Music

THE most readable, and in several ways the most repaying book on general musical topics, among the host of similar works that are constantly appearing in Germany, is A. W. Ambros’ second series of Bunte Blätter¹The author treats whatever subject he is handling with a graceful lightness of touch that has all the easy fascination of the best French feuilleton style, while the sound knowledge, the perfect grasp of his subject that inevitably makes itself felt through all his pleasant chit-chat, gives the reader a comfortable sense of not wasting his time on the mere amenities of graceful diction. Neither are special Teutonic characteristics wanting ; his thirst for generalization is immense, and he seems always eager to attack his subject in toto, in its widest possible signification. He delights in intellectual genealogy, and cannot rest until he has traced every fact that comes under his notice back to its aboriginal prototype. Like most chatty writers, when once launched in debate, he wants plenty of sea-room. Time and space are nothing to him, and if he thinks that he can give the reader a clearer, and above all a more comprehensive view of the subject by transporting him suddenly to the Feejee Islands, or taking a flight back over two or three centuries, he is perfectly ready to do it. Of persistent argument we find little in his writings; he seems to take for granted that the reader is of his opinion, and it never occurs to him to take up the didactic vein. His book is full of valuable suggestions rather than of fixed doctrines. He takes a view of his subject from so many different positions that we are not seldom at a loss to know what special conclusion he has at last arrived at. Perhaps he very often comes to no distinct and final conclusion himself. In working up his subject, all the exact information he gives us is merely incidental; the variety of ideas he suggests is immense, but when the ideas are once suggested, he leaves them to take their own course unassisted, and immediately hurries on to some other as yet tmtried point of view. After reading the Bunte Blätter it would be impossible to say what particular school of music lie pins his faith to. His object in writing seems to be rather to learn than to instruct; the public are let into his intellectual laboratory, and are there allowed to pick up what bits of knowledge they can.

Many chapters in the book are well worth translating into English, especially the one entitled, Die musikalische Wasserpest, in which he treats of Offenbach tthoc genus omne, and which is, perhaps, everything considered, the best in the book. It is one of the very few justly appreciative criticisms of Opéra Bouffe that we have yet seen. Taking Hamlet’s “ He’s for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps,” for his motto, the author begins quite an elaborate notice of humorous opera in general from the time of Monteverde down to the present day. It were difficult to find more instructive matter, compressed into so small a space, than he gives us in the first twenty and odd pages, in which he passes in review the principal composers of comic opera in Europe from Alessandro Scarlatti down to Auber. Among other excellent things, we must particularly praise his masterly notice of Cherubini’s Les deux Journées. When he has dwelt sufficiently upon Auber, Adam, Hérold, and the French composers of that stamp, he goes on : —

“While the sun of old Auber was setting, and he nevertheless continued composing, there sprang up in Paris a German, i. e., a composer accidentally born in Germany, of the same race as Meyerbeer, an inverted Antonio Montccatino of Goethe, around whose cradle the Graces assembled, but on the other hand all the other gods stayed away — a composer who perhaps did not in the beginning suspect that he was appointed to become a musical world-power : Jacques Offenbach. When his Orphée aux Enfers came across the Rhine, we could all laugh heartily, and without any scruples, at his topsy-turvied Olympus. Who has not been amused when Orpheus, who in reality thanks all the gods that he is rid of his Eurydice, is forced by an allegorically cmbodied Public Opinion to fetch her up again out of the lower world ? (Offenbach hardly dreamed that in Monteverde’s Orfeo the hero is in like manner escorted down to Orcus by Hope — La Speme!) The Manage aux Lanternes showed, on the other hand, that Offenbach was trying to walk in Auber’s footsteps, a path which he was destined to leave soon enough. The abysmal corruption of the second empire was not to be served by wit and humor alone; it demanded a moral game-flavor — the stronger the better! Offenbach’s comic muse (or whatever the capricious being who inspires him may be called) began to show more and more plainly her faun’s smile, and at last in La belle Hélène struck the key-note, which has since then been the prevailing one in Offenbach and the servum pecus imilatorum who have composed after him.” Ambros goes on to notice more particularly the Offenbach operas that were produced in Viennain 1872, Fantasia, La Baule de Neige, and Le Corsair Noir. He says, quoting from the Augsburger allgemeine Frilling : “ The Egyptian plague of the century has been Sardou’s and Offenbach’s muse; the sensuous destruction of taste through a vulgarity of the stage that is fast becoming classic.” He speaks at some length of Offenbach’s power of caricature, ending with,—

“ The French are masters in this sort of comic production (think, for instance, of Grandville’s drawings and the well-known busts of Dantan, among a host of others !), and Offenbach has caught their idea and applied it to music. This decided, and certainly by no means despicable talent which Offenbach was endowed with, and has cultivated in the fittest place in the world, namely, in Paris, has led him, even in the choice of his subjects, to enter upon a path in which this talent of his can exercise itself in the most brilliant manner, Rossini’s Doctor Bartolo is really a second Cato when brought into comparison with the mad figures that go rollicking about in Barbe-bleue, La Grande Duchesse de Gérostein, or La Princesse de Trébizonde. We may shake our heads ever so suspiciously in the midst of this madcap world of grimaces, in this antic carnival of the mind, but we cannot help feeling cheerfully stimulated, and the accusation we are about to make is stifled in the unquenchable laughter into which we break out in spite of ourselves. These musical farces have, after all, their own significance as works of art, in the history of music ; by which I do not mean to say that they are classic music of permanent value. Offenbach is an original, and if not exactly praiseworthy, or in any way a model worthy of general imitation, he is yet a remarkable phenomenon of his kind. But. Heaven preserve us from his imitators, who are already beginning to spring up here and there.”

How much real artistic harm is or can he done by these bouffes farces is a question that it is difficult to make up one’s mind on. We cannot think but that Ambros overrates the evil in this respect. We think that a much more pregnant source of anxiety to the art-lover is hinted at in the author’s next chapter, on Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet. He says : “ Hamlet as an opera! — as a modern French opera in the grand style ! ... If matters continue in the path they are now traveling at racing speed, we shall soon have the entire German and English classical tragic literature worked up into opera libretti. We have already a Don Carlos by Verdi, a Luisa Miller by Verdi, a Giovanna d’Arco by Verdi, Masnadieri by Mercadante, Guillaume Tell by Rossini, Faust by Gounod, Roméo et Juliette by Gounod, Otello by Rossini, Macbeth by Chelard and the same by Verdi —and now also Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas. The worst of the business is, that the originals of Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, are pretty well knocked on the head for the general public by the respective opera scores. Are they supposed to have such a preponderance of merit or of real effective power ? Oh no; but a tragedy is most serious enjoyment; it demands the participation of the spectator, mental absorption, and even somewhat of intellectual work : in the form of an opera, on the other hand, this intellectual work has become once for all pure, sensual enjoyment; the spectator’s ear is tickled with melodies, is set a-quiver by masses of sound, his eye is dazzled by ballets, processions, and splendid decorations — and instead of having to rivet his attention upon whether a tine histrionic talent conceives aright the dramatic character of an Othello, a Hamlet, a Desdemona, or an Ophelia, and carries out this conception with corresponding power, he is only disposed to listen to the favorite songster or songstress; and a successful roulade, a brilliant trill, accompanied with the traditional opera gesticulation, richly compensates him for the want of good declamation and true acting.”

We must insist that true art is in far greater danger of suffering from the widespread popularity of these operatized classic tragedies, which come before the world with all the pomp and assurance of serious works, and which can for the most part only be listened to as fashionable after-dinner keepawakes, than from the most outrageous parodies of the Opéra Bouffe. The moral injury which these French bouffes may inflict upon a community is a very different thing. The recent visit to Boston of Mademoiselle Aimée’s company has called out almost a torrent of virtuous indignation from the daily press. Yet, of all the forms of tainted literature and art, Opéra Bouffe is the least injurious. Compared with a large class of French fiction, not of the universally tabooed sort like that infamous, turbid cloaca of not transcendental sensuality that shut the doors of the Académic on Théophile Gautier, but of the recognized and more inentionable sort, of which Balzac’s otherwise insignificant Les Secrets de la Princesse Cadignan is a fair example — compared with these even Hervé’s Petit Faust and Offenbach’s Geneviève de Brabant are as innocent sugar-plums, fit for the nourishment of babes and sucklings. Opéra Bouffe at most offends the sense of decency. It is in itself a lively parody, if a coarse one, upon those very vices it is intended to pamper. Frivolous at best it is and must be. It sets before us a number ol impossible, but nevertheless excruciatingly life-like caricatures, whose primary essence is vice, and makes them amusing simply through their enormous viciousness. But it only makes them amusing. That the taste is not offended by the way in “which it is done bespeaks a certain degree of preexisting depravity in the spectator. But, what mortal was ever excited to sympathy with their vicious caracoling? Many of the more serious dramas with which the French stage is infested, and which come thence, as from the world’s dramatic reservoir, upon all other stages, seem to he written with the sole intent to make vice attractive and to excite our sympathy. “ Vice cured of its deformity ” ought to be their motto. In them we see beautiful, fascinating, and persecuted vice in passionate death-grips with iog-headed, utterly uninteresting virtue, and when in the fifth act virtue has her traditional triumph and beams upon the audience in stupid felicity, while poor vice is writhing under her heel, it must be the spontaneous impulse of a large part of the audience chivalrously to lift poor vice on their gallant shoulders and rush headlong down to perdition as a mark of their sympathy with her sufferings. Little space remains for us to notice the many other excellent things in Ambros’ book. A chapter on J. R. Zumsteeg, the ballad composer, is extremely interesting, and ought to help in making Zumstecg more generally known than he is. The chapter on “ Musical Restoring and Retouching ” is a vigorous discussion of a much-vexed question.

— A curious little bit of piano forte music entitled A Relic,² and purporting to have been composed by Mozart, is published by George Willig & Co., Baltimore. The story runs that Mozart improvised the piece while stopping at a lady’s house in the country, and that his hostess, being of a tenacious memory, remembered the music, although it was never written down. The little air was handed down as a sort of heirloom from generation to generation in the family, until an English-woman of equally tenacious memory learned it by heart and afterwards imparted it to the present editor. There is just enough of Mozart in the innocent little undulating theme to give those who feel themselves disposed an excuse for believing that it has not lost quite all its identity by friction against two or three generations of amateurs. The same publishers send us a reprint of Liszt’s transcription of the Evening Star Song from Tannkäuser. The transcription is masterly, but we are sorry to see any editions of pianoforte music with the old “ English ” fingering, which ought by this time to be wholly abandoned. H. Lichner’s Devotion is a simple, smoothly enough written bit of harmony, rather above the general average of sucli things, and far superior to an Album Leaf by Zeckwer, which, though more pretentiously written and, indeed, quite sonorously put upon the instrument, is sadly wanting in coherence. A Nocturne in A flat by the same composer is well written for the pianoforte, and is open to no graver charge than that of sentimental vapidity.

Stars the Night Adorning, a serenade written by J. B. Wekerlin to the words beginning, — „

from Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, is one of the very smoothest and most singable things of its kind that we have seen for some time. It would only take some competent singer, high in the good graces of the public, to make this song quite as popular as Paladilhe’s Mandolinata.