Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/194

182 contrary, in the interpretation of emotion, in accordance with the genius of the language; and the passages most relished in Italy are the simplest and most affecting, "the passionate, tender, touching airs, adapted to theatrical expression and calculated to display the capacities of the actor," such as are found in Scarlatti, Vinci, and Pergolesi. These are naturally the very passages which it is most difficult to send abroad, "since the merit of these scraps of tragedy consists in accuracy of expression," which one cannot realise without knowing the language.

Thus we find in the Italian public of the eighteenth century an extreme indifference to dramatic action, to the play; in this superb heedlessness of the subject they will even give the second or third act of the opera before the first when it suits some personage who cannot spend the whole evening in the theatre. Don Leandro de Moratin, the Spanish poet, sees, at the opera, Dido dying on her pyre; then, in the following act, Dido comes to life again and welcomes Æneas. But this same public that is so disdainful of drama becomes furiously enthusiastic over a dramatic passage divorced from the action.

The fact is that it is above all lyrical, but with a lyrical quality that has nothing abstract about it; which is applied to particular passions and cases. The Italian refers everything to himself. It is neither the action nor the characters that interest him. It is the passions; he embraces them all; he experiences them all in his own person. Hence the frenzied exaltation into which the opera throws him at certain moments. In no other country has the love of the opera this passionate quality,