Chapter X: The Opera and Its Reformers

The evolution of the drama is intimately associated with that of music and both are inseparably entwined with the unfolding of the spiritual life of the human race. Man is essentially dramatic by nature, and both history and tradition show it to have been among his earliest instincts to express his inner emotions by action and song.

From this tendency arose the Greek religious drama. We find it in legendary times at the altar of Dionysus, master of the resources of vitality, in whose train followed the Muses, actual leaders and conductors of human existence. At seed-time and harvest festivals a rude chorus, grouped about the altar, told the story of the god's wanderings and adventures, in simple words, accompanied by gesture, dance and music. This expression of thought and feeling mirrored the emotions of the worshipers, kindled the imagination, and strengthened the innate instinct for freedom. Gradually the narrative detaching itself from the choral parts fell to individual singers, the acting became more and more a distinct feature of the occasion, ever increasing dramatic quality characterized the song, and the materials were at hand for the Greek drama so fruitful to us in its results.

Greek poetry, in its matchless beauty, may still be enjoyed by all who have powers of literary appreciation. Of Greek music we know little beyond the theories which form the basis for modern musical science and the fact that it was highly esteemed. Aristotle tells us that it was an essential element in Greek stage plays and their greatest embellishment. Both Æschylus and Sophocles were practical musicians and composed music for their dramas. Euripides, less musician than poet, was at least able to have the music for his works prepared under his direction. Indeed, words, music and scenic effect were inseparably connected in the Greek dramas.

The enthusiasm these aroused is indicated by the fact that travelers from distant lands undertook perilous journeys to attend the famous performances at Athens, often remaining in their seats twenty-four hours before the play began in order to secure desirable places. Fully fifty thousand spectators could be accommodated in the Lenæan Theatre, whose stage machinery would make ours seem like a toy model. Many of its theatrical exhibitions cost more than the Peloponnesian War.

In Greek life, at the period of its glory, music and the drama were esteemed elevating factors in culture. The supreme things of human existence were pictured in them. They expressed the world-view of an entire people. Under Roman dominion, with its corrupting slavery, they degenerated into mere sources of diversion, and finally became associated with evil and degrading practices.

For this reason and because at best they represented pagan ideals, theatrical representations were discouraged by the fathers of the primitive Christian Church. The dramatic instinct was not condemned, and its imperative needs were appealed to in the church service, which early set forth in symbols all that was too mysterious and awe-inspiring for words. In order further to reach the mind through the senses, scenes from the Scriptures were read in the churches, illustrated with living pictures and music. Gradually the characters personated began to speak and to move. The drama rose anew at the foot of the altar. Christian priests were its reformers, its guardians and its actors. Designed for the amusement as well as the instruction of the gaping multitudes, it was necessarily a pretty crude affair. Satan was introduced as the clown, and laughter was provoked at his discomfiture when routed, or at the destruction of those who wilfully cast themselves into his clutches. It is not strange that the pious and learned St. Augustine, in the fourth century, regretted the polished dramatic performances at Alexandria that in his youth had afforded him so much genuine enjoyment. Among the people the church play became so popular that in the course of time it was found necessary to erect more spacious stages in the open air.

Thus arose the Mystery, Miracle, Morality and Passion Plays, the direct progenitors of the Opera and the Oratorio. The descent of the Opera may be traced also to another source, to the secular play which persisted in the face of ecclesiastical disfavor and the ban that excluded its players from the church sacraments.

Strolling histriones, jongleurs and minstrels passed from court to court, appeared in castle yards, market places or village greens, recited, acted, sang, danced and played on musical instruments. They afforded a welcome means of communication with the outside world; they broke up the monotony of life when events were few. As modern music rests on the two pillars of the Gregorian chant and the folk-song, so the opera rests on the two pillars of the religious drama and the people's play.

During the high tide of the revival of Greek learning in Italy, late in the sixteenth century, a group of the aspiring young nobility of Florence, gentlemen and gentlewomen, adopting the dignified name of the "Academy," resolved to recover the much discussed music of the Greek drama. The place of rendezvous was the palace of Count Bardi, a member of one of the oldest patrician families in Tuscany. Edifying discourse and laudable exercises were indulged in by the guests, among whom were several persons of genius and learning. The meetings were presided over by the host, himself a poet and composer, as well as a patron of the fine arts.

The culture of the times demanded a higher gratification for man's dramatic cravings than either rude religious or secular plays afforded. Other music was required to depict the emotions than that of the contrapuntist, with its puzzling intricacies. So thought these ardent Hellenists, and a burning zeal possessed them to mate dramatic poetry with a music that would heighten and intensify its expression and effect. They who seek are sure to find, even if it be not always the object of their search. In the earnest quest of these reformers for dramatic truth an unexpected treasure was disclosed.

Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo Galilei, opened the way. He was the active champion of monody, in which a principal melody was intoned or sung to the accompaniment of subordinate harmonies, believing that in music designed to arouse personal feeling individualism should predominate. The art music of the time was polyphonic, that is, constructed by so interweaving melodies that harmonies resulted. Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint. Not content with giving his ideas to the world in the form of a dialogue, Galilei composed two musical monologues, between 1581 and 1590, one to the scene of Count Ugolino, in Dante's "Inferno," and one to a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah. These the chroniclers tell us he sang very sweetly, accompanying himself on the lute. He was also a fine performer on the viola.

A dramatic representation at a court marriage, in 1590, in which the artificially constructed ecclesiastical music illy fitted the text lauding the bride's loveliness, gave a new impulse to the "Academy" efforts. Soon there was produced at court, by a company of highborn ladies and gentlemen, two pastoral plays: "Il Satiro" and "La Disperazione di Fileno," so set to music that they could be sung or declaimed throughout. The author of the text was Signora Laura Guidiccioni, of the Lucchesini family, renowned in her day for her poetic gifts and brilliant attainments. Signor Emilio del Cavalieri was the composer, and he triumphantly announced his music as that "of the ancients recovered," having power to "excite grief, pity, joy and pleasure."

These two "musical dramas," as they were called, contained the germs of modern opera, despite their crudities of harmony and monotonous melody. That noble songstress, Vittoria Archilei, known as "Euterpe" among her Italian contemporaries, greatly enhanced the success of the new venture with her superb voice, artistic skill, musical fire and splendid intelligence. She "whose excellence in music is generally known," as we are told, and who was able to "draw tears from her audience" at the right moment, also aroused enthusiasm for a third work of a similar nature by the same authors, "Il Giuco della Cieco," that appeared in 1595.

Besides being the first to tell the entire story of a play musically and to utilize the solo, Cavalieri introduced various ornaments into vocal music and increased the demands on instrumentation. He did not succeed, however, in satisfying the Academicians with his attempt to grasp the medium between speech and song, and his choruses were thought tedious because of their employment of the intricate polyphonic style. Further reform was desired.

This came through Jacopo Peri, maestro at the Medician court, and after 1601 at the court of Ferrara. In studying Greek dramas, as he states in one of his writings, he became convinced that their musical expression was that of highly colored emotional speech. Closely observing diverse modes of utterance in daily life, he endeavored to reproduce soft, gentle words by half-spoken, half-sung tones, sustained by an instrumental bass, and to express excitement by extended intervals, lively tempo and suitable distribution of dissonances in the accompaniment. To him may be attributed the first dramatic recitative. It appeared in his "Daphne," a "Dramma per la Musica," written to text by the poet Rinuccini and privately performed at the Palazzo Corsi, in 1597. This was actually the first opera, although the term was not applied to such compositions until half a century later. Several solos were added by the court singer, Giulio Caccini, who composed a number of songs for a single voice, "in imitation of Galilei," as a contemporary stated, "but in a more beautiful and pleasing style." Invited three years later to produce a similar work for the festivities attending the marriage of Henry IV. of France with Maria di Medici, Peri wrote his "Eurydice," and once more Signora Archilei interpreted the leading rôle, greatly to the composer's satisfaction. It was the first opera performed in public. The singing had a bald accompaniment of an orchestra placed behind the scenes and consisting of a clavicembalo, or harpsichord, a viola da gamba, a theorbo, or large lute, and a flute, the last being used to imitate Pan-pipes in the hands of one of the characters.

Seven years afterward, for another court marriage, a musical drama was written by a man of genius who completely broke the fetters of ancient polyphony. This was Claudio Monteverde, then in his thirty-ninth year, and chapel master to the Duke of Mantua. He was the first composer to use unprepared chords of the seventh, dominant and diminished, and to emphasize passionate situations with dissonances. He invented the tremolo and the pizzicato, and originated the vocal duet. His keen dramatic sense enabled him to arouse interest through contrasts, conspicuously characteristic passages, and independent orchestral preludes, interludes and bits of descriptive tone-painting.

His opera, "Orfeo," 1608, had an orchestra of two harpsichords, two bass viols, two violas di gamba, ten tenor viols, two little French violins, one harp, two large guitars, three small organs, four trombones, two cornets, one piccolo, one clarion and three trumpets. In "Tancredi e Clorinda," produced in Venice, in 1624, a string quartet indicated the galloping of horses, a prototype of the "Ride of the Valkyries." Like Abbé Liszt, he took holy orders late in life, without ceasing to compose. At seventy-four years of age, when the fire of his genius burned brightly as ever, he wrote his last opera "L'Incoronazione di Poppea." It may truly be said that Monteverde was the great operatic reformer, the Wagner, of the seventeenth century, as Gluck was of the eighteenth.

An epoch-making event in opera history was the opening, in 1637, of the first public opera house in commercial Venice whose wealth afforded her citizens leisure to cultivate art. Soon popular demand led to the erection of many Italian opera-houses. At the same time growing taste for magnificence of stage setting and brilliant, dazzling, even extravagant song effects, caused neglect of Academician principles. The learned and gifted Neapolitan composer, Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the famous harpsichordist, gave an impulse in his operas, during the last quarter of the century, to sensuous charm and beauty of melody. He invested recitative with classic value, enlarged the aria, and devised the da capo which became a menace to dramatic truth.

In France, the troubadours had borne melody into the domain of sentiment, and laid a solid foundation for musical growth. Adam de la Hallé's pastoral, "Robin et Marion," was an actual prototype of the opera. During the seventeenth century Corneille and Molière refined the dramatic taste of their compatriots. Attempts to introduce Italian opera only resulted in arousing a desire for an opera in accord with French ideals.

This was gratified by Jean Battiste Lully, who had come to the French court from Italy in boyhood, and had risen, in 1672, from a subordinate position to that of chief musician. Undertaking to make reforms, he succeeded in giving his adopted country a national opera. He established the overture, gave recitative rhetorical force, added coloring to the orchestra, and introduced the ballet. New life was infused into the traditions he left when Jean Philippe Rameau, in 1733, at fifty years of age, wrote his first opera. He was well-known as a theorist and composer, and was the author of a harmony treatise in which were set forth the laws of chord inversions and derivations, a stroke of genius that hopelessly entangled him in perplexities. His instrumentation was more highly colored, his rhythms more varied than those of his predecessor, and his sincerity of purpose more evident. In common with other reformers he was accused of "sacrificing the pleasures of the ear to vain harmonic speculations." Some of his many operas were written to works of Racine. He died in 1764, in his eighty-first year.

A century earlier the English reached the culmination of their Golden Age of musical productiveness in Henry Purcell, known as the most original genius England has produced. His dramatic powers were fostered by the popular masques with their gorgeous show of color and rhythm, and in mere boyhood he wrote music for several of them. In 1677, when only nineteen, he produced his first opera. He attempted no reform, but his instinct for the true relation between the accents of speech and those of melody and recitative seems to have been unerring. Saturated with native English melody, tingling with fertile fancy and controlled by education, whether he wrote for stage, church, or chamber, he evinced a freshness and vigor, a breezy picturesqueness and a wealth of rhythmic phrases and patterns, and many new orchestral devices. In 1710, fifteen years after his early death, the giant Handel began to dominate musical England, flooding the stage with operas of the Italian type and finally ushering in the reign of the oratorio. The delicate plant of English opera never took root.

Italian influence had almost caused the decline of French opera when Christopher Willibald Gluck turned to Paris, in 1774, as its regenerator. In Vienna, twelve years earlier, he had already produced his "Orfeo," whose calm, classic grandeur seemed the embodiment of the Greek art spirit. His choice of subjects indicates the enterprise on which he had embarked. He sought simplicity, subjugation of music to poetic sentiment, dramatic sincerity and organic unity. His operatic version of Racine's "Iphigènie en Aulide" called forth unbounded enthusiasm in the French metropolis directly after his arrival, and led to the warfare with the brilliant Italian Piccini, which was as hot as any Wagner controversy.

The homage of all time is due this man of genius for the splendid courage with which he attacked shams. He claimed it to be the divine right of the dramatic composer to have his works sung precisely as he had written them, and protested against the innovations that had been permitted to suit the caprices and gratify the vanity of singers. It was his idea that the Sinfonia, in other words the Overture or Prelude, should indicate the subject and prepare the spectators for the characters of the pieces, and that the instrumental coloring should be adapted to the mood of the situation, thus anticipating modern procedure. He prepared the way for the work of Cherubini, Auber, Gounod, Thomas, Massenet, Saint-Saëns and others.

In Germany, Italian opera, early introduced, long remained fashionable. Native dramatic tastes, once fostered by minnesingers and strolling players, were kept alive by the "singspiel," or song-play, composed of spoken dialogue and popular song, which furnished the actual beginnings of German national music drama. The threshold of this was reached, the sanctuary of its treasures unlocked, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who, without thought of being a reformer, unconsciously infused German spirit into Italian forms. It was during the last five years of his brief life, from 1786 to 1791, that he produced his operatic masterpieces, "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "The Magic Flute." His marvelous musical and poetic genius, supported by profound scholarship, led him into hitherto untried regions of expression, and to him it was given to bring humanity on the stage, splendidly depicting the inner being of each character in tones. Wagner said of him that he had instinctively found dramatic truth and had cast brilliant light on the relations of musician and poet.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the great tone-poet, guided by his profound comprehension of the deep things of life and his active sympathies to absolute truthfulness in delineating human passions, made the next advance in his one opera, "Fidelio," written in 1805. Ranked, though it is, rather as a symphony for voice and orchestra than as the musical complement of a dramatic poem, there is nevertheless infused into some of its chief numbers more potent dramatic expression than is found in any previous opera. Thoroughly cosmopolitan in subject, it is nevertheless German in that its lofty earnestness of tone offers a protest against all shallowness and sensationalism. The entire story of the opera is told in tones in the overture.

The next German to write overtures with a deliberate purpose to foreshadow what followed was Carl Maria von Weber, whose greatest opera, "Der Freischütz," appeared in 1821. The initial force of the German romantic school, he founded his operas on romantic themes, and depicted in tones the things of the weird, fantastic and elfish world that kindled his imagination. He has been called the connecting link between Mozart and Wagner, and in many of his theories he anticipated the latter. National to the core, he embodied in his music the finest qualities of the folk-song, and noble tone-painter that he was he excelled his predecessors in his employment of the orchestra as a means of dramatic characterization.

Richard Wagner was long regarded as the great iconoclast whose business it was to destroy all that had gone before him in art, but no one ever more profoundly reverenced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber than he. The public was persistently informed that his compositions were beyond ordinary comprehension, and yet designed, as they were, to picture man's essential life, they have slowly but surely found their way to the popular heart. It was the very essence of his musical dramatic creed that to have blood in its veins and sincerity in its soul art must come from the people and be addressed to the people. He chose the national myth and hero tradition as the basis of his music-drama because of the universality of their content and application, and because he believed they reflected the German world-view. Himself he regarded as the Siegfried whose mission it was to slay the dragon of sordid materialism and awaken the slumbering bride of German art.

Bach and Chopin had anticipated him in some of his most startling chord progressions. The motives of Bach's fugues and Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies, and the so-called "leading motives" of the Frenchman, Hector Berlioz, had preceded his "typical motives." Moreover, the orchestration of Berlioz had been a precursor of his orchestral tone-coloring. Nevertheless, everything he touched was so characteristically applied by him as to produce new impressions, and to emphasize the idea of music as a language. So peculiarly were music and poetry blended in the delicate tissue of his genius that one seemed inseparable from the other. United, he believed it to be their mission to inculcate high moral lessons of patriotism and love.

He gave the death-blow to an opera whose sole aim is to tickle the ear. Many an exquisite melody of Rossini and other Italian composers will long continue to live, but their productions as wholes have mostly ceased to be satisfying to those of us who have Teutonic blood in our veins. The Italian opera composer who holds the highest place to-day in the heart of the serious musician is that grand old man of music, Giuseppe Verdi, whose genius enabled him to yield four times to the spirit of the age, during his long career, and who in his ripe old age endeavored to give Italy what Wagner had given the German nation.