Chapter I

Four modern operas stand out as Spanish in subject and atmosphere. I would put at the top of the list Zandonai's _Conchita_; the Italian composer has caught on his musical palette and transferred to his tonal canvas a deal of the lazy restless colour of the Iberian peninsula in this little master-work. The feeling of the streets and patios is admirably caught. My friend, Pitts Sanborn, said of it, after its solitary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York by the Chicago Opera Company, "There is musical atmosphere of a rare and penetrating kind; there is colour used with the discretion of a master; there are intoxicating rhythms, and above the orchestra the voices are heard in a truthful musical speech.... Ever since _Carmen_ it has been so easy to write Spanish music and achieve supremely the banal. Here there is as little of the Spanish of convention as in Debussy's _Iberia_, but there is Spain." This opera, based on Pierre Louÿs's sadic novel, "La Femme et le Pantin," owed some of its extraordinary impression of vitality to the vivid performance given of the title-rôle by Tarquinia Tarquini. Raoul Laparra, born in Bordeaux, but who has travelled much in Spain, has written two Spanish operas, _La Habanera_ and _La Jota_, both named after popular Spanish dances and both produced at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. I have heard _La Habanera_ there and found the composer's use of the dance as a pivot of a tragedy very convincing. Nor shall I forget the first act-close, in which a young man, seated on a wall facing the window of a house where a most bloody murder has been committed, sings a wild Spanish ditty, accompanying himself on the guitar, crossing and recrossing his legs in complete abandonment to the rhythm, while in the house rises the wild treble cry of a frightened child. I have not heard _La Jota_, nor have I seen the score. I do not find Emile Vuillermoz enthusiastic in his review ("S. I. M.," May 15, 1911): "Une danse transforme le premier acte en un kaléidoscope frénétique et le combat dans l'église doit donner, au second, dans l'intention de l'auteur 'une sensation à pic, un peu comme celle d'un puits où grouillerait la besogne monstreuse de larves humaines.' A vrai dire ces deux tableaux de cinématographe papillotant, corsés de cris, de hurlements et d'un nombre incalculable de coups de feu constituent pour le spectator une épreuve physiquement douloureuse, une hallucination confuse et inquiétante, un cauchemar assourdissant qui le conduisent irrésistiblement à l'hébétude et à la migraine. Dans tout cet enfer que devient la musique?" Perhaps opera-goers in general are not looking for thrills of this order; the fact remains that _La Jota_ has had a modest career when compared with _La Habanera_, which has even been performed in Boston. _Carmen_ is essentially a French opera; the leading emotions of the characters are expressed in an idiom as French as that of Gounod; yet the dances and entr'actes are Spanish in colour. The story of Carmen's entrance song is worth retelling in Mr. Philip Hale's words ("Boston Symphony Orchestra Programme Notes"; 1914-15, P. 287): "Mme. Galli-Marié disliked her entrance air, which was in 6-8 time with a chorus. She wished something more audacious, a song in which she could bring into play the whole battery of her _perversités artistiques_, to borrow Charles Pigot's phrase: 'caressing tones and smiles, voluptuous inflections, killing glances, disturbing gestures.' During the rehearsals Bizet made a dozen versions. The singer was satisfied only with the thirteenth, the now familiar Habanera, based on an old Spanish tune that had been used by Sebastian Yradier. This brought Bizet into trouble, for Yradier's publisher, Heugel, demanded that the indebtedness should be acknowledged in Bizet's score. Yradier made no complaint, but to avoid a lawsuit or a scandal, Bizet gave consent, and on the first page of the Habanera in the French edition of _Carmen_ this line is engraved: 'Imitated from a Spanish song, the property of the publishers of _Le Ménestrel_.'"

There are other operas the scenes of which are laid in Spain. Some of them make an attempt at Spanish colouring, more do not. Massenet wrote no less than five operas on Spanish subjects, _Le Cid_, _Chérubin_, _Don César de Bazán_, _La Navarraise_ and _Don Quichotte_ (Cervantes's novel has frequently lured the composers of lyric dramas with its story; Clément et Larousse give a long list of _Don Quixote_ operas, but they do not include one by Manuel García, which is mentioned in John Towers's compilation, "Dictionary-Catalogue of Operas." However, not a single one of these lyric dramas has held its place on the stage). The Spanish dances in _Le Cid_ are frequently performed, although the opera is not. The most famous of the set is called simply _Aragonaise_; it is not a jota. _Pleurez, mes yeux_, the principal air of the piece, can scarcely be called Spanish. There is a delightful suggestion of the jota in _La Navarraise_. In _Don Quichotte_ la belle Dulcinée sings one of her airs to her own guitar strummings, and much was made of the fact, before the original production at Monte Carlo, of Mme. Lucy Arbell's lessons on that instrument. Mary Garden, who had learned to dance for _Salome_, took no guitar lessons for _Don Quichotte_. But is not the guitar an anachronism in this opera? In a pamphlet by Don Cecilio de Roda, issued during the celebration of the tercentenary of the publication of Cervantes's romance, taking as its subject the musical references in the work, I find, "The harp was the aristocratic instrument most favoured by women and it would appear to be regarded in _Don Quixote_ as the feminine instrument par excellence." Was the guitar as we know it in existence at that epoch? I think the _vihuela_ was the guitar of the period.... Maurice Ravel wrote a Spanish opera, _l'Heure Espagnole_ (one act, performed at the Paris Opéra-Comique, 1911). Octave Séré ("Musiciens français d'Aujourd'hui") says of it: "Les principaux traits de son caractère et l'influence du sol natal s'y combinent étrangement. De l'alliance de la mer et du Pays Basque (Ravel was born in the Basses-Pyrénées, near the sea) est née une musique à la fois fluide et nerveusement rythmée, mobile, chatoyante, amie du pittoresque et dont le trait net et précis est plus incisif que profond." Hugo Wolf's opera _Der Corregidor_ is founded on the novel, "El Sombrero de tres Picos," of the Spanish writer, Pedro de Alarcón (1833-91). His unfinished opera _Manuel Venegas_ also has a Spanish subject, suggested by Alarcón's "El Niño de la Bola." Other Spanish operas are Beethoven's _Fidelio_, Balfe's _The Rose of Castile_, Verdi's _Ernani_ and _Il Trovatore_, Rossini's _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ and _Le Nozze di Figaro_, Weber's _Preciosa_ (really a play with incidental music), Dargomijsky's _The Stone Guest_ (Pushkin's version of the Don Juan story. This opera, by the way, was one of the many retouched and completed by Rimsky-Korsakow), Reznicek's _Donna Diana_--and Wagner's _Parsifal_! The American composer John Knowles Paine's opera _Azara_, dealing with a Moorish subject, has, I think, never been performed.