It is far more musical, if less vivacious, than Rossini’s Barbiere;
and the decline of Italian opera is more significantly foreshadowed
in Cimarosa’s other chef-d’œuvre, the remarkable opera seria,
Gli Orazzi ed i Curiazzi. Here the arias and ensembles are serious
art, showing a pale reflection of Mozart, and not wholly without
Mozart’s spirit, the choruses, notably the first of all, have fine
moments; and the treatment of conflicting emotions at one
crisis, where military music is heard behind the scenes, is masterly.
Lastly, the abrupt conclusion at the moment of the catastrophe
is good and was novel at the time, though it foreshadows that
sacrifice of true dramatic and musical breadth to the desire for an
“effective curtain,” and that mortal fear of anti-climax which in
classical French opera rendered a great musical finale almost
impossible. But the interesting and dramatic features in Gli
Orazzi are unfortunately less significant historically than the
vulgarity of its overture, and the impossibility, after the beautiful
opening chorus, of tracing any unmistakably tragic style in the
whole work except by the negative sign of dullness.
Before Cimarosa’s overwhelming successor Rossini had retired from his indolent career, these tendencies had already reduced both composers and spectators to a supreme indifference to the mood of the libretto, an indifference far more fatal than mere inattention to the plot. Nobody cares to follow the plot of Mozart’s Figaro; but then no spectator of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro is prevented by the intricacy of its plot from enjoying it as a play. In both cases we are interested in the character-drawing and in each situation as it arises; and we do no justice to Mozart’s music when we forget this interest, even in cases where the libretto has none of the literary merit that survives in the transformation of Beaumarchais’s comedy into an Italian libretto. But with the Rossinian decline all charitable scruples of criticism are misplaced, for Italian opera once more became as purely a pantomimic concert as in the Handelian period; and we must not ignore the difference that it was now a concert of very vulgar music, the vileness of which was only aggravated by the growing range and interest of dramatic subjects. The best that can be said in defence of it was that the vulgarity was not pretentious and unhealthy, like Meyerbeer’s; indeed, if the famous “Mad Scene” in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor had only been meant to be funny it would not have been vulgar at all. Occasionally the drama pierced through the empty breeziness of the music; and so the spirit of Shakespeare, even when smothered in an Italian libretto unsuccessfully set to music by Rossini, proved so powerful that one spectator of Rossini’s Otello is recorded to have started out of his seat at the catastrophe, exclaiming “Good Heavens! the tenor is murdering the soprano!” And in times of political unrest more than one opera became as dangerous as an over-censored theatre could make it. An historical case in point is brilliantly described in George Meredith’s Vittoria. But what has this to do with the progress of music? The history of Italian opera from after its culmination in Mozart to its subsidence on the big drum amd cymbals of the Rossinians is the history of a protected industry. Verdi’s art, both in its burly youth and in its shrewd old age, is far more the crown of his native genius than of his native traditions; and, though opinions differ as to the spontaneity and depth of the change, the paradox is true that the Wagnerization of Verdi was the musical emancipation of Italy.
After Mozart the next step in the development of true operatic art was neither Italian nor German, but French. The French sense of dramatic fitness had a wonderfully stimulating effect upon every foreign composer who came to France. Rossini himself, in Guillaume Tell, was electrified into a dramatic and orchestral life of an incomparably higher order than the rollicking rattle of serious and comic Italian opera in its decline. He was in the prime of life when he wrote it, but it exhausted him and was practically his last important work, though he lived to a cheerful old age. The defects of its libretto were grave, but he made unprecedented efforts to remedy them, and finally succeeded, at the cost of an entire act. The experience was very significant; for, from the time of Gluck onwards, while it cannot be denied that native and naturalized French operatic art has suffered from many forms of musical and dramatic debasement, we may safely say that no opera has met with success in France that is without theatrical merit. And the French contribution to musical history between Gluck and Rossini is of great nobility. If Cherubini and Méhul had had Gluck’s melodic power, the classics of French opera would have been the greatest achievements in semi-tragic music-drama before Wagner. As it is, their austerity is not that of the highest classics. It is negative, and tends to exclude outward attractiveness rather because it cannot achieve it than because it contains all things in due proportion. Be this as it may, Cherubini had a real influence on Beethoven; not to mention that the libretti of Fidelio and Les Deux journées were originally by the same author, though Fidelio underwent great changes in translation and revision. It is impossible to say what French opera might have done for music through Beethoven if Fidelio had not remained his solitary (because very nearly unsuccessful) operatic monument; but there is no doubt as to its effect on Weber, whose two greatest works, Der Freischütz and Euryanthe, are two giant strides from Cherubini to Wagner. Euryanthe is in respect of Leit-motif (see below) almost more Wagnerian than Lohengrin, Wagner’s fourth published opera. It failed to make an epoch in history because of its dreary libretto, to which, however, the highly dramatic libretto of Lohengrin owes a surprising number of points.
The libretti of classical opera set too low a literary standard to induce critics to give sufficient attention to their aesthetic bearings; and perhaps the great scholar Otto Jahn is the only writer who has applied a first-rate literary analysis to the subject (see his Life of Mozart); a subject which, though of great importance to music, has, like the music itself, been generally thrust into the background by the countless externals that give theatrical works and institutions a national or political importance independent of artistic merit and historical development. Much that finds prominent place in the orthodox history of opera is really outside the scope of musical and dramatic discussion; and it may therefore be safely left to be discovered under non-musical headings elsewhere in this Encyclopaedia. Even when what passes for operatic history has a more real connexion with the art than the history of locomotion has with physical science, the importance of the connexion is often overrated. For example, much has been said as to the progress in German opera from the choice of remote subjects like Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail to the choice of a subject so thoroughly German as Der Freischütz: but this is only part of the general progress made, chiefly in France, towards the choice of romantic instead of classical subjects. Whatever the intrinsic interest of musical ethnology, and whatever light it may throw upon the reasons why an art will develop and decline sooner in one country than in another, racial character will not suffice to produce an art for which no technique as yet exists. Nor will it suffice in any country to check the development or destroy the value of an art of which the principles were developed elsewhere. No music of Mozart’s time could have handled Weber’s romantic subjects, and all the Teutonism in history could not have prevented Mozart from adopting and developing those Italian methods that gave him scope. Again, in the time of Lully, who was the contemporary of Molière, the French genius of stagecraft was devoted to reducing opera to an effective series of ballets; yet so little did this hamper composers of real dramatic power that Quinault’s libretto to Lully’s very successful Armide served Gluck unaltered for one of his greatest works 90 years later. If Lully owes so little to Cambert as to be rightly entitled the founder of French opera, if Gluck is a greater reformer than his predecessor Rameau, if Cherubini is a more powerful artist than Méhul, and if, lastly, Meyerbeer developed the vices of the French histrionic machinery with a plausibility which has never been surpassed, then we must reconcile our racial theories with the historic process by which the French Grand Opéra, one of the most pronounced national types in all music, was founded by an Italian Jew, reformed by an Austrian,
