Chapter V: Part 5

How much he and Leoncavallo and Puccini owe to Ponchielli would be hard to determine. The composer of "La Gioconda" was somewhat ahead of his time, and his work was not fairly understood when it was new. But in one feature of operatic composition suggested by this work all the later composers seem inclined to go too far. They are striving to follow Verdi in his earnest attempt to set every phrase of the text of "Otello" to music perfectly adapted to the expression of its meaning. But Verdi avoided the fatal error into which these young Italians are falling. He never went so far as to obliterate from his scores all trace of melodic character.

If one were to take a dozen or twenty pages of "Tosca," "Pagliacci," "Iris," and "Zanetto," shuffle them together and then play them, it would be almost impossible for any ordinary lover of music to distinguish the writing of one composer from that of another. "Zanetto" sounds as much like Puccini as like Mascagni, and the composer of "Iris" might have written almost any page of "La Bohème." This work, however, bears the same relation to Puccini's other works as "Cavalleria Rusticana" does to the other operas of Mascagni. It is well supplied with clearly formed melodies. That is the real reason of the wide popularity of "Cavalleria Rusticana." Rarely sinking below the level of passionate expression demanded by the intense tragedy of the story, it is always purely lyric, and its melodies stamp themselves upon the memory.

The other works for the most part seem to wander along in endless stretches of melodious phrases, which have no closely organized relation to each other. They sound well, for these Italians have the trick of writing well for the singer. But they are open confessions of a fear of becoming tuneful in the old Italian style of Donizetti and Rossini. These young men seem to be constantly on the verge of writing in the aria form and of avoiding it only by thrusting in some unnatural modulation or some unexpected cadence. They seem to be striving for an endless melody, like Wagner's, which is not congenial to them. They forget that when the emotional conditions of the scene pointed to melodious music Wagner was frankly melodic, and that he wrote as lyrically as Schubert himself, though naturally constructing his melodies on a larger frame. Think of the joyous carol of the Rhine maidens in the water-woven vision of the first scene of the great trilogy; of the hard-wrung tribute of the crafty Loge to "Weibes Wonne und Werth"; of the love song of Siegmund, the duet between him and Sieglinde, the heart-rending farewell of the stricken god in the last scene; of Siegfried's Titanic cradle song to his infant sword; of the nightingale twitter of the forest bird, of the throbbing love duet of the third act of "Siegfried"; of the ebullient duet in the first scene of "Götterdämmerung"; of the chorus of Gunther's men, of the narrative of Siegfried, and of the stupendous threnody of Brünnhilde's immolation. Wagner was not afraid to write songs when he needed them in his art.

It is a grave mistake to sell the Italian birthright of vocal melody for a mess of orchestral pottage. And it is altogether unnecessary. These young Italians must let alone their attempts to set reason to music. Their latest librettos contain too much philosophizing and not enough passion. Zanetto is altogether too sophisticated to be typical. Sylvia thinks too much. Osaka in "Iris" is altogether too much a man of the world. Iris is a human doll. Kyoto is an accomplished speculator in human folly. These are not figures to be animated with great music. They forbid its presence. These young Italians must get back to a realization of the fundamental truth that music is the speech of emotion. Love, hate, fear, elation, depression, grief,--these are for music to interpret. But you cannot discuss Christianity and positivism in lyrics, nor make intelligent comment in six-eight time on the causes of poverty. The limitations of music are far smaller even than those of lyric poetry, yet its field is as large as that of the true drama, for it is that of all human emotion.

Do they need a model? Well, there is one of whom they seemingly know not. Away back in the years before even Rossini assailed flaccid Paris with the strenuous peal of "William Tell," a German boy of seventeen wrote in 1814 a song called "Gretchen am Spinnrade," and the following year he cast upon the waters that marvellous condensed drama "Der Erl-König." In the five minutes of that one song by Franz Peter Schubert lies the history of a human soul. It is an epitome of emotion, and the piano does quite as much as the voice--but not more--in the expression. If the young Italians would like to learn something more than they already know about the way to build condensed opera, let them study the songs of Schubert. There they will find a solution of the problem of how to combine perfect vocal melody with a dramatic accompaniment without sacrificing one iota of dramatic verity.

An additional question of high import is whether these young firebrands are not setting the torch to the roots of nationality in their art. It is useless for theoreticians to argue that there is no nationality in music. There is nationality in all art, and the "Virgin" painted by Rubens is a Flemish woman just as surely as she is Italian when limned by Michael Angelo. There never was a German who could have conceived the lilt of "Funiculi, funicula," nor an Italian who could have composed "Schwesterlein." No Russian could have penned the dainty "Pierre et sa Mie," nor could a Frenchman have imagined "Ay Ouchnem." Only an Englishman could have written "Rule Britannia," of which Wagner said that the first four measures contained the whole character of the English people.

Nationality shows itself most conspicuously in song. Instrumental music is at best an artificial species. Its forms, its methods, are handed from one nation to another, and the Harvard graduate builds his symphony upon the Viennese model of Papa Haydn. But the musical idioms of a people cannot be kept out of their songs. The folk song was ignored successfully for a thousand years, but in certain happy days of the Middle Ages it wooed and won the fugue, and modern music, strong with the strength of musical science, beautiful with the beauty of spontaneous emotional utterance, was the fruit of this union. But for all time the idiom of the folk song colored the vocal art. The musical idioms imposed themselves on the scientific basis, and when a German or a Frenchman or an Italian composed a song, he composed it with a counterpoint common through all Europe, but with the melodic idiom of the songs of his own people.

The Italians of to-day have not wholly forgotten the essentials of their native melody. Indeed, their composing betrays a deep self-consciousness. They see the character of their own music and try to escape it, and it is of this very act that complaint is here made. But the fundamentals of Italian melody are not entirely lost. The pages of Puccini's "Manon," "La Bohème," and "Tosca" are not completely devoid of song which is indisputably Italian. No one would ever mistake it for French or German. But it is no longer the melody of Donizetti and Bellini. That is well. The Italian masters of the beginning of this century wrote tunes for their own sake without thought of their dramatic expressiveness, and Donizetti did not hesitate to stop the entire action of his "Lucia" at one of the most critical points in order that the famous sextet might be sung.

The modern Italians do not fall into that sort of error. They are striving with all their power to compose dramatically. They are striving, too, to preserve Italian music, and for this all honor should be shown them. More than that, they have shown plainly the path along which Italian music should advance. They have demonstrated beyond question that the aria, which was the central sun of the old Neapolitan system of opera, is wholly unessential. They have shown that the dialogue of the lyric drama can be carried on in a musical speech which is melodious, but not dominated by musical patterns. They have illustrated to the full the possibilities of a flexible and eloquent recitative. They have carried to a high degree of excellence the art of fitting the musical accent to the word, and the contour of the phrase to the natural inflection of the speech. This they have done, too, in the full knowledge that their art in this detail is quite lost upon the general public and appeals only to a few studious critics of their music.

They have abolished from the Italian stage the foolish repetitions of lines of the text as syllables on which to hang cadenzas. They have wiped out the empty colorature song, designed solely for the amazement of groundlings and for the glorification of the prima donna. They have almost terminated the career of the prima donna herself, and substituted for her, if not the singing actress of Wagner, at least an acting songstress. They have placed Italian opera beside French in its honest search after theatric directness. Italian opera is no longer music and nothing else: it is what its early fathers intended it should be, _drama per musica_.

The movement of the young Italians toward dramatic verity, as already noted, did not originate in a weak surrender to the conquest of Europe by Wagner. The "Gioconda" of Ponchielli, produced in 1876, shows not a single trace of Wagnerian influence; and yet to that work as much as to any other are the young Italians indebted. They have travelled the path on which Ponchielli was moving, but they have gone much farther than he did. Ponchielli utilized the orchestral forces with high skill, and his dramatic recitative was far ahead of that found in Verdi's earlier works. For a second-rate master he attained extraordinary influence over his successors. Alas! that suggests that they are even less than second-rate, and it is quite possible that the near future will decide that they were less than third-rate. But we of the present must take them as they appear to us, and endeavor to learn from their works whither operatic music is tending.

Boito's "Mefistofele," which is as old as 1868, gave these young Italians much to think of, so much indeed that one can trace a good deal more than a family resemblance between the introduction of Mascagni's "Iris" and the prologue in heaven in the Boito work. But the young men have striven again to make advances. That they have endeavored to introduce into their music an Italianized Wagnerism is the fault for which they must be most severely blamed, for in doing this they have wandered away from true nationalism and have betrayed their birthright.

It is not possible in a brief essay to point out the details of the methods of these young men. It may be said, however, that what they have apparently striven to do is to rear a distorted vocal structure, composed of the elements of the older Italian singing style, upon a foundation of acrid, restless, changeful, distressful harmonies. It may perhaps be injudicious to find fault with them for this, for no thoughtful observer of musical progress can fail to see that toward something new and strange in harmonic sequences all music is advancing. One needs only to think of the French operas of Bruneau and Charpentier, the piano music of the young Russians, the vast orchestral tone-riddles of Richard Strauss. If the use of strictly technical terms may be allowed, the harmony of to-day is no longer diatonic; it is not even chromatic; it is the harmony of the minor second. In other words, it is the harmony in which the sharpest of all dissonances, that of two tones only a semitone apart, is prevalent. In the presence of this style of harmony the chord of the diminished seventh becomes as gentle as the tonic triad, for music is filled with what the eloquent and witty James Huneker once happily called "diseased chords of the twenty-sixth."

This style of harmony is not natural to Italian music. The genius of Italian song is utterly opposed to it. The proclivities of the Italian people are inimical to it. It is not adapted to the methods and traditions of the Italian lyric drama, and it has not been found necessary by the writers of the greatest masterpieces of Italian opera. Verdi and Boito were able to construct their notable works without it. Mascagni, on the other hand, has forced his music into this uncongenial way. His "Iris" teems with harsh and discordant harmonies, and in order to set the melodic voice-parts on this uneasy basis he has been compelled to twist the melodic curves of Italian song into unseemly angles.

Now these are facts. Just what they are to signify in the progress of musical art only a very confident person would venture to predict. Where is Italian opera? That question we may answer. Whither is it going? To that we can only hazard a reply. We may, too, be wholly wrong in supposing that it is an evil day for art when Italian opera sacrifices anything of its intense nationality for the sake of rivalling the drastic music-drama of Richard Wagner. Critics are not prophets. They can only study the conditions of art in their own day, and try to reconcile them with those standards which the experience of time has shown to be the highest. As Mr. Webster once intimated, the only way to judge of the future is by the past. That method points to the conclusion that nothing good will come of the effort to dethrone the national genius. On the other hand, this effort looks amazingly like a confession of weakness.

It looks as if the young Italians were not of fruitful inventiveness in the production of thematic ideas. All the good tunes have not been written yet. John Stuart Mill confessed that for a time he was troubled with a fear that because there were only seven tones in the scale all the possible melodic ideas were nearly exhausted. But it has been noted that in spite of the immense drain made on the scale by Bach and Mozart and Weber and Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann there were still tunes enough to make a Dvorak, a Tschaïkowsky, a Brahms, and a Wagner.

II.--THE CLASSIC OF THE UNPROGRESSIVE

But how may he find Arcady
Who hath nor youth nor melody?

H. C. BUNNER, _The Way to Arcady_.

In these tumultuous times of Strauss and Wagner, with the furies of intellectual realism pursuing us and the sirens of seductive emotionalism panting before us, the persistence with which Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" clings to the lyric stage impels us toward the complacent conclusion that this work is become the classic of the musically unprogressive. This seems a hazardous statement, yet it may be shown without undue effort to enjoy a substantial and definite basis. The names of Racine and Molière, of Gluck and Lully, rise before the memory when the term "classic" is employed, but one should also not forget that there are thousands of well-intentioned persons to whom that is classic which is just far enough above the level of their ordinary thought to command respect. To the whistler of operetta jingles all music not to be whistled is classic. Stendahl said, in making a distinction too often made arbitrarily: "Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers."

If this demarcation of Stendahl's be correct, then "Lucia" is twice blessed in that it is both classic and romantic. For there is no doubt that it gave much pleasure to our grandfathers, nor is there any room for suspicion that it is not congenial to a "popular" audience in the actual state of its habits and beliefs. No doubt, indeed, there is a sort of gentle romanticism in "Lucia." The personages are of the class of lords and ladies, and there is something quite imposing in the strut of their boots and the waving of their feathers. One must even be impressed by the sight of the noble Scotch maiden wandering in the forest in a long-trained gown accompanied by a companion who wears low neck and short sleeves. We realize that we are in fashionable company, and we prepare for the worst. When Edgardo marches upon the scene just as Lucia has signed the futile contract, our expectations are realized, and we gaze upon the revelation of the secrets of high life with an interest almost as direct and eloquent as that of the chorus itself. The madness of Lucy, accompanied by the winsome and ingenuous accents of the flute, touches us deeply, and when Edgardo, wandering among the tombs of his sainted fathers, learns that Lucy has ceased to live, and stabs himself, breathing out his life in that sweet melody (with chorus), "A te vengo," we are dissolved in tears.

This is romanticism in truth, and unless he be of those who preserve in middle age the intellectual grasp of childhood, one cannot find in this work any qualities of the classic beyond its familiarity to our grandfathers, except in the meaning of the dictum of Sainte-Beuve, "Les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parce qu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont energiques, frais, dispos." Now this last word is open to misconstruction. It may mean "cheerful" and it may mean "disposed" or "orderly." In the case of "Lucia" either meaning will answer, for it is the "energique" rather than the "dispos" that makes us trouble in the application of the definition of Sainte-Beuve. There are fuss and fury in the strenuous utterances of the tenor in the scene of the tearing of the contract, but these can hardly be called energy in the meaning in which the French author was using the word. Youthful and cheerful, innocent and ingenuous,--these, indeed, are adjectives which may well be applied to the masterpiece of the composer of "Il Castello di Kenilworth" and other operas. For those who are living in the past of musical art "Lucia" is a classic, and it is also a living romance. It gave joy to their grandfathers, and it sends through their own nerves mild thrills, not discomforting, and not impeded by intellectual problems in tone.

When one comes beyond the "Lucia" period in operatic art, he may fairly enroll himself in the ranks of those whom Walter Pater calls "spiritual adventurers,"--those who are ready to put out on unknown seas of art experience and who are notable for their active mistrust of the teachings of their grandfathers. Some of these are fools, but this fact only serves to remind one of a wise saying of that very wise man, Robert Louis Stevenson: "Shelley was a young fool, and so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity."

It is seldom that men take things as they come in music in this "forlorn stupidity," for they set themselves stubbornly against the new. Yet the attitude of those who sit in amiable comfort at performances of "Lucia" and who go away saying, "Now that's the kind of music I like," with a tremendous accent on the "I,"--an accent which is plainly the thank-offering of the Pharisee,--they are surely insensible to the jars, if not to the incongruities, of the modern musical world. And the spiritual adventurers will presently say to them: "We are at the parting of our ways. Linger you, if you will, in the valley with your Donizetti and his three-four ditties and his big guitar. We are for the mountain with Wagner and Tschaïkowsky and the thunder-storms."

But perchance it may occur to you to question whether they are not happier in their serene movelessness than those who are continually scaling heights. There is even some doubt about this, for they experience occasional twinges of discomfort when they hear of persons enjoying exclusive satisfaction in such works as "Falstaff" or "Otello" or "Die Meistersinger," which are to them poppy and mandragora. But there is something more pitiable than this in their sad state. That is their inability to enjoy the classics of the musically progressive.

The man or woman who is not subservient to a factitious taste in music, who has not habituated the intellectual palate to the enjoyment of Wagner alone, or of Rossini alone,--he it is whose soul is enriched by a wider range of impressions. For him no flower of music blooms in vain. For him there is some very special loveliness in the operas written before the flood-gates of modern romanticism were opened. For him there is still edification in the stately measures of Gluck's "Orfeo," and there is a fountain of inexhaustible pleasure in the immortal "Don Giovanni" of Mozart. To him the latter, in particular, is a perennial "Fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro." Ability to penetrate to the heart of these works is an evidence of musical aristocracy. They are not for the common herd. The children of melodic and harmonic darkness are not enlightened by them. They shine for the few, the chosen few, who march with Music herself as their leader. To hear "Lucia" after one of these is like drinking iced water after eating ice-cream. The Donizettian masterpiece becomes suddenly lukewarm.

It has been said that in art there is no such thing as standing still. But the appreciation of art is surely a different matter. Music, the youngest of the arts, is in the very press of her first forward march. She is in the possession of the priceless gift of unwearied strength. Her technical resources have not as yet been fully explored. She has mines of mere matter which have not yet been opened up. Her future is big with promise. But whatever that future may be, it will be the direct product of her past. She will never be able to cut the chains that bind her to Bach any more than poetry can break the bonds which tie her to David, the son of Jesse. Some of us are prone to forget this, and to think that we are of the army of progress when we neglect Bach and Beethoven and the prophets for the preachers of our own era. But there would have been no Brahms without a Haydn, and there would have been no Wagner without a Mozart.

It requires an æsthetic immobility unfortunately none too rare to stand still and enjoy "Lucia di Lammermoor" and "La Sonnambula" in a period when the whole spirit and outward form of musical art are tending directly away from them. The fact that so many persons can do it is but an evidence of what we know to our regret; namely, that most men and women refuse to take these things seriously. They hold that the opera is only a form of amusement and that it is absurd to fall into disputes about it. Art is a pretty word to them; but if its meaning includes a command that they are to regard their "amusements" with grave eyes and to exercise the faculties of their minds upon them, away with it to the realms of outer darkness!

This is not an attitude which history encourages. Men have always been stern in the defence of their playthings, and they have always taken their pleasures very seriously. The whole Trojan war was about a man's passing fancy for a woman. More bitter wars than that have been waged for the sake of acquiring wealth and power, and to what end? That the possessors might buy playthings therewith. Grown-up children have their toys, but they wear graver aspects than the dolls and Noah's Arks of childhood. Sometimes the dolls become soldiers and the arks battleships in the nursery of a German Emperor. And so the world suddenly realizes that the pursuit of amusements is a large game, while his Majesty, perchance, practises a little music now and then, that some day he may fiddle while Rome burns.

Some of us are content to remain awake to the fact that, as Taine says, "At bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in life but our dreams," and to feel that this lovely art of music is a chief among these dreams. Those of us who are of this mind naturally enough plume ourselves on our relationship to the kings who have made wars for playthings. But we have a secret satisfaction in the assurance that when the kings are forgotten and the boundaries of their kingdoms blotted from the maps of the world, the art of music will still be in the possession of the hearts of men. And then we wonder if the musically unprogressive will still be clinging to their jingling classic, "Lucia di Lammermoor"?

It is not a question to be answered lightly, for in these days the number of the lovers of "Lucia" is not to be estimated by the size of the audiences in the great opera-houses. There the fashion of the hour rules, and the mellow thunders of Wagner are enjoyed even with the lights turned down and the gowns in the gloom of a very precious manifestation of musical progress. It is in the unfashionable theatres that we must look for the evidences of the continued popularity of the masterpiece of the incontinent Donizetti. For the audiences of these houses are distinguished by a noble independence of thought. They like what they like, and they do not care who disapproves of it. And they adore "Lucia" even unto this day. But they do not love Mozart on the one hand, nor Wagner and the senescent Verdi on the other. And for that reason they are at a standstill. They are the inglorious army of the musically unprogressive.

Out of this conclusion may come an inference as false as it is unattractive. If the lovers of "Lucia" are unprogressive, is, then, a great singer who still sings this part their leader? One may be tempted for a moment to utilize an apt jest and say with one of Mr. Gilbert's most delightful personages, "Bless you, it all depends." If the great artist is great only by reason of the manner in which she sings Lucia, then she is a star of the unprogressive. But if she chance to be Marcella Sembrich and to sing Mozart as beautifully as she sings Donizetti and with the added understanding which is essential to the interpretation of the classic of the progressive, then she is a leader of progress, although she still finds a field for the exercise of her talents in the world of the complacent.

And if the artist be a tenor and be called Caruso, then he may sing Edgardo and die of an aromatic melody in the moonlight amid general blessings.

THE ORATORIO OF TO-DAY

Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery
and an instrument of ten strings. Sing unto Him a new song:
play skilfully with a loud noise.

_Psalms_ xxxiii. 2, 3.

England, where, as Mr. Gilbert was good enough to tell us in "Iolanthe," every child is born either a Liberal or a Conservative, leans both ways within the comfortable domain of oratorio. Chorus answers unto chorus and fugues pursue the even tenor (or bass, as the case may be) of their way, as they did in the brave days of old, when the Saxon sputtered in the Haymarket and threatened to pitch recalcitrant prima donnas out of windows. The festival of the three choirs preserves for the edification of a prosaic and stiffnecked generation the majestic sonorities of Handel and the subtle intimacies of the introspective Bach.

The prancing of Elgar into this peaceful world with his pocket full of leading motives, with a dramatization of the very throne of the Invisible, and a suggestion of the Mary Magdalen of Wagner, neither astonishes nor stirs the critics. The harsh yell of the shofar disturbs them no more than the profound rumble of the contrabassoon. And since Mendelssohn left his "Elijah" ceaselessly clamoring for the costumes, the action, and the footlights of the stage, no Englishman is to be set staring by the projection of a sacred drama upon his field of vision.

After all, it was only in the day of Handel that the Bishop of London decided for us that oratorios should no more be acted. How do we know that, if things continue to go forward along the present lines, we shall not have a later bishop determining that the oratorio ought to be acted and thereby excluded from the hallowed precincts of famous cathedral towns? Then the censorious throng which has looked askance upon the New World performances of "Parsifal" would find that panorama of a young pilgrim's progress as innocuous as one of the "Four Serious Songs" of Brahms.

To those who watch with some solicitude the march of musical progress, it looks as if we were in the midst of a transition in the world of oratorio. A very peaceful transition, indeed, it is; for we are no longer to be excited by a comparison of Handel with other masters. We care not a pinch of snuff whether Coleridge-Taylor be a genius or not. We go once a year to hear "The Messiah," and occasionally we remember with a sort of mild surprise that Handel also wrote "Israel in Egypt." When Mr. Elgar comes along with his revolutionary notions, compounded of Carissimi, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, we view them with a placidity which would be amusing were it not so stupid. The times have changed, indeed, since Gray wrote to Swift, on Feb. 23, 1723:--

"As for the reigning amusement of the town, it is entirely
music; real fiddles, bass viols and hautboys; not poetical
harps, lyres and reeds. There's nobody allowed to say 'I
sing' but an eunuch or an Italian woman. Everybody is grown
now as great a judge of music as they were in your time of
poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from
another now daily dispute about the different styles of
Handel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have forgot Homer and
Virgil and Cæsar; or at least, they have lost their ranks.
For in London and Westminster, in all polite conversations,
Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever
lived."

True, this pother was all anent opera, which even to this day evokes a considerable gush of invalid comment about glorified tenors and sopranos. At least the men of the opera to-day are actually masculine, but there is an echo of the Handelian period in the adoration of tenors. But that, as the pleasant Mr. Kipling was wont to say in his pleasantest tales, is another story. It was but a flight of years till London town cackled as busily about Handel's oratorios as it had about his operas. A private letter from London, printed in Faulkner's Journal (Dublin) of March 12, 1743, said:--

"Our friend, Mr. Handel, is very well, and things have taken
quite a different turn here from what they did some time
past; for the publick will no longer be imposed on by Italian
singers and wrong-headed undertakers of bad operas, but
find out the merit of Mr. Handel's compositions and English
performances. The new oratorio (called Samson) which he
composed since he left Ireland, has been performed four times
to more crowded audiences than ever were seen; more people
being turned away for want of room each night than hath been
at the Italian opera."

Nevertheless, even in those days there was little enough distinction between the styles of the opera and the oratorio, and not many years before Handel's day there had been none at all. Both opera and oratorio sprang from the same soil and were nurtured by the same fount, the drama of Greece. Cavaliere's "Anima e Corpo" was a delectable theatrical performance, prepared under the direction of a very good man, St. Philip Neri, with the laudable aim of drawing young persons away from the vulgar secular shows of Rome in the dawn of the seventeenth century. Like "Die Zauberflöte" this oratorio ended with a chorus, "to be sung, accompanied sedately and reverentially by the dance." How deep was the reverence and how reposeful the sedateness may be gathered from the fact that the ballet was "enlivened with capers or _entrechats_."

A religious drama it was, this early oratorio, and it battled its way into popularity by the mighty power of music. Its arch-enemy was the old mystery and miracle play, which made of every religious story something more lively than even an oratorio with a ballet enriched with capers. To combat the attractiveness of the popular religious play the oratorio had to cling to the stage, the costume, and the footlights, and it would have been little stranger to read in the time of Carissimi (1582-1672) than it was, in the century before his birth, the famous Coventry bill of expenses, which contains these items.

Paid for a pair of gloves for God 2d.
Paid for four pairs of angels' wings 2s. 8d.
Paid for mending of hell head 6d.
Paid for a pound of hemp to mend the angels' heads 4d.

But Carissimi, and still more directly after him Stradella, advanced the oratorio toward a style in which acting was to become incongruous. Stradella had the Handelian feeling for mass effects. He perceived the true use of the great chorus, and he piled up majestic climaxes with a skill marvellous for his time. He died four years before Handel was born, but he had already carved out that definiteness of structure which is so salient a feature of Handel's works. The drift away from the dramatic character had already begun. Indeed, Dr. Parry in his admirable "Evolution of the Art of Music" expresses doubt that even the works of Carissimi can have been intended for action. Still, we must not forget that whether oratorio should or should not be acted remained an unsettled question till the decision of the good Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, in Handel's day.

However, a comprehensive view of the works of Handel and Bach shows that the oratorio had in their time been clearly differentiated in style and purpose from the opera. Bach's employment of the tenor narrator places his Passions on a ground far removed from the pictorial presentation of the stage. We know, too, that Bach wrote for church performance. Handel's oratorios designed for the concert platform were quite as far away as Bach's from the manner of the theatre, though they departed in a different direction.

Dear old Papa Haydn, who wept with emotion when he heard the Hallelujah chorus and exclaimed, "He is the master of us all," was even less dramatic than either Handel or Bach, for although they used no dramatic forms, they had their mighty outbursts of emotional expression; while their declamation, as well as their massive climaxes, often rises far above the trumpery effects of the opera of their period.

But Haydn was a most gentle spirit. He was too full of the fluid of humility and too much given to amiable reflection to approach dramatic effects. His music in both the "Creation" and "The Seasons" is descriptive, commentary, and speculative. It is delightful and it is exceedingly mild. It dwells comfortably in a peaceful atmosphere very remote from that of the nervous theatricalism of Carissimi or the impulsive eloquence of Stradella. It is just as far, too, from the poignant intensity of the psychic personification found in Bach's music. Bach's Christ is the living Son of God, but always in the heavens. It is a Christ of the inmost soul, not of the imaginative eye. It is a Christ of the heart, and has no pictorial form.

But Haydn sets a world before us, and lets us hear the rushing of the waters and the sighing of the winds. It was reserved for a thoroughly cultivated master to unify in his work the elements found in all these predecessors. Mendelssohn, without letting go of the Protestant chorale, which was so potent in the Bach Passion, or the massed chorus which Handel learned from Stradella how to use, or the orchestral description of Haydn, or the flexible recitative of Carissimi, succeeded in producing a new form of purely dramatic oratorio. His "Elijah" flashed forth as a religious opera. It might be put on the stage and acted. It stands almost perfectly adapted to such use, and would certainly prove far more influential in the theatre than "Anima e Corpo" did even in its own day. Mendelssohn was not a mighty genius, but he was a most clever adapter.

Since his day oratorio has wavered between the Italian dramatic form of the earliest period and a modernization of the Bach form. English composers have over and over again written for their festivals on the lines of Handel or Mendelssohn, seemingly without a clear discernment of the inner characteristics which differentiated the two. Continental composers have made all sorts of experiments. Gounod even tried in his "Redemption" to show how the melodic style of "Faust" could be superimposed on the ground plan of Bach. It is needless to say that the scheme met with a cheering failure. Oil and water would not mix.

Edgar Tinel, whose "St. Franciscus" was produced in Brussels in 1888, was the first to make a deliberate attempt to return to the earliest dramatic form of the Italians. He certainly did not contemplate a stage performance, but he wrote in the fashion of the lyric drama of his time. He used the whole apparatus of the German opera except the leading motive. But Tinel failed in one important particular. He was unable to use the means of the opera without making it produce the speech of the theatre. His oratorio smells of the stage. It is a religious drama only because its story is in a measure religious. The music and much of the thought are, to say the least, secular. It may not be going too far to say that sometimes they are profane.

Now, what has Edward Elgar accomplished, and what does the character of his work indicate as the present tendency of oratorio? In his musical method he has striven to demonstrate that Bach and Wagner were of one blood. And, indeed, who that has heard the twining polyphony of five themes near the end of the "Meistersinger" prelude ever doubted that both of these masters sprang from the loins of Palestrina, the son of the house of Ockeghem? Elgar has preserved for the necessity of oratorio the narrator, though he has diversified his recitation by dividing it among the voices.

This preservation of the narrator is the one characteristic of the contemporaneous oratorio form which proclaims to the world that the mandate of the Bishop of London is still in force. Nothing else in the score would disclose this fact. Everything is constructed on dramatic lines; everything is conceived in the mood of Mendelssohn's "Elijah." The tremendous picture of the entrance of the soul of Gerontius into the shrine of the Invisible and the descriptive speech of Mary Magdalen on her tower, accompanied by the sounds of the orgy, demand most eloquently the accompaniment of pictorial scenes. And these are but two examples taken at random from scores prolific in similar instances.

The distribution of the narrative among several voices is the method of Handel, but in the treatment of the choruses Elgar has learned still more from that master. Here we have lessons accepted from both Bach and the Saxon, and in the dawn of the twentieth century we find a product of the skill of Stradella in handling huge masses of tone.

In the employment of one set of choruses representative of actors in the story and another of purely commentary nature, Elgar has followed Bach's method in "The Passion." He has honored aged custom in allotting the words of Jesus to a bass voice. The treatment of the post-ascension speeches of the Saviour as choral, or many-voiced, is as old as Heinrich Schütz.

Furthermore, Mr. Elgar has preserved the ecclesiastic character in his music by adhering to the use of the polyphonic devices which were created by church composers and which have sternly resisted the efforts of the ablest masters, even of Verdi, to lend themselves to the restless utterance of the music drama. Elgar's polyphony is by no means stencilled in form; his fugues are not fugues of the North German pattern. He handles single and double counterpoint with consummate ease and with the assured freedom of one who dares to depart from the beaten path without fear of disaster.

Added to this is the employment of a harmonic style which belongs entirely to the present day. Mr. Elgar's polyphony is built on a harmonic basis which almost completely ignores the ecclesiastic tonalities of the earlier church writers and utilizes the diatonic and chromatic scheme of the present, the method of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." It is as far from Handel as it is from Mendelssohn. Its source is without question the inexhaustible fount of musical learning, the music of Sebastian Bach, but it is Bach studied by the lamp of Brahms and recited with the tongue of Wagner.

Brahms was himself a filter of Bach, and this might seem to indicate that the Sebastianism of Elgar was exceeding thin. But the English writer, while considering the work of the composer of the "German Requiem," has accepted suggestions from it only as to manner. For the original matter he has gone back to the real master of all masters. In his recitatives he again has shown a profound understanding of the psychologic nature of Bach's declamation. Upon it, as a foundation, he has reared a style of his own, very flexible, full of variety and as changeful in its harmonic undercurrents as a sunset sky.

To these derivations from the art of Bach and others Elgar has added much of the material of to-day's music. In the first place, he has permitted the diatonic major mode to occupy its own proud place as the chief medium for the expression of the optimistic emotions. Bach seldom tarried loner in major keys. He was lingering under the influence of the ecclesiastic modes. Elgar has emancipated his oratorio music from the domination of these modes, but he has not, like Handel and Mendelssohn--the one governed by the Omphalic distaff of Italian opera and the other writing in an age when the minor was always relative--neglected their significance entirely.

Secondly, he has utilized the whole splendor of the modern orchestra and has extended it in every direction which seemed to him necessary. He has employed gongs, both great and small; cymbals ancient and modern, bells with and without keyboard mechanism, tambourine and triangle. Of course, he has written elaborately for the organ; he would not be a loyal son of the royal house of Bach if he had not.

Thirdly, he has gone over, horse, foot, and baggage, to the Wagnerian camp and armed himself from head to foot with leading motives. In "The Apostles" there are ninety-two of them--just two more than Hans von Wolzogen found in the whole of "Der Ring des Nibelungen." The result is that there is almost no free composition in the score; it is all woven out of the motives. The web thus woven is sometimes thick, sometimes thin. Motives steal upon us singly or crowd before us four at a time, writhing in a counterpoint, sometimes forming most beautiful orchestral cloud shapes and again smearing garish shades and monstrous outlines across the musical firmament. Elgar never shrinks from outlandish combinations. He is as daring as Strauss. He makes fearful ugliness when he wishes to do so. But he does everything with a delineative purpose. He is the Wagnerite of oratorio.

To Wagner's ingenious scheme of interweaving and developing leading motives Elgar has joined the ground plan of polyphonic choral writing which was the secret of the influence of Bach and Handel, but Elgar has a palette with a thousand tone tints which they never knew. He has all the delicate inner tracery of modern harmonization to throw additional lights and shades upon his colors.

In a word, Elgar has brought together in his oratorios all the expressional power of modern musical romanticism, whether found in the descriptive tone pictures of the instrumentalists, the declamation of the dramatists, or the orchestration of the contemporaneous opera. What is the result? We have now oratorio quite as dramatic as Tinel's, but saved from mere theatricalism by the artistic discretion of the composer.

But the thing itself is anomalous. As we have noted, the narrator becomes an imperative necessity, because oratorio now demands scenic representation, and that is forbidden. How much more imposing would "The Apostles" be if we would frankly go back to the way of Cavaliere and put it on the stage! Why enact "Parsifal" and not this? Which is the truer tale, the more convincing art? This "Apostles" reads like that question-begging version of "Parsifal" as a narrative poem in which all the stage directions are turned into descriptive verse. Set those descriptions to music and have them recited by singers in evening dress and you have your "Parsifal" in correct oratorio form.

Are we afraid of it? Or is it simply that certain good people to whom the theatre is a place accursed must have their dramatic excitements in some other form? Let us, if you will, go to a dimly lighted concert hall and sit with our heads bent over our scores while ladies and gentlemen, gloved and in evening dress, narrate and chant to us a tremendous drama, helped out by all the resources of modern delineative music, and we try to see the action with our mind's eye. Thus shall we salve our consciences and perform the tragedy of the Passion within the four walls of our skulls. This may perchance insure to us that salvation which might be endangered were we fearlessly to countenance an actual presentation of the drama on the stage.

The oratorio of to-day tends steadily toward the completion of a cycle. It started from the primitive religious play of Cavaliere, and through the development of the method of choral composition reached a point at which all conception of action disappeared. From that point it has been slowly and surely moving around to the restoration of the dramatic element, till now it stands once more at the very threshold of the theatre. In its present form it is an absurdity. Even the singers find it almost impossible to sing the oratorios of the new sort without putting at least facial expression into their work, and every one of them looks solemnly conscious of the foolishness of evening dress. Mr. Elgar's interpretation makes Judas Iscariot altogether too realistic for a white waistcoat, and his Mary Magdalen in a Princess gown with kid-gloved arms is a portrait which would make Henner gasp and Ruskin stare.

NOTE

The chapters of this volume, except three, appeared originally as articles in the NEW YORK SUN in the course of the two years during which I have had the honor to serve that paper. The first half of the chapter on "Strauss and the Song Writers" and the chapter entitled "The Classic of the Unprogressive" were first printed in the NEW YORK TIMES, of which it was my privilege to be musical editor for some years. The first of the four articles on Richard Strauss was previously published in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of the journals named for permission to incorporate the essays in this book.

W. J. H.

THE STORY OF MUSIC.

BY W. J. HENDERSON.

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"Mr. Henderson tells in a clear, comprehensive, and logical way the story of the growth of modern music. The work is pre-fixed by a newly-prepared chronological table, which will be found invaluable by musical students, and which contains many dates and notes of important events that are not further mentioned in the text.... Few contemporary writers on music have a more agreeable style, and few, even among the renowned and profound Germans, a firmer grasp of the subject. The book, moreover, will be valuable to the student for its references, which form a guide to the best literature of music in all languages. The story of the development of religious music, a subject that is too often made forbidding and uninteresting to the general reader, is here related so simply as to interest and instruct any reader, whether or not he has a thorough knowledge of harmonics and an intimate acquaintance with the estimable dominant and the deplorable consecutive fifths. The chapter on instruments and instrumental forms is valuable for exactly the same reasons."--NEW YORK TIMES.

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AS I KNEW HIM.

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