Music

SOME few years ago French Opéra Bouffe made its first appearance before the American public with Mr. Bateman’s company, of which Mademoiselle Tostée was the bright particular star. Since then it has paid a yearly visit to our principal cities with varied success, rising to its height with Irma and Aujac, and last year dragging along a rather precarious existence with Léa Silly, Marie Aimée, and Gaussins. This year a small troop under Mademoiselle Aimée has been drawing full houses in spite of the poor quality of all but the prima donna. The great advantage that this troop has had over its predecessors is that it has sung in a smaller house, thus allowing nothing either good or bad to be lost upon the audience. As a rule the performances of Opéra Bouffe have degenerated in quality since the first two seasons, though the opera itself has, if possible, grown in popularity. The success of Mr. Bateman’s first venture was undoubted. The name of Offenbach had already become familiar to our ears ; and though we hardly expected to find him the leading musical mind of the age, as Mr. Bateman’s announcements would have led us to believe we yet knew of him as a most successful composer, in fact as the first writer of Opéra Bouffe who had gained anything more than a mere local reputation ; and we received his Grande Duchesse with open arms, in spite of, perhaps because of, certain vague hints that it was to be “more Frenchy (which term has, by some unfortunate perversion, got to signify, “more nasty ”) than anything we had yet seen in this country. But nasty or not, we had heard from across the water that Offenbach opera was eminently “the thing,” and in the true Anglo-Saxon follow-the-leader spirit we flocked to see and hear the new wonder. Every one who then heard Mademoiselle Tostée must remember that her pretensions as a singer were of the slightest. Her chief, if not her only strength lay in her acting, which showed off the possibilities of impropriety in Opéra Bouffe in the most brilliant manner. Her acting was more than what we call “Frenchy” and the French call chic; if a man were to call it positively filthy, he would not be far wrong. Her brilliant and almost universal success was rather a pointed satire upon the national school and meeting-house, and, though it might make angels weep, might certainly fairly make cynics laugh. An enlightened public who could endure and even enjoy Tostée’s brutal coarseness might well have been expected to be completely carried away by the more artistic and refined diablerie of Mademoiselle Irma. And it was noticeable that many who had been frightened away by Tostée’s more patent vulgarity, were gradually drawn to see and hear Irma and Aujac. Not that Irma was intrinsically less vulgar than Tostée, but that she was less offensively so. She openly expressed less, but hinted at more. She had more artistic and intellectual, though perhaps no more moral, refinement. People appreciated the difference between the two actresses very quickly. Where Tostée was audacious and obscene, Irma was “ chique ” and “naughty.” Perhaps it would have been better had the public shown as keen an appreciation of their resemblance as they did of their difference, but such was not the case, and “ Puritan Boston ” saw not only her fathers and sons, but also her matrons and daughters (the last could, thank heaven, get little harm from such things), flocking to hear the works of men who draw much of their music from the gutters of Saint Antoine, and much of their wit from Mabille and Bullier. The subject is not a pleasant one, and can hardly be discussed without making impolite reflections, so we will turn to a more inviting side of the bouffe Muse.

Karl Maria v. Weber owed the success of his operas, especially of the Freischütz, principally to the popular character of his melodies. By popular we do not mean that which appeals to the uneducated masses, that which is purely claptrap, but that which springs from and belongs to the heart of the people. He based his melody upon the German Volkslied. The Suabian and Tyrolese cut of many of his themes is unmistakable. Now Offenbach owes a great part of his musical success to a similar cause. He also bases his melody upon the folksong ; not the song of Suabia or Tyrol, but of Paris. The Parisians are a people by themselves, with manners and customs of their own, a dialect of their own, a physiognomy of their own, and finally their own stock of popular music, —music that has just as much sprung from the people, nobody knows exactly how or when, as have the folk-songs of the Tyrolese mountaineers, or the Venetian boatmen. The character of the Parisian people’s-melody is naturally as different from that of the Suabian or Tyrolese Volkslied, as are the Gavro-ches and cocottes of Saint Antoine and the Quartier Latin from the simple inhabitants of the mountains. But impure as the source of the Offenbachian melody is, the melody is at least genuine in its popular character, direct, concise, and without affectation. It cannot but be trivial and often commonplace, but it is of a much higher grade than the would-be sentimental and humorous imitations of Italian and English music that we continually hear ground out on our barrel-organs, or set to doleful doggerel in the form of cheap sheet-music.

Another great cause of Offenbach’s success is the capital way in which he has suited his music to the text. Herein lies his principal merit as a composer. Few composers, even of a much higher stamp, have so almost invariably helped by their music to make the text expressive. And here let us say once for all that people have been very unjust in saddling MM. Meilhac, Halévy, & Co. with all the indecencies to be found in Offenbach’s operas. The music is often to the full as suggestive of “ the thing unclean ” as is the text, and not unfrequently, to invert the quotation, “ casts a veil of indecency ” over what is by itself perfectly innocent. Offenbach has most conclusively proved the falsity of the old saying, that “ music is the only art that cannot be made to serve the Devil.” Charles Gounod has written much love-music of very questionable purity of character, and his Medjée, fine and powerful as it is, is after all rather the “ sensuous caterwauling ” of a disappointed voluptuary than an expression of exalted love. Richard Wagner has not been over-squeamish in the sensual character of much of his music, and in many passages in Tannhäuser, and especially in Tristan und Isolde, he has shown us the passion of love stripped to very nakedness. But sensual as the sentiment often is in the music of these men, it is yet the sensuality of heroes and demigods. Their genius idealizes and shows us the higher and nobler side of passion, for passion has a high and noble side ; shows us man as a magnificently developed animal, in whom impurity and immodesty are impossibilities, simply because by the very perfection of his animal nature, he is grandly unconscious of and superior to all but animal laws. Immodesty is as impossible in the nude figures of Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment, the Venus de Medici, the Hermaphrodite of the Louvre, or Wagner’s Tannhäuser, as it is in the horses on Monte Cavallo, Raphael’s Madonna di San Sisto, or Shakespeare’s Ophelia. But when Jupiter and Danaä become Arthur and Finette, when we descend from Mount Olympus or the Venusberg to the rue de la Borde, we turn away our eyes in shame. Offenbach never attempted to scale Olympus. In Orphée aux Enfers and La Belle Hélène, to be sure, he has brought the Olympians down to the Parisian level, but they are Olympian merely in name. Some few of his songs are really beautiful, full of a rough, natural sort of pathos that easily finds its way to the heart. One of the very best of these is the favorite “Letter-Song” in La Périchole. But too often the only spice to his melodies, beyond their piquant, popular character, to which we have already alluded, is a species of musical wink and wriggle, a mere reminiscence of the can-can. Anathema sit!

As a technical composer Offenbach’s claims to respect are very small indeed. One or two instances might be given where he has made good and effective use of imitative counterpoint, such as the chorus “ O soyez pitoyable,” in Les Brigands, in which the theme is very respectably worked out. The Tarantelle in the same opera is very spirited and well written, steadily growing in vivacity and entrain. The theme of the serenade “ Catarina, je chante ” in Le Pont des Soupirs is very pretty, and reminds one of Gounod ; but in spite of the pretentious plan that M. Offenbach has laid out for working it up contrapuntally in conjunction with two other themes, the management of the whole is but a clumsy failure, if tried by any decent standard of musical criticism.

Offenbach’s use of the orchestra, with the single exception that he almost always allows the voice and text to be distinctly heard, is beneath criticism. Now and then we may find some clever instrumental effects, for instance, the imitation of a bell by a sharp stroke on the cymbal with a wooden stick, and sustaining a long, high note on the cornet, in Le Pont des Soupirs ; but in general his orchestration is thin, noisy, and disagreeable.

In fine we see very little, if any, good excuse for Opéra Bouffe being tolerated at all. To be sure it does not pretend to be any better than it is, and with a plausible kind of impudence which is too liable to be mistaken for ingenuousness, bears its barsinister stamped upon its very forehead that all the world may know it. But if it is to be done away with, there are other things that must go first. Free-and-easy impudence and flippancy are yet better than hypocrisy, and we think that with all its more than doubtful points, Opéra Bouffe is better than those so-called “moral sensation dramas ” which infest our stage, and which instead of making sin and crime a vehicle for a wholesome moral, desecrate the moral of the fable by using it as a mere pretext for wading through sickening tales of crime and misery, and bringing upon the stage such moral and social garbage as only belongs in a low police court. Bad as the Devil is in the street or in the café, he is yet a thousand times worse when he steps into the pulpit and begins to point a moral. Offenbach opera is, in our opinion, as much more innocent than many of our “moral dramas,” as Paul de Kock’s devil-may-care frivolity is than Bulwer’s tainted moralizing.

It is with great pleasure that we notice the bringing put of Raff’s Symphony in C,¹ by the Harvard Musical Association. After only one or two hearings we should be a little timid of calling it a great work, but it is throughout a most enjoyable composition. Nowadays when poets, painters, and composers are straining to be romantic, idealistic, imaginative, transcendental, and heaven knows what not that is braincracking, it is refreshing to find somebody writing music in a healthy, happy state of mind. Throughout the symphony the composer shows an easy mastery over musical form and the use of the orchestra ; and although we may feel at times that a more condensed expression would do the composition no harm, yet we can hardly quarrel with what some might call too great prolixity of style, when the subject-matter that is treated at such length is in itself so charming. The Symphony is full of the buoyancy of youth, full of that simple, honest spirit that, conscious of its own purity, and thoroughly believing in the reality of its own illusions, persistently looks upon the bright side of life, and which, though it may excite a half-compassionate, half-envious smile in the more experienced, cannot but be respectable from its very sincerity. It is the spirit of a young man just about to face the world for the first time, rejoicing and Confident in his own strength, and having not yet met with those rebuffs which may prove him, if conquered by them, merely a pygmy like the mass of men he sees struggling around him, but, if conquering them, the true hero he now in his hopefulness aspires to be. The slow movement begins rather ecclesiastically in some of its modulations, but soon grows to be a most beautiful lovesong. If it does not express the love and passion of a great, mature soul, a love, which even when told of, may elevate and inspire all men, it at least expresses nothing that is impure or degrading. At times it might by some be called over-sentimental, but it is the pure, honest sentimental calflove of youth, that süsse, blöde JugendEselei of Heine, which, though it is to be outgrown and laid aside like our jackets and trousers, our love for surreptitious mince-pies and dubious cigarettes, and our boyish admiration for and belief in the cock of our school, must yet be looked back upon with a feeling closely akin to reverence, when we compare it with other loves and passions that have succeeded it. It is very rarely that one meets with such really good “young man’s music” as this symphony. Father Haydn is famous for having retained the youthful spirit even in his later compositions, but it is rather the old man’s cheerfulness and childlike simplicity, the senile love for children and children’s sayings and doings, that charm us in him, than the buoyant ardor and fire of youth itself. Franz Liszt has much of the fire, passion, and boisterous, uncontrolled expression of youth in his compositions, especially in his Symphonic Poem Les Préludes, and though he has a much more Jovian grasp of the thunderbolt, and shows more of the lion’s paw in his music than does Raff, yet is he not always so pure of purpose, and sometimes, alas ! shows himself as nearer to Salmonoeus than to the Olympian Zeus.