Part 14 (2/2)

The end of the sixteenth century saw a coterie of scholars, art-lovers, and amateur musicians in Florence who desired to re-establish the relations.h.i.+p which they knew had once existed between music and the drama. The revival of learning had made the cla.s.sic tragedy dear to their hearts. They knew that in the olden time tragedy, of which the words only have come down to us, had been musical throughout. In their efforts to bring about an intimacy between dramatic poetry and music they found that nothing could be done with the polite music of their time. It was the period of highest development in ecclesiastical music, and the climax of artificiality.

The professional musicians to whom they turned scorned their theories and would not help them; so they fell back on their own resources.

They cut the Gordian knot and invented a new style of music, which they fancied was like that used by the ancients in their stage-plays.

They abolished polyphony, or contrapuntal music, in everything except their choruses, and created a sort of musical declamation, using variations of pitch and harmonies built up on a simple ba.s.s to give emotional life to their words. In choosing their tones they were guided by observation of the vocal inflections produced in speech under stress of feeling, showing thus a recognition of the law which Herbert Spencer formulated two hundred and fifty years later.

[Sidenote: _The music of the Florentine reformers._]

[Sidenote: _The solo style, harmony, and declamation._]

[Sidenote: _Fluent recitatives._]

The music which these men produced and admired sounds to us monotonous in the extreme, for what little melody there is in it is in the choruses, which they failed to emanc.i.p.ate from the ecclesiastical art, and which for that reason were as stiff and inelastic as the music which in their controversies with the musicians they condemned with vigor. Yet within their invention there lay an entirely new world of music. Out of it came the solo style, a song with instrumental accompaniment of a kind unknown to the church composers. Out of it, too, came harmony as an independent factor in music instead of an accident of the simultaneous flow of melodies; and out of it came declamation, which drew its life from the text. The recitatives which they wrote had the fluency of spoken words and were not r.e.t.a.r.ded by melodic forms. The new style did not accomplish what its creators hoped for, but it gave birth to Italian opera and emanc.i.p.ated music in a large measure from the formalism that dominated it so long as it belonged exclusively to the composers for the church.

[Sidenote: _Predecessors of Wagner._]

[Sidenote: _Old operatic distinctions._]

[Sidenote: _Opera buffa._]

[Sidenote: _Opera seria._]

[Sidenote: _Recitative._]

Detailed study of the progress of opera from the first efforts of the Florentines to Wagner's dramas would carry us too far afield to serve the purposes of this book. My aim is to fix the att.i.tude proper, or at least useful, to the opera audience of to-day. The excursion into history which I have made has but the purpose to give the art-form a reputable standing in court, and to explain the motives which prompted the revolution accomplished by Wagner. As to the elements which compose an opera, only those need particular attention which are ill.u.s.trated in the current repertory. Unlike the opera audiences of two centuries ago, we are not required to distinguish carefully between the various styles of opera in order to understand why the composer adopted a particular manner, and certain fixed forms in each.

The old distinctions between _Opera seria_, _Opera buffa_, and _Opera semiseria_ perplex us no more. Only because of the perversion of the time-honored Italian epithet _buffa_ by the French mongrel _Opera bouffe_ is it necessary to explain that the cla.s.sic _Opera buffa_ was a polite comedy, whose musical integument did not of necessity differ from that of _Opera seria_ except in this--that the dialogue was carried on in ”dry” recitative (_recitativo secco_, or _parlante_) in the former, and a more measured declamation with orchestral accompaniment (_recitativo stromentato_) in the latter. So far as subject-matter was concerned the cla.s.sic distinction between tragedy and comedy served. The dry recitative was supported by chords played by a double-ba.s.s and harpsichord or pianoforte. In London, at a later period, for reasons of doubtful validity, these chords came to be played on a double-ba.s.s and violoncello, as we occasionally hear them to-day.

[Sidenote: _Opera semiseria._]

[Sidenote: _”Don Giovanni.”_]

Shakespeare has taught us to accept an infusion of the comic element in plays of a serious cast, but Shakespeare was an innovator, a Romanticist, and, measured by old standards, his dramas are irregular.

The Italians, who followed cla.s.sic models, for a reason amply explained by the genesis of the art-form, rigorously excluded comedy from serious operas, except as _intermezzi_, until they hit upon a third cla.s.sification, which they called _Opera semiseria_, in which a serious subject was enlivened with comic episodes. Our dramatic tastes being grounded in Shakespeare, we should be inclined to put down ”Don Giovanni” as a musical tragedy; or, haunted by the Italian terminology, as _Opera semiseria_; but Mozart calls it _Opera buffa_, more in deference to the librettist's work, I fancy, than his own, for, as I have suggested elsewhere,[E] the musician's imagination in the fire of composition went far beyond the conventional fancy of the librettist in the finale of that most wonderful work.

[Sidenote: _An Opera buffa._]

[Sidenote: _French Grand Opera._]

[Sidenote: _Opera comique._]

[Sidenote: _”Mignon.”_]

[Sidenote: _”Faust.”_]

It is well to remember that ”Don Giovanni” is an _Opera buffa_ when watching the buffooneries of _Leporello_, for that alone justifies them. The French have _Grand Opera_, in which everything is sung to orchestra accompaniment, there being neither spoken dialogue nor dry recitative, and _Opera comique_, in which the dialogue is spoken. The latter corresponds with the honorable German term _Singspiel_, and one will not go far astray if he a.s.sociate both terms with the English operas of Wallace and Balfe, save that the French and Germans have generally been more deft in bridging over the chasm between speech and song than their British rivals. _Opera comique_ has another characteristic, its _denouement_ must be happy. Formerly the _Theatre national de l'Opera-Comique_ in Paris was devoted exclusively to _Opera comique_ as thus defined (it has since abolished the distinction and _Grand Opera_ may be heard there now), and, therefore, when Ambroise Thomas brought forward his ”Mignon,” Goethe's story was found to be changed so that _Mignon_ recovered and was married to _Wilhelm Meister_ at the end. The Germans are seldom pleased with the transformations which their literary masterpieces are forced to undergo at the hands of French librettists. They still refuse to call Gounod's ”Faust” by that name; if you wish to hear it in Germany you must go to the theatre when ”Margarethe” is performed. Naturally they fell indignantly afoul of ”Mignon,” and to placate them we have a second finale, a _denouement allemand_, provided by the authors, in which _Mignon_ dies as she ought.

[Sidenote: _Grosse Oper._]

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