Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/82

 It is the French manner. We must get back to it—if we can. It is not easy. It is infinitely difficult,. [sic] It is the perfection of musical delicacy and exquisite feeling. But it is the French manner.

Wagner too found himself at grips with the problem of the Recitative. For Wagner's music is itself divided between recitatives and airs, as theatre music has been, is, and will be in all ages and in all countries, seeing that this division is absolutely inevitable. It is no less impossible to write dramatic music that shall not be a succession of recitatives and airs than it was for M. Jourdain to speak without uttering prose. But note, if it is impossible to conceive dramatico-musical utterance in which these functions are not fulfilled, yet they may be fulfilled under many different forms. The form which Wagner has chosen for his recitatives is not one of the things most to my taste in his art. In order to fill them with music (a praiseworthy object in itself) and avoid those awkward breaks of continuity between them and the singing parts, those shocks which certainly ought to be avoided, he makes their tissue out of fragments borrowed from the melodic themes of the work; these he develops, combines and elaborates according to the rules of counterpoint and symphony. I will not discuss here the value (very variable) of the results given by this procedure. What is certain is that for Frenchmen nothing could be more heavy, hampering, scholastic and crushing. Nothing could be more unsuited to our alert temperaments. The recitative that suits us is one that follows Nature with simplicity and has the lure of spontaneity of expression and of freshness due to continuous inventions. That is Rameau's way and it is, let me repeat, far more difficult to get hold of.