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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



changed for a sort of drawing-room stage, and 

 poets were hired to reset the Italian melodies, as 

 Moore reset the Irish melodies, for ears polite. 

 This new aristocratic mongrel art had nothing to 

 do with the real drama. Metastasio himself was 

 only an Italian Mr. Chorley, the very humble ser- 

 vant of everybody's tunes ; but these tunes had 

 to be strung together, so the recitative, used for 

 centuries in church, was borrowed ; then the 

 product was naturally a little dull, so the whole 

 had to be whipped up with a dance ; hence the 

 ballet, and there you have the three fixed points 

 of the opera — aria, recitative, and ballet — which 

 to this day determine the form of modern opera. 

 Thus opera, while it had no connection with the 

 real drama, did not even spring from the best 

 musical elements. " From the prosperity of op- 

 era in Italy," says Wagner, " the art-student will 

 date the decline of music in that country. . . . 

 No one who has any conception of the grandeur 

 and ineffable depth of the earlier Italian church- 

 music — Palestrina's " Stabat Mater," for instance 

 — will ever dream of maintaining that Italian 

 opera can be looked upon as the legitimate daugh- 

 ter of that wondrous mother." 1 



As ear-tickling, and not truth of expression, 

 was the chief thing, and as there was not 

 much to be expressed, the arias got wider and 

 wider of the words, and at last the words became 

 mere pegs, and the music totally irrelevant — as 

 who should dance a jig over a grave. 



Gluek's reform consisted in making the oper- 

 atic tunes once more true to the words, but the 

 improvement touched the sentiment only, with- 

 out reaching the defective form. In France the 

 form was slightly redeemed by the superior li- 

 bretti and more elaborate pantomime ; while in 

 Germany opera arrived as a finished foreign pro- 

 duction, and Mozart and others had to go to 

 Italy to learn it. " In expressing my highest ad- 

 miration of the exquisite beauties of our great 

 masters," says Wagner, " I did not detract 

 from their fame in showing that the cause of 

 their weaknesses lay in the faultiness of the 

 genre.''' 2 



And the defect of genre lay chiefly in the im- 

 molation of the libretto to the exigencies of fixed 

 aria, scena, and recitative. The drama, which 

 has to be stretched upon that Procrustean bed, 

 must necessarily become disjointed and lifeless in 

 the process. Rossini retarded the progress of 

 the musical drama for at least fifty years through 

 the absolute triumph of melody, in the most fas- 



' " Music of the Future." Letter to F. Villot, p 10. 

 « Ibid., p. 22. 



cinating abundance, over the resources of the or- 

 chestra and the inspirations of the poet. 



" His opera," writes Eduard Dannreuther, to 

 whose pamphlet on Wagner at this season we are 

 all so much indebted, " is like a string of beads, 

 each bead being a glittering and intoxicating 

 tune. Dramatic and poetic truth — all that makes 

 a stage performance interesting — is sacrificed to 

 tunes." Poet and musician alike had felt this. Goe- 

 the and Schiller both found the operatic form, and 

 even the existing stage, so uncongenial that they 

 took to writing narrative and descriptive plays 

 not to be acted at all, and have been followed in 

 this by Byron, Tennyson, Browning, and Swin- 

 burne. Beethoven wrote but one opera, " Fide- 

 lio," in which the breadth of the overture or 

 overtures seems to accuse rhe narrowness of the 

 dramatic form, although the libretto of "Fidelio" 

 is very good as times go. Mendelssohn and 

 Schumann could never find a suitable libretto. 



The conclusion of all this is obvious. The 

 perfect medium which was to combine the ap- 

 parently unmanageable arts was yet to come, and 

 Wagner proposed to himself the task of harness- 

 ing these fiery steeds to his triumphal car and 

 driving them all together. He must choose his 

 own subject, with a simple plot and a few strong 

 passions and great situations. He must write 

 his own drama, which, without being either or- 

 thodox verse or fixed metre, would aim in its 

 mobile and alliterative pathos at following the 

 varied inflections of natural feeling. He must 

 arrange his own scenery, perfect in detail, and 

 within the limits of stage possibility ; and finally 

 he must compose his own music and drill his 

 band, chorus, and characters. 



To his prophetic vision the old opera form of 

 aria, scena, and recitative, has disappeared. The 

 orchestra in a wondrous fashion floods the soul 

 with an emotion appropriate to the situation. 

 The drama itself advances unshackled by any 

 musical exigency; the music flows on continu- 

 ously, not imposing a form but taking its form 

 from the emotion of the sentences as they follow 

 each other. Snatches there are here and there 

 of exquisite melody, broken up by part-singing, 

 with a wild burst of chorus when needful to ful- 

 fill the dramatic occasion ; but never must action 

 be delayed, never must emotion be belied, never 

 truth sacrificed ; only at times, when the expres- 

 sional power of words ceases, the music will ful- 

 fill, dedpen, combine, and sometimes lift the 

 drama almost out of itself. Then the spectator 

 is raised into a sphere of ecstatic contemplation ; 

 the pageantry passes before his eyes as in a 



