The art of music, Vol. 02 (of 14) — Themes and Context

I. THE REGENERATION OF THE OPERA 1

The eighteenth century and operatic convention--Porpora and Hasse--Pergolesi and the _opera buffa_--_Jommelli_, Piccini, Cimarosa, etc.--Gluck’s early life; the Metastasio period--The comic opera in France; Gluck’s reform; _Orfeo_ and _Alceste_--The Paris period; Gluck and Piccini; the Iphigénies; Gluck’s mission--Gluck’s influence; the _opéra comique_; Cherubini.

II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CLASSIC PERIOD 45

Classicism and the classic period--Political and literary forces--The conflict of styles; the sonata form--The Berlin school; the sons of Bach--The Mannheim reform: the genesis of the symphony--Followers of the Mannheim school; rise of the string quartet; Vienna and Salzburg as musical centres.

III. THE VIENNESE CLASSICS: HAYDN AND MOZART 75

Social aspects of the classic period; Vienna, its court and its people--Joseph Haydn--Haydn’s work; the symphony; the string quartet--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart--Mozart’s style; Haydn and Mozart; the perfection of orchestral style--Mozart and the opera; the Requiem; the mission of Haydn and Mozart.

IV. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 128

Form and formalism--Beethoven’s life--His relations with his family, teachers, friends and other contemporaries--His character--The man and the artist--Determining factors in his development--The three periods in his work and their characteristics--His place in the history of music.

V. OPERATIC DEVELOPMENT IN ITALY AND FRANCE 177

Italian opera at the advent of Rossini--Rossini and the Italian operatic renaissance--_Guillaume Tell_--Donizetti and Bellini--Spontini and the historical opera--Meyerbeer’s life and works--His influence and followers--Development of _opéra comique_; Boieldieu, Auber, Hérold, Adam.

PART II. THE ROMANTIC IDEAL

VI. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT: ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND ITS GROWTH 213

Modern music and modern history; characteristics of the music of the romantic period--Schubert and the German romantic movement in literature--Weber and the German reawakening--The Paris of 1830: French Romanticism--Franz Liszt--Hector Berlioz--Chopin; Mendelssohn--Leipzig and Robert Schumann--Romanticism and classicism.

VII. SONG LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 269

Lyric poetry and song--The song before Schubert--Franz Schubert; Carl Löwe--Robert Schumann; Robert Franz; Mendelssohn and Chopin; Franz Liszt as song writer.

VIII. PIANOFORTE AND CHAMBER MUSIC OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 293

Development of the modern pianoforte--The pioneers: Schubert and Weber--Schumann and Mendelssohn--Chopin and others--Franz Liszt, virtuoso and poet--Chamber music of the romantic period; Ludwig Spohr and others.

IX. ORCHESTRAL LITERATURE AND ORCHESTRAL DEVELOPMENT 334

The perfection of instruments; emotionalism of the romantic period; enlargement of orchestral resources--The symphony in the romantic period; Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann; Spohr and Raff--The concert overture--The rise of program music; the symphonic _leit-motif_; Berlioz’s _Fantastique_; other Berlioz symphonies; Liszt’s dramatic symphonies--Symphonic poem; _Tasso_; Liszt’s other symphonic poems--The legitimacy of program music.

X. ROMANTIC OPERA AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHORAL SONG 372

The rise of German opera; Weber and the romantic opera; Weber’s followers--Berlioz as opera composer--The _drame lyrique_ from Gounod to Bizet--_Opéra comique_ in the romantic period; the _opéra bouffe_--Choral and sacred music of the romantic period.

PART III. THE ERA OF WAGNER

XI. WAGNER AND WAGNERISM 401

Periods of operatic reform; Wagner’s early life and works--Paris: _Rienzi_, “The Flying Dutchman”--Dresden: _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_; Wagner and Liszt; the revolution of 1848--_Tristan_ and _Meistersinger_--Bayreuth; “The Nibelungen Ring”--_Parsifal_--Wagner’s musico-dramatic reforms; his harmonic revolution; the _leit-motif_ system--The Wagnerian influence.

XII. NEO-ROMANTICISM: JOHANNES BRAHMS AND CÉSAR FRANCK 443

The antecedents of Brahms--The life and personality of Brahms--The idiosyncrasies of his music in rhythm, melody, and harmony as expressions of his character--His works for pianoforte, for voice, and for orchestra; the historical position of Brahms--Franck’s place in the romantic movement--His life, personality, and the characteristics of his style; his works as the expression of religious mysticism.

XIII. VERDI AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 477

Verdi’s mission in Italian opera--His early life and education--His first operas and their political significance--His second period: the maturing of his style--Crowning achievements of his third period--Verdi’s contemporaries.

A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC

CHAPTER I THE REGENERATION OF THE OPERA

The eighteenth century and operatic convention--Porpora and Hasse--Pergolesi and the _opera buffa_--Jommelli, Piccini, Cimarosa, etc.--Gluck’s early life; the Metastasio period--The comic opera in France; Gluck’s reform; _Orfeo_ and _Alceste_--The Paris period; Gluck and Piccini; the Iphigénies; Gluck’s mission--Gluck’s influence; Salieri and Sarti; the development of _opéra comique_; Cherubini.

While the deep, quiet stream of Bach’s genius flowed under the bridges all but unnoticed, the marts and highways of Europe were a babel of operatic intrigue and artistic shams. Handel in England was running the course of his triumphal career, which luckily forced him into the tracks of a new art-form; on the continent meantime Italian opera reached at once its most brilliant and most absurd epoch under the leadership of Hasse and Porpora; even Rameau, the founder of modern harmonic science, did not altogether keep aloof from its influence, while perpetuating the traditions of Lully in Paris. Vocal virtuosi continued to set the musical fashions of the age, the artificial soprano was still a force to which composers had to submit; indeed, artificiality was the keynote of the century.

The society of the eighteenth century was primarily concerned with the pursuit of sensuous enjoyment. In Italy especially ‘the cosmic forces existed but in order to serve the endless divertissement of superficial and brainless beings, in whose eyes the sun’s only mission was to illumine picturesque cavalcades and water-parties, as that of the moon was to touch with trembling ray the amorous forest glades.’ Monnier’s vivid pen-picture of eighteenth century Venetian society applies, with allowance made for change of scene and local color, to all the greater Italian cities. ‘What equivocal figures! What dubious pasts! Law (of Mississippi bubble fame) lives by gambling, as does the Chevalier Desjardins, his brother in the Bastille, his wife in a lodging-house; the Count de Bonneval, turbaned, sitting on a rug with legs crossed, worships Allah, carries on far-reaching intrigues and is poisoned by the Turks; Lord Baltimore, travelling with his physician and a seraglio of eight women, with a pair of negro guards; Ange Goudar, a wit, a cheat at cards, a police spy and perjurer, rascally, bold, and ugly; and his wife Sarah, once a servant in a London tavern, marvellously beautiful, who receives the courtly world at her palace in Pausilippo near Naples, and subjugates it with her charm; disguised maidens, false princes, fugitive financiers, literary blacklegs, Greeks, chevaliers of all industries, wearers of every order, splenetic _grands seigneurs_, and the kings of Voltaire’s _Candide_. Of such is the Italian society of the eighteenth century composed.

Music in this artificial atmosphere could only flatter the sense of hearing without appealing to the intelligence, excite the nerves and occasionally give a keener point to voluptuousness, by dwelling on a note of elegant sorrow or discreet religiousness. The very church, according to Dittersdorf, had become a musical boudoir, the convent a conservatory. As for the opera, it could not be anything but a lounge for the idle public. The Neapolitan school, which reigned supreme in Europe, provided just the sort of amusement demanded by that public. It produced scores of composers who were hailed as _maestri_ to-day and forgotten to-morrow. Hundreds of operas appeared, but few ever reached publication; their nature was as ephemeral as the public’s taste was fickle, and a success meant no more to a composer than new commissions to turn out operas for city after city, to supply the insatiate thirst for novelty. The manner in which these commissions were carried out is indicative of the result. Composers were usually given a libretto not of their choosing; the recitatives, which constituted the dramatic groundwork, were turned out first and distributed among the singers. The writing of the arias was left to the last so that the singers’ collaboration or advice could be secured, for upon their rendition the success of the whole opera depended; they were, indeed, _written for_ the singers--the particular singers of the first performance--and in such a manner that their voices might show to the best advantage. As Leopold Mozart wrote in one of his letters, they made ‘the coat to fit the wearer.’ The form which these operas took was an absolute stereotype; a series of more or less disconnected recitatives and arias, usually of the _da capo_ form, strung together by the merest thread of a plot. It was a concert in costume rather than the drama in music which was the original conception of opera in the minds of its inventors.

Pietro Metastasio, the most prolific of librettists, was eminently the purveyor of texts for these operas, just as Rinuccini, the idealist, had furnished the poetic basis for their nobler forerunners. Metastasio’s inspiration flowed freely, both in lyrical and emotional veins, but ‘the brilliancy of his florid rhetoric stifled the cry of the heart.’ His plots were overloaded with the vapid intrigues that pleased the taste of his contemporaries, with quasi-pathetic characters, with passionate climaxes and explosions. His popularity was immense. He could count as many as forty editions of his own works and among his collaborators were practically all the great composers, from Handel to Gluck and Cimarosa. As personifying the elements which sum up the opera during this its most irrational period we may take two figures of extraordinary eminence--Niccola Porpora and Johann Adolf Hasse.

Niccola Porpora (1686-1766), while prominent in his own day as composer, conductor, and teacher (among his pupils was Joseph Haydn), is known to history chiefly by his achievements as a singing master--perhaps the greatest that ever lived. The art of _bel canto_, that exaltation of the human voice for its own sake, which in him reached its highest point, was doubtless the greatest enemy to artistic sincerity and dramatic truth, the greatest deterrent to operatic progress in the eighteenth century. Though possessed of ideals of intrinsic beauty--sensuousness of tone, dynamic power, brilliance, and precision like that of an instrument--this art would to-day arouse only wonder, not admiration. Porpora understood the human voice in all its peculiarities; he could produce, by sheer training, singers who, like Farinelli, Senesino, and Caffarelli, were the wonder of the age. By what methods his results were reached we have no means of knowing, for his secret was never committed to writing, but his method was most likely empirical, as distinguished from the scientific, or anatomical, methods of to-day. It was told that he kept Caffarelli for five or six years to one page of exercises, and then sent him into the world as the greatest singer of Europe--a story which, though doubtless exaggerated, indicates the purely technical nature of his work.

Porpora wrote his own _vocalizzi_, and, though he composed in every form, all of his works appear to us more or less like _solfeggi_. His cantatas for solo voice and harpsichord show him at his best, as a master of the florid Italian vocal style, with consummate appreciation of the possibilities of the vocal apparatus. His operas, of which he wrote no less than fifty-three, are for the most part tedious, conventional, and overloaded with ornament, in every way characteristic of the age; the same is true in some measure of his oratorios, numerous church compositions, and chamber works, all of which show him to be hardly more than a thoroughly learned and accomplished technician.

But Porpora’s fame attracted many talented pupils, including the brilliant young German, Hasse (1699-1783), mentioned above, who, however, quickly forsook him in favor of Alessandro Scarlatti, a slight which Porpora never forgave and which served as motive for a lifelong rivalry between the two men. Hasse, originally trained in the tradition of the Hamburg opera and its Brunswick offshoot (where he was engaged as tenor and where he made his debut with his only German opera, ‘Antiochus’), quickly succumbed to the powerful Italian influence. The Italians took kindly to him, and, after his debut in Naples with ‘Tigrane’ (1773), surnamed him _il caro sassone_. His marriage with the celebrated Faustina Bordoni linked him still closer to the history of Italian opera; for in the course of his long life, which extends into the careers of Haydn and Mozart, he wrote no less than seventy operas, many of them to texts by the famed Metastasio, and most of them vehicles for the marvellous gifts of his wife. While she aroused the enthusiasm of audiences throughout Europe, he enjoyed the highest popularity of any operatic composer through half a century. Together they made the opera at Dresden (whither Hasse was called in 1731 as royal kapellmeister) the most brilliant in Germany--one that even Bach, as we have seen, was occasionally beguiled into visiting. Once Hasse was persuaded to enter into competition with Handel in London (1733), the operatic capital of Europe, where Faustina, seven years before, had vanquished her great rival Cuzzoni and provided the chief operatic diversion of the Handel régime to the tune of £2,000 a year! Only the death of August the Strong in 1763 ended the Hasses’ reign in Dresden, where during the bombardment of 1760 Hasse’s library and most of the manuscripts of his works were destroyed by fire. What remains of them reveals a rare talent and a consummate musicianship which, had it not been employed so completely in satisfying the prevailing taste and propitiating absurd conventions, might still appeal with the vitality of its harmonic texture and the beauty of its melodic line. Much of the polyphonic skill and the spontaneous charm of a Handel is evident in these works, but they lack the breadth, the grandeur and the seriousness that distinguish the work of his greater compatriot. Over-abundance of success militates against self-criticism, which is the essential quality of genius, and Hasse’s success was not, like Handel’s, dimmed by the changing taste of a surfeited public. Hasse’s operas signalize at once the high water mark of brilliant achievement in an art form now obsolete and the ultimate degree of its fatuousness.

Hasse and Porpora, then, were the leaders of those who remained true to the stereotyped form of opera, the singers’ opera, whose very nature precluded progress. They and a host of minor men, like Francesco Feo, Leonardo Vinci, Pasquale Cafaro, were enrolled in a party which resisted all ideas of reform; and their natural allies in upholding absurd conventions were the singers, that all-powerful race of virtuosi, the impresarios, and all the great tribe of adherents who derived a lucrative income from the system. Against these formidable forces the under-current of reform--both musical and dramatic--felt from the beginning of the century, could make little head. The protests of men like Benedetto Marcello, whose satire _Il teatro alla moda_ appeared in 1722, were voices crying in the wilderness. Yet reform was inevitable, a movement no less momentous than when the Florentine reform of 1600 was under way--the great process of crystallization and refinement which was to usher in that most glorious era of musical creation known as the classic period. Like the earlier reform, it signified a reaction against technique, against soulless display of virtuosity, a tendency toward simplicity, subjectivity, directness of expression--a return to nature.

Though much of the pioneer work was done by composers of instrumental music whose discussion must be deferred to the next chapter, the movement had its most spectacular manifestations in connection with opera, and in that aspect is summed up in the work of Gluck, the outstanding personality in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the domain of absolute music it saw its beginnings in the more or less spontaneous efforts of instrumentalists like Fasch, Foerster, Benda, and Johann Stamitz. First among those whose initiative was felt in _both_ directions we must name Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the young Neapolitan who, born in 1710, had his brilliant artistic career cut short at the premature age of twenty-six.

Pergolesi was the pupil of Greco, Durante, and Feo at the _Conservatorio dei Poveri_ at Naples, where a biblical drama and two operas from his pen were performed in 1731 without arousing any particular attention. But a solemn mass which he was commissioned to write by the city of Naples in praise of its patron saint, and which was performed upon the occasion of an earthquake, brought him sudden fame. The commission probably came to him through the good offices of Prince Stegliano, to whom he dedicated his famous trio sonatas. These sonatas, later published in London, brought an innovation which had no little influence upon contemporary composers; namely, the so-called _cantabile_ (or singing) _allegro_ as the first movement. Riemann, who has edited two of them,[1] calls attention to the richly developed sonata form of the first movement of the G major trio especially, of which the works of Fasch, Stamitz, and Gluck are clearly reminiscent. ‘The altogether charming, radiant melodies of Pergolesi are linked with such conspicuous, forcible logic in the development of the song-like theme, always in the upper voice, that we are not surprised by the attention which the movement aroused. We are here evidently face to face with the beginning of a totally different manner of treatment in instrumental melodies, which I would like to call a transplantation of the aria style to the instrumental field.’[2] We shall have occasion to refer to this germination of a new style later on. At present we must consider another of Pergolesi’s important services to art--the creation of the _opera buffa_.[3]

We have had occasion to observe in another chapter the success of the ‘Beggar’s Opera’ in England in 1723, which hastened the failure of the London Academy under Handel’s management. Vulgar as it was, this novelty embodied the same tendency toward simplicity which was the essential element of the impending reform; it was near to the people’s heart and there found a quick response. This ballad-opera, as it was called, was followed by many imitations, notably Coffey’s ‘The Devil to Pay, or The Wives Metamorphosed’ (1733), which, later produced in Germany, was adapted by Standfuss (1752) and Johann Adam Hiller (1765) and thus became the point of departure for the German singspiel. This in turn reacted against the popularity of Italian opera in Germany. The movement had its Italian parallel in the fashion for the so-called _intermezzi_ which composers of the Neapolitan school began very early in the century to interpolate between the acts of their operas, as, in an earlier period, they had been interpolated between the acts of the classic tragedies (_cf._ Vol. I, p. 326 ff). Unlike these earlier spectacular diversions, the later _intermezzi_ were comic pieces that developed a continuous plot independent of that of the opera itself--an anomalous mixture of tragedy and comedy which must have appeared ludicrous at times even to eighteenth century audiences. These artistic trifles were, however, not unlikely, in their simple and unconventional spontaneity, to have an interest surpassing that of the opera proper. Such was the case with _La serva padrona_, which Pergolesi produced between the acts of his opera _Il pigionier_ (1733). This graceful little piece made so immediate an appeal that it completely overshadowed the serious work to which it was attached, and, indeed, all the other dramatic works of its composer, whose fame to-day rests chiefly upon it and the immortal _Stabat mater_, which was his last work.

_La serva padrona_ is one of the very few operatic works of the century that are alive to-day. An examination of its contents quickly reveals the reason, for its pages breathe a charm, a vivacity, a humor which we need not hesitate to call Mozartian. Indeed, it leaves little doubt in our minds that Mozart, born twenty-three years later, must have been acquainted with the work of its composer. At any rate he, no less than Guglielmi, Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa, the chief representatives of the _opera buffa_, are indebted to him for the form, since, as the first _intermezzo_ opera capable of standing by itself (it was afterward so produced in Paris), it must be regarded as the first real _opera buffa_.