Part 16 (1/2)
[Sidenote: _Wagner's influence._]
[Sidenote: _His orchestra._]
[Sidenote: _Vocal feats._]
For those who hold such a view with me it will be impossible to condemn pieces of set forms in the lyric drama. Wagner still represents his art-work alone, but in the influence which he exerted upon contemporaneous composers in Italy and France, as well as Germany, he is quite as significant a figure as he is as the creator of the _Musikdrama_. The operas which are most popular in our Italian and French repertories are those which benefited by the liberation from formalism and the exaltation of the dramatic idea which he preached and exemplified--such works as Gounod's ”Faust,” Verdi's ”Ada” and ”Otello,” and Bizet's ”Carmen.” With that emanc.i.p.ation there came, as was inevitable, new conceptions of the province of dramatic singing as well as new convictions touching the mission of the orchestra. The instruments in Wagner's latter-day works are quite as much as the singing actors the expositors of the dramatic idea, and in the works of the other men whom I have mentioned they speak a language which a century ago was known only to the orchestras of Gluck and Mozart with their comparatively limited, yet eloquent, vocabulary.
Coupled with praise for the wonderful art of Mesdames Patti and Melba (and I am glad to have lived in their generation, though they do not represent my ideal in dramatic singing), we are accustomed to hear lamentations over the decay of singing. I have intoned such jeremiads myself, and I do not believe that music is suffering from a greater want to-day than that of a more thorough training for singers. I marvel when I read that Senesino sang cadences of fifty seconds'
duration; that Ferri with a single breath could trill upon each note of two octaves, ascending and descending, and that La b.a.s.t.a.r.della's art was equal to a perfect performance (perfect in the conception of her day) of a flourish like this:
[Sidenote: _La b.a.s.t.a.r.della's flourish._]
[Music ill.u.s.tration]
[Sidenote: _Character of the opera a century and a half ago._]
[Sidenote: _Music and dramatic expression._]
I marvel, I say, at the skill, the gifts, and the training which could accomplish such feats, but I would not have them back again if they were to be employed in the old service. When Senesino, Farinelli, Sa.s.sarelli, Ferri, and their tribe dominated the stage, it strutted with s.e.xless Agamemnons and Caesars. Telemachus, Darius, Nero, Cato, Alexander, Scipio, and Hannibal ran around on the boards as languis.h.i.+ng lovers, clad in humiliating disguises, singing woful arias to their mistress's eyebrows--arias full of trills and scales and florid ornaments, but void of feeling as a problem in Euclid. Thanks very largely to German influences, the opera is returning to its original purposes. Music is again become a means of dramatic expression, and the singers who appeal to us most powerfully are those who are best able to make song subserve that purpose, and who to that end give to dramatic truthfulness, to effective elocution, and to action the attention which mere voice and beautiful utterance received in the period which is called the Golden Age of singing, but which was the Leaden Age of the lyric drama.
[Sidenote: _Singers heard in New York._]
For seventy years the people of New York, scarcely less favored than those of London, have heard nearly all the great singers of Europe.
Let me talk about some of them, for I am trying to establish some ground on which my readers may stand when they try to form an estimate of the singing which they are privileged to hear in the opera houses of to-day. Madame Malibran was a member of the first Italian company that ever sang here. Madame Cinti-Damoreau came in 1844, Bosio in 1849, Jenny Lind in 1850, Sontag in 1853, Grisi in 1854, La Grange in 1855, Frezzolini in 1857, Piccolomini in 1858, Nilsson in 1870, Lucca in 1872, t.i.tiens in 1876, Gerster in 1878, and Sembrich in 1883. I omit the singers of the German opera as belonging to a different category. Adelina Patti was always with us until she made her European debut in 1861, and remained abroad twenty years. Of the men who were the artistic a.s.sociates of these _prime donne_, mention may be made of Mario, Benedetti, Corsi, Salvi, Ronconi, Formes, Brignoli, Amadeo, Coletti, and Campanini, none of whom, excepting Mario, was of first-cla.s.s importance compared with the women singers.
[Sidenote: _Grisi._]
[Sidenote: _Jenny Lind._]
[Sidenote: _Lilli Lehmann._]
Nearly all of these singers, even those still living and remembered by the younger generation of to-day, exploited their gifts in the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, the early Verdi, and Meyerbeer. Grisi was acclaimed a great dramatic singer, and it is told of her that once in ”Norma” she frightened the tenor who sang the part of _Pollio_ by the fury of her acting. But measured by the standards of to-day, say that set by Calve's _Carmen_, it must have been a simple age that could be impressed by the tragic power of anyone acting the part of Bellini's Druidical priestess. The surmise is strengthened by the circ.u.mstance that Madame Grisi created a sensation in ”Il Trovatore”
by showing signs of agitation in the tower scene, walking about the stage during _Manrico's_ ”_Ah! che la morte ognora_,” as if she would fain discover the part of the castle where her lover was imprisoned.
The chief charm of Jenny Lind in the memory of the older generation is the pathos with which she sang simple songs. Mendelssohn esteemed her greatly as a woman and artist, but he is quoted as once remarking to Chorley: ”I cannot think why she always prefers to be in a bad theatre.” Moscheles, recording his impressions of her in Meyerbeer's ”Camp of Silesia” (now ”L'etoile du Nord”), reached the climax of his praise in the words: ”Her song with the two concertante flutes is perhaps the most incredible feat in the way of bravura singing that can possibly be heard.” She was credited, too, with fine powers as an actress; and that she possessed them can easily be believed, for few of the singers whom I have mentioned had so early and intimate an a.s.sociation with the theatre as she. Her repugnance to it in later life she attributed to a prejudice inherited from her mother. A vastly different heritage is disclosed by Madame Lehmann's devotion to the drama, a devotion almost akin to religion. I have known her to go into the scene-room of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and search for mimic stumps and rocks with which to fit out a scene in ”Siegfried,” in which she was not even to appear. That, like her super-human work at rehearsals, was ”for the good of the cause,” as she expressed it.
[Sidenote: _Sontag._]
Most amiable are the memories that cl.u.s.ter around the name of Sontag, whose career came to a grievous close by her sudden death in Mexico in 1854. She was a German, and the early part of her artistic life was influenced by German ideals, but it is said that only in the music of Mozart and Weber, which aroused in her strong national emotion, did she sing dramatically. For the rest she used her light voice, which had an extraordinary range, brilliancy, and flexibility, very much as Patti and Melba use their voices to-day--in mere unfeeling vocal display.
”She had an extensive soprano voice,” says Hogarth; ”not remarkable for power, but clear, brilliant, and singularly flexible; a quality which seems to have led her (unlike most German singers in general) to cultivate the most florid style, and even to follow the bad example set by Catalani, of seeking to convert her voice into an instrument, and to astonish the public by executing the violin variations on Rode's air and other things of that stamp.”
[Sidenote: _La Grange._]
[Sidenote: _Piccolomini._]
[Sidenote: _Adelina Patti._]
[Sidenote: _Gerster._]
[Sidenote: _Lucca and Nilsson._]