Opera

Co-ordination.

These are the matters in which Sullivan, with his Gilbert, is as right as Wagner. It makes little difference whether the opera be with spoken dialogue, with dialogue in the secco-recitative of opera buffa, with the accompanied recitative of Gluck and of Weber's Euryanthe, or in absolute Wagnerian con tinuity. The composer will always have to demand from his libret tist an effective timing of the chief musical opportunities, and from himself a royal punctuality in the relation of his music to the drama. Wagner's advice to young opera writers was to begin with Singspiele. The a priori critic complains that spoken dialogue and music are on irreconcilably different planes; and so they are when the transitions are mishandled. But Mahler, one of the greatest opera conductors of all time, did not think the planes incompatible. He insisted on being his own stage manager (which laudable ex ample has been followed by Sir Thomas Beecham), and he re hearsed every word and every pose in the dialogue of Fidelio. . Secco-recitative, i.e., recitative accompanied on the pianoforte (or harpsichord) is no bad medium when it is properly done, viz., at the pace of spoken dialogue and, on the part of the conductor (who takes the pianoforte), with a light touch and some discreetly humorous "gagging." Modern composers, of course, might as well attempt prehistoric Chinese as try to revive this convention. With accompanied recitative and other more highly organized music the composer begins to lose the clear outlines of the problem of timing his chief musical events ; and the wisdom of Wagner's ad vice appears. For only in the Singspiel, with Freischfitz and Zau berflote as examples, and with Fidelio as both an inspiration and a warning, do we see the bones of opera laid bare.

These principles are more important than any details of chronological operatic history. The reader who has grasped them can afford to ignore most of the patriotic and political aspects that have made this or that opera famous. Der Freischiitz was the first German opera that had a truly German subject ; and Wagner, speaking at a reburial of Weber's remains, said that there never was a more German composer. Very true, but that did not prevent Weber from following Freischiitz by Euryanthe, his greatest effort, on a subject of chivalry ruined by an incompetent librettist ; nor from contributing his swan song, Oberon, to the English stage and the English operatic tradition which, ever since the time of Dryden and Purcell, inculcated an utter incoherence in the musical scheme. Weber's distress at being made to compose separate numbers as Planche sent them to him, with no information as to their order or context, was surpassed only by his disgust at finding that Planche was quite right in thinking that such information did not matter.

Euryanthe, with its elaborate accompanied recitative and its 13 distinct Leitmotive (to anticipate the Wagnerian term) is an opera on lines hardly less advanced than those of Wagner's Lohengrin. Weber retains the outward appearance of the division into sepa rate numbers, as arias, duets, finales and so on ; but the division is becoming artificial, and some vestiges of its real purport are useless. For example, the condemnation of Euryanthe at the end of the second act is expanded by Weber into a longish movement merely because he does not realize that a short outburst would suffice to round off the whole act far more grandly than a self contained finale.

Wagner.

With Wagner's Der Fliegende Holliinder extremes meet. It purports to be divided into nine "numbers," but the musical traces of such divisions are only a nuisance, and the for mal expansion of the Dutchman's duet with Senta is as out of place as a Punch and Judy show, besides being very poor music. On the other hand, the division into three acts is a grudging conces sion to the brutal necessities of the first performances, for Wagner conceived and executed Der Fliegende Hollander as a one-act opera, with continuous music during its changes of scene. It has been divided into three as if by a butcher's chopper, cutting off the curtain music at the first available tonic chord, and restarting it at the cut or a little earlier. The opera ought always to be per formed in one act. Spohr's comment on it was that it had too few full closes and rounded off forms. This shows how far it still seemed recognizable to him as a classical opera.

Wagner's mature work solves the problem of a music on the same time-scale as the drama. Every other feature of Wagner's art results naturally from this. Musical dialogue becomes com pletely realistic, to such an extent that Wagner could not at first (in Die Ll'alkiire) make up his mind to let his lovers sing together. He overcame this scruple in Tristan, and so recovered the classi cal art of making a composite emotional tableau. This he de veloped to unprecedented heights in Die Meistersinger von Nurn berg. The continuity of such highly organized music demanded a rational organization of recognizable themes. What more inevit able principle could organize them but that of association with personal and dramatic ideas? Thus Wagner's system of Leitmotiv grew up as naturally as the thematic organization of sonatas. The illustrations at the end of the article MELODY give a typical example of his handling of a theme in various contexts. Other aspects of his music are illustrated in HARMONY and INSTRUMEN TATION.

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