8. Grand opéra is French opera in which every word is sung,
and generally all recitative accompanied by the orchestra.
It originated in the Académie de Musique, which, from its foundation
in 1669 to the proclamation of the liberté des théatres in
1791, claimed the monopoly of operas on the lines laid down
by Lully, Rameau and Gluck. Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, Spontini’s
Vestala and the works of Meyerbeer crown this theoretically
promising art-form with what Sir Hubert Parry has justly
if severely called a crown of no very precious metal. Weber’s
Euryanthe, Spohr’s Jessonda, and others of his operas, are German
parallel developments; and Wagner’s first published work,
Rienzi, is like an attempt to beat Meyerbeer on his own ground.
9. Opéra bouffe is not an equivalent of opera buffa, but is French light opera with a prominent strain of persiflage. Its chief representative is Offenbach. It seems to be as native to France as the austere opéra comique which it eclipsed. Sullivan assimilated its adroit orchestration as Gilbert purified its literary wit, and the result became a peculiarly English possession.
10. The finale is that part of a classical opera where, some way before the end of an act, the music gathers itself together and flows in an unbroken chain of concerted movements. The “invention” has been ascribed to this or that composer before Mozart, and it certainly must have taken some time in the growing; but Mozart is the first classic whose finales are famous. The finales to the second act of Figaro, the first act of Don Giovanni and the second of the Zauberflöte remained unequalled in scale and in dramatic and symphonic continuity, until Wagner, as it were, extended the finale backwards until it met the introduction (see below) so that the whole act became musically continuous. This step was foreshadowed by Weber, in whose Euryanthe the numbering of the later movements of each act is quite arbitrary. Great finales are less frequent in Singspiel than in opera buffa. They can hardly be said to exist in opera seria, climax at the end of an act being there (even in Gluck) attained only by a collection of ballet movements, whereas the essence of Mozart’s finale is its capacity to deal with real turning-points of the action. A few finales of the first and second acts of opéras comiques (which are almost always in three acts) are on the great classical lines, e.g. that to the first act of Les Deux journées; but a French finale to a last act is, except in Cherubini’s works, hardly ever more than a short chorus, often so perfunctory that, for instance, when Méhul’s Joseph was first produced by Weber at Dresden in 1817, a three-movement finale by Fränzl of Munich was added; and Weber publicly explained the difference between French and German notions of finality, in excuse for a course so repugnant to his principles in the performance of other works.
11. The introduction is sometimes merely an instrumental entr’acte in classical opera; but it is more especially an extension of continuous dramatic music at the beginning of an act, like the extension of the finale backwards towards the middle of the act, but much smaller. Beethoven, in his last version of Fidelio, used the term for the perfectly normal duet that begins the first act, and for the instrumental entr’acte which leads to the rise of the curtain on Florestan’s great scene in the second act. The classical instances of the special meaning of “introduction” are the first number in Don Giovanni and, more typically, that in the Zauberflöte.
12. Leit-motif, or the association of musical themes with dramatic ideas and persons, is not only a natural means of progress in music drama, but is an absolute musical necessity as soon as the lines dividing an opera into separate formal pieces are broken down, unless the music is to become exclusively “atmospheric” and inarticulate. Without recurrence of themes a large piece of music could no more show coherent development than a drama in which the characters were never twice addressed by the same name nor twice allowed to appear in the same guise. Now the classical operatic forms, being mainly limited by the sonata style, were not such as could, when once worked out in appropriate designs of aria and ensemble, be worked out again in recognizable transformations without poverty and monotony of effect. And hence a system of Leit-motif was not appropriate to that ingenious compromise which classical opera made between music that completed from 12 to 30 independent designs and the drama that meanwhile completed one. But when the music became as continuous as the drama the case was different. There are plenty of classical instances of a theme superficially marking some cardinal incident or personal characteristic, without affecting the independence of the musical forms; the commonest case being, of course, the allusion somewhere in the overture to salient points in the body of the opera; as, for instance, the allusion to the words “cosi fan tutti” in the overture to Mozart’s opera of that name, and the Masonic three-fold chord in that to the Zauberflöte. Weber’s overtures are sonata-form fantasias on themes to come: and in later and lighter operas such allusiveness, being childishly easy, is a meaningless matter of course. Within the opera itself, songs, such as would be sung in an ordinary non-musical play, will probably recur, as in Les Deux journées; and so will all phrases that have the character of a call or a signal, a remarkable and pathetic instance of which may be found in Méhul’s Mélidore et Phrosine, where the orchestra makes a true Leit-motif of the music of the heroine’s name. But it is a long way from this to the system already clearly marked by Weber in Der Freischütz and developed in Euryanthe to an extent which Wagner did not surpass in any earlier work than Tristan, though in respect of the obliteration of sections his earliest works are in advance of Weber. Yet not only are there some thirteen recurrent musical incidents in the Freischütz and over twenty in Euryanthe, but in the latter the serpentine theme associated with the treacherous Eglantine actually stands the Wagnerian test of being recognizable when its character is transformed. This can hardly be claimed even for the organization of themes in Lohengrin.
Mature Wagnerian Leit-motif is a very different thing from the crude system of musical labels to which some of Wagner’s disciples have reduced it, and Wagner himself had no patience with the catalogue methods of modern operatic analysis. The Leit-motif system of Tristan, the Meistersinger, the Ring and Parsifal is a profoundly natural and subtle cross-current of musical thought, often sharply contrasted with the externals of a dramatic situation, since it is free to reflect not only these externals, not only the things which the audience know and the persons of the drama do not know, not only those workings of the dramatic character’s mind which he is trying to conceal from the other characters, but even those which he conceals from himself. There was nothing new in any one of these possibilities taken singly (see, for example, Gluck’s ironic treatment of “le calme rentre dans man cœur”), but polyphonic Leit-motif made them all possible simultaneously. Wagner’s mind was not concentrated on the merely literary and theatrical aspects of music-drama; he fought his way to the topmost heights of the peculiar musical mastery necessary to his ideals; and so he realized that principle in which none but the very greatest musicians find freedom; the principle that, however constantly necessary and powerful homophonic music may be in passages of artificial simplicity, all harmonic music is by nature and origin polyphonic; and that in polyphony lies the normal and natural means of expressing a dramatic blending of emotions.
Wagnerian Leit-motif has proved rather a giant’s robe for later composers; and the most successful of recent operas have, while aiming less at the sublime, cultivated Wagner’s musical and dramatic continuity more than his principles of musical texture. Certainly Wagnerian continuity is a permanent postulate in modern opera; but it shows itself to be a thing attainable quite independently of any purely musical style or merit, so long as the dramatic movement of the play is good. This condition was always necessary, even where opera was most symphonic. Mozart was incessantly disputing with his librettists; and all his criticisms and changes, though apparently of purely musical purport, had a brilliant effect on the movement of the play. In one desperate case, where the librettist was obstinate, Mozart abandoned a work (L’Oca del Cairo) to the first act of which he had already sketched a great finale embodying a grandiose farcical figure that promised to be unique in classical opera.
