Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 95.djvu/252

244 of to-day are the merest tyros compared with him.” Notice the qualification. We are to take the art as it was a century and a half ago. “It would be idle to attempt comparisons on any other basis than mere technical skill, however,” says Mr. Krehbiel; and that fairly sums up the matter.

How are we to reconcile this view with the stories of those singers so deeply moving their hearers? In so far as they relate to the tributes paid by one artist to another, we may fairly presume that the emotion was aroused by the perfection of the art, for among vocal masters and mistresses technical finish counts for more than all other qualities together. Go where you will among singers, and listen to their talk; you shall hear them discussing method, method, and only method. Doubtless it was so among the pupils of the first great school of Italian cantilena.

As for the audiences, they were easy to move. It was a happy day for the musician. He had no soul problems to solve in his music, no philosophic riddles to expound. His theory was external beauty; his system, symmetry of construction. The music of Handel was a series of exfoliations of thematic trunks. Text was employed rather as an index to the character of an air than as a dominant power, to which the music must be subservient. The prima donna had to have her aria d’ agilita that she might display the range and flexibility of her voice, and her aria of more dramatic nature that she might exhibit the beauty of her crescendo and diminuendo and her marvelous finish of phrasing. Nine times out of ten one of these airs would cover six or eight pages of printed music, while the text would consist of four lines of verse, to be sung over and over again, with endless repetitions of a word here and a word there. Even the mighty Sebastian Bach, than whom no more serious composer ever lived, was not a stranger to this method of vocal composition.

To bring ourselves to a full realization of the public attitude toward the singers and their music, we would have to carry ourselves back to the ante-Haydn period, when external beauty rather than detailed expression was the aim of musicians. Above all, composition was at that time what Dr. Parry in his Evolution of the Art of Music has so aptly named “organized simplicity.” If we would realize how the audiences of the early eighteenth century melted and swayed under the magic spell of the art of Farinelli, we must think of people hanging breathless on the accents of Patti singing Home, Sweet Home, or Brignoli singing Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye. Sentiment, grace, gentleness, but no note of the great tragedies of human life, lie in such music, and these qualities lay in the music which the princes of the operatic stage sang in the days of the great Handel and Porpora.

The construction of the operas was wholly favorable to the performance of feats of singing. The story of the work was told in the recitative. The airs were the embodiments of certain sentiments suitable to situations indicated rather than actually reached in the development of the plots. In singing these airs the artists were not expected to act. They were not expected even to gesticulate freely. Repose and dignity were their aims, together with the preservation of the perfect control of the breath. The recitatives were declaimed in a broad and noble style in which accent and nuance did the work now done by declamatory emphasis and action. The entire purpose of an opera seemed to be to tell a story which should serve as a basis for the setting of certain sentiments to songs in aria form. The art of libretto construction was to arrange the succession of sentiments in such a way that the proper series of solos, duets, choruses, and ensembles should be made, and that the arias of different character should enter in such a way as to provide variety of style, and give the singers opportunities to display all their accomplishments.