Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/148

 With the decadence of the madrigal, Monteverde brought a real musical power to bear on the new style. His results are now intelligible only to historians, and they seem to us artistically nugatory; but in their day they were so impressive as to render the further continuance of 16th-century choral art impossible. At the beginning of the 17th century no young musician of lively artistic receptivity could fail to be profoundly stirred by Monteverde’s Orfeo (1602), Arianna (1608) and Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), works in which the resources of instruments were developed with the same archaic boldness, the same grasp of immediate emotional effect and the same lack of artistic organization as the harmonic resources. The spark of Monteverde’s genius produced in musical history a result more like an explosion than an enlightenment; and the emotional rhetoric of his art was so uncontrollable, and at the same time so much more impressive in suggestion than in realization, that we cannot be surprised that the next definite step in the history of opera took the direction of mere musical form, and was not only undramatic but anti-dramatic.

The system of free musical declamation known as recitative is said to have been used by Emilio del Cavalieri as early as 1588, and it was in the nature of things almost the only means of vocal expression conceivable by the pioneers of opera. Formal melody, such as that of popular songs, was as much beneath their dignity as it had been beneath that of the high art from which they revolted; but, in the absence of any harmonic system but that of the church modes, which was manifestly incapable of assimilating the new “unprepared discords,” and in the utter chaos of early experiments in instrumentation, formal melody proved a godsend as the novelty of recitative faded. Tunes were soon legalized at moments of dramatic repose when it was possible for the actors to indulge in either a dance or a display of vocalization; it was in the tunes that the strong harmonic system of modern tonality took shape; and by the early days of Alessandro Scarlatti, before the end of the 17th century, the art of tune-making had perennially blossomed into the musically safe and effective form of the (q.v.). From this time until the death of Handel the history of opera is simply the history of the aria; except in so far as in France, under Lully, it is also the history of ballet-music, the other main theatrical occasion for the art of tune-making. With opera before Gluck there is little interest in tracing schools and developments, for the musical art had as mechanical a connexion with drama as it had with the art of scene-painting, and neither it nor the drama which was attached to it showed any real development at all, though the librettist Metastasio presented as imposing a figure in 18th-century Italian literature as Handel presented in Italian opera. Before this period of stagnation we find an almost solitary and provincial outburst of life in the wonderful patchwork of Purcell’s art (1658–1695). Whether he is producing genuine opera (as in the unique case of Dido and Aeneas) or merely incidental music to plays (as in the so-called opera King Arthur), his deeply inspired essays in dramatic music are no less interesting in their historic isolation from everything except the influence of Lully than they are admirable as evidences of a genius which, with the opportunities of 50 years later or 150 years earlier, might assuredly have proved one of the greatest in all music. Another sign of life has been appreciated by recent research in the interesting farcical operas (mostly Neapolitan) of certain early 18th-century Italian composers (see, , ), which have some bearing on the antecedents of Mozart.

The real reason for the stagnation of high opera before Gluck is (as explained in the articles and ) that the forms of music known before 1750 could not express dramatic change without losing artistic organization. The “spirit of the age” can have had little to do with the difficulty, or why should Shakespeare not have had a contemporary operatic brother-artist during the “Golden Age” of music? The opportunity for reform came with the rise of the sonata style. It was fortunate for Gluck that the music of his time was too vigorously organized to be upset by new discoveries. Gluck was

a much greater artist than Monteverde, but he too was not overloaded with academic mastery; indeed, though historians have denied it, Monteverde was by far the better contrapuntist, and seems rather to have renounced his musical powers than to have struggled for need of them. But instead of memories of a Golden Age, Gluck had behind him 150 years of harmonic and orchestral knowledge of good and evil. He also had almost as clear a sense of symphonic form as could find scope in opera at all; and his melodic power was generally of the highest order. It is often said that his work was too far in advance of his time to establish his intended reform; and, if this means that undramatic Italian operas continued to outnumber those dramatic masterpieces which no smaller man could achieve, the statement is as true as it is of every great artist. If, however, it is taken to mean that because Mozart’s triumphs do not lie in serious opera he owes nothing to Gluck, then the statement is misleading (see ). The influence of Gluck on Mozart was profound, not only where it is relevant to the particular type of libretto, as in Idomeneo, but also on the broad dramatic basis which includes Greek tragedy and the 18th-century comedy of manners. Mozart, whose first impulse was always to make his music coherent in itself, for some time continued to cultivate side by side with his growing polyphony and freedom of movement certain Italian formalities which, though musically effective and flattering to singers, were dramatically vicious. But these features, though they spoil Idomeneo, correspond to much that in Gluck’s operas shows mere helplessness; and in comic opera they may even become dramatically appropriate. Thus in Cosi fan tutti the florid arias in which the two heroines protest their fidelity are the arias of ladies who do protest too much; and in Die Zauberflöte the extravagant vocal fireworks of the Queen of Night are the displays of one who, in the words of the high priest Sarastro, “hopes to cajole the people with illusions and superstition.” In the article we have discussed other evidences of his stagecraft and insight into character, talents for which his comic subjects gave him far more scope than those of classical tragedy had given to Gluck. Mozart always extracts the utmost musical effect from every situation in his absurd and often tiresome libretti (especially in vocal ensemble), while his musical effects are always such as give dramatic life to what in other hands are conventional musical forms. These merits would never have been gainsaid but for the violence of Wagner’s earlier partisans in their revolt from the uncritical classicism of his denser and noisier opponents. Wagner himself stands as far aloof from Wagnerian Philistinism as from uncritical classicism. He was a fierce critic of social conditions and by no means incapable of hasty iconoclastic judgments; but he would have treated with scant respect the criticism that censures Mozart for superficiality in rejecting the radically unmusical element of mordant social satire which distinguishes the Figaro of Beaumarchais from the most perfect opera in all classical music.

It cannot be said that in any high artistic sense Italian comic opera has developed continuously since Mozart. The vocal athleticism of singers; the acceptance and great development by Mozart of what we may call symphonic (as distinguished from Handelian) forms of aria and ensemble; and the enlargement of the orchestra; these processes gave the Italian composers of Mozart’s and later times prosaically golden opportunities for lifting spectators and singers to the seventh heaven of flattered vanity, while the music, in itself no less than in its relation to the drama, was steadily degraded. The decline begins with Mozart’s contemporary and survivor, D. Cimarosa, whose ideas are genuine and, in the main, refined, but who lacks power and resource. His style was by no means debased, but it was just so slight that contemporaries found it fairly easy. His most famous work, Il Matrimonio Segreto, is an opera buffa which is still occasionally revived, and it is very like the sort of thing that people who despise Mozart imagine Figaro to be. Unless it is approached with sympathy, its effect after Figaro is hardly more exhilarating than that of the once pilloried spurious “Second Part” to the Pickwick Papers. But this is harsh judgment; for it proves to be a good semi-classic as soon as we take it on its own merits.