The Spirit of French Music/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE MODERN ITALIANS
Our fathers were passionately devoted to Rossini. They were not wrong. To a large extent I share their feelings. And yet Rossini's influence has been on the whole harmful to our composers, because they have yielded to it without discernment. What may be said on this subject is applicable also to the influence exercised by his juniors in glory, such as Bellini and Donizetti, and speaking generally is applicable to the long reign of musical Italianism in France.
I
The Italians cultivated the bel canto. Their cult of it certainly amounted to an abuse. But for them the abuse began at a far more advanced stage than in the case of a French composer. For Italians as for Frenchmen, the search after a fine vocal phrase is a fault in proportion as it is carried out to the detriment of truth and nobility of expression. But when a musican is an Italian and possesses genius, the right expression comes to him naturally in the form of bel canto. (I mean by right expression that which unites with pathetic accent grace or nobility of form). Such is the divine gift of these born singers. Tears, laughter, complaints, sighs, defeat and triumph, blessing and cursing, all these mean for them song, melodious song, and the spring of emotion flows into a phrase that carries the voice to perfection, and sustains and favours the expansion of its peculiar beauty.
As will be readily imagined, I am thinking only of the greatest musicians; no one will suppose that I allude to the abominably degenerate Italian or pseudo-Italian school of to-day. I am thinking of the great musicians, and of them at their moments of inspiration, of genius. Take that celebrated passage in William Tell, with which one of the sublime scenes of that work opens; "His days which they have dared to number." It is a model of fitting declamation; the grief and remorse of a proud soul tortured by the shame of weakness could not possibly be expressed in accents of greater strength, conviction, or dignity. Moreover the phrase is given out like an incomparable vocal rocket; it is one of the most marvellous tenor phrases that can be found. What a spell it weaves!
Frenchmen, even southern Frenchmen, cannot do that. They have tried and failed. They always will fail. It is a matter of sensibility, of race. The Muette de Portici, a work famous in its day, the nearest to Rossini that we have, enables us to put our finger on this truth. It is Rossini, Rossini with something mechanical about it. It has the necessary swing, but not the spell, not the inward deep musicality. The velvet softness, the grace, the sweetness and charm have faded out of it. It is delicate but dry.
Similarly, that extreme vigour of dramatico-musical movement, that captivating vivacity in what I would call the scenic arrangement of music, these are charms that our composers might try in vain to realise to the same degree as do Rossini and Verdi in their finest works. In these great masters such qualities may be traced to a certain manner of feeling, an inward energy. Our musicians could never even try to catch that style without appearing absurd, insincere, exaggerated, strained, or without wasting in the effort their real strength. The French character requires a more temperate mode of expression, more analytical, one that brings out more fine shades and, if I dare say so, more ideas in each sentiment. In our literary classical theatre, the dialogue of the characters with one another is accompanied by the internal dialogue of each character with himself. It cannot be otherwise in a good French opera—Rameau, the Racine of music, has given imcomparable examples of this touching musical psychology; it does not indeed exclude in his case, and never should exclude, beauty from the lines (see the monologue of Theseus in the last act of the Hippolytus), but we may admit that it cannot clothe itself with that sensuous richness, that fine rapture of movement which are peculiar to Italian music. To each their own virtues. I would add to each the virtues of others, in so far as they can enrich their own without destroying them. The hangers-on of Wagner pooh-pooh the Italians, and they are fools to do so. And yet no one was more steeped in the work of the Italians than their god, and he borrowed largely from their resources of musical action (see the duo in Tristan). But he did so with a fidelity to his own nature which should be taken as an example.
II
I can only explain the contempt into which Rossini has fallen with certain musical minds as being due to an obscuration of the musical sense. In my youth I myself subscribed on trust to this disdain, but in those days I did not know Rossini, and frequented a good deal the Wagnerian sect, now dispersed. In that circle we took an interest in Schopenhauer because he had been Wagner's master in philosophy, and one of the threadbare opinions we favoured was a scandalised reprobation of certain remarks by Schopenhauer on Rossini. The philosopher of Frankfort in a passage in which he seeks to analyse the profound impressions that music produces on the soul, takes his examples from Rossini. My Wagnerians or Wagner-Schopenhauerites were up in arms about it. As though Rossini's little music appealed to the soul! To day, being better instructed (at least so I fancy), I leave these people, who if the truth were known hardly like Mozart any better, to their puritan gloom, and I firmly believe that it is not Rossini's music which is little, but their souls that might be made of a finer flame.
Rossini's musical education, like that of most Italian musicians of the nineteenth century, Verdi for instance, was sadly neglected. He often said himself that he acquired his first experience by rearranging the bass of Haydn's quartets. But unlike Verdi, who by dint of study and progress rendered beautiful a style of writing that was originally rude, Rossini was pure from the very beginning. From the purely musical point of view, the Barber might be called decadent Mozart; it is Mozart thinned and grown puny, but in no way corrupted or soiled. But is not this inferiority almost made up for by its incomparable wealth of wit and humour? Its melodic language is still thin, and the harmonic language is not yet that of William Tell, but they suffice for the distribution of a shower of amazing and delightful inventions. The Barber is unique as a display of that very rare gift, facility and a happy touch combined with genius. The Barber is a fine thing, but how far away it seems—one of the last rays of smiling beauty falling on this Europe in which romanticism, Germanism and industrialism were already beginning to make the twilight of art prevail, and were destined to mingle confusion and pain with genius in artists even of the highest gifts.
III
I find in the character of Basile and the air "Calumny" opportunity for a general note on a gift which seems to me to be peculiar to the Italians. They are musically inspired by sentiments and ideas which our composers would, I think, consider incapable of translation into music. We Frenchmen are disposed to believe that music can only express the soul's expansive states—love, enthusiasm, avowed hate, grief, hope, meditation. We believe that song can only well forth from a soul entirely given up to what it feels, and pouring itself forth in song. The idea of depicting by sounds movements of the heart and blood traceable to the absence of generosity, calculated and tortuous sentiments, cold passions that restrain themselves the better to obtain satisfaction, and that seek for means to do so in subtle and dark efforts of the mind—such an idea would seem to us against nature. Or let us say that it is not in keeping with our nature. But there is no doubt it is not excluded by Italian nature; for it is obviously a feature common to the great musicians of Italy in all ages that they have managed to translate into dramatic music of extraordinary truth and beauty the inspirations of cowardice, knavery, treachery, and of vengeance reserving itself and waiting in secret for its hour to strike.
Everyone remembers that extraordinary little musical epopee of "Calumny," traced from the moment of its imperceptible birth, when it is still only "a breath, a nothing," up to the moment when, having by its slow operation imprisoned its victim in an invisible circle from which there is no escape, it rears its head and in a voice of thunder, and strengthened by popular assent, consigns the unhappy man to infamy and the gibbet. It is a magnificent thing, and if your memory does not represent it to you as such, it will be because you have heard it spoilt by that accursed theatrical purring which often transforms into a vulgar bravura air a musical poem rich in fine shades, the execution of which requires not merely a fine singer, but a very good actor.
I go back to the early days of Italian opera, and find in the Crowning of Poppaea, by Monteverde, a scene well fitted to illustrate this gift of expression. It is the scene in which Seneca the philosopher being ordered by Nero to disappear from the world, invites his disciples to follow him, in accordance with the Stoic philosophy which teaches that death is a matter of indifference. But the disciples, to talk like one of our troopers, are not having any. And they proclaim the fact with an admirable frankness and freedom of accent. They do not repudiate the Stoic philosophy, but they are not at all desirous of repudiating life, which is also a thing of value. A French poet would never be able to avoid giving these characters a certain consciousness of the somewhat debasing comic quality of their moral attitude; but the sentiment would incidentally have the effect of freezing the music on their lips. Such a poet would therein be a moralist, but would he be true to nature? Well, there is nothing comic in loving life, that dear life which we enjoy only once. This chorus of poltroons is a marvellous musical passage.
Let us pass to the other end of the chain. What a creation is that of Iago in Verdi's Othello! In this work by a septuagenarian artist, fine as it is as a whole, and possessing so touching a nobility of atmosphere, I confess that the expression of love appears to me weak and faintly portrayed; but that of warlike heroism is warm and strong. And what shall we say of the outline of the traitor? Nothing charms my mind like the passage where he tells Othello that he has heard Cassio dreaming of Desdemona. The melody lets fall with a sort of gentle heedlessness the drops of mortal poison, and is interrupted with little pauses, as though to give each drop time to find its way right into the Moor's honest and rugged heart. And it is a delicious melody.
A delicious melody of love or springtime may spring up and grow in any climate. But as to a delicious melody of treachery, that seems to me to belong to a suppleness of musical imagination peculiar to the Italians, and itself traceable to the extraordinary mimetic gifts of that race.
There is another strain in which Italian dramatic music has often excelled, and we must look for it at the opposite end of human sentiments—the note of heroism, more particularly civic heroism. It is is to be found in Rossini's second masterpiece, William Tell;—I would not say that it is a masterpiece from beginning to end; time has tarnished several portions. I willingly throw to the wolves the formulae of bravura, such as "Matilda, idol of my soul," and passages of artificial and chilly energy ("For our love no hope remains") or of faded grace ("Upon the alien shore"). I will not defend whole-heartedly "Dark Forests," which is however thoroughly musical, with a tinge of old fashioned poetry. But all that is inspired, either in individuals or in the crowd collectively, by patriotism, enthusiasm for liberty, and that love of rustic and pastoral life which among the Swiss mountain folk is identified with those sentiments,—the whole of that (in other words, the greater part of the work) is animated with that spirit of life which confers immortal youth. And of those two inseparable signs of youth, namely, vigour and freshness, it is the latter in particular which is felt in William Tell, as was fitting in a poem whose subject is steeped in the atmosphere of Alpine nature.
It is well known that after William Tell, Rossini deliberately ceased to write for the theatre. He was only thirty-seven, and during the thirty-nine years that he lived after this he hardly composed anything except his Stabat. This retirement is one of the curiosities of the history of art. The reason given by the artist was that he feared his work would deteriorate, and evidently that explanation must be accepted. But if Rossini had died on the morrow of his triumph, the world would have speculated on the magnificence of the career that had been left unfinished. William Tell introduced a fresh style and showed, in comparison with the master's previous works, a progress, an enrichment, a deepening in his music which give the impression of a possibility of being carried much further; new modes of expression are attacked, whereby the musician seems at last to have put himself in a position to grapple with the largest undertakings. And yet he stopped.[1]
After him the decadence of Italian opera was rapid—to us it seems heart-breaking. Rossini's early musical education had been, as I have said, poor. But from the very beginning his spirit had found itself carried on a stream of free and happy civilisation; from it he had drawn a grace, a natural aristocracy which, if it did not always preserve him from the sin of negligence and improvisation, at any rate saved him absolutely from the vice of vulgarity and slackness. Rossini, in spite of the date of his birth (1797), is like his contemporary Stendhal, a man of the older Europe, of Europe as it was before Rousseau and before romanticism. His sensibility is sane, live and joyous, his intellect clear and decided. He belongs to a time when genius could only be thought of as a participation in the qualities of the gods.
I shall be told that it is certainly an exaggeration or at least inappropriate, to talk of romanticism in connection with Bellini and Donizetti, especially as those musicians, who do not appear to have possessed more general culture than the clarinettist in their orchestra, must have been to a large extent strangers to the movement of ideas in their own day. But they were also sensitive natures and very impressionable, and as such became impregnated with the atmosphere of their time. It is easily perceptible (when one hears, for example, Lucy of Lammermoor) that the contagion of the harmful fashions of romantic sensibility contributed largely to that weakness and languor with which, in their hands, Italian opera was afflicted. They emasculated opera, took away its vigour, weakened and neglected its essential dramatic qualities, set it on the path that leads to dissolution, at the end of which it becomes nothing but a series of "pieces." They emasculated music itself and lost from view the fundamental condition of unity in such works—style. The realisation of style in music presupposes, apart from a general sense of art, the possession of certain technical resources which their training had not conferred on them, and which they disregarded. Style, any sort of style, that is essentially what is lacking in their works. It is not surprising that they produced them with extraordinary rapidity. The evil reputation of Italian opera is of their making.
Are they therefore to be despised? No indeed. They possess a certain genius. They have a genius for melody, melody of the Italian type, long drawn out. They give birth to some melodies that are intolerable, but they hit upon some that are admirable and will never be forgotten. This is especially so with Bellini of whom Wagner has even said: "He who knows him not, knows not what melody is." Yet they often manage to spoil by turgidity, exaggeration and clamour a melodic beginning that was both happy and delicate.
When we think of the Barber or of William Tell, we recall a work, a subject, characters, types, a musical whole entirely enveloped in a certain colour. When we think of Norma or the Favourite, what do we recall? Just airs, some of which are beautiful and charming. This simple observation is a judgment. IV
True greatness prevails in the end. I know no more striking proof of this than the fate of Verdi's work. At one time the intolerance of the Wagnerian sect—it is not among that sect that the intelligent admirers of Wagner's music must be looked for—reigned supreme over music, imposing its pedantic ostracisms, and immolating at the feet of its idol everything that might be worthy, I will not say to supersede, but to counterbalance its cult: but the members of the sect never attacked Verdi. Nothing could be more significant than this reserve. Verdi is extremely vulnerable. Much evil might be spoken of his art not merely from the point of view of Wagnerian doctrine, but from the point of view of the laws of good music in general. True, but when this article of criticism and also of plausible depreciation has been exhausted the result will be to emphasise the superb power and vitality of the genius whose expression victoriously sweeps away the effect of all these blemishes. That is why Verdi has never been attacked. No one has set about to remove him from his pedestal. The fanatics, as I call those who love Wagner more than they love music, may have growled at that great name, but they have never bitten him.
Nothing is nobler or purer in the history of great artists than this master's life. Born in the hamlet of Roncole in 1813 (the same year as Wagner) of humble parents who kept an inn, he grew and throve where he was born. At the age of twelve he was the village organist. Soon a merchant of Busseto, the neighbouring town, named Barezzi, interested himself in him and took him as a clerk, but left him time for music. Young Verdi had lessons from the Busseto bandmaster, and soon succeeded him. He then composed quantities of pieces of church music and band music. "As a religious and military musician," writes Camille Bellaigue, "he threw to all the winds of the Lombard plain pious hymns and double steps, waltzes, mazurkas and canticles; the church and square of his village resounded with nothing but his notes. His youth 'made a noise'—a tulmultuous, violent noise, often trivial and as it were half wild, but already quivering with passion and life."
The excellent Barrezzi's subsidies enabled him to pay several visits to Milan, where amongst other things he was rejected by the conservatoire, and where he succeeded in giving in 1839 his first opera, Oberto, Count of San Bonifacio. From that time his position was established; by that I mean that he could not be overlooked, and that theatres accepted and performed his scores. But he had to compose ten operas and wait ten years before accomplishing his master strokes. Of these he produced three in close succession Rigoletto came in 1851, the Trovatore in 1853, and the Traviata was written during the rehearsals of the Trovatore.
These three works have gone round the world and round again and have not grown old. Why? Because they are free from artificiality. They have gaps, rough places, and insipid passages too, and it is astonishing to think of all the resources of musical language that Verdi fails to employ, resources which might have served him, beyond all doubt, in passages that have been left weak, one might almost say meaningless and have been filled up with more noise than expression. He is incapable of rendering, or so it seems to me, half tones, shades, graduations and transitions of sentiment. And so we find he looks out for a libretto in which the dramatic elaboration is sketchy and more or less hastily thrown together. He is the man for strong situations; they call out of him the accents of a master. And what beguiles us and carries us off our feet, what has made, and continues to make the fascination of this sublime peasant-art is not—and this should be carefully noted—the charm and eloquence of the beautiful melody of the Italian type unfolded with prehensile and vigorous energy. True, that charm and eloquence of melodic line are possessed by Verdi. But Bellini and Donizetti possessed them too; and yet they, if they are not dead, are now only half alive, and it will always be a risky enterprise to try to present Norma, Lucie, or the Favourite in their entirety before the French public of these days, whereas Rigoletto and Traviata hold the stage with all their old power and fire. The reason is that Verdi's melody has, besides its purely musical charm, the most distinct, strong and original knack of hitting the dramatic truth. It is melodic, but it is also characteristic. It sings, but it also speaks and paints. One might even say that it sings merely as an embellishment. Verdi is more than anything else a musician-dramatist. I quite believe that it is in the course of fixing the outlines of some idea deeply imprinted on his mind (the idea of a passion or a character) that he discovers his happiest musical settings. They have a wonderful lilt; that is the divine privilege of Italy, that is what we admire in William Tell. Verdi, I would say again, being a musician of the theatre, has an eye above all to the action. He goes straight to the mark. But whereas it is not given to Frenchmen in the same degree, and is not given at all to Germans, to follow this straight course and find it blossoming with melody, the Italian genius plucks its flowers thus with ease. I am speaking of the genius of a Verdi, or a Rossini; for with Bellini and Donizetti the melody declares its independence and the drama languishes; the feminine element emancipates itself from the virile.
V
In the fine book of Camille Bellaigue, to whom no work of Verdi is unknown, will be found accurate and valuable information on the long series of operas which he wrote between the decisive moments of his career, the moments that mark the beginning of a fresh stage. I will say a word about the last stage, which corresponds to that triple harvest of glory, Aïda, Othello, Falstaff.
It has often been said that Verdi changed his manner under the influence of Wagner. Nothing could be more untrue. Verdi remained entirely himself. If he had deviated however little from the line of his own nature, he would have grown weak. And that certainly is not what happened. We ought to say that Verdi's own special genius, received from the impulsion of Wagner a fresh impetus on its own lines. It is right to give credit to Wagner for this, but it is not possible to say that in any of these three works there is the smallest Wagnerian touch or inflexion. "The hour was grave, even threatening," writes Camille Bellaigue, speaking of this renovation. "Lohengrin was about to cross the Alps and descend as a conqueror. Verdi armed himself for the defence of the genius of his race. But whatever may have been asserted then or since, he armed himself with no weapons but his own. He borrowed nothing from, and yielded nothing to his terrible adversary. Someone has put it whimsically: 'It was on his own shoulders that Verdi always climbed to raise himself higher and higher.' "
In this reform he did not allow his personal sense of expression to be in any way impaired. He simply perfected and purified his instrument of expression. I feel sure that he renewed his musical studies, and we have a curious corroboration of this in a string quartet written in 1873; it is not a masterpiece, but still less is it deserving of contempt; it is very well written according to the rules governing this difficult form. It was not the bandmaster of Busseto who had taught him that. The result in Verdi's work was a nobility of style which reaches grandeur in Aïda, an art of half tones which triumphs in Othello and Falstaff. It seems to me (but I may be mistaken) that in Othello the portrayal of the violent passions of love and hate smacks somewhat of old age. On the other hand, the cold passion of a traitor and consummate master of intrigue is there rendered with a mastery only to be compared with that which created Basile in the Barber; it is one of the things in music that will never die.
VI
I have called the art of Verdi, the earlier Verdi especially, a peasant art. He was himself a peasant, but one of nature's noblemen. Thanks to this characistic his intellectual development was magnificently extended while retaining a perfect simplicity.
I do not suppose that he learnt much at his village school, and his literary culture must have remained very incomplete and haphazard. But he had that mark of the higher breeds, common-sense and reasoning power. And so what he managed to read and acquire without much method taught him to have a clear outlook on humanity and life. The books which he set to music, except those made for him by the master hand of Boïto, were poor literature. I am struck with the perseverance with which he meditated them, steeped himself in them. He would con them a hundred times. These often wretched lucubrations dealt after all with human matters. Their subjects were the follies and tragedies of love and ambition, the greatness and distress of kings, the destiny of nations. It was just universal history, and a piercing eye could trace its outlines under a clumsy and puerile portrayal. That is why Verdi read his books so many times. He was transforming them. He was transporting these melodramatic trifles on to the plane of seriousness, truth and greatness. And that is why one so often has the impression that his music is saying something great, though the words are poor.
A fine trilogy might be made of these three great Latins, Verdi, Mistral and J. H. Fabre. Three great peasants, each a genius, they grew like oaks in the middle of their village square, and they grew so high that the universe has greeted their burgeoning.
- ↑ There was something ironical in this. Meyerbeer was in the ascendant. And in Meyerbeer's style Rossini's defeat was a foregone conclusion. But Rossini's own style was better.