Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/88

 great success. The interludes which are interpolated in the drama, far from impairing its emotion, render it more beautiful and poetic. The poet has shown great cleverness. Dardanus may be quoted as marking the opposite defect. Its drama is very weak; its springs are mechanism rather than sentiment; it seems to be made for the interludes, not they for the drama. It is to be feared that in spite of a great deal of admirable music, it must have fallen flat on the stage. Rameau used to worry the life out of his librettists, by forcing them constantly to undo or reconstruct their text, but it seems to me that he exercised this very formidable censorship only on the prosody and detail of the words. As to the general conception he showed himself accommodating, and one certainly cannot consider he was wise in so doing, as he thereby to some extent injured the future of his work. But in Hippolyte, which like Castor is by Pellegrin (and by Pellegrin guided by Racine) he found in this way an excellent book. I might have chosen Hippolyte as the subject of an analysis intended to bring out the form that opera took in Rameau's hands. But Castor appears to me to be a more perfect whole. I find in the parts of Hippolyte and Phèdre an element of coldness and weakness, something of that forced effect with which the master is reproached. But I am far more impressed with the prodigious musical creations which that work contains—creations of a style quite wanting in Castor.

All those who know the score will know that I have specially in mind the second act, that of the world below, in which the power of evocation is blended with the grandeur of true tragedy: