, and how equal the two master-
pieces are and yet how dissimilar, it is difficult
to demonstrate in so brief a space.
The whole of “Roméo " is in four love-
duets. Suppress them, and the work is killed ;
leave but them, and it is preserved. They are
the essential pages to be studied, for they testify
of the whole.
The first of these duets, the madrigal, is sig-
nificant from the beginning. Let us recall, for
a moment, the first meeting between Faust and
Marguerite, – the request and the refusal, in a
single phrase; the hesitation of the petition,
the modesty of the response, and the words,
“demoiselle ni belle,” so sadly repeated. Noth-
ing of all that do we find here, — no uncertainty
nor suspense, no one who doubts or fears.
Juliet hears Romeo to the end without inter-
rupting and without moving away, and consents
in the same ingenuous spirit with which she is
approached; and at the end the same melody
which is pouring from his lips bursts forth from .
hers; for already, and for evermore, the two
have but one soul, and this first sympathy of
Song ushers in their eternal oneness.
Charles Gounod. 2O5
Gounod sometimes gave, as one of his chief
reasons for renouncing the priesthood, his dread
of hearing a woman's confession ; but the artist,
freer than the priest, has made amends, and
Gounod has confessed some most adorable peni-
tents, – Sappho, Marguerite, and, above all,
Juliet. Music has been defined as the affinity
of Sound and soul; and never has this affinity
shown itself more gracefully than in the second
act of “Roméo ; ” never was sound a more
delicate interpreter of a lovelier soul. Juliet
lives for us as much through sound as by her
words. By the changing light of the music, we
see the transformations of her soul, and with
every variety of thought and sentiment comes a
corresponding change of melody, harmony, or
instrumentation. The music of these pages
stands out from Gounod's work as a whole by
the obedient grace of its contours and the docil-
ity as well as the liberty of its forms. The in-
novations of his characteristic style appear
more clearly here than in the garden-Scene of
“Faust,” by this pliant continuity of plot, in
the homogeneity of the musical language and
the equilibrium and fusion of melody and recita-
tive. As Gounod himself said, no more do
rigorous boundaries lie here, but ever a sure
foundation. With what an easy grace does the
2O6 Charles Gounod.
line of song run along the pages of the dear old
album, and with what a subtile hand was this
woman's portrait drawn As we recall the
strokes, think of the dreamy languor of those
first words: “Hélas ! moi le hair l’ And then
the proud “even a little wild” surprise of
the sudden movement: “Qui m'écoute l"
“M'aimes-tu ?” pursues the sweet questioner,
and two chords, anticipating Romeo, hasten to
speak for him. The dialogue is constantly
broken, but never disjointed ; with continuity
ever renewed, it is no less a unity; now there
is a brief movement full of insinuations and
reticences, and again long periods of lyric elo-
quence. Throughout this passage Juliet plays
the principal rôle, with a widely different action
from that of Marguerite; she does not so much
abandon as give herself voluntarily, and the
child, no less wise than loving, herself fixes the
sacred condition of this, her free giſt. And
with what a loyalty and brave purity Through
the alternating transports and vows of these two
lovers the music is pervaded by a most delicate
sense of woman’s love and of man's ; the two
characterised and distinguished by two respon-
sive, musical phrases, resembling one another
and yet differing, as in Juliet's “Et mon hon-
neur se fie au tien,” and Romeo's reply, “Ah!
Charles Gounod. 2O7
je te l'ai dit, je t'adore | " They move with the
same rhythm, each borne upon a harp accom-
paniment ; and yet Romeo's song, animated by a
more virile spirit, springs from the more robust
breast with a passion which is grand. The rein-
forced notes of the accompaniment, changed
from three time to four, run into more eager,
rapid arpeggios as the violoncellos fortify them
with their deep unison. Thus all the elements
of music concur to the perfecting of the moral
analysis; thus are the affinities and values main-
tained between the two figures, and thus does
variety lighten that which might have been mo-
notonous, and delicate exactitude clear all which
might have been confused and vague.
Calmly the act approaches its completion,
retarded by charming parentheses and grace-
ful délours; as, for instance, Juliet's phrase,
“Comme un oiseau captif,” in which the music
imitates — almost reproduces — the picturesque
image of the poet ; or, again, the Sweet nocturne
with which the act begins and ends.
Let those who fail to see any essential dif-
ference between “Faust’” and ‘‘ Roméo et
Juliette" recall, as they listen to this epilogue in
“Roméo,” a similar situation in “Faust.” Be-
neath Marguerite's open window, melodies and
Sonorous tones blend voluptuously; every modu–
2O8 Charles Gounod.
lation is a surrender, every cadence a fall, in
very truth, as the orchestra, trembling with im–
patience, melts into languor. One evening, as I
sat by Gounod's side, listening to this music, he
suddenly asked in his deep voice: “My child,
dost thou not feel the touch of a woman's hair
about thy neck P” And, in truth, it was with
but a faint smile that I answered the Strange
question, for all through this music one seems
to catch a perfume and to feel the tightening of
a caress in the melodies of oboes, flutes, and
horns, and all the enveloping sweetness of the
delicious symphony.
But nothing of all that lingers in this melody,
which rises from beneath the window which
Juliet has just closed behind her. This serene
song, with its pure accompaniment, descends in
equal degrees, with no strange, trembling ac-
cents, but ever breathing the assurance that this
garden of Juliet's is not that of Marguerite, and
that, perfumed with love as they both are, yet
this love is not the same.
“I think,” Gounod wrote from St. Raphaël
in April, 1865, – “I think that I have found a
little interlude which is both tender and passion- .
ate enough, as the curtain rises on Juliet's bed-
chamber.” And some days later, —
“At last I have it ! That plagued duet in
Charles Gounod. 2O9
the fourth act. Ah I wish I knew if it is
really they ; it seems to me that it is I have
seen them distinctly, these two lovers, but have
I rightly seen, – rightly heard them If they
could but tell me that I am right, or give me a
sign of approval I read this duet and re-read
it, and listen to it with all my ears, trying to
criticise its faults. I am afraid of being satis-
fied with it, so deceiving myself, and yet it has
burned within me, and does burn even now ;
it is in truth a real creation, and, at last, I be-
lieve in it. Voices, orchestra, – all play their
part ; the violins are passionate. Juliet's hesi-
tation, Romeo's anxiety, their rapturous embrace;
the sudden accents of the few measures in
the midst of the struggle between love and im-
prudence, —it seems to me that all is expressed.”
Gounod was justified in believing in his duet;
it was a creation of his genius at its best. The
“little interlude which is both tender and pas-
sionate enough "is no less beautiful than Faust's
“O nuit d'amour; ” and by a curious coinci-
dence, it seems, at least in the first measure, to be
the same phrase reversed, falling, as it does, in-
stead of rising. It too might well be given as a
perfect model of Gounod's phrasing. It possesses
all his characteristic marks, – facility, elegance,
a tenderness which is both intimate and intense,
I4.
2 IO Charles Gounod.
an unobstructed development, and a fall which
is without precipitation. Little does it resemble
the Wagnerian phrase, – some love-passage,
from “Tristan,” for instance ; it does not
seek to express aspiration, tendency, and effort,
but rather a happy plenitude, an eternal desire,
eternally satisfied. As to the nuptial duet, we
may fearlessly compare at least a page of it to
Shakespeare's immortal duet.* There is nothing
Wagnerian here in either words or music; the
same antithesis, the same contrast between the
night and the day, are to be found, it is true,
in the great love-duet of “Tristan,” but trans-
posed there into the order and almost into the
language of metaphysics. In Shakespeare and
in Gounod, on the contrary, it is a concrete
image which symbolises the struggle between
the friendly night-shadows and love's enemy, -
the light; and all the philosophy of Germany
could never paint such a picture as do the two
words thrown out into the Italian night: “Le
rossignoll " - “L’alouette | " Again what bril-
liancy does this music add to the poetry, - yes,
even to this poetry | The transport of the
1 JULIET. Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree;
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Charles Gounod. 2 II
words is reinforced by the melody, gaining
through it an added light and power. For a
moment Gounod envelops Shakespeare and
draws him on, — music like the fabled river
floats gold upon its waves. If the “Roméo"
of Gounod sometimes lacks fire and violence, is
not Southern enough in its warmth, and has more
of tenderness than of passion, these, at least,
among its pages are beyond such reproach.
These are “two children of the country where
all is light . . . ; ” here speaks to us the Italian
nature, with its volcanoes upon the surface,
and its moral life, so prompt to show itself, so
ready to burst forth from the secret confines of
the inner “ I.” Melody, orchestra, all pours
itself forth unreservedly ; never before had
Gounod shown such an expansive strength, nor
an equal power of projective energy.
This power he has carried to its height in the
beautiful scene at the tomb. The last act of
“Roméo et Juliette" is perhaps born of a greater
musician even than he who wrote the final act
of “Faust; ” the latter is grand in its repetition,
the former in its ever renewed beauty. There
is but one progression of tonality in the finale
of “Faust” and in the triple invocation, “An-
ges pur, anges radieux; ” the melodic formula
1 Emile Montégut, loc. cit.
2 I 2 Charles Gounod.
resting ever the same. But in “Roméo,” on
the contrary, the progressions are more than
tonal, the exaltation of feeling from beginning to
end is expressed by a gradation of increasingly
pathetic phrases, by a redoubling of sad, fervent
eloquence, and by Romeo's more and more im-
passioned adjurations to his dead love. The
liberty of the musical thought at this point is
as admirable as its abundance. This symphonic,
singing music, is slave to no precedent, nor to
any other system. Lovely as it is by virtue of
its melodies and chords, by its tone-quality and
accent, it is beautiful, too, in the elaboration
of its themes, – as in Juliet's awakening, — or
simply in their abrupt return, as in the repetition
of the lark-theme. All conspires to make of
this act a sort of assumption. The last scene
of “Sapho" was the masterpiece of a calm
which was almost immobility; whilst this lovely
finale of ‘‘ Roméo et Juliette ’’ rises ever and
moves upward to the consummation ; the one
music “static,” the other “dynamic,” say the
Savants. Be that as it may, let it suffice us
that Gounod, the musician of love, never before
wrote of such a love as this. For what is the
dénouement of “Faust” as the light of Romeo's
soul falls upon it? This higher ideal has raised
its music to a higher level. The last of the
Charles Gounod. 2I 3
four quartets in “Roméo,” confirms and is the
consummation as it were of all the others ; it is
the supreme consecration of that invincible,
absolute unity which raises the love of the two
children of Verona above the love of all history.
Love, it is said, melts two Souls into one,
pares aut invenil aut facil; and if the last pages
of this opera are the most beautiful it is because
in them we hear for the last time the voices of
those two souls, so at one in their love, as they
stand on the threshold of their eternal union.
V.
Mgr. Gay once wrote to Gounod: “I know
thy soul well. It is only in God that it will at
last find true repose, and blossom into fullest
beauty.” The priest understood the artist: it
was only after work, and fatigue, even exhaus-
tion, that this soul finally found rest in God,
there to send forth its last if not its most
beautiful flowers. The musician of “Sapho"
and “Ulysse,” of “Faust” and of “Roméo et
Juliette,” of the “Rédemption ” and of “Mors
et Vita,” passed his years in the beautiful order
of a perfectly rounded life: his early days in
the old world of the gods, then years of love
2I4. Charles Gounod.
and lastly years of self-consecration. If his
youth was that of a Levite, his old age was that
of a patriarch, and the religious sentiment which
never fully left him, occupied, at the last, his
whole soul. I say sentiment, for in speaking
of Gounod the word seems to come naturally to
the lips; but it is the religious idea, – too, that
we must consider, for Gounod was a Christian
as well through his intelligence as through his
heart, and was possessed of no less faith than
love. No contemporary artist has so shown
his genius to be affected by the idea, – the pas-
sion, of the divine, and of the divine in all its
phases; he sought for and worshipped it in all
Truth as in all Beauty, -in the doctrine of the
gospel, in the genius of Mozart ; in a page of
St. Augustine, a symphony of Beethoven, or a
formula of Copernicus or Kepler. Many are
the essays upon philosophy or theology found
among the manuscripts which he has left:
“Etudes de logique,” signed Abbé Gounod;
“Méditations sur la prière ; ” notes on “L’His-
toire comparée des religions; ” on “La Foi et la
Raison ; ” or on “L'Hostilité envers l'enseigne-
ment de l'Église.” Again we find an “Essai.
philosophique sur les Dogmes; ” a beautiful
translation of “Dix sermons du pape Saint
Léon sur le fête de Noël ; ” and, finally, among
Charles Gounod. 2 I 5
his papers is a large sheet on which the master
has grouped, in a wide semicircle, the principal
articles of the Christian faith, designing a
species of chart, which demonstrates the meta-
physical and moral world.
It was thus that Gounod the believer medi-
tated ; but when the artist within him awoke,
there came a metamorphosis, or rather a reac-
tion ; his thought was modified in passing from
the domain of the intellect to that of the senses,
from a speculative to a formal order, — that is,
to the special order of sonorous forms. His
ideas adapted themselves to that tenderness,
which, as we have seen, was the essential charac-
teristic of his genius, and Gounod, musician of
the Christian world or of the pagan, was always
and above all the musician of love. Scan-
dalised by what they deem an impropriety, even
a sacrilege, men have reproached him in great,
swelling words, uttered against his “voluptuous
piety" and “erotic mysticism.” The author of
the “Redemption ” has been counted little
less than the Renan of music, - this equivo-
cal singer of piety without faith, whose harp
rings with the sweetness of a lyre, and who
celebrates after the same fashion the love divine
and all other love.
All this is more than a misunderstanding ;
2 I6 Charles Gounod.
Such criticisms show lack of acuteness as well
as of justice. In the first place, let us remem-
ber that the laws by which a certain style shall
be appropriated to sacred subjects, do not per-
haps rule under artistic conditions with the same
rigour with which they hold in the literary world.
Art, being a less direct mode of expression than
speech, would seem to warrant a freer inter-
pretation, through its Sonorous or plastic forms,
than must be conveyed through words; and
in art the ever-unsullied purity of truth, even
of religious truth, suffers certain liberties.
The brush does not wound as does the pen,
and while Renan needed but two words where-
with to uncrown Christ, Veronese could seat
his Lord at a patrician banquet beneath the
porticoes of Venice without impiety. And
music would seem to be still more privileged ;
its language, which can be so ardent and yet so
pure, is that which permits the expression of
divine and human love through the same chan-
nels, and with least risk of irreverence. Surely
it could only be in music that the one phrase
could assume to voice Polyeucte's baptismal
ecstasy and the amorous raptures of a Romeo ;
Sound may attempt such twofold duty, but
words never ! Moreover, what musician, or
artist, to speak more generally, changes his
Charles Gounod. 217
style with his subject P Does not each creator,
rather, reduce the infinite diversity of things,
ideas, and sentiments to the unity of his genius 2
Even in his secular music, Palestrina conserved
his piety, and his madrigals differ from his
motets in words only. Händel borrows cer-
tain pages of his sacred music from his own
operas; the Mozart of “Idomeneo" and he
of the “Requiem" are not two Mozarts, and
Beethoven is but one in his “Missa Solennis "
and his choral symphony. These are illus-
trious examples and noble excuses if Gounod
were in need of such. But is he, in reality ?
Love, to be divine, does not cease to be love,
and Gounod could not but sing of it as such ;
that he has always given it the highest, noblest
expression of which love is capable is not to be
questioned ; and is it nothing that he has added
its deepest note of tenderness 2 Mysticism is
not all of religion, nor all of piety, but it is a
legitimate element of both, and, as such, does
it prevail in Gounod's music. His master-soul
was one of those of which Fénelon wrote in
his “Lettres spirituelles,” or rather to which he
wrote, in warning and reproof, understanding
and loving them in secret, because they so
resembled his own soul. “They are all senti-
ment,” he says, “accepting as real only that
2I 8 Charles Gounod.
which they can feel or imagine. And finally,
becoming enthusiasts . . . they follow Jesus
Christ for the miraculous loaves and fishes; they
would have quails in the desert, and like St.
Peter, they would ever be setting up tabernacles
on Mt. Tabor, and crying, “It is good for us to
be here !' Happy the soul which is equally
faithful in the midst of material abundance or in
rigorous privation. . . . Which eats the daily
bread of pure faith and neither longs to taste
some blessing of which it has been deprived,
nor to see what God has hidden. . . . When
one loses this desire of the senses, without
at the same time losing his faith, he is but
as a child weaned from its mother; hard, dry
bread is not so sweet as milk, but it is more
nourishing.”
These words of Fénelon seem to express all
that which the religious art of Gounod pos-
sesses, and all that which it lacks. The food,
then, of his genius is fervour and the satisfaction
of the senses, the rapturous love of Tabor's
heights rather than simple volition and pure
faith, – in a word, milk rather than bread ; but
if it must be acknowledged that there are more
solid nourishments, at least none are more deli-
cious. The great ancestors of music gave to the
world the necessities of their art ; Gounod has
Charles Gounod. 2 IQ
given us its luxuries. Palestrina and Bach raised
giant cathedrals, and in their lofty shadows Gou-
nod has built his church. White and beautiful,
perfumed with flowers — with joy we enter its
portals to meet with God. I like to imagine
it, to hear it, as in a dream, harmonious with
the music of the master; there no songs but his
own should be Sung, — a beautiful liturgy, com-
posed from three works: “Polyeucte,” “Mors
et Vita,” and the “Redemption.” Beautiful
and complete, for in it we should find recitals
and illustrations from the sacred Book, as well
as meditations and prayers; serving now for the
celebration of life's events, and again for the
voicing of the soul's prayer.
“Polyeucte” is Gounod's work of transition
from his operas to his oratorios. Dealing, as it
does, with love and with Christianity, one would
be justified, from this twofold subject, in the
expectation of a masterpiece. The work is
Somewhat disappointing, and still it contains
within itself at least one masterpiece, — a beau-
tiful bit of sacred eloquence. I refer to the
scene in which Polyeucte reads the gospel to
Pauline, as she lies in prison. In the name of
their love, in the names of the gods whom they
both had so long worshipped, Pauline suppli-
cates her husband, but in vain ; for all answer, he
22O Charles Gounod.
opens the gospel and reads, beginning with the
Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, “When
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.” It is
to the music of an old-time Noël that the mys–
teries of the divine truth are chanted. Imper-
turbable in its pious reverence, the voice recites
along a single note, accompanied by but one
oboe; and thus does a simple interlude accom-
plish that which an entire opera would have
been incapable of, - the creation of a moral and
historical antithesis, summing up within itself
all the elements of a great subject. Paganism
and Rome and the old world crumble before
the notes of a shepherd's pipe. The excited pa-
trician woman vainly resists the swelling tones.
“Now,” the voice goes on, “Now when they
had condemned Him, Jesus was led forth to
Golgotha.” Who, after hearing this music, will
refuse to Gounod a dignity, even a sublimity of
style, in his religious art 2 Nowhere in music
has the Crucifixion been more beautifully por-
trayed. “And I, if I be lifted up from the
earth, will draw all men unto me.” And so,
the slowly rising voice of Polyeucte seems to
elevate all with an ever-increasing power of
attraction. Each note, higher than the last, is
stronger and more brilliant, while the orches-
tra quiets into sadness. Its hesitating trip-
Charles Goullod. 22 I
lets creep through the shadow, but the voice
mounts up and up, till at the words, “And the
heavens themselves wept,” breath and notes
seem to fail, and reaching the summit it falls and
breaks. Gounod, as is shown by the altera-
tions in his manuscript, long sought for this
beautiful cry of Polyeucte’s ; and only once
again in his lifework did his genius reach such
eloquence. In an unpublished collection of his
thoughts we find this exclamation : “Man has
cost — a God; and God costs man nothing.”
One seems to feel in these few words, as in the
music of “Polyeucte,” all the gratitude and all
the awe of the man whose redemption has cost
the sacrifice of God.
Gounod's oratorios of the “Redemption ”
and “Mors et Vita" are neither complete nor
powerful works, and their music may at no point
be more pathetic than that of “Polyeucte,” but it
is often more touching. They weaken and relax
— with grace doubtless, and still they weaken ;
they are less the monuments of a robust faith
than of a tender piety, and, if in time to come
they crumble and fall, there will be nothing aus-
tere or terrible in their ruins. ‘‘ Mors et Vita | "
While this title alone — the order of the words
— announces a grand design, the work shows
only a sentiment, which, while often profound,
222 Charles Gounod.
is more often only exquisitely beautiful. Its
beautiful “Judex" is familiar to all ; composed
of one theme, which is presented first by the or-
chestra alone and again with the addition of the
chorus, this phrase is most characteristic of
Gounod's genius. It bears the suggestion of a
certain phrase in the “Faust” prelude, but im-
measurably expanded, Surrounding in its nobler
curve a larger and more radiant space. We
recognise even in the accompaniment the regu-
lar triplets with which Gounod loves to sustain
his noble songs. “Judex I " What a tender
judgment, in which all shall stand at the right
hand of the Judge | What ineffable tenderness
in the melody, which seems not to rise as though
to curse but to open in a divine embrace
They reproach it with being passionate. Per-
haps — if passion signifies love ; but not if it
means suffering, for all is love in this music and
nothing suffers. The Christ of which it sings is
not so much the awful judge of Michael Angelo,
as Raphael's Christ of the “Theology,” — He
who, enthroned upon the clouds, sees none but
saints around Him, and beneath Him only the
happy elect.
For “happy” is the significant word of this g
music : and the “Beati qui lavant stolas Suas,
— Felix Culpal " reveals the real Gounod.
Charles Gounod. 223
“Beati qui lavant stolas Suas in Sanguine Agni.”
The sacred text conveyed to the mind of the
musician more of a picture than of a doctrinal
idea, a scene rather than a sacrament. I remem-
ber that when Gounod played this page of music
he would comment, with an emphasis on the pro-
noun : “Elles lavent, elles lavent en chantant.”
In spite of himself his characters were femi-
nine, and for us, too, these graceful rhythms and
clear triangles, tinkling like bells, evoke a pas-
toral that is indescribably feminine and primitive.
In a mystical prairie which Van Eyck has strewn
with flowers, the holy washerwomen plunge
their linen tunics in the blood of the Lamb.
‘‘ Felix culpa" – “Happy sin that gave us
such a Redeemer I " Gounod, more sensible of
the happiness than of the sin, forgets here the
crime, only to remember, — and with what love I
— the Salvation and the Saviour. Such a mel-
ody is worthy of study, without consideration
of any psychological signification. It is in the
fullest acceptation of the word a melody — a
musical idea — and in the following quotation we
find Gounod's understanding of the term : —
“An idea is an exact musical form, which
Seizes upon me on a sudden and unexpectedly,
and more than that a prolific form, containing the
entire passage which it ushers in : a passage which
224 Charles Gounod.
unfolds itself, clear, powerful, one, in such a
way that I am not forced to grope about after
its robust identity. The conception emerges
from the principle not by means of artifices
and arbitrary complexities, but by natural gen-
eration. . . . The property of a melody is not
that it should consist of a more or less vague
form, but of a sharp silhouette, a distinct con-
tour, fastening the attention from its first ap-
pearance. It should not be an enigma, a
problem, but a clean concise figure ; in other
words, a self-existing creature. Every chance
succession of notes does not constitute a mel-
ody. The succession must conclude in a com-
plete reality living in and consistent in itself. If
we take Cherubini's lovely cantilènes from
Mozart’s “Figaro: ‘Je ne sais quelle ardeur
me pénêtre,’ and “Mon coeur soupire,’ and
separate them for a moment from the sentiment
which they express and the delicate orchestral
accompaniment, it will still be evident that they
exist in and for themselves; that they contain
all that which constitutes the meaning and pre-
cision of an idea, - the clean-cut contour, the
characteristic, equalised rhythm, even the har-
mony implied in the melody.”
Ideas, so understood, were formerly the very
essence of music, while to-day they count for
Charles Gounod. 225
nothing. Mozart knew no other mode of
thought, and in this Gounod resembled the
older master, to whom he constantly appealed.
It is from the phrases of Mozart that such a
passage as “Felix culpa " emanates ; of its
thirty measures not one is motiveless, still less
alien to the others. Nothing arrests nor mis-
leads its continuity; and it neither hastens nor
lingers, sure of finding all along its happy path
resting-places of delicious repose. Continuous
and yet well distributed, it is a perfect example
of order and harmony, not in its combination,
which is simple, but in succession and devel-
opment. Never was the cadence, so dear to
Gounod, sweeter and more full of love. Before
such a page we forget to ask whether the work
fulfils the promise of its rather ambitious title.
In “Mors et Vita’’ we realise that the senti-
ment more than once triumphs over the idea,
but — like that sin which Gounod himself sings
so tenderly — it is a “happy" fault.
“Tu fis ton Dieu mortel et tu l'en aimas mieux.”
This line might serve as epigraph to the
“Redemption,” it so well expresses the pene-
trating charm and touching beauty of the music;
that same passionate, piously amorous sweet-
ness which seems more in homage to the hu-
IS
226 Charles Gounod.
manity than to the divinity of Christ. In speak-
ing, just now, of the liturgy of Gounod we ob-
served that it might contain both narrative and
prayer. After the crucifixion of “Polyeucte”
this is the Resurrection ; not only the miracle
itself, - the sublime uprising from the dead, but
the scenes which follow, touching so closely
upon our human nature, and therefore so ap-
pealing to Gounod's genius, – the holy Marys
at the sepulchre, and the apparition of Jesus in
their midst. Criticism has weighed heavily
upon these exquisite pages; the holy visitants
have been accused of too friendly an eagerness.
They run too like very peasant-girls, it is said,
but the critics have failed to recognise the simple
naturalness of their pious haste. Who can say,
then, just how they hurried along the Judaean
pathway on that morning, two thousand years
ago 2 And what could be more appropriate than
this pastoral, this sad Noël of death They ran
to the tomb, these humble women, as thirty-two
years before the shepherds had hurried to the
manger, crying as they went ; and the naïve Sym-
phony is melancholy with something, too, of the
Springtime, almost smiling through its tears; for
they were hastening through the fresh, sweet air
of an Oriental morning to render sad but tender
service to their dear buried Lord. But let us
Charles Gottnod. 227
not undertake the defence of a great art, which
we need not, in fact, consider as menaced ;
rather let us admire unhesitatingly its familiar
and touching form, its primitive but profound
feeling, and its true and beautiful realism, recog-
nising in it that twofold ideal which in Gounod's
words is both “above us and in our hearts.”
Such music as that which records the words
of the angel to the holy women is, indeed,
“above us ; ” especially the last, “Come, see
the place where the Lord lay.” Before this
passionate fervour, cry no more of Sacrilege |
Gounod has justified himself, not only by piety,
but by the strictest, simplest faith. “These
cloths have touched the divine brow.” These
rapturous notes sing a dogma of love above all
other love. “Behold my body,” said Christ,
and Gounod's cadence is sublime, letting us
almost feel the presence of that Body and
Touch Divine. And here, again, are the beau-
ties which lie “in our hearts.” Having seen
the Lord, and heard Him speak, the holy women
go away, not as they came, but consoled and
joyful; and their report to the Apostles, the
Mendelssohnian Scherzo, the pious chatter — I
had almost said the gossip — of the women, and
the haste and emulation of their recital, all
forms a masterpiece of primitive realism and
228 Charles Gounod.
familiar truth. Astonished, and perhaps a little
deaf to the women's excited words, the Apostles
doubt : “And their words seemed to them as
idle tales,” says St. Luke, till the necessity of
convincing them raises the humble messengers
above themselves ; they recount no longer, but
proclaim and confess as the Sacred testimony
bursts from their eloquent lips. There is a
happy antithesis between the gentle simplicity
of the preceding pages and this sacred song :
“Thy paternal goodness, Lord, teaches the
faithful Thy law.” There is no grander move-
ment in the entire work than this beautiful cry
of holy love; and never has Gounod's melody
risen to greater heights in the ever-widening
circle of its flight.
The dogma of the “Redemption " was the
favourite article of Gounod's creed.
“The first, luminous, fertile, inexhaustible
principle from which flows, in its entirety, the
grand, invulnerable economy of the Catholic
doctrine, is the dogma of the original Fall
appealing to the dogma of the Redemption.
Outside of it, there is no solution to the reli-
gious problem ; nothing but a terrible chaos
over which man's misery and God's cruelty
hover like despairing phantoms. But with the
belief in the original Fall, and that of the Re-
Charles Gounod. 229
demption, all is explained in an order so calm,
luminous, and satisfying that the mystery itself
seems to disappear before the enraptured mind
and heart, so soothed is man's conscience and
the world's misery by this ineffable reconcilia-
tion of justice with divine goodness.”
We find a spirit which corresponds with
this statement of his creed in the prologue to
Gounod's oratorio of the “Redemption ; ” an
anticipatory summary which the work itself
simply paraphrases in narrative and prayer.
This prologue is the most dogmatic and doc-
trinal of all the master's music ; but even its
doctrine and its dogma are warm with tender-
ness. The typical Christ-melody, which first
appears here, is more loving, and appeals more
closely to the in most soul, than does the mel-
ody of “Judex,” in “Mors et Vita.” The little
choral, “The earth is my possession,” is deli-
cious in its divine benevolence and amenity ;
while the play of the violins which crowns it,
and the last words of the Saviour as he offers
himself, “Oh, my Father I come,” are of an
unparalleled sweetness. Thus did one and the
same spirit breathe through Gounod's writings,
whether in literature or in music. This short
prologue, which we have just analysed, is a
fitting conclusion to our study of the master,
23O Charles Gounod.
for we find in it a last, complete revelation of
that ardent soul and beautiful genius whose
every thought became a passion, and whose
every act of faith found its completion in an
act of love.
VI.
And such as we now know him to be, where
shall we place him but in the sphere of clear
thought and tender sentiment P St. Bernard's
“Ardere et lucere " might have served Gounod
as the motto of his life, for his work was
instinct with warmth and light. If we choose,
at hazard, any one of his finer melodies, – the
stanzas of “Sapho; ” the canticle from the “Re-
demption,” “Vos bontés paternelles; ” “Felix
Culpa,” from “Mors et Vita; ” “Salut, demeure
chaste et pure" from “Faust; ” or the Lark-
duet from “Roméo et Juliette,”— each page
burns with the flame of that love whose many-
sided beauty we have been studying. The love
which Gounod sings is less violent than tender;
neither fierce nor frantic, one never fears to find
it, as so often in Wagner's passion, the brother
of destruction and death. And, moreover, it is
the love which is loved for itself alone, in its
purity, borrowing no interest either from the
Charles Gounod. 23 I
world's epics, as do Wagner's heros and hero-
ines, or from history, as do Meyerbeer's. And,
finally, it is an intimate, familiar love, which was
unknown to French music before Gounod's time,
— the opera in France being more ambitious
in those days, and the opéra-comique lacking in
depth and poetry. Exempt from frivolity and
bombast, the art which Gounod inaugurated was
also free from complications and obscurities.
His melody is always clear ; mind and ear seize
economy and structure at once, following the
repetitions and the carrying forward, as it were,
of the original motive to ever-varying keys.
By virtue of this characteristic symmetry, Gou-
nod is a pure classic, and a son, not only of
Mozart, but of Bach.
The beautiful “Ave Maria " proves, of itself
alone, the latter affiliation. It is a perfect model
of Gounod's melodic formula, and the ease with
which it adapts itself to the harmonies of Bach,
shows that from the beginning it was implicated,
as it were, within them. The melody is light-
ened by the constant reproduction of like peri-
ods, but still more by the gentle descent of its
final cadence into light and peace. “There
can be no harmony,” Hegel says, with much
truth, “in chords which give only a contradiction
to the ear ; there must be a reconciliation before
232 Charles Gounod.
ear and soul are satisfied. Thus with the oppo-
sition there comes an immediate necessity for
the destruction of the dissonances, and a return
to perfect accord. Truth in every form of life is
but such a return to unity.” No musician, per-
haps, since the days of Mozart, has so loved this
“truth" in music as did Gounod, - realising,
as he did, that this return from dissonance
to consonance is the fitting end of a musical
phrase, and that which remains with us when
all contradictions are forgotten. Gounod's
melodies seem to accomplish, or at least to
follow, a human destiny ; having grown to the
ardour and passion of life, it is in serenity and
calm that they fade away and finally die. And
thus do they possess a twofold beauty : real-
ising a double ideal and inspiring in men a long-
ing for passion and for truth.
Even the life of Gounod himself was like one
of his own songs. Peace in his latter days de-
scended upon the soul which had been so full of
fire, leaving it bathed in light. He composed
but little toward the last of his life, and if
by chance he took up a pen, it was to write
not passionate but contemplative works, --
masses in the Palestrinian style, in which he
Voluntarily renounces himself, endeavouring to
sink his personality in that of the grand,
Charles Gounod. 233
pious old artist. I recall, too, a hymn to
the night, which was one of his last inspira-
tions, calmer and more august in its quiet strength
than “Le Soir.” Once, shortly before his
death, as he sang me this song, I seemed to see
his lifework pass before my eyes. I could see
all his passion and love ending in the unchang-
ing consonances of the serene melody, and I
realised that, in the genius of the master, and in
his own soul, those profound words of Amiel
had been accomplished : “Aime et reste
d'accord.”
SILHOUETTES OF MUSICIANS.
“TIBI DILECTISSIM.A.”
HAYDN.

T.
HAYDN.
A SPIRIT of peaceful activity and of serene
cheerfulness has seemed to pervade the
atmosphere of these last days, as I stirred the
dust where sleeps the charming soul of Haydn.
The ink of his manuscripts is faded, and the
pale notes, few in number, are sown along his
pages in a sort of old-time simplicity. One sees
God's own air and light between them. I have
read once more “The Creation ” and “The
Seasons,” Symphonies and quartets, and all
without fatigue to mind or body, for I was so-
journing in a world of forms, or rather of agile,
smiling spirits, where none were rude and none
were sinful, and few were sad ; for Haydn re-
membered the sufferings of his youth only to
pardon them. Haydn 1 A pretty name, simple
and easily uttered. As simple as he who was to
make it illustrious, for he was born of a wheel-
wright and a serving-maid in that land of Austria,
which was Mozart's fatherland and Beethoven’s
country by adoption ; the land which is doubly
238 Haydn.
the homeland of music, whose thoughts are
German and who sings with the voice of Italy.
Haydn's childhood and youth were beset
with difficulties. Taken away from his native
village by a kinsman, who realised, to some ex-
tent, the boy's talents, he was admitted as a
chorister to the cathedral of Vienna, where he
remained for ten years, working to live, and
already only living to work. At the age of six-
teen he was suddenly and most unjustly dis-
missed from the cathedral choir, when an honest
wig-maker, who indulged in a love for music,
received the boy into his house. It was not
until Haydn's twenty-eighth year that the great
Prince Esterhazy discovered and captured the
young genius for his own service. There he
remained, however, for thirty years, creating in
tranquillity innumerable masterpieces for a prince
who was not an unworthy master. Soon after
entering the home of the charitable wig-maker,
Haydn had, most unfortunately, married the
daughter of his benefactor; but the union was
an unhappy one, and apparently one which was
soon dissolved, for we find the young musician
easily consoling himself in the affections of an
Italian cantatrice, Mademoiselle Boselli, who
was herself attached to the musical household of
the prince. Rising with the dawn, clad in the
Haydn. 239
elaborate costume of a kapellmeister, — periwig,
shirt-frill, coat of fine cloth, and red-heeled shoes,
and wearing on his finger the ring given him by
Frederick II., - the little man, who was the
great Haydn, lived quietly on in his master's
Service, working gaily on from morning till
night, covering with his fine handwriting the
leaves of a paper which he never could find
Smooth enough or white enough to please him.
“He would never, perhaps, have left Eisen-
stadt,” says Stendhal, “if Mademoiselle Bo-
selli had not died. After her loss Haydn began
to feel an emptiness in his days.” And doubt-
less it was to fill this “emptiness” that he took
two journeys into England. With the shillings
earned over there in the fog he bought a sunny
little house on the road to Schönbrunn, in which
he lived the last years of his life, and where, in
1809, he died, with the din of the French
cannons sounding in his ears; praying for his
emperor, and reassuring his frightened domestics
with the proud words: “Know that where
Haydn is, no misfortune can come.”
His country had crowned his old age with
glory. On one occasion the Viennese aristocracy
gathered in the Lobkowitz palace to witness in
his honour a performance of “The Creation,”
which was an apotheosis. Ill and infirm though
24O Haydn.
he was, Haydn was present. The audience rose
to its feet as he entered, and during the concert,
as he seemed to be cold — Stendhal goes on to
say — scarfs and shawls were drawn hastily from
fair shoulders to warm the knees of the beloved
old man. When he retired, borne in his arm-
chair by lackeys in princely livery, the crowd
again sprang to its feet and broke into cheers as
the old master passed through, holding up his
trembling hands in blessing.
But the humble loved him no less than the
great, and the country-people looked upon him
with an affection which he warmly returned.
Each year he gathered together the farmers and
peasants of his neighbourhood, giving them a
banquet and some silver pieces each ; he was
wont to call this his “day of magnificence.”
But of all the gifts which he showered upon
these humble friends of his, the most magnificent
was that of “The Seasons,” — those musical
georgics which without doubt he dedicated in
thought to his friends of the fields; to all those
who live by the produce of the earth, and near
its breast; to all those who plough and sow, who
reap and gather in the grapes, and whom the
musician — the first to celebrate their joys and
their sorrows — has, as it were, consecrated.
It was Gounod, I believe, who said: “Haydn
Haydn. 24 I
has opened the window.” It is true, and by
the open window has entered the joy of the
country. Bach had held the German muse fast
within the sanctuary, and it was Haydn who
brought her forth. He led her out from the
church, even from the town, and she, seeing
for the first time flowers, brooks, fields, and
woods, has smiled in joy.
Haydn created the Symphony and the quartet,
those two most beautiful forms of musical art;
forms which Mozart and Beethoven developed,
indeed, but without altering their original model.
The “Eroica ’’ and the ‘‘ Pastorale '' are but the
noble posterity of such naïve and charming an-
cestors as the “Surprise,” “Roxelane,” or the
“Reine de France.”
As for the quartet, scarcely yet do we wor-
thily comprehend its beauty; so much does the
theatre absorb and spoil our tastes, so deeply
does the public allow itself to be interested in
buffoons and charlatans. To-day we think only
of getting out of ourselves; and one must turn
to the secrets of the heart to love the quartet,
that expression musical, and only musical, of the
inner life, – of meditation and pure thought ;
of the purest thought, in truth, unrestrained by
the intervention of the drama or by any person-
ality; of thought disinterested of all matter,
I6
242 Haydn.
flowing on in the integrity of its being and in
the full freedom of its course. For chamber
music is the lovely companion of the heart in its
secret loneliness; enemy of the outer world, it
is the friend of retreat and of refuge, — of that
chamber whose door the “ Imitation ” counsels
us to close upon ourselves. Who shall say
what treasures of calm grace and sweet wis-
dom the good Haydn has hidden within his
peerless masterpieces !
Not long ago, at the Paris Conservatory,
one of the most simple of Haydn's sympho-
nies was performed immediately after the Pre-
lude to “Tristan.” Some learned persons
present smiled at the first quiet, unaffected
strains; but, as the agile melodies ran gaily
on, I thought I saw a smile on the face of the
old master whose portrait decorates one of the
medallions about the hall. “With what,” he
seemed to say, “with what were you torment-
ing yourselves a moment since 2 Whither were
they groping, those wild ardours and those un-
satiated desires 2 Believe me, art is not so
difficult, nor life so cruel, nor joy so rare
Among the ploughmen in their furrows, and
the reapers among the sheaves, and the grape-
gatherers along the slopes, there are always
those who sing.” g
II.
MOZART.
IN 1790, when Haydn was leaving Vienna
for London, Mozart, who loved the sim-
ple, kindly master well, threw himself, sobbing,
into the older man's arms. “Oh, my dear
Papa I’’ he cried, “this kiss will be the last !
We shall never see one another again l’” Some
months after, Haydn, when he learned that
Mozart was dead, exclaimed, weeping in his
turn, “My friends, will this world ever again
find such an artist 2 "
And in truth, such an one the world has
never since found.
Mozart, like Pascal, showed proof of his
wonderful genius in the days of his earliest
childhood. At five or six years of age, his
father, having one day surprised him in the act
of writing, asked him what he was doing. “A
concerto for the harpsichord,” replied the little
fellow ; and the father, having read over his
shoulder, and seeing that he spoke the truth,
244 Mozart.
fell to weeping from an emotion which was
almost fear.
Not long after this the elder Mozart, proud
of his boy's great genius, carried him through
all Europe; and all Europe applauded the
miraculous efforts of the wonderful child.
Through Germany and France, and even to
London the boy went on, gracious and smil-
ing in his coat of lilac cloth embroidered with
gold, his curled periwig, and little sword, sing-
ing, playing upon violin or piano, improvising
Sonatas and fugues, writing Symphonies and
operas, – exposing to the hazards of the way
the fragile treasure of his genius.
On returning to Salzburg, he entered the ser–
vice of the Archbishop, in whose house he sub-
mitted to all the humiliations undergone by the
menials of the great; he was already the author
of “Idomeneo,” whilst supping still at the
valets’ table.
Knowing only too well the meaning of pov-
erty, and feeling its privations all through his
young manhood, love was his one consolation,
— the love of Constance Weber, his wife. He
suffered cold, - almost hunger, — disdain, and
rebuffs, begging in vain for the most humble
positions, and not obtaining until after the ap-
pearance of his “Figaro" and “Don Juan "
Mozart. 245
the poorly remunerated office of composer to
the Imperial Court. His wife, his beloved
Constance, became an invalid, who lived only
through his tender, unremitting care. At the
waters of Baden, near Vienna, to which she
was sent, an humble chorister of the village gave
her hospitality. “Thou seest,” Mozart wrote to
her, upon a sheet blotted by tears, “thou seest
that I have wept much in writing to thee. But
a fig for sorrow ! There flutter about my head
an innumerable quantity of kisses.”
Sorrow, in the end, drowned the kisses; and
yet, a prey to misery as he was, the gentle
master heard for the last time happy spirits
sing, as the genii and the fairies dictated to him
the “Magic Flute.” At last came glory and
fortune, but they came too late. One Decem-
ber morning, at the age of thirty-five, he died.
They interred him but meanly ; his wife was
too ill to follow his body to the grave, and in
the raging snow and wind the few friends who
had at first accompanied the hearse, one by one
dropped away, till all that remained on earth
of that wonderful genius and simple, kindly man
was carried into the cemetery alone and laid in
a pauper's grave. When his wife, a few days
later, sought to find where he lay, the grave-
digger could only tell her that he knew not
246 Mozari.
what body she was seeking, nor where it had
been laid ; and since that day, none longing to
pray at the tomb of Mozart have known where
to bend the knee.
His life knew nothing but suffering, and yet
his work breathes nothing but happiness. His
art, which knew naught of his martyrdom, bears
neither trace nor proof of it; outside of and
above his misery Mozart dreamed of an ideal
felicity. It is with none but happy forms that
he has peopled the kingdom “where dwell,”
says Hoffmann, “the celestial enchantments of
sound.” His melodies live, like the flowers,
without trouble or sorrow ; when they fall in
death they are ever smiling, and their fall,
their death, is but the last and not the least
exquisite of their graces.
God apportions beauty amongst the great
artists. To each He assigns his portion in the
human soul, to each his place in the house
of many mansions. Blessed are the simple I
Blessed are the gentle I Blessed are the pure I
The genius of Mozart was crowned with these
three Beatitudes.
Mozart is purel No alloy corrupts his art.
He resembles that water-course of which Bos-
Suet writes, which never agitated the earth
over which it passed with such violence as to
Mozart. 247
detach one polluting particle that it must bear
onward in its waters.
Mozart is gentle ! The poor idiot whom
George Sand, as a child, Saw wandering through
the country, seeking everywhere for tenderness,
would have found his longings satisfied in the
music of Mozart. There happy tenderness,
pitying tenderness, all tenderness Superabounds.
In that treasure of love there is peace for all
disquietude, consolation for all suffering.
Mozart is simple, and because he is simple,
the power of his music will never decline.
There is as little as possible of matter in his
work ; it is all mind and soul. The ear is not
delicate enough to hear Mozart ; fingers are
too heavy to play his melodies, and words are
powerless to tell of him.
He died while writing the “Requiem,” ask-
ing for himself and leaving to us that greatest of
all gifts, – repose. He has done nothing repell–
ing, nor even obscure or disquieting. He is
not the musician of what we are but of what we
dream of being, and of what we shall be in the
hereafter. He is the musician of the future,
in the eternal meaning of the word ; and his
is the last happy genius of music. After him
comes Beethoven, the sublime sufferer, the
heroic conqueror of himself, the unequalled
248 Mozart.
exemplar of humanity ; Beethoven, who is as
beautiful as passion or the storm, and as infinite
as grief. Mozart is above all humanity — he is
as beautiful as the peace of the azure heavens
and as infinite as joy. He is, in truth, “le
jeune homme divin.”

III.
GLUCK.
O to the Louvre some bright summer day,
when the Sun is at its highest and hot-
test : there at the bottom of the Salle de Hou-
don you will find the old master. The vast
forehead and disordered hair, the face all pitted
with smallpox, the compressed lips, and the
rugged, Stern gaze of the eyes — there he is
behind a slender “ Diana,” and between a curly-
locked “Love" and a dainty “ Grief.” He
looks at his neighbours, never seeing them ;
such is not his love nor his sorrow. Then,
when you have seen the man himself, pass on
into the galleries of Greek sculpture, and there,
seated amidst marble queens and veiled virgins
bethink yourself of “Orpheus and Eurydice,”
“Alceste,” and “ Iphigenia,” and, for you, the
souls will return to these superb bodies, the
still beauty will breathe once more, and the mar-
bles will sing.
Gluck was nearly fifty years of age when he .
wrote “Orpheus and Eurydice,” his first mas-
terpiece; and, indeed, one never thinks of him
25O Gluck.
as young. Critics write of him and artists paint
him, not as an old man, perhaps, but in the wig-
orous maturity which the young Méhul knew so
well: in slippers and calico dressing-gown, his
head covered with a black velvet cap, pound-
ing furiously on his harpsichord. But his was
a sacred fury, and the gods dwelt within him.
Just what do men mean when they call Gluck
old-fashioned 2 — That in his music beauty does
not give place to passion, and that the paroxysms
of feeling respect the linear perfection. Life, and
the best that is in it, animates and fills his work,
but it is embodied in his music and never breaks
out impetuously. And thus there is something
of the plastic, concrete, and formal in Gluck.
He is not like Mozart or Beethoven, universal
and infinite ; he represents rather than suggests.
We can see no likeness to ourselves in his
heroes and heroines; we do not feel ourselves
their equals, and still less are we in touch with
them. Their sorrows are so proud and so
beautiful that they put our humble and — alas —
our ugly griefs to shame. They say to us:
“You suffer, but beside our own your suffering
lacks nobility and beauty. Whilst in your trouble
you struggle and make useless grimaces our sobs
are ever harmonious, and our marble eyelids
never swell nor redden beneath our tears.”
Gluck. 25 I
With Gluck joy, too, was as noble as grief,
and as serene. “The happiness of the blessed,”
he said, “must lie chiefly in the continuity and
therefore in the equality of their felicity. Thus
what we call “pleasure cannot enter such happi-
ness; for pleasure is susceptible of different
degrees; moreover, its edge becomes dull, and
it produces at the last Satiety.” Continuous and
equal — such indeed is the felicity which reigns
in the Elysian Fields of “Orpheus.” One
breathes in its atmosphere that peace and twi-
light softness with which pagan immortality was
content. All is antique in this music, even
to the melancholy of the flutes, in which we
seem to hear the echoes of that regret sung by
Homer, which troubled the shade of Achilles, –
the longing for the terrestrial, living activity of
flesh and blood.
But this music suggests the antique marbles
not only in its plastic qualities, but again in the
stability which is one of its strong characteris–
tics. Listen to the sorrows of Orpheus, Al-
ceste, or Iphigenia; long silences interrupt their
moans, as the orchestra envelops with its mag-
nificent folds their dumb grief. Gluck neither
hurries himself nor urges on his hearer; he
contemplates in leisure the beauty which he has
created for us. He has made lasting that art
252. Gluck.
which was the most fugitive, and calls forth for
us an illusion, which he holds in suspense. He
takes his time in prolonging our emotion, and
allows us ours ; he arrests for us that beautiful
moment which Goethe So longed to stay in its
flight.
The work of Gluck was music's first homage
to antiquity. Before his time the art of the
ancients lived again on canvas and in Stone,
beneath porticoes and arcades, and this resur-
rection had been christened the Renaissance.
One only of the muses had not wakened from
her long sleep. It is said that in the old days
Apollo, when he was a shepherd amongst men,
once laid his lyre down upon a stone, and that
the divine strings left upon their resting-place
melodies which were sublime. Surely, then, it
was Gluck who found the stone whereon these
god-given songs lay sleeping. He should have
been born three centuries earlier, in the days
when heroes and heroines sprang from the soil of
Rome. Then would he have sung of them in
all the brilliancy and bloom of their youth ; he
would have been the great musician of the
Renaissance and the beloved of the Medicis.
BEETHOVEN

IV.
BEETHOVEN.
MANY have been my misgivings at the
thought of attempting to write of Beet-
hoven in a few meagre lines. An admiration
which is near a fear seizes upon one after liv-
ing for but a little time under the influence of
his genius. He is so great ; the greatest of
musicians, – one of the greatest of mortal men.
The three contemporary master-minds, Napo-
leon, Goethe, and Beethoven, shared the uni-
verse ; conquerors, respectively, of men, ideas,
and forms. The writer and the artist were greater
than the warrior, in that all which they pos-
sessed they had themselves created. Think of
this : Beethoven is the man who has produced
the most beautiful creations of sound, and from
the same air which we all, indeed, breathe into
our breasts, but which he seems to have breathed
into his soul till it was Saturated with beauty.
In the domains of the other arts, which deal
with relief and colour, there exists no royalty
so supreme as that which invests the author of
254 Beethoven.
the nine Symphonies in his domain of sound.
The music written before his time, even that
of a Haydn or a Mozart, is a diversion or
pleasure, exquisite in its charm, and still only a
pleasure ; an art at times above us, and even at
times quite beyond us. Beethoven made music
a manifestation of life, a mode of thought, a way
through which to conceive of this world and to
express the conception. It is impossible to
define the music of the great master, or to char-
acterise it by this or that specific or moral attri-
bute. Say that it possesses strength, pathos,
Sadness, grandeur, − and still you feel that you
have Said nothing. It is something more, it is
music itself; possessing in itself alone the genius
of music in its fulness and its infinity.
No less than the “Archimède " of Pascal,
does Beethoven throw light into our minds.
Bettina once wrote to Goethe : “ Music is
soul, for it moves to tenderness; but it is like-
wise mind, in that while it excites the emotion
it also rules it.” And Beethoven could have
endorsed this definition of his young friend, for,
above all other, his music is mind. His work
is one of the grandest productions of reason
and human logic, and he who would write
the history of that department of the human
intellect that men call musical thought, must
Beethoven. 255
inevitably recognise that it is completely and
supremely dominated by Beethoven. He, of
all musicians, has thought with most grandeur,
force, order, and liberty;, beside him, Bach is
scholastic, Haydn, and even Mozart, a little thin,
Mendelssohn too elegant, Schumann obscure,
and Wagner extravagant.
So pure is the intellectuality of Beethoven's
genius that he has almost ignored the realism
of the theatre. Creating ideas and figures, his
word did not make itself flesh. Such abstrac-
tion is unexampled in the realm of the arts;
painting and sculpture have their models; archi-
tecture even, when she raises a palace or a tem-
ple, confines herself within the limits of the
chosen subject ; but in Beethoven's mind, on
the contrary, the thought exists and lives eman-
cipated from all concrete form. Without name
or form it operates, free from any determining,
and therefore any impeding, influence.
But Beethoven shines upon the soul no less
than upon the mind, and in this twofold glory
lies his incomparable splendour; he is more sub-
lime, perhaps, in his passion than in his reason,
and before and above the reverence which is
due to the grandest intellect of music, we may
love the unparalleled greatness of his heart.
Carlyle justly calls every superior man a
256 Beethoven.
hero, whatever may be the nature of his supe-
riority ; and crowns the memories of Dante and
of Shakespeare with this added honour. Well
might he have hailed Beethoven as the hero of
musicians, for he was all heroism in life and
work. All the world knows what he had to
bear, and how he bore it. At thirty he became
deaf- and Beethoven no longer heard the
music of Beethoven l He loved, and his love
was not returned. “To my absent love,” is
on the title-page of one of his collections of
lieder; and sadly enough, Beethoven's beloved,
— whether Thérèse de Brunswick, Juliette
Guicciardi, or Thérèse Malfatti, - seems to
have ever been “absent.” In one of his note-
books is this heart-broken prayer: “Hear me,
Thou Being whom I know not how to name
Grant the ardent prayer of the unhappiest of
all men, of the most unfortunate of Thy crea-
tures l’’ And elsewhere he cries : “While
waiting, I will keep up the brave struggle
against the rigours of fate ; they shall not suc-
ceed — I swear it ! — in bending me to the
earth.” And fate, in truth, did not succeed ;
Beethoven's work will eternally testify to his
struggle and to his victory. A symphony or
overture, even a sonata of his, is almost inva-
riably a moral representation, figuring forth a
Beethoven. 257
sublime effort, triumphing at the end. Mozart
possesses peace — Beethoven gains glory. What
is the Eroica Symphony, the symphony in ut minor,
the Trio dedicated to the Archduke Rudolph,
the sonata for piano, Op. I I I, the Kreutzer
sonata, – what is any one of these master-
pieces but the drama of a soul fighting against
destiny, sorrow, and passion ? Against the outer
world or against itself, -in a word, against a
force which it braves and finally conquers 2 We
know the intoxication of such a victory, and
with what rapture Beethoven grasps the con-
quered ideal. The all-powerful will, the highest
degree of human activity, is personified in his
work, and by this force of his genius he stands
at the head ; through it the Beautiful and the
Good are one. Life is a secret to the mind
and to the soul; “an open secret,” says Goethe,
into which the eyes of all men gaze, but which
few understand. Beethoven, of all musicians,
is he who gazed the deepest into this great
unknown.
17
V.
ROSSINI.
OSSINI, passing through Vienna in May,
1822, had a desire to meet Beethoven.
According to some, the master of the sym-
phonies received the author of “Il Barbiere
di Siviglia " with scanty warmth, and according
to others, he refused an interview altogether.
In truth, the two had nothing in common, for
Rossini was quite the opposite of a hero ; far
from pretending to any success at self-mastery,
he was his own complacent and obedient ser-
want throughout his life. Nature gifted him
with genius and laziness, and he tasted the de-
lights of both. He created much and yet
worked but little ; to become immortal, he
needed only to be born, and his master-
pieces are not the offspring of his labour, but
of his leisure, — deus haec olia, – of his divine
leisure.
What did he do in the hot days of his youth P
Be not displeased that in the glow of his twenty
years, and through the warm summer days of
ROSSINI,

ROSSini. 259
his beautiful Italy, he did nothing but sing.
From Venice to Milan, Rome, and Naples he
went, always with a melody—like a flower— on
his lips. We must forget the serious and premed-
itated in art to judge of, or even to understand,
Rossini; we must banish all thoughts of will,
and work, and effort. “Yes,” said he in his
old age, to one of his friends, “I have my
Italian career to reproach myself with ; but,
after all, I was young in those days, my friend,
and poor. I had to live, and to support a father
and a mother.” Father and mother were, the
one a player upon the horn, the other a seconda
donna in the provincial theatres ; and Gioachimo,
like his parents, was a strolling musician.
Through the writings of Stendhal we know
the mechanism of the Italian theatres of those
days and that quality of pleasure which the
public sought in them. Two or three months
before the opera season, the impresario, who-
ever he might be, hastily gathered together a
prima donna, a tenore, a basso buffo, a “second
lady" and “third man,” and finally a composer
to write for the several voices what was then
called an opera. Now from 1810 to 1816 Rossini
was none other than such a composer, of some-
thing like twenty just such works. “You
know,” he said to the pedants of his time, ac-
26O ROSSini.
cording to Stendhal, “you know that I have
scarcely six weeks in which to compose an
opera. I amuse myself for the first month. —
And when would you have me amuse myself if
not at my age and during my success * Would
you have me wait till I am old and envious 2
Finally the last fortnight comes, and I write
every morning a duetto or an air, which they
rehearse at night.” If it chanced to be in the
springtime, he wrote this “air” or “duetto’’ in
the sun ; if it was winter, for lack of a fire, he
would write in bed ; and if a page on which he
had begun to write slipped to the floor, rather
than disturb himself he would take a fresh sheet
and scrawl off something new.
With all this genius, beautiful as a god, and
improvising love as easily as music, it is no
wonder that prime donne and titled ladies con-
tended for his society, or shared it, rather; and
if by chance such an arrangement involved diffi-
culties between two less accommodating rivals,
he would sing them a gay air, and forsake both
ladies forthwith.
On the day promised, his opera would be in
readiness, a true festa Sotto i raggi del sole, ac-
cording to the pretty popular expression, a burst
of laughter in the Italian carnival. In those
days it was, for the most part, such operas as
Rossini. 26 I
“Tancredi,” “Italiana in Algeri,” “Pietra del
Paragone,” “Aureliano in Palmira,” or “Turco
in Italia,” that were given; or perhaps “Otello,”
or “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” — in the one a page
or two of sublime sadness, the other a master-
piece of joy. Light, and external, but living, it
is a joy of the senses rather than of the intellect
or of the heart, — a natural joy, like that of the
sun, the flowing streams, or the birds. In truth,
this grand trifier, in his early days, turned to a
jest all that is most serious in life or tragic in
the soul; he transfigured or disfigured every-
thing with a laugh. With the same insouciance
— one is tempted to say insolence — he wrote
a “Barbiere di Siviglia " Superior to Beaumar-
chais's and an “Otello " which is almost a parody
on Shakespeare.
Both works were equally applauded ; his
world accepted the lavish waste of his genius,
without attempting to choose or control. The
feast which he spread for enraptured Europe
was like one of those baptisms of the fairy stories
in which handfuls of gold are thrown pell-mell
into the crowd.
For twenty years did he play thus, and then,
one fine day, he conceived the thought of taking
himself and his fellowmen seriously. He real-
ised, at last, that he had a soul which must speak
262 Rossini.
to the soul of others, and thus he spoke of
country, of love filial and paternal, of nature and
of liberty. His genius approaches with its
wonderful facility the noblest of human senti-
ments and the grandest of earth's scenes, and
the author of “Il Barbiere" becomes the smiling
author of “William Tell.” But his smile is
deep and calm now, for “William Tell” is a
masterpiece of peace and serenity. Sublime in
its characters, and more sublime still in its nature,
this music, in its elevation and grandeur, is in-
deed the music of the mountains, and, in its fresh
purity, the music of the lakes. The mystery of
the forest lurks in it, and brilliant as the day, it
is yet as gentle as the night. The heroes which
it sings are no more ; the turf of Rutli guards
no trace of their steps, and no furrow of their
oars lies through its waters; but the nature which
this music sings, and which will remain forever,
will not cease to associate with its eternal beauty
that of the masterpiece in which it sees its own
loveliness reflected.
Rossini wrote “William Tell,” and from that
day till the end of his life did nothing more ; for
it was as nothing to him — that “Stabat” which,
like a crown of brilliant flowers, he hung one
Good Friday upon the cross. Having in a few
years paid off the debt which he owed to his
ROSSini. 263
genius, he set himself for a long fifty years to
the discharge of his duties toward his laziness
and his appetite. The musician became a cook;
and, more proud of his macaroni than of his
operas, he wrapped himself in his repose as in a
cloud, from which there broke every now and
again a burst of laughter. And thus, in the
midst of his good dishes and his jests, did the
author of “Il Barbiere " and “William Tell"
grow old and die; that Rossini whom some one
has cleverly described as a mixture of Punchi-
nello and Jupiter Olympus.
VI.
WEBER.
“I CANNOT praise this book too highly. It
is fragrant with the most delicate flowers of
the German mind, and he who would study the
German people in their most favourable light
should read it. It lies open before me, and
as I write I seem to catch the odour of our
northern lindens.”
The words are Henri Heine's, concerning a
collection of songs once published by D’Arnim
& Brentano, called “ l'Enfant au cor merveil-
leux.” And thus might one describe “Der
Freischütz.” As I write, its pages, too, as they
lie open before me, seem to exhale the perfume
of the lindens and firs of Harz. On some of its
pages shines the calm Summer Sun of a German
Sunday, while over others, pale in the light of
the moon, hovers the poetic weirdness of a Ger-
man night. Weber, patriotic above his fellows,
was the well-beloved son of Germany, in very
truth its “enfant au cor merveilleux.” After the
first representation of the “Tetralogy,” Wagner,
WEBER.

Weber. 265
intoxicated with his own genius, dared say to
the Germans, “Now you have an art.” But
his land had long since boasted a national art ;
“Der Freischütz” had been one of Germany's
masterpieces for sixty years when the “Ring
der Nibelungen” was born. And to-day it still
holds its place ; for, simply and profoundly pop-
ular, born of and for the people, it is to them a
part of their land and sky; their language, and
of their very blood and soul.
For “Der Freischütz,” which embodies Weber
heart and soul, is Germany herself. Not a trace
do we find in its pages of anything Italian or
classic, - this is the real opera of German ro-
manticism, and the first in which there has been
any suggestion of disquietude or trouble or fear.
The Haydn of “The Creation" and “The
Seasons” greeted the country with a gay Smile ;
the Weber of ‘‘ Der Freischütz" was seized with
fear when he discovered nature. He crowned
the brow of the queen of night with no diadem
of stars, as did Mozart ; and it was of no serene
splendour and radiant life, such as Rossini Saw,
that his strange voice sang, but of a secret undis-
covered and vaguely terrible.
All this is purely German. It is not the
qualities of right and wrong only which vary
with the various climates in which men and
266 Weber.
women live and sin and suffer. Three degrees
of elevation may overturn the rules of aestheti-
cism as well as of jurisprudence, and a meridian
or a river will decide the idea of beauty as clearly
as the idea of truth. The beauty of southern
Europe consists in an external loveliness and
the evidence of things admirable to the senses;
while, on the farther bank of the Rhine, beauty
is enshrouded in uncertainty and mystery.
Weber was the first of the great musicians to
voice the mystery of which the poet sings: “the
mystery of the waves, of night, and the forest.”
He adopted the most sober and the most power-
ful interpreters for his thoughts, one of his
characteristics being the strong popular colour of
his songs. No music is more naïve and at the
same time more profound than his ; it is ever
German blue eyes that look out at us beneath
locks of fair hair. But this is not all ; Weber
is a German romanticist by virtue of the timbre
of his instrumentation as much as, if not more
than, through his melody. Well do we know
what a picturesque eloquence he has given to
certain instruments, what a power of appeal and
of description. We hear the very voice of the
forest in the horn, which was never used before
Weber's time, save for the fanfares of the chase.
It is with a roll of the drum that he darkens
Weber. 267
the sky; but presently the note of an oboe
pierces the cloud, the sun smiles, and as the
'cellos sing, down there between the green
shutters of that little house we espy the hunts-
man's sweetheart. Simple folk, all these char-
acters in ‘‘ Der Freischütz.” Weber did the
honours of his genius to forest guards and rifle-
men ; to the people, in other words, and therein
lay a beauty hitherto unknown to music. I well
remember an evening several years ago at Dres-
den ; during the preceding fortnight I had twice
heard the complete “Ring der Nibelungen,”
and this evening had been listening to “Der
Freischütz.” After so much of heroes and gods,
the simple country-people charmed me more
than ever, because they were but men. Going
out into the evening air, I sat down by a bronze
statue of Weber, which was not far from the
opera-house. It was a lovely night; a fountain
was flowing near by, with a musical sound, and
the breath of the woods, which encircle the city,
was in the air. As I sat thinking over the great
works which I had heard, – the old genius of
Germany and the new, - I felt springing up
within my heart a wave of great admiration and
tenderness for the soul of Weber. Blessed be
the sublime, familiar master of the old days
Blessed be he who, popular in deed and in truth,
268 Weber.
came to the humble and the small, revealing to
them the soul of their race and of their Father-
land.
For he greatly exalted these “little ones,”
and raised the humble to high honour. How-
ever German Weber was, he was still more
human. “Der Freischütz” was symbolic and
suggestive — for these terms are in the fashion
to-day ; listen to the very end of the beautiful
Song of joy. Who then is acquitted and re-
deemed here P Max the huntsman alone 2
Nay, verily, but every man who has sinned and
is repentant, every soul which was wellnigh
lost and is saved 1 As for that curiosity for
what may be called the supernatural, who has
not felt the desire which torments Agnes's
sombre lover ? There are certain days when
we all have felt a mystery of uneasiness, almost
of fear, haunting the clouds and rocks, the
torrents and all nature. Far from the truth
was that voice which once sang to the waters,
that Pan — the great god Pan — was dead; he
is immortal, hiding in the forms and apparitions
of nature. He draws us to himself and ever
tempts us; for it is he whom Weber sought
and found in the depths of the Wolf's Glen.
MENDELSSOHN.

VII.
MENDELSSOHN.
Forgotten is the great artist, to-day,
or despised rather. Wagner detested him,
and too many Wagnerians follow their master's
example. M. Lamoureux fails to understand
him, plays him badly, and the Société Nationale
hate him perforce. Apparently M. de Bréville
undervalues him, and certainly M. Chausson
has no love for him.
But Goethe loved him. “I am Saul,” the
aged poet wrote to the young musician. “I
am Saul, and thou art David. Come to me
when I am sad and discouraged, and quiet my
soul with thy sweet harmonies.” He called
him precious, a divine young man, and send-
ing him once a manuscript of “Faust,” he
wrote on it, “To the powerful, sweet master
of the piano.”
Let us follow Goethe, and range ourselves on
the side of David and against the Philistines.
Let us love him, than whom none could be
more lovable ; possessed of an ardent Soul and
270 Mendelssohn.
noble heart, he lived with the gaiety of a child,
the enthusiasm of a great artist, and the serious-
ness of a young Sage; a delicious genius, arrested,
rather than crushed, by death in the bloom of
its youth, Mendelssohn possessed all gifts, all
graces, all charms, even the charm, so Su-
premely attractive, of happiness.
“A bourgeois musician,” they tell us now-
adays — the famous “they " to whose absurd-
ities the world is grown so used. The master
of “Elijah " and “St. Paul” a bourgeois 1–" St.
Paul,” in which there floats over the martyr
that song which the 'cellos accompany and
so delicately sustain, - a song as noble and
pure and divinely sorrowful as is the figure of
Christ in the “Descent from the Cross,” at
Antwerp. And I know in “Elijah "a song or
rather a sigh of the prophet which is weighed
down with a graver lassitude, heavier with
sacred weariness, than are the verses of the
poet of “Moise,” who surely is no poet of
the bourgeois : —
“O, Seigneur, j'ai vécu puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre.”
Such is the austere, Hebraic side of Men-
delssohn's genius, the powerful master of whom
Goethe speaks, but of whom the world knows
Mendelssohn. 271
but little; and again in the “Midsummer's
Night Dream,” “Fingal's Cave,” the “Songs
without Words,” and the symphonies, is the
Mendelssohn known of all men ; the sweet
master, elegant and distinguished, whom, in
this phase of his genius, as in the other, Goethe
knew and loved.
The overture to “Fingal's Cave" is a sound
aquarelle. Few music pictures so fulfil the
promise of their title, and few of them so rise
to the idea which they voice. Mendelssohn
has not merely described what one hears in
these singing, half-imprisoned waters, in the
echoes under the vaulted roof and the kisses
of the swell along the rocks; but with quick-
ened senses we seem to see the irised space, the
mother-of-pearl reflections, or the translucent
Sub-marine waters, and now and again, the
humid freshness of the Cave of Fingal brushes
across our brows.
After the music of the waters, there comes in
the “Midsummer's Night Dream,” the music
of the air. An overture all lightness and vibra-
tion ; a Scherzo, which dances along the tips of
the bows with the hum of the violoncellos and
the gliding of the flutes; a murmuring duet, in
which the flutes, grave and slow now, are the
points of light ; a nocturne, slumbering upon the
272 Mendelssohn.
greensward of a Shakespearian park ; and, at
the last, an allegrello, a little agitated in its
movement, but so little that one knows not
whether it betrays the trembling of a soul or
of a rose. And all this in one delicious sym-
phony, - a symphony of the atmosphere, whose
musical transparency and liquid Sweetness is un-
rivalled and beyond compare.
But such pictures as “A Midsummer's Night
Dream ” and “Fingal's Cave” are, in a way,
but the external genius of the artist, and not the
man himself. It is in the “Songs without
Words” and the symphonies that we must seek
the real Mendelssohn, – the timbre and the
tone-qualities of his soul's charm.
Poor old “Songs,” forsaken to-day ! With-
out words, indeed, but not without thoughts,
nor, above all, without dreams. They are grown
old, the critics say, and out of date. Perhaps,
and yet they bear the date of tender memories;
for the “Songs” had ceased to be forbidden
fruit to the little ones, and often, between
the two classical pages of a Bach fugue and
a Clementi étude, an indulgent master would
slip one of these melodies. They bear poetic
names, and the child who had deciphered
the “ Hirtenlied " or “The Cloud " believed
in his ingenuousness that he had discovered
Mendelssohn. 273
the infinite depths of melancholy and of
passion.
For Mendelssohn is easily melancholy ; his
soul is often keyed in the minor, – in the Sweet
A minor of his Scotch Symphony. He can be
passionate too, but his passion moves but lightly
over his genius; it rouses him, but never to
frenzy or even to trouble ; he loved its emotion,
but he fled incontinently from its disorder and
folly, and even in giving way to it never lost
command of himself. He was possessed with
a love of reserve and an aesthetic and moral
steadiness. In one of his letters, written upon
some journey, he complains of and excuses him-
self for having gone for three days without a
cravat. In music, he was never guilty of losing
his cravat, proscribing all slackness or negli-
gence in his work as in his toilet.
He was mindful of conventionalities, and
rightly ; for, in a sense, what is art itself
but a Supreme conventionality ?
And, moreover, Mendelssohn was given to
no extreme expressions or paroxysms of senti-
ment. Rarely did he say a sublime thing, but
often something exquisite.
Here and there, for he was sensitive, shad-
ows pass across his genius, as they must across
the most serene soul and the purest happiness;
I8
274 Mendelssohn.
but he was wise, and though the shade passes
it never lingers.
Listen to the wedding march in the “Mid-
summer's Night Dream,” young lovers, as it
conducts you to the altar, and you whom it
leads away, - made one. The music of Men-
delssohn should ever accompany the nuptials
of love, for it sings a passion which alone can
make love perfect, and a wisdom which alone
can make it lasting.
SCHUMANN.

VIII.
SCHUMANN.
“Aus der Heimath hinten den Blitzen roth
Da kommen die Wolken her.”
Do you know this lied of Schumann's, which
floats with such an inexpressible sadness
above its mournful arpeggios ? When I first
heard it, long ago, a young lady sang it. It
was towards the close of an Oriental spring,
and I sat near an open window which looked
out on the blue sea and sky of Alexandria. Of
a sudden, I seemed to see through the eternal,
unbroken azure the clouds of Europe; and in
the midst of that Eastern splendour of things
visible I longed for uncertainty and shadow,
for the Northern ideal clothed in its mystery
and sadness; and I would fain have asked the
singer, in Henri Heine's words: “Madame, do
you not smell the odour of the lindens 2 "
Never will those German lindens shelter a
sadder destiny than that of Schumann. As a
child in Zwickau, he picked out his first chords
on a miserable piano which had been relegated
276 Schumann.
to the back room of his father's little book-
shop; as a lad he lost the father who had
looked kindly on the boy's precocious talents,
and, left to the harsh guardianship of a mother
who entirely opposed his musical development,
it was not until his twentieth year that he suc-
ceeded in overcoming her resistance. “At
last,” he wrote then, “the sun shines in my
heart.” But his sun was not long in setting ;
for scarcely three years had gone by when
he received one night, which he somewhere
speaks of as the “terrible night,” the first warn-
ing of that dreadful inheritance to which he
was in the end to succumb. What evenings
those must have been which, after this, he
spent in the Leipzig beer-gardens, trying to
ward off some more fatal disorder in the fumes
of smoke, and doubtless of drink. Davids-
bündler, companions of David I Such was the
name adopted by his confrères, fellow-labourers
with him in a musical journal which he had
edited. Alas ! If he was David, he was also
Saul; and the gentleness of the music-loving
shepherd lad within him was never to heal the
spirit of the gloomy king.
Even his love cost him dear ; for the father
of his fiancée would have nothing to do with
him. “A great part of the suffering and strug-
Schumann. 277
gles which Clara cost me,” he writes, “have
found a voice in my music.” But in the end
his love triumphed ; and the poor, distempered
genius took refuge in an affection which, in-
deed, sustained him for fifteen years, but
which could not save him. The disease re-
turned with redoubled virulence ; until the hallu-
cinations, more and more frequent, at last never
left his mind clear. While in Düsseldorf in 1854,
though surrounded by friends, he one day stole
away and threw himself into the Rhine. He
was rescued, but only to a hopeless insanity;
and two years later death, the actual merciful
death, came to deliver him from what he had
once called in horror his living death.
Schumann's genius inevitably felt and was
affected by his disease. The author of “Faust,”
“Manfred,” and the “Lieder" is no joyous,
Serene master, such as was Haydn or Mozart:
and still less does his genius, like that of Bach,
appeal solely to the intellect ; nor is he, like
Beethoven, the master of passion and of hero-
ically vanquished Sorrow. Schumann voices an
omnipotent passion and an invincible grief. Only
a mediocre symphonist because wanting in order
and logic, he is an unequalled lyrist by reason
of the depth and strength of his emotion, —
greater even than Schubert in his lyrical genius,
278 Schumann.
through the strong individualism of his power.
From this point of view certain portions of his
“Faust" are exceptionally fine. Read, for ex-
ample, the symbolic dialogue between Faust
and die Sorge incorporated in his music, - an
idea of Goethe's, which is philosophical, almost
metaphysical, in its nature. Nowhere has he
demonstrated more tragically the combat be-
tween man and suffering, — that combat whose
lists he himself entered, only to be vanquished
at the last. Never has he called so desperately
from out his dark despair to joy and life, to
existence in all the plenitude of its possibilities:
that existence which in Goethe's eyes was not
only happiness but duty: “Dasein ist Pflicht.”
The dialogue will bear much study; it is strange,
a little obscure, but beautiful.
As to “Manfred,” it is mad, but it too is
surpassingly beautiful. It is the froth and bit-
ter quintessence, as it were, of Schumann's
genius. “This is a state of wild unrest,” said
the herdsman of the Jungfrau, as he met By-
ron's wild hero up among the mountain peaks;
“ this is not life and health.” “Manfred '' is a
masterpiece of wrath, mystery, and Sorrow ; of
an impious, blasphemous wrath, a criminal mys-
tery, and a cowardly, shameful sorrow. Its
beauty breathes poison and death, exciting our
Schumann. 279
troubled admiration and unwholesome fancies.
And still it is beautiful, and one feels inclined
to pity those who are not sensible to its charm
as well as those who feel it too keenly.
Too weak to develop and sustain, Schumann
excelled in concentration. The great master of
the lied triumphs in the short compositions, which
gain in depth what they lack in extent. Many
of his songs are startling in their power: “In
der Fremde,” for instance, in which one seems
to catch the very savour of death ; or “Frülings-
nacht.” If we compare this song of Spring
with Beethoven’s “ Adelaïde,” from which it
was derived, we see what a passion of fever
and frenzy Schumann has instilled into lyric
music. Or again read his “Ich grolle nicht,”
and say if ever the human soul has cried out so
bitterly through such heart-rending chords of
music. And finally listen to the last sepulchral
page of his “Dichter Liebe.” Measure the
“giant coffin ; ” listen, for you can hear it, to
the weight with which it lies on the shoulders of
the bearers, and with what a leaden plunge it
falls into the waters. Before dropping that
burden into the ocean, they had looked within
it, and behold it was heavy only with love and
pain I Only with a few heart-throbs was it so
heavy-ladened Schumann wonders, in his bit-
28O Schumann.
terness: and this investment of human per-
sonality with infinite power is the very height
of lyric art.
But perhaps of all his “Lieder,” the simplest
and the most humble are the most original ; for
Schumann was the great master of familiar,
homely lyric art. Do not relinquish those
sweet, heart-rending songs of his to the public,
but save them for the sacred hours of some
Secret sadness; they scarcely seem to be music
in their dumb suffering. Uncertain in their
Suspense, incomplete, vanishing in a Sob or a
sigh, they last but for a moment; but in them is
a sorrow which is infinite, even as all the bitter-
ness of the ocean lies in one tear.
AUBER.

IX.
AU BER.
NE cannot be always in the company of the
great musicians, so let us give a thought
to Auber, — it will not cost us many moments.
He has been called the Voltaire of French
music; in sober truth he was no greater than
its Scribe, but he was every inch a Scribe, as
the latter was, indeed, no less exactly, the Auber
of the French theatre. “Both have mind,
grace, sentiment, passion,” wrote Henri Heine
of the poet and the musician ; “the one is lack-
ing in poetry alone, – the other only in music.”
Scribe-Auber, Auber-Scribe, one god in two per-
sons, for they were, in very truth, the god of a
whole generation. They possessed a marvellous
affinity for one another; for forty years the
Opéra-Comique was composed of Scribe and
Auber, as a drop of water is composed of
oxygen and hydrogen. Their union was not a
combination, but so perfect a blending that the
words might have been Auber's and the music
Scribe's, with precisely the same result.
282 Auber.
In rereading a dozen of their pieces I found
myself living once again in the most absurd but
amusing world of gentlemen and shop-girls, dip-
lomats and prime donne, Senators and gondo-
liers. Once more do I see novices running to
masked balls, thieves paying court to English
ladies, and a young traveller, after a friendly cup
of chocolate one rainy day, marrying the niece
of a counterfeiter, only to find his wife develop-
ing later into the Queen of Portugal; — these
marvels being accomplished always to the air
of a waltz, quadrille, or polka. All sing, dance,
laugh, skip, and Sparkle ; no one is ever vulgar,
but all are extremely ordinary ; this trifling
music, now and then very charming, Sometimes
spirituelle, and even furtively sentimental, goes
to one's head like cheap wine.
M. Jules Simon once said of Auber, with
much truth : “His name is — facility.” And
again, but with less reason : “He is a magnifi-
cent exception,” for though with Auber every-
thing is facile, little or nothing is magnificent.
He was never at the head of the French school,
not even of the famous Opéra-Comique ; its real
masters are back of him. To place Auber above
Monsigny, Grétry, Bofeldieu, or “Le Maçon,”
and “Les Diamants de la Couronne "above “Le
Déserteur,” “Richard Coeur de Lion,” and “La
Auber. 283
Dame Blanche,” is to raise the king of the mo-
ment above the legitimate king. “Demain c'est
le sapin du trène; ” no, not even the fir, for of
that noble wood are the masts built which brave
the tempest, and the coffins made for our dead;
but the mahogany rather of which the bourgeois
make their furniture.
Auber is bourgeois. Only once — in Masā-
niello — is he popular, in the deep, true Sense of
the word ; and then not in that favourite duet of
the people: “Amour sacré de la patrie,” but
in the air of “Sommeil,” the one truly beautiful
page which he ever wrote. There, by some
chance, he touches the heart of the people; in
it he seems to understand the simple and the
unhappy, pities them and loves them. In a
few reverent, tender notes he implores for them
the blessing of rest, and over the Swooning
Fenella, the brotherly voice of the fisherman
spreads a mantle which covers, as Cervantes
says, not only human thoughts but human
SOTTOWS.
And then this vaudeville-musician returns to
his flon flons.
If only he had sought out the grace and even
the beauty which lies hidden in the most humble
walks for those who know to look. If he had but
extracted from the daily life of the most medi-
284 Auber.
ocre destiny some of the charm and perfume
concealed within its modest happiness and
quiet suffering ! But no In place of showing
the humble and the small that poetry and truth
lay within their reach, and that the flowers
which lie low in the grass are still flowers, he
dragged them away from their surroundings,
and disgusted them with themselves. He set
them dreaming of romantic shopkeepers and
ecstatic doorkeepers. He turned their heads
and worked upon their imaginations, and gave
them square dances and penny Songs for their
music and their poetry.
He was jesting, they say. No doubt, and
we will take him no more seriously than he
took himself; but what sorry jesting I Even
Rossini, the great laugher, never laughed in this
wise. Read over the musical comedies of these
two men ; compare, for example, the trio in
the first act of “Le Domino Noir,” however
charming it may be, with the final trio in
“Comte Ory,” and you will see how that
thread of niggardly gaiety is lost in this flood
of joy.
In speaking of a musician whom he consid-
ered too serious, Auber once said: “I expect he
will be attempting to make benches and arm-
chairs talk.” I do not know that the musician
Auber. 285
in question ever had any such intention, but
Auber himself entertained just such hopes all
his life, and with most successful results; but
are benches and armchairs just those things
which should be made to sing Doubtless the
music which he wrote was most appropriate to
the words of Scribe, but it is quite within rea-
son to suggest that Scribe's words needed no
music. Auber has given far too good an illus-
tration of Beaumarchais's saying, that men set
to music words which it would be a waste of
breath to utter in ordinary conversation.
Let no one call him the musician par excel-
lence of the French people; French he is, no
doubt, but after a very small fashion. It is
French to drink cheap wine of a Sunday at
Bas Meudon, in a crowd of students and gri-
selles, but happily France can boast a better
vintage, and grander landscapes, and a truer
love, than these.
X.
BERLIOZ.
GREAT as an artist, greater as a musician,
his was an extraordinary genius, shared,
as it were, by two strangely unequal Souls: at
bottom intensely romantic, Berlioz was often
purely classic in his writings.
His life was but one long transport, now of
love and again of hate, always passionate and
nearly always sad. He dwelt up amidst the
thunders and lightnings of a Sinai, but when
he descended from the mount, the people, his
own people at least, had no faith in him.
It was love which first caught him in its grasp.
He was twelve and she eighteen 1 A girl of his
native mountains, Estelle by name, – “Stella
montis.” After love, it was genius that beat
at the door of his soul; the genius of others,
while he waited for the coming of his own.
Shakespeare and Goethe, Byron and Virgil,
Gluck, Beethoven, even Spontini, stirred his
being to its very depths.
BERLIOZ.

Berlioz. 287
Loving and believing in Shakespeare as men
believe in God, he one day imagined that he
was espousing Desdemona or Ophelia, under
the guise of an English actress, Henrietta
Smithson ; but their union was filled with a
horror truly Shakespearian, and they broke it
after a few awful years. Later, on hearing of
the “fair Ophelia's " death, Berlioz wrote:
“Destruction | Fire and thunders | Blood
and tears | My brain shrivels in my skull when
I think of those horrors | " Five or six years
after her death he married again.
“Music and love,” he once wrote, ‘‘ are the
two wings of the soul.” But his own great
eagle's wings were broken, for his people of
France would have none of his genius ; and
while Prussia, Austria, and Russia were loud
in their applause, Frenchmen, during his life-
time, would but rarely listen to his works.
And then at what a cost, under what condi-
tions, and with what success 1 till, at last, he
took despairing refuge in a silence that was
almost oblivion.
He grew to be an inconsolable old man,
twice a widower and “wicked as a thousand
devils,” he himself said, “spewing life out of
my mouth " — the life at which Chateaubriand
merely yawned.
288 Berlioz.
At sixty-one he met once more the love of
his boyhood, the “Stella montis,” whom he had
seen only once during half a century. He
loved her yet, — as a child, always as a child,
he told her. His “star,” now a good lady
who, herself, had been twice a widow, smiled
upon him with indulgence, and a little emotion,
too ; but still only with a Smile, and he had
dreamed of something more.
This was the last star in his heaven, for the
doubtful success of the “Trojans" threw but
a passing light across his night. His only son
died far from home. At last death came to
him, as he waited, solitary and Savage towards
men and things. “I think,” Berlioz once said,
“that men must leave vengeance to time,” and
how has time avenged him
Berlioz is romantic by virtue of more than
one feature of his genius. In the first place, he
has an independent personality and a keen sense
of his own passion. One of his first works,
the “Symphonie Fantastique,” is a bit of musi-
cal autobiography. Another sign of the romance
of his genius is its worship of Strange gods. It
was to the genius of a Shakespeare, a Byron,
and a Goethe that his own genius made its first
votive offerings, when he wrote “Roméo et
Juliette,” “Harold in Italie,” and the “Dam-
Berlioz. 289
nation de Faust.” And lastly, and most char-
acteristic feature of romanticism, he seeks less
the realisation of beauty than the manifestation
of character; he strives for expression always
and at all cost. It may be questioned whether
Berlioz depreciated music in thus making it a
means rather than an end in itself. But does
there exist — natural or human — any being ex-
cept God Himself, which may be an end sufficient
unto itself? What are the arts, if not means,
modes, and interpreters ? And which of them
may boast of an abstract, completely self-suffi-
cient beauty Which one possesses any intrin-
sic charm for men beyond and outside of its
power of expression and representation
But without attempting to discuss such grave
questions, we may simply define Berlioz as the
great “expresser,” and “Faust,” his master-
piece, as the wonderful expression of one of the
moral phases of humanity — and this phase the
love of the romantic. Berlioz's favourite hero
is the hero of a Byron or a Chateaubriand; an
ardent, unhappy creature, the plaything of vague
passions and transient dreams, a prey to grand
griefs and magnificent ennui, and such is Faust
— the man of Berlioz's imagination. See him
at the first, face to face with the nature which
no longer has the power to give him pleasure, —
I9
29O Berlioz.
himself gloomy enough to darken the face of all
natural things. – Laughing meadows of Haydn,
what change has come over you ? Then comes
the march of the battalions, the march sublime
and unequalled, the march of the heroes of all
the centuries moving on to their victories.
And then the Easter hymn ; the enchanting
music of Easter Sunday, which not even the
Good Friday chants of “Parsifal' can excel.
But neither nature, nor glory, nor faith can stir
the human lassitude of Faust. The scene of
the “Sommeil de Faust" is perhaps most beau-
tiful and most romantic of all, as the man, weary
of living, plunges down, is absorbed once more,
and annihilated within the bosom of Universal
Being.
Berlioz, it is scarcely necessary to say, was a
Symphonist of great genius. In his style, which
is neither that of a Beethoven, nor still less of
a Sebastian Bach, but above all, in his orchestra-
tion is Berlioz the great sound colourist ; and
this less by the linear perfection of his work
than by its timbre, for timbre is colour in music.
He is the greatest musician of French romanti-
cism by virtue of his colour, as Eugène Dela-
croix in his colouring is its greatest painter.
But let us not forget that in a portion, at
least, of one of his works — the fourth act of the
Berlioz. V 29I
original “Trojans,” the second act of the muti-
lated version — Berlioz is classic. Nothing could
be more Virgilian than the hymn of Iopas to
Ceres. The Septet by the sea is the kiss of
divine waves upon a divine shore, and the duet
which follows is the royal nocturne of a royal
love. All here is so calm, so antique, so pure,
that one hesitates to choose between “Faust ''
and the “Trojans,” or to come to any critical
conclusion upon the two great efforts of his
genius. What way better, then, than to rest
undecided, leaving ourselves two great delights 2
Let us love the horror of the abyss and the
sweet calm of the refuge. Happy the traveller
who, crossing the slopes of some treacherous
volcano, sees nestling in a fold of the terrible
mountain the divine quiet of some Sacred wood.
XI.
MEYERBEER.
THE Emperor Otho, so says Henri Heine,
once entered the tomb of Charlemagne.
“The body was not lying as the dead are left
in their coffins, but seated as though in life upon
a throne. On his head was a golden crown, and
in his hands his sceptre. . . .” As we, too, are
about to enter the tomb of the illustrious dead,
well may we hesitate at the threshold. Wagner
is in the ascendant, and it is with a certain dread
that we open the pages, perhaps somewhat ne-
glected of late, of “Robertle Diable,” “Les Hu-
guenots,” “Le Prophète,” and “L’Africaine,”
— that first tetralogy, forsaken for another. But
our fears are groundless, for in his vaulted sepul-
chre Meyerbeer, too, sits enthroned. The
sceptre has not fallen from his hand, nor the
crown from his brow, and before the grand
genius, one instinctively exclaims: “I knew
not that he was so grand l’’
He is, indeed, one of the greatest of all the
musicians of the theatre, and the chief of the
MEYERBEER.

Meyerbeer. 293
musicians of history. For why should we
question the historical property of music, - es-
pecially the music of the theatre * Why should
music be the one art powerless to understand
and bring back to us the past P And why should
it not as well be the interpreter of a real hu-
manity as of a world of legends and dreams ?
Said George Sand: “Save, perhaps, a meta-
physical dissertation — and I for my part waste
no regrets upon that — there is nothing which
music is not capable of expressing.” And the
music of to-day is not afraid even of meta-
physics. She has her philosophers—leave her
her historian |
But, says some one, the historical character
of “Les Huguenots,” for example, lies, perhaps,
solely in the text and in the embellishments of
the libretto, or the poem rather, — for the Scribe
of Meyerbeer was a poet. Very well Try to
set “Les Huguenots” upon the stage without
its music, and say whether its colour is in the
drama and its stage-setting, or in the music.
Who is the historian, Scribe or Meyerbeer
What more charming and faithful picture of
the French Renaissance was ever painted than
the first two acts of “Les Huguenots”? The
music seems to linger over the surroundings and
surface of the subject. First a feast of courtiers
294 Meyerbeer.
with their prince ; then sweet, royal Touraine,
and the white stones of Valois reflected in the
calm waters; over all grace, distinction, and
high-bred beauty. After these two acts in the
sunlight come three night scenes : Pré aux
Clercs and the Louvre, the silence broken by
confused noises and vague rumours. A bell
Sounds the curfew, and women sing a sad litany
on the threshold of the chapel, as old Paris draws
within herself, disquieted and menaced with
death. -
All this, however, is but the physiognomy of
the time. If you would seek its soul, turn to
the fourth and fifth acts; there you find the soul,
or rather the two souls, of that great historical
event, — the massacre of Bartholomew ; the
soul of atrocity and that of heroism ; the soul of
the butcher and of his victim.
But Meyerbeer is a still greater dramatist than
historian. He is not the musician of analysis
or psychological anatomy, but of movement and
theatrical action. Perhaps there is even some-
thing too external in this art which so lends it-
self to situation and characters, but which never
rises above them ; the art of a Gluck, who rep-
resents rather than suggests. Meyerbeer's
thoughts were altogether in opposition to the
methods of to-day, for he went from idea to indi-
Meyerbeer. 295
vidual, rather than from individual to idea ; far
from generalising his personalities, he personi-
fied his sentiment, and in this lies the very
essence of dramatic genius.
Such a genius can be constantly traced through
Meyerbeer's work; he incarnates every thought,
and with him all words are flesh. That element
of the fantastic, for instance, which in ‘‘Der
Freischütz” is so picturesque, becomes the living,
human figure of Bertram in “Robert le Diable.”
Neither has the demon of Meyerbeer anything
in common with the Mephistopheles of Berlioz
or Schumann ; for Bertram is no principle nor
spirit of evil; he is simply a father possessed of
the evil one. Again, compare the dénouement
of “Robert le Diable " with that of “ Tann–
häuser”: both deal with the peril and the salvation
of a soul ; but Tannhäuser's battle and victory
are fought and won within his own breast, while
Robert struggles not only between two influ-
ences, but between the two personalities of
Alice and Bertram.
And love | Who has ever so dramatised love
as the author of “Les Huguenots " " If those
simple words, “Tu m'aimes l’ in the immortal
duet between Raoul and Valentine vibrate with
a power which they never before possessed, do
they not owe this new accent of blended fear
296 Meyerbeer.
and delight to the urgency of peril and the
approach of death
And finally, as to religion, “this son of Ger-
many has taught us how it may be preached
from the stage of a theatre.” The words are
Richard Wagner's, spoken years ago, and none
could be more just. That religious idea which
the Wagner of “Parsifal " would one day take as
the theme of his sublime imaginations and tender
reveries, the Meyerbeer of “Les Huguenots"—
that great musician of the theatre — had already
established as a province of drama and as a
principle of action, by which men live, for which
they kill, and for which they die.
Legend and symbol are beautiful, but no less
fair are life and drama. They are gigantic to-
day, those pre-historic men of the “Eddas"
in their “mantles of goat-skin; ” but only yes-
terday how charming was the young gentleman
of France, in his doublet of violet velvet and his
chain of gold l I am glad to study and admire
Tristan and Isolde, as they represent the principle
and essence of pure love ; but I am well pleased,
too, that Valentine and Raoul are simply two
human beings who love one another, two lowers
of the same flesh and blood as my own. The
maternity of Fides does not strike me as too
commonplace, even beside the paternity of
Meyerbeer. 297
Wotan ; and the kiss which the humble woman
gives her son is no less touching to me than the
sublime embrace in which the just god clasps
the goddess in her punishment, on the Scandi-
navian rock.
Let us, then, continue to admire Meyerbeer,
endeavouring to retain in our music something
of his genius, something of the solid and con-
crete, which reassures and confirms, and which
saves us from the menacing abstraction not of
realism but of reality.
XII.
WAGNER,
HOUGH greater, much greater, as a mu-
sician, Wagner was nevertheless a great
poet. In the inwardness and generality of his
poetic thought, from “Der Fliegender Hol-
länder’ to his latest drama, he represents only
acts of the mind and conditions of the con-
science. He plunges, as he himself says, with
perfect confidence, into the depths of the soul's
mysteries, and from without this inmost centre
of life he sees the growth of an external form.
“Lohengrin,” as its author again tells us, rests
upon an entirely moral revolution within the
heart of Elsa. From the innermost recesses of
that heart come all the danger and all the mis-
fortune ; and more tragic than a Paris swim-
ming in the blood of St. Bartholomew's Eve,
or a John of Leyden buried beneath the ruins
of his palace, is the thought that one short
moment, one word of doubt, may destroy
forever the union of two souls. Deep down
into the mythology and the philosophy of Wag-
WAGNER.

Wagner. 299
ner's operas, one must search for the moral and
spiritual meaning which is embodied in them ;
always so large and so profound that it em-
braces and envelops all men. In the Wagnerian
drama, personal, concrete beauty develops into
a symbolic grace. While Valentine and Raoul
are themselves, and themselves alone, we believe
as we listen to the scene of “Die Walküre ''
that we ourselves are Wotan and Brünnhilde,
participating in the soul of the universe ; we
are raised, through intellect and emotions, at
once to the comprehension of the purest and
grandest moral ideas, – the ideas of Justice and
of Mercy, of Pity, Sacrifice, and Redemption.
But alas ! At times we fall far short of such
delights, for the symbol has fallen into the ab-
stract, and the abstract into nothingness ; for
Wagner the musician, as well as for Wagner the
poet, we must plead guilty to such vicissitudes
and such mistakes.
The author of the “Tetralogy "is a wonder-
ful master of symphony, — after Beethoven,
perhaps the greatest. According to his own
words, it was the torrent of German Symphony
which Beethoven had created, that he flung
into the bed of musical drama. “Symphonialis
est anima,” said a saint of the Middle Ages, and
Wagner has echoed the thought; the soul, to
3OO Wagner.
him, is nothing but a symphony, and the sym-
phony a soul. He expressed all through his
orchestra, and it sufficed him. Many a beautiful
scene from his dramas is but a tableau vivant
with grand instrumental accompaniment. As
Siegmund lies dying of thirst and fatigue at
Sieglinde's door, it is the orchestra that entreats
her pity. And Parsifal and Gurnemanz might
sit silent in the sweet air of the April morn-
ing, for flowers blossom in the orchestra, and
through it the springtime sends her perfume and
her smile.
But the grand symphonist passed by the
beauty of the human voice almost without
recognition. Despising, sometimes insulting,
human speech, he neglected to establish an equi-
librium between the two elements of dramatic
music, and reversed the primitive inequality of
voice and orchestra.
Wagner is now the all-powerful master, and
again the captive and slave of that essential ele-
ment of symphony, - the leitmotiv. By the
development, and still more by the combining
of his themes, he has voiced the infinite gran-
deur of the soul and the infinite detail; the pro-
found complexity of that soul where nothing
exists for itself alone ; in which every note has
its harmonic, each movement its reaction, and
Wagner. 3OI
where the opposite and contradicting meet and
are reconciled.
But if the leitmotiv is the life of music, it
may also be its death ; in time Wagner's leil-
motiv kills liberty, fancy, and happy ease in
art, and imprisons genius in a monotonous
formula and repetition. Thus the colossal mu-
sician at times belittles his own music ; from a
language grandly independent he sinks to con-
straint and weakness ; and turning from a System
of signs full of sensitive feeling, he shackles
himself with a scheme as conventional as that of
figures and words.
Lastly, Wagner willed that in music all should
be melody; for him the current of life could as
well be interrupted as the current of music.
And, in truth, though the soul is complex, its
continuity of life is never broken ; we are not
to-day So much what we are as what we have
been and what we shall be, and this Wagner
realised. Marvellously has he written into his
music this perpetual evolution and this constant
tendency. In this sense he is the great mu-
sician of the future, seldom touching upon
that which abides but ever upon transfor-
mation and preparation. Is it not, however,
end and achievement which possess the
truest beauty, and not movement and tendency P
3O2 Wagner.
Eternal satisfaction lies in “to be " and not
‘‘ to become.”
Such is this all-powerful, extraordinary genius;
the sovereign dispenser of supernatural ecsta-
sies and of superhuman weariness. We plunge
into the infinitude of his genius and are lost;
irresistible as nature or a crowd, he is as piti-
less as both. He charms and depresses us;
he is the god of the mountain height and the
demon of the abyss. It is impossible to speak
of him without enthusiasm and without revolt ;
from the same breast he calls forth anathemas
and blessings.
THE END.

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