CHAPTER III.
ITALIAN OPERA UNTIL THE TIME OF ROSSINI
Tancredi was Rossini's first serious opera, and the first opera by which his name became known throughout Europe. In this work, too, we find indicated, if not fully carried out, all those changes in the composition of the lyric drama which, without absolutely inventing them, he introduced from Germany, and especially from Mozart's operas, into Italy.
It seems strange, what was nevertheless the case, that when Rossini began to write, the mere forms of the lyric drama were, in Italy at least, far from being looked upon as settled. Opera could not at that time boast a history of more than about two centuries, and though it had made great progress during the previous hundred years and was scarcely the same entertainment as that which the most illustrious nobles in Italy had taken under their protection in the early part of the seventeenth century, it was still far from resembling the opera of the present day; so much more developed, so much more elaborated.
No general view of the progress of operatic art in Europe can well be taken; for its advance has been different in each country. But its progress in Italy was sufficiently regular from its birth, or rather its invention, towards the end of the sixteenth century up to the period of Scarlatti; and from Scarlatti in a continuous line to Rossini.
Without going back to the origin of music in general, it may not be inappropriate, in connection with Rossini's innovations, and with a view to these innovations being better understood, to sketch in the briefest manner the history of the musical drama in Italy from its deliberate invention until, after its various developments, it became what Rossini made it between the years 1813, the year in which Tancredi was brought out, and 1823, the date of the production of Semiramide.
The opera, so far as a natural origin can be claimed for it at all, proceeds from the sacred musical plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the modern drama proceeds from the so-called mysteries of the same period. Indeed the earliest musical dramas of modern Italy, from which the opera of the present day is directly descended, were mysteries differing only from the dramatic mysteries in having been written for the singing, not for the speaking voice. The opera, or drama in music, is not, compared with the spoken drama, a very ancient form of art. Persons afflicted with a rage for seeking in the distant past traces and origins of a form of art which was created and forced into existence in comparatively modern times, see the first specimens of opera in the Greek plays; a view which will be worth considering when writers on the subject of Greek music have come to an understanding as to its exact nature. One thing is quite certain, that the Greek plays are remembered solely by what musicians call the "words," whereas, with the exception of Herr Wagner's highly poetical, highly dramatic works, there are no operas written to be performed throughout in music, which, by their words alone, would have the least chance of living. Nor did the musical mysteries or musical plays of the fifteenth century – which were partly declaimed, partly sung, and always by solo voices – bear any great resemblance to the grand operas of the present day with their airs, duets, concerted pieces, and elaborate dramatic finales, supported by an orchestra which is always being varied and reinforced through the addition of new instruments, and in which composers aim constantly at the formation of new instrumental combinations. Of course, too, the sacred musical plays of the fifteenth century differed from our modern operas by their subjects. A primitive sort of opera on the Conversion of St. Paul, which was performed throughout in music at Rome in 1440, is not the sort of work that would be likely to interest our modern audiences, who entertain a marked preference for operas in which a leading part is assigned to the prima donna, and who have no objection to the prima donna's representing a thoroughly mundane character, such as the fascinating Carmen, in the late M. Bizet's opera of that name, or the less fascinating Violetta, in Verdi's Traviata.
The first opera on a profane, or rather on a secular subject – for it is surely a mistake to regard everything not sacred as necessarily profane – was the descent of Orpheus into the infernal regions, drawn thither, as is well known, by his wife, Eurydice. The subject of Orpheus, alike lyrical and dramatic, has been a favourite one with composers for the last four hundred years, from Poliziano, who produced his Orfeo at Rome in 1440, up to Gluck, nearly three centuries later, and from Gluck down to Offenbach, who delights a good many persons in the present day. The Orfeo, which was brought out just four centuries ago, at Rome, bore no more resemblance, in a musical point of view, to a modern opera, than did the sacred musical plays before spoken of; and up to the year 1600 we meet with no musical work which bears more than a fundamental or general sort of resemblance to the modern opera. But almost immediately after the production of the second Eurydice a great reformer appeared. Monteverde, the innovator in question, changed, or at least gave new development to, the harmonic system of his predecessors, assigned far greater importance in his operas to accompaniments, and increased greatly both the number and the variety of the instruments in the orchestra, which, under his arrangement, included every kind of instrument known at the time. Monteverde employed a separate combination of instruments to announce the entry and return of each personage in his operas; a dramatic means made use of long afterwards by Hoffmann – better known by his fantastic tales than by his musical works – in his opera of Undine; and which cannot but suggest a similar device employed with more system and with greater elaboration by Wagner.
Monteverde, like so many of his predecessors and followers, felt attracted by the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and his first work was on the subject of Orfeo, which was produced in 1608 at the Court of Mantua; ordered, it may be, by that gallant but dissolute Duke of Mantua whom Signor Mario used to impersonate so admirably in Rigoletto. Monteverde's Orfeo contained parts for harpsichords, lyres, violas, double basses, a double harp with two rows of strings, two violins, besides guitars, organs, a flute, clarions, and even trombones. It is interesting to know that, apart from the instrumental combinations which announced the entry and return of each character, the bass-violas accompanied Orpheus; the violas, Eurydice; the trombones, Pluto; the organs, Apollo; while Charon – a most unsentimental personage, one would think – sang to the accompaniment of that sentimental instrument, the guitar.
I have, of course, no intention of following out the history of opera from Monteverde to Verdi. It will be sufficient to remark that Monteverde, the real founder of opera in something like its present form, produced a number of works at Venice, until at last the fame of the Venetian operas spread throughout Italy, so that by the middle of the seventeenth century the new entertainment was established at Verona, Bologna, Rome, Turin, Naples, and Messina. Opera, whatever its merits and defects, is essentially a royal and aristocratic entertainment. The drama was started by Thespis in a cart. The opera, on the other hand, was founded by popes, cardinals, and kings. The first operatic libretto, that of Poliziano's Orfeo, was the work of Cardinal Riario, nephew of Sixtus IV. Pope Clement IX. was the author of no less than seven libretti. The popes, indeed, used, in former days, to keep up an excellent theatre; and even in these degenerate times the taste for music has not, or had not until lately, died out at the Vatican.
It has been said that the history of opera, though Italy cannot claim to have been the one scene of its development, can be more conveniently because more continuously traced in Italy than in the various European countries where it has been cultivated, and where, in the case of three of these countries – Italy, Germany, and France, – it has made distinct advances. Nor, in considering the history of opera in Italy, is it necessary to observe its progress in Italy generally. It is sufficient to note the changes through which it passed at Naples alone. From Scarlatti (end of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century) to the immediate predecessors of Rossini, the history of the development of the opera in Italy is indeed the history of its development at Naples; and though, unlike previous celebrated composers, Rossini did not pursue his studies at Naples, he soon made Naples his head-quarters, and produced at the San Carlo theatre between the years 1815 and 1823 all his best Italian operas in the serious style: Otello, for instance, La Donna del Lago and Semiramide.
Scarlatti, the founder of the great Neapolitan school, studied at Rome under Carrissimi; and he is memorable in musical history as having given new development to the operatic air, while he introduced for the first time measured recitative. Of Scarlatti's immediate followers, Logroscino and Durante, the former introduced concerted pieces and the dramatic finale which afterwards received new development at the hands of Piccinni. This important feature to which modern opera owes so much of its importance and so much of its effect, was introduced into serious opera by Paisiello. Paisiello, like Scarlatti, Logroscino and Durante, was professor at the Conservatorio of Naples; and under his guidance were formed Jomelli, Piccinni, Sacchini, Guglielmi, and Cimarosa. The particular innovations due to Piccinni and Paisiello have already been mentioned. Cimarosa composed the best overtures which, up to his time, the Italian school could boast of, and he was the first to introduce quartets and other concerted pieces in the midst of dramatic action; not, that is to say, as ornaments at the end of an act, which hitherto had been the place conventionally assigned to them, but as integral parts of the musical drama. This innovation occurs for the first time in Il Fanatico per gli antichi Romani, which Cimarosa composed in 1773. It was not until nineteen years afterwards that this master produced his Matrimonio Segreto. But meanwhile Cimarosa had been completely distanced by Mozart, who, himself a great inventor, and, so to say, anticipator, adopted moreover everything that was worth adopting in the methods of all his contemporaries and predecessors.
To resume, in as few words as possible, the history of opera in Italy up to the time of Rossini, this form of art was at first nothing but recitative, or recitative with a chorus at the end of each act. Then occasional airs were introduced, then duets; and it is not until the middle of the eighteenth century that we find an example of an operatic trio. Quartets and dramatic finales followed in due course; and while the Italians had been developing new methods of employing the solo voices, Gluck had given prominence to the chorus as a dramatic factor, and had cultivated choral writing with the happiest effect. Other Germans, with Haydn foremost among them, had produced new orchestral combinations, until at last Mozart joined to the vocal forms of the Italians the instrumental forms of the Germans, while developing and perfecting both. Rossini introduced quite gradually into Italian opera those reforms which are particularly associated with his name; and perhaps in no other way could he have got them accepted. But he might, had he felt so disposed, have borrowed them one and all in a piece from the works of Mozart.
Let it be remembered, however, as a matter of fact, that when in 1813 Rossini produced Tancredi, which marks the commencement of the reforms introduced by him into serious opera, he had enjoyed no opportunity of seeing any of Mozart's works on the stage. Probably he had studied the music of Mozart, as we know him to have studied that of Haydn, in score; but it was not until 1814 that Don Giovanni, nor until 1815 that the Marriage of Figaro, was performed for the first time in Italy at the Scala theatre.
Rossini's success, due above all to the fascinating character of his easily appreciable melodies, was instantaneous; and it spread like wild-fire from Italy all over Europe. More than a quarter of a century, however, passed before Mozart's great works made their way from Vienna to the chief cities of Italy, and to the capitals of France and England. This tardy recognition of Mozart's dramatic genius may be explained in part by the outbreak of the French revolution soon after their production, and by the wars which distracted Europe from the time of the French revolution until the pacification of 1815.
CHAPTER IV.
TANCREDI
Tancredi, composed a year after La Pietra del Paragone, was Rossini's first serious opera. It was also the first opera by which he became known throughout Europe.
To amateurs of the present day its melodies appear of old-fashioned, or at least of antique cast. The recitatives seem long, and they are interminable compared with those by which Verdi connects his musical pieces. But when Tancredi was first brought out opera seria consisted almost entirely of recitative, relieved here and there and only at long intervals by solo airs. For much of this declamation Rossini substituted singing; for endless monologues and dialogues supported by a few chords, concerted pieces connected and supported by a brilliant orchestral accompaniment.
Rossini, in fact, introduced into serious opera the forms which comic opera already possessed. The parts were at that time differently distributed in opera seria and opera buffa; and in the latter less restricted style the bass singer was not as a matter of course kept in the background. Tancredi was the first serious opera in which a certain prominence was given to the bass, though it was not until some years later – in Otello, 1816, in La Gazza Ladra, 1817, and in Mosè, 1818 – that Rossini ventured to entrust bass singers with leading parts. Opera seria, when Rossini was beginning his career, was governed by rules as strict, as formal, and as thoroughly conventional as those which gave so much artificiality and so much dulness to the classical drama of France. The company for comic opera consisted of the primo buffo (tenor), prima buffa, buffo caricato (bass), seconda buffa, and ultima parte (bass). The company for serious opera was made up of the primo uomo (soprano), prima donna, and tenor, the secondo uomo (soprano), seconda donna, and ultima parte (bass); and in serious opera the ultima parte was not only kept in the background, but, except in concerted pieces, was scarcely ever heard.
As a solo singer, the bass in serious opera had no existence. Gradually Rossini brought him forward, until he became at last as prominent as the tenor, or even more so. In Semiramide, for instance, the principal male character is Assur. In Tancredi, from which Semiramide is separated by an interval of ten years, the bass has little to do. He already, however, possesses an importance which was denied to him in the serious operas of Rossini's predecessors.
In Tancredi, again, the composer introduces concerted pieces in situations where, had the ancient method been followed, there would have been only monologues. In these concerted pieces, moreover, the dramatic action is kept up, whereas the endless monologues and long sequences of airs which gave such character as they possessed to the operas of Rossini's immediate predecessors had the effect of delaying it. To musical reformers of a later period Rossini himself seemed to insert songs in his operas merely for the sake of singing, and greatly to the injury of the drama. But he diminished considerably the number of formal airs which, until he began to write, were included as a matter of course in every opera. He increased the number of characters, and made, for the first time in Italian opera, a free use of the chorus, which in the works of the old school plays quite a subordinate part and has no dramatic functions assigned to it at all.
Rossini's innovations are well described by Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, who has no praise, however, to bestow upon them, but on the contrary, condemns them without measure. Indeed, the more he blames Rossini, the more he calls attention to what are now recognised as his chief merits. When Lord Mount-Edgcumbe undertakes to show how Rossini was ruining the musical drama, he in fact points out how he was reforming it. "So great a change," he writes, "has taken place in the character of the (operatic) dramas, in the style of the music and its performance, that I cannot help enlarging upon that subject before we proceed further. One of the most material alterations is that the grand distinction between serious and comic operas is nearly at an end, the separation of the singers for their performances entirely so. Not only do the same sing in both, but a new species of drama has arisen, a kind of mongrel between them, called semi-seria, which bears the same analogy to the other two that the nondescript melodrama does to the legitimate tragedy and comedy of the English stage. The construction of these newly invented pieces," continues Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, "is essentially different from the old. The dialogue, which used to be carried on in recitative, and which in Metastasio's operas is often so beautiful and interesting, is now cut up (and rendered unintelligible if it were worth listening to) into pezzi concertati, or long singing conversations, which present a tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing motivos, having nothing to do with each other; and if a satisfactory air is for a moment introduced, which the ear would like to dwell upon, to hear modulated, varied, and again returned to, it is broken off, before it is well understood, by a sudden transition into a totally different melody, time, and key, and recurs no more, so that no impression can be made or recollection of it preserved. Single songs are almost exploded … even the prima donna, who would formerly have complained at having less than three or four airs allotted to her, is now satisfied with one trifling cavatina for a whole opera."
In his valuable attack upon Rossini, Lord Mount-Edgcumbe is admirably sincere. After condemning Rossini for his new distribution of characters, and for his employment of bass voices in leading parts, "to the manifest injury of melody and total subversion of harmony, in which the lowest part is their peculiar province," he calls attention to the fact that Mozart has previously sinned in like manner; and he cannot help expressing some astonishment when he reflects "that the principal characters in two of Mozart's operas have been written for basses." It might have occurred to him, moreover, that Mozart, both in Don Giovanni and in the Magic Flute, united the serious with the comic, and, indeed, that there was not one of the so-called innovations charged against Rossini, which were not in reality due to Mozart. In Italy, where Mozart's works were at the time unknown, Rossini may well have appeared a perfectly original genius, not only by his richness of melodic invention, but also by the novelty of his forms. But it is strange that an amateur, acquainted, as Lord Mount-Edgcumbe was, with the works of Mozart, should not at once have perceived that Rossini, in introducing so much which was new only to the Italians, was making no bold experiment, but was merely following in the wake of a greater inventor than himself.
The success, however, of Rossini's first serious opera was due less to new methods of distributing parts and of constructing pieces than to the beauty of the melodies. Stendhal, in his always ingenious but seldom quite veracious Vie de Rossini, dwells on the sort of fever with which its tuneful themes inspired the whole Venetian population, so that even in the law-courts the judges, he relates, were obliged to direct the ushers to stop the singing of "Di tanti palpiti" and "Mi rivedrai ti rivedrò." "I thought that after hearing my opera," wrote Rossini himself, "the Venetians would think me mad. Not at all: I found they were much madder than I was."
"It is said at Venice," writes Stendhal, "that the first idea of this delicious cantilena, which expresses so well the joy of meeting after a long absence, is taken from a Greek litany; Rossini had heard it a few days before at vespers in the church of one of the little islands of the lagoons of Venice."
"Since its production," says M. Azevedo, "on the stage and in the universe, it has been made the subject of a canticle for the Catholic Church, like all other successful airs. But a litany before the air, and a canticle after the air, are not the same thing."
In connection with Tancredi, mention has been made of Rossini's reforms in serious opera, which he found too serious. Comic opera, on the other hand, as it existed up to his time, seemed to him too comic or rather, too extravagant. We have seen that the old opera buffa had its separate set of characters and singers, and its own separate style, musical as well as dramatic. Rossini raised the level of the style, and for farce substituted comedy. In the midst, too, of comedy airs, he introduced, from time to time, a sentimental one such as "Ecco ridente" in Il Barbiere, and "Languir per una bella," in L'Italiana in Algeri– which Rossini brought out at Milan (1813) soon after the production of Tancredi at Venice, and which holds among his comic operas the same position that belongs to Tancredi among his serious ones.
Italian audiences had been trained to disapprove of the same singer appearing one night in a comic and the next in a tragic part; and critical hearers are said to have been shocked at seeing the same artist appear successively as Figaro and as Assur, as Dr. Bartolo and as Mosè. Apart from the substitution of the comic for the farcical in the general treatment, L'Italiana in Algeri is remarkable as the first comic opera in which Rossini introduced that crescendo, which was soon recognised as a characteristic feature in all his works. He had already tested its effect in the overture to Tancredi– the first Italian overture which became popular apart from the work to which it belonged – and in the concerted finale of the same opera. Rossini is said to have borrowed this effect from Paisiello's Re Teodoro. But the invention of the crescendo was energetically claimed by Mosca, who had certainly employed it before Rossini, and who regarded it as his own private property; circulating, in order to establish his prior right, copies of a piece composed long before Tancredi was brought out, in which fully developed crescendi occurred. This did not prevent Rossini from continuing to write crescendi, nor from being satirised and caricatured as "Signor Crescendo," when, some ten years afterwards, he went to Paris.