Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 4.djvu/388

372 set to rights without much real difficulty—a glaring evil remains, an evil so great that it seems to threaten the very life of Wagner's art. Among innumerable performances, not one in a hundred is free from the most barbarous and senseless cuts; in many instances mere shams and shabby makeshifts are offered to the public! If an aria be omitted in an opera of Mozart's (take the first act of 'Nozze di Figaro' for an instance), the audience will lose so many bars of beautiful music, and one of the characters will in so far appear at a disadvantage. Cut an equivalent number of bars in the Finale of the same opera, and the case is already different—the balance of an entire section appears marred, the action disturbed, the sequence of musical effects crude. But in a musical drama constructed on Wagner's lines the damage done by such a cut will be still greater, because the scenic arrangements, the words, action, music, are inextricably interwoven; mutilate any portion of the music and the continuity is lost, the psychological thread connecting scene with scene torn asunder, the equilibrium of the entire structure destroyed. How can the result be other than a sense of incongruity, vagueness, eccentricity, and consequent irritation and weariness on the part of the audience? All manner of lame excuses, 'preposterous demands on the public time,' 'strain on the singers' voices,' etc., have been put forward; but there is no valid excuse for imitating and perpetuating the mistakes of slovenliness and incompetency. It is easy to discover the origin of any particular cut—the true cause will invariably be found to lie in the caprice of this or that conductor or singer at some leading theatre whose example is blindly followed. Then the text-books are printed with the cuts, and before long something like an authoritative tradition comes to be established. Latterly things have been carried so far that if leading executants from all parts of Europe were brought together and asked to perform any one of the master's works in its integrity they could not do it. They would have to study the cuts, the orchestra and chorus parts would have to be filled in, and rehearsals begun afresh.

'If I had a chance,' said Wagner in 1877, 'to get up the Meistersinger with an intelligent company of young people, I would first ask them to read and act the play; then only would I proceed with the music in the usual way. I am certain we should thus arrive at a satisfactory performance in a very short time.' The desiderata are simple enough. Keep the work apart from the ordinary répertoire, clear the stage for at least a week, and during that time let every one concerned give his attention to the task in hand and to nothing else; give the work entire, and aim at reproducing the score exactly as it stands.—Individual conductors and singers who see the existing evils and suffer from them protest now and then; but they are powerless, and Wagner's own appeals to the artistic or intellectual conscience of the operatic world appear to have been addressed to an unknown quantity. It would seem that there is no hope unless the pressure of public opinion can be brought to bear upon all those concerned.