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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Aspects of Modern Opera
+       Estimates and Inquiries
+
+Author: Lawrence Gilman
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2011 [EBook #38268]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Linda Cantoni and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
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+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected
+without note.]
+
+
+
+
+ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA
+
+_Estimates and Inquiries_
+
+
+BY
+
+LAWRENCE GILMAN
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+"The Music of To-morrow," "Phases of Modern Music," "Stories of
+Symphonic Music," "Edward MacDowell: A Study," "Strauss' 'Salome': A
+Guide to the Opera," "Debussy's 'Pelléas et Mélisande': A Guide to the
+Opera," etc.
+
+
+  NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+  LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+  MCMIX
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1908,
+  JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+ERNEST NEWMAN
+
+A CRITIC OF
+
+BREADTH, WISDOM, AND INDEPENDENCE
+
+THESE STUDIES
+
+ARE APPRECIATIVELY INSCRIBED
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTORY: THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH                      1
+
+  A VIEW OF PUCCINI                                         31
+
+  STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS                 65
+
+  A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA                                    107
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH
+
+
+Since that day when, a quarter of a century ago, Richard Wagner ceased
+to be a dynamic figure in the life of the world, the history of
+operatic art has been, save for a few conspicuous exceptions, a barren
+and unprofitable page; and it has been so, in a considerable degree,
+because of him. When Mr. William F. Apthorp, in his admirable history
+of the opera--a book written with unflagging gusto and vividness--observed
+that Wagner's style has been, since his death, little imitated, he
+made an astonishing assertion. "If by Wagner's influence," he went on,
+"is meant the influence of his individuality, it may fairly be said to
+have been null. In this respect Wagner has had no more followers than
+Mozart or Beethoven; he has founded no school." Again one must
+exclaim: An astonishing affirmation! and it is not the first time that
+it has been made, nor will it be the last. Yet how it can have seemed
+a reasonable thing to say is one of the insoluble mysteries. The
+influence of Wagner--the influence of his individuality as well as of
+his principles--upon the musical art of the past twenty-five years has
+been simply incalculable. It has tinged, when it has not dyed and
+saturated, every phase and form of creative music, from the opera to
+the sonata and string quartet.
+
+It is not easy to understand how anyone who is at all familiar with
+the products of musical art in Europe and America since the death of
+the tyrant of Bayreuth can be disposed to question the fact. No
+composer who ever lived influenced so deeply the music that came
+after him as did Wagner. It is an influence that is, of course,
+waning; and to the definite good of creative art, for it has been in a
+large degree pernicious and oppressive in its effect. The shadow of
+the most pervasive of modern masters has laid a sinister and
+paralysing magic upon almost all of his successors. They have sought
+to exert his spells, they have muttered what they imagined were his
+incantations; yet the thing which they had hoped to raise up in glory
+and in strength has stubbornly refused to breathe with any save an
+artificial and feeble life. None has escaped the contagion of his
+genius, though some, whom we shall later discuss, have opposed against
+it a genius and a creative passion of their own. Yet in the domain of
+the opera, wherewith we are here especially concerned, it is an
+exceedingly curious and interesting fact that out of the soil which he
+enriched with his own genius have sprung, paradoxically, the only
+living and independent forces in the lyrico-dramatic art of our time.
+
+Let us consider, first, those aspects of the operatic situation which,
+by reason of the paucity of creative vitality that they connote, are,
+to-day, most striking; and here we shall be obliged to turn at once to
+Germany. The more one hears of the new music that is being put forth
+by Teutonic composers, the stronger grows one's conviction of the
+lack, with a single exception, of any genuine creative impulse in that
+country to-day. It is doubtless a little unreasonable to expect to be
+able to agree in this matter with the amiable lady who told Matthew
+Arnold that she liked to think that æsthetic excellence was "common
+and abundant." As the sagacious Arnold pointed out, it is not in the
+nature of æsthetic excellence that it should be "common and
+abundant"; on the contrary, he observed, excellence dwells among rocks
+hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear out his heart before he
+can reach her. All of this is quite unanswerable; yet, so far as
+musical Germany is concerned, is not the situation rather singular?
+Germany--the Germany which yielded the royal line founded by Bach and
+continued by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and
+Brahms--can show us to-day, save for that exception which we shall
+later discuss, only a strenuous flock of Lilliputians (whom it would
+be fatuous to discuss with particularity), each one of whom is
+confidently aware that the majestic mantle of the author of "Tristan"
+has descended upon himself. They write music in which one grows weary
+of finding the same delinquency--the invariable fault of emptiness, of
+poverty of idea, allied with an extreme elaboration in the manner of
+presentation. And it is most deliberate and determined in address. One
+would think that the message about to be delivered were of the utmost
+consequence, the deepest moment: the pose and the manner of the bearer
+of great tidings are admirably simulated. Yet the actual deliverance
+is futile and dull, pathetically meagre, causing us to wonder how
+often we must remind ourselves that it is as impossible to achieve
+salient or distinguished or noble music without salient,
+distinguished, and noble ideas as it is to create fire without flame.
+
+In France there are--again with an exception to which we shall later
+advert--Saint-Saëns, d'Indy, Massenet, Charpentier, and--_les autres_.
+
+Now Saint-Saëns is very far from being a Wagnerian. He is, indeed,
+nothing very definite and determinable. He is M. Saint-Saëns, an
+abstraction, a brain without a personality. It is almost forty years
+since Hector Berlioz called him "one of the greatest musicians of our
+epoch," and since then the lustre of his fame has waxed steadily,
+until to-day one must recognise him as one of the three or four most
+distinguished living composers. Venerable and urbane, M. Saint-Saëns,
+at the New York opening of the American tour which he made in his
+seventy-second year, sat at the piano before the audience whom he had
+travelled three thousand miles to meet, and played a virtuoso piece
+with orchestral accompaniment, and two shorter pieces for piano and
+orchestra: a valse-caprice called "Wedding Cake," and an "Allegro
+Appassionato." That is to say, M. Camille Saint-Saëns, the bearer of
+an internationally famous and most dignified name, braved the tragic
+perils of the deep to exhibit himself before a representative American
+audience as the composer of the "Wedding Cake" valse-caprice, an
+entertaining fantasy on exotic folk-themes, and a _jeu d'esprit_ with
+a pleasant tune and some pretty orchestral embroidery.
+
+No one could have it in his heart to chide M. Saint-Saëns for these
+things, for he is very venerable and very famous. Yet is not the
+occurrence indicative, in a way, of M. Saint-Saëns's own attitude
+toward his art?--that facile, brilliant, admirably competent,
+chameleon-like art of his, so adroit in its external fashioning, yet
+so thin and worn in its inner substance! One wonders if, in the entire
+history of music, there is the record of a composer more completely
+accomplished in his art, so exquisite a master of the difficult trick
+of spinning a musical web, so superb a mechanician, who has less to
+say to the world: whose discourse is so meagre and so negligible. One
+remembers that unfortunate encomium of Gounod's, which has been so
+often turned into a justified reproach: "Saint-Saëns," said the
+composer of "Faust," "will write at will a work in the style of
+Rossini, of Verdi, of Schumann, of Wagner." The pity of his case is
+that, when he writes pure Saint-Saëns, one does not greatly care to
+listen. He has spoken no musical thought, in all his long and
+scintillant career, that the world will long remember. His dozen
+operas, his symphonic poems, his symphonies, his concertos, the best
+of his chamber works--is there in them an accent which one can
+soberly call either eloquent or deeply beautiful? Do they not excel
+solely by reason of their symmetry and solidity of structure, their
+deft and ingenious delivery of ideas which at their worst are banal
+and at their best mediocre or derivative? "A name always to be
+remembered with respect!" cries one of his most sane and just
+admirers: since "in the face of practical difficulties,
+discouragements, misunderstandings, sneers, he has worked constantly
+to the best of his unusual ability for musical righteousness in its
+pure form." "A name to be remembered with respect," beyond dispute:
+with the respect that is due the man of supereminent intelligence, the
+fastidious artisan, the tireless and honourable workman--with respect,
+yes; but scarcely with enthusiasm. He never, as has been truly said,
+bores one; it is just as true that he never stimulates, moves,
+transports, or delights one, in the deeper sense of the term. At its
+best, it is a hard and dry light that shines out of his music: a
+radiance without magic and without warmth. His work is an impressive
+monument to the futility of art without impulse: to the immeasurable
+distance that separates the most exquisite talent from the merest
+genius. For all its brilliancy of investiture, his thought, as the
+most liberal of his appreciators has said, "can never wander through
+eternity"--a truth which scarcely needed the invocation of the
+Miltonic line to enforce. It may be true, as Mr. Philip Hale has
+asserted, that "the success of d'Indy, Fauré, Debussy, was made
+possible by the labor and the talent of Saint-Saëns"; yet it is one of
+the pities of his case that when Saint-Saëns's name shall have become
+faint and fugitive in the corridors of time, the chief glories of
+French art in our day will be held to be, one may venture, the
+legacies of the composers of "Pelléas et Mélisande" and the "Jour
+d'été à la montagne," rather than of the author of "Samson et Dalila"
+and "Le Rouet d'Omphale." Which brings one to M. Vincent d'Indy.
+
+Now M. d'Indy offers a curious spectacle to the inquisitive observer,
+in that he is, in one regard, the very symbol of independence, of
+artistic emancipation, whereas, in another phase of his activity, he
+is a mere echo and simulacrum. As a writer for the concert room, as a
+composer of imaginative orchestral works and of chamber music, he is
+one of the most inflexibly original and self-guided composers known to
+the contemporary world of music. With his aloofness and astringency of
+style, his persistent austerity of temper, his invincible hatred of
+the sensuous, his detestation of the kind of "felicity" which is a
+goal for lesser men, this remarkable musician--who, far more
+deservingly than the incontinent Chopin, deserves the title of "the
+proudest poetic spirit of our time"--this remarkable musician, one
+must repeat, is the sort of creative artist who is writing, not for
+his day, but for a surprised and apprehending futurity. He is at once
+a man of singularly devout and simple nature, and an entire mystic.
+For him the spectacle of the living earth, in lovely or forbidding
+guise, evokes reverend and exalted moods. His approach to its wonders
+is Wordsworthian in its deep and awe-struck reverence and its
+fundamental sincerity. He does not, like his younger artistic kinsman,
+Debussy, see in it all manner of fantastic and mist-enwrapped visions;
+it is not for him a pageant of delicate and shining dreams.
+Mallarmé's lazy and indulgent Faun in amorous woodland reverie would
+not have suggested to him, as to Debussy, music whose sensuousness is
+as exquisitely concealed as it is marvellously transfigured. The
+mysticism of d'Indy is pre-eminently religious; it has no tinge of
+sensuousness; it is large and benign rather than intimate and intense.
+
+He is absolutely himself, absolutely characteristic, for example, in
+his tripartite tone-poem, "Jour d'été à la montagne." This music is a
+hymn the grave ecstasy and the utter sincerity of which are as
+evident as they are impressive. In its art it is remarkable--not so
+monumental in plan, so astoundingly complex in detail, as his superb
+B-minor symphony, yet a work that is full of his peculiar traits.
+
+Now it would seem as if so fastidious and individual a musician as
+this might do something of very uncommon quality if he once turned his
+hand to opera-making. Yet in his "L'Étranger," completed only a year
+before he began work on his astonishing B-minor symphony, and in his
+"Fervaal" (1889-95), we have the melancholy spectacle of M. d'Indy
+concealing his own admirable and expressive countenance behind an
+ill-fitting mask modelled imperfectly after the lineaments of Richard
+Wagner. In these operas (d'Indy calls them, by the way, an _action
+dramatique_ and an _action musicale_: evident derivations from the
+"Tristan"-esque _Handlung_)--in these operas, the speech, from first
+to last, is the speech of Wagner. The themes, the harmonic structure,
+the use of the voice, the plots (d'Indy, like Wagner, is his own
+librettist)--all is uncommuted Wagnerism, with some of the Teutonic
+cumbrousness deleted and some of the Gallic balance and measure
+infused. These scores have occasional beauty, but it is seldom the
+beauty that is peculiar to d'Indy's own genius: it is an imported and
+alien beauty, a beauty that has in it an element of betrayal.
+
+We find ourselves confronting a situation that is equally dispiriting
+to the seeker after valuable achievements in contemporary French opera
+when we view the performances of such minor personages as Massenet,
+Bruneau, Reyer, Erlanger, and Charpentier. They are all tarred, in a
+great or small degree, with the Wagnerian stick. When they speak out
+of their own hearts and understandings they are far from commanding:
+they are vulgarly sentimental or prettily lascivious, like the amiable
+Massenet, or pretentious and banal, like Bruneau, or incredibly dull,
+like Reyer, or picturesquely superficial, like Charpentier--though the
+author of "Louise" disports himself with a beguiling grace and verve
+which almost causes one to forgive his essential emptiness.
+
+Modern Italy discloses a single dominant and vivid figure. In none of
+his compatriots is there any distinction of speech, of character. In
+that country the memory of Wagner is less imperious in its control;
+yet not one of its living music-makers, with the exception that I have
+made, has that atmosphere and quality of his own which there is no
+mistaking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have referred by implication and reservation to three personalities
+in the art of the modern lyric-drama who stand out as salient figures
+from the confused and amorphous background against which they are to
+be observed: who seem to me to represent the only significant and
+important manifestations of the creative spirit which have thus far
+come to the surface in the post-Wagnerian music-drama. They are, it
+need scarcely be said, Puccini in Italy, Richard Strauss in Germany,
+and Debussy in France. Yet these men built upon the foundations laid
+by Wagner; they took many leaves from his vast book of instructions,
+in some cases stopping short of the full reach of his plans as
+imagined by himself, in other cases carrying his schemes to a point of
+development far beyond any result of which he dreamed. But they have
+not attempted to say the things which they had to say in the way that
+he would have said them. They have been content with their own
+eloquence; and it has not betrayed them. No one is writing music for
+the stage which has the profile, the saliency, the vitality, the
+personal flavour, which distinguish the productions of these men. So
+far as it is possible to discern from the present vantage-ground, the
+future--at least the immediate future--of the lyric stage is theirs.
+In no other quarters may one observe any manifestations that are not
+either negligible by reason of their own quality, or mere dilutions,
+with or without adulterous admixtures, of the Wagnerian brew.
+
+
+
+
+A VIEW OF PUCCINI
+
+
+A plain-spoken and not too reverent observer of contemporary musical
+manners, discussing the melodic style of the Young Italian
+opera-makers, has observed that it is fortunate in that it "gives the
+singers opportunity to pour out their voices in that lavish volume and
+intensity which provoke applause as infallibly as horseradish provokes
+tears." The comment has a good deal of what Sir Willoughby Patterne
+would have called "rough truth." It is fairly obvious that there is
+nothing in the entire range of opera so inevitably calculated to
+produce an instant effect as a certain kind of frank and sweeping
+lyricism allied with swiftness of dramatic emotion; and it is because
+the young lions of modern Italy--Puccini and his lesser brethren--have
+profoundly appreciated this elemental truth, that they address their
+generation with so immediate an effect.
+
+In those days when the impetus of a pristine enthusiasm drove the more
+intelligent order of opera-goers to performances of Wagner, it was a
+labour of love to learn to know and understand the texts of his
+obscure and laboured dramas; and even the guide-books, which were as
+leaves in Vallombrosa, were prayerfully studied. But to-day there are
+no Wagnerites. We are no longer impelled by an apostolic fervour to
+delve curiously into the complex genealogy and elaborate ethics of the
+"Ring," and it is no longer quite clear to many slothful intelligences
+just what Tristan and Isolde are talking about in the dusk of King
+Mark's garden. There will always be a small group of the faithful who,
+through invincible and loving study, will have learned by heart every
+secret of these dramas. But for the casual opera-goer, granting him
+all possible intelligence and intellectual curiosity, they cannot but
+seem the reverse of crystal-clear, logical, and compact. A score of
+years ago those who cared at all for the dramatic element in opera,
+and the measure of whose delight was not filled up by the vocal
+pyrotechny which was the mainstay of the operas of the older
+répertoire, found in these music-dramas their chief solace and
+satisfaction. Wagner reigned then virtually alone over his kingdom.
+The dignity, the imaginative power, and the impressive emotional sweep
+of his dramas, as dramas, offset their obscurity and their inordinate
+bulk; and always their splendid investiture of music exerted, in and
+of itself, an enthralling fascination. And that condition of affairs
+might have continued for much longer had not certain impetuous young
+men of modern Italy demonstrated the possibility of writing operas
+which were both engrossing on their purely dramatic side and, in their
+music, eloquent with the eloquence that had come to be expected of the
+modern opera-maker. Moreover, these music-dramas had the incalculable
+merit, for our time and environment, of being both swift in movement
+and unimpeachably obvious in meaning. Thereupon began the reign of
+young Italy in contemporary opera. It was inaugurated with the
+"Cavalleria Rusticana" of Mascagni and the "I Pagliacci" of
+Leoncavallo; and it is continued to-day, with immense vigour and
+persistence, by Puccini with all his later works. The sway of the
+composer of "Tosca," "Bohème," and "Madame Butterfly" is triumphant
+and wellnigh absolute; and the reasons for it are not elusive. He has
+selected for musical treatment dramas that are terse and rapid in
+action and intelligible in detail, and he has underscored them with
+music that is impassioned, incisive, highly spiced, rhetorical,
+sometimes poetic and ingenious, and pervadingly sentimental. Moreover,
+he possesses, as his most prosperous attribute, that facility in
+writing fervid and often banal melodies to the immediate and unfailing
+effect of which, in the words of Mr. Henry T. Finck, I have alluded.
+As a sensitive English critic, Mr. Vernon Blackburn, once very
+happily observed, Puccini is "essentially a man of his own generation
+... the one who has caught up the spirit of his time, and has made his
+compact with that time, in order that he should not lose anything
+which a contemporary generation might give him."
+
+It is a curious and striking truth that the chief trouble with the
+representative musical dramatists who have built, from the standpoint
+of system, upon the foundational stones that Wagner laid, is not, as
+the enemies and opponents of Bayreuth used to charge, an excess of
+drama at the expense of the music, but--as was the case with Wagner
+himself (a fact which I have elsewhere in this volume attempted to
+demonstrate)--an excess of music at the expense of the drama: in
+short, the precise defect against which reformers of the opera have
+inveighed since the days of Gluck. With Richard Strauss this musical
+excess is orchestral; with the modern Italians it implicates the
+voice-parts, and is manifested in a lingering devotion to full-blown
+melodic expression achieved at the expense of dramatic truth, logic,
+and consistency. In this, Puccini has simply, in the candid phrase of
+Mr. Blackburn, "caught up the spirit of his time, and made his compact
+with that time." That is to say, he has, with undoubted artistic
+sincerity, played upon the insatiable desire of the modern ear for an
+ardent and elemental kind of melodic effect, and upon the acquired
+desire of the modern intelligence for a terse and dynamic substratum
+of drama. His fault, from what I hold to be the ideal standpoint in
+these matters, is that he has not perfectly fused his music and his
+drama. There is a sufficiently concrete example of what I mean--an
+example which points both his strength and his weakness--in the second
+act of "Tosca," where he halts the cumulative movement of the scene
+between _Scarpia_ and _Tosca_, which he has up to that point developed
+with superb dramatic logic, in order to placate those who may not
+over-long be debarred from their lyrical sweetmeats; but also--for it
+would be absurd to charge him with insincerity or time-serving in this
+matter--in order that he may satisfy his own ineluctable tendency
+toward a periodical effusion of lyric energy, which he must yield to
+even when dramatic consistency and logic go by the board in the
+process; when, in short, lyrical expression is supererogatory and
+impertinent. So he writes the sentimental and facilely pathetic
+prayer, "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore," _dolcissimo con grande
+sentimento_: a perfectly superfluous, not to say intrusive, thing
+dramatically, and a piece of arrant musical vulgarity; after which the
+current of the drama is resumed. We have here, in fact, nothing more
+nor less respectable than the old-fashioned Italian aria of unsavoury
+fame: it is merely couched in more modern terms.
+
+The offence is aggravated by the fact that Puccini, in common with the
+rest of the Neo-Italians, is at his best in the expression of dramatic
+emotion and movement, and at his worst in his voicing of purely lyric
+emotion, meditative or passionate. In its lyric portions his music is
+almost invariably banal, without distinction, without beauty or
+restraint--when the modern Italian music-maker dons his singing-robes
+he becomes clothed with commonness and vulgarity. Thus in its scenes
+of amorous exaltation the music of "Tosca," of "Madame Butterfly"
+(recall, in the latter work, the flamboyant commonness of the exultant
+duet which closes the first act), is blatant and rhetorical, rather
+than searching and poignant. Puccini's strength lies in the truly
+impressive manner in which he is able to intensify and underscore the
+more dramatic moments in the action. At such times his music possesses
+an uncommon sureness, swiftness, and incisiveness; especially in
+passages of tragic foreboding, of mounting excitement, it is gripping
+and intense in a quite irresistible degree. Often, at such moments,
+it has an electric quality of vigour, a curious nervous strength. That
+is its cardinal merit: its spare, lithe, closely-knit, clean-cut,
+immensely energetic orchestral enforcement of those portions of the
+drama where the action is swift, tense, cumulative, rather than of
+sentimental or amorous connotation. Puccini has, indeed, an almost
+unparalleled capacity for a kind of orchestral commentary which is
+both forceful and succinct. He wastes no words, he makes no
+superfluous gestures: he is masterfully direct, pregnant, expeditious,
+compact. Could anything be more admirable, in what it attempts and
+brilliantly contrives to do, than almost the entire second act of
+"Tosca," with the exception of the sentimental and obstructive Prayer?
+How closely, with what unswerving fidelity, the music clings to the
+contours of the play; and with what an economy of effort its effects
+are made! Puccini is thus, at his best, a Wagnerian in the truest
+sense--a far more consistent Wagnerian than was Wagner himself.
+
+It is in "Tosca" that he should be studied. He is not elsewhere so
+sincere, direct, pungent, telling. And it is in "Tosca," also, that
+his melodic vein, which is generally broad and copious rather than
+fine and deep, yields some of the true and individual beauty which is
+its occasional, its very rare, possession--for example, to name it at
+its best, the poetic and exceedingly personal music which accompanies
+the advancing of dawn over the house-tops of Rome, at the beginning of
+the last act: a passage the melancholy beauty and sincere emotion of
+which it would be difficult to overpraise.
+
+In Puccini's later and much more elaborate and meticulous "Madame
+Butterfly," there is less that one can unreservedly delight in or
+definitely deplore, so far as the music itself is concerned. It is
+from a somewhat different angle that one is moved to consider the
+work.
+
+In choosing the subject for this music-drama, Puccini set himself a
+task to which even his extraordinary competency as a lyric-dramatist
+has not quite been equal. As every one knows, the story for which
+Puccini has here sought a lyrico-dramatic expression is that of an
+American naval officer who marries little "Madame Butterfly" in
+Japan, deserts her, and cheerfully calls upon her three years later
+with the "real" wife whom he has married in America. The name of this
+amiable gentleman is Pinkerton--B.F. Pinkerton--or, in full, Benjamin
+Franklin Pinkerton. Now it would scarcely seem to require elaborate
+argument to demonstrate that the presence in a highly emotional
+lyric-drama of a gentleman named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton--a
+gentleman who is, moreover, the hero of the piece--is, to put it
+briefly, a little inharmonious. The matter is not helped by the fact
+that the action is of to-day, and that one bears away from the
+performance the recollection of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton asking his
+friend, the United States consul at Nagasaki, if he will have some
+whiskys-and-soda. There lingers also a vaguer memory of the consul
+declaring, in a more or less lyrical phrase, that he "is not a student
+of ornithology."
+
+Let no one find in these remarks a disposition to cast a doubt upon
+the seriousness with which Puccini has completed his work, or to
+ignore those features of "Madame Butterfly" which compel sincere
+admiration. But recognition and acknowledgment of these things must be
+conditioned by an insistence upon the fact that such a task as Puccini
+has attempted here, and as others have attempted, is foredoomed to a
+greater or less degree of artistic futility. One refers, of course, to
+the attempt to transfer bodily to the lyric stage, for purposes of
+serious expression, a contemporary subject, with all its inevitable
+dross of prosaic and trivially familiar detail. To put it concretely,
+the sense of humour and the emotional sympathies will tolerate the
+spectacle of a _Tristan_ or a _Tannhäuser_ or a _Don Giovanni_ or a
+_Pelléas_ or a _Faust_ uttering his longings and his woes in opera;
+but they will not tolerate the spectacle of a _Benjamin Franklin
+Pinkerton_ of our own time and day telling us, in song, that he is not
+a student of ornithology. The thing simply cannot be done--Wagner
+himself could not impress us in such circumstances. The chief glory of
+Wagner's texts--no matter what one may think of them as viable and
+effective dramas--is their ideal suitability for musical translation.
+Take, for example, the text of "Tristan und Isolde": there is not a
+sentence, scarcely a word, in it, which is not fit for musical
+utterance--nothing that is incongruous, pedestrian, inept. All that is
+foreign to the essential emotions of the play has been eliminated. So
+unsparingly has it been subjected to the alembic of the
+poet-dramatist's imagination that it has been wholly purged of all
+that is superfluous and distracting, all that cannot be gratefully
+assimilated by the music. That is the especial excellence of his
+texts. Opera, though it rests, like the other arts, heavily upon
+convention, yet offers at bottom a reasonable and defensible vehicle
+for the communication of human experience and emotion. But it is not a
+convincing form, and no genius, living or potential, can make it a
+convincing form, save when it deals with matters removed from our
+quotidian life and environment: save when it presents a heightened and
+alembicated image of human experience. Thus we accept, with sympathy
+and approval, "Siegfried," "Lohengrin," "Die Meistersinger," "Don
+Giovanni"--even, at a pinch, "Tosca"; but we cannot, if we allow our
+understanding and our sense of humour free play, accept "Madame
+Butterfly," with its naval lieutenant of to-day, its American consul
+in his tan-coloured "spats," and its whiskys-and-soda.
+
+This, then, was the prime disadvantage under which Puccini laboured.
+He was, as a necessary incident of his task, confronted with the
+problem of setting to music a great deal of prosaic and altogether
+unlovely dialogue, essential to the unfolding of the action, no doubt,
+but quite fatal to lyric inspiration. Under these circumstances, the
+music is often surprisingly successful; but it is significant that the
+most poetic and moving passages in the score are those which enforce
+emotions and occasions which have no necessary connection with time or
+place; which are, from their nature, fit subjects for musical
+treatment,--for example, such a passage as that at the end of the
+second act, where _Madame Butterfly_ and her child wait through the
+long night for the coming of the faithless _Pinkerton_; for here the
+moment and the mood to be expressed have a dignity and a pathos
+entirely outside of date or circumstance.
+
+The score, as a whole, compares unfavourably with that of "Tosca,"
+which still, as it seems to me, represents Puccini at his most
+effective and sincere. In "Madame Butterfly" one misses the salient
+characterisation, the gripping intensity, the sharpness and boldness
+of outline that make "Tosca" so notable an accomplishment. "Tosca,"
+for all its occasional commonness, its melodic banality, is a work of
+immense vigour and unquestionable individuality. In it Puccini has
+saturated almost every page of the music with his own extremely vivid
+personality: a personality that is exceedingly impressive in its crude
+strength and directness; he has, in this score, exploded the strange
+critical legend that his style is little more than a blended echo of
+the later Verdi, Ponchielli, and Massenet. The music of "Tosca" is not
+often distinguished, but it is singularly striking, potent, and
+original; no one save Puccini could possibly have written it. But
+since then this composer has, artistically speaking, visited Paris. He
+has appreciated the value of certain harmonic experiments which such
+adventurous Frenchmen as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others,
+are making; he has appreciated them so sincerely that certain pages in
+"Madame Butterfly," as, for instance, the lovely interlude between the
+second and third acts, sound almost as if they had been contrived by
+Debussy himself--a Latinised Debussy, of course. Puccini, in short,
+has become intellectually sophisticated, and he has learned gentler
+artistic manners, in the interval between the composition of "Tosca"
+and of "Madame Butterfly." The music of the latter work is far more
+delicately structured and subtle than anything he had previously given
+us, and it has moments of conquering beauty, of great tenderness, of
+superlative sweetness. It is, beyond question, a charming and
+brilliant score, exceedingly adroit in workmanship and almost
+invariably effective. Yet, after such excellences have been gladly
+acknowledged, one is disturbingly conscious that the real, the
+essential, Puccini has, for the most part, evaporated. There are other
+voices speaking through this music, voices that, for all their charm
+and distinction of accent, seem alien and a little insincere. Has the
+vital, if crude, imagination which gave issue to the music of "Tosca"
+acquired finesse and delicacy at a cost of independent impulse?
+
+
+
+
+STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS
+
+
+That Richard Strauss the opera-maker is, for the present, summed up in
+Richard Strauss the composer of "Salome," would scarcely, I think, be
+disputed by any one who is sympathetically cognisant of his
+achievements in that rôle. Neither in "Guntram" nor in the later and
+far more characteristic "Feuersnot" is his essential quality as a
+musical dramatist so fully and clearly revealed as in his setting of
+the play of Wilde to which he has given a fugacious immortality. Yet
+in discussing this astonishing work, I prefer to consider it in and
+for itself rather than as a touchstone whereby to form a general
+estimate of Strauss the dramatical tone-poet; for I believe that, if
+he lives and produces for another decade, it will be seen that
+"Salome" does not furnish a just or adequate measure of Strauss'
+indisputable genius as a writer of music for the stage. I believe that
+he has not given us here a valid or completely representative account
+of himself in that capacity. So remarkable, though, is the work in
+itself, so assertive in its challenge to contemporary criticism, that
+it imperatively compels some attempt at appraisement in any deliberate
+survey of modern operatic art.
+
+For any one who is not convinced that those ancient though
+occasionally reconciled adversaries, Art and Ethics, are necessarily
+antipodal, such a task, it must be confessed, is not one to be
+approached in a jaunty or easeful spirit, for it means that one must
+be willing, apparently, to enter the lists ranged with the
+hypocrites, the prudes, the short-sighted and the unwise; with
+frenzied and myopic champions of respectability; with all those who
+are as inflexible in their allegiance to the moralities as they are
+resourceful and tireless in their pursuit of impudicity in art. Yet
+that there are two standpoints from which this extraordinary work must
+be regarded by any candid observer I do not think is open to question:
+it has its purely æsthetic aspect, and its--I shall not say moral, but
+social--aspect. To separate them in any conscientious discussion is
+impossible.
+
+Let us, to begin with, consider, in and by itself, the quality of the
+music which the incomparable Strauss--Strauss, the most conquering
+musical personality since Wagner--has conceived as a fit embodiment in
+tones of the tragic and maleficent and haunting tale of the Dancing
+Daughter of Herodias and her part in the career of the prophet John,
+as recounted--with non-Scriptural variations--by Oscar Wilde. We may
+consider, first, whether or not it achieves the prime requisite of
+music in its organic relation to a dramatic subject: an enforcement
+and heightening of the effect of the play; setting aside, for the
+present, those other aspects of it which have so absorbed critical
+attention, and of which we have heard overmuch: its remorseless
+complexity, its unflagging ingenuity, its superb and miraculous
+orchestration. These are matters of importance, but of secondary
+importance. The point at issue is, has Strauss, through his music,
+intensified and italicised the moods and situations of the drama; and,
+secondly, has he achieved this end through music which is in itself
+notable and important?
+
+Never was music so avid in its search for the eloquent word as is the
+music of Strauss in this work. We are amazed at the audacity, the
+resourcefulness, of the expressional apparatus that is cumulatively
+reared in this unprecedented score. The alphabet of music is ransacked
+for new and undreamt-of combinations of tone: never were effects so
+elaborate, so cunning, so fertilely contrived, offered to the ears of
+men since the voice of music was heard in its pristine estate. This
+score challenges the music of the days that shall follow after it.
+
+For the most part, the atmosphere of horror, of ominous suspense, of
+oppressive and bodeful gloom, in which the tragedy of Wilde is
+enwrapped, is wonderfully rendered in the music. There are beyond
+question overmastering pages in the score--music which has the kind of
+superb audacity and power of effect that Dr. Johnson discerned in the
+style of Sir Thomas Browne: "forcible expressions which he would never
+have used but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and
+flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very
+little fear of the shame of falling." Of such quality is the passage
+which portrays the agonised suspense of _Salome_ during the beheading
+of _John_; the passage, titanic in its expression of malignly exultant
+triumph, which accentuates the delivery of the head to the insensate
+princess; the few measures before _Herod's_ patibulary order at the
+close: these things are products of genius, of the same order of
+genius which impelled the music of "Don Quixote," of "Ein
+Heldenleben," of "Zarathustra"; they are true and vital in
+imagination, marvellous in intensity of vision, of great and subduing
+potency as dramatic enforcement and as sheer music.
+
+But when one has said that much, one comes face to face with the chief
+weakness of the score--its failure in the expression of the governing
+motive of the play: the consuming and inappeasable lust of _Salome_
+for the white body and scarlet lips of _John_.
+
+     "Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my
+     passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a
+     virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was
+     chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire.... Ah! ah!
+     wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan?..."
+
+That is the note which is sounded from beginning to end of the
+play--that is its focal emotion. And Strauss has not made it sound, as
+it should sound, in his music. When it should be wildly, barbarically,
+ungovernably erotic, as for the enforcement of _Salome's_ fervid
+supplications in her first interview with _John_, the music is merely
+conventional in its sensuousness. It should here be febrile,
+vertiginous. But what, actually, do we get? We get a scene built upon
+a phrase in which is crystallised the desire of _Salome_ for the lips
+of the Prophet; and this theme is saccharinely ardent and sentimental,
+rather than feverish and unbridled; a phrase which might have been a
+product of the amiably voluptuous inspiration of the composer of
+"Faust." The "Tannhäuser" Bacchanale, even in its original form, is
+more truly expressive of venereous abandon than is this strangely
+sentimentalised music. It has, no doubt, a certain effectiveness, a
+certain expressiveness; but the effect that is produced, and the
+emotion that is expressed, are far removed from the field of sensation
+inhabited by Wilde's remarkable Princess. Yet it would seem to be a
+point needing but the lightest emphasis that if the passion of
+_Salome_ is not fitly and eloquently rendered by the music, the
+cardinal impulse, the very heart of Wilde's drama, is left
+unexpressed.
+
+So it is in the music of the final scene, _Salome's_ mad apostrophe to
+the severed head. Here we get, not the note of lustful abandonment
+which would alone remove _Salome's_ horrible appetite from the region
+of the perverted and the incredible, but a kind of musical utterance
+which simulates the noble rapture of Wagner's dying _Isolde_. The
+discrepancy of the music in this regard has been recognised by those
+who praise most warmly Strauss' score. It has been said in
+extenuation, on the one hand, that music is incapable of expressing
+what are called "base" emotions, and, on the other hand, that Strauss
+wished to exalt, to idealise and transfigure, this scene. To the first
+objection it may be said simply that it is based upon an argument that
+is at least open to serious question. It is by no means an evident or
+settled truth that music is incapable of uttering anything but worthy
+emotions, ideas, concepts. There is music by Berlioz, by Liszt, by
+Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, by Strauss himself, which is, in its
+emotional substance, sinister, demonic, even pornographic in
+suggestion; and not simply by reason of a key furnished by text,
+motto, or dramatic subject, but in itself--in its quality and
+character as music. But the claim need not be elaborated, or even
+demonstrated, since it is beside the point. One quarrels with the
+music of the final scene of "Salome" on the broad ground of its
+inappropriateness: because the emotional note which it strikes and
+sustains is one of nobility, whereas the plain requirement of the
+scene, of the psychological moment, demands music that should be
+anything but noble. And here we encounter the objections of those who
+hold that _Salome_ herself, at the moment of her apostrophe to the
+dead head, becomes transfigured, uplifted through the power of a great
+and purifying love. But to argue in this manner is to indulge in a
+particularly egregious kind of fatuity. To conceive Wilde's lubricious
+princess as a kind of Oriental _Isolde_ is grotesquely to distort the
+vivid and wholly consistent woman of his imagining; and it is to
+renounce at once all possibility of justifying her culminating
+actions. For the only ground upon which it might be remotely possible
+to account for _Salome's_ remarkable behaviour, except by regarding
+her as a necrophilistic maniac, is that supplied by the conditions and
+the environment of a lustful, decadent, and bloodshot age. Only when
+one conceives her as frankly and spontaneously a barbarian, nourished
+on blood and lechery, does she become at all comprehensible to others
+than pathologists, even if she does not cease to impress us as
+noisome, monstrous, and horrible.
+
+The music of "Salome," then, judging it in its entirety, is deficient
+as an exposition, as a translation into tone, of the drama upon which
+it is based; for it is inadequate in its expression of the play's
+central and informing emotion. One listens to this music, it must be
+granted, with the nerves in an excessive state of tension--it is
+enormously exciting; but so is, under certain conditions, a determined
+beating upon a drum. An assault upon the nerve-centres is a vastly
+different thing from an emotional persuasion; yet there are many who,
+in listening to "Salome," will need to be convinced of it.
+
+It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many ways
+a noteworthy and brilliant--and, for the curious student of musical
+evolution--a fascinating work. Its musicianship--the sheer technical
+artistry which contrived it--is stupefying in its enormous and
+inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a
+musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime considerations
+in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most
+exacting standards--by the standards set in other and greater works of
+Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in
+vitality, sincerity, and importance. In at least one respect,
+however, it compels the most unreserved praise; and that is in the
+case of its superlative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a
+huge and complicated body of instruments, and he has set them an
+appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation
+found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his
+performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to
+the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful
+distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its
+total effect, and the almost uncanny art with which it is
+accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative
+achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic
+feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment.
+The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gorgeous fabric of
+strange and novel and obsessing colours--for in such orchestral
+writing as this, sound becomes colour, and colour sound: it is not a
+single sense which is engaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex
+of all the senses; one not only hears, one also imagines that one
+sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their
+possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It
+is when one turns from the bewildering magnificence of its orchestral
+surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the
+fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope,
+that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined
+admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by
+Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this
+music, its marvellous witchery, are incurably external. It is a
+gorgeous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and
+glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality,
+little true substance, within this dazzling instrumental envelope; and
+for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and
+who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems
+but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times
+cacophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which
+is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and
+deliberately hideous; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of
+post-Wagnerian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any
+possible musical means that will appropriately express it: to-day we
+cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another
+character that his body is "like the body of a leper, like a plastered
+wall where vipers crawl ... like a whitened sepulchre, full of
+loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of
+Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so
+often vulgarly sentimental, when it should be terrible and unbridled
+in its passion, that it seems to some a defective performance. For
+sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse
+for being inflated in expression, it would be hard to find, in any
+score of the rank of "Salome," the equal of the two themes which
+Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant
+motives in the score: the theme which is associated with _Salome's_
+desire to kiss the lips of _John_, and that other theme--it has been
+called that of "Ecstasy"--which begins like the _cantabile_ subject in
+the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic" Symphony, and
+ends--well, like Strauss at his worst.
+
+An astounding score!--music that is by turns gorgeous, banal,
+delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, sentimental, insinuating, tornadic:
+music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is
+overwhelming in its occasional triumphs.
+
+We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the
+candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work.
+
+Those over-zealous friends of Strauss who have sought to justify the
+offensiveness of "Salome" by alleging the case of Wagner's "Die
+Walküre," and the relationship that is there shown to exist between
+the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however
+unhallowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual
+malaise. _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_ are superbly healthful and
+untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath
+with the horrible lust of _Salome_ is stupid and absurd.
+
+Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling
+passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead
+lips, is not necessarily deleterious to morals, nor is it necessarily
+an act of impudicity; it is merely, for those whose calling does not
+happen to induce familiarity with mortuary things, horrible and
+revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be
+ameliorated, the fact,--the situation as conceived and ordered by the
+dramatist,--is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not
+really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions
+require that _Salome's_ kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a
+darkened stage. But to that it may be replied, in the first place,
+that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as
+conveyed by the words of _Salome_--so little, in fact, that _Herod_,
+who was anything but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome
+with loathing and commands her despatch; and, secondly, that the stage
+directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a
+"moonbeam" ... which "covers her with light," just before the end,
+while she is at the climax of her ghastly _libido_.
+
+Mr. Ernest Newman, a thoroughly sane and extremely able champion of
+all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of
+"Salome," that "the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too
+excitable people who are not artists, and who therefore cannot
+understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human
+nature," he goes on, "breaks out into a variety of forms of energy
+that are not at all nice from the moral point of view--murder, for
+example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for
+power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense.
+But because these things are objectionable in themselves and
+dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist
+should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes
+them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in
+real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels; but sensible
+people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson
+for creating such a character; they simply enjoy the art of it. The
+writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of
+deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect on
+us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in
+real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase
+of human nature does not necessarily mean that, as a private
+individual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make
+for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn
+an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may
+have been. They do not recommend her; they simply present her, as a
+specimen of what human nature can be like in certain circumstances....
+The hysterical moralists who cry out against 'Salome' ... have a
+terrified, if rather incoherent, feeling that if women in general were
+suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for
+bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were
+rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of
+love and revenge in the middle of the drawing-room, the respectable
+£40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet.
+But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they
+saw _Salome_ on the stage do something like them, any more than men
+are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read
+that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Hamlet's uncle
+murdered his."
+
+Now that, of course, is irresistible. But Mr. Newman's gift of
+vivacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the
+cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led
+him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital
+relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its
+probable effect upon the public is to yield the whole case to those
+who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of
+course, the opera house), is merely casual and inconsequential: it is
+to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation,"
+an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensation. It is not
+unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the
+prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived
+to be that of enlarging the sense of life: as an agency for liberating
+and mellowing the spirit: as an instrument primarily quickening and
+emancipative. "The sadness of life is the joy of art," said Mr.
+George Moore. The sadness of life, yes; and the evil and tragedy, the
+terror and violence, of life: for the contemplation of these may,
+through the evoking of pity, nourish and enlarge the spirit of the
+beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of
+that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion? I do
+not speak of "morality" or "immorality," since there is nothing stable
+in the use or understanding of these terms. But those aspects of life
+which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather than terrible--are
+they fit matter for the artist?
+
+It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not
+unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. Johnson
+left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady
+was interrogating him. "She seemed", recounts the admirable Boswell,
+"desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity."
+
+To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by
+wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss?--the unparalleled
+maker of music, the indisputable genius who gave us a sheaf of
+masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben,"
+"Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklärung." Has he passed into that desolate
+region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the
+tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist--the futility
+of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that
+ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as
+"Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)?
+Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the ministrations
+of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends
+out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and
+purify the lips of whom he pleases"?
+
+
+
+
+A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA
+
+
+I
+
+Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for
+opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that
+the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by
+simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her
+paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite
+only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have
+improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical
+forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is
+doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely
+contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those
+classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the
+shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by
+being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and
+voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though,
+Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might
+to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse
+which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly
+not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived
+as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and
+"sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are
+growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever
+defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile
+and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The
+ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of
+motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent
+genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they
+were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.
+
+Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before
+Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained
+(despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it--not a
+drama with auxiliary music, but a _dramma per musica_--a drama for
+(the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of
+Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary
+music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming
+more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing,
+despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of
+their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent
+developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both
+his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review
+certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the
+quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves
+and him.
+
+
+II
+
+It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's
+doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of
+pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be
+tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He
+conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be
+strictly auxiliary--an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the
+enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has
+excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in
+old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the
+poet, all other persons who have to do with the work--composer,
+stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and
+singing actors--should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect,
+and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel
+with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the
+musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that
+is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it
+is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should
+be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor--like the
+scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can
+be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship
+between the drama and the music is inverted--that in his music-dramas
+the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect,
+while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours--it becomes
+obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively)
+in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in
+Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the
+play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of
+"Meistersinger," of "Götterdämmerung," when this principle is tested
+by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among
+the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour
+of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the
+play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the
+music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act,
+with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a
+little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat
+raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial
+one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and
+reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music
+which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and
+that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there
+to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the
+element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and
+controlling?
+
+It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing,
+or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived
+himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely
+and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and
+the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he
+had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised
+and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a
+dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul
+assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of
+their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and
+anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than
+his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth
+which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially
+a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama
+and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse
+for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by
+his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is
+distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate
+his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or
+suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in
+order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his
+operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is
+impossible to find the drama because of the music.
+
+It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he
+went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed
+intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a
+welter of magnificent and inspired music--obscured them, stretched
+them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them
+with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he
+thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has
+remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of
+sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that
+Wagnerism ever had.
+
+It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both
+in spite of and because of their music. The validity and
+persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as
+consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less
+certain than of old. But the music, _qua_ music, is of undiminished
+potency--it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost
+unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and
+the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and
+sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite,
+epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and
+despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and,
+as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be
+lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim
+the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among
+the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart--a little
+lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold
+said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and
+attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a
+master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of
+expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse
+things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us
+as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the
+apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die
+Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic
+tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain
+supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic
+swoon of _Tristan_ and _Isolde_ in the midst of which the warning
+voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood
+of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which
+this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the
+adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal--music that is as
+the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial
+altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can
+say no less than that, regarded from any æsthetic standpoint at all,
+he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great
+though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or
+reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and
+that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting
+his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."
+
+
+III
+
+As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency
+of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination
+of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part--their
+music--which should be accessory and contributive rather than
+essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly--and, let
+it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art--through Wagner's
+orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its
+master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly
+against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice.
+He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of
+the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be
+permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His
+singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech,
+necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense
+of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing
+in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not
+infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments
+where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not
+impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical
+dramatist.
+
+And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A.
+Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both
+courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices,
+entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an
+art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama,"
+he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely,"
+he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the
+place of form in absolute music"--a sentence which, one may be
+permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of
+the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by
+this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner
+was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not
+musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination
+of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned,
+assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the
+most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little
+to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at
+the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the
+voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of
+music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted
+numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as
+it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being
+deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice,
+I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name
+page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a
+musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little
+difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified
+his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if
+the ensemble piece--the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example--is
+inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it incontrovertibly
+is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal attitude toward the
+conventions of the operatic stage makes it difficult to tolerate what
+Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle of two persons inside a
+house and two outside, supposed to be unconscious of each other's
+presence, making their remarks in rhythmic and harmonic consonance.
+Yet is Wagner much less distant from the dramatic verities when, in
+the third act of "Die Meistersinger," he ranges five people in the
+centre of a room and causes them to soliloquise in concert, to the end
+of producing a quintette of ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly
+freed himself from what he regarded as the musical bondage of his
+predecessors when he could tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the
+duet, the ensemble piece, and the chorus? The truth of the matter
+seems to be that if Wagner's music, in itself, were less wonderful
+and enthralling than it is, those who would fain insist upon a decent
+regard for dramatic consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate
+many things in the vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the
+"Ring" and "Parsifal" which are not a whit more dramatically
+reasonable than the absurdities which Wagner contemptuously derided in
+the operas of the old school. His vocal writing, far from being
+deficient in melodic quality, far from ignoring "the full resources of
+music and of the beautiful singing voice," is saturated and
+overflowing with musical beauty, and with almost every variety of
+melodic effectiveness except that which is possible to purely formal
+song. Mr. Baughan complains that the voice-parts have "no independent
+life" of their own. "In many cases," he says, "the vocal parts, if
+detached from the score [from the orchestral support] are without
+emotional meaning of any kind--the expression is absolutely
+incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For the same thing is
+necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied with modern
+harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written since composers
+began to discover the modulatory capacities of harmony, one might ask
+Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or any kind of expression
+or effect, if the voice part were sung without its harmonic support?
+
+No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect
+in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe,
+have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should
+be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain
+the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the
+second place, he had been content to let his _dramatis personæ_
+employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric
+speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more
+naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and
+intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.
+
+It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in
+Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their
+continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as
+examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only
+every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that
+Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to
+what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently
+instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly
+dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply
+suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of
+irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for
+example, _Waltraute's_ narrative in "Götterdämmerung"; the early
+scenes between _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_, and _Brunnhilde's_
+announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walküre"; and
+in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to _Isolde_ his
+sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures
+that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act--where the
+breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with
+extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair
+suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of
+battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated
+outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.
+
+But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in
+Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward
+musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he
+had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward
+musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and
+music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which
+produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the
+materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and
+variety, and until the intellectual and æsthetic seed which Wagner
+sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own
+time--it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of
+us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved--that
+the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck
+in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out
+with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that
+cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with
+that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime
+deficiency.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a
+masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when
+France--not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck
+and Wagner--produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of
+Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelléas et Mélisande" of Claude
+Debussy, it produced a work which is as commanding in quality as it
+is unique in conception and design.
+
+It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the
+eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day
+regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical
+integrity--those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of
+æsthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established
+methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse
+disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music
+as in the other arts, are held to be inviolable until they are set
+aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired
+innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a
+form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square
+with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so
+significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development
+as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the
+history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a
+lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise
+the paramount place in the structural scheme, the musical envelope
+with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying,
+but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree.
+The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count
+Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two
+hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music
+in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and
+situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective
+application in Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande." What the _Camerata_,
+and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate
+musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of
+boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for
+too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman
+of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.
+
+His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow
+growth of the art as of a preeminent natural fitness for the task. The
+Florentines, for all their eagerness and sincerity, were helpless
+before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and
+effective form, for they were hopelessly blocked by reason of the
+desperate poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the
+elaborate and lovely art of the contrapuntists, they found themselves
+in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with
+passionate convictions but without tools--in other words, they aspired
+to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing
+to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost
+non-existent orchestra, and with virtually no perception of the
+possibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any
+infirmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it
+is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear
+as was his perception of the rightful demands of the drama in any
+serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck
+justly says, to effect a "real amalgamation of music and drama,"
+failed to strike out "a form organically connecting each part of the
+opera with every other." His unconnected "numbers," his indulgence in
+vocal embroidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the
+operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or
+far-seeing reformatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes,
+he "insisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he
+did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer.
+Such a thing as allowing the drama to condition the form of the music
+never occurred to him." A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic
+speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in
+which the music was really made to exercise, continuously and
+undeviatingly, what he stated to be "its true function." It would be
+absurd to dispute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was
+both keen and rich; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in
+isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or
+exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent
+manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole.
+
+Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his
+principles--which were of course in essence the principles of the
+Florentines and of Gluck--and the evident reason for his failure,
+enough has already been said. So we come again to Debussy. For it is a
+singular fact--and this is the point to insist upon--that this French
+mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musical
+art who has exhibited the courage, and who has possessed the means, to
+carry the principles of the _Camerata_, of Gluck, and of Wagner to
+their ultimate conclusion. In "Pelléas et Mélisande" he has made his
+music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute
+fidelity and consistency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic
+that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here
+as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the
+entire dramatic material into the terms of the symphonic poem, and
+with the singing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless
+orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the
+method of Wagner), as we are from the futile experimentings of the
+_Camerata_.
+
+
+V
+
+One cannot but wonder what Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty,
+simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible
+association with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the
+lyric stage which ignores even those opportunities for musical effect
+which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held
+to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to
+the Spirit of Comedy in trying to imagine what Richard Wagner would
+have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is
+not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course
+of a score almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde," and in
+which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a
+_mezzo-forte_. Debussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic
+art for the exquisite justness with which it enforces the moods and
+action of the play. It never seduces the attention of the auditor from
+the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner,
+tyrannically absorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama
+there is maintained, as to emphasis and intensity, a scrupulous
+balance between the movement of the drama and the tonal undercurrent
+which is its complement: the music is absolutely merged in the play,
+suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it.
+It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the
+ideal manner of constructing a music-drama, the hazardous epithet
+"perfect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more
+faithful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently
+inconsistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture,
+there is none of Wagner's gorgeously expansive rhetoric: the "Je
+t'aime," "Je t'aime aussi" of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a
+simplicity and a stark sincerity which could not well go further; and
+it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their
+profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is
+represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete
+silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's
+music-drama: that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet:
+that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich
+and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reticent. After the grave
+speech and simple gestures of these naïve yet subtle and passionate
+tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the
+posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid personages seem, for
+a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and overwrought. To attempt
+to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical
+romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile
+endeavour; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy
+as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound,
+as it is grateful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and
+tramplings of Wagnerian conquests.
+
+His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than
+in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed commentary on
+the text and the action of the play, underlining the significance of
+the former and colouring and intensifying the latter; but its comments
+are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's--indeed,
+their reticence and discretion are, as it has been said, extreme.
+Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does
+not say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner
+being able to resist the temptation to indulge in some graphic and
+detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delaying the action and
+overloading the score, at the passage wherein _Golaud_, coming upon
+the errant and weeping _Mélisande_ in the forest, and seeing her crown
+at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it
+is that shines in the water? Yet observe the curiously insinuating
+effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treatment of
+this episode--the _pianissimo_ chords on the muted horns, followed by
+a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have
+wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene of
+_Mélisande_?--a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost
+insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced
+that it enters the consciousness almost unperceived as music.
+
+The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgotten; nor
+are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome,"
+overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense,
+oppressive, and many-stranded web of tone. Yet always Debussy's
+musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes
+visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages;
+though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent
+emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous
+reality,--"the thing behind the thing," as the Celts have named
+it,--which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of
+Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening
+to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de
+L'Isle-Adam's description of the voice of his _Elen_: "... it was
+taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through
+the region of shadows." This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic
+exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for
+the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The
+huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here.
+Taine once spoke of the "violent sorcery" of Victor Hugo's style, and
+it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music
+of the titanic German. Debussy in his "Pelléas" has written music
+that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. In it inheres a
+capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result,
+that music had not before exerted--an enchantment that invades the
+mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious
+degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading
+note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude--the sweeping and
+cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic
+fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and
+delicacy of texture and its economy of accent, it is neither
+amorphous nor inert.
+
+
+VI
+
+_Tristan_ and _Isolde_, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that
+emotion with the frankest lyricism; _Pelléas_ and _Mélisande_, in
+moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and
+unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere
+couched. It is the orchestra which sings--which, passionately or
+meditatively, colours the dramatic moment. Wherein we come to what is
+perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score:
+the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this
+respect, justly summarised, is this: He has released the orchestra
+from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which
+Wagner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than
+a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and
+transparency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself
+has succinctly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of
+writing for the voices in "Pelléas." "I have been reproached," he has
+said, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always found in the
+orchestra, never in the voice. I wished--intended, in fact,--that the
+action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous,
+uninterrupted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases.
+When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spectator is wont to
+experience two kinds of emotion: the musical emotion on the one hand;
+and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other.
+Generally these are felt successively. I have tried to blend these two
+emotions, and make them simultaneous. Melody is, if I may say so,
+almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of
+emotion or life. Melody is suitable only for the song [_chanson_],
+which confirms a fixed sentiment. I have never been willing that my
+music should hinder ... the changes of sentiment and passion felt by
+my characters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that
+these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries,
+in their joys as in their sorrow."
+
+Now Debussy in his public excursions as a critic is not always to be
+taken seriously; indeed, it is altogether unlikely that he has
+refrained from demonstrations of exquisite delight over the startled
+or contemptuous comment which some of his vivacious heresies
+concerning certain of the gods of music have evoked. These published
+appraisements of his are, of course, nothing more than impertinent,
+though at times apt and sagacious, _jeux d'esprit_. But when he speaks
+seriously, as in the defence of his practice which I have just quoted,
+of the menace of "parasitic" musical phrases in the voice-parts, and
+when he observes that melody, when it occurs in the speech of
+characters in music-drama, is "almost anti-lyric," he speaks with
+penetration and truth. His practice, which illustrates it, amounts to
+this: He employs in "Pelléas" a continuous declamation, uncadenced,
+entirely unmelodic (in the sense in which melodious declamation has
+been understood). Save for a brief and particular instance, there is
+no melodic form whatsoever, from beginning to end of the score. There
+is not a hint of the Wagnerian arioso. The declamation is founded
+throughout upon the natural inflections of the voice in speaking--it
+is, indeed, virtually an electrified and heightened form of speech.
+It is never musical, for the sake of sheer musical beauty, when the
+emotion within the text or situation does not lift it to the plane
+where the quality of utterance tends naturally and inevitably toward
+lyricism of accent. He does not, for example, commit the kind of
+indiscretion that Wagner commits when he makes _Isolde_ sing the
+highly unlyrical line, "Der 'Tantris' mit sorgender List sich nannte,"
+to a phrase that has the double demerit of being "parasitically" and
+intrusively melodic and wholly conventional in pattern--one of those
+musical platitudes which have no excuse for existence in any sincere
+and vital score. Nor in "Pelléas" do the singers ever sing, it need
+hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a concerted
+number, or a chorus (the snatches of distant song heard from the
+sailors on the departing ship is a mere touch of atmospheric
+suggestion). The dialogue is everywhere and always clearly
+individualised, as in the spoken drama. Yet this surprising fact is to
+be noted: undeviatingly naturalistic as are the voice-parts in their
+structure and inflection, and despite their haughty and stoic
+intolerance of melodic effect, they yet are so contrived that they
+often yield--incidentally, as it were--effects of musical beauty; and
+in so doing, they demonstrate the unfamiliar truth that there is
+possible in music-drama a use of the voice which permits of an
+expressiveness that is both telling and beautiful, though it yields
+nothing that accepted canons would warrant us in describing as either
+melody or melodious declamation. Now Mr. Baughan, whose views
+concerning Wagner and his habits have been discussed, craves in the
+music-dramas of Wagner a frankness of melody in the vocal writing
+whose absence he deplores; and he seems to think that when this
+melodiousness of utterance is denied to the voices in modern opera,
+all that is left them is something "that an orchestral instrument
+could do as well"--something that, inferentially, is anti-vocal, or at
+least unidiomatic. It would seem that Mr. Baughan, and those who think
+as he does, fail to realise, as I have remarked before, the immensely
+important part which it is possible for modern harmony to play in the
+combination of a voice and accompanying instruments. It would not be
+difficult to demonstrate that a large part of what we are in the
+habit of regarding as a purely melodic form of vocal expression in the
+modern lyric-drama owes a large and unsuspected measure of its potency
+of effect to the modulatory character of its harmonic support. Take a
+passage that we are apt to think of as one of the most ravishingly and
+purely melodious in the whole of that fathomless well of lyric beauty,
+"Tristan und Isolde"--the passage in the duet in the second act
+beginning, "Bricht mein Blick sich wonn' erblindet." As one hears it
+sung by the two voices above the orchestra, it seems a perfect
+example of pure melodic inspiration; yet play the voice-parts, alone
+or together, without their harmonic undercurrent, and all the beauty,
+all the meaning, vanish at once: without the kaleidoscopic harmonic
+color the melodic phrases are without point, coherence, or design. But
+this is aside from the point that I would make--that the
+potentialities of modern harmony make possible a use of the voice in
+music-drama which, while it is remote from the character of formal
+melody, may yet be productive of a kind of emotional eloquence that is
+exceedingly puissant and beautiful, and that may even possess a
+seemingly lyric quality. We find a foreshadowing of this kind of
+effect in such a passage as _Tristan's_ "Bin ich in Kornwall?" where
+all of the haunting effect of the phrase is due to the modulation in
+the harmony into the G-major chord at the first syllable of
+"Kornwall." And one might point out to Mr. Baughan that this effect is
+subtly dependent upon the co-operation of the voice and the
+instruments. The phrase in the voice-part is not one "that an
+orchestral instrument could do as well", as Mr. Baughan would at once
+recognise if he were to play the accompanying chords on a piano and
+give the progression in the voice to a 'cello or a violin.
+
+But while Wagner foreshadowed this manner of making his harmonic
+support confer a special character upon the effect of the voice-part,
+he did not begin to sound its possibilities. That was left for Debussy
+to do; and for the task he was obviously equipped in a surpassing
+degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful
+harmonic vocabulary--the richest harmonic instrument, beyond
+comparison, that music has yet known. The score of "Pelléas"
+overflows with instances of this--one may paradoxically call it
+harmonic--use of the voice: things that Wagner, with his comparatively
+limited harmonic range, could not have accomplished. As instances
+where the voice-part, without being inherently melodic, borrows a
+semblance of almost lyrical beauty from its harmonic associations,
+consider the passage in the grotto scene beginning at _Pelléas'_
+words, "Elle est très grande et très belle", and continuing to
+"Donnez-moi la main"; or the astonishing passage in the final love
+scene beginning at _Pelléas'_ words, "On a brisé la glace avec des
+fers rougis!" or, in the last act, the expression that is given to
+_Mélisande's_ phrase, "la grande fenêtre...." Yet note that in such
+passages the voice-part does not, in Mr. Baughan's phrase, merely
+"weave up" with the orchestra, as he protests that it does in Wagner's
+practice; in other words, it is not simply an incidental strand in the
+general harmonic texture; it has character and individuality of its
+own, though these are absolutely dependent for their full effect upon
+their harmonic background. Nor is it, on the other hand, so assertive
+and conspicuous that it comes within the class of that which Debussy
+repudiates as "parasitic." Here, then, is a method of uttering the
+text that not only permits of a just and veracious rendering of every
+possible dramatic _nuance_, but which, by virtue of the means of
+musical enforcement that are applied to it, takes on a character and
+quality, as music, which are as influential as they are unparalleled.
+
+
+VII
+
+It has been affirmed that in "Pelléas et Mélisande" Debussy has
+produced a work as commanding in quality as it is unique in
+conception and design. Let us consider what grounds there may be for
+the assertion.
+
+To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without analogy
+in the previous history, not merely of opera, but of music. Debussy is
+a man of unhampered and clairvoyant imagination, a dreamer with a
+far-wandering vision. He views the spectacle of the world through the
+magic casements of the mystic who is also a poet and visionary. One
+can easily conceive him as taking the more tranquil part in that
+provocative dialogue put by Mr. Yeats into the mouths of two of his
+dramatic characters:
+
+     "And what in the living world can happen to a man that is
+     asleep on his bed? Work must go on and coach-building must
+     go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much
+     attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no
+     profit in it to anyone at all."
+
+     "There are some would answer you that it is to those who are
+     awake that nothing happens, and it is they who know nothing.
+     He that is asleep on his bed is gone where all have gone for
+     supreme truth."
+
+In Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande," Debussy has, through a
+fortunate conjunction of circumstances, found a perfect vehicle for
+his impulses and preoccupations. There will always be, naturally
+enough, persons who must inevitably regard such a work as that for
+which he and Maeterlinck are now responsible as, for the most part,
+vain, inutile, even preposterous. They are sincere in their dislike,
+these forthright and excellent people, and they are to be
+commiserated, for they are, in such a region of the imagination as
+this drama builds up about them, aliens in a world whose ways and
+whose wonders must be forever hidden from their most determined
+scrutiny. Such robust and worldly spirits, writes a thoughtful
+contemporary essayist, "that swim so vigorously on the surface of
+things," have always "a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who
+dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the
+depth holds": they will not even grant that the depths are anything
+save murky, that the tidings have validity or importance. They take
+comfort in their detachment, and are apt to speak of themselves, with
+mock humility, as "plain, blunt persons," for whom the alleged
+vacuities of such an order of art are comfortably negligible. Well,
+it is, after all, as Maeterlinck's _Pelléas_ himself observes, a
+matter not so much for mirth as for lament; yet even more is it a
+matter for resignation. There will always be, as has been observed, an
+immense and confident majority for whom that territory of the creative
+imagination which lies over the boundaries of the palpable world will
+seem worse than delusive: who will always and sincerely pin their
+faith to that which is definite and concrete, patent and direct, and
+who must in all honesty reject that which is undeclared, allusive,
+crepuscular: which communicates itself through echoes and in
+glimpses; by means of intimations, signs, and tokens. For them it
+would be of no avail to point to the dictum of one who, like
+Maeterlinck, is aware of remote voices and strange dreams: "Dramatic
+art," he has wisely said, "is a method of expression, and neither a
+hair-breadth escape nor a love affair more befits it than the
+passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions; and
+the dramatist is as free as the painter of good pictures and the
+writer of good books. All art is passionate, but a flame is not the
+less flame because we change the candle for a lamp or the lamp for a
+fire; and all flame is beautiful."
+
+It is a dictum that is scarcely calculated to persuade a very general
+acceptance: a "passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange
+intuitions" is not precisely the kind of æsthetic fare which the
+"plain, blunt man," glorying in his plainness and his bluntness, is
+apt to relish. It is a point upon which it is perhaps needless to
+dwell; but its recognition serves as explanation of the fact that the
+music-drama into which Debussy has transformed Maeterlinck's play
+should not everywhere and always be either accepted or understood.
+For in the musical setting of Debussy, Maeterlinck's drama has found
+its perfect equivalent: the qualities of the music are the qualities
+of the play, completely and exactly; and, sharing its qualities, it
+has evoked and will always evoke the more or less contemptuous
+antagonism of those for whom it has little or nothing to say.
+
+Of the quality of its style, perhaps the most obvious trait to note is
+its divergence from the kind of music-making which we are accustomed
+to regard as typically French. We have come to regard as inevitable
+the clear-cut precision, the finesse, the instinctive grace of French
+music; but we are not at all accustomed to discovering this fineness
+of texture allied with marked emotional richness, with depth and
+substance of thought--we do not look for such an alliance, nor find
+it, in any French music from Rameau to Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and
+Massenet. Yet Debussy has the typical French clarity and fineness of
+surface without the French hardness of edge and thinness of substance.
+The contours of his music are as melting and elastic as its emotional
+substance is rich; and it is phantasmal rather than definite and
+clear-cut; evasive rather than direct. His art, as a matter of fact,
+has its roots in the literature rather than in the music of his
+country. His true forebears are not Rameau, Couperin, Boieldieu,
+Bizet, Saint-Saëns, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé; and, beyond
+his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace
+of French musical influence in the score of "Pelléas," save for its
+limpidity of expression and its delicate logic of structure. The truth
+is that Debussy, with d'Indy, Ravel, and others, has made it
+impossible to speak any longer, without qualification, of "French"
+quality, or "French" style, in music; for to-day there is the French
+of Saint-Saëns and Massenet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy,
+Duparc, Fauré, Ravel: and the two orders are as inassociable under a
+generic yoke as are the poetry of Hugo and the poetry of Verlaine.
+
+But the essential thing to observe and to praise in this music is its
+astonishing, its almost incredible, affluence of substance: its
+richness in ideas that are both extraordinarily beautiful and wholly
+new. The score, in this respect alone, is epoch-making. Debussy is the
+first music-maker since Wagner to evolve a kind of style of which the
+substance is, so to say, newly-minted. Strauss is not to be compared
+with him in this regard; for the basis of the German master's style,
+upon which he has reared no matter how wonderful a superstructure, is
+compounded of materials which he got straight from Richard Wagner and
+his great forerunner, Franz Liszt; whereas the basis, the
+starting-point, of Debussy's style--its harmonic and melodic
+stuff--existed nowhere, in any artistic shape or condition, before
+him. To speak of it as in any vital sense a reversion, because it
+makes use of certain principles of plain-song, is mere trifling.
+Debussy is a true innovator, if ever there was one. He has added fresh
+materials to the matter out of which music is evolved; and no composer
+of whom this may be said, from Beethoven to Chopin, has failed to find
+himself eventually ranked as the originator of a new order of things
+in the development of the art.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the
+music of "Pelléas et Mélisande" will for some time to come find it
+difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of
+extravagance. One owns, in trying to appraise it, to a compunction
+similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics,
+when, after applauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded
+himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation," and "must
+mix in a little depreciation," to show that he had "read attentively,
+critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite
+risk in praising too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to
+intrude itself upon contemporary observation, and upon a critical
+function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of
+adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am
+quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric-drama as is spoken
+here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also
+aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which
+afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the
+entertainment of subsequent generations and the inextinguishable
+delight of the Comic Muse--which, as Mr. Meredith has pointed out,
+watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind
+of excess. Yet I am willing to assert deliberately, and with a
+perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the
+score of "Pelléas" is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that
+are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of
+modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century
+ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of "Tristan und
+Isolde"; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a
+dozen measures in which one cannot point out some touch of genius.
+The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey
+of it a conviction of its almost continuous inspiration, of its
+profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that
+possess character and nobility, and that are often of deep and
+ravishing beauty--a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the
+sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the
+inspiration is so persistent and so fresh--in which there is so little
+that is _cliché_, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is
+thinking of music written for the stage, one has to go to the author
+of "Tristan" for anything comparable to it. It has been said that in
+this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is
+justified. There are passages, most of them to be found in the
+interludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known,
+were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and
+rare gold of his thought is intermixed with the dross of alien ideas.
+And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow
+of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score: thus we hear
+"Parsifal" in the first interlude, "Parsifal" and "Siegfried" in the
+interlude following the scene at the fountain--the scene wherein
+_Mélisande's_ ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that
+it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of
+this music, even when it momentarily takes the timbre of another; and
+none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled,
+has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and
+passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching
+and so underived.
+
+The nature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon
+its remarkable quality by his appreciators, have provoked the
+assertion that the score of "Pelléas" is devoid of melody, or at least
+that it is weak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests
+upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect
+exemplification of that critical method which consists in measuring
+new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of
+seeking to learn whether they do not themselves establish new
+standards by which alone they are to be appraised. The method has
+been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is
+probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The
+music of "Pelléas" is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen,
+reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have
+already been discussed, has deliberately and wisely avoided formal
+melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra--an orchestra
+which, while it depends in an unexampled degree upon a predominantly
+harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from being
+devoid of melodic effect. But the melody is Debussy's melody--it is
+fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have
+been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors,--men who
+themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic
+barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles
+impatient or inhospitable ears by reason of its seeming
+indefiniteness, its apparently wayward movement, and because of the
+shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It
+would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the
+melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of
+instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by
+the fountain, in the second act; the whole of the tower scene--an
+outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the
+loveliest pages of "Tristan" for a comparison; the affecting interview
+between _Mélisande_ and the benign and infinitely wise _Arkël_, in the
+fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park; and almost the
+whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the
+entrancing music to which he has set the ecstatic apostrophe of
+_Pelléas_ to his beloved's hair, he would have established an
+indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original
+kind. It has been said that he is "incapable of writing sustained
+melody"; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order
+to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem
+that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to
+have compassed even "sustained" melody; for the melodic line--varied,
+sensitive, and plastic though it is--is here of almost unbroken
+continuity.
+
+In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder
+at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is
+individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene,
+is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing
+aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has
+discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of
+this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One
+would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief
+and final claim to the highest excellence in its triumphant character
+as an expressional achievement; in this it ranks with the supreme
+things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one
+is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and
+beautiful expression. It is probably unnecessary to allege the quality
+of such examples as the scene by the fountain, the perilous encounter
+at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude
+which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the
+sunlit terrace above the sea--music that has an entrancing radiance
+and perfume, through which blows "all the air of all the sea"--these
+things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal
+comprehension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise
+them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose
+quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the
+countless felicities of structural and external detail: felicities
+which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter,
+less obvious felicities: of the grave beauty of the passage in which
+_Geneviève_ reads to the King the letter of _Golaud_ to his brother
+_Pelléas_[1]; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act,
+after _Mélisande's_ question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the
+delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at _Pelléas'_ words,
+in the scene at the fountain, "... le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the
+exquisite setting of _Golaud's_ exclamation of delight over the beauty
+of _Mélisande's_ hands; of the entire grotto scene,--a passage of
+superb imaginative fervour,--with its indescribably poetic ending (the
+fragment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes
+and a harp); of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo
+violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the
+"Regarde, regarde, j'embrasse tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured
+_Pelléas_; of the piercing effect of the _Mélisande_ theme where it is
+combined with that of _Pelléas_ in the interlude which follows the
+scene at the tower window; of the passage preceding the entrance of
+_Mélisande_ and _Arkël_ in the fourth act, where _Mélisande's_ theme
+is heard in augmentation; of the passage in the transitional music
+following the misusing of _Mélisande_ by _Golaud_ where her theme is
+played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns--a
+_diminuendo_ of inexpressible poignancy; of the impassioned soliloquy
+of _Pelléas_ preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the
+theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites
+_Mélisande_ to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees;
+of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he
+asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him; of the interplay
+of "ninth" chords which is heard, in the final act, when _Arkël_ asks
+_Mélisande_ if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage
+which immediately follows, as _Mélisande_ says that she wishes the
+window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea; of, indeed,
+the whole of the incomparable music of _Mélisande's_ death; and
+finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical
+dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the
+curiously potent and haunting scene in which _Pelléas_ and
+_Mélisande_, with _Geneviève_, watch the departure of the ship from
+the port and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting
+the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written
+music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of
+the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and
+oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On
+s'embarquerait sans le savoir et l'on ne reviendrait plus" of
+_Pelléas_, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the
+ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the
+passage in triplets which is heard when _Pelléas_ speaks of the
+beacon light shining dimly through the mist; the veiled and sinister
+phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of
+the sailors' call: these are salient moments in a masterly piece of
+psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal
+delineation.
+
+[Footnote 1: As one out of many instances of similarly striking
+detail, observe the remarkable and moving progression in the
+voice-part from the D in the ninth chord on B-flat to the B-natural in
+the chord of G-sharp minor, at _Geneviève's_ words "... tour qui
+regarde la mer."]
+
+Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish--and it is not unlikely
+that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of
+style--will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of
+"Pelléas et Mélisande." It has had, it has been truly said, no
+predecessor, no forerunner; and there is nothing in the musical art
+that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree
+resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal
+welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive
+influence, it is not now possible to say; but that its extraordinary
+importance as a work of art will compel an ever-widening appreciation,
+seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score,
+Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Patmore: "I have respected
+posterity."
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+Some of the material contained in the foregoing studies appeared
+originally in articles published in _Harper's Weekly_, _The North
+American Review_, and _The Musician_. But for the most part the essays
+are new; and such passages of earlier origin as are retained have been
+considerably altered and amplified.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Aspects of Modern Opera
+       Estimates and Inquiries
+
+Author: Lawrence Gilman
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2011 [EBook #38268]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Linda Cantoni and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<div class="notes">
+<p><i>Transcriber's Note:</i> Obvious printer errors have been corrected
+without note. Skipped page numbers are due to blank pages and repeated half-titles in the original.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="centertp"><b><a href="#CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></b></p>
+
+<p class="centertbp">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="316" height="500" alt="cover" title="cover" />
+</p>
+
+<div class="bbox">
+<h1><span class="gesp">ASPECTS OF</span><br />
+MODERN OPERA<br />
+<br />
+<span class="sm"><i>Estimates and Inquiries</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="xsm">BY</span><br />
+<span class="sm">LAWRENCE GILMAN</span></h1>
+
+<p class="centertbp"><b>AUTHOR OF<br />
+<br />
+&#8220;The Music of To-morrow,&#8221; &#8220;Phases of Modern Music,&#8221; &#8220;Stories<br />
+of Symphonic Music,&#8221; &#8220;Edward MacDowell: A Study,&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;Strauss&#8217; &#8216;Salome&#8217;: A Guide to the Opera,&#8221;<br />
+&#8220;Debussy&#8217;s &#8216;Pelléas et Mélisande&#8217;: A<br />
+Guide to the Opera,&#8221; etc.</b></p>
+
+
+<p class="centertp">
+<span class="smcap">New York</span>: JOHN LANE COMPANY<br />
+<span class="smcap">London</span>: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD<br />
+MCMIX<br />
+</p>
+
+<hr class="short" />
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="sm"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1908,<br />
+<span class="smcap">John Lane Company</span></span>
+</p>
+
+<p class="centerbp"><span class="xsm">THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p class="center">TO</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="lg">ERNEST NEWMAN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">A CRITIC OF</p>
+
+<p class="center">BREADTH, WISDOM, AND INDEPENDENCE</p>
+
+<p class="center">THESE STUDIES</p>
+
+<p class="center">ARE APPRECIATIVELY INSCRIBED</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a><span class="gesp">CONTENTS</span></h2>
+
+
+<table style="width: 75%" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="contents">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="right"><span class="smcap sm">Page</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#INTRODUCTORY">Introductory: The Wagnerian Aftermath</a></span></td><td class="right">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#A_VIEW_OF_PUCCINI">A View of Puccini</a></span></td><td class="right">31</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#STRAUSS_SALOME_ITS_ART_AND_ITS_MORALS">Strauss' "Salome": Its Art and its Morals</a></span></td><td class="right">65</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#A_PERFECT_MUSIC-DRAMA">A Perfect Music-Drama</a></span></td><td class="right">107</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">-3-</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTORY" id="INTRODUCTORY"></a>INTRODUCTORY<br />
+<br />
+THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH</h2>
+
+
+<p class="tp"><span class="smcap">Since</span> that day when, a quarter of a century ago, Richard Wagner ceased
+to be a dynamic figure in the life of the world, the history of
+operatic art has been, save for a few conspicuous exceptions, a barren
+and unprofitable page; and it has been so, in a considerable degree,
+because of him. When Mr. William F. Apthorp, in his admirable history
+of the opera&mdash;a book written with unflagging gusto and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">-4-</a></span>
+vividness&mdash;observed that Wagner's style has been, since his death,
+little imitated, he made an astonishing assertion. "If by Wagner's
+influence," he went on, "is meant the influence of his individuality,
+it may fairly be said to have been null. In this respect Wagner has
+had no more followers than Mozart or Beethoven; he has founded no
+school." Again one must exclaim: An astonishing affirmation! and it is
+not the first time that it has been made, nor will it be the last. Yet
+how it can have seemed a reasonable thing to say is one of the
+insoluble mysteries. The influence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">-5-</a></span> of Wagner&mdash;the influence of his
+individuality as well as of his principles&mdash;upon the musical art of
+the past twenty-five years has been simply incalculable. It has
+tinged, when it has not dyed and saturated, every phase and form of
+creative music, from the opera to the sonata and string quartet.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to understand how anyone who is at all familiar with
+the products of musical art in Europe and America since the death of
+the tyrant of Bayreuth can be disposed to question the fact. No
+composer who ever lived influenced so deeply the music that came
+after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">-6-</a></span> him as did Wagner. It is an influence that is, of course,
+waning; and to the definite good of creative art, for it has been in a
+large degree pernicious and oppressive in its effect. The shadow of
+the most pervasive of modern masters has laid a sinister and
+paralysing magic upon almost all of his successors. They have sought
+to exert his spells, they have muttered what they imagined were his
+incantations; yet the thing which they had hoped to raise up in glory
+and in strength has stubbornly refused to breathe with any save an
+artificial and feeble life. None has escaped the contagion of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">-7-</a></span> his
+genius, though some, whom we shall later discuss, have opposed against
+it a genius and a creative passion of their own. Yet in the domain of
+the opera, wherewith we are here especially concerned, it is an
+exceedingly curious and interesting fact that out of the soil which he
+enriched with his own genius have sprung, paradoxically, the only
+living and independent forces in the lyrico-dramatic art of our time.</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider, first, those aspects of the operatic situation which,
+by reason of the paucity of creative vitality that they con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">-8-</a></span>note, are,
+to-day, most striking; and here we shall be obliged to turn at once to
+Germany. The more one hears of the new music that is being put forth
+by Teutonic composers, the stronger grows one's conviction of the
+lack, with a single exception, of any genuine creative impulse in that
+country to-day. It is doubtless a little unreasonable to expect to be
+able to agree in this matter with the amiable lady who told Matthew
+Arnold that she liked to think that æsthetic excellence was "common
+and abundant." As the sagacious Arnold pointed out, it is not in the
+nature of æsthetic ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">-9-</a></span>cellence that it should be "common and
+abundant"; on the contrary, he observed, excellence dwells among rocks
+hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear out his heart before he
+can reach her. All of this is quite unanswerable; yet, so far as
+musical Germany is concerned, is not the situation rather singular?
+Germany&mdash;the Germany which yielded the royal line founded by Bach and
+continued by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and
+Brahms&mdash;can show us to-day, save for that exception which we shall
+later discuss, only a strenuous flock of Lilliputians<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">-10-</a></span> (whom it would
+be fatuous to discuss with particularity), each one of whom is
+confidently aware that the majestic mantle of the author of "Tristan"
+has descended upon himself. They write music in which one grows weary
+of finding the same delinquency&mdash;the invariable fault of emptiness, of
+poverty of idea, allied with an extreme elaboration in the manner of
+presentation. And it is most deliberate and determined in address. One
+would think that the message about to be delivered were of the utmost
+consequence, the deepest moment: the pose and the manner of the bearer
+of great tid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">-11-</a></span>ings are admirably simulated. Yet the actual deliverance
+is futile and dull, pathetically meagre, causing us to wonder how
+often we must remind ourselves that it is as impossible to achieve
+salient or distinguished or noble music without salient,
+distinguished, and noble ideas as it is to create fire without flame.</p>
+
+<p>In France there are&mdash;again with an exception to which we shall later
+advert&mdash;Saint-Saëns, d'Indy, Massenet, Charpentier, and&mdash;<i>les autres</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Now Saint-Saëns is very far from being a Wagnerian. He is, indeed,
+nothing very definite and determin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">-12-</a></span>able. He is M. Saint-Saëns, an
+abstraction, a brain without a personality. It is almost forty years
+since Hector Berlioz called him "one of the greatest musicians of our
+epoch," and since then the lustre of his fame has waxed steadily,
+until to-day one must recognise him as one of the three or four most
+distinguished living composers. Venerable and urbane, M. Saint-Saëns,
+at the New York opening of the American tour which he made in his
+seventy-second year, sat at the piano before the audience whom he had
+travelled three thousand miles to meet, and played a virtuoso piece<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">-13-</a></span>
+with orchestral accompaniment, and two shorter pieces for piano and
+orchestra: a valse-caprice called "Wedding Cake," and an "Allegro
+Appassionato." That is to say, M. Camille Saint-Saëns, the bearer of
+an internationally famous and most dignified name, braved the tragic
+perils of the deep to exhibit himself before a representative American
+audience as the composer of the "Wedding Cake" valse-caprice, an
+entertaining fantasy on exotic folk-themes, and a <i>jeu d'esprit</i> with
+a pleasant tune and some pretty orchestral embroidery.</p>
+
+<p>No one could have it in his heart<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">-14-</a></span> to chide M. Saint-Saëns for these
+things, for he is very venerable and very famous. Yet is not the
+occurrence indicative, in a way, of M. Saint-Saëns's own attitude
+toward his art?&mdash;that facile, brilliant, admirably competent,
+chameleon-like art of his, so adroit in its external fashioning, yet
+so thin and worn in its inner substance! One wonders if, in the entire
+history of music, there is the record of a composer more completely
+accomplished in his art, so exquisite a master of the difficult trick
+of spinning a musical web, so superb a mechanician, who has less to
+say to the world: whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">-15-</a></span> discourse is so meagre and so negligible. One
+remembers that unfortunate encomium of Gounod's, which has been so
+often turned into a justified reproach: "Saint-Saëns," said the
+composer of "Faust," "will write at will a work in the style of
+Rossini, of Verdi, of Schumann, of Wagner." The pity of his case is
+that, when he writes pure Saint-Saëns, one does not greatly care to
+listen. He has spoken no musical thought, in all his long and
+scintillant career, that the world will long remember. His dozen
+operas, his symphonic poems, his symphonies, his concertos, the best
+of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">-16-</a></span> chamber works&mdash;is there in them an accent which one can
+soberly call either eloquent or deeply beautiful? Do they not excel
+solely by reason of their symmetry and solidity of structure, their
+deft and ingenious delivery of ideas which at their worst are banal
+and at their best mediocre or derivative? "A name always to be
+remembered with respect!" cries one of his most sane and just
+admirers: since "in the face of practical difficulties,
+discouragements, misunderstandings, sneers, he has worked constantly
+to the best of his unusual ability for musical righteousness in its
+pure form."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">-17-</a></span> "A name to be remembered with respect," beyond dispute:
+with the respect that is due the man of supereminent intelligence, the
+fastidious artisan, the tireless and honourable workman&mdash;with respect,
+yes; but scarcely with enthusiasm. He never, as has been truly said,
+bores one; it is just as true that he never stimulates, moves,
+transports, or delights one, in the deeper sense of the term. At its
+best, it is a hard and dry light that shines out of his music: a
+radiance without magic and without warmth. His work is an impressive
+monument to the futility of art without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">-18-</a></span> impulse: to the immeasurable
+distance that separates the most exquisite talent from the merest
+genius. For all its brilliancy of investiture, his thought, as the
+most liberal of his appreciators has said, "can never wander through
+eternity"&mdash;a truth which scarcely needed the invocation of the
+Miltonic line to enforce. It may be true, as Mr. Philip Hale has
+asserted, that "the success of d'Indy, Fauré, Debussy, was made
+possible by the labor and the talent of Saint-Saëns"; yet it is one of
+the pities of his case that when Saint-Saëns's name shall have become
+faint and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">-19-</a></span> fugitive in the corridors of time, the chief glories of
+French art in our day will be held to be, one may venture, the
+legacies of the composers of "Pelléas et Mélisande" and the "Jour
+d'été à la montagne," rather than of the author of "Samson et Dalila"
+and "Le Rouet d'Omphale." Which brings one to M. Vincent d'Indy.</p>
+
+<p>Now M. d'Indy offers a curious spectacle to the inquisitive observer,
+in that he is, in one regard, the very symbol of independence, of
+artistic emancipation, whereas, in another phase of his activity, he
+is a mere echo and simulacrum. As a writer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">-20-</a></span> for the concert room, as a
+composer of imaginative orchestral works and of chamber music, he is
+one of the most inflexibly original and self-guided composers known to
+the contemporary world of music. With his aloofness and astringency of
+style, his persistent austerity of temper, his invincible hatred of
+the sensuous, his detestation of the kind of "felicity" which is a
+goal for lesser men, this remarkable musician&mdash;who, far more
+deservingly than the incontinent Chopin, deserves the title of "the
+proudest poetic spirit of our time"&mdash;this remarkable musician, one
+must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">-21-</a></span> repeat, is the sort of creative artist who is writing, not for
+his day, but for a surprised and apprehending futurity. He is at once
+a man of singularly devout and simple nature, and an entire mystic.
+For him the spectacle of the living earth, in lovely or forbidding
+guise, evokes reverend and exalted moods. His approach to its wonders
+is Wordsworthian in its deep and awe-struck reverence and its
+fundamental sincerity. He does not, like his younger artistic kinsman,
+Debussy, see in it all manner of fantastic and mist-enwrapped visions;
+it is not for him a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">-22-</a></span> pageant of delicate and shining dreams.
+Mallarmé's lazy and indulgent Faun in amorous woodland reverie would
+not have suggested to him, as to Debussy, music whose sensuousness is
+as exquisitely concealed as it is marvellously transfigured. The
+mysticism of d'Indy is pre-eminently religious; it has no tinge of
+sensuousness; it is large and benign rather than intimate and intense.</p>
+
+<p>He is absolutely himself, absolutely characteristic, for example, in
+his tripartite tone-poem, "Jour d'été à la montagne." This music is a
+hymn the grave ecstasy and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">-23-</a></span> utter sincerity of which are as
+evident as they are impressive. In its art it is remarkable&mdash;not so
+monumental in plan, so astoundingly complex in detail, as his superb
+B-minor symphony, yet a work that is full of his peculiar traits.</p>
+
+<p>Now it would seem as if so fastidious and individual a musician as
+this might do something of very uncommon quality if he once turned his
+hand to opera-making. Yet in his "L'Étranger," completed only a year
+before he began work on his astonishing B-minor symphony, and in his
+"Fervaal" (1889-95),<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">-24-</a></span> we have the melancholy spectacle of M. d'Indy
+concealing his own admirable and expressive countenance behind an
+ill-fitting mask modelled imperfectly after the lineaments of Richard
+Wagner. In these operas (d'Indy calls them, by the way, an <i>action
+dramatique</i> and an <i>action musicale</i>: evident derivations from the
+"Tristan"-esque <i>Handlung</i>)&mdash;in these operas, the speech, from first
+to last, is the speech of Wagner. The themes, the harmonic structure,
+the use of the voice, the plots (d'Indy, like Wagner, is his own
+librettist)&mdash;all is uncommuted Wagnerism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">-25-</a></span> with some of the Teutonic
+cumbrousness deleted and some of the Gallic balance and measure
+infused. These scores have occasional beauty, but it is seldom the
+beauty that is peculiar to d'Indy's own genius: it is an imported and
+alien beauty, a beauty that has in it an element of betrayal.</p>
+
+<p>We find ourselves confronting a situation that is equally dispiriting
+to the seeker after valuable achievements in contemporary French opera
+when we view the performances of such minor personages as Massenet,
+Bruneau, Reyer, Erlanger, and Charpentier. They are all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">-26-</a></span> tarred, in a
+great or small degree, with the Wagnerian stick. When they speak out
+of their own hearts and understandings they are far from commanding:
+they are vulgarly sentimental or prettily lascivious, like the amiable
+Massenet, or pretentious and banal, like Bruneau, or incredibly dull,
+like Reyer, or picturesquely superficial, like Charpentier&mdash;though the
+author of "Louise" disports himself with a beguiling grace and verve
+which almost causes one to forgive his essential emptiness.</p>
+
+<p>Modern Italy discloses a single dominant and vivid figure. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">-27-</a></span> none of
+his compatriots is there any distinction of speech, of character. In
+that country the memory of Wagner is less imperious in its control;
+yet not one of its living music-makers, with the exception that I have
+made, has that atmosphere and quality of his own which there is no
+mistaking.</p>
+
+<hr class="med" />
+
+<p>I have referred by implication and reservation to three personalities
+in the art of the modern lyric-drama who stand out as salient figures
+from the confused and amorphous background against which they are to
+be observed: who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">-28-</a></span> seem to me to represent the only significant and
+important manifestations of the creative spirit which have thus far
+come to the surface in the post-Wagnerian music-drama. They are, it
+need scarcely be said, Puccini in Italy, Richard Strauss in Germany,
+and Debussy in France. Yet these men built upon the foundations laid
+by Wagner; they took many leaves from his vast book of instructions,
+in some cases stopping short of the full reach of his plans as
+imagined by himself, in other cases carrying his schemes to a point of
+development far<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">-29-</a></span> beyond any result of which he dreamed. But they have
+not attempted to say the things which they had to say in the way that
+he would have said them. They have been content with their own
+eloquence; and it has not betrayed them. No one is writing music for
+the stage which has the profile, the saliency, the vitality, the
+personal flavour, which distinguish the productions of these men. So
+far as it is possible to discern from the present vantage-ground, the
+future&mdash;at least the immediate future&mdash;of the lyric stage is theirs.
+In no other quarters may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">-30-</a></span> one observe any manifestations that are not
+either negligible by reason of their own quality, or mere dilutions,
+with or without adulterous admixtures, of the Wagnerian brew.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">-33-</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="A_VIEW_OF_PUCCINI" id="A_VIEW_OF_PUCCINI"></a>A VIEW OF PUCCINI</h2>
+
+
+<p class="tp"><span class="smcap">A plain-spoken</span> and not too reverent observer of contemporary musical
+manners, discussing the melodic style of the Young Italian
+opera-makers, has observed that it is fortunate in that it "gives the
+singers opportunity to pour out their voices in that lavish volume and
+intensity which provoke applause as infallibly as horseradish provokes
+tears." The comment has a good deal of what Sir Willoughby Patterne
+would have called "rough<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">-34-</a></span> truth." It is fairly obvious that there is
+nothing in the entire range of opera so inevitably calculated to
+produce an instant effect as a certain kind of frank and sweeping
+lyricism allied with swiftness of dramatic emotion; and it is because
+the young lions of modern Italy&mdash;Puccini and his lesser brethren&mdash;have
+profoundly appreciated this elemental truth, that they address their
+generation with so immediate an effect.</p>
+
+<p>In those days when the impetus of a pristine enthusiasm drove the more
+intelligent order of opera-goers to performances of Wagner,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">-35-</a></span> it was a
+labour of love to learn to know and understand the texts of his
+obscure and laboured dramas; and even the guide-books, which were as
+leaves in Vallombrosa, were prayerfully studied. But to-day there are
+no Wagnerites. We are no longer impelled by an apostolic fervour to
+delve curiously into the complex genealogy and elaborate ethics of the
+"Ring," and it is no longer quite clear to many slothful intelligences
+just what Tristan and Isolde are talking about in the dusk of King
+Mark's garden. There will always be a small group of the faithful who,
+through invincible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">-36-</a></span> and loving study, will have learned by heart every
+secret of these dramas. But for the casual opera-goer, granting him
+all possible intelligence and intellectual curiosity, they cannot but
+seem the reverse of crystal-clear, logical, and compact. A score of
+years ago those who cared at all for the dramatic element in opera,
+and the measure of whose delight was not filled up by the vocal
+pyrotechny which was the mainstay of the operas of the older
+répertoire, found in these music-dramas their chief solace and
+satisfaction. Wagner reigned then virtually alone over his kingdom.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">-37-</a></span>
+The dignity, the imaginative power, and the impressive emotional sweep
+of his dramas, as dramas, offset their obscurity and their inordinate
+bulk; and always their splendid investiture of music exerted, in and
+of itself, an enthralling fascination. And that condition of affairs
+might have continued for much longer had not certain impetuous young
+men of modern Italy demonstrated the possibility of writing operas
+which were both engrossing on their purely dramatic side and, in their
+music, eloquent with the eloquence that had come to be expected of the
+modern opera-maker.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">-38-</a></span> Moreover, these music-dramas had the incalculable
+merit, for our time and environment, of being both swift in movement
+and unimpeachably obvious in meaning. Thereupon began the reign of
+young Italy in contemporary opera. It was inaugurated with the
+"Cavalleria Rusticana" of Mascagni and the "I Pagliacci" of
+Leoncavallo; and it is continued to-day, with immense vigour and
+persistence, by Puccini with all his later works. The sway of the
+composer of "Tosca," "Bohème," and "Madame Butterfly" is triumphant
+and wellnigh absolute; and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">-39-</a></span> reasons for it are not elusive. He has
+selected for musical treatment dramas that are terse and rapid in
+action and intelligible in detail, and he has underscored them with
+music that is impassioned, incisive, highly spiced, rhetorical,
+sometimes poetic and ingenious, and pervadingly sentimental. Moreover,
+he possesses, as his most prosperous attribute, that facility in
+writing fervid and often banal melodies to the immediate and unfailing
+effect of which, in the words of Mr. Henry T. Finck, I have alluded.
+As a sensitive English critic, Mr. Vernon Blackburn, once very
+happily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">-40-</a></span> observed, Puccini is "essentially a man of his own generation
+... the one who has caught up the spirit of his time, and has made his
+compact with that time, in order that he should not lose anything
+which a contemporary generation might give him."</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious and striking truth that the chief trouble with the
+representative musical dramatists who have built, from the standpoint
+of system, upon the foundational stones that Wagner laid, is not, as
+the enemies and opponents of Bayreuth used to charge, an excess of
+drama at the expense of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">-41-</a></span> music, but&mdash;as was the case with Wagner
+himself (a fact which I have elsewhere in this volume attempted to
+demonstrate)&mdash;an excess of music at the expense of the drama: in
+short, the precise defect against which reformers of the opera have
+inveighed since the days of Gluck. With Richard Strauss this musical
+excess is orchestral; with the modern Italians it implicates the
+voice-parts, and is manifested in a lingering devotion to full-blown
+melodic expression achieved at the expense of dramatic truth, logic,
+and consistency. In this, Puccini has simply, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">-42-</a></span> candid phrase of
+Mr. Blackburn, "caught up the spirit of his time, and made his compact
+with that time." That is to say, he has, with undoubted artistic
+sincerity, played upon the insatiable desire of the modern ear for an
+ardent and elemental kind of melodic effect, and upon the acquired
+desire of the modern intelligence for a terse and dynamic substratum
+of drama. His fault, from what I hold to be the ideal standpoint in
+these matters, is that he has not perfectly fused his music and his
+drama. There is a sufficiently concrete example of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">-43-</a></span> I mean&mdash;an
+example which points both his strength and his weakness&mdash;in the second
+act of "Tosca," where he halts the cumulative movement of the scene
+between <i>Scarpia</i> and <i>Tosca</i>, which he has up to that point developed
+with superb dramatic logic, in order to placate those who may not
+over-long be debarred from their lyrical sweetmeats; but also&mdash;for it
+would be absurd to charge him with insincerity or time-serving in this
+matter&mdash;in order that he may satisfy his own ineluctable tendency
+toward a periodical effusion of lyric energy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">-44-</a></span> which he must yield to
+even when dramatic consistency and logic go by the board in the
+process; when, in short, lyrical expression is supererogatory and
+impertinent. So he writes the sentimental and facilely pathetic
+prayer, "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore," <i>dolcissimo con grande
+sentimento</i>: a perfectly superfluous, not to say intrusive, thing
+dramatically, and a piece of arrant musical vulgarity; after which the
+current of the drama is resumed. We have here, in fact, nothing more
+nor less respectable than the old-fashioned Italian aria of unsavoury
+fame: it is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">-45-</a></span> merely couched in more modern terms.</p>
+
+<p>The offence is aggravated by the fact that Puccini, in common with the
+rest of the Neo-Italians, is at his best in the expression of dramatic
+emotion and movement, and at his worst in his voicing of purely lyric
+emotion, meditative or passionate. In its lyric portions his music is
+almost invariably banal, without distinction, without beauty or
+restraint&mdash;when the modern Italian music-maker dons his singing-robes
+he becomes clothed with commonness and vulgarity. Thus in its scenes
+of amorous exaltation the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">-46-</a></span> music of "Tosca," of "Madame Butterfly"
+(recall, in the latter work, the flamboyant commonness of the exultant
+duet which closes the first act), is blatant and rhetorical, rather
+than searching and poignant. Puccini's strength lies in the truly
+impressive manner in which he is able to intensify and underscore the
+more dramatic moments in the action. At such times his music possesses
+an uncommon sureness, swiftness, and incisiveness; especially in
+passages of tragic foreboding, of mounting excitement, it is gripping
+and intense in a quite irresistible degree. Often, at such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">-47-</a></span> moments,
+it has an electric quality of vigour, a curious nervous strength. That
+is its cardinal merit: its spare, lithe, closely-knit, clean-cut,
+immensely energetic orchestral enforcement of those portions of the
+drama where the action is swift, tense, cumulative, rather than of
+sentimental or amorous connotation. Puccini has, indeed, an almost
+unparalleled capacity for a kind of orchestral commentary which is
+both forceful and succinct. He wastes no words, he makes no
+superfluous gestures: he is masterfully direct, pregnant, expeditious,
+compact. Could anything be more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">-48-</a></span> admirable, in what it attempts and
+brilliantly contrives to do, than almost the entire second act of
+"Tosca," with the exception of the sentimental and obstructive Prayer?
+How closely, with what unswerving fidelity, the music clings to the
+contours of the play; and with what an economy of effort its effects
+are made! Puccini is thus, at his best, a Wagnerian in the truest
+sense&mdash;a far more consistent Wagnerian than was Wagner himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is in "Tosca" that he should be studied. He is not elsewhere so
+sincere, direct, pungent, telling.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">-49-</a></span> And it is in "Tosca," also, that
+his melodic vein, which is generally broad and copious rather than
+fine and deep, yields some of the true and individual beauty which is
+its occasional, its very rare, possession&mdash;for example, to name it at
+its best, the poetic and exceedingly personal music which accompanies
+the advancing of dawn over the house-tops of Rome, at the beginning of
+the last act: a passage the melancholy beauty and sincere emotion of
+which it would be difficult to overpraise.</p>
+
+<p>In Puccini's later and much more elaborate and meticulous "Ma<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">-50-</a></span>dame
+Butterfly," there is less that one can unreservedly delight in or
+definitely deplore, so far as the music itself is concerned. It is
+from a somewhat different angle that one is moved to consider the
+work.</p>
+
+<p>In choosing the subject for this music-drama, Puccini set himself a
+task to which even his extraordinary competency as a lyric-dramatist
+has not quite been equal. As every one knows, the story for which
+Puccini has here sought a lyrico-dramatic expression is that of an
+American naval officer who marries little "Madame Butterfly" in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">-51-</a></span>
+Japan, deserts her, and cheerfully calls upon her three years later
+with the "real" wife whom he has married in America. The name of this
+amiable gentleman is Pinkerton&mdash;B.F. Pinkerton&mdash;or, in full, Benjamin
+Franklin Pinkerton. Now it would scarcely seem to require elaborate
+argument to demonstrate that the presence in a highly emotional
+lyric-drama of a gentleman named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton&mdash;a
+gentleman who is, moreover, the hero of the piece&mdash;is, to put it
+briefly, a little inharmonious. The matter is not helped by the fact
+that the action is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">-52-</a></span> of to-day, and that one bears away from the
+performance the recollection of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton asking his
+friend, the United States consul at Nagasaki, if he will have some
+whiskys-and-soda. There lingers also a vaguer memory of the consul
+declaring, in a more or less lyrical phrase, that he "is not a student
+of ornithology."</p>
+
+<p>Let no one find in these remarks a disposition to cast a doubt upon
+the seriousness with which Puccini has completed his work, or to
+ignore those features of "Madame Butterfly" which compel sin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">-53-</a></span>cere
+admiration. But recognition and acknowledgment of these things must be
+conditioned by an insistence upon the fact that such a task as Puccini
+has attempted here, and as others have attempted, is foredoomed to a
+greater or less degree of artistic futility. One refers, of course, to
+the attempt to transfer bodily to the lyric stage, for purposes of
+serious expression, a contemporary subject, with all its inevitable
+dross of prosaic and trivially familiar detail. To put it concretely,
+the sense of humour and the emotional sympathies will tolerate the
+spec<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">-54-</a></span>tacle of a <i>Tristan</i> or a <i>Tannhäuser</i> or a <i>Don Giovanni</i> or a
+<i>Pelléas</i> or a <i>Faust</i> uttering his longings and his woes in opera;
+but they will not tolerate the spectacle of a <i>Benjamin Franklin
+Pinkerton</i> of our own time and day telling us, in song, that he is not
+a student of ornithology. The thing simply cannot be done&mdash;Wagner
+himself could not impress us in such circumstances. The chief glory of
+Wagner's texts&mdash;no matter what one may think of them as viable and
+effective dramas&mdash;is their ideal suitability for musical translation.
+Take, for example,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">-55-</a></span> the text of "Tristan und Isolde": there is not a
+sentence, scarcely a word, in it, which is not fit for musical
+utterance&mdash;nothing that is incongruous, pedestrian, inept. All that is
+foreign to the essential emotions of the play has been eliminated. So
+unsparingly has it been subjected to the alembic of the
+poet-dramatist's imagination that it has been wholly purged of all
+that is superfluous and distracting, all that cannot be gratefully
+assimilated by the music. That is the especial excellence of his
+texts. Opera, though it rests, like the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">-56-</a></span> arts, heavily upon
+convention, yet offers at bottom a reasonable and defensible vehicle
+for the communication of human experience and emotion. But it is not a
+convincing form, and no genius, living or potential, can make it a
+convincing form, save when it deals with matters removed from our
+quotidian life and environment: save when it presents a heightened and
+alembicated image of human experience. Thus we accept, with sympathy
+and approval, "Siegfried," "Lohengrin," "Die Meistersinger," "Don
+Giovanni"&mdash;even, at a pinch, "Tosca"; but we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">-57-</a></span> cannot, if we allow our
+understanding and our sense of humour free play, accept "Madame
+Butterfly," with its naval lieutenant of to-day, its American consul
+in his tan-coloured "spats," and its whiskys-and-soda.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, was the prime disadvantage under which Puccini laboured.
+He was, as a necessary incident of his task, confronted with the
+problem of setting to music a great deal of prosaic and altogether
+unlovely dialogue, essential to the unfolding of the action, no doubt,
+but quite fatal to lyric inspiration. Under these circum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">-58-</a></span>stances, the
+music is often surprisingly successful; but it is significant that the
+most poetic and moving passages in the score are those which enforce
+emotions and occasions which have no necessary connection with time or
+place; which are, from their nature, fit subjects for musical
+treatment,&mdash;for example, such a passage as that at the end of the
+second act, where <i>Madame Butterfly</i> and her child wait through the
+long night for the coming of the faithless <i>Pinkerton</i>; for here the
+moment and the mood to be expressed have a dignity and a pathos<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">-59-</a></span>
+entirely outside of date or circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>The score, as a whole, compares unfavourably with that of "Tosca,"
+which still, as it seems to me, represents Puccini at his most
+effective and sincere. In "Madame Butterfly" one misses the salient
+characterisation, the gripping intensity, the sharpness and boldness
+of outline that make "Tosca" so notable an accomplishment. "Tosca,"
+for all its occasional commonness, its melodic banality, is a work of
+immense vigour and unquestionable individuality. In it Puccini has
+saturated almost every page of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">-60-</a></span> music with his own extremely vivid
+personality: a personality that is exceedingly impressive in its crude
+strength and directness; he has, in this score, exploded the strange
+critical legend that his style is little more than a blended echo of
+the later Verdi, Ponchielli, and Massenet. The music of "Tosca" is not
+often distinguished, but it is singularly striking, potent, and
+original; no one save Puccini could possibly have written it. But
+since then this composer has, artistically speaking, visited Paris. He
+has appreciated the value of certain harmonic ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">-61-</a></span>periments which such
+adventurous Frenchmen as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others,
+are making; he has appreciated them so sincerely that certain pages in
+"Madame Butterfly," as, for instance, the lovely interlude between the
+second and third acts, sound almost as if they had been contrived by
+Debussy himself&mdash;a Latinised Debussy, of course. Puccini, in short,
+has become intellectually sophisticated, and he has learned gentler
+artistic manners, in the interval between the composition of "Tosca"
+and of "Madame Butterfly." The music of the latter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">-62-</a></span> work is far more
+delicately structured and subtle than anything he had previously given
+us, and it has moments of conquering beauty, of great tenderness, of
+superlative sweetness. It is, beyond question, a charming and
+brilliant score, exceedingly adroit in workmanship and almost
+invariably effective. Yet, after such excellences have been gladly
+acknowledged, one is disturbingly conscious that the real, the
+essential, Puccini has, for the most part, evaporated. There are other
+voices speaking through this music, voices that, for all their charm
+and distinction of accent,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">-63-</a></span> seem alien and a little insincere. Has the
+vital, if crude, imagination which gave issue to the music of "Tosca"
+acquired finesse and delicacy at a cost of independent impulse?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">-67-</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="STRAUSS_SALOME_ITS_ART_AND_ITS_MORALS" id="STRAUSS_SALOME_ITS_ART_AND_ITS_MORALS"></a>STRAUSS&#8217; &#8220;SALOME&#8221;: ITS<br />
+ART AND ITS MORALS</h2>
+
+
+<p class="tp"><span class="smcap">That</span> Richard Strauss the opera-maker is, for the present, summed up in
+Richard Strauss the composer of "Salome," would scarcely, I think, be
+disputed by any one who is sympathetically cognisant of his
+achievements in that rôle. Neither in "Guntram" nor in the later and
+far more characteristic "Feuersnot" is his essential quality as a
+musical dramatist so fully and clearly re<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">-68-</a></span>vealed as in his setting of
+the play of Wilde to which he has given a fugacious immortality. Yet
+in discussing this astonishing work, I prefer to consider it in and
+for itself rather than as a touchstone whereby to form a general
+estimate of Strauss the dramatical tone-poet; for I believe that, if
+he lives and produces for another decade, it will be seen that
+"Salome" does not furnish a just or adequate measure of Strauss'
+indisputable genius as a writer of music for the stage. I believe that
+he has not given us here a valid or com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">-69-</a></span>pletely representative account
+of himself in that capacity. So remarkable, though, is the work in
+itself, so assertive in its challenge to contemporary criticism, that
+it imperatively compels some attempt at appraisement in any deliberate
+survey of modern operatic art.</p>
+
+<p>For any one who is not convinced that those ancient though
+occasionally reconciled adversaries, Art and Ethics, are necessarily
+antipodal, such a task, it must be confessed, is not one to be
+approached in a jaunty or easeful spirit, for it means that one must
+be willing, apparently, to enter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">-70-</a></span> the lists ranged with the
+hypocrites, the prudes, the short-sighted and the unwise; with
+frenzied and myopic champions of respectability; with all those who
+are as inflexible in their allegiance to the moralities as they are
+resourceful and tireless in their pursuit of impudicity in art. Yet
+that there are two standpoints from which this extraordinary work must
+be regarded by any candid observer I do not think is open to question:
+it has its purely æsthetic aspect, and its&mdash;I shall not say moral, but
+social&mdash;aspect. To separate them in any conscientious discussion is
+impossible.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">-71-</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us, to begin with, consider, in and by itself, the quality of the
+music which the incomparable Strauss&mdash;Strauss, the most conquering
+musical personality since Wagner&mdash;has conceived as a fit embodiment in
+tones of the tragic and maleficent and haunting tale of the Dancing
+Daughter of Herodias and her part in the career of the prophet John,
+as recounted&mdash;with non-Scriptural variations&mdash;by Oscar Wilde. We may
+consider, first, whether or not it achieves the prime requisite of
+music in its organic relation to a dramatic subject: an enforcement
+and heightening of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">-72-</a></span> effect of the play; setting aside, for the
+present, those other aspects of it which have so absorbed critical
+attention, and of which we have heard overmuch: its remorseless
+complexity, its unflagging ingenuity, its superb and miraculous
+orchestration. These are matters of importance, but of secondary
+importance. The point at issue is, has Strauss, through his music,
+intensified and italicised the moods and situations of the drama; and,
+secondly, has he achieved this end through music which is in itself
+notable and important?</p>
+
+<p>Never was music so avid in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">-73-</a></span> search for the eloquent word as is the
+music of Strauss in this work. We are amazed at the audacity, the
+resourcefulness, of the expressional apparatus that is cumulatively
+reared in this unprecedented score. The alphabet of music is ransacked
+for new and undreamt-of combinations of tone: never were effects so
+elaborate, so cunning, so fertilely contrived, offered to the ears of
+men since the voice of music was heard in its pristine estate. This
+score challenges the music of the days that shall follow after it.</p>
+
+<p>For the most part, the atmosphere of horror, of ominous suspense, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">-74-</a></span>
+oppressive and bodeful gloom, in which the tragedy of Wilde is
+enwrapped, is wonderfully rendered in the music. There are beyond
+question overmastering pages in the score&mdash;music which has the kind of
+superb audacity and power of effect that Dr. Johnson discerned in the
+style of Sir Thomas Browne: "forcible expressions which he would never
+have used but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and
+flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very
+little fear of the shame of falling." Of such quality is the passage
+which portrays<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">-75-</a></span> the agonised suspense of <i>Salome</i> during the beheading
+of <i>John</i>; the passage, titanic in its expression of malignly exultant
+triumph, which accentuates the delivery of the head to the insensate
+princess; the few measures before <i>Herod's</i> patibulary order at the
+close: these things are products of genius, of the same order of
+genius which impelled the music of "Don Quixote," of "Ein
+Heldenleben," of "Zarathustra"; they are true and vital in
+imagination, marvellous in intensity of vision, of great and subduing
+potency as dramatic enforcement and as sheer music.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">-76-</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But when one has said that much, one comes face to face with the chief
+weakness of the score&mdash;its failure in the expression of the governing
+motive of the play: the consuming and inappeasable lust of <i>Salome</i>
+for the white body and scarlet lips of <i>John</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my
+passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a
+virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was
+chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire.... Ah! ah!
+wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan?..."</p></div>
+
+<p>That is the note which is sounded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">-77-</a></span> from beginning to end of the
+play&mdash;that is its focal emotion. And Strauss has not made it sound, as
+it should sound, in his music. When it should be wildly, barbarically,
+ungovernably erotic, as for the enforcement of <i>Salome's</i> fervid
+supplications in her first interview with <i>John</i>, the music is merely
+conventional in its sensuousness. It should here be febrile,
+vertiginous. But what, actually, do we get? We get a scene built upon
+a phrase in which is crystallised the desire of <i>Salome</i> for the lips
+of the Prophet; and this theme is saccharinely ardent and sentimental,
+rather than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">-78-</a></span> feverish and unbridled; a phrase which might have been a
+product of the amiably voluptuous inspiration of the composer of
+"Faust." The "Tannhäuser" Bacchanale, even in its original form, is
+more truly expressive of venereous abandon than is this strangely
+sentimentalised music. It has, no doubt, a certain effectiveness, a
+certain expressiveness; but the effect that is produced, and the
+emotion that is expressed, are far removed from the field of sensation
+inhabited by Wilde's remarkable Princess. Yet it would seem to be a
+point needing but the lightest emphasis that if the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">-79-</a></span> passion of
+<i>Salome</i> is not fitly and eloquently rendered by the music, the
+cardinal impulse, the very heart of Wilde's drama, is left
+unexpressed.</p>
+
+<p>So it is in the music of the final scene, <i>Salome's</i> mad apostrophe to
+the severed head. Here we get, not the note of lustful abandonment
+which would alone remove <i>Salome's</i> horrible appetite from the region
+of the perverted and the incredible, but a kind of musical utterance
+which simulates the noble rapture of Wagner's dying <i>Isolde</i>. The
+discrepancy of the music in this regard has been recognised by those
+who praise most warmly Strauss' score.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">-80-</a></span> It has been said in
+extenuation, on the one hand, that music is incapable of expressing
+what are called "base" emotions, and, on the other hand, that Strauss
+wished to exalt, to idealise and transfigure, this scene. To the first
+objection it may be said simply that it is based upon an argument that
+is at least open to serious question. It is by no means an evident or
+settled truth that music is incapable of uttering anything but worthy
+emotions, ideas, concepts. There is music by Berlioz, by Liszt, by
+Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, by Strauss himself, which is, in its
+emotional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">-81-</a></span> substance, sinister, demonic, even pornographic in
+suggestion; and not simply by reason of a key furnished by text,
+motto, or dramatic subject, but in itself&mdash;in its quality and
+character as music. But the claim need not be elaborated, or even
+demonstrated, since it is beside the point. One quarrels with the
+music of the final scene of "Salome" on the broad ground of its
+inappropriateness: because the emotional note which it strikes and
+sustains is one of nobility, whereas the plain requirement of the
+scene, of the psychological moment, demands music that should be
+anything but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">-82-</a></span> noble. And here we encounter the objections of those who
+hold that <i>Salome</i> herself, at the moment of her apostrophe to the
+dead head, becomes transfigured, uplifted through the power of a great
+and purifying love. But to argue in this manner is to indulge in a
+particularly egregious kind of fatuity. To conceive Wilde's lubricious
+princess as a kind of Oriental <i>Isolde</i> is grotesquely to distort the
+vivid and wholly consistent woman of his imagining; and it is to
+renounce at once all possibility of justifying her culminating
+actions. For the only ground upon which it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">-83-</a></span> might be remotely possible
+to account for <i>Salome's</i> remarkable behaviour, except by regarding
+her as a necrophilistic maniac, is that supplied by the conditions and
+the environment of a lustful, decadent, and bloodshot age. Only when
+one conceives her as frankly and spontaneously a barbarian, nourished
+on blood and lechery, does she become at all comprehensible to others
+than pathologists, even if she does not cease to impress us as
+noisome, monstrous, and horrible.</p>
+
+<p>The music of "Salome," then, judging it in its entirety, is deficient
+as an exposition, as a translation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">-84-</a></span> into tone, of the drama upon which
+it is based; for it is inadequate in its expression of the play's
+central and informing emotion. One listens to this music, it must be
+granted, with the nerves in an excessive state of tension&mdash;it is
+enormously exciting; but so is, under certain conditions, a determined
+beating upon a drum. An assault upon the nerve-centres is a vastly
+different thing from an emotional persuasion; yet there are many who,
+in listening to "Salome," will need to be convinced of it.</p>
+
+<p>It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">-85-</a></span> ways
+a noteworthy and brilliant&mdash;and, for the curious student of musical
+evolution&mdash;a fascinating work. Its musicianship&mdash;the sheer technical
+artistry which contrived it&mdash;is stupefying in its enormous and
+inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a
+musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime considerations
+in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most
+exacting standards&mdash;by the standards set in other and greater works of
+Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in
+vitality, sincerity, and importance.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">-86-</a></span> In at least one respect,
+however, it compels the most unreserved praise; and that is in the
+case of its superlative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a
+huge and complicated body of instruments, and he has set them an
+appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation
+found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his
+performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to
+the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful
+distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its
+total effect, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">-87-</a></span> almost uncanny art with which it is
+accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative
+achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic
+feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment.
+The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gorgeous fabric of
+strange and novel and obsessing colours&mdash;for in such orchestral
+writing as this, sound becomes colour, and colour sound: it is not a
+single sense which is engaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex
+of all the senses; one not only hears, one also imagines that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">-88-</a></span> one
+sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their
+possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It
+is when one turns from the bewildering magnificence of its orchestral
+surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the
+fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope,
+that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined
+admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by
+Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this
+music, its marvellous witchery,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">-89-</a></span> are incurably external. It is a
+gorgeous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and
+glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality,
+little true substance, within this dazzling instrumental envelope; and
+for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and
+who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems
+but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times
+cacophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which
+is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and
+deliberately<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">-90-</a></span> hideous; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of
+post-Wagnerian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any
+possible musical means that will appropriately express it: to-day we
+cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another
+character that his body is "like the body of a leper, like a plastered
+wall where vipers crawl ... like a whitened sepulchre, full of
+loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of
+Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so
+often vulgarly sentimental, when it should be terrible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">-91-</a></span> and unbridled
+in its passion, that it seems to some a defective performance. For
+sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse
+for being inflated in expression, it would be hard to find, in any
+score of the rank of "Salome," the equal of the two themes which
+Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant
+motives in the score: the theme which is associated with <i>Salome's</i>
+desire to kiss the lips of <i>John</i>, and that other theme&mdash;it has been
+called that of "Ecstasy"&mdash;which begins like the <i>cantabile</i> subject in
+the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pa<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">-92-</a></span>thetic" Symphony, and
+ends&mdash;well, like Strauss at his worst.</p>
+
+<p>An astounding score!&mdash;music that is by turns gorgeous, banal,
+delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, sentimental, insinuating, tornadic:
+music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is
+overwhelming in its occasional triumphs.</p>
+
+<p>We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the
+candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work.</p>
+
+<p>Those over-zealous friends of Strauss who have sought to justify the
+offensiveness of "Salome" by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">-93-</a></span> alleging the case of Wagner's "Die
+Walküre," and the relationship that is there shown to exist between
+the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however
+unhallowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual
+malaise. <i>Siegmund</i> and <i>Sieglinde</i> are superbly healthful and
+untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath
+with the horrible lust of <i>Salome</i> is stupid and absurd.</p>
+
+<p>Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling
+passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">-94-</a></span>
+lips, is not necessarily deleterious to morals, nor is it necessarily
+an act of impudicity; it is merely, for those whose calling does not
+happen to induce familiarity with mortuary things, horrible and
+revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be
+ameliorated, the fact,&mdash;the situation as conceived and ordered by the
+dramatist,&mdash;is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not
+really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions
+require that <i>Salome's</i> kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a
+darkened stage. But to that it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">-95-</a></span> may be replied, in the first place,
+that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as
+conveyed by the words of <i>Salome</i>&mdash;so little, in fact, that <i>Herod</i>,
+who was anything but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome
+with loathing and commands her despatch; and, secondly, that the stage
+directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a
+"moonbeam" ... which "covers her with light," just before the end,
+while she is at the climax of her ghastly <i>libido</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ernest Newman, a thoroughly sane and extremely able<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">-96-</a></span> champion of
+all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of
+"Salome," that "the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too
+excitable people who are not artists, and who therefore cannot
+understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human
+nature," he goes on, "breaks out into a variety of forms of energy
+that are not at all nice from the moral point of view&mdash;murder, for
+example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for
+power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense.
+But because these things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">-97-</a></span> are objectionable in themselves and
+dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist
+should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes
+them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in
+real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels; but sensible
+people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson
+for creating such a character; they simply enjoy the art of it. The
+writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of
+deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">-98-</a></span> on
+us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in
+real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase
+of human nature does not necessarily mean that, as a private
+individual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make
+for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn
+an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may
+have been. They do not recommend her; they simply present her, as a
+specimen of what human nature can be like in certain circumstances....
+The hysterical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">-99-</a></span> moralists who cry out against 'Salome' ... have a
+terrified, if rather incoherent, feeling that if women in general were
+suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for
+bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were
+rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of
+love and revenge in the middle of the drawing-room, the respectable
+£40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet.
+But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they
+saw <i>Salome</i> on the stage do some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">-100-</a></span>thing like them, any more than men
+are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read
+that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Hamlet's uncle
+murdered his."</p>
+
+<p>Now that, of course, is irresistible. But Mr. Newman's gift of
+vivacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the
+cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led
+him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital
+relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its
+probable effect upon the public is to yield the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">-101-</a></span> whole case to those
+who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of
+course, the opera house), is merely casual and inconsequential: it is
+to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation,"
+an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensation. It is not
+unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the
+prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived
+to be that of enlarging the sense of life: as an agency for liberating
+and mellowing the spirit: as an instrument primarily quickening and
+emancipative. "The sad<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">-102-</a></span>ness of life is the joy of art," said Mr.
+George Moore. The sadness of life, yes; and the evil and tragedy, the
+terror and violence, of life: for the contemplation of these may,
+through the evoking of pity, nourish and enlarge the spirit of the
+beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of
+that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion? I do
+not speak of "morality" or "immorality," since there is nothing stable
+in the use or understanding of these terms. But those aspects of life
+which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">-103-</a></span> than terrible&mdash;are
+they fit matter for the artist?</p>
+
+<p>It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not
+unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. Johnson
+left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady
+was interrogating him. "She seemed", recounts the admirable Boswell,
+"desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity."</p>
+
+<p>To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by
+wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss?&mdash;the unparalleled
+maker of music, the indis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">-104-</a></span>putable genius who gave us a sheaf of
+masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben,"
+"Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklärung." Has he passed into that desolate
+region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the
+tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist&mdash;the futility
+of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that
+ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as
+"Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)?
+Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">-105-</a></span> ministrations
+of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends
+out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and
+purify the lips of whom he pleases"?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">-109-</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="A_PERFECT_MUSIC-DRAMA" id="A_PERFECT_MUSIC-DRAMA"></a>A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA</h2>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">I</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Somewhat</span> less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for
+opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that
+the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by
+simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her
+paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite
+only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">-110-</a></span> have
+improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical
+forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is
+doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely
+contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those
+classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the
+shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by
+being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and
+voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though,
+Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">-111-</a></span> with whose example one might
+to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse
+which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly
+not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived
+as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and
+"sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are
+growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever
+defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile
+and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">-112-</a></span>temned. The
+ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of
+motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent
+genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they
+were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before
+Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained
+(despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it&mdash;not a
+drama with auxiliary music, but a <i>dramma per musica</i>&mdash;a drama for
+(the sake of)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">-113-</a></span> music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of
+Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary
+music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming
+more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing,
+despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of
+their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent
+developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both
+his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review
+certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">-114-</a></span> by the
+quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves
+and him.</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">II</h3>
+
+<p>It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's
+doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of
+pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be
+tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He
+conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be
+strictly auxiliary&mdash;an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">-115-</a></span>
+enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has
+excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in
+old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the
+poet, all other persons who have to do with the work&mdash;composer,
+stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and
+singing actors&mdash;should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect,
+and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel
+with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the
+musical element in its constitu<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">-116-</a></span>tion. If there is one principle that
+is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it
+is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should
+be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor&mdash;like the
+scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can
+be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship
+between the drama and the music is inverted&mdash;that in his music-dramas
+the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect,
+while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours&mdash;it becomes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">-117-</a></span>
+obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively)
+in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in
+Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the
+play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of
+"Meistersinger," of "Götterdämmerung," when this principle is tested
+by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among
+the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour
+of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the
+play's the thing? Im<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">-118-</a></span>agine what the second act, say, divorced from the
+music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act,
+with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a
+little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat
+raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial
+one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and
+reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music
+which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and
+that its form is dramatic form and not musical form;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">-119-</a></span> but is there
+to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the
+element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and
+controlling?</p>
+
+<p>It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing,
+or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived
+himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely
+and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and
+the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he
+had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more gener<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">-120-</a></span>ally recognised
+and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a
+dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul
+assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of
+their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and
+anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than
+his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth
+which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially
+a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama
+and its appurtenances, for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">-121-</a></span> most part, as a mere stalking-horse
+for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by
+his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is
+distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate
+his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or
+suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in
+order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his
+operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is
+impossible to find the drama because of the music.</p>
+
+<p>It was not, as has been said before,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">-122-</a></span> that he fell short, but that he
+went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed
+intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a
+welter of magnificent and inspired music&mdash;obscured them, stretched
+them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them
+with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he
+thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has
+remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of
+sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that
+Wagnerism ever had.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">-123-</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both
+in spite of and because of their music. The validity and
+persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as
+consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less
+certain than of old. But the music, <i>qua</i> music, is of undiminished
+potency&mdash;it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost
+unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and
+the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and
+sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">-124-</a></span>
+epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and
+despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and,
+as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be
+lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim
+the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among
+the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart&mdash;a little
+lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold
+said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and
+attractive"; and at his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">-125-</a></span> finest he is incomparable. No one but a
+master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of
+expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse
+things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us
+as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the
+apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die
+Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic
+tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain
+supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">-126-</a></span> ecstatic
+swoon of <i>Tristan</i> and <i>Isolde</i> in the midst of which the warning
+voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood
+of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which
+this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the
+adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal&mdash;music that is as
+the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial
+altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can
+say no less than that, regarded from any æsthetic standpoint at all,
+he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">-127-</a></span> quoted said of a great
+though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or
+reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and
+that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting
+his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">III</h3>
+
+<p>As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency
+of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination
+of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part&mdash;their
+music&mdash;which should be accessory and con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">-128-</a></span>tributive rather than
+essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly&mdash;and, let
+it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art&mdash;through Wagner's
+orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its
+master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly
+against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice.
+He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of
+the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be
+permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">-129-</a></span> His
+singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech,
+necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense
+of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing
+in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not
+infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments
+where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not
+impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical
+dramatist.</p>
+
+<p>And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">-130-</a></span>A.
+Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both
+courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices,
+entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an
+art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama,"
+he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely,"
+he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the
+place of form in absolute music"&mdash;a sentence which, one may be
+permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of
+the truth if the word<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">-131-</a></span> "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by
+this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner
+was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not
+musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination
+of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned,
+assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the
+most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little
+to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at
+the same time Mr. Baughan holds that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">-132-</a></span> Wagner, in his treatment of the
+voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of
+music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted
+numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as
+it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being
+deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice,
+I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name
+page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a
+musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyri<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">-133-</a></span>cism. It is a little
+difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified
+his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if
+the ensemble piece&mdash;the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example&mdash;is
+inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it
+incontrovertibly is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal
+attitude toward the conventions of the operatic stage makes it
+difficult to tolerate what Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle
+of two persons inside a house and two outside, supposed to be
+unconscious of each other's presence, mak<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">-134-</a></span>ing their remarks in
+rhythmic and harmonic consonance. Yet is Wagner much less distant from
+the dramatic verities when, in the third act of "Die Meistersinger,"
+he ranges five people in the centre of a room and causes them to
+soliloquise in concert, to the end of producing a quintette of
+ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly freed himself from what he
+regarded as the musical bondage of his predecessors when he could
+tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the duet, the ensemble piece,
+and the chorus? The truth of the matter seems to be that if Wagner's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">-135-</a></span>
+music, in itself, were less wonderful and enthralling than it is,
+those who would fain insist upon a decent regard for dramatic
+consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate many things in the
+vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the "Ring" and "Parsifal"
+which are not a whit more dramatically reasonable than the absurdities
+which Wagner contemptuously derided in the operas of the old school.
+His vocal writing, far from being deficient in melodic quality, far
+from ignoring "the full resources of music and of the beautiful
+singing voice," is saturated and overflowing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">-136-</a></span> with musical beauty, and
+with almost every variety of melodic effectiveness except that which
+is possible to purely formal song. Mr. Baughan complains that the
+voice-parts have "no independent life" of their own. "In many cases,"
+he says, "the vocal parts, if detached from the score [from the
+orchestral support] are without emotional meaning of any kind&mdash;the
+expression is absolutely incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For
+the same thing is necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied
+with modern harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">-137-</a></span>
+since composers began to discover the modulatory capacities of
+harmony, one might ask Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or
+any kind of expression or effect, if the voice part were sung without
+its harmonic support?</p>
+
+<p>No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect
+in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe,
+have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should
+be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain
+the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">-138-</a></span>
+second place, he had been content to let his <i>dramatis personæ</i>
+employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric
+speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more
+naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and
+intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.</p>
+
+<p>It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in
+Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their
+continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as
+examples of a perfect kind of music-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">-139-</a></span>drama: which satisfy, not only
+every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that
+Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to
+what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently
+instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly
+dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply
+suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of
+irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for
+example, <i>Waltraute's</i> narrative in "Götterdämmerung"; the early
+scenes be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">-140-</a></span>tween <i>Siegmund</i> and <i>Sieglinde</i>, and <i>Brunnhilde's</i>
+announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walküre"; and
+in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to <i>Isolde</i> his
+sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures
+that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act&mdash;where the
+breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with
+extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair
+suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of
+battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated
+outpour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">-141-</a></span>ings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.</p>
+
+<p>But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in
+Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward
+musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he
+had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward
+musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and
+music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which
+produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the
+materials of musical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">-142-</a></span> expression had attained a greater ductility and
+variety, and until the intellectual and æsthetic seed which Wagner
+sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own
+time&mdash;it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of
+us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved&mdash;that
+the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck
+in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out
+with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that
+cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">-143-</a></span> to achieve, and with
+that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime
+deficiency.</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">IV</h3>
+
+<p>It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a
+masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when
+France&mdash;not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck
+and Wagner&mdash;produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of
+Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelléas et Mélisande" of Claude
+Debussy, it produced a work which is as com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">-144-</a></span>manding in quality as it
+is unique in conception and design.</p>
+
+<p>It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the
+eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day
+regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical
+integrity&mdash;those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of
+æsthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established
+methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse
+disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music
+as in the other arts, are held<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">-145-</a></span> to be inviolable until they are set
+aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired
+innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a
+form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square
+with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so
+significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development
+as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the
+history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a
+lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise
+the paramount place<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">-146-</a></span> in the structural scheme, the musical envelope
+with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying,
+but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree.
+The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count
+Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two
+hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music
+in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and
+situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective
+application in Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande." What the <i>Camerata</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">-147-</a></span>
+and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate
+musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of
+boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for
+too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman
+of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.</p>
+
+<p>His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow
+growth of the art as of a preeminent natural fitness for the task. The
+Florentines, for all their eagerness and sincerity, were helpless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">-148-</a></span>
+before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and
+effective form, for they were hopelessly blocked by reason of the
+desperate poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the
+elaborate and lovely art of the contrapuntists, they found themselves
+in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with
+passionate convictions but without tools&mdash;in other words, they aspired
+to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing
+to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost
+non-existent orchestra, and with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">-149-</a></span> virtually no perception of the
+possibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any
+infirmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it
+is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear
+as was his perception of the rightful demands of the drama in any
+serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck
+justly says, to effect a "real amalgamation of music and drama,"
+failed to strike out "a form organically connecting each part of the
+opera with every other." His unconnected "numbers," his indulgence in
+vocal em<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">-150-</a></span>broidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the
+operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or
+far-seeing reformatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes,
+he "insisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he
+did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer.
+Such a thing as allowing the drama to condition the form of the music
+never occurred to him." A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic
+speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in
+which the music was really made to exercise,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">-151-</a></span> continuously and
+undeviatingly, what he stated to be "its true function." It would be
+absurd to dispute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was
+both keen and rich; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in
+isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or
+exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent
+manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his
+principles&mdash;which were of course in essence the principles of the
+Floren<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">-152-</a></span>tines and of Gluck&mdash;and the evident reason for his failure,
+enough has already been said. So we come again to Debussy. For it is a
+singular fact&mdash;and this is the point to insist upon&mdash;that this French
+mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musical
+art who has exhibited the courage, and who has possessed the means, to
+carry the principles of the <i>Camerata</i>, of Gluck, and of Wagner to
+their ultimate conclusion. In "Pelléas et Mélisande" he has made his
+music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute
+fidelity and consis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">-153-</a></span>tency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic
+that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here
+as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the
+entire dramatic material into the terms of the symphonic poem, and
+with the singing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless
+orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the
+method of Wagner), as we are from the futile experimentings of the
+<i>Camerata</i>.</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">V</h3>
+
+<p>One cannot but wonder what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">-154-</a></span> Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty,
+simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible
+association with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the
+lyric stage which ignores even those opportunities for musical effect
+which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held
+to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to
+the Spirit of Comedy in trying to imagine what Richard Wagner would
+have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is
+not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">-155-</a></span>
+of a score almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde," and in
+which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a
+<i>mezzo-forte</i>. Debussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic
+art for the exquisite justness with which it enforces the moods and
+action of the play. It never seduces the attention of the auditor from
+the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner,
+tyrannically absorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama
+there is maintained, as to emphasis and intensity, a scrupulous
+balance between the movement of the drama<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">-156-</a></span> and the tonal undercurrent
+which is its complement: the music is absolutely merged in the play,
+suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it.
+It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the
+ideal manner of constructing a music-drama, the hazardous epithet
+"perfect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more
+faithful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently
+inconsistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture,
+there is none of Wagner's gorgeously expansive rhetoric: the "Je
+t'aime,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">-157-</a></span> "Je t'aime aussi" of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a
+simplicity and a stark sincerity which could not well go further; and
+it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their
+profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is
+represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete
+silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's
+music-drama: that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet:
+that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich
+and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reti<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">-158-</a></span>cent. After the grave
+speech and simple gestures of these naïve yet subtle and passionate
+tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the
+posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid personages seem, for
+a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and overwrought. To attempt
+to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical
+romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile
+endeavour; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy
+as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound,
+as it is grate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">-159-</a></span>ful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and
+tramplings of Wagnerian conquests.</p>
+
+<p>His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than
+in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed commentary on
+the text and the action of the play, underlining the significance of
+the former and colouring and intensifying the latter; but its comments
+are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's&mdash;indeed,
+their reticence and discretion are, as it has been said, extreme.
+Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does
+not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">-160-</a></span> say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner
+being able to resist the temptation to indulge in some graphic and
+detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delaying the action and
+overloading the score, at the passage wherein <i>Golaud</i>, coming upon
+the errant and weeping <i>Mélisande</i> in the forest, and seeing her crown
+at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it
+is that shines in the water? Yet observe the curiously insinuating
+effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treatment of
+this episode&mdash;the <i>pianissimo</i> chords on the muted horns, followed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">-161-</a></span> by
+a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have
+wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene of
+<i>Mélisande</i>?&mdash;a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost
+insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced
+that it enters the consciousness almost unperceived as music.</p>
+
+<p>The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgotten; nor
+are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome,"
+overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense,
+oppressive, and many-stranded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">-162-</a></span> web of tone. Yet always Debussy's
+musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes
+visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages;
+though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent
+emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous
+reality,&mdash;"the thing behind the thing," as the Celts have named
+it,&mdash;which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of
+Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening
+to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de
+L'Isle-Adam's descrip<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">-163-</a></span>tion of the voice of his <i>Elen</i>: "... it was
+taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through
+the region of shadows." This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic
+exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for
+the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The
+huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here.
+Taine once spoke of the "violent sorcery" of Victor Hugo's style, and
+it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music
+of the titanic German. Debussy in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">-164-</a></span> his "Pelléas" has written music
+that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. In it inheres a
+capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result,
+that music had not before exerted&mdash;an enchantment that invades the
+mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious
+degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading
+note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude&mdash;the sweeping and
+cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic
+fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and
+delicacy of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">-165-</a></span> texture and its economy of accent, it is neither
+amorphous nor inert.</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">VI</h3>
+
+<p><i>Tristan</i> and <i>Isolde</i>, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that
+emotion with the frankest lyricism; <i>Pelléas</i> and <i>Mélisande</i>, in
+moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and
+unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere
+couched. It is the orchestra which sings&mdash;which, passionately or
+meditatively, colours the dramatic moment. Wherein we come to what is
+perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">-166-</a></span>
+the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this
+respect, justly summarised, is this: He has released the orchestra
+from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which
+Wagner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than
+a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and
+transparency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself
+has succinctly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of
+writing for the voices in "Pelléas." "I have been reproached," he has
+said, "because in my score the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">-167-</a></span> melodic phrase is always found in the
+orchestra, never in the voice. I wished&mdash;intended, in fact,&mdash;that the
+action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous,
+uninterrupted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases.
+When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spectator is wont to
+experience two kinds of emotion: the musical emotion on the one hand;
+and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other.
+Generally these are felt successively. I have tried to blend these two
+emotions, and make them simultaneous.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">-168-</a></span> Melody is, if I may say so,
+almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of
+emotion or life. Melody is suitable only for the song [<i>chanson</i>],
+which confirms a fixed sentiment. I have never been willing that my
+music should hinder ... the changes of sentiment and passion felt by
+my characters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that
+these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries,
+in their joys as in their sorrow."</p>
+
+<p>Now Debussy in his public excursions as a critic is not always to be
+taken seriously; indeed, it is alto<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">-169-</a></span>gether unlikely that he has
+refrained from demonstrations of exquisite delight over the startled
+or contemptuous comment which some of his vivacious heresies
+concerning certain of the gods of music have evoked. These published
+appraisements of his are, of course, nothing more than impertinent,
+though at times apt and sagacious, <i>jeux d'esprit</i>. But when he speaks
+seriously, as in the defence of his practice which I have just quoted,
+of the menace of "parasitic" musical phrases in the voice-parts, and
+when he observes that melody, when it occurs in the speech of
+characters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">-170-</a></span> in music-drama, is "almost anti-lyric," he speaks with
+penetration and truth. His practice, which illustrates it, amounts to
+this: He employs in "Pelléas" a continuous declamation, uncadenced,
+entirely unmelodic (in the sense in which melodious declamation has
+been understood). Save for a brief and particular instance, there is
+no melodic form whatsoever, from beginning to end of the score. There
+is not a hint of the Wagnerian arioso. The declamation is founded
+throughout upon the natural inflections of the voice in speaking&mdash;it
+is, indeed, virtually an electrified and height<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">-171-</a></span>ened form of speech.
+It is never musical, for the sake of sheer musical beauty, when the
+emotion within the text or situation does not lift it to the plane
+where the quality of utterance tends naturally and inevitably toward
+lyricism of accent. He does not, for example, commit the kind of
+indiscretion that Wagner commits when he makes <i>Isolde</i> sing the
+highly unlyrical line, "Der 'Tantris' mit sorgender List sich nannte,"
+to a phrase that has the double demerit of being "parasitically" and
+intrusively melodic and wholly conventional in pattern&mdash;one of those
+musical platitudes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">-172-</a></span> which have no excuse for existence in any sincere
+and vital score. Nor in "Pelléas" do the singers ever sing, it need
+hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a concerted
+number, or a chorus (the snatches of distant song heard from the
+sailors on the departing ship is a mere touch of atmospheric
+suggestion). The dialogue is everywhere and always clearly
+individualised, as in the spoken drama. Yet this surprising fact is to
+be noted: undeviatingly naturalistic as are the voice-parts in their
+structure and inflection, and despite their haughty and stoic
+intolerance of melodic ef<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">-173-</a></span>fect, they yet are so contrived that they
+often yield&mdash;incidentally, as it were&mdash;effects of musical beauty; and
+in so doing, they demonstrate the unfamiliar truth that there is
+possible in music-drama a use of the voice which permits of an
+expressiveness that is both telling and beautiful, though it yields
+nothing that accepted canons would warrant us in describing as either
+melody or melodious declamation. Now Mr. Baughan, whose views
+concerning Wagner and his habits have been discussed, craves in the
+music-dramas of Wagner a frankness of melody in the vocal writing
+whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">-174-</a></span> absence he deplores; and he seems to think that when this
+melodiousness of utterance is denied to the voices in modern opera,
+all that is left them is something "that an orchestral instrument
+could do as well"&mdash;something that, inferentially, is anti-vocal, or at
+least unidiomatic. It would seem that Mr. Baughan, and those who think
+as he does, fail to realise, as I have remarked before, the immensely
+important part which it is possible for modern harmony to play in the
+combination of a voice and accompanying instruments. It would not be
+difficult to demonstrate that a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">-175-</a></span> large part of what we are in the
+habit of regarding as a purely melodic form of vocal expression in the
+modern lyric-drama owes a large and unsuspected measure of its potency
+of effect to the modulatory character of its harmonic support. Take a
+passage that we are apt to think of as one of the most ravishingly and
+purely melodious in the whole of that fathomless well of lyric beauty,
+"Tristan und Isolde"&mdash;the passage in the duet in the second act
+beginning, "Bricht mein Blick sich wonn' erblindet." As one hears it
+sung by the two voices above the orchestra, it seems a perfect
+ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">-176-</a></span>ample of pure melodic inspiration; yet play the voice-parts, alone
+or together, without their harmonic undercurrent, and all the beauty,
+all the meaning, vanish at once: without the kaleidoscopic harmonic
+color the melodic phrases are without point, coherence, or design. But
+this is aside from the point that I would make&mdash;that the
+potentialities of modern harmony make possible a use of the voice in
+music-drama which, while it is remote from the character of formal
+melody, may yet be productive of a kind of emotional eloquence that is
+exceedingly puissant and beauti<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">-177-</a></span>ful, and that may even possess a
+seemingly lyric quality. We find a foreshadowing of this kind of
+effect in such a passage as <i>Tristan's</i> "Bin ich in Kornwall?" where
+all of the haunting effect of the phrase is due to the modulation in
+the harmony into the G-major chord at the first syllable of
+"Kornwall." And one might point out to Mr. Baughan that this effect is
+subtly dependent upon the co-operation of the voice and the
+instruments. The phrase in the voice-part is not one "that an
+orchestral instrument could do as well", as Mr. Baughan would at once
+recognise<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">-178-</a></span> if he were to play the accompanying chords on a piano and
+give the progression in the voice to a 'cello or a violin.</p>
+
+<p>But while Wagner foreshadowed this manner of making his harmonic
+support confer a special character upon the effect of the voice-part,
+he did not begin to sound its possibilities. That was left for Debussy
+to do; and for the task he was obviously equipped in a surpassing
+degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful
+harmonic vocabulary&mdash;the richest harmonic instrument, beyond
+comparison, that music has yet known.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">-179-</a></span> The score of "Pelléas"
+overflows with instances of this&mdash;one may paradoxically call it
+harmonic&mdash;use of the voice: things that Wagner, with his comparatively
+limited harmonic range, could not have accomplished. As instances
+where the voice-part, without being inherently melodic, borrows a
+semblance of almost lyrical beauty from its harmonic associations,
+consider the passage in the grotto scene beginning at <i>Pelléas'</i>
+words, "Elle est très grande et très belle", and continuing to
+"Donnez-moi la main"; or the astonishing passage in the final love
+scene beginning at <i>Pelléas'</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">-180-</a></span> words, "On a brisé la glace avec des
+fers rougis!" or, in the last act, the expression that is given to
+<i>Mélisande's</i> phrase, "la grande fenêtre...." Yet note that in such
+passages the voice-part does not, in Mr. Baughan's phrase, merely
+"weave up" with the orchestra, as he protests that it does in Wagner's
+practice; in other words, it is not simply an incidental strand in the
+general harmonic texture; it has character and individuality of its
+own, though these are absolutely dependent for their full effect upon
+their harmonic background. Nor is it, on the other hand, so assertive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">-181-</a></span>
+and conspicuous that it comes within the class of that which Debussy
+repudiates as "parasitic." Here, then, is a method of uttering the
+text that not only permits of a just and veracious rendering of every
+possible dramatic <i>nuance</i>, but which, by virtue of the means of
+musical enforcement that are applied to it, takes on a character and
+quality, as music, which are as influential as they are unparalleled.</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">VII</h3>
+
+<p>It has been affirmed that in "Pelléas et Mélisande" Debussy has
+produced a work as command<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">-182-</a></span>ing in quality as it is unique in
+conception and design. Let us consider what grounds there may be for
+the assertion.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without analogy
+in the previous history, not merely of opera, but of music. Debussy is
+a man of unhampered and clairvoyant imagination, a dreamer with a
+far-wandering vision. He views the spectacle of the world through the
+magic casements of the mystic who is also a poet and visionary. One
+can easily conceive him as taking the more tranquil part in that
+provocative dialogue<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">-183-</a></span> put by Mr. Yeats into the mouths of two of his
+dramatic characters:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"And what in the living world can happen to a man that is
+asleep on his bed? Work must go on and coach-building must
+go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much
+attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no
+profit in it to anyone at all."</p>
+
+<p>"There are some would answer you that it is to those who are
+awake that nothing happens, and it is they who know nothing.
+He that is asleep on his bed is gone where all have gone for
+supreme truth."</p></div>
+
+<p>In Maeterlinck's "Pelléas et Mélisande," Debussy has, through a
+fortunate conjunction of circum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">-184-</a></span>stances, found a perfect vehicle for
+his impulses and preoccupations. There will always be, naturally
+enough, persons who must inevitably regard such a work as that for
+which he and Maeterlinck are now responsible as, for the most part,
+vain, inutile, even preposterous. They are sincere in their dislike,
+these forthright and excellent people, and they are to be
+commiserated, for they are, in such a region of the imagination as
+this drama builds up about them, aliens in a world whose ways and
+whose wonders must be forever hidden from their most determined
+scru<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">-185-</a></span>tiny. Such robust and worldly spirits, writes a thoughtful
+contemporary essayist, "that swim so vigorously on the surface of
+things," have always "a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who
+dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the
+depth holds": they will not even grant that the depths are anything
+save murky, that the tidings have validity or importance. They take
+comfort in their detachment, and are apt to speak of themselves, with
+mock humility, as "plain, blunt persons," for whom the alleged
+vacuities of such an order of art are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">-186-</a></span> comfortably negligible. Well,
+it is, after all, as Maeterlinck's <i>Pelléas</i> himself observes, a
+matter not so much for mirth as for lament; yet even more is it a
+matter for resignation. There will always be, as has been observed, an
+immense and confident majority for whom that territory of the creative
+imagination which lies over the boundaries of the palpable world will
+seem worse than delusive: who will always and sincerely pin their
+faith to that which is definite and concrete, patent and direct, and
+who must in all honesty reject that which is undeclared, allusive,
+crepuscular: which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">-187-</a></span> communicates itself through echoes and in
+glimpses; by means of intimations, signs, and tokens. For them it
+would be of no avail to point to the dictum of one who, like
+Maeterlinck, is aware of remote voices and strange dreams: "Dramatic
+art," he has wisely said, "is a method of expression, and neither a
+hair-breadth escape nor a love affair more befits it than the
+passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions; and
+the dramatist is as free as the painter of good pictures and the
+writer of good books. All art is passionate, but a flame is not the
+less flame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">-188-</a></span> because we change the candle for a lamp or the lamp for a
+fire; and all flame is beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>It is a dictum that is scarcely calculated to persuade a very general
+acceptance: a "passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange
+intuitions" is not precisely the kind of æsthetic fare which the
+"plain, blunt man," glorying in his plainness and his bluntness, is
+apt to relish. It is a point upon which it is perhaps needless to
+dwell; but its recognition serves as explanation of the fact that the
+music-drama into which Debussy has transformed Maeterlinck's play
+should not every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">-189-</a></span>where and always be either accepted or understood.
+For in the musical setting of Debussy, Maeterlinck's drama has found
+its perfect equivalent: the qualities of the music are the qualities
+of the play, completely and exactly; and, sharing its qualities, it
+has evoked and will always evoke the more or less contemptuous
+antagonism of those for whom it has little or nothing to say.</p>
+
+<p>Of the quality of its style, perhaps the most obvious trait to note is
+its divergence from the kind of music-making which we are accustomed
+to regard as typically French. We have come to regard as inevitable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">-190-</a></span>
+the clear-cut precision, the finesse, the instinctive grace of French
+music; but we are not at all accustomed to discovering this fineness
+of texture allied with marked emotional richness, with depth and
+substance of thought&mdash;we do not look for such an alliance, nor find
+it, in any French music from Rameau to Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and
+Massenet. Yet Debussy has the typical French clarity and fineness of
+surface without the French hardness of edge and thinness of substance.
+The contours of his music are as melting and elastic as its emotional
+substance is rich; and it is phantas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">-191-</a></span>mal rather than definite and
+clear-cut; evasive rather than direct. His art, as a matter of fact,
+has its roots in the literature rather than in the music of his
+country. His true forebears are not Rameau, Couperin, Boieldieu,
+Bizet, Saint-Saëns, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé; and, beyond
+his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace
+of French musical influence in the score of "Pelléas," save for its
+limpidity of expression and its delicate logic of structure. The truth
+is that Debussy, with d'Indy, Ravel, and others, has made it
+impossible to speak any longer,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">-192-</a></span> without qualification, of "French"
+quality, or "French" style, in music; for to-day there is the French
+of Saint-Saëns and Massenet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy,
+Duparc, Fauré, Ravel: and the two orders are as inassociable under a
+generic yoke as are the poetry of Hugo and the poetry of Verlaine.</p>
+
+<p>But the essential thing to observe and to praise in this music is its
+astonishing, its almost incredible, affluence of substance: its
+richness in ideas that are both extraordinarily beautiful and wholly
+new. The score, in this respect alone, is epoch-making. Debussy is the
+first music-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">-193-</a></span>maker since Wagner to evolve a kind of style of which the
+substance is, so to say, newly-minted. Strauss is not to be compared
+with him in this regard; for the basis of the German master's style,
+upon which he has reared no matter how wonderful a superstructure, is
+compounded of materials which he got straight from Richard Wagner and
+his great forerunner, Franz Liszt; whereas the basis, the
+starting-point, of Debussy's style&mdash;its harmonic and melodic
+stuff&mdash;existed nowhere, in any artistic shape or condition, before
+him. To speak of it as in any vital<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">-194-</a></span> sense a reversion, because it
+makes use of certain principles of plain-song, is mere trifling.
+Debussy is a true innovator, if ever there was one. He has added fresh
+materials to the matter out of which music is evolved; and no composer
+of whom this may be said, from Beethoven to Chopin, has failed to find
+himself eventually ranked as the originator of a new order of things
+in the development of the art.</p>
+
+
+<h3 class="tp">VIII</h3>
+
+<p>Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the
+music of "Pelléas et Mélisande"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">-195-</a></span> will for some time to come find it
+difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of
+extravagance. One owns, in trying to appraise it, to a compunction
+similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics,
+when, after applauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded
+himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation," and "must
+mix in a little depreciation," to show that he had "read attentively,
+critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite
+risk in praising too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to
+intrude<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">-196-</a></span> itself upon contemporary observation, and upon a critical
+function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of
+adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am
+quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric-drama as is spoken
+here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also
+aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which
+afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the
+entertainment of subsequent generations and the inextinguishable
+delight of the Comic Muse&mdash;which, as Mr. Meredith<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">-197-</a></span> has pointed out,
+watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind
+of excess. Yet I am willing to assert deliberately, and with a
+perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the
+score of "Pelléas" is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that
+are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of
+modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century
+ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of "Tristan und
+Isolde"; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a
+dozen measures in which one cannot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">-198-</a></span> point out some touch of genius.
+The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey
+of it a conviction of its almost continuous inspiration, of its
+profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that
+possess character and nobility, and that are often of deep and
+ravishing beauty&mdash;a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the
+sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the
+inspiration is so persistent and so fresh&mdash;in which there is so little
+that is <i>cliché</i>, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is
+thinking of music written for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">-199-</a></span> stage, one has to go to the author
+of "Tristan" for anything comparable to it. It has been said that in
+this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is
+justified. There are passages, most of them to be found in the
+interludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known,
+were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and
+rare gold of his thought is intermixed with the dross of alien ideas.
+And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow
+of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score: thus we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">-200-</a></span> hear
+"Parsifal" in the first interlude, "Parsifal" and "Siegfried" in the
+interlude following the scene at the fountain&mdash;the scene wherein
+<i>Mélisande's</i> ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that
+it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of
+this music, even when it momentarily takes the timbre of another; and
+none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled,
+has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and
+passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching
+and so underived.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">-201-</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The nature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon
+its remarkable quality by his appreciators, have provoked the
+assertion that the score of "Pelléas" is devoid of melody, or at least
+that it is weak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests
+upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect
+exemplification of that critical method which consists in measuring
+new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of
+seeking to learn whether they do not themselves establish new
+standards by which alone they are to be appraised.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">-202-</a></span> The method has
+been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is
+probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The
+music of "Pelléas" is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen,
+reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have
+already been discussed, has deliberately and wisely avoided formal
+melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra&mdash;an orchestra
+which, while it depends in an unexampled degree upon a predominantly
+harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from being
+devoid of melodic effect. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">-203-</a></span> the melody is Debussy's melody&mdash;it is
+fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have
+been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors,&mdash;men who
+themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic
+barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles
+impatient or inhospitable ears by reason of its seeming
+indefiniteness, its apparently wayward movement, and because of the
+shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It
+would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">-204-</a></span>
+melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of
+instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by
+the fountain, in the second act; the whole of the tower scene&mdash;an
+outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the
+loveliest pages of "Tristan" for a comparison; the affecting interview
+between <i>Mélisande</i> and the benign and infinitely wise <i>Arkël</i>, in the
+fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park; and almost the
+whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the
+entrancing music to which he has set<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">-205-</a></span> the ecstatic apostrophe of
+<i>Pelléas</i> to his beloved's hair, he would have established an
+indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original
+kind. It has been said that he is "incapable of writing sustained
+melody"; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order
+to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem
+that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to
+have compassed even "sustained" melody; for the melodic line&mdash;varied,
+sensitive, and plastic though it is&mdash;is here of almost unbroken
+continuity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">-206-</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder
+at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is
+individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene,
+is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing
+aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has
+discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of
+this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One
+would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief
+and final claim to the highest excellence in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">-207-</a></span> its triumphant character
+as an expressional achievement; in this it ranks with the supreme
+things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one
+is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and
+beautiful expression. It is probably unnecessary to allege the quality
+of such examples as the scene by the fountain, the perilous encounter
+at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude
+which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the
+sunlit terrace above the sea&mdash;music that has an entrancing radiance
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">-208-</a></span> perfume, through which blows "all the air of all the sea"&mdash;these
+things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal
+comprehension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise
+them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose
+quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the
+countless felicities of structural and external detail: felicities
+which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter,
+less obvious felicities: of the grave beauty of the passage in which
+<i>Geneviève</i> reads to the King the let<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">-209-</a></span>ter of <i>Golaud</i> to his brother
+<i>Pelléas</i><a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act,
+after <i>Mélisande's</i> question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the
+delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at <i>Pelléas'</i> words,
+in the scene at the fountain, "... le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the
+exquisite setting of <i>Golaud's</i> exclamation of delight over the beauty
+of <i>Mélisande's</i> hands; of the entire grotto scene,&mdash;a passage of
+superb imaginative fervour,&mdash;with its indescribably poetic ending (the
+frag<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">-210-</a></span>ment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes
+and a harp); of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo
+violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the
+"Regarde, regarde, j'embrasse tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured
+<i>Pelléas</i>; of the piercing effect of the <i>Mélisande</i> theme where it is
+combined with that of <i>Pelléas</i> in the interlude which follows the
+scene at the tower window; of the passage preceding the entrance of
+<i>Mélisande</i> and <i>Arkël</i> in the fourth act, where <i>Mélisande's</i> theme
+is heard in augmentation; of the pas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">-211-</a></span>sage in the transitional music
+following the misusing of <i>Mélisande</i> by <i>Golaud</i> where her theme is
+played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns&mdash;a
+<i>diminuendo</i> of inexpressible poignancy; of the impassioned soliloquy
+of <i>Pelléas</i> preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the
+theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites
+<i>Mélisande</i> to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees;
+of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he
+asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him; of the interplay
+of "ninth" chords which is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">-212-</a></span> heard, in the final act, when <i>Arkël</i> asks
+<i>Mélisande</i> if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage
+which immediately follows, as <i>Mélisande</i> says that she wishes the
+window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea; of, indeed,
+the whole of the incomparable music of <i>Mélisande's</i> death; and
+finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical
+dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the
+curiously potent and haunting scene in which <i>Pelléas</i> and
+<i>Mélisande</i>, with <i>Geneviève</i>, watch the departure of the ship from
+the port<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">-213-</a></span> and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting
+the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written
+music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of
+the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and
+oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On
+s'embarquerait sans le savoir et l'on ne reviendrait plus" of
+<i>Pelléas</i>, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the
+ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the
+passage in triplets which is heard when <i>Pelléas</i> speaks of the
+beacon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">-214-</a></span> light shining dimly through the mist; the veiled and sinister
+phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of
+the sailors' call: these are salient moments in a masterly piece of
+psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal
+delineation.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish&mdash;and it is not unlikely
+that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of
+style&mdash;will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of
+"Pelléas et Mélisande." It has had, it has been truly said, no
+predecessor, no forerunner; and there is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">-215-</a></span> nothing in the musical art
+that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree
+resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal
+welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive
+influence, it is not now possible to say; but that its extraordinary
+importance as a work of art will compel an ever-widening appreciation,
+seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score,
+Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Patmore: "I have respected
+posterity."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>NOTE</h2>
+
+
+<p class="tp"><span class="smcap">Some</span> of the material contained in the foregoing studies appeared
+originally in articles published in <i>Harper's Weekly</i>, <i>The North
+American Review</i>, and <i>The Musician</i>. But for the most part the essays
+are new; and such passages of earlier origin as are retained have been
+considerably altered and amplified.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>FOOTNOTE</h2>
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> As one out of many instances of similarly striking
+detail, observe the remarkable and moving progression in the
+voice-part from the D in the ninth chord on B-flat to the B-natural in
+the chord of G-sharp minor, at <i>Geneviève's</i> words "... tour qui
+regarde la mer."</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA ***
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Aspects of Modern Opera
+       Estimates and Inquiries
+
+Author: Lawrence Gilman
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2011 [EBook #38268]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Linda Cantoni and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected
+without note.]
+
+
+
+
+ASPECTS OF MODERN OPERA
+
+_Estimates and Inquiries_
+
+
+BY
+
+LAWRENCE GILMAN
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+"The Music of To-morrow," "Phases of Modern Music," "Stories of
+Symphonic Music," "Edward MacDowell: A Study," "Strauss' 'Salome': A
+Guide to the Opera," "Debussy's 'Pelleas et Melisande': A Guide to the
+Opera," etc.
+
+
+  NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+  LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+  MCMIX
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1908,
+  JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+ERNEST NEWMAN
+
+A CRITIC OF
+
+BREADTH, WISDOM, AND INDEPENDENCE
+
+THESE STUDIES
+
+ARE APPRECIATIVELY INSCRIBED
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTORY: THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH                      1
+
+  A VIEW OF PUCCINI                                         31
+
+  STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS                 65
+
+  A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA                                    107
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+THE WAGNERIAN AFTERMATH
+
+
+Since that day when, a quarter of a century ago, Richard Wagner ceased
+to be a dynamic figure in the life of the world, the history of
+operatic art has been, save for a few conspicuous exceptions, a barren
+and unprofitable page; and it has been so, in a considerable degree,
+because of him. When Mr. William F. Apthorp, in his admirable history
+of the opera--a book written with unflagging gusto and vividness--observed
+that Wagner's style has been, since his death, little imitated, he
+made an astonishing assertion. "If by Wagner's influence," he went on,
+"is meant the influence of his individuality, it may fairly be said to
+have been null. In this respect Wagner has had no more followers than
+Mozart or Beethoven; he has founded no school." Again one must
+exclaim: An astonishing affirmation! and it is not the first time that
+it has been made, nor will it be the last. Yet how it can have seemed
+a reasonable thing to say is one of the insoluble mysteries. The
+influence of Wagner--the influence of his individuality as well as of
+his principles--upon the musical art of the past twenty-five years has
+been simply incalculable. It has tinged, when it has not dyed and
+saturated, every phase and form of creative music, from the opera to
+the sonata and string quartet.
+
+It is not easy to understand how anyone who is at all familiar with
+the products of musical art in Europe and America since the death of
+the tyrant of Bayreuth can be disposed to question the fact. No
+composer who ever lived influenced so deeply the music that came
+after him as did Wagner. It is an influence that is, of course,
+waning; and to the definite good of creative art, for it has been in a
+large degree pernicious and oppressive in its effect. The shadow of
+the most pervasive of modern masters has laid a sinister and
+paralysing magic upon almost all of his successors. They have sought
+to exert his spells, they have muttered what they imagined were his
+incantations; yet the thing which they had hoped to raise up in glory
+and in strength has stubbornly refused to breathe with any save an
+artificial and feeble life. None has escaped the contagion of his
+genius, though some, whom we shall later discuss, have opposed against
+it a genius and a creative passion of their own. Yet in the domain of
+the opera, wherewith we are here especially concerned, it is an
+exceedingly curious and interesting fact that out of the soil which he
+enriched with his own genius have sprung, paradoxically, the only
+living and independent forces in the lyrico-dramatic art of our time.
+
+Let us consider, first, those aspects of the operatic situation which,
+by reason of the paucity of creative vitality that they connote, are,
+to-day, most striking; and here we shall be obliged to turn at once to
+Germany. The more one hears of the new music that is being put forth
+by Teutonic composers, the stronger grows one's conviction of the
+lack, with a single exception, of any genuine creative impulse in that
+country to-day. It is doubtless a little unreasonable to expect to be
+able to agree in this matter with the amiable lady who told Matthew
+Arnold that she liked to think that aesthetic excellence was "common
+and abundant." As the sagacious Arnold pointed out, it is not in the
+nature of aesthetic excellence that it should be "common and
+abundant"; on the contrary, he observed, excellence dwells among rocks
+hardly accessible, and a man must almost wear out his heart before he
+can reach her. All of this is quite unanswerable; yet, so far as
+musical Germany is concerned, is not the situation rather singular?
+Germany--the Germany which yielded the royal line founded by Bach and
+continued by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and
+Brahms--can show us to-day, save for that exception which we shall
+later discuss, only a strenuous flock of Lilliputians (whom it would
+be fatuous to discuss with particularity), each one of whom is
+confidently aware that the majestic mantle of the author of "Tristan"
+has descended upon himself. They write music in which one grows weary
+of finding the same delinquency--the invariable fault of emptiness, of
+poverty of idea, allied with an extreme elaboration in the manner of
+presentation. And it is most deliberate and determined in address. One
+would think that the message about to be delivered were of the utmost
+consequence, the deepest moment: the pose and the manner of the bearer
+of great tidings are admirably simulated. Yet the actual deliverance
+is futile and dull, pathetically meagre, causing us to wonder how
+often we must remind ourselves that it is as impossible to achieve
+salient or distinguished or noble music without salient,
+distinguished, and noble ideas as it is to create fire without flame.
+
+In France there are--again with an exception to which we shall later
+advert--Saint-Saens, d'Indy, Massenet, Charpentier, and--_les autres_.
+
+Now Saint-Saens is very far from being a Wagnerian. He is, indeed,
+nothing very definite and determinable. He is M. Saint-Saens, an
+abstraction, a brain without a personality. It is almost forty years
+since Hector Berlioz called him "one of the greatest musicians of our
+epoch," and since then the lustre of his fame has waxed steadily,
+until to-day one must recognise him as one of the three or four most
+distinguished living composers. Venerable and urbane, M. Saint-Saens,
+at the New York opening of the American tour which he made in his
+seventy-second year, sat at the piano before the audience whom he had
+travelled three thousand miles to meet, and played a virtuoso piece
+with orchestral accompaniment, and two shorter pieces for piano and
+orchestra: a valse-caprice called "Wedding Cake," and an "Allegro
+Appassionato." That is to say, M. Camille Saint-Saens, the bearer of
+an internationally famous and most dignified name, braved the tragic
+perils of the deep to exhibit himself before a representative American
+audience as the composer of the "Wedding Cake" valse-caprice, an
+entertaining fantasy on exotic folk-themes, and a _jeu d'esprit_ with
+a pleasant tune and some pretty orchestral embroidery.
+
+No one could have it in his heart to chide M. Saint-Saens for these
+things, for he is very venerable and very famous. Yet is not the
+occurrence indicative, in a way, of M. Saint-Saens's own attitude
+toward his art?--that facile, brilliant, admirably competent,
+chameleon-like art of his, so adroit in its external fashioning, yet
+so thin and worn in its inner substance! One wonders if, in the entire
+history of music, there is the record of a composer more completely
+accomplished in his art, so exquisite a master of the difficult trick
+of spinning a musical web, so superb a mechanician, who has less to
+say to the world: whose discourse is so meagre and so negligible. One
+remembers that unfortunate encomium of Gounod's, which has been so
+often turned into a justified reproach: "Saint-Saens," said the
+composer of "Faust," "will write at will a work in the style of
+Rossini, of Verdi, of Schumann, of Wagner." The pity of his case is
+that, when he writes pure Saint-Saens, one does not greatly care to
+listen. He has spoken no musical thought, in all his long and
+scintillant career, that the world will long remember. His dozen
+operas, his symphonic poems, his symphonies, his concertos, the best
+of his chamber works--is there in them an accent which one can
+soberly call either eloquent or deeply beautiful? Do they not excel
+solely by reason of their symmetry and solidity of structure, their
+deft and ingenious delivery of ideas which at their worst are banal
+and at their best mediocre or derivative? "A name always to be
+remembered with respect!" cries one of his most sane and just
+admirers: since "in the face of practical difficulties,
+discouragements, misunderstandings, sneers, he has worked constantly
+to the best of his unusual ability for musical righteousness in its
+pure form." "A name to be remembered with respect," beyond dispute:
+with the respect that is due the man of supereminent intelligence, the
+fastidious artisan, the tireless and honourable workman--with respect,
+yes; but scarcely with enthusiasm. He never, as has been truly said,
+bores one; it is just as true that he never stimulates, moves,
+transports, or delights one, in the deeper sense of the term. At its
+best, it is a hard and dry light that shines out of his music: a
+radiance without magic and without warmth. His work is an impressive
+monument to the futility of art without impulse: to the immeasurable
+distance that separates the most exquisite talent from the merest
+genius. For all its brilliancy of investiture, his thought, as the
+most liberal of his appreciators has said, "can never wander through
+eternity"--a truth which scarcely needed the invocation of the
+Miltonic line to enforce. It may be true, as Mr. Philip Hale has
+asserted, that "the success of d'Indy, Faure, Debussy, was made
+possible by the labor and the talent of Saint-Saens"; yet it is one of
+the pities of his case that when Saint-Saens's name shall have become
+faint and fugitive in the corridors of time, the chief glories of
+French art in our day will be held to be, one may venture, the
+legacies of the composers of "Pelleas et Melisande" and the "Jour
+d'ete a la montagne," rather than of the author of "Samson et Dalila"
+and "Le Rouet d'Omphale." Which brings one to M. Vincent d'Indy.
+
+Now M. d'Indy offers a curious spectacle to the inquisitive observer,
+in that he is, in one regard, the very symbol of independence, of
+artistic emancipation, whereas, in another phase of his activity, he
+is a mere echo and simulacrum. As a writer for the concert room, as a
+composer of imaginative orchestral works and of chamber music, he is
+one of the most inflexibly original and self-guided composers known to
+the contemporary world of music. With his aloofness and astringency of
+style, his persistent austerity of temper, his invincible hatred of
+the sensuous, his detestation of the kind of "felicity" which is a
+goal for lesser men, this remarkable musician--who, far more
+deservingly than the incontinent Chopin, deserves the title of "the
+proudest poetic spirit of our time"--this remarkable musician, one
+must repeat, is the sort of creative artist who is writing, not for
+his day, but for a surprised and apprehending futurity. He is at once
+a man of singularly devout and simple nature, and an entire mystic.
+For him the spectacle of the living earth, in lovely or forbidding
+guise, evokes reverend and exalted moods. His approach to its wonders
+is Wordsworthian in its deep and awe-struck reverence and its
+fundamental sincerity. He does not, like his younger artistic kinsman,
+Debussy, see in it all manner of fantastic and mist-enwrapped visions;
+it is not for him a pageant of delicate and shining dreams.
+Mallarme's lazy and indulgent Faun in amorous woodland reverie would
+not have suggested to him, as to Debussy, music whose sensuousness is
+as exquisitely concealed as it is marvellously transfigured. The
+mysticism of d'Indy is pre-eminently religious; it has no tinge of
+sensuousness; it is large and benign rather than intimate and intense.
+
+He is absolutely himself, absolutely characteristic, for example, in
+his tripartite tone-poem, "Jour d'ete a la montagne." This music is a
+hymn the grave ecstasy and the utter sincerity of which are as
+evident as they are impressive. In its art it is remarkable--not so
+monumental in plan, so astoundingly complex in detail, as his superb
+B-minor symphony, yet a work that is full of his peculiar traits.
+
+Now it would seem as if so fastidious and individual a musician as
+this might do something of very uncommon quality if he once turned his
+hand to opera-making. Yet in his "L'Etranger," completed only a year
+before he began work on his astonishing B-minor symphony, and in his
+"Fervaal" (1889-95), we have the melancholy spectacle of M. d'Indy
+concealing his own admirable and expressive countenance behind an
+ill-fitting mask modelled imperfectly after the lineaments of Richard
+Wagner. In these operas (d'Indy calls them, by the way, an _action
+dramatique_ and an _action musicale_: evident derivations from the
+"Tristan"-esque _Handlung_)--in these operas, the speech, from first
+to last, is the speech of Wagner. The themes, the harmonic structure,
+the use of the voice, the plots (d'Indy, like Wagner, is his own
+librettist)--all is uncommuted Wagnerism, with some of the Teutonic
+cumbrousness deleted and some of the Gallic balance and measure
+infused. These scores have occasional beauty, but it is seldom the
+beauty that is peculiar to d'Indy's own genius: it is an imported and
+alien beauty, a beauty that has in it an element of betrayal.
+
+We find ourselves confronting a situation that is equally dispiriting
+to the seeker after valuable achievements in contemporary French opera
+when we view the performances of such minor personages as Massenet,
+Bruneau, Reyer, Erlanger, and Charpentier. They are all tarred, in a
+great or small degree, with the Wagnerian stick. When they speak out
+of their own hearts and understandings they are far from commanding:
+they are vulgarly sentimental or prettily lascivious, like the amiable
+Massenet, or pretentious and banal, like Bruneau, or incredibly dull,
+like Reyer, or picturesquely superficial, like Charpentier--though the
+author of "Louise" disports himself with a beguiling grace and verve
+which almost causes one to forgive his essential emptiness.
+
+Modern Italy discloses a single dominant and vivid figure. In none of
+his compatriots is there any distinction of speech, of character. In
+that country the memory of Wagner is less imperious in its control;
+yet not one of its living music-makers, with the exception that I have
+made, has that atmosphere and quality of his own which there is no
+mistaking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have referred by implication and reservation to three personalities
+in the art of the modern lyric-drama who stand out as salient figures
+from the confused and amorphous background against which they are to
+be observed: who seem to me to represent the only significant and
+important manifestations of the creative spirit which have thus far
+come to the surface in the post-Wagnerian music-drama. They are, it
+need scarcely be said, Puccini in Italy, Richard Strauss in Germany,
+and Debussy in France. Yet these men built upon the foundations laid
+by Wagner; they took many leaves from his vast book of instructions,
+in some cases stopping short of the full reach of his plans as
+imagined by himself, in other cases carrying his schemes to a point of
+development far beyond any result of which he dreamed. But they have
+not attempted to say the things which they had to say in the way that
+he would have said them. They have been content with their own
+eloquence; and it has not betrayed them. No one is writing music for
+the stage which has the profile, the saliency, the vitality, the
+personal flavour, which distinguish the productions of these men. So
+far as it is possible to discern from the present vantage-ground, the
+future--at least the immediate future--of the lyric stage is theirs.
+In no other quarters may one observe any manifestations that are not
+either negligible by reason of their own quality, or mere dilutions,
+with or without adulterous admixtures, of the Wagnerian brew.
+
+
+
+
+A VIEW OF PUCCINI
+
+
+A plain-spoken and not too reverent observer of contemporary musical
+manners, discussing the melodic style of the Young Italian
+opera-makers, has observed that it is fortunate in that it "gives the
+singers opportunity to pour out their voices in that lavish volume and
+intensity which provoke applause as infallibly as horseradish provokes
+tears." The comment has a good deal of what Sir Willoughby Patterne
+would have called "rough truth." It is fairly obvious that there is
+nothing in the entire range of opera so inevitably calculated to
+produce an instant effect as a certain kind of frank and sweeping
+lyricism allied with swiftness of dramatic emotion; and it is because
+the young lions of modern Italy--Puccini and his lesser brethren--have
+profoundly appreciated this elemental truth, that they address their
+generation with so immediate an effect.
+
+In those days when the impetus of a pristine enthusiasm drove the more
+intelligent order of opera-goers to performances of Wagner, it was a
+labour of love to learn to know and understand the texts of his
+obscure and laboured dramas; and even the guide-books, which were as
+leaves in Vallombrosa, were prayerfully studied. But to-day there are
+no Wagnerites. We are no longer impelled by an apostolic fervour to
+delve curiously into the complex genealogy and elaborate ethics of the
+"Ring," and it is no longer quite clear to many slothful intelligences
+just what Tristan and Isolde are talking about in the dusk of King
+Mark's garden. There will always be a small group of the faithful who,
+through invincible and loving study, will have learned by heart every
+secret of these dramas. But for the casual opera-goer, granting him
+all possible intelligence and intellectual curiosity, they cannot but
+seem the reverse of crystal-clear, logical, and compact. A score of
+years ago those who cared at all for the dramatic element in opera,
+and the measure of whose delight was not filled up by the vocal
+pyrotechny which was the mainstay of the operas of the older
+repertoire, found in these music-dramas their chief solace and
+satisfaction. Wagner reigned then virtually alone over his kingdom.
+The dignity, the imaginative power, and the impressive emotional sweep
+of his dramas, as dramas, offset their obscurity and their inordinate
+bulk; and always their splendid investiture of music exerted, in and
+of itself, an enthralling fascination. And that condition of affairs
+might have continued for much longer had not certain impetuous young
+men of modern Italy demonstrated the possibility of writing operas
+which were both engrossing on their purely dramatic side and, in their
+music, eloquent with the eloquence that had come to be expected of the
+modern opera-maker. Moreover, these music-dramas had the incalculable
+merit, for our time and environment, of being both swift in movement
+and unimpeachably obvious in meaning. Thereupon began the reign of
+young Italy in contemporary opera. It was inaugurated with the
+"Cavalleria Rusticana" of Mascagni and the "I Pagliacci" of
+Leoncavallo; and it is continued to-day, with immense vigour and
+persistence, by Puccini with all his later works. The sway of the
+composer of "Tosca," "Boheme," and "Madame Butterfly" is triumphant
+and wellnigh absolute; and the reasons for it are not elusive. He has
+selected for musical treatment dramas that are terse and rapid in
+action and intelligible in detail, and he has underscored them with
+music that is impassioned, incisive, highly spiced, rhetorical,
+sometimes poetic and ingenious, and pervadingly sentimental. Moreover,
+he possesses, as his most prosperous attribute, that facility in
+writing fervid and often banal melodies to the immediate and unfailing
+effect of which, in the words of Mr. Henry T. Finck, I have alluded.
+As a sensitive English critic, Mr. Vernon Blackburn, once very
+happily observed, Puccini is "essentially a man of his own generation
+... the one who has caught up the spirit of his time, and has made his
+compact with that time, in order that he should not lose anything
+which a contemporary generation might give him."
+
+It is a curious and striking truth that the chief trouble with the
+representative musical dramatists who have built, from the standpoint
+of system, upon the foundational stones that Wagner laid, is not, as
+the enemies and opponents of Bayreuth used to charge, an excess of
+drama at the expense of the music, but--as was the case with Wagner
+himself (a fact which I have elsewhere in this volume attempted to
+demonstrate)--an excess of music at the expense of the drama: in
+short, the precise defect against which reformers of the opera have
+inveighed since the days of Gluck. With Richard Strauss this musical
+excess is orchestral; with the modern Italians it implicates the
+voice-parts, and is manifested in a lingering devotion to full-blown
+melodic expression achieved at the expense of dramatic truth, logic,
+and consistency. In this, Puccini has simply, in the candid phrase of
+Mr. Blackburn, "caught up the spirit of his time, and made his compact
+with that time." That is to say, he has, with undoubted artistic
+sincerity, played upon the insatiable desire of the modern ear for an
+ardent and elemental kind of melodic effect, and upon the acquired
+desire of the modern intelligence for a terse and dynamic substratum
+of drama. His fault, from what I hold to be the ideal standpoint in
+these matters, is that he has not perfectly fused his music and his
+drama. There is a sufficiently concrete example of what I mean--an
+example which points both his strength and his weakness--in the second
+act of "Tosca," where he halts the cumulative movement of the scene
+between _Scarpia_ and _Tosca_, which he has up to that point developed
+with superb dramatic logic, in order to placate those who may not
+over-long be debarred from their lyrical sweetmeats; but also--for it
+would be absurd to charge him with insincerity or time-serving in this
+matter--in order that he may satisfy his own ineluctable tendency
+toward a periodical effusion of lyric energy, which he must yield to
+even when dramatic consistency and logic go by the board in the
+process; when, in short, lyrical expression is supererogatory and
+impertinent. So he writes the sentimental and facilely pathetic
+prayer, "Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore," _dolcissimo con grande
+sentimento_: a perfectly superfluous, not to say intrusive, thing
+dramatically, and a piece of arrant musical vulgarity; after which the
+current of the drama is resumed. We have here, in fact, nothing more
+nor less respectable than the old-fashioned Italian aria of unsavoury
+fame: it is merely couched in more modern terms.
+
+The offence is aggravated by the fact that Puccini, in common with the
+rest of the Neo-Italians, is at his best in the expression of dramatic
+emotion and movement, and at his worst in his voicing of purely lyric
+emotion, meditative or passionate. In its lyric portions his music is
+almost invariably banal, without distinction, without beauty or
+restraint--when the modern Italian music-maker dons his singing-robes
+he becomes clothed with commonness and vulgarity. Thus in its scenes
+of amorous exaltation the music of "Tosca," of "Madame Butterfly"
+(recall, in the latter work, the flamboyant commonness of the exultant
+duet which closes the first act), is blatant and rhetorical, rather
+than searching and poignant. Puccini's strength lies in the truly
+impressive manner in which he is able to intensify and underscore the
+more dramatic moments in the action. At such times his music possesses
+an uncommon sureness, swiftness, and incisiveness; especially in
+passages of tragic foreboding, of mounting excitement, it is gripping
+and intense in a quite irresistible degree. Often, at such moments,
+it has an electric quality of vigour, a curious nervous strength. That
+is its cardinal merit: its spare, lithe, closely-knit, clean-cut,
+immensely energetic orchestral enforcement of those portions of the
+drama where the action is swift, tense, cumulative, rather than of
+sentimental or amorous connotation. Puccini has, indeed, an almost
+unparalleled capacity for a kind of orchestral commentary which is
+both forceful and succinct. He wastes no words, he makes no
+superfluous gestures: he is masterfully direct, pregnant, expeditious,
+compact. Could anything be more admirable, in what it attempts and
+brilliantly contrives to do, than almost the entire second act of
+"Tosca," with the exception of the sentimental and obstructive Prayer?
+How closely, with what unswerving fidelity, the music clings to the
+contours of the play; and with what an economy of effort its effects
+are made! Puccini is thus, at his best, a Wagnerian in the truest
+sense--a far more consistent Wagnerian than was Wagner himself.
+
+It is in "Tosca" that he should be studied. He is not elsewhere so
+sincere, direct, pungent, telling. And it is in "Tosca," also, that
+his melodic vein, which is generally broad and copious rather than
+fine and deep, yields some of the true and individual beauty which is
+its occasional, its very rare, possession--for example, to name it at
+its best, the poetic and exceedingly personal music which accompanies
+the advancing of dawn over the house-tops of Rome, at the beginning of
+the last act: a passage the melancholy beauty and sincere emotion of
+which it would be difficult to overpraise.
+
+In Puccini's later and much more elaborate and meticulous "Madame
+Butterfly," there is less that one can unreservedly delight in or
+definitely deplore, so far as the music itself is concerned. It is
+from a somewhat different angle that one is moved to consider the
+work.
+
+In choosing the subject for this music-drama, Puccini set himself a
+task to which even his extraordinary competency as a lyric-dramatist
+has not quite been equal. As every one knows, the story for which
+Puccini has here sought a lyrico-dramatic expression is that of an
+American naval officer who marries little "Madame Butterfly" in
+Japan, deserts her, and cheerfully calls upon her three years later
+with the "real" wife whom he has married in America. The name of this
+amiable gentleman is Pinkerton--B.F. Pinkerton--or, in full, Benjamin
+Franklin Pinkerton. Now it would scarcely seem to require elaborate
+argument to demonstrate that the presence in a highly emotional
+lyric-drama of a gentleman named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton--a
+gentleman who is, moreover, the hero of the piece--is, to put it
+briefly, a little inharmonious. The matter is not helped by the fact
+that the action is of to-day, and that one bears away from the
+performance the recollection of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton asking his
+friend, the United States consul at Nagasaki, if he will have some
+whiskys-and-soda. There lingers also a vaguer memory of the consul
+declaring, in a more or less lyrical phrase, that he "is not a student
+of ornithology."
+
+Let no one find in these remarks a disposition to cast a doubt upon
+the seriousness with which Puccini has completed his work, or to
+ignore those features of "Madame Butterfly" which compel sincere
+admiration. But recognition and acknowledgment of these things must be
+conditioned by an insistence upon the fact that such a task as Puccini
+has attempted here, and as others have attempted, is foredoomed to a
+greater or less degree of artistic futility. One refers, of course, to
+the attempt to transfer bodily to the lyric stage, for purposes of
+serious expression, a contemporary subject, with all its inevitable
+dross of prosaic and trivially familiar detail. To put it concretely,
+the sense of humour and the emotional sympathies will tolerate the
+spectacle of a _Tristan_ or a _Tannhaeuser_ or a _Don Giovanni_ or a
+_Pelleas_ or a _Faust_ uttering his longings and his woes in opera;
+but they will not tolerate the spectacle of a _Benjamin Franklin
+Pinkerton_ of our own time and day telling us, in song, that he is not
+a student of ornithology. The thing simply cannot be done--Wagner
+himself could not impress us in such circumstances. The chief glory of
+Wagner's texts--no matter what one may think of them as viable and
+effective dramas--is their ideal suitability for musical translation.
+Take, for example, the text of "Tristan und Isolde": there is not a
+sentence, scarcely a word, in it, which is not fit for musical
+utterance--nothing that is incongruous, pedestrian, inept. All that is
+foreign to the essential emotions of the play has been eliminated. So
+unsparingly has it been subjected to the alembic of the
+poet-dramatist's imagination that it has been wholly purged of all
+that is superfluous and distracting, all that cannot be gratefully
+assimilated by the music. That is the especial excellence of his
+texts. Opera, though it rests, like the other arts, heavily upon
+convention, yet offers at bottom a reasonable and defensible vehicle
+for the communication of human experience and emotion. But it is not a
+convincing form, and no genius, living or potential, can make it a
+convincing form, save when it deals with matters removed from our
+quotidian life and environment: save when it presents a heightened and
+alembicated image of human experience. Thus we accept, with sympathy
+and approval, "Siegfried," "Lohengrin," "Die Meistersinger," "Don
+Giovanni"--even, at a pinch, "Tosca"; but we cannot, if we allow our
+understanding and our sense of humour free play, accept "Madame
+Butterfly," with its naval lieutenant of to-day, its American consul
+in his tan-coloured "spats," and its whiskys-and-soda.
+
+This, then, was the prime disadvantage under which Puccini laboured.
+He was, as a necessary incident of his task, confronted with the
+problem of setting to music a great deal of prosaic and altogether
+unlovely dialogue, essential to the unfolding of the action, no doubt,
+but quite fatal to lyric inspiration. Under these circumstances, the
+music is often surprisingly successful; but it is significant that the
+most poetic and moving passages in the score are those which enforce
+emotions and occasions which have no necessary connection with time or
+place; which are, from their nature, fit subjects for musical
+treatment,--for example, such a passage as that at the end of the
+second act, where _Madame Butterfly_ and her child wait through the
+long night for the coming of the faithless _Pinkerton_; for here the
+moment and the mood to be expressed have a dignity and a pathos
+entirely outside of date or circumstance.
+
+The score, as a whole, compares unfavourably with that of "Tosca,"
+which still, as it seems to me, represents Puccini at his most
+effective and sincere. In "Madame Butterfly" one misses the salient
+characterisation, the gripping intensity, the sharpness and boldness
+of outline that make "Tosca" so notable an accomplishment. "Tosca,"
+for all its occasional commonness, its melodic banality, is a work of
+immense vigour and unquestionable individuality. In it Puccini has
+saturated almost every page of the music with his own extremely vivid
+personality: a personality that is exceedingly impressive in its crude
+strength and directness; he has, in this score, exploded the strange
+critical legend that his style is little more than a blended echo of
+the later Verdi, Ponchielli, and Massenet. The music of "Tosca" is not
+often distinguished, but it is singularly striking, potent, and
+original; no one save Puccini could possibly have written it. But
+since then this composer has, artistically speaking, visited Paris. He
+has appreciated the value of certain harmonic experiments which such
+adventurous Frenchmen as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others,
+are making; he has appreciated them so sincerely that certain pages in
+"Madame Butterfly," as, for instance, the lovely interlude between the
+second and third acts, sound almost as if they had been contrived by
+Debussy himself--a Latinised Debussy, of course. Puccini, in short,
+has become intellectually sophisticated, and he has learned gentler
+artistic manners, in the interval between the composition of "Tosca"
+and of "Madame Butterfly." The music of the latter work is far more
+delicately structured and subtle than anything he had previously given
+us, and it has moments of conquering beauty, of great tenderness, of
+superlative sweetness. It is, beyond question, a charming and
+brilliant score, exceedingly adroit in workmanship and almost
+invariably effective. Yet, after such excellences have been gladly
+acknowledged, one is disturbingly conscious that the real, the
+essential, Puccini has, for the most part, evaporated. There are other
+voices speaking through this music, voices that, for all their charm
+and distinction of accent, seem alien and a little insincere. Has the
+vital, if crude, imagination which gave issue to the music of "Tosca"
+acquired finesse and delicacy at a cost of independent impulse?
+
+
+
+
+STRAUSS' "SALOME": ITS ART AND ITS MORALS
+
+
+That Richard Strauss the opera-maker is, for the present, summed up in
+Richard Strauss the composer of "Salome," would scarcely, I think, be
+disputed by any one who is sympathetically cognisant of his
+achievements in that role. Neither in "Guntram" nor in the later and
+far more characteristic "Feuersnot" is his essential quality as a
+musical dramatist so fully and clearly revealed as in his setting of
+the play of Wilde to which he has given a fugacious immortality. Yet
+in discussing this astonishing work, I prefer to consider it in and
+for itself rather than as a touchstone whereby to form a general
+estimate of Strauss the dramatical tone-poet; for I believe that, if
+he lives and produces for another decade, it will be seen that
+"Salome" does not furnish a just or adequate measure of Strauss'
+indisputable genius as a writer of music for the stage. I believe that
+he has not given us here a valid or completely representative account
+of himself in that capacity. So remarkable, though, is the work in
+itself, so assertive in its challenge to contemporary criticism, that
+it imperatively compels some attempt at appraisement in any deliberate
+survey of modern operatic art.
+
+For any one who is not convinced that those ancient though
+occasionally reconciled adversaries, Art and Ethics, are necessarily
+antipodal, such a task, it must be confessed, is not one to be
+approached in a jaunty or easeful spirit, for it means that one must
+be willing, apparently, to enter the lists ranged with the
+hypocrites, the prudes, the short-sighted and the unwise; with
+frenzied and myopic champions of respectability; with all those who
+are as inflexible in their allegiance to the moralities as they are
+resourceful and tireless in their pursuit of impudicity in art. Yet
+that there are two standpoints from which this extraordinary work must
+be regarded by any candid observer I do not think is open to question:
+it has its purely aesthetic aspect, and its--I shall not say moral, but
+social--aspect. To separate them in any conscientious discussion is
+impossible.
+
+Let us, to begin with, consider, in and by itself, the quality of the
+music which the incomparable Strauss--Strauss, the most conquering
+musical personality since Wagner--has conceived as a fit embodiment in
+tones of the tragic and maleficent and haunting tale of the Dancing
+Daughter of Herodias and her part in the career of the prophet John,
+as recounted--with non-Scriptural variations--by Oscar Wilde. We may
+consider, first, whether or not it achieves the prime requisite of
+music in its organic relation to a dramatic subject: an enforcement
+and heightening of the effect of the play; setting aside, for the
+present, those other aspects of it which have so absorbed critical
+attention, and of which we have heard overmuch: its remorseless
+complexity, its unflagging ingenuity, its superb and miraculous
+orchestration. These are matters of importance, but of secondary
+importance. The point at issue is, has Strauss, through his music,
+intensified and italicised the moods and situations of the drama; and,
+secondly, has he achieved this end through music which is in itself
+notable and important?
+
+Never was music so avid in its search for the eloquent word as is the
+music of Strauss in this work. We are amazed at the audacity, the
+resourcefulness, of the expressional apparatus that is cumulatively
+reared in this unprecedented score. The alphabet of music is ransacked
+for new and undreamt-of combinations of tone: never were effects so
+elaborate, so cunning, so fertilely contrived, offered to the ears of
+men since the voice of music was heard in its pristine estate. This
+score challenges the music of the days that shall follow after it.
+
+For the most part, the atmosphere of horror, of ominous suspense, of
+oppressive and bodeful gloom, in which the tragedy of Wilde is
+enwrapped, is wonderfully rendered in the music. There are beyond
+question overmastering pages in the score--music which has the kind of
+superb audacity and power of effect that Dr. Johnson discerned in the
+style of Sir Thomas Browne: "forcible expressions which he would never
+have used but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and
+flights which would never have been reached but by one who had very
+little fear of the shame of falling." Of such quality is the passage
+which portrays the agonised suspense of _Salome_ during the beheading
+of _John_; the passage, titanic in its expression of malignly exultant
+triumph, which accentuates the delivery of the head to the insensate
+princess; the few measures before _Herod's_ patibulary order at the
+close: these things are products of genius, of the same order of
+genius which impelled the music of "Don Quixote," of "Ein
+Heldenleben," of "Zarathustra"; they are true and vital in
+imagination, marvellous in intensity of vision, of great and subduing
+potency as dramatic enforcement and as sheer music.
+
+But when one has said that much, one comes face to face with the chief
+weakness of the score--its failure in the expression of the governing
+motive of the play: the consuming and inappeasable lust of _Salome_
+for the white body and scarlet lips of _John_.
+
+     "Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my
+     passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a
+     virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was
+     chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire.... Ah! ah!
+     wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan?..."
+
+That is the note which is sounded from beginning to end of the
+play--that is its focal emotion. And Strauss has not made it sound, as
+it should sound, in his music. When it should be wildly, barbarically,
+ungovernably erotic, as for the enforcement of _Salome's_ fervid
+supplications in her first interview with _John_, the music is merely
+conventional in its sensuousness. It should here be febrile,
+vertiginous. But what, actually, do we get? We get a scene built upon
+a phrase in which is crystallised the desire of _Salome_ for the lips
+of the Prophet; and this theme is saccharinely ardent and sentimental,
+rather than feverish and unbridled; a phrase which might have been a
+product of the amiably voluptuous inspiration of the composer of
+"Faust." The "Tannhaeuser" Bacchanale, even in its original form, is
+more truly expressive of venereous abandon than is this strangely
+sentimentalised music. It has, no doubt, a certain effectiveness, a
+certain expressiveness; but the effect that is produced, and the
+emotion that is expressed, are far removed from the field of sensation
+inhabited by Wilde's remarkable Princess. Yet it would seem to be a
+point needing but the lightest emphasis that if the passion of
+_Salome_ is not fitly and eloquently rendered by the music, the
+cardinal impulse, the very heart of Wilde's drama, is left
+unexpressed.
+
+So it is in the music of the final scene, _Salome's_ mad apostrophe to
+the severed head. Here we get, not the note of lustful abandonment
+which would alone remove _Salome's_ horrible appetite from the region
+of the perverted and the incredible, but a kind of musical utterance
+which simulates the noble rapture of Wagner's dying _Isolde_. The
+discrepancy of the music in this regard has been recognised by those
+who praise most warmly Strauss' score. It has been said in
+extenuation, on the one hand, that music is incapable of expressing
+what are called "base" emotions, and, on the other hand, that Strauss
+wished to exalt, to idealise and transfigure, this scene. To the first
+objection it may be said simply that it is based upon an argument that
+is at least open to serious question. It is by no means an evident or
+settled truth that music is incapable of uttering anything but worthy
+emotions, ideas, concepts. There is music by Berlioz, by Liszt, by
+Wagner, by Rimsky-Korsakoff, by Strauss himself, which is, in its
+emotional substance, sinister, demonic, even pornographic in
+suggestion; and not simply by reason of a key furnished by text,
+motto, or dramatic subject, but in itself--in its quality and
+character as music. But the claim need not be elaborated, or even
+demonstrated, since it is beside the point. One quarrels with the
+music of the final scene of "Salome" on the broad ground of its
+inappropriateness: because the emotional note which it strikes and
+sustains is one of nobility, whereas the plain requirement of the
+scene, of the psychological moment, demands music that should be
+anything but noble. And here we encounter the objections of those who
+hold that _Salome_ herself, at the moment of her apostrophe to the
+dead head, becomes transfigured, uplifted through the power of a great
+and purifying love. But to argue in this manner is to indulge in a
+particularly egregious kind of fatuity. To conceive Wilde's lubricious
+princess as a kind of Oriental _Isolde_ is grotesquely to distort the
+vivid and wholly consistent woman of his imagining; and it is to
+renounce at once all possibility of justifying her culminating
+actions. For the only ground upon which it might be remotely possible
+to account for _Salome's_ remarkable behaviour, except by regarding
+her as a necrophilistic maniac, is that supplied by the conditions and
+the environment of a lustful, decadent, and bloodshot age. Only when
+one conceives her as frankly and spontaneously a barbarian, nourished
+on blood and lechery, does she become at all comprehensible to others
+than pathologists, even if she does not cease to impress us as
+noisome, monstrous, and horrible.
+
+The music of "Salome," then, judging it in its entirety, is deficient
+as an exposition, as a translation into tone, of the drama upon which
+it is based; for it is inadequate in its expression of the play's
+central and informing emotion. One listens to this music, it must be
+granted, with the nerves in an excessive state of tension--it is
+enormously exciting; but so is, under certain conditions, a determined
+beating upon a drum. An assault upon the nerve-centres is a vastly
+different thing from an emotional persuasion; yet there are many who,
+in listening to "Salome," will need to be convinced of it.
+
+It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many ways
+a noteworthy and brilliant--and, for the curious student of musical
+evolution--a fascinating work. Its musicianship--the sheer technical
+artistry which contrived it--is stupefying in its enormous and
+inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a
+musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime considerations
+in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most
+exacting standards--by the standards set in other and greater works of
+Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in
+vitality, sincerity, and importance. In at least one respect,
+however, it compels the most unreserved praise; and that is in the
+case of its superlative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a
+huge and complicated body of instruments, and he has set them an
+appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation
+found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his
+performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to
+the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful
+distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its
+total effect, and the almost uncanny art with which it is
+accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative
+achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic
+feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment.
+The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gorgeous fabric of
+strange and novel and obsessing colours--for in such orchestral
+writing as this, sound becomes colour, and colour sound: it is not a
+single sense which is engaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex
+of all the senses; one not only hears, one also imagines that one
+sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their
+possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It
+is when one turns from the bewildering magnificence of its orchestral
+surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the
+fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope,
+that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined
+admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by
+Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this
+music, its marvellous witchery, are incurably external. It is a
+gorgeous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and
+glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality,
+little true substance, within this dazzling instrumental envelope; and
+for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and
+who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems
+but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times
+cacophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which
+is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and
+deliberately hideous; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of
+post-Wagnerian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any
+possible musical means that will appropriately express it: to-day we
+cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another
+character that his body is "like the body of a leper, like a plastered
+wall where vipers crawl ... like a whitened sepulchre, full of
+loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of
+Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so
+often vulgarly sentimental, when it should be terrible and unbridled
+in its passion, that it seems to some a defective performance. For
+sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse
+for being inflated in expression, it would be hard to find, in any
+score of the rank of "Salome," the equal of the two themes which
+Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant
+motives in the score: the theme which is associated with _Salome's_
+desire to kiss the lips of _John_, and that other theme--it has been
+called that of "Ecstasy"--which begins like the _cantabile_ subject in
+the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic" Symphony, and
+ends--well, like Strauss at his worst.
+
+An astounding score!--music that is by turns gorgeous, banal,
+delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, sentimental, insinuating, tornadic:
+music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is
+overwhelming in its occasional triumphs.
+
+We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the
+candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work.
+
+Those over-zealous friends of Strauss who have sought to justify the
+offensiveness of "Salome" by alleging the case of Wagner's "Die
+Walkuere," and the relationship that is there shown to exist between
+the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however
+unhallowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual
+malaise. _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_ are superbly healthful and
+untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath
+with the horrible lust of _Salome_ is stupid and absurd.
+
+Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling
+passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead
+lips, is not necessarily deleterious to morals, nor is it necessarily
+an act of impudicity; it is merely, for those whose calling does not
+happen to induce familiarity with mortuary things, horrible and
+revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be
+ameliorated, the fact,--the situation as conceived and ordered by the
+dramatist,--is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not
+really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions
+require that _Salome's_ kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a
+darkened stage. But to that it may be replied, in the first place,
+that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as
+conveyed by the words of _Salome_--so little, in fact, that _Herod_,
+who was anything but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome
+with loathing and commands her despatch; and, secondly, that the stage
+directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a
+"moonbeam" ... which "covers her with light," just before the end,
+while she is at the climax of her ghastly _libido_.
+
+Mr. Ernest Newman, a thoroughly sane and extremely able champion of
+all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of
+"Salome," that "the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too
+excitable people who are not artists, and who therefore cannot
+understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human
+nature," he goes on, "breaks out into a variety of forms of energy
+that are not at all nice from the moral point of view--murder, for
+example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for
+power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense.
+But because these things are objectionable in themselves and
+dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist
+should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes
+them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in
+real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels; but sensible
+people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson
+for creating such a character; they simply enjoy the art of it. The
+writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of
+deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect on
+us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in
+real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase
+of human nature does not necessarily mean that, as a private
+individual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make
+for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn
+an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may
+have been. They do not recommend her; they simply present her, as a
+specimen of what human nature can be like in certain circumstances....
+The hysterical moralists who cry out against 'Salome' ... have a
+terrified, if rather incoherent, feeling that if women in general were
+suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for
+bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were
+rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of
+love and revenge in the middle of the drawing-room, the respectable
+L40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet.
+But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they
+saw _Salome_ on the stage do something like them, any more than men
+are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read
+that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Hamlet's uncle
+murdered his."
+
+Now that, of course, is irresistible. But Mr. Newman's gift of
+vivacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the
+cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led
+him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital
+relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its
+probable effect upon the public is to yield the whole case to those
+who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of
+course, the opera house), is merely casual and inconsequential: it is
+to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation,"
+an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensation. It is not
+unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the
+prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived
+to be that of enlarging the sense of life: as an agency for liberating
+and mellowing the spirit: as an instrument primarily quickening and
+emancipative. "The sadness of life is the joy of art," said Mr.
+George Moore. The sadness of life, yes; and the evil and tragedy, the
+terror and violence, of life: for the contemplation of these may,
+through the evoking of pity, nourish and enlarge the spirit of the
+beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of
+that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion? I do
+not speak of "morality" or "immorality," since there is nothing stable
+in the use or understanding of these terms. But those aspects of life
+which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather than terrible--are
+they fit matter for the artist?
+
+It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not
+unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. Johnson
+left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady
+was interrogating him. "She seemed", recounts the admirable Boswell,
+"desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity."
+
+To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by
+wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss?--the unparalleled
+maker of music, the indisputable genius who gave us a sheaf of
+masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben,"
+"Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklaerung." Has he passed into that desolate
+region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the
+tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist--the futility
+of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that
+ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as
+"Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)?
+Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the ministrations
+of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends
+out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and
+purify the lips of whom he pleases"?
+
+
+
+
+A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA
+
+
+I
+
+Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for
+opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that
+the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by
+simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her
+paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite
+only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have
+improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical
+forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is
+doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely
+contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those
+classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the
+shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by
+being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and
+voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though,
+Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might
+to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse
+which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly
+not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived
+as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and
+"sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are
+growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever
+defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile
+and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The
+ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of
+motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent
+genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they
+were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.
+
+Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before
+Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained
+(despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it--not a
+drama with auxiliary music, but a _dramma per musica_--a drama for
+(the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of
+Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary
+music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming
+more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing,
+despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of
+their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent
+developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both
+his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review
+certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the
+quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves
+and him.
+
+
+II
+
+It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's
+doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of
+pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be
+tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He
+conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be
+strictly auxiliary--an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the
+enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has
+excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in
+old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the
+poet, all other persons who have to do with the work--composer,
+stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and
+singing actors--should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect,
+and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel
+with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the
+musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that
+is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it
+is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should
+be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor--like the
+scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can
+be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship
+between the drama and the music is inverted--that in his music-dramas
+the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect,
+while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours--it becomes
+obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively)
+in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in
+Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the
+play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of
+"Meistersinger," of "Goetterdaemmerung," when this principle is tested
+by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among
+the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour
+of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the
+play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the
+music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act,
+with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a
+little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat
+raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial
+one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and
+reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music
+which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and
+that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there
+to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the
+element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and
+controlling?
+
+It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing,
+or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived
+himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely
+and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and
+the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he
+had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised
+and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a
+dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul
+assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of
+their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and
+anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than
+his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth
+which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially
+a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama
+and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse
+for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by
+his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is
+distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate
+his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or
+suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in
+order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his
+operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is
+impossible to find the drama because of the music.
+
+It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he
+went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed
+intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a
+welter of magnificent and inspired music--obscured them, stretched
+them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them
+with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he
+thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has
+remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of
+sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that
+Wagnerism ever had.
+
+It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both
+in spite of and because of their music. The validity and
+persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as
+consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less
+certain than of old. But the music, _qua_ music, is of undiminished
+potency--it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost
+unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and
+the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and
+sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite,
+epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and
+despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and,
+as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be
+lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim
+the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among
+the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart--a little
+lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold
+said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and
+attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a
+master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of
+expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse
+things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us
+as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the
+apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die
+Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic
+tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain
+supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic
+swoon of _Tristan_ and _Isolde_ in the midst of which the warning
+voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood
+of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which
+this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the
+adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal--music that is as
+the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial
+altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can
+say no less than that, regarded from any aesthetic standpoint at all,
+he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great
+though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or
+reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and
+that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting
+his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."
+
+
+III
+
+As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency
+of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination
+of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part--their
+music--which should be accessory and contributive rather than
+essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly--and, let
+it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art--through Wagner's
+orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its
+master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly
+against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice.
+He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of
+the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be
+permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His
+singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech,
+necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense
+of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing
+in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not
+infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments
+where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not
+impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical
+dramatist.
+
+And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A.
+Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both
+courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices,
+entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an
+art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama,"
+he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely,"
+he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the
+place of form in absolute music"--a sentence which, one may be
+permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of
+the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by
+this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner
+was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not
+musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination
+of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned,
+assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the
+most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little
+to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at
+the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the
+voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of
+music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted
+numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as
+it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being
+deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice,
+I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name
+page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a
+musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little
+difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified
+his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if
+the ensemble piece--the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example--is
+inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it incontrovertibly
+is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal attitude toward the
+conventions of the operatic stage makes it difficult to tolerate what
+Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle of two persons inside a
+house and two outside, supposed to be unconscious of each other's
+presence, making their remarks in rhythmic and harmonic consonance.
+Yet is Wagner much less distant from the dramatic verities when, in
+the third act of "Die Meistersinger," he ranges five people in the
+centre of a room and causes them to soliloquise in concert, to the end
+of producing a quintette of ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly
+freed himself from what he regarded as the musical bondage of his
+predecessors when he could tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the
+duet, the ensemble piece, and the chorus? The truth of the matter
+seems to be that if Wagner's music, in itself, were less wonderful
+and enthralling than it is, those who would fain insist upon a decent
+regard for dramatic consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate
+many things in the vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the
+"Ring" and "Parsifal" which are not a whit more dramatically
+reasonable than the absurdities which Wagner contemptuously derided in
+the operas of the old school. His vocal writing, far from being
+deficient in melodic quality, far from ignoring "the full resources of
+music and of the beautiful singing voice," is saturated and
+overflowing with musical beauty, and with almost every variety of
+melodic effectiveness except that which is possible to purely formal
+song. Mr. Baughan complains that the voice-parts have "no independent
+life" of their own. "In many cases," he says, "the vocal parts, if
+detached from the score [from the orchestral support] are without
+emotional meaning of any kind--the expression is absolutely
+incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For the same thing is
+necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied with modern
+harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written since composers
+began to discover the modulatory capacities of harmony, one might ask
+Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or any kind of expression
+or effect, if the voice part were sung without its harmonic support?
+
+No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect
+in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe,
+have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should
+be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain
+the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the
+second place, he had been content to let his _dramatis personae_
+employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric
+speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more
+naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and
+intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.
+
+It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in
+Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their
+continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as
+examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only
+every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that
+Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to
+what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently
+instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly
+dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply
+suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of
+irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for
+example, _Waltraute's_ narrative in "Goetterdaemmerung"; the early
+scenes between _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_, and _Brunnhilde's_
+announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walkuere"; and
+in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to _Isolde_ his
+sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures
+that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act--where the
+breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with
+extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair
+suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of
+battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated
+outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.
+
+But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in
+Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward
+musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he
+had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward
+musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and
+music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which
+produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the
+materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and
+variety, and until the intellectual and aesthetic seed which Wagner
+sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own
+time--it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of
+us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved--that
+the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck
+in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out
+with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that
+cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with
+that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime
+deficiency.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a
+masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when
+France--not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck
+and Wagner--produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of
+Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelleas et Melisande" of Claude
+Debussy, it produced a work which is as commanding in quality as it
+is unique in conception and design.
+
+It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the
+eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day
+regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical
+integrity--those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of
+aesthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established
+methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse
+disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music
+as in the other arts, are held to be inviolable until they are set
+aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired
+innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a
+form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square
+with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so
+significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development
+as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the
+history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a
+lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise
+the paramount place in the structural scheme, the musical envelope
+with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying,
+but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree.
+The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count
+Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two
+hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music
+in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and
+situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective
+application in Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande." What the _Camerata_,
+and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate
+musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of
+boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for
+too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman
+of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.
+
+His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow
+growth of the art as of a preeminent natural fitness for the task. The
+Florentines, for all their eagerness and sincerity, were helpless
+before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and
+effective form, for they were hopelessly blocked by reason of the
+desperate poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the
+elaborate and lovely art of the contrapuntists, they found themselves
+in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with
+passionate convictions but without tools--in other words, they aspired
+to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing
+to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost
+non-existent orchestra, and with virtually no perception of the
+possibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any
+infirmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it
+is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear
+as was his perception of the rightful demands of the drama in any
+serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck
+justly says, to effect a "real amalgamation of music and drama,"
+failed to strike out "a form organically connecting each part of the
+opera with every other." His unconnected "numbers," his indulgence in
+vocal embroidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the
+operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or
+far-seeing reformatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes,
+he "insisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he
+did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer.
+Such a thing as allowing the drama to condition the form of the music
+never occurred to him." A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic
+speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in
+which the music was really made to exercise, continuously and
+undeviatingly, what he stated to be "its true function." It would be
+absurd to dispute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was
+both keen and rich; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in
+isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or
+exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent
+manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole.
+
+Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his
+principles--which were of course in essence the principles of the
+Florentines and of Gluck--and the evident reason for his failure,
+enough has already been said. So we come again to Debussy. For it is a
+singular fact--and this is the point to insist upon--that this French
+mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musical
+art who has exhibited the courage, and who has possessed the means, to
+carry the principles of the _Camerata_, of Gluck, and of Wagner to
+their ultimate conclusion. In "Pelleas et Melisande" he has made his
+music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute
+fidelity and consistency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic
+that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here
+as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the
+entire dramatic material into the terms of the symphonic poem, and
+with the singing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless
+orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the
+method of Wagner), as we are from the futile experimentings of the
+_Camerata_.
+
+
+V
+
+One cannot but wonder what Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty,
+simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible
+association with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the
+lyric stage which ignores even those opportunities for musical effect
+which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held
+to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to
+the Spirit of Comedy in trying to imagine what Richard Wagner would
+have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is
+not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course
+of a score almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde," and in
+which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a
+_mezzo-forte_. Debussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic
+art for the exquisite justness with which it enforces the moods and
+action of the play. It never seduces the attention of the auditor from
+the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner,
+tyrannically absorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama
+there is maintained, as to emphasis and intensity, a scrupulous
+balance between the movement of the drama and the tonal undercurrent
+which is its complement: the music is absolutely merged in the play,
+suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it.
+It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the
+ideal manner of constructing a music-drama, the hazardous epithet
+"perfect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more
+faithful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently
+inconsistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture,
+there is none of Wagner's gorgeously expansive rhetoric: the "Je
+t'aime," "Je t'aime aussi" of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a
+simplicity and a stark sincerity which could not well go further; and
+it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their
+profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is
+represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete
+silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's
+music-drama: that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet:
+that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich
+and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reticent. After the grave
+speech and simple gestures of these naive yet subtle and passionate
+tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the
+posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid personages seem, for
+a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and overwrought. To attempt
+to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical
+romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile
+endeavour; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy
+as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound,
+as it is grateful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and
+tramplings of Wagnerian conquests.
+
+His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than
+in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed commentary on
+the text and the action of the play, underlining the significance of
+the former and colouring and intensifying the latter; but its comments
+are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's--indeed,
+their reticence and discretion are, as it has been said, extreme.
+Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does
+not say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner
+being able to resist the temptation to indulge in some graphic and
+detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delaying the action and
+overloading the score, at the passage wherein _Golaud_, coming upon
+the errant and weeping _Melisande_ in the forest, and seeing her crown
+at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it
+is that shines in the water? Yet observe the curiously insinuating
+effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treatment of
+this episode--the _pianissimo_ chords on the muted horns, followed by
+a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have
+wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene of
+_Melisande_?--a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost
+insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced
+that it enters the consciousness almost unperceived as music.
+
+The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgotten; nor
+are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome,"
+overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense,
+oppressive, and many-stranded web of tone. Yet always Debussy's
+musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes
+visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages;
+though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent
+emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous
+reality,--"the thing behind the thing," as the Celts have named
+it,--which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of
+Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening
+to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de
+L'Isle-Adam's description of the voice of his _Elen_: "... it was
+taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through
+the region of shadows." This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic
+exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for
+the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The
+huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here.
+Taine once spoke of the "violent sorcery" of Victor Hugo's style, and
+it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music
+of the titanic German. Debussy in his "Pelleas" has written music
+that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. In it inheres a
+capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result,
+that music had not before exerted--an enchantment that invades the
+mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious
+degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading
+note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude--the sweeping and
+cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic
+fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and
+delicacy of texture and its economy of accent, it is neither
+amorphous nor inert.
+
+
+VI
+
+_Tristan_ and _Isolde_, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that
+emotion with the frankest lyricism; _Pelleas_ and _Melisande_, in
+moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and
+unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere
+couched. It is the orchestra which sings--which, passionately or
+meditatively, colours the dramatic moment. Wherein we come to what is
+perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score:
+the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this
+respect, justly summarised, is this: He has released the orchestra
+from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which
+Wagner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than
+a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and
+transparency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself
+has succinctly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of
+writing for the voices in "Pelleas." "I have been reproached," he has
+said, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always found in the
+orchestra, never in the voice. I wished--intended, in fact,--that the
+action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous,
+uninterrupted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases.
+When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spectator is wont to
+experience two kinds of emotion: the musical emotion on the one hand;
+and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other.
+Generally these are felt successively. I have tried to blend these two
+emotions, and make them simultaneous. Melody is, if I may say so,
+almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of
+emotion or life. Melody is suitable only for the song [_chanson_],
+which confirms a fixed sentiment. I have never been willing that my
+music should hinder ... the changes of sentiment and passion felt by
+my characters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that
+these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries,
+in their joys as in their sorrow."
+
+Now Debussy in his public excursions as a critic is not always to be
+taken seriously; indeed, it is altogether unlikely that he has
+refrained from demonstrations of exquisite delight over the startled
+or contemptuous comment which some of his vivacious heresies
+concerning certain of the gods of music have evoked. These published
+appraisements of his are, of course, nothing more than impertinent,
+though at times apt and sagacious, _jeux d'esprit_. But when he speaks
+seriously, as in the defence of his practice which I have just quoted,
+of the menace of "parasitic" musical phrases in the voice-parts, and
+when he observes that melody, when it occurs in the speech of
+characters in music-drama, is "almost anti-lyric," he speaks with
+penetration and truth. His practice, which illustrates it, amounts to
+this: He employs in "Pelleas" a continuous declamation, uncadenced,
+entirely unmelodic (in the sense in which melodious declamation has
+been understood). Save for a brief and particular instance, there is
+no melodic form whatsoever, from beginning to end of the score. There
+is not a hint of the Wagnerian arioso. The declamation is founded
+throughout upon the natural inflections of the voice in speaking--it
+is, indeed, virtually an electrified and heightened form of speech.
+It is never musical, for the sake of sheer musical beauty, when the
+emotion within the text or situation does not lift it to the plane
+where the quality of utterance tends naturally and inevitably toward
+lyricism of accent. He does not, for example, commit the kind of
+indiscretion that Wagner commits when he makes _Isolde_ sing the
+highly unlyrical line, "Der 'Tantris' mit sorgender List sich nannte,"
+to a phrase that has the double demerit of being "parasitically" and
+intrusively melodic and wholly conventional in pattern--one of those
+musical platitudes which have no excuse for existence in any sincere
+and vital score. Nor in "Pelleas" do the singers ever sing, it need
+hardly be said, anything remotely approaching a duet, a concerted
+number, or a chorus (the snatches of distant song heard from the
+sailors on the departing ship is a mere touch of atmospheric
+suggestion). The dialogue is everywhere and always clearly
+individualised, as in the spoken drama. Yet this surprising fact is to
+be noted: undeviatingly naturalistic as are the voice-parts in their
+structure and inflection, and despite their haughty and stoic
+intolerance of melodic effect, they yet are so contrived that they
+often yield--incidentally, as it were--effects of musical beauty; and
+in so doing, they demonstrate the unfamiliar truth that there is
+possible in music-drama a use of the voice which permits of an
+expressiveness that is both telling and beautiful, though it yields
+nothing that accepted canons would warrant us in describing as either
+melody or melodious declamation. Now Mr. Baughan, whose views
+concerning Wagner and his habits have been discussed, craves in the
+music-dramas of Wagner a frankness of melody in the vocal writing
+whose absence he deplores; and he seems to think that when this
+melodiousness of utterance is denied to the voices in modern opera,
+all that is left them is something "that an orchestral instrument
+could do as well"--something that, inferentially, is anti-vocal, or at
+least unidiomatic. It would seem that Mr. Baughan, and those who think
+as he does, fail to realise, as I have remarked before, the immensely
+important part which it is possible for modern harmony to play in the
+combination of a voice and accompanying instruments. It would not be
+difficult to demonstrate that a large part of what we are in the
+habit of regarding as a purely melodic form of vocal expression in the
+modern lyric-drama owes a large and unsuspected measure of its potency
+of effect to the modulatory character of its harmonic support. Take a
+passage that we are apt to think of as one of the most ravishingly and
+purely melodious in the whole of that fathomless well of lyric beauty,
+"Tristan und Isolde"--the passage in the duet in the second act
+beginning, "Bricht mein Blick sich wonn' erblindet." As one hears it
+sung by the two voices above the orchestra, it seems a perfect
+example of pure melodic inspiration; yet play the voice-parts, alone
+or together, without their harmonic undercurrent, and all the beauty,
+all the meaning, vanish at once: without the kaleidoscopic harmonic
+color the melodic phrases are without point, coherence, or design. But
+this is aside from the point that I would make--that the
+potentialities of modern harmony make possible a use of the voice in
+music-drama which, while it is remote from the character of formal
+melody, may yet be productive of a kind of emotional eloquence that is
+exceedingly puissant and beautiful, and that may even possess a
+seemingly lyric quality. We find a foreshadowing of this kind of
+effect in such a passage as _Tristan's_ "Bin ich in Kornwall?" where
+all of the haunting effect of the phrase is due to the modulation in
+the harmony into the G-major chord at the first syllable of
+"Kornwall." And one might point out to Mr. Baughan that this effect is
+subtly dependent upon the co-operation of the voice and the
+instruments. The phrase in the voice-part is not one "that an
+orchestral instrument could do as well", as Mr. Baughan would at once
+recognise if he were to play the accompanying chords on a piano and
+give the progression in the voice to a 'cello or a violin.
+
+But while Wagner foreshadowed this manner of making his harmonic
+support confer a special character upon the effect of the voice-part,
+he did not begin to sound its possibilities. That was left for Debussy
+to do; and for the task he was obviously equipped in a surpassing
+degree by his unprecedentedly flexible, plastic, and resourceful
+harmonic vocabulary--the richest harmonic instrument, beyond
+comparison, that music has yet known. The score of "Pelleas"
+overflows with instances of this--one may paradoxically call it
+harmonic--use of the voice: things that Wagner, with his comparatively
+limited harmonic range, could not have accomplished. As instances
+where the voice-part, without being inherently melodic, borrows a
+semblance of almost lyrical beauty from its harmonic associations,
+consider the passage in the grotto scene beginning at _Pelleas'_
+words, "Elle est tres grande et tres belle", and continuing to
+"Donnez-moi la main"; or the astonishing passage in the final love
+scene beginning at _Pelleas'_ words, "On a brise la glace avec des
+fers rougis!" or, in the last act, the expression that is given to
+_Melisande's_ phrase, "la grande fenetre...." Yet note that in such
+passages the voice-part does not, in Mr. Baughan's phrase, merely
+"weave up" with the orchestra, as he protests that it does in Wagner's
+practice; in other words, it is not simply an incidental strand in the
+general harmonic texture; it has character and individuality of its
+own, though these are absolutely dependent for their full effect upon
+their harmonic background. Nor is it, on the other hand, so assertive
+and conspicuous that it comes within the class of that which Debussy
+repudiates as "parasitic." Here, then, is a method of uttering the
+text that not only permits of a just and veracious rendering of every
+possible dramatic _nuance_, but which, by virtue of the means of
+musical enforcement that are applied to it, takes on a character and
+quality, as music, which are as influential as they are unparalleled.
+
+
+VII
+
+It has been affirmed that in "Pelleas et Melisande" Debussy has
+produced a work as commanding in quality as it is unique in
+conception and design. Let us consider what grounds there may be for
+the assertion.
+
+To begin with, its spiritual and emotional flavour are without analogy
+in the previous history, not merely of opera, but of music. Debussy is
+a man of unhampered and clairvoyant imagination, a dreamer with a
+far-wandering vision. He views the spectacle of the world through the
+magic casements of the mystic who is also a poet and visionary. One
+can easily conceive him as taking the more tranquil part in that
+provocative dialogue put by Mr. Yeats into the mouths of two of his
+dramatic characters:
+
+     "And what in the living world can happen to a man that is
+     asleep on his bed? Work must go on and coach-building must
+     go on, and they will not go on the time there is too much
+     attention given to dreams. A dream is a sort of a shadow, no
+     profit in it to anyone at all."
+
+     "There are some would answer you that it is to those who are
+     awake that nothing happens, and it is they who know nothing.
+     He that is asleep on his bed is gone where all have gone for
+     supreme truth."
+
+In Maeterlinck's "Pelleas et Melisande," Debussy has, through a
+fortunate conjunction of circumstances, found a perfect vehicle for
+his impulses and preoccupations. There will always be, naturally
+enough, persons who must inevitably regard such a work as that for
+which he and Maeterlinck are now responsible as, for the most part,
+vain, inutile, even preposterous. They are sincere in their dislike,
+these forthright and excellent people, and they are to be
+commiserated, for they are, in such a region of the imagination as
+this drama builds up about them, aliens in a world whose ways and
+whose wonders must be forever hidden from their most determined
+scrutiny. Such robust and worldly spirits, writes a thoughtful
+contemporary essayist, "that swim so vigorously on the surface of
+things," have always "a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who
+dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the
+depth holds": they will not even grant that the depths are anything
+save murky, that the tidings have validity or importance. They take
+comfort in their detachment, and are apt to speak of themselves, with
+mock humility, as "plain, blunt persons," for whom the alleged
+vacuities of such an order of art are comfortably negligible. Well,
+it is, after all, as Maeterlinck's _Pelleas_ himself observes, a
+matter not so much for mirth as for lament; yet even more is it a
+matter for resignation. There will always be, as has been observed, an
+immense and confident majority for whom that territory of the creative
+imagination which lies over the boundaries of the palpable world will
+seem worse than delusive: who will always and sincerely pin their
+faith to that which is definite and concrete, patent and direct, and
+who must in all honesty reject that which is undeclared, allusive,
+crepuscular: which communicates itself through echoes and in
+glimpses; by means of intimations, signs, and tokens. For them it
+would be of no avail to point to the dictum of one who, like
+Maeterlinck, is aware of remote voices and strange dreams: "Dramatic
+art," he has wisely said, "is a method of expression, and neither a
+hair-breadth escape nor a love affair more befits it than the
+passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange intuitions; and
+the dramatist is as free as the painter of good pictures and the
+writer of good books. All art is passionate, but a flame is not the
+less flame because we change the candle for a lamp or the lamp for a
+fire; and all flame is beautiful."
+
+It is a dictum that is scarcely calculated to persuade a very general
+acceptance: a "passionate exposition of the most delicate and strange
+intuitions" is not precisely the kind of aesthetic fare which the
+"plain, blunt man," glorying in his plainness and his bluntness, is
+apt to relish. It is a point upon which it is perhaps needless to
+dwell; but its recognition serves as explanation of the fact that the
+music-drama into which Debussy has transformed Maeterlinck's play
+should not everywhere and always be either accepted or understood.
+For in the musical setting of Debussy, Maeterlinck's drama has found
+its perfect equivalent: the qualities of the music are the qualities
+of the play, completely and exactly; and, sharing its qualities, it
+has evoked and will always evoke the more or less contemptuous
+antagonism of those for whom it has little or nothing to say.
+
+Of the quality of its style, perhaps the most obvious trait to note is
+its divergence from the kind of music-making which we are accustomed
+to regard as typically French. We have come to regard as inevitable
+the clear-cut precision, the finesse, the instinctive grace of French
+music; but we are not at all accustomed to discovering this fineness
+of texture allied with marked emotional richness, with depth and
+substance of thought--we do not look for such an alliance, nor find
+it, in any French music from Rameau to Saint-Saens, Gounod, and
+Massenet. Yet Debussy has the typical French clarity and fineness of
+surface without the French hardness of edge and thinness of substance.
+The contours of his music are as melting and elastic as its emotional
+substance is rich; and it is phantasmal rather than definite and
+clear-cut; evasive rather than direct. His art, as a matter of fact,
+has its roots in the literature rather than in the music of his
+country. His true forebears are not Rameau, Couperin, Boieldieu,
+Bizet, Saint-Saens, but Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme; and, beyond
+his own frontier, Rossetti and Maeterlinck. There is scarcely a trace
+of French musical influence in the score of "Pelleas," save for its
+limpidity of expression and its delicate logic of structure. The truth
+is that Debussy, with d'Indy, Ravel, and others, has made it
+impossible to speak any longer, without qualification, of "French"
+quality, or "French" style, in music; for to-day there is the French
+of Saint-Saens and Massenet, and the French of Debussy, d'Indy,
+Duparc, Faure, Ravel: and the two orders are as inassociable under a
+generic yoke as are the poetry of Hugo and the poetry of Verlaine.
+
+But the essential thing to observe and to praise in this music is its
+astonishing, its almost incredible, affluence of substance: its
+richness in ideas that are both extraordinarily beautiful and wholly
+new. The score, in this respect alone, is epoch-making. Debussy is the
+first music-maker since Wagner to evolve a kind of style of which the
+substance is, so to say, newly-minted. Strauss is not to be compared
+with him in this regard; for the basis of the German master's style,
+upon which he has reared no matter how wonderful a superstructure, is
+compounded of materials which he got straight from Richard Wagner and
+his great forerunner, Franz Liszt; whereas the basis, the
+starting-point, of Debussy's style--its harmonic and melodic
+stuff--existed nowhere, in any artistic shape or condition, before
+him. To speak of it as in any vital sense a reversion, because it
+makes use of certain principles of plain-song, is mere trifling.
+Debussy is a true innovator, if ever there was one. He has added fresh
+materials to the matter out of which music is evolved; and no composer
+of whom this may be said, from Beethoven to Chopin, has failed to find
+himself eventually ranked as the originator of a new order of things
+in the development of the art.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Those who feel the beauty and recognise the important novelty of the
+music of "Pelleas et Melisande" will for some time to come find it
+difficult to speak of it appreciatively without an appearance of
+extravagance. One owns, in trying to appraise it, to a compunction
+similar to that expressed by one of the wisest of modern critics,
+when, after applauding some notable poetry, he whimsically reminded
+himself that he "must guard against too great appreciation," and "must
+mix in a little depreciation," to show that he had "read attentively,
+critically, authoritatively." Well, there is no doubt a very definite
+risk in praising too warmly a masterpiece which has the effrontery to
+intrude itself upon contemporary observation, and upon a critical
+function which has but just compassed the abundantly painful task of
+adjusting its views to the masterpieces of the immediate past. I am
+quite aware that such praise of Debussy's lyric-drama as is spoken
+here will seem to many preposterous, or at best excessive. I am also
+aware that the mistaking of geese for swans is a delusion which
+afflicts generation after generation of over-confident critics, to the
+entertainment of subsequent generations and the inextinguishable
+delight of the Comic Muse--which, as Mr. Meredith has pointed out,
+watches not more vigilantly over sentimentalism than over every kind
+of excess. Yet I am willing to assert deliberately, and with a
+perfectly clear sense of all that the words denote and imply, that the
+score of "Pelleas" is richer in inner musical substance, in ideas that
+are at once new and valuable, than anything that has come out of
+modern music since Wagner wrote his final page a quarter of a century
+ago. The orchestral score is almost as long as that of "Tristan und
+Isolde"; yet in the course of its 409 pages there are scarcely half a
+dozen measures in which one cannot point out some touch of genius.
+The music is studded with felicities. One carries away from a survey
+of it a conviction of its almost continuous inspiration, of its
+profound originality. The score overflows with ideas, ideas that
+possess character and nobility, and that are often of deep and
+ravishing beauty--a beauty that takes captive both the spirit and the
+sense. It is difficult to think of more than a few scores in which the
+inspiration is so persistent and so fresh--in which there is so little
+that is _cliche_, perfunctory, derivative. Certainly, if one is
+thinking of music written for the stage, one has to go to the author
+of "Tristan" for anything comparable to it. It has been said that in
+this music Debussy is not always at his best, and the comment is
+justified. There are passages, most of them to be found in the
+interludes connecting the earlier scenes (which, it is well known,
+were extended to meet a mechanical exigency), wherein the fine and
+rare gold of his thought is intermixed with the dross of alien ideas.
+And it is equally true that the vast and wellnigh inescapable shadow
+of Wagner's genius impinges at moments upon the score: thus we hear
+"Parsifal" in the first interlude, "Parsifal" and "Siegfried" in the
+interlude following the scene at the fountain--the scene wherein
+_Melisande's_ ring is lost. But the fact is mentioned here only that
+it may be dismissed. The voice of Debussy speaks constantly out of
+this music, even when it momentarily takes the timbre of another; and
+none other, since the superlative voice of Wagner himself was stilled,
+has spoken with so potent and magical a blend of tenderness and
+passion, with so rare yet limpid a beauty, with an accent so touching
+and so underived.
+
+The nature of Debussy's harmony, and the emphasis which is laid upon
+its remarkable quality by his appreciators, have provoked the
+assertion that the score of "Pelleas" is devoid of melody, or at least
+that it is weak in melodic invention. Of course the whole matter rests
+upon what one means by "melody." The comment is a perfect
+exemplification of that critical method which consists in measuring
+new forms of expression by the standards of the past, instead of
+seeking to learn whether they do not themselves establish new
+standards by which alone they are to be appraised. The method has
+been applied to every innovator in the records of art, and it is
+probably futile to cry out against it, or to assert its stupidity. The
+music of "Pelleas" is rich in melody. It does not, as we have seen,
+reside in the voice-parts, for there Debussy, for reasons which have
+already been discussed, has deliberately and wisely avoided formal
+melodic contours. It is to be found in the orchestra--an orchestra
+which, while it depends in an unexampled degree upon a predominantly
+harmonic mode of expression, is at the same time very far from being
+devoid of melodic effect. But the melody is Debussy's melody--it is
+fatuous to expect to find in this score the melodic forms which have
+been made familiar to us by the practice of his predecessors,--men who
+themselves were made to bear the primeval accusation of melodic
+barrenness. Debussy's melodic idiom is his own, and it often baffles
+impatient or inhospitable ears by reason of its seeming
+indefiniteness, its apparently wayward movement, and because of the
+shifting and mercurial basis of harmony upon which it is imposed. It
+would be easy to instance page after page in the score where the
+melodic expression is, for those who are open to its address, of
+instant and irresistible effect: as the greater part of the scene by
+the fountain, in the second act; the whole of the tower scene--an
+outpouring of rapturous lyric beauty which, again, sends one to the
+loveliest pages of "Tristan" for a comparison; the affecting interview
+between _Melisande_ and the benign and infinitely wise _Arkel_, in the
+fourth act; the calamitous love scene in the park; and almost the
+whole of the last act. If Debussy had written nothing else than the
+entrancing music to which he has set the ecstatic apostrophe of
+_Pelleas_ to his beloved's hair, he would have established an
+indisputable claim to a melodic gift of an exquisite and original
+kind. It has been said that he is "incapable of writing sustained
+melody"; and though just how extended a melodic line must be in order
+to merit the epithet "sustained" is not quite clear, it would seem
+that in this particular scene, at all events, Debussy may be said to
+have compassed even "sustained" melody; for the melodic line--varied,
+sensitive, and plastic though it is--is here of almost unbroken
+continuity.
+
+In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder
+at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is
+individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene,
+is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing
+aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has
+discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of
+this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. One
+would not be far wrong, probably, in finding this music-drama's chief
+and final claim to the highest excellence in its triumphant character
+as an expressional achievement; in this it ranks with the supreme
+things in music. There are in the score innumerable passages which one
+is tempted to adduce as particular instances of ideally fit and
+beautiful expression. It is probably unnecessary to allege the quality
+of such examples as the scene by the fountain, the perilous encounter
+at the tower window, the final tryst in the park, or the interlude
+which accompanies the change of scene from the castle vaults to the
+sunlit terrace above the sea--music that has an entrancing radiance
+and perfume, through which blows "all the air of all the sea"--these
+things will be rightly valued by every observer of liberal
+comprehension and sensitive discernment: to name them is to praise
+them. But there are other triumphs of expression in the score whose
+quality is not so immediately to be perceived. I do not speak of the
+countless felicities of structural and external detail: felicities
+which will repay close and protracted study. I am thinking of remoter,
+less obvious felicities: of the grave beauty of the passage in which
+_Genevieve_ reads to the King the letter of _Golaud_ to his brother
+_Pelleas_[1]; of the extraordinary final measures of the first act,
+after _Melisande's_ question: "Oh! ... pourquoi partez-vous?"; of the
+delicious effect which is heard in the orchestra at _Pelleas'_ words,
+in the scene at the fountain, "... le soleil n'entre jamais"; of the
+exquisite setting of _Golaud's_ exclamation of delight over the beauty
+of _Melisande's_ hands; of the entire grotto scene,--a passage of
+superb imaginative fervour,--with its indescribably poetic ending (the
+fragment of a descending scale given out in imitation by two flutes
+and a harp); of the passage in the tower scene where the two solo
+violins in octaves sing the ravishing phrase that accompanies the
+"Regarde, regarde, j'embrasse tes cheveux ..." of the enraptured
+_Pelleas_; of the piercing effect of the _Melisande_ theme where it is
+combined with that of _Pelleas_ in the interlude which follows the
+scene at the tower window; of the passage preceding the entrance of
+_Melisande_ and _Arkel_ in the fourth act, where _Melisande's_ theme
+is heard in augmentation; of the passage in the transitional music
+following the misusing of _Melisande_ by _Golaud_ where her theme is
+played by the oboe above an interchanging phrase in the horns--a
+_diminuendo_ of inexpressible poignancy; of the impassioned soliloquy
+of _Pelleas_ preparatory to the nocturnal meeting in the park; of the
+theme which is played by the horns and 'cellos as he invites
+_Melisande_ to come out of the moonlight into the shadow of the trees;
+of the exquisite phrase given out by the strings and a solo horn as he
+asks her if she knows why he wished her to meet him; of the interplay
+of "ninth" chords which is heard, in the final act, when _Arkel_ asks
+_Melisande_ if she is cold, and the mysterious majesty of the passage
+which immediately follows, as _Melisande_ says that she wishes the
+window to remain open until the sun has sunk into the sea; of, indeed,
+the whole of the incomparable music of _Melisande's_ death; and
+finally, of that scene wherein the genius of the musician and musical
+dramatist is, as I think, most characteristically exerted: the
+curiously potent and haunting scene in which _Pelleas_ and
+_Melisande_, with _Genevieve_, watch the departure of the ship from
+the port and speak of the approaching storm. Here Debussy, in setting
+the simple yet elliptical speeches of the two tragedians, has written
+music which is of marvellously subtle eloquence in its suggestion of
+the atmosphere of impending disaster, of vague foreboding and
+oppressive mystery, which rests upon the scene. The penetrating "On
+s'embarquerait sans le savoir et l'on ne reviendrait plus" of
+_Pelleas_, sung over a lingering series of descending chords of the
+ninth; the strange, receding song of the departing sailors; the
+passage in triplets which is heard when _Pelleas_ speaks of the
+beacon light shining dimly through the mist; the veiled and sinister
+phrase in thirds on the muted horns which follows the dying-away of
+the sailors' call: these are salient moments in a masterly piece of
+psychological and (there is no other word for it) subliminal
+delineation.
+
+[Footnote 1: As one out of many instances of similarly striking
+detail, observe the remarkable and moving progression in the
+voice-part from the D in the ninth chord on B-flat to the B-natural in
+the chord of G-sharp minor, at _Genevieve's_ words "... tour qui
+regarde la mer."]
+
+Whatever Debussy may in the future accomplish--and it is not unlikely
+that he may transcend this score in adventurousness and novelty of
+style--will not imperil the unique distinction, the unique value, of
+"Pelleas et Melisande." It has had, it has been truly said, no
+predecessor, no forerunner; and there is nothing in the musical art
+that is now contemporary with it which in the remotest degree
+resembles it in impulse or character. That, as an example of the ideal
+welding of drama and music, it will exert a formative or suggestive
+influence, it is not now possible to say; but that its extraordinary
+importance as a work of art will compel an ever-widening appreciation,
+seems, to many, certain and indisputable. Thinking of this score,
+Debussy might justly say, with Coventry Patmore: "I have respected
+posterity."
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+Some of the material contained in the foregoing studies appeared
+originally in articles published in _Harper's Weekly_, _The North
+American Review_, and _The Musician_. But for the most part the essays
+are new; and such passages of earlier origin as are retained have been
+considerably altered and amplified.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Aspects of Modern Opera, by Lawrence Gilman
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