I

THE form of drama with music which we loosely call ‘opera’ is such a curious mixture of many elements — some of them closely related, others nearly irreconcilable — that it is almost impossible to arrive at any definite idea of its artistic value. A great picture or piece of sculpture, a great book or a great symphony represents a perfectly clear evolution of a well-defined art. You do not question the artistic validity of Pendennis or of a portrait by Romney; they have their roots in the earlier works of great writers and painters and they tend toward those which follow. The arts they represent grew by a slow process of evolution, absorbing everything that was useful to them and rejecting everything useless, until they finally became consistent and self-contained. The development of opera, on the other hand, has been a continual compromise — with the whims of princes, with the even more wayward whims of singers, and with social conventions.

Its increasing costliness (due sometimes to the composer’s grandiloquence and sometimes to the demands of the public) has necessitated producing it in huge opera houses entirely unsuited to it; and, being a mixed art, it has been subject to two different influences which have not by any means always been in agreement. Its life-line has been crossed over and over again by daring innovators who, forgetting the past, have sought to force it away from nature and to make it an expression of excessive individualism. Methods which would find oblivion quickly enough in any pure form of art have been carried out in opera, and have been supported by an uncritical public pleased by a gorgeous spectacle or entertained by fine singing. All the other art-forms progress step by step; opera leaps first forward, then backward; it becomes too reasonable, only to become immediately afterward entirely unreasonable; it passes from objectivity to subjectivity and back again, or employs both at the same time; it turns a man into a woman, or a woman into a man; it thinks nothing of being presented in two languages at once; it turns colloquial Bret Harte into Italian without the slightest realization of having become, in the process, essentially comic: in short, there seems no limit to the havoc it can play with geography, science, language, costume, drama, music, human nature itself.

Any attempt, therefore, to deal here with the development of opera as a whole would be an impossible undertaking. We should become at once involved in a glossary of singers (now only names, then in effect constituting the opera itself), an unsnarling of impossible plots, an excursion into religion, into the ballet, into mythology, demonology, pseudo-philosophy, mysticism, and Heaven knows what else. We should see our first flock of canary birds, — released simply to make us gape, — and we should hear a forest bird tell the hero (through the medium of a singer off the stage) the way to a sleeping beauty; we should hear the hero and the villain sing a delightful duet and then see them turn away in different directions to seek and murder each other; we should find the Pyramids and the Latin Quarter expressible in the same terms; our heroines would include the mysterious and demoniac scoffer, Kundry, the woman who doubts and questions, the woman who should have but did not, and the woman who goes mad and turns the flute-player in the orchestra to madness with her; we should see men and women, attired in inappropriate and even unintelligible costumes, drink out of empty cups, and a hero mortally wound a papier-mâché dragon; we should have to shut our eyes in order to hear, or stop our ears in order to see; if we cared for music, we should have to wait ten minutes for a domestic quarrel in recitative to finish; if we cared for drama, we should have to wait the same length of time while a prima donna tossed off birdling trills and chirpings. We should, in short, find ourselves dealing with a mixed art of quite extraordinary latitude in style, form, dramatic purpose, and musical texture.

It will be sufficient for our purposes, therefore, to state that both sacred and secular plays with music have existed from the earliest times, and that their development has tended toward the form as we now know it. The introduction of songs into plays was, in itself, so agreeable and interesting that their use continually increased until some vague operatic form was reached in which music predominated.

But there are two great revolutionary epochs to which proper attention must be paid if we are to understand opera at all. The first of these is the so-called ‘Florentine Revolution’ in the years 1595 to 1600, and the second is the Wagnerian reform in the middle of the last century.

II

The ‘Florentine Revolution’ was an attempt to create an entirely new type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To Eurydice, the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote a preface from which we quote the following: ‘Therefore, abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded by this poem.’ (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment, for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up, and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art entirely detached, from an old one: Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it because opera can subsist — it has, and does — without logic or even reasonableness.

There had been composed before the year 1600 the most beautiful sacred music the world possesses — that which culminated in the works of Palestrina. A style or method of expression had been perfected, and this style or method was gradually and naturally being applied to secular and even to dramatic forms. There were at that time, also, songs of the people which had been often used in plays with music, and which might have supplied a basis for opera. But the creators of the new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o’-thewisp, which has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music’s sake. All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera in existence, save alone Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy, in which the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy’s opera is unique in its treatment and leads nowhere— or, if anywhere, away from opera). Peri’s reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements necessary to artistic completeness.

It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a ‘human nightingale’) is sure to attract an audience, no matter what she sings or how little musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawingroom song, the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely unintelligible words. And, second, when this singing, which the public dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is irresistible.

I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this, however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of beauty in their own minds — although nature surrounds them with it, and imaginative literature is in every library— the stage is a perpetual delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last. These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they embody the essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and Shakespeare divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and while those great dramatists imply the whole of life, — whereas the ordinary play implies nothing,— they do not and cannot present it in its actual and complete continuity.

Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny. ‘What is too silly to be said is sung,’ says Voltaire.

Let us note also that when an art becomes detached from its own past, when it is not based on natural human life, and does not obey those general laws to which all art is subject, it is sure to evolve conventions of one sort or another and to become artificial. This is to be observed in what is called the ‘rococo’ style of architecture, as well as in the terrible objects perpetrated by the ‘futurists’ and ‘cubists’ (anything that is of the future must also be of the past, no matter whether it is a picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was soon in the grip of these conventions from which, with a few notable exceptions, it has never escaped. Even the common conventions of the drama, which we accept readily enough, are in opera stretched to the breaking point. For many generations operas were planned according to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a woman took a man’s part (as in Gounod’s Faust); characters were stereotyped; the position of the chief aria (solo) for the prima donna was exactly determined so as to give to her entrance all possible impressiveness; the set musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and so forth) were arranged artificially and not to satisfy any dramatic necessity. There is some justness in Wagner’s saying that the old conventional opera was ‘a concert in costume.’

An example of this conventionality and lack of dramatic unity may be found in the famous quartette scene in Verdi’s Rigoletto, an opera which is typical of the Italian style (in which, in Meredith’s phrase, ‘there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish’). In this scene there are two persons in hiding to watch two others. The concealment is the hinge upon which, for the moment, the story swings. But the exigences of the music are such that, before the piece has progressed very far, all four are singing at the top of their lungs and with no pretext of concealment — in a charming piece of music, indeed, but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity. And then, naturally enough, the thin veneer of drama having been pierced, they answer your applause by joining hands and bowing, after which the two conceal themselves again, the music strikes up as before, and the whole scene is repeated.

But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinarily unlucky stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: ‘The very ballet girls, with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees — as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still in the Devil’s name!’

One remembers, also, War and Peace, with its scene at the opera —and Tolstoï’s reference to the chief male dancer as getting ‘ sixty thousand francs a year for cutting capers.’ So, looking over the older operas which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that today opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art.

III

Then came the second great operatic reform, — that of Wagner, — which was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner’s operas, at the outset, bade fair to be. In Der Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin there is a reasonable correspondence between the action and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption of our faculties. Wagner’s librettos are, with one exception, based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal types — Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in his characters — such as Siegfried’s youth and fearlessness, Wotan’s majesty, and so forth—were defined by short phrases of music called leit-motifs; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of his drama, instead of employing it as a ‘huge guitar’; he eliminated the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called ‘authentic cadence,’ which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.

But by all these means he imposed on his listener a constant strain of attention : leit-motifs recurring, developing, and disintegrating, every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being evolved, — as in an opera by Verdi, — but which are related to something first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week before in another drama) : we have all this to strain every possibility of our appreciative faculty, and at the same time he asks us to watch an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another between two heroes half in the clouds, with a God resplendent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water, with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more; for he asks us to witness the end of the world — the waters rising, the very heavens aflame — when our heart is so torn by the stupendous inner tragedy of Brunhilde’s immolation that, the end of the world seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.

After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state of inner exaltation. An opera must be objective or subjective; it cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of Don Giovanni is due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the action and of the musical expression — or, in other words, to the complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The ‘ Ring ’ cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very nature of those beings for whom it was created. The ‘ Ring ’ dramas should be both acted and witnessed by gods and goddesses for whom time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas, — every one recognizes Wagner’s genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde, — but the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan and Fricka in Das Rheingold and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)

One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene is in a mining camp in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards, — an Outcast-of-Poker-Flat opera, — and this translated, for the benefit of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language ? ’I ’m dead gone on you, Minnie,’ says Rance; ‘ Ti voglio bene, Minnie,’sings his Italian counterpart.

Rigoletto does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well in literature — in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point in the development of the opera. But after Wagner’s reforms, and the influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a Girl of the Golden West.

Nearly all Puccini’s operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in La Tosca, which leaves almost nothing to the imagination — one specially wishes that it did in certain scenes. ‘Local color,’ so called, appears again in all its arid deception — as in the Japanese effects in the music of Madame Butterfly; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic scene in Puccini’s operas with the last act of Verdi’s Otello, we realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric moments — as when Mimi, in La Bohème, tells Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is not for the purpose of decrying one at the expense of the other, but to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and the lesser is; that we get La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, and La Tosca twenty times to Otello’s once, and that we thereby lose all sense of operatic values.

The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the method Strauss employs in Electra. In its original form Electra is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents. This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically. Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its artistic and its historical sense. The real Electra is an impersonal, typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion.

The lead given by Strauss in Salome, Electra, and, in different form or type, in Der Rosenkavallier has been quickly followed. The Jewels of the Madonna is an Electra of the boulevard, in which the worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the Grand Guignol. Let any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form an opinion, not of their morals, — for there is only one opinion about that, — but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded person.

I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but on the other hand he is ‘a brother to his villains’ and he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in The Idiot is a predominating and overbalancing character. The object of all great literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is as moral as Emma. But the further one gets from a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is. The Jewels of the Madonna might serve as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.

IV

I have referred to these various inconsistencies and absurdities of opera, not with the idea of making out a case against it; on the contrary I want to make out a case for it. This obviously can be done only by means of operas which are guiltless of absurdities and of melodramatic exaggeration, which answer the requirements of artistic reasonableness, and are, at the same time, beautiful. This cannot be said of Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry — Heaven save the mark!), La Bohème, La Tosca, The Girl of the Golden West, Thaïs (poison, infidelity, suicide, sorcery, and religion mixed up in an intolerable mélange), Contes d’Hoffman (a Don Juan telling his adventures in detail) — these are bad art, not because they are immoral, but because they are untrue, distorted, without sense of the value of the material they employ.

Operas which are both beautiful and reasonable do exist, and one or two of them are actually in our present-day repertoire. The questions we have to ask are these: Can a highly imaginative and significant drama, in which action and reflection hold a proper balance, in which some great and moving passion or some elemental human motives find true dramatic expression — can such a drama exist as opera? Is it possible to preserve the body and the spirit of drama and at the same time to preserve the body and spirit of music? Does not one of these have to give way to the other? We want opera to be one thing, and not several. We want the same unity which exists in other artistic forms. We want to separate classic, romantic, and realistic. If opera changes from blank verse to rhymed verse, so to speak, we want the change to be dictated by an artistic necessity as it is in As You Like It. We want, above all, such a reasonable correspondence between seeing and hearing as shall make it possible for us to preserve each sense unimpaired by the other. A few such operas have been composed. A considerable number approach this ideal. From Gluck’s Orfeo (produced in 1762) to Wagner’s Tristan (1865) the pure conception of opera has always been kept alive. Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Verdi are the great names that stand out above the general level.

Gluck’s Orfeo is even more interesting since the dark shadow of Strauss’s Electra has appeared to throw it into relief. Once in a decade or two Orfeo is revived to reveal anew how nobly Gluck interpreted the old Greek story. And it must be remembered that Gluck lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when music was quite inflexible in the matter of those dissonances which are considered by modern composers absolutely necessary to the expression of dramatic passion.

After Gluck came Mozart with his Don Giovanni, preserving the same balance between action and emotion, with an even greater unity of style and the same sincerity of utterance. Mozart possessed a supreme mastery over all his material, and a unique gift for creating pure and lucid melody. In his operas there is no admixture: his tragedy and his comedy are alike purely objective— and it is chiefly this quality which prevents our understanding them. We, in our day and age, cannot project ourselves into Mozart’s milieu; the tragedy at the close of Don Giovanni moves us no whit because it is devoid of shrieking dissonances and thunders of orchestral sound. Our nervous systems are adjusted to instrumental cataclysms. (We are conscious only of a falling star; the serene and placid Heavens look down on us in vain.) Could we hear Don Giovanni in a small opera house sung in pure classic style, we should realize how beautiful it is; we should no longer crave the overexcitement and unrestrained passion of La Tosca; we should understand that the deepest passion is expressible without tearing itself to tatters, and that music may be unutterably tragic in simple major and minor mode. Don Giovanni is a type of operatic hero, — he may be found in some modified form in half the operas ever written, — but Mozart lifts him far above his petty intrigues and makes him a great figure standing for certain elements in human nature. (It is the failure of Gounod to accomplish this which puts Faust on the lower plane it occupies.) The stage setting of Don Giovanni, — the conventional rooms with gilt chairs, and the like, — the costumes, the acting, the music (orchestral and vocal), are all unified in one style. And this, coupled with the supreme mastery and the melodic gift of its composer, makes it one of the most perfect, if not the most perfect, of operas.

Beethoven’s Fidelio (produced in 1805) celebrates the devotion and selfsacrifice of a woman — and that devotion and self-sacrifice actually have for their object her husband! It is a noble opera, but Beethoven’s mind and temperament were not suited to the operatic problem, and Fidelio is not by any means a perfect work of art. The Beethoven we hear there is the Beethoven of the slow movements of the sonatas and symphonies; but we could well hear Fidelio often, for it stands alone in its utter sincerity and grandeur.

The romantic operas of Weber tend toward that characterization which is the essential equality of his great successor, Wagner, for Der Freischütz and Euryanthe are full of characteristic music. Weber begins and ends romantic opera. (Romantic subjects are common enough, but romantic treatment is exceedingly uncommon. Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor, for example, in passing through the hands of librettist and composer becomes — in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor — considerably tinged with melodrama.) There is evidence enough in Der Freischütz and Euryanthe of Weber’s sincerity and desire to make his operas artistic units. Each of them conveys a definite impression of beauty and avoids those specious appeals so common in opera.

Meanwhile, in the early part of the nineteenth century, opéra comique was flourishing in France. Auber, Hérold, Boieldieu, and other composers were producing works in which the impossible happenings of grand opera were made possible by humor and lightness of touch. The words of these composers are full of delightful melody and are more reasonable and true than are many better-known grand operas.

Then comes the Wagnerian period, with its preponderance of drama over music. In Tristan und Isolde Wagner, by his own confession, turned away from preconceived theories and composed as his inner spirit moved him. Tristan is, therefore, the work of an artist rather than of a theorist, and although it is based on the leit-motif and on certain other important structural ideas which belong to the Wagnerian scheme, it rises far above their limitations and glows with the real light of genius. In Tristan the action is suited to the psychology. It is a great work of art and the most beautiful of all recantations. In it we realize how finely means may be adjusted to ends, how clearly music and text may be united, how reasonable is the use of the leitmotif when it characterizes beings aflame with passion; how the song, under the influence of great dramatic situations, can be expanded; how vividly the orchestra can interpret and even further the actions; how even the chorus can be fitted into the dramatic scheme — everywhere in Tristan there is unity. This is not true of most of Wagner’s other operas. Die Meistersinger comes nearest to Tristan in this respect. May we not say that of all the music-dramas of Wagner, Tristan and Die Meistersinger lay completely in his consciousness unmixed with philosophical ideas and theories? In them the leit-motif deals chiefly with emotions or with characteristics of persons rather than with inanimate objects, or ideas; in them is no grandiose scenic display, no perversity of theory, but only beautiful music wedded to a fitting text.

Wagner’s reforms were bound to bring about a reaction, which came in due season and resulted in shorter and more direct works, such as those of the modern Italians. No operas since Wagner, save Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, approach the greatness of his musicdramas, and the tendency of many of these later works has been too much toward what we mildly call ‘decadence.’ But there is a great difference between the truthfulness and artistic validity of Carmen and that of La Bohème and La Tosca. The former is packed full of genuine passion, however primitive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and its technical skill is undoubted.

The most interesting phase of modern opera is found in the works of the Russians. It was inevitable that they should overturn our delicately adjusted artistic mechanism. Dostoïevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is as though there never had been a Meredith or a Henry James, and Moussorgsky’s Boris Godounov is as though there had never been a Mozart or a Wagner. It has something of that amorphous quality which seems to be a part of Russian life, but, on the other hand, it has immense vitality. How refreshing to see a crowd of peasants look like peasants, and to hear them sing their own peasant songs; and what stability they give to the whole work! Boris Godounov gravitates, as it were, around these folk-songs, which give to it a certain reality and truthfulness.

V

These various works have long since been accepted by the musical world as the great masterpieces in operatic form. Many of them are practically out of the present repertoire of our opera houses. Were we to assert ourselves —were the general public given an opportunity to choose between good and bad — we should hear them often. And who shall say what results might not come from a small and properly managed opera house, with performances of fine works at reasonable prices?

Opera is controlled by a few rich men who think it a part of the life of a great city that there should be an opera house with a fine orchestra, fine scenery, and the greatest singers obtainable. It does not exist for the good of the whole city, but rather for those of plethoric purses. It does not make any attempt to become a sociological force; it does not even dimly see what possibilities it possesses in that direction. Opera houses and opera companies are sedulously protected against any sociological scrutiny. They are persistently reported to be hot-beds of intrigue; they trade on society and on the love of highly paid singing; they surround themselves with an exotic atmosphere in which the normal person finds difficulty in breathing, and which often turns the opera singer into a strange specimen of the genus man or woman; they go to ruin about once in so often, and are extricated by the unnecessarily rich; they are too little related to the community that supports them save in the mediums of money and social convention.

These artificial and false conditions are bound to bring evils in their train, but these conditions and these evils are chiefly the result of our own complacency. Were opera in any sense domestic; were opera singers to some extent, at least, human beings like ourselves, moving in a reasonable world; did we go to hear opera as we go to a symphony concert, or to an art museum, — to satisfy our love of beauty, and quicken our imagination by contact with beautiful objects; were the conditions of performance such as to enable us to hear the words, then would opera become a fine human institution, then would it take its place among the noble dreams of humanity.

In my endeavor to make some distinctions between good and bad opera I have drawn a somewhat arbitrary line. I do not wish to give the impression that I think all opera on one side of the line is bad and on the other good. I have tried to strike a just balance by applying certain admitted principles of artistic contruction and expression. From these principles, which are the basis of life and, therefore, of art, opera has unjustly claimed immunity.

And finally we come to that point in our argument where reasoning must stop altogether. For opera is to many people a sort of fascination entirely outside reason. They refuse to admit it as a subject of discussion; they enjoy the spectacle on the stage and the spectacle of which they are a part; the sight of three thousand people well dressed like themselves comforts them; the fine singing, costumes, and stage-setting, the gorgeous orchestra throbbing with passion entirely unbridled — all these they enjoy in that mental lassitude which is dear to them. They are, perhaps, slightly uncomfortable at a symphony concert; here there are no obligations. Opera is, in short, to such people a slightly illicit æsthetic adventure.