basis for opera. But the creators of the new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o'-thewisp, which has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music's sake. All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera in existence, save alone Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy, in which the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy's opera is unique in its treatment and leads nowhere- or, if anywhere, away from opera). Peri's reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements necessary to artistic completeness.

It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a ‘human nightingale') is sure to attract an audience, no matter what she

sings or how little musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawingroom song, the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely unintelligible words. And, second, when this singing, which the public dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is irresistible.

I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this, however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of beauty in their own minds

although nature surrounds them with it, and imaginative literature is in every library—the stage is a perpetual delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last. These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they embody the essence of what the drama is. Eschylus and Shakespeare divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and while those great dramatists imply the whole of life, - whereas

the ordinary play implies nothing, they do not and cannot present it in its actual and complete continuity.

Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny. 'What is too silly to be said is sung,' says Voltaire.

Let us note also that when an art becomes detached from its own past, when it is not based on natural human life, and does not obey those general laws to which all art is subject, it is sure to evolve conventions of one sort or another and to become artificial. This is to be observed in what is called the 'rococo' style of architecture, as well as in the terrible objects perpetrated by the 'futurists' and 'cubists' (anything that is of the future must also be of the past, no matter whether it is a picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was soon in the grip of these conventions from which, with a few notable exceptions, it has never escaped. Even the common conventions of the drama, which we accept readily enough, are in opera stretched to the breaking point. For many generations operas were planned according to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a woman took a man's part (as in Gounod's Faust); characters were stereotyped; the position of the chief aria (solo) for the prima donna was exactly determined so as to give to her entrance all possible impressiveness; the set musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and so forth) were arranged artificially and not to satisfy

any dramatic necessity. There is some justness in Wagner's saying that the old conventional opera was 'a concert in costume.'

An example of this conventionality and lack of dramatic unity may be found in the famous quartette scene in Verdi's Rigoletto, an opera which is typical of the Italian style (in which, in Meredith's phrase, 'there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish'). In this scene there are two persons in hiding to watch two others. The concealment is the hinge upon which, for the moment, the story swings. But the exigences of the music are such that, before the piece has progressed very far, all four are singing at the top of their lungs and with no pretext of concealment - in a charming piece of music, indeed, but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity. And then, naturally enough, the thin veneer of drama having been pierced, they answer your applause by joining hands and bowing, after which the two conceal themselves again, the music strikes up as before, and the whole scene is repeated.

But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinarily unlucky stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: "The very ballet girls, with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right

as

great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still in the Devil's name!'

One remembers, also, War and Peace, with its scene at the opera-and Tolstoï's reference to the chief male dancer as getting 'sixty thousand francs a year for cutting capers.' So, looking over the older operas which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that today opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art.

III

which

Then came the second great operatic reform, that of Wagner, was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner's operas, at the outset, bade fair to be. În Der Fliegende Holländer, In Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin there is a reasonable correspondence between the action and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption of our faculties. Wagner's librettos are, with one exception, based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal types - Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in his characters such as Siegfried's youth and fearlessness, Wotan's majesty, and so forth-were defined by short phrases of music called leit-motifs; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of his drama, instead of employing it as a

-

'huge guitar'; he eliminated the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called 'authentic cadence,' which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.

But by all these means he imposed on his listener a constant strain of attention: leit-motifs recurring, developing, and disintegrating, every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being evolved, as in an opera by Verdi, — but which are related to something first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week before in another drama): we have all this to strain every possibility of our appreciative faculty, and at the same time he asks us to watch an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another between two heroes half in the clouds, with a God resplendent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water, with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more; for he asks us to witness the end of the world-the waters rising, the very heavens aflame

when our heart is so torn by the stupendous inner tragedy of Brunhilde's immolation that the end of the world seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.

After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state of inner exaltation. An opera must be objec

sion

tive or subjective; it cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of Don Giovanni is due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the action and of the musical expresor, in other words, to the complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The 'Ring' cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very nature of those beings for whom it was created. The 'Ring' dramas should be both acted and witnessed by gods and goddesses for whom time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas, every one recognizes Wagner's genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde, — but the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan and Fricka in Das Rheingold and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)

One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene is in a mining camp

an

in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards, Outcast-of-Poker-Flat opera,- and this translated, for the benefit of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language? 'I'm dead gone on you, Minnie,' says Rance; Ti voglio bene, Minnie,' sings his Italian counterpart.

Rigoletto does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well in literature in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point in the development of the opera. But after Wagner's reforms, and the influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a Girl of the Golden West.

Nearly all Puccini's operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in La Tosca, which leaves almost nothing to the imagination one specially wishes that it did in certain scenes. 'Local color,' so called, appears again in all its arid deceptionas in the Japanese effects in the music of Madame Butterfly; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic scene in Puccini's operas with the last act of Verdi's Otello, we realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric moments as when Mimi, in La Bohème, tells Rudolph who

she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is not for the purpose of decrying one. at the expense of the other, but to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and the lesser is; that we get La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, and La Tosca twenty times to Otello's once, and that we thereby lose all sense of operatic values.

The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the method Strauss employs in Electra. In its original form Electra is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents. This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically. Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its artistic and its historical sense. The real Electra is an impersonal, typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion.

The lead given by Strauss in Salome, Electra, and, in different form or type, in Der Rosenkavallier has been quickly followed. The Jewels of the Madonna is an Electra of the boulevard, in which the worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the

Grand Guignol. Let any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form an opinion, not of their morals, for there is only one opinion about that, but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded person.

I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but on the other hand he is ‘a brother to his villains' and he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in The Idiot is a predominating and overbalancing character. The object of all great literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is as moral as Emma. But the further one gets from a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoievsky would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is. The Jewels of the Madonna might serve as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.

IV

I have referred to these various inconsistencies and absurdities of opera, not with the idea of making out a case against it; on the contrary I want to make out a case for it. This obviously can be done only by means of operas which are guiltless of absurdities and of melodramatic exaggeration, which