Chapter X: Act V: The Forum (1)

I need hardly tell you the original story—how Mathô, the fierce Libyan warrior, first saw the lovely daughter of Hamilcar; how he resolved to win her; the rape of the sacred veil of Tanit, called the Zäimph, and Salammbô’s terror at seeing it shroud the person of a Barbarian in her sleeping chamber; the pursuit, the escape, the return of Hamilcar and the resolve of Salammbô to win back for Carthage its holy veil. Who can describe after Flaubert the massed shock of armies, the pillage of cities and the crucifixion of the lions! To the march of his sonorous sentences we move through strange scenes, scenes of repulsive horror, slaughtered men and beasts, and the odor of sun-baked carcasses, over which hover obscene winged creatures seeking carrion.

Salammbô, after a hieratic ceremonial with the huge sacred serpent of the temple—Rodin alone might execute this episode in shivering marble—visits the tent of Mathô, recovers the Zäimph, but meets with an accident. She discovers her love for the Mercenary chief, who justly besieges Carthage for the pay of his soldiers, and she snaps the gold anklet-chain that daughters of patricians wore in those times. Mathô is captured, tortured by having to run the gantlet of Carthage’s enraged populace, and finally drops before the terraced throne upon which sits Salammbô beside her affianced husband, Narr’ Havas, the Numidian. The poor hunted wretch, over whose red flesh the skin hangs in bloody strips, dies, and his heart is cut out before the eyes of Salammbô. She takes poison from a goblet handed her by the expectant bridegroom. All who touch the veil of Tanit must perish. So is it decreed by the law and the prophets!

M. du Locle has altered this significant ending by making Salammbô stab herself, and then Mathô—by the usual “frenzied and superhuman effort”—breaks his bonds and carves himself into eternity. It is sweetly gory and melodramatic, this ending. Of course, the trip through the aqueduct is omitted and the theft of the Zäimph takes place before Salammbô’s eyes. This is in the second act. The librettist, with memories of Faust, causes Mathô to make an imaginary circle through which it would be impious to penetrate. Incidentally he wooes the young lady with true Gallic ardor. Yet this act, far removed as it is from the book, is the best of the five.

What follows is of no consequence; the council chamber is lugged in for its picture, and the spectacle of Salammbô dressing on a terrace under the rays of a Carthaginian moon, as round as a silver buckler, does not advance the action materially. The camp and battle scenes do credit to the taste of the decorator, though they are meaningless. But in Mathô’s tent, where Salammbô presently arrives, Reyer strikes fire for the first time. His hero and heroine have thus far been smothered by processions of chanting priests, by mobs of soldiery, by ballets and by monster choruses. Here the man and the woman, face to face, bare their souls, and the music, not so passionate or so desperate as Valentine and Raoul’s duo in the fourth act of Les Huguenots, is yet sincere and touching. After that the opera oozes away in mere pantomime. There is a fall down a series of lofty staircases, which is not high art.

I could only distinguish two well-defined leading-motives in the _partition_. One came from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, fourth act, the other is a slight deviation from Tristan’s cry in Act III: “O Isolde.” For the rest, I have a vague remembrance of _cantilena_ without melody, finales without climax, a thin, noisy, shallow, and irritating stream of orchestration and a vocal score that either screamed or roared. The harmonic scheme is dull and there is little rhythmic variety. Reyer, as I said before, has few musical ideas, and he does not conceal this deficiency by the graceful externals of a brilliant instrumentation. As well meant as was Reyer’s admiration for the immortal story, a story that will outlive the mock antiquities of Bulwer, Ebers, and Sienkiewicz, the French critic and composer was not the man to give it a musical setting. Wagner or Verdi—none other—could have made of his glowing Oriental prose-poem a music-drama of vital power and exquisite coloring.

* * * * *

It is a holy and wholesome thing to visit the graves of genius, for the memories aroused may serve as an inspiration and a consolation in the spiritually arid tracts of daily and doleful existence. But as the emotions aroused at the sight of great men’s relics are profound only to the individual—they seldom make interesting reading—so more than a record of the fact that I have visited Rouen several times to view the tomb of Gustave Flaubert is not of burning importance. I cannot help protesting, however, at the tardy official recognition accorded one of the greatest prose masters France can boast, and one of the great world novelists. In the Solferino Gardens there is the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and up on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery lie his remains in the Flaubert family plot, not very far from the Joan of Arc monument. The Government has done nothing, though it has erected marble quarries to mediocrities not worthy to unlatch the shoes of Flaubert. Guy de Maupassant is remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue _vis-à-vis_ to the master whom he loved and to whom he owed so much. At Paris another loving memorial stands in the Parc Monceau; yet for Flaubert, a giant when compared to the unhappy writer of the Contes, there is nothing—not even a commemorative tablet.

The least reparation for this neglect that the French Government can offer is the purchase and preservation of the little house in which Madame Bovary was composed with such painful travail. It still stands, though fast crumbling into decay, on the bank of the Seine at Croisset about half an hour below Rouen. The paternal house has vanished, and occupying part of the little park is a dismantled manufactory. Abbé Prévost is said to have written Manon Lescaut in the old house—at least, Flaubert believed the story.

The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert household, keeps a small café near his former home, and is always ready to talk of the master and of his mother, Madame Flaubert. For two seasons I vainly tried to get from Colange a photograph of this mother. To me the mothers of great men are of extraordinary interest. No money could tempt the old man, though he might have had the picture reproduced and sold the copies.

With his phrase uttered at Flaubert’s grave, M. François Coppée fastened more firmly to history the name of that noble artist, “The Beethoven of French Prose.”

VII

VERDI AND BOÏTO

Drama is relentlessly encroaching upon the domain of music. In Falstaff, the most noteworthy achievement since Die Meistersinger, we get something which for want of a better title one may call lyric comedy. But in form it is novel. It is not opera buffa; nor yet is it opèra comique in the French sense; in fact it shows a marked deviation from its prototypes; even the elaborate system of Wagnerian leading motives is not employed. It is a new Verdi we hear; not the Verdi of Il Trovatore, La Traviata, or Aïda, but a Verdi brimful of the joy of life, sophisticated, yet naïve. A marvellous compound is this musical comedy, in which the music follows the text, and no concessions are made to the singers or to the time-honored conventions of the operatic stage. Verdi has thrown overboard old forms and planted his victorious standard in the country discovered by Mozart and conquered by Wagner. A marvellous old man indeed!

The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the composer to-day. The action in Falstaff is almost as rapid as if the text were spoken; and the orchestra, the wittiest and most sparkling _riant_ orchestra I ever heard,—comments upon the monologue and dialogue of the book. When the speech becomes rhetorical, so does the orchestra. It is heightened speech, and instead of melody of the antique, formal pattern we hear the endless melody which Wagner employs. But Verdi’s speech is his own and does not savor of Wagner. If the ideas are not developed or do not assume vaster proportions, it is because of their character. They could not be so treated without doing violence to the sense of proportion. Classic purity in expression, Latin exuberance, joyfulness, and an inexpressibly delightful atmosphere of irresponsible youthfulness and gayety are all in this charming score.

We get a touch of the older style in the concerted numbers, but the handling is very free and the content Verdian and modern. Here are variety, color, freshness, earnestness, insouciance, and numberless quaint conceits. The tempo is like an arrow-shot from the bow of a classic-featured archer, whose arrows have been steeped in the burning lake of romanticism. There is melodic repetition of phrases, but it is more in the manner of Grétry than Wagner. I have called Falstaff a pendant to Die Meistersinger, and the two works, directly antithetical, are both supreme products of the Gallic and Teutonic lyric genius. And how Verdi escaped the current of his younger years! What wonderful adaptability, what receptivity, what powers of assimilation! Some future biographer will write of The Three Styles of Verdi as did de Lenz of Beethoven’s styles; perhaps he will even increase the number.

Wagner did not shed his musical skin as absolutely as this Italian. Compare the young and the old Verdi. In style to-day Falstaff is younger than Il Trovatore half a century ago. Think of La donna è mobile and then of the fugued finale to Falstaff. And remember, it is not a fugato with imitative passages, nor the fugal treatment of an ensemble finale, but a well-constructed fugue in eight real parts, with episodes, inversions of the subject, stretti, and even a pedal point. It is not so pleasing in effect as the magnificent polyphonic close of Die Meistersinger, because of its severely formal construction. It sounds as if Verdi had said, “Go to; after all this mumming and masking I will show ye that I, too, can be serious.” So he fugues the words “Tutto nel mondo è burlo,” of all words in the world for such a form! What a gay old dog he must have been! And heaven knows what jokes he had in store for us, hidden in the capacious sleeves of his genius. I am sorry that an important engagement in the Lethean fields prevented von Bülow from being present at this Falstaff performance. He had to recant his opinion of the Manzoni Requiem; but after this fugue he would have surely bent the stubborn knee of pride and prostrated himself before the Italian god of music.

No one can reproach Verdi with lack of ideas in Falstaff. They are never ending. The orchestra flows furiously, like a stream of quicksilver, tossing up repartee, argument, facts, amplifying, developing, and strengthening the text. No melody? Why, the opera is one long, merry tune—jocund, blithe, sweet, dulcet, and sunny. Few moods of melancholy, no moods of madness, but all gracious folly and fantasy.

The Honor soliloquy from Henry IV, with its pizzicati accompaniment and its No! punctuated by a drum tap, is changed into strength and sarcastic humor. When I Was a Page is another gem, and so is the chattering quartet. But why enumerate details? It is a work of which one cannot say “this and this,” it is so rich, so exuberant, so novel, and yet so learned; little wonder then that we marvel. Verdi’s musical scholarship is enormous. He paints delicate, fairylike pictures, using the most delicate pigments and with the daintiest touch imaginable; and then he pens a severe and truthful canon in the second which excites the admiration of the scholar. The minuet is an echo of old time, but how superlatives pale before the wealth of rhythms, modes, subtle tonalities, simple diatonic effects contrasted with gorgeous, sonorous orchestral bursts! And it must not be forgotten that both composer and librettist have caught the true Shakespearean note. The corpulent knight, despite his braggadocio humor, lechery, and gluttony, is a gentleman born, although sadly run to seed because of sack and petticoats. The glamour of the revel at Herne’s Oak, the street scene at dusk, with the gossiping of the women, and the clear, fresh air,—and there is no attempt at Purcell madrigals, English local color,—all these prove Verdi’s sympathy; also that music is a universal language and that an Italian poet-composer may faithfully frame the story of an English dramatist.

And with what a light hand and vivacity of speech Verdi has done it! Miracles of construction there are, but the grim bones of theory are never exposed. Even the fugue is jaunty. The love element peeps archly out behind the puffed mask of humor; the note is never deep, just a sigh, and it has departed before you can fairly grasp its beauty. The duos are all charming, and—but what boots idle cataloguing? Its beauties should have become patent to our opera-going public and the work a favorite long ago. “Après moi, le deluge,” said the Wagnerites of the great Richard. “After Wagner, Verdi!” some may explain. Falstaff suggests, of course, Victor Maurel, and our debt of gratitude for his vital and sympathetic interpretations is great. Is there an actor on any stage to-day who can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago? I doubt it. Making all due allowances for the different art medium the singing actor must work in, despite the slight exaggeration of pose and gesture, Maurel had no superior, if indeed an equal, in these two rôles. And then the man’s astonishing versatility! What method, what manner of training has he had? Of what school or schools is he the crystallized product? His voice, worn and siccant, seemed to take on any hue he desired. In Falstaff, you may remember, it was bullying, blandishing, defiant, tender, and gross; full of impure suggestiveness, as jolly as a boon companion. And when he sang “Quando ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk,” how his vocal horizon lighted up!

The brainlessness of Verdi’s music previous to the time when Aïda was composed should not close our eyes to the promise and potency of that same early music. It is the music of a passionate Italian temperament—music hastily conceived, still more speedily jotted down, and tumbled anyhow on the stage. Musical Italy before 1880 was devoted to the voice. Give it a plank, a dramatic situation, an aria, and success pursued the composer. As for the dramatic unities, the orchestral commentary, the welding of action, story, and music—why, they could all go hang. Melody, irrelevant, fatuous, trivial melody, and again melody, was the shibboleth. The wonder is that an orchestra was ever employed—except that it made more noise than a piano player; that costumes were ever worn—only because they looked braver, gayer, in the flare of the footlights than street attire. And most wonderful of all was the expense of a theatre, for to those melomaniacs anything but a tune was a deterrent factor. The singer and the song sung composed an opera. All the rest was sheer waste of material—or Teutonic madness.

Verdi’s acquaintance with Arrigo Boïto was the turning-point in his career. He knew Boïto’s far better than he knew Wagner’s scores. If he was affected at all by Wagnerism, it was by way of Boïto and not at first hand. I am not prepared to deny that Verdi ever listened to the Ring, to Tristan, or to Die Meistersinger in its entirety sung by competent throats; yet I sincerely doubt it. The Italian’s early music is full of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Meyerbeer. He could not, being of a receptive nature, have escaped Wagner had he known him thoroughly. He was a very suspicious, proud old man,—as proud of I Due Foscari as of Aïda,—and almost to the day of his death deprecated Wagner’s influence on modern opera. To see, then, as do many wise men of music, Wagner peering sardonically from behind the lively and exciting bars of Verdi’s later scores, is to claim a clairvoyance to which I dare not pretend.

Take any of Verdi’s operas previous to those of 1850, and what do we get? A string of passionate tunes bracketed in the conventional _cavatina-cabaletta_ style; little attempt at following the book—such awful books!—and the orchestra, a huge strumming machine, strumming without color, appositeness, rhyme, or reason. And then the febrile, simian-like restlessness of the music. It was written for people of little musical intelligence, people who must hum a tune or ever after view it with contempt. Verdi could furnish tunes by the hundred—real, vital, dramatic ones. Think of the waste, the saddening waste, of material made by the young maestro in Oberto, Nabucco, I Lombardi, Ernani, I Due Foscari, Attila, Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and I Masnadieri! If he could have but saved them for his latter days—for his so-called third period! I know that your early Verdian refuses to consider the later music. He even listens to Aïda under protest. In it lurks the Wagnerian _Wurm_ that in Otello and Falstaff stings to death the melodic genius of the venerable master. Now, I quarrel with no man’s artistic tastes. It were a futile proceeding. If you love Rigoletto better than Otello, I have no objection to make. I cannot bring any argument to bear upon you, for I am not a special pleader in matters musical. As well try to convince a man who asserts that Dumas père is a greater novelist than Flaubert. Yet I enjoy certain moments in Rigoletto, just as I think The Three Guardsmen rattling good reading. But to call either the opera or the romance great art is to mix your critical values.

Verdi was not by nature a reformer. A man of sensual gifts in the way of music-making, a born dramatizer of anything from an antique ruin to a murder, he took up the operatic form as he found it and did not seek to develop it. But he poured into its ancient, honorable, and somewhat shaky mould stuff of a stirring nature—and also an amazing amount of it. Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love, fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical pot-boilers. I have always admired Rossini’s musical laziness. Once rich, he refused to compose any more. As his facility was on a par with his lack of artistic conscience, the thought of the amount he might have left makes one shudder. But luckily he was content to give us—not to mention any of the others—The Barber of Seville, a masterpiece pure and undefiled.

Verdi, also lacking an artistic conscience, and without high artistic ideals, produced operas as indefatigably as incubators chickens. Naturally such music perished early, and his failures more than balance his successes. He made money, an enormous amount; he was probably the richest composer that ever drove a pen. The usual fate has overtaken the early music, while even Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata no longer draw unless sung by an “all star” cast. I pass over the Manzoni Requiem of 1874. It was too near the Aïda epoch to make a great forward step. Otello, in 1887, set the musical world mad with surprise, curiosity, delight. It reveals little or none of the narrow, noisy, vulgar, and violent Verdi of 1850. The character-drawing is done by a man who is master of his material. The plot moves in majestical splendor, and the musical psychology is often subtle. At last Verdi has flowered. His other music, smelling ranker of the soil, showing more thematic invention, was but the effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause and money. In Otello all musical provincialisms have vanished; the writing is clear, the passion more controlled, the effects aimed at easily compassed. The master craft of Iago is set over against the fiery, nerve-shaking passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested, withal a very Italian one.

Falstaff was a second surprise. How an old graybeard of eighty could have conceived such music is only to be explained by the young heart of the man, by his sweetly healthy nature, his Latin frugality in living. He was ever a taciturn man, a stoic, not an epicurean. As an index to his character his music is often misleading. Add to these qualities the beautiful friendship of Arrigo Boïto, from which came a libretto, and the sum total is a setting of Shakespeare’s comedy such as the world has never seen. Here again Wagner had less to do with the matter than is supposed. In the musical dialogue Verdi patterned after Die Meistersinger, for the emotion ever follows the text. From Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville he absorbed no little of gay sunshine and effervescence. But his form is his own; it grew out of the situations of the play, and was not a procrustean bed of theory upon which the composer stretched his characters. It is laughing and joyous, this comedy of an octogenarian. It fairly ripples with the humor of the Fat Knight. There are no leading motives in the Wagnerian sense, though every character is outlined with precision.

Now, I assert that Arrigo Boïto helped all this, stimulated a young-old man to conquer new and more fruitful provinces. And Boïto, who built two of the best librettos we know, certainly influenced Verdi in his study of instrumentation. Compare Rigoletto and Otello orchestrally! The advance is remarkable, all things being considered. And at Verdi’s years! I suspect that Verdi made the sketches, which Boïto transformed into painted pictures; just as I discern, as can any one with ears, the intellectual characteristics in common between Mefistofele and Iago’s monologues. Yet Verdi is true Verdi to the last.

Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata have one cardinal merit, in addition to their miracles of mellifluousness—they prefigure the later Verdi, the thinking Verdi, the truer musical dramatist. In regarding these we again encounter critical superciliousness of the most pronounced type. The neo-Verdians will have none of the middle-century Verdi—forgetting that no man may lift himself to the stars by his own bootstraps. Verdi offers a fine picture of crawling, creeping evolution. I confess that I believe the man would have stuck at Don Carlos, Sicilian Vespers, Araldo, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and the rest of the reactionary stuff, had it not been for the masterful influence of Boïto, himself a composer. Boïto helped Verdi to scramble upon the shoulders of Verdi, compelled the Verdi of 1887 to forget the Verdi of 1871.

Aïda is pointed out as the great turn in the style of the composer. It is fuller of Meyerbeerisms than any opera composed since L’Africaine, as full as is Rienzi. Indeed, I doubt if Aïda would have been born had not L’Africaine preceded it. The resemblance to Meyerbeer does not stop at the libretto; there is the same flamboyancy in color, the same barbaric taste for full-blown harmony and exotic tunes—not to mention the similarities in the stories. Wagner had far less to do with Aïda than Meyerbeer, though many believe the contrary. To Rigoletto, in 1851, must we go in the search for the roots of the mature Verdi. In the declamatory monologues of the hunchback jester are the germs of the more intellectual and subtle monologues of Iago and of Falstaff. Il Trovatore contains strong dramatic situations, and if the tower scene is become hackneyed, yet how well devised! In this much-admired, much-sung composition are to be found harmonic straws which indicate to the keen observer the way the musical wind was bound to blow nearly a half-century later. With Traviata Verdi made his first attempt at musical psychologizing. Banal as is the book, there is no denying the power of some of its situations. No, decidedly it will not do to overlook the Verdi of 1850. It would be building musical history without straw.

As among modern German music-dramas Tristan and Isolde is the greatest, so is Otello among the lyric dramas of Italy—one might as well include France. Falstaff is their comic pendant as Die Meistersinger is to Tristan. Verdi composed Otello when he was past threescore and ten. The fact seems incredible; in its score seethes the passion of middle manhood, the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one ever dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini fluted with the theme; in Verdi jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are handled by a master. It is a wonderful opera, and a Shakespearean Verdi began at a time when most men are preparing for death. Reversing natural processes, this phenomenal being wrote younger music the older he grew. After Aïda—Otello! After grim tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaff! If he had survived ninety years, he might have written a comic opera that would have outpointed in wit and humor Johann Strauss!

Otello is a true music-drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize his events as does Wagner. Boïto, the greatest of librettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music gives it vitality, grace, contour, brilliancy. And yet the Italian poet has not gravely disturbed the old original. It is but a compliment to his gift of absorbing the Shakespearean spirit to say that Iago’s Credo, that terrific explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of perspective in the picture. It is Boïto’s intercalation, as are the Cypriote choruses in Act II. All the rest is pure Shakespeare, barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I.

Verdi’s character-drawing is masterly. Do not let us balk at comparisons, or for that matter at superlatives. No composer ever lived—Mozart and Wagner are alone excepted—who could have so drawn the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin clinker, set them facing each other in the score, and allowed them to work out their own musical fates, as has Verdi. The key to Otello is its characterization—in a musical sense, of course. But the medium in which Verdi bids them move, their fluidity, their humanity—these are the things that almost defy critical analysis. Whether he is listening to his crafty Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the hardy Numean lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a living, suffering, loving man—Shakespeare’s Otello.

The character does not suggest the flashy operatic, the ranter of the footlights. Nor does Iago, whether as the bluff hero of battles and battles, or the loathsome serpent stinging the other’s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever sink into the conventional attitudes of a transpontine melodrama. It is Iago, “the spirit that denies,” underlined perhaps, as music must emphasize ever the current emotions of a character. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and in relief to her cold-blooded maligner.

Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song. She is a pure white cloud against which as a background are etched the powerful masculine motives of the play. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, bit by bit, the interior of a sweet, troubled soul. The other figures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches that add to the density of the background without detracting from the chief motives. It is a remarkable libretto.

From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows swiftly, as swiftly as the drama. Rich, varied, and eloquent, the orchestra seldom tarries in its vivid and acute commentary. There is scant employment of typical motives—the “kiss” theme in Act I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. In the Handkerchief Trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but, in the main, old set forms are avoided, and while there is melodic flow, it does not often crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith, and Otello’s exhortation to the high heavens in Act II; the tremendous outburst in the next act with Iago’s sardonically triumphant exclamation, “Behold the lion!” as he plants his scornful heel on the recumbent man—then the final catastrophe! Throughout there are picturesque strokes, effects of massed splendor; and about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, of doom, of guilt and melancholy foreboding.

Verdi has felt the moods of his poet and made them his own. The moods, the character-painting, are progressive; Otello, Iago, grow from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a savage thirsting for blood; “Sangue, sangue!” he howls; he sees blood; the multitudinous music is incarnadine with it. And it is all vocal, it is written for the human voice; the voice, not the orchestra, is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama. Another such Iago, subtle, sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously graceful fellow,—such an impersonation as Maurel’s may never be duplicated. And this singing actor had the advantage of Verdi and Boïto’s “coaching” in 1887, when the music-drama was produced at Milan. This to show that the music play demands as excellent an Iago as an Otello—indeed, Verdi’s first idea of a title was the former—and while there have been several Otellos, only one great Iago has appeared thus far on the contemporary operatic stage.

BOÏTO’S MEFISTOFELE

Mefistofele by Arrigo Boïto to was revived at the Metropolitan Opera House, January 14, 1901, where it was originally heard in December, 1883, and later, January 15, 1896. There is a record that Marie Roze was the first Marguerite of Boïto at the Academy of Music. This was as early as November 24, 1880. Mefistofele was first heard in Milan, Italy, in 1868: its _première_ was a scene of rioting, and a duel in which Boïto participated occurred later. Public feeling ran very high, for they take their art seriously in Italy. The performance lasted six hours, and was a hopeless failure. Not until the work, pruned, revised, and greatly curtailed, was repeated in Bologna, did Boïto receive a fair hearing. He had composed little previous to this music-drama, preferring journalism and literary work. But Mefistofele was such a challenge to older operatic forms that the work was soon sung in London and elsewhere. Boïto, who is chiefly known as the librettist of the later Verdi, is a man of the highest artistic ideals. His mother was Polish, which may account for his versatility, his poetic gifts. He worked over, re-orchestrated, and polished Mefistofele, and changed Faust from a tenor to a barytone part. And it all smells of the lamp, despite some beautiful pages.

Mefistofele was once music of the future; now it reminds one of some strange, amorphous survival from a remote period. It is such a tremendous attempt to embrace all of Goethe’s profound world philosophy, poetry, dramatic symbolism, that it is a failure—a remarkable failure. There is little melodic invention, the prison scene being the top notch of its dramatic passion; while the tenor solo, From the Meadows, From the Valleys, is strangely reminiscent of the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata. It is mostly music of the head, not of the heart. Boïto has admirably characterized Mefistofele. His sinister solo, I am the Spirit that Denies, is very striking; the orchestra with its shrill, diabolical whistling suggests Berlioz. And it also suggests in feeling the Honor solo in Verdi’s Falstaff and Iago’s Credo in Otello. Boïto and Verdi have collaborated so much that they must have absorbed each other’s ideas. In the garden scene—a quartet and nothing more—Rigoletto is recalled in the echoing laughter. It seems trifling though trickily difficult. Goethe’s Marguerite is not realized. She is hardly ingénue, this flirting girl who so calmly gives a sleeping potion to her mother. And the loving side of her nature is barely outlined.

The Prologue in Heaven reveals Boïto’s fine skill in choral writing. Mascagni did not fail to note this when writing the prayer in Cavalleria Rusticana. The scene on the Brocken, the Witches’ Sabbath, is very difficult to realize scenically. It contains a big fugue. The dying scene is very strong, dramatically stronger than Gounod’s. Gounod set out to write a very effective operatic scena. His trio has in it the fire of the footlights. Boïto is possessed with the tragic beauty of the situation, and so presents a more affecting and dramatically truthful picture. Calvé has made this scene familiar to New York.

Boïto attempts Part II of Faust. The classical Sabbath leaves us dull, although the composer with his unrhymed dactylic and choriambic verse, and the accompanying music, with its old-fashioned harmonic flavor, endeavors to symbolize the embrace of German and Greek ideals.

The public sees only Faust consoling himself with the dark-haired Elena, and the symbolism falls flat. There is some effort at unity in the welding of the prologue and epilogue by using the opening theme as a chorale finale. The one well-known duo of this second part is La Luna Immobile for soprano and alto. But it is all too episodic to rivet the attention; indeed, Mefistofele is a series of loosely connected episodes. One is constantly reminded of Mascagni’s obligations to Boïto. The spoor of Verdi’s later style is also here. Boïto seems to have been the pivotal point of the neo-Italian school—himself remaining in the background—while the youngsters profited by his many experimentings. Mefistofele strikes one as an experiment, with Wagner as a model. The most admirable thing in the work is the free treatment of the declamatory passages. In this Boïto set the pace for Verdi.

Boïto’s devil is greater than Gounod’s. The French devil is not a terrible fellow; he is too fond of high living, and has a pretty taste in wine. The sardonic, mocking arch fiend of Boïto is more like the popular notion of mankind’s enemy. He is familiar with the Powers, and is contemptuous of earthworms. His defiant and evil song of Triumph is the best thing in the work. The solo in the Brocken scene, Here is the World Empty and Round, does not make the same impression as the Denial song. Faust in this version is rather colorless, and more philosopher than lover. Marguerite’s most musical episode is when she recalls her lost happiness in the mad scene. And there is much music that is ugly and dreary, for Boïto, no matter what he has accomplished in his unpublished music-drama, is in Mefistofele rather the poet than the composer. Of rich, red, musical blood, of vital figures, we are offered but little. This composition is a product for the closet. It lacks that quality possessed by musicians of meaner attainments than Boïto—the quality of humanity. There are dramatic moments, but the story halts, the symbolism is not appreciable, and the mystic element not quite realized. To give the world a Faust in tone one must be a musical Goethe. Neither Gounod nor Boïto was strong enough to cope with the grandeur and beauty of Goethe’s masterpiece among masterpieces. Gounod was a musical sensualist, lacking lofty imagination; Boïto fails in the sensuous temperament and is ever cerebral.

VIII

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

I

A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,
A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and Thou
Trying to sing an Anthem off the Key—
Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!
—WALLACE IRWIN.

To the girl who plays Chopin! This sounds like a toast, and a cynic would certainly add: “May her pretty fingers ne’er touch ivory again!” But it is not a health that I wish to propose, nor yet an exhortation. My notion is to put the question boldly: Can women play Chopin? Before the rigor of such a query the hardiest-souled male must retire abashed, or write with the usual masculine brutality and lack of finesse. Chopin is the favorite composer of women; Chopin rules the soul of the girl, and to Chopin is addressed a particular form of worship. This consists of inarticulate gasps, irregular sighs, and the glance which is called psychic. To girls of eighteen or thereabouts Chopin is a religion—a sentimental one. Sympathetic medical men diagnose the symptoms and declare them Chopinitis. We have, many of us, suffered severely from it; most musical and unmusical people do. Chopin is in the emotional curriculum of every woman who plays the piano; therefore it shocks one if this question be posed: Can women play Chopin?

Let us be scientific, let us be profound, and let us quote rows of horrid, forbidding figures. I am now proposing a little journey into the misty mid-region of Womanology, for the need of proving my somewhat oblique case. It is crab-wise, this progression, but it may serve. The Nineteenth Century some years ago contained an article on woman’s brain by Alexander Sutherland. Written in fullest accord with the aims and ideals of the new woman, the author is yet forced to confess that “the male brain has an advantage of about 10 per cent in weight,” and adds that “it is a difference which certainly affords some little foundation for a very ancient belief,” said belief being the inferiority of the female intellect to the male intellect. But he proves that 90 per cent of women are the equals of 90 per cent of men. And in the very beginning of his short study he demonstrates that the neurons on the cortex of the brain are quite as numerous in women as in men, and that these neurons “are the instruments of mental energy.”

Mere brain weight, then, seems to prove nothing. It is the activity of the neurons which determines the quality of brain power. Music is denied a place among the more intellectual arts by many great thinkers. Whether this is just or not, considering the vast claims of Bach and Beethoven, I will not say, but one thing is certain: in Chopin emotional sensibility predominates, and as women are supposed to be more emotional than their mates, _ergo_ they should play Chopin better. But are they more emotional? Lombroso, who has measured the sighs of sentimental girls, and weighed her tears, says no. In an extraordinary series of public experiments, conducted at Turin, the learned Italian found that woman as compared with man was deficient in tactile sensibility; that she did not record impressions, whether optical, aural, or sensory, as rapidly or with such clear definition as did man. I admit this sounds discouraging, and is enough to give pause to the upward flight of the sex, if that flight is to be tested by scientific analysis. But what is all this testing, weighing, and measuring when faced by the spectacle of a glorious winged creature which sails away on victorious pinions with plumage unruffled by Lombroso and his laboratory logic?

A genuine _féministe_, one who gently felt the female pulse of his century and suavely waved the patient aside, was the late Ernest Renan. If ever a man should have had exalted ideals of womanhood, he was that man. His sister Henriette was his life companion, a veritable staff to him in his erudite studies, and when she died, he withered, or, rather, grew fat and spiritually flabby. Yet this most subtly feminine of men had the ingratitude to write: “There is no doubt whatever that at the present time feminine instincts occupy more space in the general physiognomy of the world than they did formerly. The world is more exclusively preoccupied just now with frivolities that formerly were looked upon as the exclusive property of women. Instead of asking men for great achievements, bold enterprises, and heroic labors, the women ask them for riches only, to satisfy a vulgar taste. The general movement of the world has put itself at the service of the instincts of woman, not those splendid instincts through which they display more clearly than men can, perhaps, the divine ideal of our nature, but the lower instincts which form the least noble portion of her vocation.” This was written in 1855. What would Renan have written in the twentieth century?

We have now laboriously collated the opinions of three men—Sutherland on the brain, Lombroso on the sensibility, and Renan on the moral nature of woman. The general tenor of these three messages is hardly as hopeful as the new woman could desire. Let us leave the chill topic in all its frozen splendor and turn to the latter part of my question—Chopin. What is Chopin playing?

That Chopin was a Pole who went from Warsaw to Paris, there won fame, the love of George Sand, misery, and a sad death are facts that even schoolgirls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim, long fingers, played vaporous moon-haunted music, and after his desertion by Sand coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the most genteel and romantic manner. I like to recall George Moore’s description of Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr. Stevenson,” he wrote in his Confessions, “as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window and scratching thereon certain exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil.” The piano was Chopin’s window, and upon it he traced arabesques, tender and heroic, sorrowful and capricious. All this is Chopin romantically conventionalized by artist-biographers and associates. The real man, as nearly as we dare describe a real man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature, who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We can see him giving a few piano lessons to prim, chaperoned misses of the Boulevard Saint-Germain before each noon; in the afternoons making calls or studying; in the evening at the opera for an hour, later in the enchanted circle of countesses who listened to his weaving music, and afterward a space for breathing at a fashionable café before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he reveal the richness of his inner life. That he suffered intensely from petty annoyances before which the ordinary man would hunch his shoulders was but the result of a hyperæsthetic delicacy. An æolian harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.

And then there is the national element, perhaps the most fascinating of all the fibres of his many-colored soul. Chopin was Polish, he loved Poland madly, yet Chopin never laid down his music to take up arms for his native land, fight or die for, as did his countrywoman Emilia Plater. Being infinitely more feminine than any woman, Chopin sang his dreams, his disillusions, into his music, and put his fiery patriotism into his polonaises. His range is not so wide as Beethoven’s; but it is quite as intense. His mazurkas, valses, nocturnes, studies, preludes, impromptus, scherzos, ballades, polonaises, fantaisies, variations, concertos, cradle-song, barcarolle, sonatas, and various dances are the most intimate music written for any instrument. A lyric poet, he touched us to the core, and with exquisite tentacles drew our soul to his. He is dead, yet a vital musical force to-day. To play Chopin one must have acute sensibilities, a versatility of mood, a perfect mechanism, the heart of a woman and the brain of a man. He is not all elegant languors and melancholy simperings. A capricious, even morbid, temperament is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an infinity of colorings; supreme musicianship—Chopin was a musician first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey; and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin, sensitive edge and the soul is aflame with the joy of death. Does this sound like mocking at the impossible? All this and much more that is subtle and indescribable are needed to interpret Chopin. And now do you see that I am right when I declare that most women play his music mechanically?

Who has played Chopin in a remarkable manner? The list is not large. Chopin himself must have been the greatest of all, though Liszt declared that his physical strength was not able to cope with the more heroic of his works. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Essipoff, Joseffy, Karl Heymann, Pachmann, and Paderewski—a somewhat attenuated number of names. Of course there were many others; but these represent supreme mastery in various phases of the master’s music. The real pupils all claimed to have inherited the magic formula, the tradition. To-day the best-known Chopin players are Joseffy, Rosenthal, Pachmann, Paderewski, and others. Each has his virtues, and to define their limitations, enunciate their excellences, would be critical hair-splitting. Nearly all the younger professional men and women play Chopin after approved academic models. He is expounded by æstheticians and taught throughout the land. He is mauled, maimed, thumped, and otherwise maltreated at conservatories, and the soul of him is seldom invoked, but floats, a wraith with melancholy eyes, over nearly every piano in Christendom. There have been and are charming interpreters of his music among women pianists. Paderewski told me that he never heard the mazurkas better played than by Marcelline, Princess Czartoryska, a beloved pupil of Chopin’s. We have never had the mazurkas so charmingly played here as by the wilful Vladimir de Pachmann; yet not even his dearest foe would dower that artist with great mental ability. But he is more feminine than any woman in his tactile sensibilities. Joseffy has far more intellectuality; Paderewski is more poetic. All three are, as all musical artists should be, feminine in their delicacy of temperament.

Where, then, does woman enter this race, a race in which sex traditions are topsy-turvied? If women are deficient in brain weight, in nervous and spiritual powers, how is it that they dare attempt Chopin at all?

Because, patient reader—and now I begin to draw in the very large loop I have made—men of science deal with the palpable, and the time for measuring and weighing the impalpable has not yet arrived. Because there is no sex in music, and because you may not be very moral or very intellectual, and yet play Chopin like “a little god”—as Pachmann would say. And now for my most triumphant contention: if the majority of women play Chopin abominably—so do the majority of men!

II

“It may indeed,” answered Amelia; “and I am so sensible of it that unless you have a mind to see me faint before your face, I beg you will order me something—a glass of water if you please.” And then that most fascinating chronicler, Henry Fielding, Esq., proceeds to relate the further history of Captain Booth’s good lady, but not until Mrs. Bennet infuses some “hartshorn drops” into a glass of water for her. All this was about 1750. Since then Miss Austen and her troop of youthful creatures, swooning to order, have stolen with charming graces across the canvas of fiction; the young woman of 1750, with her needles and her scruples, has quite vanished; and passed away is the girl who played the piano in the stiff Victorian drawing-rooms of our mothers. It has always seemed to me that slippery haircloth sofas and the Battle of Prague dwelt in mutual harmony. And now at the beginning of the century the girls who devote time to the keyboard merely for the purpose of social display are almost as rare as the lavender water ladies of morbid sensibilities in the Richardson and Fielding novels. It was one of the new English essayists who wrote of The Decay of Sensibility. He meant the Jane Austen girl; but I wonder if the musical girl of the old sort may not be also set down for study—the study we accord to rare and disappearing types. Yet never has America been so musical, never so crowded the recitals of popular pianists, while piano manufacturers bewail the day’s brevity, so eager for their instruments is the public. Here is a pretty paradox: the piano is passing and with it the piano girl,—there really was a piano girl,—and more music was never made before in the land!

Women and music have been inseparable in the male imagination since the days when the morning stars sang cosmic chorals in the vasty blue. The Old Testament tells of dancing and lyrics that accompanied many sacred offices, and we all recall those music-mad maids who slew Bacchus for a mere song. Women played upon shawm and psaltery, and to her fate went dancing with measured tones the daughter of Jephthah. I am not sure but Judith crooned a melody for the ravished ears of Holofernes. An early keyed instrument was named in honor of woman—the virginal—and the first printed piece of English music was called Parthenia. On the title-page is represented a simpering and rather blowzy young woman of Rubens-like physique, playing upon a virginal, her fingers in delightfully impossible curlicues. This piece was engraved in 1611. A variety of pictures, some as early as 1440, show the inevitable girl seated at the spinet, or clavichord. There is a painting by Jan Steen in the London National Gallery, depicting an awkward Dutch miss fingering the keys, and a Gérard Ter Borch at the Royal Museum, Berlin, reveals a woman of generous breadth playing upon a violoncello. She appears to be handling her bow like a professional; and she is, strange to say, left-handed. Ample are the facts relating to the important rôle enacted by woman as interpretative artist. To no less an authority has been ascribed—wrongly, I suspect—a certain aphorism which places in curious sequence wine, woman, and song. It was the woman who entertained that then was considered. She pleased the rude warrior, fatigued by the chase or war, and with her dainty tinklings soothed his sottish brain. Like music, woman was a handmaiden. With the emancipation of the art from churchly rubric came its worldly victories. In the brilliant spaces of the concert room the piano was king, and not seldom a king subdued by queenly fingers. The male virtuoso, surely a thing of gorgeous vanities, soon had his feminine complement. The woman who played the piano appeared in Europe; and there were those that predicted the millennium. In the eighteenth century pianos had sconces in which burned candles, while charming women, hair powdered and patch on face, played Haydn, attempted Scarlatti, and greatly wondered at the famously difficult music of Mozart. Beethoven, a loutish young man of unbearable habits, wrote music that was not to be thought of—it was simply not playable. To be sure, a few grand ladies who gave themselves superior airs of culture—as do Ibsen girls to-day—attempted the Beethoven sonatas in the presence of the composer, who, quite deaf, lolled complacently in their drawing-rooms and betimes picked his teeth with the candle snuffers. But there was sterner stuff in the next generation. After Camilla Pleyel came Madame de Belleville-Oury, admired of Chopin, and the transition to the modern piano-playing women, Clara Schumann, Annette Essipoff, Sophie Menter, Teresa Carreño, was an easy one.