The Spirit of French Music/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
MEYERBEER
In the discussions provoked, or rather renewed, by the war, on the subject of French and German music, the names and works of many famous musicians have come up for judgment, but not much has been said about Meyerbeer. Wagner's apologists have given him a few hard knocks, but have not pressed the attack. Doubtless they do not see much danger for the future of their cult in the author of the Huguenots. M. Saint-Saëns has made a brief reply, and in particular has asked whether they regarded the fourth act of the Huguenots as a small thing. The point was quite inadequate as a general defence of Meyerbeer's work, but it was not ill-chosen. The fourth act of the Huguenots is Meyerbeer's most successful effort; he has perhaps written other pages as strong, but he has never written an equally long sequence of strong pages. I say strong, not fine, pages; there is a distinction. M. Saint-Saëns has by no means proved by this reference as much as he would have wished to prove; he will not have changed in the least the opinion of those who, knowing Meyerbeer's musical work by hearing and reading it, judge it as a whole with severity. But he has done well in indicating a certain limit, a certain restraint which should be observed in this severity if one wishes that it should remain strictly fair and rightly proportioned to the interests of taste.
I will justify to the best of my ability the estimate which I propose to offer of the value of Meyerbeer's work and of his share in the destinies of musical art. Even those who judge it with greater disfavour than myself cannot but recognise that it is worth while to examine closely the constitution of works which between 1830 and 1870 reigned with brilliance not only in Paris, but in all the musical theatres of Europe; some of them are still performed, and have, as it is expressed, kept a public, even after having lost all influence on artists and schools.
I
Jacob Liebmann Beer was born at Berlin on the 23rd September, 1791 and was the son of a rich Jewish banker. The paternal fortune was destined to play no unimportant part in his artistic career. It was not merely that it freed him in his youth from the preoccupation of earning his bread and permitted him thereafter to consecrate his whole time to musical production, which in his case seems to have been a painful and laborious process (in passing I may remark that time has nothing to do with the matter). But more than this, he knew how to employ his money with superior cunning to organise, as it is called now-a-days, the launching of his works, to pave the way for their success and make it last. He did not pay theatrical managers to perform them, because in his day that was not done. But he used to give expensive dinners to journalists before the first nights; he was ready, though clever, with his gold. He had the means for self-advertisement, and made the most of them. Let us add, though the fact is obvious, that all this would have availed him nothing if his art had not contained in itself the material of sucess at the moment when his works were brought out. But we shall perhaps find that his art itself had some of the characteristics of a successful flotation, and that if Meyerbeer's genius and Meyerbeer's money were certainly two quite different things, yet they were not two things between which there was exactly the solution of continuity that we should normally expect.
Having shown very early a turn for music he was entrusted to the care of the Abbé Vogler, precentor at Darmstadt, at whose school he had for fellow-pupil the future author of Freischütz and of Oberon, Carl Maria Weber. In the excellent notice of Meyerbeer written by MM. Victor Debay and Paul Locard for Lavignac's Musical Encyclopaedia, I see the "principles of musical discipline" taught by the Abbé Vogler are characterised as "severe." These gentlemen are no doubt better informed than I on the teaching of the Abbé Vogler. But there is one branch of classical musical discipline which Meyerbeer soon forgot completely, assuming he ever had any solid grounding in it. He shewed himself utterly impotent in the symphonic side of the art. In principle I certainly would not make that a reproach against him; he was a musician of the theatre, and the example of more than one great genius, Grück and Grétry for instance, proves that masterpieces of dramatic music can be written by men who have not made themselves masters of this side of their art. That is a fact. But it is only one fact, and it would be wrong to conclude that a studious apprenticeship in symphonic technique is valueless for all musicians, or that they can dispense with it without running a dangerous risk; or even that those great men would have gained nothing from it in resources of expression and composition in which they were lacking, and in the possibility of bold experiments on which they did not venture. Yet we bow before the results, charming or sublime, which the gifts of sensibility and inventiveness possessed by these great poets with a genius for the theatre were able to attain merely by the observance of more elementary and simpler laws than those which govern symphonic composition. The great thing is only to do what one can do; accordingly we do not find Glück and Grétry attempting what is beyond their powers, but not beyond the powers of Rameau, Mozart and Beethoven, trained athletes who could give play to every kind of suppleness, strength or fancy, wizards initiated in all the glorious devices and all the magic of the feast of sound. Meyerbeer did not copy this reserve. His unlucky symphonic efforts draw painful attention to this gap in his talent. His overtures offer the most convincing example. Look at that of the Huguenots, which aims at being a development of Luther's fine chant. No sooner has the theme been set out with the accompaniment of an apt and strong harmony than there begins the most pitiful, irrational and breathless working up. It is the same with the overture of Robert the Devil on the famous theme of the infernal evocation, and with the Coronation March in the Prophet. Well, I shall be told, Meyerbeer can afford to have condemnation passed on him on that point, according to the rule you have laid down yourself, if he has given all the necessary proofs of mastery and power in the form of dramatic composition. The question is not so simple where Meyerbeer is concerned. The majority of the French public of his time, who only knew music by the contemporary musicians of the theatre, lived in the conviction that Meyerbeer had brought them "great music." Auber was little music, pleasant and "very French." But Meyerbeer was high art, with its depths and mysteries. Now it was especially by these big chunks of false symphony (the solemn presentation of which did not alter the fact that they were failures), that he had created this illusion. The remainder of my criticism will show the drift of that remark.
It is only fair to add that Meyerbeer's musical culture considered in its other aspects was rich and substantial. His harmony is often massive, and for that reason too Germanic for my taste; but it is strong, and close and firm. He excels in musical construction within the peculiar limits of operatic airs and stage settings. He handles his ideas firmly. He has vivacity, pageantry, and sometimes elegance. He has a variety of form which lends itself to criticism on the ground that the forms are obviously borrowed from all sorts of musicians, but which yet has its value. He is a master of instrumentation.
Let us dwell upon this last merit, though even that cannot be praised without reserve. The illustrious Gevaërt is no doubt justified in saying that "the most passionate detractors of Meyerbeer cannot deny that he has an exquisite tact in the choice of sounds."[1] But in the eyes of sound scholarship this talent has no true worth except by the quality of the inspiration in the service of which it is employed, and of the ideas which it illustrates. The tones of the different instruments are a wonderful means of expression, but of all the means of expression at music's disposal they are the most material, and therefore they are really only valuable through the nobility of the matter which they help to express and make felt. They might be compared to a colour scheme of which the least important appeals have an inestimable charm when the picture that it expresses recommends itself by the poetry of its thought, the beauty and energy of the composition, the strength of the movement. Are these higher virtues absent? Then a connoisseur will certainly not let himself be captured by the brilliant palette-work which a clever artist offers us by way of compensation. There you have the point that it is important to note about Meyerbeer's instrumentation. The passages in which the fascination that he knows so well how to put into his work is in true proportion to the poetry of the idea are absolutely exceptional. One of the passages that does give me the impression of this due proportion is the celebrated bit in the Africaine, "Wonderful Land." There the feeling of gracious and calm enthusiasm which is exhaled from the melody and harmony calls for the fascination of a cleverly smooth orchestration. But take "Whiter than the ermine white," or again, "O fair land of Touraine." Here the special charm of the orchestral tones is nothing but the adornment of a hollow emptiness.
The brilliance of this exploitation of instrumental resources was something new for French ears, it was largely this that attracted them—one might say, as regards a good deal of it, took them in. By this feature of his art Meyerbeer was destined to exercise a most unfortunate influence on the future of music in our country. He required of combinations of sound—mere sound effects—that they should make up for the inadequacy, the mediocre and often low quality of the actual musical thought; how then could he be content with the orchestra of such as Rameau, Mozart, Beethoven or Boïeldieu? To create for himself the necessary resources, he had to provision himself, if I may put it that way, with an exaggerated quantity of sound-material, and to enlarge greatly the orchestral mass. The heaviness, the excessive weight, what has been called the obesity of the modern dramatic orchestra, which has become in our time the nightmare of all refined lovers of music, dates from Meyerbeer. The Germans put up with it gladly, nay revel in it. But for French musicians it is a condition incompatible with the free development and liberty of their nature; and French musical art, which has unfortunately allowed it to prevail far too much, could only continue to tolerate it at the price of its own extinction and death.
I have no intention, nor indeed have I the opportunity, of following the first part of Meyerbeer's career when he was producing work without having yet found I will not say his personality, but his form, the form of the works which have filled the world with his name. As to his personality, I do not consider he ever found it; at most he found it only in rare and disjointed fragments whose authenticity is never very sure. The series begins with Robert the Devil, which was triumphantly successful at Paris in November 1831.
But it is very interesting, or rather it is necessary, to indicate briefly the incarnations, multiple and complete avatars, through which he had gone before reaching this point; he was in succession a German composer, an Italian composer and a French composer.
He began in Germany with an oratorio and two operas, produced at Darmstadt, Vienna and Stuttgart. According to the testimony that I have been able to gather about these works of his youth, they seem to have shown strength, but to have been conceived in that form of stiff and cold scholasticism that has generally been achieved by those who have sought to copy the majesty of Handel (the Saxon master whose work was so nobly influenced and modified by the environment of aristocratic England), without being able to copy his genius or his grandeur of sentiment. They had no success. Now Nature had created in Jacob Liebmann Beer (he had added Meyer to his name in obedience to the wish if a rich relation whose heir he had become) a man hardly capable of imagining any polestar but success for artists at the crossroads of life, success being, beyond dispute, the polestar of merchants anxious to find a market for their wares. Who was successful in Europe just then? Rossini. Meyerbeer is off to Italy, steeps himself in the methods of Rossini, and brings out at Padua, Turin and Venice three operas in Rossini's first manner. He translates his first name Jacob into Italian, and becomes Giacomo Meyerbeer. A symbolic combination, as M. Lionel Dauriac has wittily remarked; for in the operas of his settled manner, it was constantly to happen that an air begun in the German style should go on in the Italian, that Handel should give way to Rossini or Donizetti, that Meyer should provide the air and Giacomo the refrain.
However, the affectionate remonstrances of Weber, added no doubt to the signs of wear which Rossini's manner (the Rossini of Tancred and Semiramis) was beginning to show, and the great expansion in style of Rossini himself, led Meyerbeer to conclude that he had gone too far in the direction of Italy. He resumed relations with Berlin and composed an opera of mixed, or rather double, style, Il Crociato in Egitto, which we know; the biographers whom I have quoted say truly that in it he thought to attain originality by drawing inspiration simultaneously from Rossini and Weber. Il Crociato was presented at the Théâtre-Italien in 1825. This circumstance was decisive. Contact with Paris and the first-hand discovery of French music and its virtues revealed to the musician the path of his future triumphs. He was approaching forty, but no change alarmed him, and he resolved to become a French composer. From that time it was on books written in French, or at any rate in a sort of French, that he composed all his operas. The first fruit of this resolve was Robert the Devil presented at the Opera on the 22nd November, 1831, poem by Scribe. Its success was sensational, and when at a later date Robert was performed at Berlin, we shall find Frederick-William IV endorsing the applause of Paris by appointing Meyerbeer director-general of music at the Prussian court.
II
Robert the Devil is an important date in the history of music. In this work Meyerbeer had created a new branch of art, a branch that was destined to make his fortune and derive its fortune from him—Grand Opera. But is "branch" the right word? No, it was rather a combination. The legitimate branches of literature and art have their foundation in nature. Tragedy, comedy, the epopee, the novel, satire, the madrigal, epigram—or again, lyric drama, comic opera, oratorio, the cantata, song—these correspond to so many aspects under which things can be regarded, painted, or sung, or to so many natural modes of feeling, natural aspirations of the human soul. Grand opera has its foundation not in nature, but in Meyerbeer's nature. It was born with Meyerbeer and died with him. Its decease is not universally admitted, and many people still imagine that what corresponds in music to the natural and eternal distinction of comedy and tragedy, whatever names one may give them, is the distinction between comic opera and grand opera. But that is an error. Grand opera is in no way musical tragedy; I allow that it more resembles tragedy than comedy, though it commonly contains a large comic element—an involuntary element, it is true. More than anything else it resembles itself. Let us try to define it.
Among its characteristics the most striking is not the least disastrous, namely the literary baseness of the libretto. Providence had not created Meyerbeer for Scribe, since the latter's work would still be considerable apart from his collaboration with the author of The Huguenots. But Providence had created Scribe for Meyerbeer. The association of these two introduced into the musical theatre the toleration of those books which are absolute artistic outrages both in matter and in form. The idea, still very widespread, that the book of an opera is not really adapted to its function and does not conform to its destiny unless it contains absurdities, is only a statement of the way they are made, set up as a rule for their manufacture.
In old days it was an almost universal custom of operatic composers to borrow their subjects from the masterpieces of ancient and modern literature. It was an immense gain to music to take as its material fables and figures already handled, interpreted and illustrated by the great poets. Musical drama, (I use the expression in its most general application) is after all nothing but the modern form of the ancient and natural union between music and poetry; without that union complete enjoyment seems impossible—the absence of it leaves something wanting. By uniting herself in this form and setting to poetry of proved nobility, grandeur or delicacy, music bound herself in turn to seek these virtues and to display them in opera, as she had displayed them before the days of opera in the choruses of Greek tragedy, in the fine hymns of the church, which were a continuation of ancient music, and in that wonderful choral music of the sixteenth century which was written to the verses of Ronsard and the masters of the "Pleiad." The very titles of the operas of Monteverde, Lulli, Rameau, Glück, Mozart, Méhul—of all the great masters (not to mention the lesser, and without quoting those who, after Meyerbeer, reverted to this custom, or the heroic Berlioz who was faithful to it all his life), bear absolutely unanimous witness to the truth of my remark. I am not in the least attempting to lay this down as a sine qua non of good opera; but all the same the age-long persistence of a certain artistic practice and the great number of masterpieces in which we come across it, do oblige us to accept it as a convention almost equivalent to a necessity. The reasons why this convention showed itself eminently favourable to beauty of expression are obvious. In view of the very dominant part that music plays in opera, it is hardly to be expected that many librettists will be found who combine disinterested enthusiasm with the power to create anything equivalent to the accepted masterpieces of literature. If this combination should be found, so much the better; but all one can expect, or rather all one ought to exact, from the poet of opera is that he should contribute in his adaptations good sense, a delicate and sure taste, a certain grace and a good style.
I would add that the services rendered to music by literary masterpieces may also be rendered by subjects which though, they have not found their Sophocles, their Vergil, their Tasso or their Racine, have yet undergone some treatment by the human imagination that is familiar to all; for instance legendary traditions or popular tales. The essential thing is that Music should find a certain poetic elaboration completed and ready to her hand. Perhaps I shall here be confronted with examples such as Verdi (Verdi in his earlier days) who more often that not worked on the coarsest and most raw dramatic material. His case is exceptional, but it bears out the idea; for in this early manner Verdi (whom I passionately admire) while showing sufficient strength to raise a poor subject above its own level in places, is yet lacking in general harmony and order, and his spurts of genius do not constitute a style. Then again, the dramatic poems on which he works are very simple and elementary in their shrivelled roughness, a fact which allows him great freedom to interpret and almost to create the subject himself.
Meyerbeer's "books" on the other hand are complicated and turgid, and the action gets involved in a great deal of ostentation.
Let us however make no mistake about the quality of the ambition shown by Meyerbeer's choice of these books. It is a large but modest ambition. The course steered by him from Robert the Devil on proves that he had arrived at a true knowledge of himself. He had in his youth written a Daughter of Jephtha, a mediocre work indeed; but he now realised that these high poetic sources, these purified and ennobled materials were not for him. He had, I say, this modesty as regards himself. He shewed it also (and, alas, not without some reason) on behalf of the kind of public that the political revolutions of France, the prevalent social confusion and romantic jumble of ideas, had prepared for a musician of the year 1831. What he expected of Scribe, or what Scribe offered him was heavy historic melodrama conceived in a spirit of trivial romanticism, and overloaded with contrivances and special scenic or decorative machinery, This last element of the combination was not after all the worst, being the most capable of inspiring in Meyerbeer a relatively sincere music.
I do not deny that there are in Scribe's "books" some elements less worthless than others I indicate his average quality.[2]
III
Nothing could be more instructive than the metamorphoses of Robert the Devil. It was conceived first as comic opera, then as a fantastic ballet, and lastly as grand opera. The two former destinations would have been more suitable for one of those naughtily horrifying stories of the middle ages, in which a lady is mishandled by the devil. In the theatre, there are difficulties about taking the devil tragically; he can hardly appear except either as a particularly outrageous practical joker or as a master of fireworks. Meyerbeer's Bertram has kept some features of this primitive character, and displays them in the celebrated humorous duet of Raimbaud, "The worthy man," which is an excellent piece, far the best in the whole score. But to turn the theme into grand opera, it was necessary to invent a tragic and moving devil, and give him a psychology, a double psychology as devil and father, which any pen but Scribe's would have been afraid to portray. It was necessary moreover to link up the motives of the ballet with the bases of the tragedy, in which however the ballet continued to stick out in all directions. We know the result. This devil displays to his son at once the tender protection of a father and the wickedness of a tempter; he passionately desires the happiness of his son and from sheer love strives desperately to damn his soul, so as not to be separated from him but enjoy (no doubt) in hell the sweets of paternity; one fine day, or rather one foul night, he learns, having gone to Satan's caverns for information, that he has only till the morrow at midnight to achieve the perdition of this soul (Satan regards the whole business with a strange aloofness), because that is the hour when "his leave expires." Does not this style of invention show the most delightfully reckless ineptitude? These words would in fact be rather stronger than the subject is worth if there had not been whole generations who imagined (and there still are people who do so) that Meyerbeer had achieved in Bertram a masterly creation. Bertram's creation stops short at a red beard and a flame-coloured doublet.
All the moral (so-called) springs of the action, the character of Robert, and all the characters are of the same calibre. And now having spoken of the book, we shall be expected no doubt to talk of the music. But is it not at once obvious that this music can only develop its merits up to a certain level, and that all the virtues to be found in it cannot exclude or make up for a certain essential blemish, a birthmark, traceable to the incongruity of the occasion that provides the reason for its existence? I admit that the famous air of the diabolic summons, "Nuns at rest," is musically welcome, and has a satisfying tragic way about it. But this tragic element—this tragic puppetry, cannot be taken seriously, and merely conveys a touch of the grotesque. I find a very subtle appreciation of it among the night wanderers of Toulouse, when they make the streets of their worthy town (where Meyerbeer is thought a deal of) resound with Bertram's appeal.
It is the same sense of fitness which makes Alphonse Daudet select "Robert, thou whom I adore" as the great dramatic air to be sung at the Bezuquets at Tarascon. Verdi is full of airs that linger in everyone's memory, and that have a popular, often even a vulgar, turn. And yet Daudet would never have given us Verdi at the Bezuquets, and the airs of Traviata are not the ones with which the echoes of the Toulouse streets resound at the break-up of festive dinner parties. There is in them a dignity that protects them, and it is this dignity (of which every connoisseur feels the secret absence in Meyerbeer's ideas) which perhaps does most to give the idea of greatness. We still read now and again that Meyerbeer's music is "very French." What is assuredly more French is this pleasant irony at the expense of operatic rhetoric.
IV
The Huguenots, presented in 1836 with a Parisian success equal to that of Robert, and a European success still more pronounced, is not a masterpiece. But it is Meyerbeer's masterpiece. Side by side with a certain quantity of rubbish there certainly occur powerful pages marked by superior mastery. But none of them have that natural charm and simplicity which characterise what is really fine and really good not only in delicate work, but equally in the serious and grand styles. Still, unless one is hopelessly prejudiced, one cannot withhold admiration from some scenes and one act which show an energy that is abundant though impure in form and colouring, a pompous but sustained eloquence, strong handling and firm balance. These qualities always secure an undeniable hold, if not on the heart, which is not touched, at any rate on the senses and on the understanding.
We must not be surprised that the Huguenots is the "book" that best inspired Meyerbeer. The musician used to indicate a subject to his librettist, and the latter made a scenario of it. Now I am convinced that of all the "books" on which he worked this one attracted him by less cold, artificial and material motives than the others. It flattered in Meyerbeer a latent hereditary religious hostility. A regrettable passion; granted, but we are talking art. And this passion was, like all passions, capable of mingling a certain ardour with its expression. Do you not perceive it in that special strength of coarse musical eloquence which saves from disaster the famous scene of the benediction of the daggers? One cannot say whether it is historically, morally or dramatically that this device is most absurd.
In this scene the musician has introduced nuns also praying over daggers, not, be it said, as a refinement of artistic outrage, but in order that the chorus should not lack soprano voices. And I admit I greatly enjoy a complete harmony of voices. But I esteem musical art too highly to endure that its beauty should be achieved at the price of incongruities committed in another sphere, beauty being, according to the immortal saying of Eugène Delacroix, "the union of all seemliness."
Combined with the dexterity of Scribe this personal feeling on the composer's part produced a book which (if we tolerate the form at all) is relatively happy. This art form is so mechanical that it is bound to exclude the real study of characters and sentiments, and when it attempts these it soon makes itself ridiculous. One cannot deny to the old Huguenot soldier Marcel some rudimentary moral personality. But doesn't this manner of displaying the religious depths of his soul (it consists of shouting, on any provocation or none, Luther's hymn) smack of the puppet show? With this reserve it must admitted be that in the Huguenots the spectacular part—the set pieces of the court and its pleasures, the feasts, scenes of crowds and processions—is cleverly connected with the action. One is grateful to the authors for having given it great importance, this accessory being the main part of grand opera of the Meyerbeer school. And for that reason I quite believe that the Huguenots will remain not the masterpiece (that is not the right word), but the very brilliant monument of grand opera—I should say of "big" opera.
V
Thirteen years elapsed between the Huguenots and the Prophet. In spite of this laudably prolonged elaboration, this work did not surpass its predecessor as the latter had surpassed Robert. For my part I place it lower. Parts of the Prophet are brilliant, but the work as a whole leaves the impression of vast emptiness. This is easily explained by the radically uncertain and vacillating character of the plot. The principal character, the prophet, has no real existence. Jean, the young innkeeper of Leyde, lets himself be pushed into the position of religious head of the anabaptists who are stirring up the peasants against their masters. But is he actuated merely by the thought of personal vengeance against the Lord Oberthal who has robbed him of his sweetheart? Or is he on the other hand an inspired fanatic who puts his mystic mission before everything, and has no thought left of sweetheart or mother? He embodies these two contradictory ideas, these two versions, both in turn affirmed and predominating; the story of the vision in the second act only offers a very miserable and vamped up effort at reconciling the two. This moral quality of the hero, this ambiguity of nature in the action, make the Prophet, regarded as drama, a sort of void for the intellect, and prevent the heart from being touched by those great religious scenes, which seem mere veneer. The character of Fides, the mother, is the only one which has a certain moral reality. Whatever be the motive for which her son has put himself at the head of robbers and assassins, the grief of this old peasant woman will be the same and will be expressed in the same fashion. There is also merit, and sometimes a great deal of merit, in the sketch of the three anabaptists.
These rapid analyses illustrate sufficiently on the dramatic side the form which Meyerbeer, aided by Scribe, invented for his own use. It is easy to see how empty, artificial and faked it is, and also how audaciously clever in the calculation of effect. I will not dwell upon the Africaine, in which we see a couple of African savages who could give points to the most skilful Portuguese navigator in the reading of marine charts, and who think and express themselves with refinements of delicacy worthy of old-fashioned diplomatists. Nor will I linger over the comic operas—the tiresome Northern Star, in which all the recipes for French lightness are applied with painful heaviness—or the Ploërmel Pardon, which is perhaps better, but contributes nothing to the glory of Meyerbeer, who certainly did not shine in comic opera.
I think too I should be wearisome if I spent long in emphasising the wretchedness of the writing. It is notorious, and it is an easy game to pick out the faults in French and the fine blossoms of absurdity.[3] But what is the use of quoting these gems? Even when the style of speech of the Meyerbeer–Scribe characters is less incorrect or less extravagant, it is still separated from what is natural by a mysterious gulf. A feature that is not noticed so much is the outrages on prosody with which the musical text teems. In the quick movements especially, the musician, whose mother-tongue was German, completely loses the small sense he may ever have acquired of the values of syllables in French.
For your instruction, look at the Polonaise in the first act of the Northern Star. As regards prosody it is appalling, it is really unsingable. Only a Boche could keep smiling when rendering soldat with the sol long and the dat short; or qui marche droit with the che long and droit short—or when giving s'élance with the same length for s'é and lan. An example familiar to everyone is that of Robert's Ballade at the words: "Et Berthe jusqu-alors si fière." I don't know how singers get over it, but it's much more difficult than fruit cuit, fruit cru. And I repeat, these horrors abound. They are absolutely intolerable, and to my way of thinking, a page of music in which they occur has no right to see the light of day.
VI
It remains for me to consider the musician separately. Not that the judgment to be delivered on a work of dramatic music taken alone and the judgment concerning the quality of the dramatic work itself can be made independent of each other. What is attempted is merely to observe separately the elements of the whole work, poetry and music, in order to form a just impression of the combined effect and assign the work its right place.
Here is one striking point. It is, if not true, at any rate plausible and specious to say that Meyerbeer is a great musician. And yet his name does not suggest to the imagination the points of a really distinct musical personality. When we speak of Rameau or Glück or Mozart, or again (I purposely add to these great names some lesser ones) of Berlioz, Bizet, Gounod, Massenet, we have present in our mind the vision, either sublime or at least attractive, of a certain original creation with which they have enriched the world of art, of some form of expression which they have contributed, something coming from them which did not exist before them, which would not have existed without them. In the same way we cannot read four lines of Racine or of La Fontaine, or even of Voltaire, without being conscious that, mysteriously blended with the classic generality of the form, there exists a touch, an imprint that belongs only to these poets. It is the imprint, the aroma of individuality; and from that comes the affection, which combines in us with admiration, for artists of real genius and real grace—a softer and perhaps a truer emotion than mere admiration.
There is nothing of this sort about Meyerbeer. Show me if you can the passage where you find his special touch, the unique sound of his voice, his original accent, the inimitable inflexions of his sensibility. With him they do not exist, Among the pleasures which some minds find in him affection cannot be reckoned one.
What is consistently lacking in Meyerbeer's music is the freshness of nature and sincerity. I have already said so incidentally, and I now make it the dominant point of my criticism. Attribute to him all the other virtues, and I will reason with you. But if you do not feel the radical absence of that quality, without which one may say tersely that nothing is any good, without which nothing can be achieved but a more or less successful "stunt," then discussion is useless. There is nothing surprising in this peculiarity of Meyerbeer's music, for it is not his own, it is other people's. Whose? Everybody's, provided they were great or successful. It is the music of everybody whom Germany, Italy and France had been applauding for half a century or a century. It is Handel's, Rossini's, Mozart's, Boïeldieu's, Beethoven's, Herold's—not forgetting Glück, Spontini, and Spohr. It is the music of reflection.
Legitimate imitation, as practised by all great artists, consists of steeping oneself in the works of the masters, not in order to reproduce their style and manner, but in order to provide one's personal inspiration with means of expression. This inspiration when it exists infuses a new life into the substance of what is borrowed and transfigures it. To have mastered certain delicate secrets of French rhythm in Anatole France or Lemaître, is a totally different thing from writing diluted Anatole France or Lemaître Meyerbeer writes diluted Handel, Rossini, etc. Even then it would not be so bad if he had only taken one model, or only one to each opera. But he passes from one to another and back again in the course of a single work, a single act, a single scene, a single page. And this patchwork of styles gives the most tangible evidence for the proof of his eternal alibi.
Imagine a Delille possessed of talent and rhetorical cleverness, but having no poetic accent of his own, and dominated by all the styles of poetry which have successively prevailed in France from the Pléiade to Victor Hugo and Ronsard. He writes scenes of plays, tirades beginning in the manner of Racine, or at any rate of Crebillon, and continuing in the manner of Hugo, or it may be of Auguste Vacquerie. That would have been impossible in literature, even at periods of relative corruption in our taste. But the like has been seen in music. To the coarsening of taste have been added, by way of cloaking the scandal, all the camouflage of which opera admits the use. But if, in France at any rate, this scandal has never been unmasked and denned by criticism, there has been an obscure consciousness of it ever since a more sincere expression has reappeared on the boards, and it has been the death of Meyerbeer. "Something for all tastes," might be the motto of his work. It exploited pell-mell all the forms which had been successful in all the countries of Europe, and dragged them in side by side in musical utterance with no other rule of choice than the inflexible purpose of forcing success. It is a known fact that for certain important passages Meyerbeer wrote several airs. He used to try them at the public rehearsal and plump for the one which produced most effect.
Imitation conceived in this manner allows the most precious part of what it imitates to be lost. It is useless for Meyerbeer to take as model the masters of impassioned eloquence or brilliant lightness; he himself is more often than not cold and heavy. The forms that he steals are no longer animated in his hands by the vibration of the life-impulse which created them. There is a certain quality, the most enviable of all that music can possess, more easily felt than defined, for which musicians have only one word, oddly chosen it may be thought, but there is no substitute for it. "A thing is, or is not, musical," they say, and it often happens that they deny the epithet to music that is very well constructed. Meyerbeer's music is often well constructed. But it rarely deserves to be called musical. One is distinctly conscious that this expression describes a kind of divine lightness of the elements.
I would not be taken to mean that movement is wanting in Meyerbeer's works. But the movement that may be discovered in them is not really (as it should be) that of the music itself, or very rarely so. It is the movement of the great melodramatic and scenic machine to whose engines the music is harnessed; they give it an artificial and seeming animation without fully succeeding in relieving its heaviness. What is original about Meyerbeer is that he applied to the use of grand opera all the music that had been made in Europe from Bach to Auber, sacred and profane music, vocal and instrumental music. In this sense, an ill-informed public was not wrong in finding "great music" in his work. But it was presented to them (side by side with a great deal of little and even bad music) in a kind of refraction, on the very artificial plane and in the terribly gilded setting of grand opera. Meyerbeer himself took cognisance of the world of poetry and the world of sounds with a sort of enthusiasm, from the angle of grand opera. Grand opera, that was what he loved, with the love of a barbarian, a manufacturer and a real artist, simultaneously. This love inspired him now and again with a kind of theatrical poetry, of which the expression crops up especially in certain passages of the Africaine. I like to imagine as coming from his own lips the really fine phrase of Vasco, "Wonderful land"; the horizons he is contemplating are the boards, furnished with astonishing landscapes of gilded cardboard, sumptuous processions, dazzling costumes and other magnificent effects; the boards where fright and terror come suddenly to interrupt the joyous feast, where the intoxicated guests see a spectre rise, where the soul of dark conspiracies is revealed merely at the bidding of a minor seventh chord crashed out by the orchestra at the right moment.
To test the correctness of my judgnemt (it is one that brings me into agreement with a great many musicians) you have only to look through Meyerbeer's scores in the best passages, that is in the scenes that are reputed to be the most happily contrived, and find out whether or no a perpetual solution of continuity in the style may be observed in them; whether or no the three or four developments which follow one another in them are written in three or four different languages; a sort of arbitrary selection or instantaneous decision seems to have presided over their choice, as though at each phase of his composition the musician had relapsed into a state of absolute mental confusion, and an uncertainty of musical control, from which he has only been able to extricate himself by making an entirely fresh start. Drawing at random on my memory, I will offer a few examples.
VII
In the Africaine, Act I., Scene I, compare these three passages: "I hope … My hand shall be … The farewell song …”—taken from a space of thirty bars and sung by the same person. The first is a phrase from Euryanthe, spoilt; the second a good formula from Glück; the third from Weber. The opening bars of the romance which follows are, by the way, very pretty up to where the runs begin.
Take, in the same opera, Nelusko's air, "Daughter of Kings." The first phrase has certainly a majestic gait; but the one which follows, "When Love possesses me," without being bad is taken off quite a different shelf of the musical library. This head and body do not fit each other.
In the Prophet, at the beginning of Act IV., follow what is sung by Fides from the cavatina, "Oh thou who forsakest me," and on to the following scene. Take first the cavatina; a phrase apparently noble and pure, resembling Beethoven, and composed of the notes of the perfect chord; one cannot deny that it is a fine phrase, but on the other hand it has the misfortune to be instrumental, not vocal; to be exact, it is a clarinet phrase. The mother weeps over the son who has forsaken her, and promises to forgive him. Thereupon appears an officer who urges the aged woman to prostrate herself before the "King-Prophet" who is about to appear. Then the pious woman's thought turns to God, and she implores the divine light to bring back her lost one. This certainly ought to be said in a different tone, but in a tone suited to the character and coming from the soul. Well, what do we find? A horrible piece of bravura, a coarse imitation of Weber in his passionate manner, ascending and descending cascades of notes and syllables, whose material precipitation does not in the least produce, as the composer intends, the expression of moral exaltation. However, as this achievement does not satisfy him, and he is determined for the finish further to augment his effect, what resource is left him? Sheer brutality. He has recourse to it in the last part, in four time, where the voice of the unhappy Fides is strained over the insignificant and violent conclusion of a mediocre sonata by Spohr. Thus having produced in succession style, virtuosity and brutality, he may be supposed to have left no single hearer in the room unsatisfied.[4]
Speaking generally, you have only to make the experiment of putting side by side, from no matter what score of Meyerbeer, three passages taken from different acts. (Naturally the experiment will not be instructive unless you are well acquainted with the masters, and have acquired by these studies certain habits of mind). You will recognise that to assemble in one work such heterogeneous manners of writing required a blender who had little scruple about style, and that the work which juxtaposes them belongs truly to the realm of musical curios.
Let us take our three passages from the Huguenots—say for example, the women's chorus "Fresh beauties"—a page of Donizetti with a more flowery accompaniment; the nocturnal scene between Valentine and Marcel, manufactured Mozart, and the duet in the fourth act, in which there is something of everything. "Sir! The duet from the Huguenots?" I fancy some old concert-goer exclaiming; "What, do you not spare even that illustrious page, to which you yourself seemed but now to be paying homage?" I do not take back what I said; one would have to be the slave of scholastic or other prejudices to deny to this duet, so well placed too from the melodramatic point of view, its qualities of warmth and eloquence, its very powerful effect. But one would have to be a barbarian or an ignoramus not to notice that it is written in a blended and impure style, and that from one phrase to another there is a constant change of musical idiom and musical spirit.
There is no need for me to multiply my proofs. But it important that I have taken them only from the "best" passages. What would happen if I tackled what I have called Meyerbeer's rubbish heap—that rubbish heap which in the total weight of his work represents no small proportion of kilogrammes! Meyerbeer is appalling when the kindly Muse of Reflection does not come to his aid, or at least does not bring him sufficiently definite assistance. As types of these passages, rich in notes but empty of meaning, one may quote: in a falsely sentimental or elegant style, "Whiter than the ermine white," "For Bertha I sigh:" in a gravely dramatic style, the whole of the second act of the Africaine, except the phrase, "Daughter of Kings." Those to whom the troubadour and time-piece-picture style are still dear will also enjoy the air of Sleep. It is a curious thing that this Africaine which taken as a whole is the most insufferable of Meyerbeer's scores (the unique ineptitude of the "book" has something to do with that) is also the work in which occur the few really attractive pages that he wrote,—"Wonderful Land," and the first part of the manchineal scene. I do not include the famous prelude, which is absolutely hollow and owes its well-known effect merely to a certain illusory charm of instrumentation.
What is most offensive in Meyerbeer is the rhythms, those heavy crushing rhythms from which he never manages, if I may put it so, to extricate himself; they betray the lack of breed in his music, just as it often happens that the gait of a man who has arrived at aping a great politeness of manner which deceives nearly everybody, offers to some more observant eyes the living witness of a coarse and vain nature.
In a passionate article against the Huguenots, in which however the merits of Meyerbeer are fully recognised and described, Schumann wrote that everthing in his music is "fake, appearance, and hypocrisy." Without subscribing to a contradiction of this cruel formula, I would say with more moderation, that by playing the weakest pages of Rossini or Verdi after the best-filled pages of Meyerbeer, one almost always gets the feeling of leaving a stifling atmosphere and stepping into the open air.
VIII
I know admirers of Meyerbeer into whose illusion there enters an element of truth.
They are struck with the terrible errors of doctrine and practice in our contemporary theatre music, and they contrast these errors with the example of Meyerbeer. The enthusiasts I have in mind deplore, and quite rightly to my thinking, the excessive intrusion into opera of the symphonic style, and the abandonment of all the old forms and moulds of dramatic music, which used to have great virtue and were founded, to speak the truth, on the very nature of this branch of art. (As to that, all that is needed is to rejuvenate them, correcting those aspects which offend our taste.) These critics deplore also the renunciation of all the spectacular part of the opera of tradition, which as long as it was confined to its proper place and inspired by intelligence and taste gave music a magnificent field of expansion. It is because they are against these departures from the right road that they love Meyerbeer, but in that I think they are wrong.
Meyerbeer practised all that they lay down. But he practised it by corrupting it, coarsening it and debasing, it. He practised it as a cosmopolitan manipulator, strongly and brilliantly endowed indeed, far more than as an artist in blood and race. He thus did a great deal to destroy the authority of the very tradition with which hasty consideration connects him, though he had nothing of its spirit, and he it was who made an opening for the Wagnerian invasion. If Meyerbeer's music had really been French nothing would have been more justifiable than that invasion. But French music is something quite different.
The Meyerbeer style has been disastrous to music, because it inspired a contempt for it, or at the very least a lack of interest in it, among a considerable part of the intellectual élite of France. There we have a new fact of the nineteenth century. Before that time all our best people were passionately devoted to music. But how many fastidious minds who only knew it by this spoilt art-form, refused to take an interest in an art which they thought necessarily implied, on its literary side, a foundation of absurdity.
The Meyerbeer style has been disastrous outside the realm of art by its influence on the historical and political ideas of the French people. In the days when it flourished how many good people, especially in the provinces, never opened a book, but used to go to the theatre to hear Robert, The Huguenots, The Prophet, L'Africaine, and drew from no other source their notions and judgments on the middle ages, French royalty, religious wars and the Inquisition!
From the musical point of view this style of art has been and was bound to be utterly sterile. All that one can say is that it has marked a stage in a development from which music is very far from having derived nothing but benefits, and largely of Germanic origin. I refer to the exaggerated increase of the orchestral mass.
There are people to-day who would like to stir up enthusiasm for Meyerbeer by emphasising that it was Wagner who killed him. No doubt he did, but in France Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Massenet contributed infinitely more than Wagner to the result.
Meyerbeer is dead, stone dead. Multa renascentur, many things will come to life again, as the poet says, and I hope that in time soon to come music will see many purely French things come to life again on the ruins of the German mania which choked them. Meyerbeer will not come to life again. His apologists plead the brilliance of his success. Certainly, it is an argument. But those successes belong to the worst period that French art has known.
- ↑ Traité d'instrumentation p. 261.
- ↑ The Jewess of Halévy, which belongs to 1835, and is therefore a year earlier than the Huguenots, also gives us heavy pseudo-historic melodrama without humanity or poetry. That too is by Eugène Scribe, and might well have been by Eugène Sue. But its music is far more sincere than Meyerbeer's. Without liking its style one can acknowledge its feeling and power and here and there its touching and graceful quality. Speaking generally Halévy's work seems to me to have become the object of more contempt than it deserves. There are some really fine portions in the Musketeer's Guido, and the Queen of Cyprus.
- ↑ Translator's note: The quotation with which M. Lasserre illustrates this remark may be of interest to some readers in the original French:
Ses jours sont ménacés,
Ah! je dois l'y soustraire.
Déjà le Portugais, hardi navigateur,
D'une route nouvelle entrevoyant la chance.
Où grondait la tempête a placé l'espérance.
Amoureux vulgaires,
Vos Feux ordinaires
Ne s'allument guère,
Que pour quelques jours.
Pâtissier modèle,
Ma flamme éternelle
Et se renouvelle
Et brûle toujours. - ↑ Very characteristic too in the duet of Berthe and Fides is the juxtaposition of the phrase, "God will guide me" (Handel) with that which immediately follows, "My eyes can only weep," a plaintive melody of Bellini.