ASPECTS OFi MODERN OPER It P I II LAWRENCE GILM AN ^7 V i ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/aspectsofmodernoOOgilmrich ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA Estimates and Inquiries BY LAWRENCE OILMAN AUTHOR OF The Music of To-morrow," " Phases of Modern Music," "Stories of Symphonic Music," " Edward MacDowell : A Sludy»" " Strauss' ' Salome ' : A Guide to the Opera," "Debussy's 'Pelleas et Melisande':A Guide to the Opera," etc. New York : JOHN LANE COMPANY London : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD MCMIX ]^V.\^o^ Q- Copyright, 1908, John Lank Company THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. >T^ TO ERNEST NEWMAN A CRITIC OF BREADTH, WISDOM, AND INDEPENDENCE THESE STUDIES ARE APPRECIATIVELY INSCRIBED 302450 CONTENTS Page Introductory: The Wagnerian Aftermath i A View of Puccini 31 Strauss' "Salome": Its Art AND its Morals 6^ A Perfect Music-Drama . . 107 INTRODUCTORY THE WAGNERIAN AFTER- MATH INTRODUCTORY THE WAGNERIAN AFTER- MATH Since that day when, a quarter of a century ago, Richard Wagner ceased to be a dynamic figure in the life of the world, the history of operatic art has been, save for a few conspicuous exceptions, a bar- ren and unprofitable page; and it has been so, in a considerable de- gree, because of him. When Mr. William F. Apthorp, in his admi- rable history of the opera — a book written with unflagging gusto and 3 ASPECTS OF vividness — observed that Wagner's style has been, since his death, little imitated, he made an astonishing assertion. " If by Wagner's influ- ence,'' he went on, "is meant the influence of his individuality, it may fairly be said to have been null. In this respect Wagner has had no more followers than Mozart or Beethoven ; he has founded no school." Again one must exclaim : An astonishing affirmation! and it is not the first time that it has been made, nor will it be the last. Yet how it can have seemed a reason- able thing to say is one of the in- soluble mysteries. The influence 4 MODERN OPERA of Wagner — the influence of his individuality as well as of his prin- ciples — upon the musical art of the past twenty-five years has been simply incalculable. It has tinged, when it has not dyed and saturated, every phase and form of creative music, from the opera to the sonata and string quartet. It is not easy to understand how anyone who is at all familiar with the products of musical art in Europe and America since the death of the tyrant of Bayreuth can be disposed to question the fact. No composer who ever lived influenced so deeply the music that came after 5 ASPECTS OF him as did Wagner. It is an influ- ence that is, of course, waning ; and to the definite good of creative art, for it has been in a large degree pernicious and oppressive in its effect. The shadow of the most pervasive of modern masters has laid a sinister and paralysing magic upon almost all of his successors. They have sought to exert his spells, they have muttered what they imagined were his incantations ; yet the thing which they had hoped to raise up in glory and in strength has stub- bornly refused to breathe with any save an artificial and feeble life. None has escaped the contagion of MODERN OPERA his genius, though some, whom we shall later discuss, have opposed against it a genius and a creative passion of their own. Yet in the domain of the opera, wherewith we are here especially concerned, it is an exceedingly curious and interesting fact that out of the soil which he enriched with his own genius have sprung, paradoxi- cally, the only living and indepen- dent forces in the lyrico-dramatic art of our time. Let us consider, first, those as- pects of the operatic situation which, by reason of the paucity of creative vitality that they con- ASPECTS OF note, are, to-day, most striking; and here we shall be obliged to turn at once to Germany. The more one hears of the new music that is being put forth by Teutonic composers, the stronger grows one's conviction of the lack, with a single exception, of any genuine creative impulse in that country to- day. It is doubtless a little unrea- sonable to expect to be able to agree in this matter with the amiable lady who told Matthew Arnold that she liked to think that aesthetic excel- lence was "common and abundant.'* As the sagacious Arnold pointed out, it is not in the nature of aesthetic ex- 8 MODERN OPERA cellence that it should be " common and abundant '' ; on the contrary, he observed, excellence dwells among rocks hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear out his heart before he can reach her. All of this is quite unanswerable ; yet, so far as musical Germany is con- cerned, is not the situation rather singular? Germany — the Ger- many which yielded the royal line founded by Bach and continued by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schu- mann, Wagner, and Brahms — can show us to-day, save for that excep- tion which we shall later discuss, only a strenuous flock of Lilliputians ASPECTS OF (whom it would be fatuous to dis- cuss with particularity), each one of whom is confidently aware that the majestic mantle of the author of " Tristan" has descended upon him- self. They write music in which one grows weary of finding the same delinquency — the invariable fault of emptiness, of poverty of idea, allied with an extreme elaboration in the manner of presentation. And it is most deliberate and determined in address. One would think that the message about to be delivered were of the utmost consequence, the deepest moment : the pose and the manner of the bearer of great tid- lO MODERN OPERA ings are admirably simulated. Yet the actual deliverance is futile and dull, pathetically meagre, causing us to wonder how often we must remind ourselves that it is as im- possible to achieve salient or dis- tinguished or noble music without salient, distinguished, and noble ideas as it is to create fire without flame. In France there are — again with an exception to which we shall later advert — Saint-Saens, d'Indy, Mas- senet, Charpentier, and — les autres. Now Saint-Saens is very far from being a Wagnerian. He is, indeed, nothing very definite and determin- II ASPECTS OF able. He is M. Saint-Saens, an abstraction, a brain without a per- sonality. It is almost forty years since Hector Berlioz called him " one of the greatest musicians of our epoch/' and since then the lus- tre of his fame has waxed steadily, until to-day one must recognise him as one of the three or four most distinguished living composers. Venerable and urbane, M. Saint- Saens, at the New York opening of the American tour which he made in his seventy-second year, sat at the piano before the audience whom he had travelled three thousand miles to meet, and played a virtuoso piece 12 MODERN OPERA with orchestral accompaniment, and two shorter pieces for piano and orchestra: a valse-caprice called ** Wedding Cake," and an "Allegro Appassionato/' That is to say, M. Camille Saint-Saens, the bearer of an internationally famous and most dignified name, braved the tragic perils of the deep to exhibit him- self before a representative Ameri- can audience as the composer of the " Wedding Cake " valse-ca- price, an entertaining fantasy on exotic folk-themes, and 2ijeu d' esprit with a pleasant tune and some pretty orchestral embroidery. No one could have it in his heart "3 ASPECTS OF to chide M. Saint-Saens for these things, for he is very venerable and very famous. Yet is not the occur- rence indicative, in a way, of M. Saint Saens's own attitude toward his art ? — that facile, brilliant, admirably competent, chameleon-like art of his, so adroit in its external fashion- ing, yet so thin and worn in its inner substance! One wonders if, in the entire history of music, there is the record of a composer more completely accomplished in his art, so exquisite a master of the difficult trick of spinning a musical web, so superb a mechanician, who has less to say to the world : whose MODERN OPERA discourse is so meagre and so negli- gible. One remembers that unfortu- nate encomium of Gounod's, which has been so often turned into a jus- tified reproach : " Saint Saens," said the composer of "Faust," "will write at will a work in the style of Rossini, of Verdi, of Schumann, of Wagner." The pity of his case is that, when he writes pure Saint- Saens, one does not greatly care to listen. He has spoken no musical thought, in all his long and scintil- lant career, that the world will long remember. His dozen operas, his symphonic poems, his sympho- nies, his concertos, the best of his / 1 15 ASPECTS OF chamber works — is there in them an accent which one can soberly call either eloquent or deeply beau- tiful? Do they not excel solely by reason of their symmetry and solidity of structure, their deft and ingenious delivery of ideas which at their worst are banal and at their best mediocre or derivative? "A name always to be remembered with respect ! " cries one of his most sane and just admirers : since " in the face of practical difficulties, discour- agements, misunderstandings, sneers, he has worked constantly to the best of his unusual ability for musi- cal righteousness in its pure form/* i6 MODERN OPERA "A name to be remembered with respect/' beyond dispute : with the respect that is due the man of su- pereminent intelligence, the fas- tidious artisan, the tireless and hon- ourable workman — with respect, yes ; but scarcely with enthusiasm. He never, as has been truly said, bores one ; it is just as true that he never stimulates, moves, transports, or delights one, in the deeper sense of the term. At its best, it is a hard and dry light that shines out of his music : a radiance with- out magic and without warmth. His work is an impressive monu- ment to the futility of art without 2 17 ASPECTS OF impulse : to the immeasurable dis- tance that separates the most ex- quisite talent from the merest genius. For all its brilliancy of in- vestiture, his thought, as the most liberal of his appreciators has said, " can never wander through eter- nity " — a truth which scarcely needed the invocation of the Mil- tonic line to enforce. It may be true, as Mr. Philip Hale has as- serted, that " the success of d'Indy, Faure, Debussy, was made possible by the labor and the talent of Saint- Saens " ; yet it is one of the pities of his case that when Saint-Saens's name shall have become faint and i8 MODERN OPERA fugitive in the corridors of time, the chief glories of French art in our day will be held to be, one may- venture, the legacies of the compos- ers of " Pelleas et Melisande " and the *' Jour d'ete a la montagne," rather than of the author of " Sam- son et Dalila** and " Le Rouet d'Omphale." Which brings one to M. Vincent d'Indy. Now M. d'Indy offers a curious spectacle to the inquisitive observer, in that he is, in one regard, the very symbol of independence, of artistic emancipation, whereas, in another phase of his activity, he is a mere echo and simulacrum. As a writer 19 ASPECTS OF for the concert room, as a composer of imaginative orchestral works and of chamber music, he is one of the most inflexibly original and self- guided composers known to the con- temporary world of music. With his aloofness and astringency of style, his persistent austerity of temper, his in- vincible hatred of the sensuous, his detestation of the kind of "felicity" which is a goal for lesser men, this remarkable musi- cian — who, far more deservingly than the incontinent Chopin, de- serves the title of "the proudest poetic spirit of our time" — this remarkable musician, one must MODERN OPERA repeat, is the sort of creative artist who is writing, not for his day, but for a surprised and appre- hending futurity. He is at once a man of singularly devout and simple nature, and an entire mystic. For him the spectacle of the living earth, in lovely or forbidding guise, evokes reverend and exalted moods. His approach to its won- ders is Wordsworthian in its deep and awe-struck reverence and its fundamental sincerity. He does not, like his younger artistic kins- man, Debussy, see in it all man- ner of fantastic and mist-enwrapped visions; it is not for him a 21 ASPECTS OF pageant of delicate and shining dreams. Mallarme's lazy and in- dulgent Faun in amorous woodland reverie would not have suggested to him, as to Debussy, music whose sensuousness is as exquisitely con- cealed as it is marvellously transfig- ured. The mysticism of d'Indy is pre-eminently religious; it has no tinge of sensuousness; it is large and benign rather than intimate and intense. He is absolutely himself, abso- lutely characteristic, for example, in his tripartite tone-poem, " Jour d'ete a la montagne." This music is a hymn the grave ecstasy and the 22 MODERN OPERA utter sincerity of which are as evi- dent as they are impressive. In its art it is remarkable — not so monumental in plan, so astound- ingly complex in detail, as his superb B-minor symphony, yet a work that is full of his peculiar traits. Now it would seem as if so fastidious and individual a musician as this might do something of very uncommon quality if he once turned his hand to opera-making. Yet in his " L'Etranger," completed only a year before he began work on his astonishing B-minor symphony, and in his " Fervaal*' (1889-95), 23 ASPECTS OF we have the melancholy spectacle of M. d'Indy concealing his own admirable and expressive counte- nance behind an ill-fitting mask modelled imperfectly after the lin- eaments of Richard Wagner. In these operas (d'Indy calls them, by the way, an action dramatique and an action fnusicale : evident deriva- tions from the " Tristan "-esque Handlung) — in these operas, the speech, from first to last, is the speech of Wagner. The themes, the harmonic structure, the use of the voice, the plots (d'Indy, like Wagner, is his own librettist) — all is uncommuted Wagnerism, 24 MODERN OPERA with some of the Teutonic cum- brousness deleted and some of the Gallic balance and measure infused. These scores have occa- sional beauty, but it is seldom the beauty that is peculiar to d'Indy's own genius : it is an imported and alien beauty, a beauty that has in it an element of betrayal. We find ourselves confronting a situation that is equally dispiriting to the seeker after valuable achieve- ments in contemporary French opera when we view the perform- ances of such minor personages as Massenet, Bruneau, Reyer, Erlan- ger, and Charpentier. They are all 25 ASPECTS OF tarred, in a great or small degree, with the Wagnerian stick. When they speak out of their own hearts and understandings they are far from commanding: they are vul- garly sentimental or prettily las- civious, like the amiable Massenet, or pretentious and banal, like Bru- neau, or incredibly dull, like Reyer, or picturesquely superficial, like Charpentier — though the author of " Louise " disports himself with a beguiling grace and verve which almost causes one to forgive his essential emptiness. Modern Italy discloses a single dominant and vivid figure. In 26 MODERN OPERA none of his compatriots is there any distinction of speech, of char- acter. In that country the mem- ory of Wagner is less imperious in its control ; yet not one of its living music-makers, with the ex- ception that I have made, has that atmosphere and quality of his own which there is no mistaking. I have referred by implication and reservation to three personali- ties in the art of the modern lyric- drama who stand out as salient figures from the confused and amor- phous background against which they are to be observed : who 27 ASPECTS OF seem to me to represent the only significant and important mani- festations of the creative spirit which have thus far come to the surface in the post-Wagnerian music-drama. They are, it need scarcely be said, Puccini in Italy, Richard Strauss in Germany, and Debussy in France. Yet these men built upon the foundations laid by Wagner ; they took many leaves from his vast book of in- structions, in some cases stopping short of the full reach of his plans as imagined by himself, in other cases carrying his schemes to a point of development far 28 MODERN OPERA beyond any result of which he dreamed. But they have not at- tempted to say the things which they had to say in the way that he would have said them. They have been content with their own elo- quence; and it has not betrayed them. No one is writing music for the stage which has the profile, the saliency, the vitality, the personal flavour, which distinguish the productions of these men. So far as it is possible to discern from the present vantage-ground, the future — at least the immediate future — of the lyric stage is theirs. In no other quarters may 29 MODERN OPERA one observe any manifestations that are not either negligible by reason of their own quality, or mere dilu- tions, with or without adulterous admixtures, of the Wagnerian brew. 30 A VIEW OF PUCCINI A VIEW OF PUCCINI A PLAIN-SPOKEN and not too rev- erent observer of contemporary mu- sical manners, discussing the melodic style of the Young Italian opera- makers, has observed that it is fortunate in that it " gives the sing- ers opportunity to pour out their voices in that lavish volume and in- tensity which provoke applause as infallibly as horseradish provokes tears." The comment has a good deal of what Sir Willoughby Pat- terne would have called "rough 3 33 ASPECTS OF truth." It is fairly obvious that there is nothing in the entire range of opera so inevitably calculated to produce an instant effect as a certain kind of frank and sweeping lyricism allied v^ith swiftness of dramatic emotion; and it is because the young lions of modern Italy — Puccini and his lesser brethren — have profoundly appreciated this elemental truth, that they address their generation with so immediate an effect. In those days when the impetus of a pristine enthusiasm drove the more intelligent order of opera- goers to performances of Wagner, 34 MODERN OPERA it was a labour of love to learn to know and understand the texts of his obscure and laboured dramas ; and even the guide-books, which were as leaves in Vallombrosa, were prayerfully studied. But to-day there are no Wagnerites. We are no longer impelled by an apostolic fervour to delve curiously into the complex geneaology and elaborate ethics of the " Ring/* and it is no longer quite clear to many slothful intelligences just what Tristan and Isolde are talking about in the dusk of King Mark's garden. There will always be a small group of the faithful who, through invincible 35 ASPECTS OF and loving study, will have learned by heart every secret of these dramas. But for the casual opera-goer, grant- ing him all possible intelligence and intellectual curiosity, they cannot but seem the reverse of crystal- clear, logical, and compact. A score of years ago those w^ho cared at all for the dramatic element in opera, and the measure of whose delight was not filled up by the vocal pyrotechny which was the mainstay of the operas of the older repertoire, found in these music- dramas their chief solace and satis- faction. Wagner reigned then vir- tually alone over his kingdom. 36 MODERN OPERA The dignity, the imaginative power, and the impressive emotional sweep of his dramas, as dramas, offset their obscurity and their inordinate bulk ; and always their splendid investi- ture of music exerted, in and of itself, an enthralling fascination. And that condition of affairs might have continued for much longer had not certain impetuous young men of modern Italy demonstrated the possibility of writing operas which were both engrossing on their purely dramatic side and, in their music, eloquent with the elo- quence that had come to be ex- pected of the modern opera-maker. 37 ASPECTS OF Moreover, these music-dramas had the incalculable merit, for our time and environment, of being both swift in movement and unimpeach- ably obvious in meaning. There- upon began the reign of young Italy in contemporary opera* It was inaugurated with the " Cav- aUeria Rusticana " of Mascagni and the " I Pagliacci '* of Leon- cavallo ; and it is continued to-day, with immense vigour and persist- ence, by Puccini with all his later works. The sway of the com- poser of "Tosca," ** Boheme,'* and " Madame Butterfly '' is triumphant and wellnigh absolute ; and the 38 MODERN OPERA reasons for it are not elusive. He has selected for musical treatment dramas that are terse and rapid in action and intelligible in detail, and he has underscored them with music that is impassioned, incisive, highly- spiced, rhetorical, sometimes poetic and ingenious, and pervadingly sentimental. Moreover, he pos- sesses, as his most prosperous attri- bute, that facility in vs^riting fervid and often banal melodies to the immediate and unfailing effect of v^hich, in the w^ords of Mr. Henry T. Finck, I have alluded. As a sensitive English critic, Mr. Ver- non Blackburn, once very happily 39 ASPECTS OF observed, Puccini is " essentially a man of his own generation . . . the one who has caught up the spirit of his time, and has made his compact with that time, in order that he should not lose any- thing which a contemporary gener- ation might give him/' It is a curious and striking truth that the chief trouble with the representative musical dramatists who have built, from the stand- point of system, upon the founda- tional stones that Wagner laid, is not, as the enemies and opponents ' of Bayreuth used to charge, an ex- cess of drama at the expense of the 40 MODERN OPERA music, but — as was the case with Wagner himself (a fact which I have elsewhere in this volume at- tempted to demonstrate) — an ex- cess of music at the expense of the drama: in short, the precise defect against which reformers of the opera have inveighed since the days of Gluck. With Richard Strauss this musical excess is or- chestral; with the modern Italians it implicates the voice-parts, and is manifested in a lingering devotion to full-blown melodic expression achieved at the expense of dra- matic truth, logic, and consistency. In this, Puccini has simply, in the 41 ASPECTS OF candid phrase of Mr. Blackburn, " caught up the spirit of his time, and made his compact with that time." That is to say, he has, with undoubted artistic sincerity, played upon the insatiable desire of the modern ear for an ardent and elemental kind of melodic effect, and upon the acquired desire of the modern intelligence for a terse and dynamic substra- tum of drama. His fault, from what I hold to be the ideal stand- point in these matters, is that he has not perfectly fused his music and his drama. There is a suffi- ciently concrete example of what 42 MODERN OPERA I mean — an example which points both his strength and his weak- ness — in the second act of "Tosca/* where he halts the cumulative movement of the scene between Scarpia and Tosca, which he has up to that point devel- oped with superb dramatic logic, in order to placate those who may not over-long be debarred from their lyrical sweetmeats; but also — for it would be absurd to charge him with insincerity or time-serving in fhis matter — in order that he may satisfy his own ineluctable tendency toward a periodical effusion of lyric energy, 43 ASPECTS OF which he must yield to even when dramatic consistency and logic go by the board in the process; when, in short, lyrical expression is super- erogatory and impertinent. So he writes the sentimental and facilely pathetic prayer, " Visi d'arte, visi d'amore,'' dolcissimo con grande sen-- timento: a perfectly superfluous, not to say intrusive, thing dramati- cally, and a piece of arrant mu- sical vulgarity; after which the current of the drama is resumed. We have here, in fact, noth- ing more nor less respectable than the old-fashioned Italian aria of unsavoury fame: it is 44 MODERN OPERA merely couched in more modern terms. The offence is aggravated by the fact that Puccini, in common with the rest of the Neo-Itahans, is at his best in the expression of dra- matic emotion and movement, and at his worst in his voicing of purely lyric emotion, meditative or passion- ate. In its lyric portions his music is almost invariably banal, without distinction, without beauty or re- straint — when the modern Italian music-maker dons his singing-robes he becomes clothed with common- ness and vulgarity. Thus in its scenes of amorous exaltation the 45 ASPECTS OF music of " Tosca/' of " Madame Butterfly'* (recall, in the latter work, the flamboyant commonness of the exultant duet which closes the first act), is blatant and rhetor- ical, rather than searching and poignant. Puccini's strength lies in the truly impressive manner in which he is able to intensify and underscore the more dramatic mo- ments in the action. At such times his music possesses an uncommon sureness, swiftness, and incisiveness ; especially in passages of tragic fore- boding, of mounting excitement, it is gripping and intense in a quite irresistible degree. Often, at such 46 MODERN OPERA moments, it has an electric quality of vigour, a curious nervous strength. That is its cardinal merit : its spare, lithe, closely-knit, clean-cut, im- mensely energetic orchestral en- forcement of those portions of the drama where the action is swift, tense, cumulative, rather than of sentimental or amorous connota- tion. Puccini has, indeed, an al- most unparalleled capacity for a kind of orchestral commentary which is both forceful and succinct. He wastes no words, he makes no su- perfluous gestures : he is masterfully direct, pregnant, expeditious, com- pact. Could anything be more 47 ASPECTS OF admirable, in what it attempts and brilliantly contrives to do, than al- most the entire second act of " Tosca," with the exception of the sentimental and obstructive Prayer ? How closely, with what unswerving fidelity, the music clings to the contours of the play ; and with what an economy of effort its effects are made ! Puccini is thus, at his best, a Wagnerian in the truest sense — a far more con- sistent Wagnerian than was Wagner himself. It is in " Tosca " that he should be studied. He is not elsewhere so sincere, direct, pungent, telling. 48 MODERN OPERA And it is in "Tosca/' also, that his melodic vein, which is generally broad and copious rather than fine and deep, yields some of the true and individual beauty which is its occasional, its very rare, possession — for example, to name it at its best, the poetic and exceedingly personal music which accompanies the advancing of dawn over the house-tops of Rome, at the be- ginning of the last act: a passage the melancholy beauty and sincere emotion of which it would be difficult to overpraise. In Puccini's later and much more elaborate and meticulous " Ma- 4 49 ASPECTS OF dame Butterfly," there is less that one can unreservedly delight in or definitely deplore, so far as the music itself is concerned. It is from a somewhat different angle that one is moved to consider the v^ork. In choosing the subject for this music-drama, Puccini set himself a task to w^hich even his extraordinary competency as a lyric-dramatist has not quite been equal. As every one knov^s, the story for v^hich Puccini has here sought a lyrico- dramatic expression is that of an American naval officer who mar- ries little " Madame Butterfly " in 50 MODERN OPERA Japan, deserts her, and cheerfully calls upon her three years later with the **rear' wife whom he has married in America. The name of this amiable gentleman is Pinkerton — B. F. Pinkerton — or, in full, Benjamin Franklin Pinker- ton. Now it would scarcely seem to require elaborate argument to demonstrate that the presence in a highly emotional lyric-drama of a gentleman named Benjamin Frank- lin Pinkerton — a gentleman who is, moreover, the hero of the piece — is, to put it briefly, a little in- harmonious. The matter is not helped by the fact that the action is 51 ASPECTS OF of to-day, and that one bears away from the performance the recollec- tion of Benjamin Franklin Pinker- ton asking his friend, the United States consul at Nagasaki, if he will have some whiskys-and-soda. There lingers also a vaguer mem- ory of the consul declaring, in a more or less lyrical phrase, that he "is not a student of orni- thology." Let no one find in these remarks a disposition to cast a doubt upon the seriousness with which Puccini has completed his work, or to ignore those features of " Ma- dame Butterfly '' which compel sin- 52 MODERN OPERA cere admiration. But recognition and acknowledgment of these things must be conditioned by an insistence upon the fact that such a task as Puccini has at- tempted here, and as others have attempted, is foredoomed to a greater or less degree of artistic futility. One refers, of course, to the attempt to transfer bodily to the lyric stage, for purposes of serious expression, a contemporary subject, with all its inevitable dross of prosaic and trivially familiar detail. To put it concretely, the sense of humour and the emotional sympathies will tolerate the spec- 53 ASPECTS OF tacle of a Tristan or a Tannhduser or a Don Giovanni or a Pelleas or a F^wj-/ uttering his longings and his woes in opera; but they will not tolerate the spectacle of a Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of our own time and day telling us, in song, that he is not a student of ornithology. The thing simply cannot be done — Wagner himself could not impress us in such circumstances. The chief glory of Wagner's texts — no matter what one may think of them as viable and effective dramas — is their ideal suitability for musical translation. Take, for example, 54 MODERN OPERA the text of "Tristan und Isolde": there is not a sentence, scarcely a word, in it, which is not fit for musical utterance — nothing that is incongruous, pedestrian, inept. All that is foreign to the essential emotions of the play has been eliminated. So unsparingly has it been subjected to the alembic of the poet-dramatist's imagina- tion that it has been wholly purged of all that is superfluous and -distracting, all that can- not be gratefully assimilated by the music. That is the especial excellence of his texts. Opera, though it rests, like the other 55 ASPECTS OF arts, heavily upon convention, yet offers at bottom a reasonable and defensible vehicle for the com- munication of human experience and emotion. But it is not a convincing form, and no genius, living or potential, can make it a convincing form, save when it deals with matters removed from our quotidian life and environment : save when it presents a heightened and alembicated image of human * experience. Thus we accept, with sympathy and approval, ** Sieg- fried," " Lohengrin,'' " Die Meis- tersinger,'' " Don Giovanni '* — even, at a pinch, " Tosca '' ; but we 56 MODERN OPERA cannot, if we allow our understand- ing and our sense of humour free play, accept " Madame Butterfly,'* with its naval lieutenant of to-day, its American consul in his tan- coloured " spats,'* and its whiskys- and-soda. This, then, was the prime dis- advantage under which Puccini laboured. He was, as a necessary incident of his task, confronted with the problem of setting to music a great deal of prosaic and altogether unlovely dialogue, essen- tial to the unfolding of the action, no doubt, but quite fatal to lyric inspiration. Under these circum- 57 ASPECTS OF stances, the music is often surpris- ingly successful ; but it is significant that the most poetic and moving passages in the score are those which enforce emotions and occa- sions which have no necessary connection with time or place; which are, from their nature, fit subjects for musical treatment, — for example, such a passage as that at the end of the second act, where Madame Butterfly and her child wait through the long night for the coming of the faith- less Pinkerton; for here the mo- ment and the mood to be expressed have a dignity and a pathos 58 MODERN OPERA entirely outside of date or circum- stance. The score, as a whole, compares unfavourably with that of "Tosca," which still, as it seems to me, rep- resents Puccini at his most effective and sincere. In " Madame Butter- fly '* one misses the salient charac- terisation, the gripping intensity, the sharpness and boldness of out- line that make " Tosca *' so notable an accomplishment. "Tosca," for all its occasional commonness, its melodic banality ,js a work of im- menje^i^o ur and un guestionable individuality . In it Puccini has saturated almost every page of the 59 ASPECTS OF music with his own extremely vivid personality : a personality that is exceedingly impressive in its crude strength and directness; he has, in this score, exploded the strange critical legend that his style is little more than a blended echo of the later Verdi, Ponchielli, and Massenet. The music of "Tosca" is not often distin- guished, but it is singularly strik- ing, potent, and original ; no one save Puccini could possibly have written it. But since then this composer has, artistically speaking, visited Paris. He has appreciated the value of certain harmonic ex- 60 MODERN OPERA periments which such adventurous Frenchmen as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others, are making ; he has appreciated them so sincerely that certain pages in ** Madame Butterfly," as, for in- stance, the lovely interlude between the second and third acts, sound almost as if they had been con- trived by Debussy himself — a Lat- inised Debussy, of course. Puccini, in short, has become intellectually sophisticated, and he has learned gentler artistic manners, in the in- terval between the composition of " Tosca '' and of " Madame Butter- fly." The music of the latter 6i ASPECTS OF work is far more delicately struc- tured and subtle than anything he had previously given us, and it has moments of conquering beauty, of great tenderness, of superlative svs^eetness. It is, beyond question, a charming and brilliant score, ex- ceedingly adroit in workmanship and almost invariably effective. Yet, after such excellences have been gladly acknowledged, one is disturbingly conscious that the real, the essential, Puccini has, for the most part, evaporated. There are other voices speaking through this music, voices that, for all their charm and distinction of accent, 62 MODERN OPERA seem alien and a little insincere. Has the vital, if crude, imagination which gave issue to the music of "Tosca" acquired finesse and deli- cacy at a cost of independent impulse ? 63 STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS That Richard Strauss the opera-maker is, for the present, summed up in Richard Strauss the composer of "Salome,'' would scarcely, I think, be disputed by any one who is sympathetically cognisant of his achievements in that role. Neither in " Gun- tram " nor in the later and far more characteristic " Feuersnot " is his essential quality as a musical dramatist so fully and clearly re- 67 ASPECTS OF vealed as in his setting of the play of Wilde to which he has given a fugacious immortality. Yet in discussing this astonishing work, I prefer to consider it in and for itself rather than as a touchstone whereby to form a general estimate of Strauss the dramatical tone-poet ; for I be- lieve that, if he lives and pro- duces for another decade, it will be seen that "Salome" does not furnish a just or adequate measure of Strauss' indisputable genius as a writer of music for the stage. I believe that he has not given us here a valid or com- 68 MODERN OPERA pletely representative account of himself in that capacity. So re- markable, though, is the work in itself, so assertive in its chal- lenge to contemporary criticism, that it imperatively compels some at- tempt at appraisement in any delib- erate survey of modern operatic art. For any one w^ho is not con- vinced that those ancient though occasionally reconciled adversaries. Art and Ethics, are necessarily an- tipodal, such a task, it must be confessed, is not one to be ap- proached in a jaunty or easeful spirit, for it means that one must be willing, apparently, to enter 69 ASPECTS OF the lists ranged with the hypo- crites, the prudes, the short-sighted and the unwise; with frenzied and myopic champions of respect- ability ; with all those who are as inflexible in their allegiance to the moralities as they are resource- ful and tireless in their pursuit of im- pudicity in art. Yet that there are two standpoints from which this ex- traordinary work must be regarded by any candid observer I do not think is open to question : it has its purely esthetic aspect, and its — I shall not say moral, but social — as- pect. To separate them in any con- scientious discussion is impossible. 70 MODERN OPERA Let us, to begin with, consider, in and by itself, the quality of the music which the incomparable Strauss — Strauss, the most conquer- ing musical personality since Wagner — has conceived as a fit em- bodiment in tones of the tragic and maleficent and haunting tale of the Dancing Daughter of Herodias and her part in the career of the prophet John, as recounted — with non- Scriptural variations — by Oscar Wilde. We may consider, first, whether or not it achieves the prime requisite of music in its organic re- lation to a dramatic subject : an en- forcement and heightening of the 7J ASPECTS OF effect of the play ; setting aside, for the present, those other aspects of it which have so absorbed critical at- tention, and of which we have heard overmuch : its remorseless complex- ity, its unflagging ingenuity, its su- perb and miraculous orchestration. These are matters of importance, but of secondary importance. The point at issue is, has Strauss, through his music, intensified and italicised the moods and situations of the drama ; and, secondly, has he achieved this end through music which is in itself notable and im- portant ? Never was music so avid in its 72 MODERN OPERA search for the eloquent word as is the music of Strauss in this work. We are amazed at the audacity, the resourcefulness, of the express- ional apparatus that is cumulatively- reared in this unprecedented score. The alphabet of music is ran- sacked for new and undreamt-of combinations of tone: never were effects so elaborate, so cunning, so fertilely contrived, offered to the ears of men since the voice of music was heard in its pristine estate. This score challenges the music of the days that shall follow after it. For the most part, the atmosphere of horror, of ominous suspense, of 73 ASPECTS OF oppressive and bodeful gloom, in which the tragedy of Wilde is en- wrapped, is wonderfully rendered in the music. There are beyond question overmastering pages in the score — music which has the kind of superb audacity and power of effect that Dr. Johnson discerned in the style of Sir Thomas Browne : "forcible expressions which he would never have used but by ven- turing to the utmost verge of pro- priety; and flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling.'' Of such qual- ity is the passage which portrays 74 MODERN OPERA the agonised suspense of Salome during the beheading of yohn ; the passage, titanic in its expression of malignly exultant triumph, which accentuates the delivery of the head to the insensate princess ; the few measures before Herod's patibulary order at the close : these things are products of genius, of the same order of genius which impelled the music of " Don Quixote,*' of" Ein Heldenleben,'* of " Zarathustra '' ; they are true and vital in imagina- tion, marvellous in intensity of vis- ion, of great and subduing potency as dramatic enforcement and as sheer music. 75 ASPECTS OF But when one has said that much, one comes face to face with the chief weakness of the score — its failure in the expression of the gov- erning motive of the play : the consuming and inappeasable lust of Salome for the white body and scarlet lips of John, " Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire. . . . Ah ! ah ! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jo- kanaan ? . . . " That is the note which is sounded 76 MODERN OPERA from beginning to end of the play — that is its focal emotion. And Strauss has not made it sound, as it should sound, in his music. When it should be wildly, barbarically, ungovernably erotic, as for the en- forcement of Salome's fervid suppli- cations in her first interview with John^ the music is merely conven- tional in its sensuousness. It should here be febrile, vertiginous. But what, actually, do we get? We get a scene built upon a phrase in which is crystallised the desire of Salome for the lips of the Prophet ; and this theme is saccharinely ar- dent and sentimental, rather than 11 ASPECTS OF feverish and unbridled; a phrase which might have been a product of the amiably voluptuous inspira- tion of the composer of " Faust." The "Tannhauser" Bacchanale, even in its original form, is more truly expressive of venereous a- bandon than is this strangely senti- mentalised music. It has, no doubt, a certain effectiveness, a certain ex- pressiveness ; but the effect that is produced, and the emotion that is expressed, are far removed from the field of sensation inhabited by Wilde's remarkable Princess. Yet it would seem to be a point needing but the lightest emphasis that if the 78 MODERN OPERA passion of Salome is not fitly and elo- quently rendered by the music, the cardinal impulse, the very heart of Wilde's drama, is left unexpressed. So it is in the music of the final scene, Salome's mad apostrophe to the severed head. Here we get, not the note of lustful abandonment w^hich would alone remove Salome's horrible appetite from the region of the perverted and the incredi- ble, but a kind of musical utterance which simulates the noble rapture of Wagner's dying Isolde. The dis- crepancy of the music in this regard has been recognised by those who praise most warmly Strauss' score. 79 ASPECTS OF It has been said in extenuation, on the one hand, that music is inca- pable of expressing what are called ** base *' emotions, and, on the other hand, that Strauss wished to exalt, to idealise and transfigure, this scene. To the first objection it may be said simply that it is based upon an argument that is at least open to serious question. It is by no means an evident or settled truth that music is incapable of uttering anything but worthy emotions, ideas, concepts. There is music by Berlioz, by Liszt, by Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, by Strauss himself, which is, in its emotional 80 MODERN OPERA substance, sinister, demonic, even pornographic in suggestion ; and not simply by reason of a key furnished by text, motto, or dramatic subject, but in itself — in its quality and character as music. But the claim need not be elaborated, or even demonstrated, since it is beside the point. One quarrels with the music of the final scene of ** Salome'' on the broad ground of its inappropri- ateness : because the emotional note which it strikes and sustains is one of nobility, whereas the plain re- quirement of the scene, of the psychological moment, demands music that should be anything but 6 8i ASPECTS OF noble. And here we encounter the objections of those who hold that Salome herself, at the moment of her apostrophe to the dead head, becomes transfigured, uplifted through the power of a great and purifying love. But to argue in this manner is to indulge in a par- ticularly egregious kind of fatuity. To conceive Wilde's lubricious princess as a kind of Oriental Isolde is grotesquely to distort the vivid and wholly consistent woman of his imagining ; and it is to re- nounce at once all possibility of jus- tifying her culminating actions. For the only ground upon which it 82 MODERN OPERA might be remotely possible to ac- count for Salome' s remarkable behav- iour, except by regarding her as a necrophilistic maniac, is that sup- plied by the conditions and the envi- ronment of a lustful, decadent, and bloodshot age. Only when one conceives her as frankly and sponta- neously a barbarian, nourished on blood and lechery, does she become at all comprehensible to others than pathologists, even if she does not cease to impress us as noisome, monstrous, and horrible. The music of "Salome,'' then, judging it in its entirety, is deficient as an exposition, as a translation 83 ASPECTS OF into tone, of the drama upon which it is based ; for it is inadequate in its expression of the play's central and informing emotion. One listens to this music, it must be granted, with the nerves in an excessive state of tension — it is enormously excit- ing ; but so is, under certain condi- tions, a determined beating upon a drum. An assault upon the nerve- centres is a vastly different thing from an emotional persuasion ; yet there are many who, in listening to "Salome,'* will need to be con- vinced of it. It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many 84 MODERN OPERA ways a noteworthy and brilliant — and, for the curious student of musical evolution — a fascinating work. Its musicianship — the sheer technical artistry which contrived it — is stupefying in its enormous and inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime consid- erations in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most exacting standards — by the stand- ards set in other and greater works of Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in vitality, sincerity, and importance. 85 ASPECTS OF In at least one respect, however, it compels the most unreserved praise ; and that is in the case of its super- lative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a huge and compli- cated body of instruments, and he has set them an appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to the effect of the music as a whole ; for the domi- nant and wonderful distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its total effect, and the 86 MODERN OPERA almost uncanny art with which it is accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and super- lative achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment. The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gor- geous fabric of strange and novel and obsessing colours — for in such orchestral writing as this, sound be- comes colour, and colour sound : it is not a single sense which is en- gaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex of all the senses ; one not only hears, one also imagines that «7 ASPECTS OF one sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It is w^hen one turns from the bewilder- ing magnificence of its orchestral surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope, that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this music, its marvellous witchery, 88 MODERN OPERA are incurably external. It is a gor- geous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality, little true substance, within this dazzling in- strumental envelope ; and for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times ca- cophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and deliberately 89 ASPECTS OF hideous ; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of post- Wagne- rian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any possible musi- cal means that will appropriately express it : to-day we cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another character that his body is ** like the body of a leper, like a plastered wall where vipers crawl . . . like a whitened sepulchre, full of loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so often vulgarly senti- mental, when it should be terrible 90 MODERN OPERA and unbridled in its passion, that it seems to some a defective perform- ance. For sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse for being inflated in ex- pression, it would be hard to find, in any score of the rank of " Salome," the equal of the two themes which Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant mo- tives in the score : the theme which is associated with Salome's desire to kiss the lips of ^ohriy and that other theme — it has been called that of " Ecstasy '' — which begins like the cantabile subject in the first movement of Tschaikowsky's " Pa- 91 ASPECTS OF thetic " Symphony, and ends — well, like Strauss at his worst. An astounding score ! — music that is by turns gorgeous, banal, delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, senti- mental, insinuating, tornadic : music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is over- whelming in its occasional tri- umphs. We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work. Those over-zealous friends of Strauss who have sought to justify the ofFensiveness of " Salome *' by 92 MODERN OPERA alleging the case of Wagner's " Die Walkure/' and the relationship that is there shown to exist between the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however unhal- lowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual malaise. Siegmund and Sieglinde are superbly healthful and untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath with the hor- rible lust of Salome is stupid and absurd. Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead 93 ASPECTS OF lips, is not necessarily delete- rious to morals, nor is it neces- sarily an act of impudicity ; it is merely, for those whose calling does not happen to induce famil- iarity with mortuary things, horrible and revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be ameliorated, the fact, — the situation as conceived and ordered by the dramatist, — is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions require that Salome s kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a darkened stage. But to that it 94 MODERN OPERA may be replied, in the first place, that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as conveyed by the words of Salome — so little, in fact, that Herod, who was any- thing but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome with loathing and commands her de- spatch; and, secondly, that the stage directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a " moonbeam "... which " covers her with light," just be- fore the end, while she is at the climax of her ghastly libido, Mr. Ernest Newman, a thor- oughly sane and extremely able 95 ASPECTS OF champion of all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of " Salome," that ** the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too excitable people who are not artists, and who there- fore cannot understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human nature,'' he goes on, ** breaks out into a variety of forms of energy that are not at all nice from the moral point of view — murder, for example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense. But because these things 96 MODERN OPERA are objectionable in themselves and dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels ; but sensible people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson for creating such a char- acter; they simply enjoy the art of it. The writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect 7 97 ASPECTS OF on us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase of human nature does not neces- sarily mean that, as a private in- dividual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may have been. They do not recom- mend her ; they simply present her, as a specimen of what human nature can be like in certain cir- cumstances. . . . The hysterical 98 MODERN OPERA moralists who cry out against * Salome ' . • . have a terrified, if rather incoherent, feeUng that if women in general were suddenly to become abnormally morbid, con- ceive perverse passions for bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of love and revenge in the middle of the draw- ing-room, the respectable ^^40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet. But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they saw Salome on the stage do some- 99 ASPECTS OF thing like them, any more than men are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Ham- let's uncle murdered his/' Now that, of course, is iresist- ible. But Mr. Newman's gift of vi- vacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its probable effect upon the public is to yield the lOO MODERN OPERA whole case to those who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of course, the opera house), is merely casual and incon- sequential : it is to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation,*' an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensa- tion. It is not unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived to be that of enlarging the sense of life : as an agency for liberating and mellowing the spirit : as an instrument primarily quicken- ing and emancipative. "The sad- lOI ASPECTS OF ness of life is the joy of art," said Mr. George Moore. The sadness of life, yes ; and the evil and tragedy, the terror and violence, of life : for the contemplation of these may, through the evoking of pity, nour- ish and enlarge the spirit of the beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion ? I do not speak of "morality" or " immorality," since there is noth- ing stable in the use or understand- ing of these terms. But those aspects of life which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather I02 MODERN OPERA than terrible — are they fit matter for the artist ? It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. John- son left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady was interrogating him. "She seemed,*' recounts the admirable Boswell, " desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity." To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician : Where, one ends by wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss? — the unpar- alleled maker of music, the indis- 103 ASPECTS OF putable genius who gave us a sheaf of masterpieces: who gave us " Don Quixote/' "Ein Heldenleben," " Zarathustra," "Tod und Verkla- rung." Has he passed into that desolate region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist — the futility of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as ** Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past) ? Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the 104 MODERN OPERA ministrations of that "Eternal Spirit '* which, in Milton's wonder- ful phrase, " sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases '' ? 105 A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA I Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for opera as a form of art was gen- uine and profound, observed amiably that the "Opera Muse'' was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters 109 ASPECTS OF have improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical forte was not ur- banity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely contrived " to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those classes of society on whose sup- port it immediately depends." Yet the shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though, Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker no MODERN OPERA with whose example one might to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly not be conceived as ** a tawdry courtesan,'* neither can she be conceived as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her " sim- plicity'' and ** sensibility/' Wag- ner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever defiance of dramatic con- sistency, as was any one of the other facile and conscienceless opera- wrights whom his doctrines con- ASPECTS OF temned. The ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they were, com- paratively speaking, Lilliputians. Mr. William F. Apthorp, speak- ing of the condition of the Opera before Wagner's reforms were ex- erted upon it, observes that it " remained (despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it — not a drama with aux- iliary music, but a dramma per music a — a drama for (the sake of) 112 MODERN OPERA music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiHary music, rather than dramas for the sake of music ; yet it is becoming more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing, despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded 8 113 n ASPECTS OF by the quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves and him. II It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be strictly auxiliary — an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the 114 MODERN OPERA enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has excellently stated it, his basic prin- ciple was that " the text (what in old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the poet, all other persons who have to do with the work — composer, stage- architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and sing- ing actors — should aim at one thing only : the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought.'' Wagner's chief quarrel with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the musical element in its constitu- "5 ASPECTS OF tion. If there is one principle that is definite, positive, and unmistak- able in his theoretical position it is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor — like the scene- painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship be- tween the drama and the music is inverted — that in his music-dramas the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect, while the drama is a mere frame- work for its splendours — it becomes ii6 MODERN OPERA obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively) in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the play 's the thing/' Yet what be- comes of " Tristan und Isolde,*' of "Meistersinger,'' of " Gotterdam- merung,*' when this principle is tested by their quality and effect ? Would even the most incorruptible among the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most ex- alted hour of martyrdom, have ven- tured to say that in " Tristan," for example, the play 's the thing ? Im- shf;d.„goteiK:j;- — it is still, re- garded as an independent entity, ,of almost unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and the varied pageant of the visible world ; and it will always float and sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite, 123 ASPECTS OF epical and tender, sublimely_n1df= wM^^^^^h^- com pr omise the para m ount place^ lo 145 / ASPECTS OF in the structural scheme, the musi- cal envelope with which it is sur- rounded is not only transparent and intensifying, but, as music, beauti- ful and remarkable in an extraord- inary degree. The point to be emphasised is this: that the post- ulate of Count Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers,'' formulated by Gluck almost two hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective application in Debussy's " Pelleas "* et Melisande." What the Cameratdy 146 MODERN OPERA and their successors, could not ac- complish for lack of adequate musi- cal means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a French- man of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved. His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow growth of the art as of a pre- eminent natural fitness for the task. The Flo rentines , for all their eager- ness and sincerity, were helj H7 ASPECTS OF before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and effec- tive form, for they were hopelessly- blocked by reason of the desperate I poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the elab- orate and lovely art of the contra- puntists, they found themselves in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with passionate con- victions but without tools — in other words, they aspired to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost L non -existent orchestra, and with 148 MODERN OPERA virtually no perception of the pos- sibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any in- firmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear as was his perception of the rightful de- mands of the drama in any serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck justly says, to effect a " real amalgamation of music and drama,'' failed to strike out " a form organically connecting each part of the opera with every! other." His unconnected " num- bers,*' his indulgence in vocal em- 149 ASPECTS OF broidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or far-seeing re- formatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes, he ** in- sisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer. Such a thing as allowing the drama to con- dition the form of the music never occurred to him.'' A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in which the music was really made to exercise, 150 MODERN OPERA continuously and undeviatingly, what he stated to be " its true func- tion/' It would be absurd to dis- pute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was both keen and rich ; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole. Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his princi- ples — which were of course in essence the principles of the Floren- 151 ASPECTS OF tines and of Gluck — and the evi- dent reason for his failure, enough has already been said. So we come again to Debussy. For it is a singular fact — and this is the point to insist upon — that this French mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musi- cal art who has exhibited the cour- age, and who has possessed the means, to carry the principles of the Cameratay of Gluck, and of Wagner to their ultimate conclu- sion. In " Pelleas et Melisande " he has made his music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute fidelity and consis- 152 MODERN OPERA tency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the entire dramatic material into the terms of the sym- phonic poem, and with the sing- ing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the method of Wagner), as we are from the futile cxperimentings of the Camerata. V One cannot but wonder what 153 ASPECTS OF Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty, simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible associa- tion with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the lyric stage which ignores even those op- portunities for musical effect which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to the Spirit of Comedy in trying to im- agine what Richard Wagner would have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course 154 MODERN OPERA of a score almost as long as that of " Tristan und Isolde/' and in which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a mex%o-forte. De- bussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic art for the ex- quisite justness with which it en- forces the moods and action of the play. It never seduces the atten- tion of the auditor from the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner, tyrannically ab- sorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama there is maintained, as to emphasis and in- tensity, a scrupulous balance be- tween the movement of the drama 155 ASPECTS OF and the tonal undercurrent which is its complement : the music is absolutely merged in the play, suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it. It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the ideal manner of constructing a music- drama, the hazardous epithet ** per- fect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more faith- ful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently in- consistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture, there is none of Wagner's gorgeously ex- pansive rhetoric : the " Je t'aime," 156 MODERN OPERA **Je t'aime aussi " of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a simpli- city and a stark sincerity which could not well go further ; and it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's music- drama : that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet : that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reti- 157 ASPECTS OF cent. After the grave speech and simple gestures of these naive yet subtle and passionate tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid per- sonages seem, for a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and over- wrought. To attempt to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile endeavour ; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound, as it is grate- '58 MODERN OPERA ful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and tramplings of Wag- nerian conquests. His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed com- mentary on the text and the action of the play, underlining the signifi- cance of the former and colouring and intensifying the latter ; but its comments are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's — indeed, their reticence and discre- tion are, as it has been said, extreme. Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does not 159 ASPECTS OF say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner being able to resist the temptation to in- dulge in some graphic and detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delay- ing the action and overloading the score, at the passage wherein Golaudy coming upon the errant and weep- ing Melts ande in the forest, and see- ing her crown at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it is that shines in the water ? Yet observe the curiously insinuating effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treat- ment of this episode — t\\Q pianissimo chords on the muted horns, followed 1 60 MODERN OPERA by a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene oi Melisande? — a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced that it enters the consciousness al- most unperceived as music. The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgot- ten ; nor are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome,'' overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense, oppressive, and many-stranded II i6i ASPECTS OF web of tone. Yet always Debussy's musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages ; though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous reality, — "the thing behind the thing,'' as the Celts have named it, — which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de L' Isle- Adam's descrip- 162 MODERN OPERA tion of the voice of his Elen : "... it was taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through the region of shadows.'' This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here. Taine once spoke of the " violent sorcery " of Victor Hugo's style, and it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music of the titanic German. Debussy in 163 ASPECTS OF his " Pelleas '* has written music that is rich in sorcery ; but it is not violent. In it inheres a capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result, that music had not before exerted — an enchantment that invades the mind by stealth yet holds it with en- chaining power. In a curious degree the music is both contem- plative and impassioned ; its per- vading note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude — the sweeping and cosmic winds of " Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic fibre of the score is strong and rich ; for all its fineness and delicacy of 164 MODERN OPERA texture and its economy of accent, it is neither amorphous nor inert. VI Tristan and Isolde^ in moments of exalted emotion, utter that emotion with the frankest lyricism ; Pelleas and Melisande, in moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere couched. It is the orchestra which sings — which, passionately or medi- tatively, colours the dramatic mo- ment. Wherein we come to what is perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score : 165 ASPECTS OF the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this respect, justly summarised, is this : He has released the orchestra from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which Wag- ner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and transpar- ency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself has suc- cintly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of writ- ing for the voices in " Pelleas." " I have been reproached," he has said, " because in my score the i66 MODERN OPERA melodic phrase is always found in the orchestra, never in the voice. I vi^ished — intended, in fact, — that the action should never be arrested ; that it should be continu- ous, uninterruDted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spec- tator is wont to experience two kinds of emotion : the musical emotion on the one hand ; and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other. Generally these are felt successively. I have tried to blend these two emotions, and make them simultaneous. 167 ASPECTS OF Melody is, if I may say so, almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotion or life. Melody is suitable only for the song [c/ianson], which confirms a fixed sentiment. I have never been willing that my music should hinder . . . the changes of senti- ment and passion felt by my char- acters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that these should have perfect liberty in tlieir gestures as in their cries, in their joys as in their sorrow." Now Debussy in his public excur- sions as a critic is not always to be taken seriously ; indeed, it is alto- i68 MODERN OPERA gether unlikely that he has refrained from demonstrations of exquisite delight over the startled or con- temptuous comment which some of his vivacious heresies concerning certain of the gods of music have evoked. These published appraise- ments of his are, of course, nothing more than impertinent, though at times apt and s3.g2Lcious,jeux d'esprit. But when he speaks seriously, as in the defence of his practice which I have just quoted, of the menace of "parasitic'* musical phrases in the voice-parts, and when he ob- serves that melody, when it oc- curs in the speech of characters 169 ASPECTS OF in music-drama, is "almost anti- lyric," he speaks with penetration and truth. His practice, which illustrates it, amounts to this : He employs in " Pelleas " a continuous declamation, uncadenced, entirely unmelodic (in the sense in which melodious declarnation has been understood). Save for a brief and particular instance, there is no melo- dic form whatsoever, from begin- ning to end of the score. There is not a hint of the Wagnerian arioso. The declamation is founded throughout upon the natural inflections of the voice in speaking — it is, indeed, virtually an electrified and height- 170 MODERN OPERA ened form of speech. It is never musical, for the sake of sheer musi- cal beauty, when the emotion within the text or situation does not lift it to the plane where the quality of utterance tends naturally and inevi- tably toward lyricism of accent. He does not, for example, commit the kind of indiscretion that Wagner commits when he makes Isolde sing the highly unlyrical line, " Der * Tantris ' mit sorgender List sich nannte,'' to a phrase that has the double demerit of being " para- sitically '' and intrusively melodic and wholly conventional in pattern — one of those musical platitudes 171 ASPECTS OF which have no excuse for existence in any sincere and vital score. Nor in **Pelleas*' do the singers ever sing, it need hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a con- certed number, or a chorus (the snatches of distant song heard from the sailors on the departing ship is a mere touch of atmospheric suggestion). The dialogue is every- where and always clearly individual- ised, as in the spoken drama. Yet this surprising fact is to be noted : undeviatingly naturalistic as are the voice-parts in their structure and in- flection, and despite their haughty and stoic intolerance of melodic ef- 172 MODERN OPERA feet, they yet are so contrived that they often yield — incidentally, as it were — effects of musical beauty ; and in so doing, they demonstrate the unfamiliar truth that there is possible in music-drama a use of the voice which permits of an ex- pressiveness that is both telling and beautiful, though it yields nothing that accepted canons would warrant us in describing as either melody or melodious declamation. Now Mr. Baughan, whose views concern- ing Wagner and his habits have been discussed, craves in the music- dramas of Wagner a frankness of melody in the vocal writing whose >73 ASPECTS OF absence he deplores; and he seems to think that when this melodious- ness of utterance is denied to the voices in modern opera, all that is left them is something "that an orchestral instrument could do as well" — something that, inferen- entially, is anti-vocal, or at least un- idiomatic. It would seem that Mr. Baughan, and those who think as he does, fail to realise, as I have remarked before, the immensely important part which it is possible for modern harmony to play in the combination of a voice and accom- panying instruments. It would not be difficult to demonstrate that a 174 MODERN OPERA large part of what we are in the habit of regarding as a purely melo- dic form of vocal expression in the modern lyric-drama owes a large and unsuspected measure of its potency of effect to the modulatory charac- ter of its harmonic support. Take a passage that we are apt to think of as one of the most ravishingly and purely melodious in the whole of that fathomless well of lyric beauty, " Tristan und Isolde '' — the passage in the duet in the second act beginning, " Bricht mein Blick sich wonn* erblindet/* As one hears it sung by the two voices above the orchestra, it seems a perfect ex- 175 ASPECTS OF ample of pure melodic inspiration ; yet play the voice-parts, alone or together, without their harmonic undercurrent, and all the beauty, all the meaning, vanish at once : with- out the kaleidescopic harmonic color the melodic phrases are without point, coherence, or design. But this is aside from the point that I would make — that the potentiaU- ties of modern harmony make possible a use of the voice in music- drama which, while it is remote from the character of formal melody, may yet be productive of a kind of emotional eloquence that is exceedingly puissant and beauti- 176 MODERN OPERA ful, and that may even possess a seemingly lyric quality. We find a foreshadowing of this kind of effect in such a passage as Tristan s ** Bin ich in Kornwall?'* where all of the haunting effect of the phrase is due to the modulation in the harmony into the G-major chord at the first syllable of "Kornwall." And one might point out to Mr. Baughan that this effect is subtly dependent upon the co-operation of the voice and the instruments. The phrase in the voice-part is not one " that an orchestral instru- ment could do as well/' as Mr. Baughan would at once recognise 12 177 ASPECTS OF if he were to play the accompany- ing chords on a piano and give the progression in the voice to a 'cello or a violin. But while Wagner foreshadowed this manner of making his har- monic support confer a special char- acter upon the effect of the voice- part, he did not begin to sound its possibilities. That was left for Debussy to do ; and for the task he was obviously equipped in a surpass- ing degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful harmonic vocabulary — the richest harmonic instrument, beyond com- parison, that music has yet known. 178 MODERN OPERA The score of "Pelleas" overflows with instances of this — one may paradoxically call it harmonic — use of the voice: things that Wagner, with his comparatively limited har- monic range, could not have accom- plished. As instances where the voice-part, without being inher- ently melodic, borrows a semblance of almost lyrical beauty from its harmonic associations, consider the passage in the grotto scene begin- ning at Pelleas' words, " Elle est tres grande et tres belle,'' and con- tinuing to ** Donnez-moi la main'' ; or the astonishing passage in the final love scene beginning at Pelleas* 179 ASPECTS OF words, "On a brise la glace avec dcs fers rougis ! " or, in the last act, the expression that is given to Mel- isandes phrase, "la grande fenetre . . . *' Yet note that in such passages the voice-part does not, in Mr. Baughan's phrase, merely " weave up '' with the orchestra, as he protests that it does in Wagner's practice; in other words, it is not simply an incidental strand in the general harmonic texture ; it has character and individuality of its own, though these are absolutely dependent for their full effect upon their harmonic background. Nor is it, on the other hand, so assertive 1 80 MODERN OPERA and conspicuous that it comes within the class of that which De- bussy repudiates as ** parasitic/* Here, then, is a method of uttering the text that not only permits of a just and veracious rendering of every possible dramatic nuance, but which, by virtue of the means of musical enforcement that are applied to it, takes on a character and quality, as music, which are as influential as they are unparalleled. VII It has been affirmed that in "Pelleas et Melisande " Debussy has produced a work as command- i8i ASPECTS OF ing in quality as it is unique in conception and design. Let us consider what grounds there may- be for the assertion. To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without an- alogy in the previous history, not merely of opera, but of music. Debussy is a man of unhampered and clairvoyant imagination, a dreamer with a far-wandering vision. He views the spectacle of the world through the magic casements of the mystic who is also a poet and visionary. One can easily conceive him as taking the more tranquil part in that provocative dialogue 182 MODERN OPERA put by Mr. Yeats into the mouths of two of his dramatic characters : "And what in the living world can happen to a man that is asleep on his bed ? Work must go on and coach- building must go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no profit in it to anyone at all.** " There are some would answer you that it is to those who are awake that nothing happens, and it is they who know nothing. He that is asleep on his bed is gone where all have gone for supreme truth.** In Maeterlinck's " Pelleas et Melisande,** Debussy has, through a fortunate conjunction of circum- ASPECTS OF stances, found a perfect vehicle for his impulses and preoccupations. There will always be, naturally enough, persons who must inevi- tably regard such a work as that for which he and Maeterlinck are now responsible as, for the most part, vain, inutile, even prepos- terous. They are sincere in their dislike, these forthright and excel- lent people, and they are to be commiserated, for they are, in such a region of the imagination as this drama builds up about them, aliens in a world whose ways and whose wonders must be forever hidden from their most determined scru- 184 MODERN OPERA tiny. Such robust and worldly spirits, writes a thoughtful contem- porary essayist, " that swim so vigor- ously on the surface of things,'' have always ** a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the depth holds'*: they will not even grant that the depths are anything save murky, that the tidings have va- lidity or importance. They take comfort in their detachment, and are apt to speak of themselves, with mock humility, as "plain, blunt persons," for whom the alleged vacuities of such an order of art are 1 8s ASPECTS OF comfortably negligible. Well, it is, after all, as Maeterlinck's Pelleas himself observes, a matter not so much for mirth as for lament; yet even more is it a matter for resigna- tion. There will always be, as has been observed, an immense and con- fident majority for whom that ter- ritory of the creative imagination which lies over the boundaries of the palpable world will seem worse than delusive : who will always and sincerely pin their faith to that which is definite and concrete, pat- ent and direct, and who must in all honesty reject that which is unde- clared, allusive, crepuscular : which i86 MODERN OPERA communicates itself through echoes and in glimpses ; by means of inti- mations, signs, and tokens. For them it would be of no avail to point to the dictum of one who, like Maeterlinck, is aware of remote voices and strange dreams : ** Dra- matic art,'' he has wisely said, "is a method of expression, and neither a hair-breadth escape nor a love affair more befits it than the pas- sionate exposition of the most deli- cate and strange intuitions ; and the dramatist is as free as the painter of good pictures and the writer of good books. All art is passionate, but a flame is not the less flame 187 ASPECTS OF because we change the candle for a lamp or the lamp for a fire ; and all flame is beautiful/* It is a dictum that is scarcely- calculated to persuade a very gen- eral acceptance : a " passionate ex- position of the most delicate and strange intuitions '' is not precisely the kind of aesthetic fare which the " plain, blunt man," glorying in his plainness and his bluntness, is apt to relish. It is a point upon which it is perhaps needless to dwell ; but its recognition serves as explanation of the fact that the music-drama into which Debussy has transformed Maeterlinck's play should not every- i88 MODERN OPERA where and always be either accepted or understood. For in the musical setting of Debussy, Maeterlinck's drama ^has found its perfect equiva- lent : the qualities of the music are the qualities of the play, completely and exactly ; and, sharing its quali- ties, it has evoked and will always evoke the more or less contemptuous antagonism of those for whom it has little or nothing to say. Of the quality of its style, perhaps the most obvious trait to note is its divergence from the kind of music- making which we are accustomed to regard as typically French. We have come to regard as inevitable 189 ASPECTS OF the clear-cut precision, the finesse, the instinctive grace of French music ; but we are not at all accus- tomed to discovering this fineness of texture allied with marked emo- tional richness, with depth and sub- stance of thought — we do not look for such an alliance, nor find it, in any French music from Rameau to Saint-Saens, Gounod, and Masse- net. Yet Debussy has the typical French clarity and fineness of sur- face without the French hardness of edge and thinness of substance. The contours of his music are as melting and elastic as its emotional substance is rich ; and it is phantas- 190 MODERN OPERA mal rather than definite and clear- cut ; evasive rather than direct. His art, as a matter of fact, has its roots in the literature rather than in the music of his country. His true fore- bears are not Rameau, Couperin, Boieldieu, Bizet, Saint-Saens, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme; and, beyond his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace of French musical influence in the score of ^* Pelleas,'* save for its limpidity of expression and its delicate logic of structure. The truth is that Debussy, v/ith d'Indy, Ravel, and others, has made it impossible to speak any longer, 191 ASPECTS OF without qualification, of " French " quality, or "French" style, in music; for to-day there is the French of Saint-Saens and Massenet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy, Duparc, Faure, Ravel : and the two orders are as inassociable under a generic yoke as are the poetry of Hugo and the poetry of Verlaine. But the essential thing to observe and to praise in this music is its astonishing, its almost incredible, affluence of substance : its richness in ideas that are both extraordinarily beautiful and wholly new. The score, in this respect alone, is epoch- making. Debussy is the first music- 192 MODERN OPERA maker since Wagner to evolve a kind of style of which the sub- stance is, so to say, new^ly-minted. Strauss is not to be compared with him in this regard ; for the basis of the German master's style, upon which he has reared no matter how wonderful a superstructure, is compounded of materials which he got straight from Richard Wagner and his great forerunner, Franz Liszt; whereas the basis, the starting-point, of Debussy's style — its harmonic and melodic stuff — existed nowhere, in any artistic shape or condition, before him. To speak of it as in any vital 13 193 ASPECTS OF sense a reversion, because it makes use of certain principles of plain- song, is mere trifling. Debussy is a true innovator, if ever there was one. He has added fresh mate- rials to the matter out of which music is evolved ; and no composer of whom this may be said, from Beethoven to Chopin, has failed to find himself eventually ranked as the originator of a new order of things in the development of the art. VIII Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the music of "Pelleas et Melisande'' 194 MODERN OPERA will for some time to come find it difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of extrava- gance. One owns, in trying to ap- praise it, to a compunction similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics, when, after ap- plauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation,'* and " must mix in a little depreciation,'' to show that he had " read attentively, critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite risk in prais- ing too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to intrude 195 ASPECTS OF itself upon contemporary observa- tion, and upon a critical function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric- drama as is spoken here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the entertainment of sub- sequent generations and the inex- tinguishable delight of the Comic Muse — which, as Mr. Meredith 196 MODERN OPERA has pointed out, watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind of excess. Yet I am w^illing to assert deliberately, and v^ith a perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the score of " Pelleas '' is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of " Tristan und Isolde *' ; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a dozen measures in which one cannot 197 ASPECTS OF point out some touch of genius. The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey of it a conviction of its almost contin- uous inspiration, of its profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that possess char- acter and nobility, and that are often of deep and ravishing beauty — a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the inspiration is so per- sistent and so fresh — in which there is so little that is cliche, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is thinking of music written for the 198 MODERN OPERA stage, one has to go to the author of "Tristan'' for anything compa- rable to it. It has been said that in this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is justi- fied. There are passages, most of them to be found in the inter- ludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known, were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and rare gold of his thought is inter- mixed with the dross of alien ideas. And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score : thus we 199 ASPECTS OF hear "Parsifal*' in the first inter- lude, "Parsifal'' and "Siegfried" in the interlude following the scene at the fountain — the scene wherein Melisande* s ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of this music, even when it momen- tarily takes the timbre of another ; and none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled, has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching and so underived. 200 MODERN OPERA Thenature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon its remarkable quality by his appre- ciators, have provoked the assertion that the score of " Pelleas '* is de- void of melody, or at least that it is v^eak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect exempli- fication of that critical method which consists in measuring new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of seeking to learn whether they do not them- selves establish new standards by which alone they are to be appraised. -( ASPECTS OF The method has been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The music of "Pelleas'' is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen, reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have already been discussed, has de- liberately and wisely avoided formal melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra — an orchestra which, while it depends in an un- exampled degree upon a predomi- nantly harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from be- ing devoid of melodic effect. But 202 MODERN OPERA the melody is Debussy's melody — it is fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors, — men who themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles impatient or inhospi- table ears by reason of its seeming indefiniteness, its apparently way- ward movement, and because of the shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the 203 ASPECTS OF melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by the fountain, in the second act ; the whole of the tower scene — an outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the love- liest pages of "Tristan" for a com- parison; the affecting interview between Melisande and the benign and infinitely wise Arkely in the fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park ; and almost the whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the en- trancing music to which he has set 204 MODERN OPERA the ecstatic apostrophe of Pelleas to his beloved's hair, he would have established an indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original kind. It has been said that he is " incapable of writing sus- tained melody "; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to have compassed even "sus- tained '' melody ; for the melodic line — varied, sensitive, and plastic though it is — is here of almost unbroken continuity. 205 ASPECTS OF In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder at its precision and flexibil- ity. The manner in which each scene is individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene, is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has discovered the exact and illuminating equiva- lent. The eloquence of this music is seldom abated ; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief and final claim to the highest excellence in 206 MODERN OPERA its triumphant character as an ex- pressional achievement ; in this it ranks with the supreme things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and beautiful expression. It is probably unneces- sary to allege the quality of such examples as the scene by the foun- tain, the perilous encounter at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the sun- lit terrace above the sea — music that has an entrancing radiance and 207 ASPECTS OF perfume, through which blows ** all the air of all the sea" — these things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal compre- hension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the countless felicities of structural and external detail : felicities which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter, less obvious felicities : of the grave beauty of the passage in which Genevieve reads to the King the let- 208 MODERN OPERA ter of Golaud to his brother Felleas ^; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act, after Melts ande s ques- tion : " Oh ! . . . pourquoi partez- vous?''; of the delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at Pelleas* words, in the scene at the fountain, " . . . le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the exquisite setting of Golaud' s ex- clamation of delight over the beauty of Melisande s hands ; of the entire grotto scene, — a passage of superb imaginative fervour, — with its in- describably poetic ending (the frag- 1 As one out of many instances of similarly striking detail, observe the remarkable and moving progression in the voice- part from the D in the ninth chord on B-flat to the B-natural in the chord of G-sharp minor, at Gene'vie-ve' s words" . . . tour qui regardela mer." 14 209 ASPECTS OF ment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes and a harp) ; of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the " Regarde, re- garde, j*embrasse tes cheveux . . ." of the enraptured Pelleas ; of the piercing effect of the Melts ande theme where it is combined with that of Pelleas in the interlude which follows the scene at the tower window; of the pas- sage preceding the entrance of Me lis ande and Ark'el in the fourth act, where Melts ande' s theme is heard in augmentation; of the pas- 2IO MODERN OPERA sage in the transitional music follow- ing the misusing of Melisande by Golaud where her theme is played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns — a diminuendo of inexpressible poignancy ; of the impassioned soliloquy oi Pelleas pre- paratory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites Melisande to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees ; of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him ; of the in- terplay of " ninth '* chords which is 211 ASPECTS OF heard, in the final act, when Arkel asks Melisande if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage which immediately follows, as Melisande says that she wishes the window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea ; of, indeed, the whole of the incomparable music of Melu sande's death; and finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the curiously potent and haunting scene in which Pelleas and Melisande, with Genevieve, watch the departure of the ship from the port 212 MODERN OPERA and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On s'embarquerait sans le savoir et Ton ne reviendrait plus" oiPelleaSy sung over a linger- ing series of descending chords of the ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the passage in triplets which is heard when Pelleas speaks of the beacon 213 ASPECTS OF light shining dimly through the mist ; the veiled and sinister phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of the sail- ors' call : these are salient moments in a masterly piece of psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal delineation. Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish — and it is not unlikely that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of style — will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of "Pelleas et Melisande/' It has had, it has been truly said, no prede- cessor, no forerunner ; and there is 214 MODERN OPERA nothing in the musical art that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive influence, it is not now possible to say ; but that its extraordinary importance as a work of art will compel an ever- widening appreciation, seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score, Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Pat- more: **I have respected posterity." NOTE Some of the material contained in the foregoing studies appeared origin- ally in articles published in Harper s Weekly y The North American Review ^^ind The Musician, But for the most part the essays are new; and such passages of earlier origin as are retained have been considerably altered and amplified. w 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LIBRARY This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. . . J vai>-^ o\m JO 1982 13oU pcp'rv m\^s^ AUG 2 9 1983 DEC 7 1952 JUN 6 1963 DEC i 8 1963 SEP 1 1968 , „_ ^ R IpCR OCT lo iy<'» MI\P 2 2 19G9 MAY 3 1969 JUL 71978 MAR 2 3 1979 ?Als^rir,%^6^ U.i.^^£igSLnia 30245& } UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY