History of the Opera from its Origin in Italy to the present Time

"It is a sad affair, no doubt," said the visitor; "but it can be remedied."

"Remedied!" exclaimed the distressed hero; "no; all hope is lost; I am in despair!"

The officer showed that the bridge might be repaired in such and such a manner; upon which, the great commander, whom no military disaster could depress, but who was now profoundly afflicted by the loss of a very charming singer, replied —

"Are you talking about the bridge? That can be mended in a couple of hours. I was thinking of Chantilly. Perfidious girl! she has deserted me!"

Among the historical persons who figured at the Académie Musique about the middle of the 18th century, we must not forget Charles Edward, who was taken prisoner there. The Duke de Biron had been ordered to see to his arrest, and on the evening of the 11th December, when it was known that he intended to visit the Opera, surrounded the building with twelve hundred guards as soon as the Young Pretender had entered it. The prince was taken to Vincennes, and kept there four days. He was then liberated, and expelled from France in accordance with the terms of the treaty of 1748, so humiliating to the French arms.

CHARLES EDWARD AT THE ACADEMIE

The servants of the Young Pretender, and with them one of the retinue of the Princess de Talmont, whose antiquated charms had detained the Chevalier de St. Georges at Paris, were sent to the Bastille, upon which the princess wrote the following letter to M. de Maurepas: —

"The king, sir, has just covered himself with immortal glory by arresting Prince Edward. I have no doubt but that His Majesty will order a Te Deum to be sung, to thank God for so brilliant a victory. But as Placide, my lacquey, taken in this memorable expedition, can add nothing to His Majesty's laurels, I beg you to send him back to me."

"The only Englishman the regiment of French guards has taken throughout the war!" exclaimed the Princess de Conti, when she heard of the arrest.

There was a curious literary apparition at the Académie in 1750, on the occasion of the revival of Thétis et Pélée, when Fontenelle, the author of the libretto of that opera, entered a box, and sat down just where he had taken his place sixty years before, on the first night of its production. The public, delighted, no doubt, to see that men could live so long, and get so much enjoyment out of life, applauded with enthusiasm.

FRENCH COMIC OPERA

In this necessarily incomplete history of the Opera (anything like a full narrative of its rise and progress, with particulars of the lives of all the great composers and singers, would fill ten large volumes and would probably not find a hundred readers) there are some forms of the lyric drama to which I can scarcely do more than allude. My great difficulty is to know what to omit, but I think that in addressing English readers I am justified in passing hastily over the Pulcinella Operas of Italy and the Opéra Comique of France. I shall say very little about the ballad operas of England, which are no longer played, which led to nothing, and which do not interest me personally. The lowest style of Italian comic opera, again, has not only exercised no influence, but has never attained even a moderate amount of success in this country. Not so the Opéra Comique of France, if Auber is to be taken as its representative. But the author of the Muette de Portici, Gustave III., and Fra Diavolo, is not only the greatest dramatic composer France has produced, but one of the greatest dramatic composers of the century. By his masterly concerted pieces and finales he has given an importance to the Opéra Comique which it did not possess before his time, and if he had never written works of that class at all he would still be one of the favourite composers of the English public, esteemed and studied by musicians, and admired by all classes. The French historians of the Opéra Comique show that, as regards the dramatic form, it has its origin in the vaudeville, many of the old opéras comiques being, in fact, little more than vaudevilles, with original airs in place of songs adapted to tunes already known. In a musical point of view, however, the French owe their lyrical comedy to the Italians. Monsigny, Philidor, Grétry, the founders of the style, were felicitous imitators of the Pergoleses, the Leos, the Vincis, and the Piccinnis. "In Le Déserteur, Le Roi et le Fermier, Le Maréchal Ferrant, Le Tableau Parlant, we are struck," says M. Scudo, the excellent musical critic of the Révue des Deux Mondes, "as Dr. Burney was, in 1770, to find more than one recollection of La Serva Padrona, La Cecchina, and other opera buffas by the first masters of the Neapolitan school. The influence of Cimarosa, Paisiello, Anfossi, may be remarked in the works of Dalayrac, Berton, Boieldieu, and Nicolo. Boieldieu afterwards imitated Rossini to some extent in La Dame Blanche, but the chief followers of this great Italian master in France have been Hérold and Auber." This brings us down to the present day, when we find Meyerbeer, the composer of great choral and orchestral schemes, the cultivator of musico-dramatic "effects" on a large scale, writing for the Opéra Comique; and in spite of the spoken dialogue in the Etoile du Nord and the Pardon de Ploermel, it is impossible not to place those important and broadly conceived lyrical dramas in the class of grand opera.

CHAPTER IX.

ROUSSEAU AS A CRITIC AND AS A COMPOSER OF MUSIC

The Musical Dictionary. – Account of the French Opera from the Nouvelle Héloise. – Le devin du Village. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Granet of Lyons.

ROUSSEAU, a man of a decidedly musical organisation, who, during his residence in Italy, learnt, as he tells us in the Confessions, to love the music of Italy; who wrote so earnestly and so well in favour of that music, and against the psalmody of Lulli and Rameau, in his celebrated Lettre sur la Musique Française; and who had sufficient candour, or, rather let us say, a sufficiently sincere love of art to express the enthusiasm he felt for Gluck when all the other writers in France, who had ever praised Italian music, felt bound to depreciate him blindly, for the greater glory of Piccinni; this Rousseau, who cared more for music than for truth or honour, and who has now been proved to have stolen from two obscure, but not altogether unknown, composers the music which he represented to be his own, in Pygmalion, and the Devin du Village, has given in his Dictionnaire Musicale, in the before-mentioned Lettre sur la Musique Française, but above all in the Nouvelle Héloise, the best general account that can be obtained of the Opera in France during the middle of the 18th century. I will begin with Rousseau's article on the Opera (omitting only the end, which relates to the ballet), from the Dictionnaire Musicale: —

ROUSSEAU'S DEFINITION OF OPERA

"An opera is a dramatic and lyrical spectacle, designed to combine the enchantments of all the fine arts by the representation of some passionate action through sensations so agreeable as to excite both interest and illusion.45

"The constituent parts of an opera are the poem, the music, and the decoration. By poetry, the spectacle speaks to the mind; by music, to the ear; and by painting, to the eye: all combining, through different organs, to make the same impression on the heart. Of these three parts, my subject only allows me to consider the first and last with reference to the second.

"The art of combining sounds agreeably may be regarded under two different aspects. As an institution of nature, music confines its effects to the senses, to the physical pleasure which results from melody, harmony, and rhythm. Such is usually the music of churches; such are the airs suited to dancing and songs. But as the essential part of a lyrical scene, aiming principally at imitation, music becomes one of the fine arts, and is capable of painting all pictures; of exciting all sentiments; of competing with poetry; of endowing her with new strength; of embellishing her with new charms; and of triumphing over her while placing the crown on her head.

"The sounds of a speaking voice, being neither harmonious nor sustained, are inappreciable, and cannot, consequently, connect themselves agreeably with the singing voice, or with instruments, at least in modern languages. It was different with the Greeks. Their language was so accentuated that its inflections, in a long declamation, formed, spontaneously as it were, musical intervals, distinctly appreciable. Thus it may be said that their theatrical pieces were a species of opera; and it was for this very reason that they could have no operas properly so called.

"But the difficulty of uniting song to declamation in modern languages explains how it is that the intervention of music has given to the lyric poem a character quite different from that of tragedy or comedy, and made it a third species of drama, having its particular rules. The differences alluded to cannot be determined without a perfect knowledge of music, of the means of identifying it with words, and of its natural relations to the human heart – details which belong less to the artist than to the philosopher.

GREEK MUSIC

"Confining myself, therefore, on this subject to a few observations rather historical than didactic, I remark, first, that the Greek theatre had not, like ours, any lyrical feature, for that which they called so, had not the slightest resemblance to what we call so.

Their language had so much accent that, in a concert of voices, there was little noise, whilst all their poetry was musical, and all their music declamatory. Thus, song with them was hardly more than sustained discourse. They really sang their verses, as they declared at the head of their poems, a practice which gave the Romans, and afterwards the moderns, the ridiculous habit of saying, I sing, when nothing is sung. That which the Greeks called the lyric style was a pompous and florid strain of heroic poesy, accompanied by the lyre. It is certain, too, that their tragedies were recited in a manner very similar to singing, and that they were accompanied by instruments, and had choruses.

"But if, on that account, it should he inferred that they were operas like ours, then it must be supposed that their operas were without airs, for it appears to me unquestionable that the Greek music, without excepting even the instrumental, was a real recitative. It is true that this recitative, uniting the charm of musical sounds to all the harmony of poetry, and to all the force of declamation, must have had much more energy than the modern recitative, which can hardly acquire one of these advantages but at the expense of the others. In our living languages, which partake for the most part of the rudeness of their native climates, the application of music to speech is much less natural than it was with the Greeks. An uncertain prosody agrees ill with regularity of measure; deaf and dumb syllables, hard articulations, sounds not sonorous, with little variation, and no suppleness, cannot but with great difficulty be consorted with melody; and a poetry cadenced solely by the number of syllables, whilst it gets but a very faint harmony in musical rhythm, is constantly opposed to the diversity of that rhythm's values and movements. These are the difficulties which were to be overcome, or eluded, in the invention of the lyrical poem. The effort, therefore, of its inventors was to form, by a nice selection of words, by choice turns of expression, and by varied metres, a particular language; and this language, called lyrical, is rich or poor in proportion to the softness or harshness of that from which it is derived.

"Having thus prepared a language for music, the question was next to apply music to this language, and to render it so apt for the purposes of the lyrical scene that the whole, vocal and instrumental, should be taken for one and the same idiom. This produced the necessity of continuous singing, – a necessity the greater in proportion as the language employed should be unmusical, as the less a language has of softness and accentuation, the more the alternate change from song to speech shocks the ear.

MUSIC AND LANGUAGE

"This mode of uniting music to poetry sufficed to produce interest and illusion among the Greeks, because it was natural; and, for the contrary reason, it cannot have the like effect on us. In listening to a hypothetical and constrained language, we can hardly conceive what the singers would say, so that with much noise they excite little emotion. Hence the further necessity of bringing physical to the aid of moral pleasure, and of supplying, by the charm of harmony, the lack of distinctness of meaning and energy of expression. Thus, the less the heart was touched the more need there was to flatter the ear, and from sensation was sought the delight which sentiment could not furnish. Hence the origin of airs, choruses, symphonies, and of that enchanting melody which often embellishes modern music at the expense of its poetic accompaniment.

"At the birth of the Opera, its inventors, to elude that which seemed unnatural, as an imitation of human life, in the union of music with speech, transferred their scenes from earth to heaven, and to hell. Not knowing how to make men speak, they made gods and devils, instead of heroes and shepherds, sing. Thus magic and marvels became speedily the stock in trade of the lyrical theatre. Yet, in spite of every effort to fascinate the eyes, whilst multitudes of instruments and of voices bewildered the ear, the action of every piece remained cold, and all its scenes were totally void of interest. As there was no plot which, however intricate, could not be easily unravelled by the intervention of some god, the spectator quietly abandoned to the poet the task of delivering his hero from his greatest dangers. Thus immense machinery produced little effect, for the imitation was always grossly defective and coarse. A supernatural action had in it no human interest, and the senses refused to yield to an illusion, in which the heart had no part. It would have been difficult to weary an assembly at greater cost than was done by these first operas.

But the spectacle, imperfect as it was, was for a long time the admiration of its contemporaries. They congratulated themselves on so fine a discovery. Here, they said, is a new principle added to that of Aristotle; here is admiration added to terror and pity. They were not aware that the apparent riches of which they boasted were but a sign of sterility, like flowers which cover the fields before harvest. It was because they could not touch the heart that they aimed at surprising, and their pretended admiration was, in fact, but a puerile astonishment of which they ought to have been ashamed. A false air of magnificence and enchantments, sorceries, chimeras, extravagances the most insane, so imposed upon them that, with the best faith in the world, they spoke with respect and enthusiasm of a theatre which merited nothing but hisses: as if there were more merit in making the king of gods utter the stupidest platitudes than there would be in attributing the same to the lowest of mortals; or as if the valets of Molière were not infinitely preferable to the heroes of Pradon.

EARLY OPERAS

"Although the author of these first operas had had hardly any other object than to dazzle the eye and to astound the ear, it could scarcely happen that the musician did not sometimes endeavour to express, by his art, some sentiments diffused through the piece in performance. The songs of nymphs, the hymns of priests, the shouts of warriors, infernal outcries did not so completely fill up these barbarous dramas as to leave no moments or situations of interest when the spectator was disposed to be moved. Thus it soon began to be felt, that independently of the musical declamation, often ill adapted to the language employed, the musical movement of harmony and of songs was not alien to the words which were to be uttered, and that consequently the effect of music alone, hitherto confined to the senses, could reach the heart. Melody, which was at first only separated from poetry by necessity, profited by this independence to adopt beauties absolutely and purely musical; harmony, improved and carried to perfection, opened to it new means of pleasing and of moving; and the measure, freed from the embarrassment of poetic rhythm, acquired a sort of cadence of its own.

"Music, having thus become a third imitative art, had speedily its own language, its expressions, its pictures, altogether independent of poetry. Symphony also learnt to speak without the aid of words; and sentiments often came from the orchestra quite as distinctly and vividly expressed as they could be by the mouths of actors. Spectators then, beginning to get disgusted with all the tinsel of fairy land, of puerile machinery, and of fantastic images of things never seen, looked for the imitation of nature in pictures more interesting and more true. Up to this time the Opera had been constituted as it alone could be; for what better use, at the theatre, could be made of a kind of music which could paint nothing than by employing it in the representation of things which could not exist? But as soon as music learnt to paint and to speak the charms of sentiment, it brought into contempt those of the Wand; the theatre was purged of its garden of mythology, interest was substituted for astonishment; the machines of poets and of carpenters were destroyed; and the lyric drama assumed a more noble and less gigantic character. All that could move the heart was employed with success, and gods were driven from the stage on which men were represented46…

OPERATIC SUBJECTS

"This reform was followed by another not less important. The Opera, it was felt, should represent nothing cold or intellectual – nothing that the spectator could witness with sufficient tranquillity to reflect on what he saw. And it is in this especially that the essential difference between the lyric drama and pure tragedy consists. All political deliberations, all plots, conspiracies, explanations, recitals, sententious maxims – in a word, all which speaks to the reason was banished from the theatre of the heart, with all jeux d'esprit, madrigals, and other pleasant conceits, which suppose some activity of thought. On the contrary, to depict all the energies of sentiments, all the violence of the passions, was made the principal object of this drama: for the illusion which makes its charm is destroyed as soon as the author and actor leave the spectator a moment to himself. It is on this principle that the modern Opera is established. Apostolo Zeno, the Corneille of Italy, and his tender pupil, who is its Racine, [Metastasio] have opened and carried to its perfection this new career of the dramatic art. They have brought the heroes of history on a theatre which seemed only adapted to exhibit the phantoms of fable…

"Having tried and felt her strength, music, able to walk alone, began to disdain the poetry she had to accompany. To enhance her own value, she drew from herself beauties of which her companion had hitherto had a share. She still professes, it is true, to express her ideas and sentiments; but she assumes, so to speak, an independent language, and though the object of the poet and of the musician is the same, they are too much separated in their labours, to produce at once two images, resembling each other, yet distinct, without mutual injury. Thus it happens, that if the musician has more art than the poet, he effaces him; and the actor, seeing the spectator sacrifice the words to the music, sacrifices in his turn theatrical gesture and action to song and brilliancy of voice, which transforms a dramatic entertainment into a mere concert…

"Such are the defects which the absolute perfection of music, and its defective application to language, may introduce into the Opera. And here it may be remarked that the languages the most apt to conform to all the laws of measure and of melody are those in which the duality of which I have spoken is the least apparent, because music, lending itself to the ideas of poetry, poetry yields, in its turn, to the inflections of music, so that when music ceases to observe the rhythm, the accent and the harmony of verses, verses syllable themselves, and submit to the cadence of musical measure and accent. But when a language has neither softness nor flexibility, the harshness of its poetry hinders its subjection to music; a good recitation of verses is obstructed even by the sweetness of the melody accompanying it; and one is conscious, in the forced union of the two arts, of a perpetual constraint which shocks the ear, and which destroys at once the charm of melody and the effect of declamation. For this defect there is no remedy; and to apply, by compulsion, music to a language which is not musical, is to give it more harshness than it would otherwise have…

MUSIC AND PAINTING

"Although music, as an imitative art, has more connection with poetry than with painting, this latter is not obliged, as poetry is, at the theatre, to make a double representation of the same object; because the one expresses the sentiments of men, and the other gives pictures merely of the places where they are, which strengthens much the illusion of the whole spectacle… But it must be acknowledged that the task of the musician is greater than that of the painter. The imitation expressed by painting is always cold, because it wants that succession of ideas and of impressions which increasingly kindle the soul, all its portraiture being conveyed to the mind at a first look. It is a great advantage, also, to a musician that he can paint things which cannot be heard, whilst the painter cannot paint those which cannot be seen; and the greatest prodigy of an art which has no life but in movement is, that it is able to give even an image of repose. Sleep, the quietude of night, solitude, and silence, are among the number of music's pictures. Sometimes noise produces the effect of silence and silence the effect of noise, as when one falls asleep at a monotonous reading and wakes up the moment the reader stops… Further, whilst the painter can derive nothing from the musician, the skilful musician will not leave the studio of the painter without profit. Not only can he, at his will, agitate the sea, excite the flames of a conflagration, make rivulets run and murmur, bring down the rain and swell it to torrents, but he can augment the horrors of the frightful desert, darken the walls of a subterranean prison, calm the storm, make the air tranquil and the sky serene, and shed from the orchestra the freshest fragrance of the sweetest bowers.

"We have seen how the union of the three arts we have mentioned constitute the lyric scene. Some have been tempted to introduce a fourth, of which I have now to speak.

"The question is to know whether dancing, being a language, and consequently capable of becoming an imitative art, should not enter with the other three into the action of the lyrical drama, or whether it would not rather interrupt and suspend this action and spoil the effect and the unity of the whole piece.

"But here, I think, there can be no question at all. For every one feels that the interest of a successive action depends upon the continuance and growing increase of the impression its representation makes on us. But by breaking off a spectacle and introducing other spectacles which have nothing to do with it, the principal subject is divided into independent parts, with no link of connection between them; and the more agreeable the inserted spectacles are, the greater must be the deformity produced by the mutilation of the whole… It is for this reason that the Italians have at last banished these interludes from their operas. They are, separately considered, a species of spectacle very pleasing, very piquante, and quite natural, but so misplaced in the midst of a tragic action, that the two exhibitions injure each other mutually, and the one can never interest but at the expense of the other."

THE BALLET

Rousseau then suggests that the ballet should come after the opera, which, as every one knows, is the rule at the Italian Opera houses of London, and which appears to me a far preferable arrangement to that of the French Académie, where no lyrical work is considered complete without a divertissement introduced anyhow into the middle of it, or of the Italian theatres where it is still the custom to perform short ballets or divertissements between the acts of the opera. Italy, the country of the Vestrises, of the Taglionis, and in the present day I may add of Rosati, has always bestowed much care on the production of its ballets. I have mentioned (Chapter I.), that the opera in its infancy owed much to the protection of the Popes. The Papal Government in the present day is said to pay special attention to the ballet, and to watch with paternal solicitude the pirouettes and jetés battus of the danseuses. At least I find a passage to that effect in a work entitled "La Rome des Papes,"47 the writer declaring that cardinals and bishops attend the Operas of Italy to see that the ballerine swing their legs within certain limits.