Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/337

MEYERBEER. detrimental to coherence of plot. But in spite of all this, the music has a special charm, a kind of exotic fragrance of its own, which will always make it to some minds the most sympathetic of Meyerbeer's works. It is, in fact, the most purely musical of them all. None is so melodious or so pathetic, or so free from blemishes of conventionality; in none is the orchestration so tender: it may contain less that is surprising, but it is more imaginative; it approaches the domain of poetry more nearly than any of his other operas.

It is common to speak of Meyerbeer as the founder of a new school. Fétis affirms that whatever faults or failings have been laid to his charge by his opponents, one thing—his originality—has never been called in question. 'All that his works contain,—character, ideas, scenes, rhythm, modulation, instrumentation,—all are his and his only.'

Between this view and that of Wagner, who calls him a 'miserable music-maker,' 'a Jew banker to whom it occurred to compose operas,' there seems an immeasurable gulf. The truth probably may be expressed by saying that he was unique rather than original. No artist exists that is not partly made what he is by the 'accident' of preceding and surrounding circumstances. But on strong creative genius these modifying influences, especially those of contemporary Art, have but a superficial effect, wholly secondary to the individuality which asserts itself throughout, and finally moulds its environment to its own likeness. Meyerbeer's faculty was so determined in its manifestations by surrounding conditions, that, apart from them, it may almost be said to have had no active existence at all. He changed music as often as he changed climate, though a little of each of his successive styles clung to him till the last. A born musician, of extraordinary ability, devoted to Art, and keenly appreciative of the beautiful in all types, with an unlimited capacity for work, helped by the circumstance of wealth which in many another man would have been an excuse for idleness, he seized on the tendencies of his time and became its representative. He left no disciples, for he had no doctrine to bequeath: but he filled a gap which no one else could fill. As a great actor endows the characters he represents with life—since to the union of his personality with the outlines suggested by the dramatist, they do in fact owe to him their objective existence, and are said to be created by him—so Meyerbeer, by blending his intellect with the outlines and suggestions of a certain epoch, gave to it a distinct art-existence which it has in his works and in his only. His characters stand out from the canvas with—his contemporary eulogists say—the vividness of Shakespeare's characters; we should say rather of Scott's. The literary analogue to his operas is to be found, not in Tragedy, they are too realistic for that, but in the Historical Novel. Here the men and women of past times live again before our eyes, not as they appear to the Poet, who 'sees into the life of things,' but as they appeared to each other when they walked this earth. This is most compatible with the conditions of the modern stage, and Meyerbeer responds to its every need.

It is consistent with all this that he should have been singularly dependent for the quality of his ideas on the character of his subject. His own original vein of melody was limited, and his constructive skill not such as to supplement the deficiency in sustained idea. This defect may have been partly owing to the shallow pedantry of his instructor, at the time when his youthful talent was developing itself. Wagner (whose antipathy to Meyerbeer's music was rather intensified than otherwise by the fact that some of the operatic reforms on which his own heart was set were first introduced, or at least attempted, by that composer) compares him to a man who, catching the first syllable of another man's speech, thereupon screams out the whole sentence in a breath, without waiting to hear what it really should have been! However this may be, Meyerbeer's own ideas rarely go beyond the first syllable; the rest is built up by a wholly different process, and too often—as though his self-reliance failed him at the crucial point—a melody with a superbly suggestive opening will close with some conventional phrase or vulgar cadenza, all the more irritating for this juxtaposition. As a striking case in point it is enough to adduce the baritone song in 'Dinorah.' The first phrase is beautiful. The second, already inferior, seems dragged in by the hair of its head. The third is a masterly augmentation—a crescendo on the first. The fourth is a tawdry platitude. Something of the same sort is the case with his harmonies. He often arrests the attention by some chord or modulation quite startling in its force and effect, immediately after which he is apt to collapse, as if frightened by the sudden stroke of his own genius. The modulation will be carried on through a sequence of wearisome sameness, stopping short in some remote key, whence, as if embarrassed how to escape, he will return to where he began by some trite device or awkward makeshift. His orchestral colouring, however, is so full of character, so varied and saisissant as to hide many shortcomings in form. His grand combinations of effects can hardly be surpassed, and are so dazzling in their result that the onlooker may well be blinded to the fact that what he gazes on is a consummate piece of mosaic rather than an organic structure.

But in some moments of intense dramatic excitement he rises to the height of the situation as perhaps no one else has done. His very defects stand him here in good stead, for these situations do not lend themselves to evenness of beauty. Such a moment is the last scene in the fourth act of the 'Huguenots,' culminating in the famous duet. Here the situation is supreme, and the music is inseparable from it. Beyond description, beyond criticism, nothing is wanting. The might, the futility, the eternity of Love and Fate—he has caught up the