Opera

Two qualities take precedence of dramatic power as conditions for success in opera; one is the theatrical sense, and the other the histrionic sense. They are inseparable but not identical. The theatrical sense can thrill the listener before the curtain rises, as in the modulation to F major at the end of the overture to Don Giovanni; the histrionic sense can save the stage-manager the trouble of telling the actors what to do with their hands. The beginning of Rossini's Barbiere is an excellent example, especially when compared with that of Paisiello's setting, which dominated the stage until Rossini's ousted it. Paisiello's opening is good music for any moderately cheerful situation, Rossini's opening consists of a scale rising for nine notes and descending again, with long halts and water-beetle glides. Actors may be defied to walk on during this music with any steps but those of conspir ators! And the scoring (which is so perfunctory that literally half of the bulk of the opera is expressed by abbreviations) gives in perfection the theatrical atmosphere of a night scene. The same ridiculous scale in another ridiculous rhythm hisses up and down in thirds sul ponticello (close to the violin bridge) while Basilio describes the destructive effects of a well managed cal umny. Poor Paisiello's famous duet between two stammerers was no asset wherewith to outbid Rossini's ubiquitous histrionic sense in the contest for popularity.

But when brilliant writers tell us that Rossini is superior to Mozart in the sense of pace, it is high time to study the elements of Mozart's art. Three senses of pace enter into music. There is that of the athlete, relying on his own limbs, the limbs of his horse or the wheels which he directly controls. There is that of the passenger reclining in his car; and there is the cosmic motion of the stars among which our own humble earth moves hun dreds of times faster than a cannon ball, yet takes several minutes to traverse its own diameter. Of these three senses of movement that of the passenger in his car is equivalent to repose, and to nothing else ; while cosmic movement, discernible in Bach, Beetho ven and Wagner must be related to human measurements before it means anything at all. The one directly exhilarating sense of movement is that of the athlete; and we are asked to believe that Rossini exemplifies this when Figaro rattles his "Largo al facto tum" at some nine syllables a second, immovable for six minutes except for semaphore gestures once in 12 bars, to the right when the music halts on the dominant, to the left when it halts on the tonic. No, let us be accurate; there is another tradition which identifies the tonic with the right and the dominant with the left. Mozart's Figaro contains one piece of patter-singing even faster than "Largo al factotum," but he pronounces judgment on this kind of movement by giving it to the decrepit Dr. Bartolo ("se

tutto it codice dovesse leggere," etc.).

The decline of opera seria and opera buffa led to an approxima tion between tragic and comic styles till the distinction became too subtle to be distinguished by any but experts. Dance rhythms became the only Italian forms of accompaniment, and vocal scale exercises remained the last resource of the dying Desdemona. Yet Rossini retained so much histrionic force that an English spectator of his Otello is recorded to have started out of his seat at the catastrophe, exclaiming "Good Heavens ! the tenor is murdering the soprano!" And in times of political unrest more than one opera became as dangerous as censorship could make it. An historical case is brilliantly described in George Meredith's Vittoria. But what has this to do with the progress of music? The history of Italian opera from after its culmination in Mozart to its subsidence on the big drum and cymbals of the Rossinians is the history of "star" singers.

Verdi's art, both in its burly youth and in its shrewd old age, changed all that. He reformed nothing except by slow experi ence; but he gradually found a meaning for everything. Even the vile Italian brass is used in his last works in just the same style as in his earliest, with the enormous difference that he appreci ates its brutality and uses it only where brutality is wanted. Verdi's development belongs to a later stage of operatic history.

France.

Af ter Mozart the next forward step in operatic art was again made in France. The French histrionic atmosphere had a stimulating effect upon every foreign composer who visited Paris. Rossini himself, in Guillaume Tell, was electrified into a higher dramatic and orchestral life than the rollicking rattle of his serious and comic Italian operas. The grave defects of its libretto were overcome by unprecedented efforts at the cost of an entire act. Anywhere but in Paris Rossini's music would have pulled a worse drama through or else failed outright ; but in Paris the composer found it worth while to learn how to rescue his best music from failure.

The French contribution to musical history between Gluck and Rossini is of austere nobility worthy of a better crown than Meyerbeer's music. If Cherubini and Maul had had Gluck's melodic power, the classics of French opera would have been the greatest achievements in semi-tragic music-drama before Wagner. As it is, their austerity is negative, failing to achieve beauty rather than rejecting what is irrelevant. The histrionic sense is good, but the sense of movement rejects patter-singing without achieving anything more real. Cherubini's Medee, Les Deux Journees and Faniska, however, did achieve grand musical forms and had a great influence on Beethoven.