Italian opera at the advent of Rossini—Rossini and the Italian operatic renaissance; Guillaume Tell—Donizetti and Bellini—Spontini and the historical opera—Meyerbeer’s life and works—His influence and followers—Development of opéra comique; Auber, Hérold, Adam.
Operatic development in Italy and France during the first half of the nineteenth century represents, broadly speaking, the development of the romantic ideal by Rossini and Meyerbeer; a breaking away from classic and traditional forms; and the growth of individual freedom in musical expression. Rossini, as shown by subsequent detailed consideration of his works and the reforms they introduced, overthrows the time-honored operatic conventions of his day and breathes new life into Italian dramatic art. Spontini, ‘the last great classicist of the lyric stage,’ nevertheless forecasts French grand opera in his extensive historical scores. And French grand opera (as will be shown) is established as a definite type, and given shape and coherence by Rossini in Tell, by Meyerbeer in Robert, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, and l’Africaine.
In this period the classical movement, interpreting in a manner the general trend of musical feeling in the eighteenth century, merges into the romantic movement, expressing that of the nineteenth. A widespread, independent rather than interdependent, musical activity in many directions at one and the same time explains such apparent contradictions as Beethoven and Rossini, Schubert, Cherubini, Spontini, Weber and Meyerbeer, all creating simultaneously. To understand the operatic reforms of Rossini and their later development a résumé of the leading characteristics of the Italian opera of his day is necessary.
As is usually the case when an art-form has in the course of time crystallized into conventional formulas, a revolution of some sort was imminent in Italian opera at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In France Gluck had already banished from his scores the dreary recitativo secco, and extended the use of the chorus. The opéra comique had come to stay, finding its most notable exponents in Grétry, Méhul, and Boieldieu. Cherubini’s nobly classic but cold and formal scores gave enjoyment to a capital which has at nearly all times been independent and self-sufficient. Mozart, in Zauberflöte, had already unlocked for Germany the sacred treasures of national art, and Weber,[66] following the general trend of German poetry and fiction, had inaugurated the romantic opera, a musical complement of the romantic literary movement, to which he gave its finest and fullest expression. Utilizing fairy tale and legend, he had secured for opera ‘a wider stage and an ampler air,’ and no longer relegating the beauties of Nature to the background, but treating them as an integral part of his artistic scheme, he laid the foundation upon which was eventually to rise the modern lyric drama.
But in Italy, beyond innate refinement of thought and grace of style, the composers whose names are identified with what was best in opera during the closing years of the eighteenth century had nothing to say. Cimarosa, Paesiello, Piccini (the one-time rival of Gluck) were prolific writers of the sort of melodious opera which had once delighted all Europe and still enchanted the opera-mad populace of Naples, Florence, Rome, and Venice. They had need to be prolific at a time when, as Burney says, an opera already heard was ‘like a last year’s almanac,’ and when Venice alone could boast thirteen opera houses, public and private. Each had to compose unremittingly, sometimes three or even four operas a year, and it is hardly surprising that their works, for all their charm, were thin and conventional in orchestration, and had but scant variety of melodic line. The development of the symphonic forms of aria and ensemble by Mozart, the enlargement of the orchestra, and the exaggerated fondness for virtuoso singing encouraged these defects, and gave these Italian composers ‘prosaically golden opportunities of lifting spectators and singers to the seventh heaven of flattered vanity.’ There was little or no connection between the music and its drama. Speaking generally, the operatic ideals of Italy were those of old Galuppi, who, when asked to define good music, replied: ‘Vaghezza, chiarezza e buona modulazione’ (vagueness, tenderness, and good modulation).
With all its faults the music of these eighteenth century masters excelled in a certain gracious suavity. Cimarosa, Paesiello and their contemporaries represent the perfection of the older Italian opera buffa, the classical Italian comic opera with secco-recitative, developed by Logroscino, Pergolesi, and Jommelli, a form which then reigned triumphant in all the large capitals of Europe. In the more artificial opera seria as well Cimarosa and Paesiello in particular achieved notable successes, and their works are the link which connects Italian opera with the most glorious period the lyric drama has known since the elevation of both Italian and German schools. But the criticism of the Abbé Arnaud, who said, ‘These operas, for which their drama is only a pretext, are nothing but concerts,’ is altogether just.
The reforms of Gluck and the romantic movement in Germany in no wise disturbed the trend of Italian operatic composition. Weber’s influence was negligible, for Italian operatic composers were, as a rule, indifferent to what was going on, musically, outside their own land. Those who, like Francesco Morlacchi (1784-1841) or the Bavarian Simon Mayr (1763-1845), were brought into contact with Weber or his works, showed their indebtedness to him rather in their endeavors to secure broader and more interesting harmonic development of their melodies and greater orchestral color than in any direct working out of his ideals. But one native Italian was destined to exert an influence, the constructive power of which, within the confines of his own land, equalled that exerted by Weber in Germany. The time was at hand when in Italy, the citadel of operatic conventionality and formalism, a reaction against vapidity of idea, affectation, and worn-out sentimentality was to find its leaders in Rossini, the ‘Swan of Pesaro,’ and his followers and disciples, Bellini and Donizetti.
Gioacchino Antonio Rossini, his father a trumpeter, his mother a baker’s daughter, was born in Pesaro, February 29, 1792, and had his first musical instruction, on the harpsichord, from Prinetti, a musician of Novara, who played the scale with two fingers only and fell asleep while giving lessons. He soon left his first teacher, but when, at the age of fifteen, he was admitted to the counterpoint class of Padre P. S. Mattei, he read well at sight, and could play both the pianoforte and the horn. At the Conservatory of Bologna, under Cavedagni, he also learned to play the 'cello with ease.
His insight into orchestral writing, however, came rather from the knowledge he gained by scoring Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets and symphonies than from Mattei’s instruction. For counterpoint he never had much sympathy; but, though the stricter forms of composition did not appeal to him, he was well enough grounded in the grammar of his art to enable him at all times to give the most effective expression to the delicious conceptions which continually presented themselves to his mind.
In 1808 the Conservatory of Bologna awarded him a prize for his cantata Il pianto d’armonia per la morte d’Orfeo, and two years later the favor of the Marquis Cavalli secured the performance of his first opera, Il cambiale di matrimonio, at Venice. Rossini now produced opera after opera with varying fortune in Bologna, Rome, Venice, and Milan. The success of La pietra del paragone (Milan, 1812), in which he introduced his celebrated crescendo,[67] was eclipsed by that of Tancredi (Venice, 1813), the only one among these early works of which the memory has survived. In it the plagiarism to which Rossini was prone is strongly evident; it contains fragments of both Paer and Paesiello. But the public was carried away with the verve and ingenuity of the opera, and the charm of melodies like Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò, which, we are told, so caught the public fancy that judges in the courts of law were obliged to call those present to order for singing it. Even the arrival of the Emperor Napoleon in Venice, which took place at the time, could not compete in popular interest with the performances of Tancredi. In 1814 Rossini’s Il turco in Italia was heard in Milan, and in the next year he agreed to take the musical direction of the Teatro del Fondo at Naples, with the understanding that he was to compose two operas every year, and in return to receive a stipend of 200 ducats (approximately one hundred and seventy-five dollars) a month, and an annual share of the gaming tables amounting to one thousand ducats (eight hundred and seventy-five dollars)!
In Naples the presence of Zingarelli and Paesiello gave rise to intrigue against the young composer, but all opposition was overcome by the enthusiastic manner in which the court received Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, set to a libretto by Schmidt, which anticipated by a few years the incidents of Scott’s ‘Kenilworth.’ As in La pietra del paragone, Rossini had first made effective use of the crescendo, so in Elisabetta he introduced other innovations. The classic recitative secco was replaced by a recitative accompanied by a quartet of strings.[68] And for the first time Rossini wrote out the ‘ornaments’ of the arias, instead of leaving them to the fancy of the singers, on whose good taste and sense of fitness he had found he could not depend.
A version by Sterbini of Beaumarchais’ comedy, Le Barbier de Seville, furnished the libretto for his next opera. Given the same year at Rome, at first under the title of Almaviva, it encountered unusual odds. Rome was a stronghold of the existing conventional type of Italian opera which Rossini and his followers in a measure superseded. There, as elsewhere, Paesiello’s Barbiere had been a favorite of twenty-five years’ standing. Hence Rossini’s audacity to use the same libretto was so strongly resented that his opera was promptly and vehemently hissed from the stage. But had not Paesiello himself, many years before, tried to dim the glory of Pergolesi by resetting the libretto of La serva padrona? Perhaps Italy considered it a matter of poetic justice, for the success of Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia, brightest and wittiest of comic operas, was deferred no longer than the second performance, and it soon cast Paesiello’s feebler score into utter oblivion.
Of the twelve operas which followed from Rossini’s pen between 1815 and 1823, Otello (Rome, 1816) and Semiramide (Venice, 1823) may be considered the finest. In them the composer’s reform of the opera seria culminated. ‘William Tell’ belongs to another period and presents a wholly different phase of his creative activity. In the field of opera buffa, La Cenerentola (Cinderella), given in Rome in 1817, is ranked after Il barbiere. It offers an interesting comparison with Nicolo Isouard’s[69] Cendrillon. In the French composer’s score all is fragrant with the atmosphere of fairyland and rich in psychic moods; in Rossini’s treatment of the same subject all is realistic humor and dazzling vocal effect. He accepted the libretto of Cenerentola only on condition that the supernatural element should be omitted! It is the last of his operas which he brought to a brilliant close for the sake of an individual prima donna.
La gazza ladra, produced in Milan the same year, was long considered Rossini’s best work. It is characteristic of all that is best in his Italian period. The tuneful overture with its crescendo—with the exception of the Tell overture the best of all he has written—arias, duets, ensembles, and finales are admirable. The part-writing in the chorus numbers is inferior to that of none of his other works. Two romantic operas, Armida (1817)—the only one of Rossini’s Italian operas provided with a ballet—and Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818), both given in Naples, are rich in imagination and contain fine choral numbers.
In 1820 the Carbonarist revolution, which drove out
King Ferdinand IV, ruined Rossini’s friend Barbaja and induced Rossini to visit Vienna. On his way, in 1821, he married Isabella Colbran, a handsome and wealthy Spanish prima donna, seven years older than himself, who had taken a leading part in the first performance of his Elisabetta six years before. Upon his return to Bologna a flattering invitation from Prince Metternich to ‘assist in the general reëstablishment of harmony,’ took him to Verona for the opening of the Congress, October 20, 1822. Here he conducted a number of his operas, and wrote a pastoral cantata, Il vero omaggio, and some marches for the amusement of the royalties and statesmen there assembled, and made the acquaintance of Chateaubriand and Madame de Lieven. The cool reception accorded his Semiramide in Venice probably had something to do with his accepting the suggestion of Benelli, the manager of the King’s Theatre in London, to pay that capital a visit. He went to England late in the year and remained there for five months, receiving many flattering attentions at court and being presented to King George IV, with whom he breakfasted tête-à-tête. His connection with the London opera during his stay netted him over seven thousand pounds.
Between the years 1815 and 1823—a comparatively short space of time—Rossini had completely overthrown the operatic ideals of Cimarosa and Paesiello, and by sheer intelligence, trenchant vigor, marvellous keenness in measuring the popular appetite and ability to gratify it with novel sensations he entirely remodelled both the opera seria and the opera buffa.
Rossini created without effort, for nature had granted him, as she has granted most Italian composers, the power of giving a nameless grace to all he wrote. Yet he was more than versatile, more than merely facile. In spite of his weakness for popular success and the homage of the multitude, he was no musical charlatan. Even his weakest productions were stronger than those of the best of his Italian contemporaries. His early study of Mozart had drawn his attention to the need of improvement in Italian methods, and, as a result, his instrumentation was richer, and—thanks to his own natural instinct for orchestral color—more glowing and varied than any previously produced in Italy. In his cantabile melodies he often attained telling emotional expression, he enriched the existing order with a wider range of novel forms and ornamentations, and he abandoned the lifeless recitative in favor of a more dramatic style of accompanied recitation.
In the Italy of Rossini the prima donna was the supreme arbiter of the lyric stage, and individual singers became the idols of kings and peoples. Such singers as Pasta, whose voice ranged from a to high d; the contraltos Isabella Colbran (Rossini’s first wife) and Malibran, who, despite the occasional ‘dead’ tones in her middle register, never failed of an ovation when she sang in Rome, Naples, Bologna, or Milan; Teresa Belloc, the dramatic mezzo-soprano, who was a favorite interpreter of Rossinian rôles; Fanny Persiani, so celebrated as a coloratura soprano that she was called la piccola Pasta; Henriette Sontag, most wonderful of Rosines; and Catalani, mistress of bravura; the tenors Rubini, Manuel Garcia, Nourrit; the basses Luigi Lablache, Levasseur, and Tamburini, these were the sovereigns of the days of Rossini and Meyerbeer. But their reign was not as absolute as Farinelli’s and Senesino’s in an earlier day. The new ideas which claimed that the singer existed for the sake of the opera, and not the opera for that of the singer, inevitably, though slowly, reacted in the direction of proportion and fitness.
Rossini was the first to insist on writing out the coloratura cadenzas and fioriture passages, which the great singers still demanded, instead of leaving them to the discretion, or indiscretion, of the artists. It had been the custom to allow each soprano twenty measures at the end of her solo, during which she improvised at will. As a matter of fact, the cadenzas Rossini wrote for his prime donne were quite as florid as any they might have devised, but they were at least consistent; and his determined stand in the matter sounded the death-knell of the old tradition that the opera was primarily a vehicle for the display of individual vocal virtuosity. He was also the first of the Italians to assign the leading parts to contraltos and basses; to make each dramatic scene one continuous musical movement; and to amplify and develop the concerted finale. These widespread reforms culminate, for opera buffa, in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and for opera seria in Semiramide and Otello.
Il Barbiere, with its witty and amusing plot and its entertaining and brilliant music, is one of the few operas by Rossini performed at the present time. It gives genuine expression in music to Beaumarchais’ comedy—a comedy of gallantry, not of love—and the music is developed out of the action of the story. So perfect is the unity of the work in this respect that its coloratura arias, such as the celebrated one of Rosine’s, do not even appear as a concession made to virtuoso technique. One admirer speaks of the score, in language perhaps a trifle exaggerated, as ‘a glittering, multicolored bird of paradise, who had dipped his glowing plumage in the rose of the dawn and the laughing, glorious sunshine,’ and says that ‘each note is like a dewdrop quivering on a rose-leaf.’ Stendhal says: ‘Rossini has had the happy thought, whether by chance or deliberate intention, of being primarily himself in the “Barber of Seville.” In seeking an intimate acquaintance with Rossini’s style we should look for it in this score.’
In Otello, which offers a suggestive contrast with the treatment of the same subject by Verdi at a similar point of his artistic development, the transition from recitativo secco to pure recitative, begun in Elisabetta, was carried to completion. Shakespeare’s tragedy was, in a measure, ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday,’ the Roman public of Rossini’s day insisting on happy endings, which therefore had to be invented. And it is claimed that there are still places in Italy in which the Shakespearian end of the story can never be performed without interruption from the audience, who warn Desdemona of Otello’s deadly approach. Otello is essentially a melodrama. In his music Rossini has portrayed a drama of action rather than a tragedy. There is no inner psychological development, but an easily grasped tale of passion of much scenic effect, though in some of the dramatic scenes the passionate accent is smothered beneath roulades. But if the musical Othello himself is unconvincing from the tragic point of view, in Desdemona Rossini has portrayed in music a character of real tragic beauty and elevation. Two great artists, Pasta and Malibran, have immortalized the rôle—‘Pasta, imposing and severe as grief itself,’ and Malibran, more restless and impetuous, ‘rushing up trembling, bathed in her tears and tresses.’ Semiramide composed in forty days to a libretto by Rossi,[70] gains a special interest because of its strong leaven of Mozart. In Rossini’s own day and long afterward it was considered his best opera seria, always excepting Tell. The judgment of our own day largely agrees in looking upon it as an almost perfect example of the rococo style in music.
Rossini’s removal to Paris in 1824, when he became musical director of the Théâtre des Italiens, marks the beginning of another stage of his development, one that produced but a single opera, Guillaume Tell, but that one a masterpiece.
Owing to Rossini’s activity in his new position, which he held for only eighteen months, the technical standard of performance was decidedly raised. Among the works he produced were Il viaggio a Reims (1825), heard again three years later in a revised and augmented version as Le Comte Ory, and Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato, the first work of that composer to be heard in Paris. In 1826 Charles X appointed him ‘first composer to the king’ and ‘inspector-general of singing in France,’ two sinecures the combined salaries of which amounted to twenty thousand francs. Rossini, who had a keen sense of humor, is said to have been in the habit of stopping in the street, when some pavement singer raised his voice, or the sound of song floated down from some open window, and whispering to his friends to be silent ‘because the inspector of singing was busy gathering material for his next official report.’
The leisure thus afforded him gave him an opportunity to revise and improve his older works, and to devote himself to a serious study of Beethoven. Between 1810 and 1828 he had produced forty distinct works; in 1829 he produced the one great score of his second period, which in most respects outweighs all the others. It was to be the first of a series of five operas which the king had commissioned him to write for the Paris opera, but the overthrow of Charles X made the agreement void in regard to the others.
The libretto of Guillaume Tell, which adheres closely to Schiller’s drama, was written by Étienne Jouy and Hippolyte Bis, and further altered according to Rossini’s own suggestions. Though the original drama contains fine situations, the libretto was not an ideal one for musical treatment. Musically it ranks far above any of his previous scores, since into the Italian fabric of his own creation he had woven all that was best in French operatic tradition. The brilliant and often inappropriate fioriture with which many of the works of his first period were overladen gave way to a clear melodic style, befitting the simple nobility of his subject and better qualified than his earlier style to justify the title given him of ‘father of modern operatic melody.’ No longer abstract types nor mere vehicles for vocal display, his singers sang with the dramatic accents of genuine passion. The conventional cavatina was deliberately avoided. The choruses were planned with greater breadth and with an admirable regard for unity. The orchestration developed a wonderful diversity of color, and breathed fresh and genuine life through the entire score. The overture, not a dramatic preface, but a pastoral symphony in abridged form, with the obligatory three movements—allegro, andante, presto; the huntsman’s chorus; the duet between Tell and Arnold; the finale of the first act; the prelude to the second and Matilda’s aria; the grandiose scene on the Rütli, the festival scene and the storm scene are, perhaps, the most noteworthy numbers.
It cost Rossini six months to compose Guillaume Tell, the time in which he might have written six of his earlier Italian operas. The result of earnest study and deep reflection, it shows both French and German influences; something of German depth and sincerity of expression, a good deal of French esprit and dramatic truth, and the usual Italian grace are its composite elements. The ease and fluency of Rossini’s style persist unchanged, while he discards mere mannerisms and rises to heights of genuine dramatic intensity he had not before attained. The new and varied instrumental timbres he employed no doubt had a considerable share in forming modern French composers’ taste for delicate orchestral effects.
Tell marks a transitional stage in the history of opera. It is to be regretted that it does not also mark a transitional stage in the composer’s own creative activity, instead of its climax. There is interesting matter for speculation in what Rossini might have accomplished had he not decided to retire from the operatic field at the age of thirty-seven. After the success of Guillaume Tell he retired for a time to Bologna to continue his work according to the terms of his Paris contract—he had been considering the subject of Faust for an opera—and was filled with ambitious plans for the inauguration of a new epoch in French opera. When, in November, 1830, he returned to Paris his agreement had been repudiated by the government of Louis Philippe, and the interest in dramatic music had waned. In 1832 he wrote six movements of his brilliant Stabat mater (completed in 1839, the year of his father’s death) and in 1836, after the triumph of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, he determined to give over operatic composition altogether. His motive in so doing has always been more or less a mystery. It has been claimed that he was jealous of Meyerbeer’s success, but his personal relations with Meyerbeer were friendly. One of Rossini’s last compositions, in fact, was a pianoforte fantasia on motives of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, the final rehearsal of which he had attended. And after his death there was found among his manuscripts a requiem chant in memory of Meyerbeer, who had died four years before. Another and more probable theory is that the successive mutilation of what he regarded as his greatest work (it was seldom given in its complete form) checked his ardor for operatic composition. Again, as he himself remarked to a friend, ‘A new work if successful could not add to my reputation, while if it failed it might detract from it.’ And, finally, Rossini was by nature pleasure-loving and fond of the good things of life. He had amassed a considerable fortune, and it is quite possible that he felt himself unequal to submitting again to the strain he had undergone in composing Tell. He told Hiller quite frankly that when a man had composed thirty-seven operas he began to feel a little tired, and his determination to write no more allowed him to enjoy the happiness of not outliving his capacity for production, far less his reputation.
His first wife had died in 1845. In the interval between the production of Tell and his second marriage in 1847, with Olympe Pelissier (who sat to Horace Vernet for his picture of ‘Judith and Holofernes’), the reaction of years of ceaseless creative work, domestic troubles, and the annoyance of his law suit against the French government had seriously affected him physically and mentally. His marriage with Mme. Pelissier was a happy one, and he regained his good spirits and health. Leaving Bologna during the year of his second marriage, he remained for a time in Florence, and in 1855 settled in Paris, where his salon became an artistic and musical centre. Here Richard Wagner visited him in 1860, a visit of which he has left an interesting record. The Stabat mater (its first six numbers composed in 1832), completed in 1842, and given with tremendous success at the Italiens; his Soirées musicales (1834), a set of album leaves for one and two voices; his Requiem Mass (Petite messe solennelle), and some instrumental solos comprise the entire output of his last forty years. He died Nov. 13, 1868, at his country house at Passy, rich in honors and dignities, leaving the major portion of a large fortune to his native town of Pesaro, to be used for humanitarian and artistic ends.
It has been said, and with truth, that to a considerable extent the musical drama from Gluck to Richard Wagner is the work of Rossini. He assimilated what was useful of the old style and used it in establishing the character of his reforms. In developing the musical drama Rossini, in spite of the classic origin of his manner, may be considered one of the first representatives of romantic art. And by thus laying a solid foundation for the musical drama Rossini afforded those who came after him an opportunity of giving it atmosphere and, eventually, elevating its style. ‘As a representative figure Rossini has no superior in the history of the musical drama and his name is the name of an art epoch.’
Rossini’s remodelling of Italian opera, representing, as it did, the Italian spirit of his day in highest creative florescence, could not fail to influence his contemporaries. Chief among those who followed in his footsteps were Donizetti and Bellini. Though without the artistic genius of their illustrious countryman, they are identified with him in the movement he inaugurated and assisted him in maintaining Italian opera in its old position against the increasing onslaughts from foreign quarters.
Gaetano Donizetti (1798-1848) was a pupil of Simon Mayr in his native city of Bergamo, and later of Rossini’s master, Mattei, of Bologna. His first dramatic attempt was an opera seria, Enrico conte di Borgogna, given successfully in Venice in 1818. Obtaining his discharge from the army, in which he had enlisted in consequence of a quarrel with his father, he devoted himself entirely to operatic composition, writing in all sixty-five operas—he composed with incredible rapidity and is said to have orchestrated an entire opera in thirty hours—but, succumbing to brain trouble, brought on by the strain of overwork, he died when barely fifty years of age.
He added three unaffectedly tuneful and vivacious operas to the opera buffa repertory: La fille du régiment, L’Elisir d’amore, and Don Pasquale. In these he is undoubtedly at his best, for he discards the affectations he cultivated in his serious work to satisfy the prevailing taste of his day and gives free rein to his imagination and his power of humorous characterization.
La fille du régiment made the rounds of the German and Italian opera houses before the Parisians were willing to reconsider their verdict after its first unsuccessful production at the Opéra Comique in 1840. It presents a tale of love which does not run smooth, but which terminates happily when a high-born mother at length allows her daughter to marry a Napoleonic officer, her inferior in birth. Though the music is slight, it is free from pretense and unaffectedly gay. Like Rossini, Donizetti settled in France after his reputation was established and suited his style to the taste of his adopted country. In a minor degree the differences between Rossini’s Tell and his Semiramide are the same as those between Donizetti’s Fille du régiment and one of his Italian operas. But there parallel ends. The ‘Daughter of the Regiment’ shows, however, that Donizetti’s lighter operas have stood the test of time better than his more serious ones.
L’Elisir d’amore (Milan, 1832) also contains some spontaneous and gracefully fresh and captivating music. The plot is childish, but musically the score ranks with that of Don Pasquale (Paris, 1843), the plot of which turns on a trick played by two young lovers upon the uncle and guardian of one of them. This brilliant trifle made a tremendous success, and in it Donizetti’s gay vivacity reached its climax. It was the last of his notable contributions to the opera buffa of the Rossinian school. Written for the Théâtre des Italiens, and sung for the first time by Grisi, Mario, Tambarini, and Lablache, its success was in striking contrast to the failure of Don Sebastien, a large serious opera produced soon afterward.
The vogue of Donizetti’s serious operas has practically passed away. To modern ears, despite much tender melody and occasional dramatic expressiveness, they sound stilted and lacking in vitality. Lucia di Lammermoor, founded on Scott’s tragic romance ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ (Naples, 1835), immensely popular in the composer’s day, is still given as a ‘prima donna’s opera,’ for the virtuoso display of some favorite artist. The fine sextet enjoys undiminished popularity in its original form as well as in instrumental arrangements, but in general the composer’s subservience to the false standard of public taste detracts from the music. An instance is the ‘mad-scene,’ ridiculous from the dramatic standpoint, with its smooth and polished melody, ending in a virtuoso fioritura cadenza for voice and flute!
The same criticism applies to the tuneful Lucrezia Borgia (Milan, 1833), which, in spite of charming melodies and occasionally effective concerted numbers, is orchestrated in a thin and childish manner. Anna Bolena (Milan, 1830), written for Pasta and Rubini, after the good old Italian fashion of adapting rôles to singers, and Marino Faliero (1835) were both written in rivalry with Bellini, and the failure of the last-named opera was responsible for the supreme effort which produced Lucia. More important is Linda di Chamounix, which aroused such enthusiasm when first performed in Vienna, in 1842, that the emperor conferred the title of court composer on its composer. But La Favorita, with its repulsive plot, which shares with Lucia the honor of being the best of Donizetti’s serious operas, is superior to Linda in the care with which it has been written and in the dramatic power of the ensemble numbers. Spirto gentil, the delightful romance in the last act, is perhaps the best-known aria in the score. In Lucia and La Favorita Donizetti’s melodic inspiration—his sole claim to the favor of posterity—finds its freest and most spontaneous development.
While Donizetti had an occasional sense of dramatic effect, his contemporary, Vincenzo Bellini (1802-1835), the son of an organist of Catania, showed a genius which, if wanting in wit and vivacity, had much melancholy sweetness and a certain elegiac solemnity of expression. He had studied the works of both the German and Italian composers, in particular those of Pergolesi, and, like Donizetti, he fell a victim to the strain of persistent overwork. Among his ten operas—he did not attempt the buffa style—three stand out prominently: La Sonnambula (Milan, 1831), Norma (Milan, 1831), and I Puritani (Paris, 1835).
La Sonnambula, in which the singer Pasta created the title rôle, is an admirable example of Bellini in his most tender and idyllic mood. A graceful melodiousness fills the score and the closing scene attains genuine sincerity and pathos. Norma (Milan, 1831), set to a strong and moving libretto by the poet Felice Romani, is a tragedy of Druidic Britain, and in it the composer may be considered to have reached his highest level. At a time like the present, when the art of singing is not cultivated to the pitch of perfection that was the standard in the composer’s own period, a modern rendering of Norma, for instance, is apt to lose in dramatic intensity, since Bellini and the other followers of Rossini were content to provide a rich, broad flow of cantilena melody, leaving it to the singers to infuse in it dramatic force and meaning—something which Tamburini, Rubini, and other great Italian singers were well able to do.
Norma surpasses I Puritani in the real beauty and force of its libretto, and gains thereby in musical consistency; but the latter opera, which shows French influences to some extent, cannot be excelled as regards the tender pathos and sweet sincerity of its melodies, which, like those in the composer’s other works, depend on bel canto for their effect. Triumphantly successful at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris, 1834, this last of Bellini’s works may well have been that of which Wagner wrote: ‘I shall never forget the impression made upon me by an opera of Bellini at a period when I was completely exhausted with the everlasting abstract complication used in our orchestras, when a simple and noble melody was revealed to me anew.’ In a manner Bellini may be considered a link between the exuberant force and consummate savoir-faire of Rossini’s French period and the more earnest earlier efforts of Verdi.
Though Donizetti and Bellini are the leading figures in the group of composers identified with Rossini’s operatic reforms, a few other names call for mention here: Saverio Mercadante, who composed both opera seria and opera buffa—a gifted but careless writer whose best-known work is the tragic opera Il Giuramento (Milan, 1837); Giovanni Pacini, whose Safo, a direct imitation of Rossini, was most successful; and Niccolò Vaccai, better known for his vocal exercises—still in general use—than for his once popular opera Giuletta e Romeo (Milan, 1825). Meyerbeer’s seven Italian operas, Romilda e Constanza, Semiramide riconosciuta, Eduardo e Christina, Emma di Resburgo, Margherita di Anjou, L’Esule di Granata, and Il Crociato in Egitto, which were due directly to the admiration he had conceived for Rossini in 1815, and of which he afterward repented, also properly belong in this enumeration.
Meanwhile the reform in Italian opera associated with Rossini made itself felt in Germany, where, in opera, the Italian style was still supreme, by way of one of the most remarkable figures in the history of music. Gassaro Spontini (1774-1851), the son of a cobbler of Ancona, had studied composition at the Conservatorio dei Turichi in Naples. By 1799 he had written and produced eight operas. Appointed court composer to King Ferdinand of Naples the same year, he was compelled to leave that city in 1800, in consequence of the discovery of an intrigue he had been carrying on with a princess of the court. Two comic operas, Julie and La petite maison (Paris, 1804), having been hissed, he determined to drop the buffa style completely. The production of Milton (one act) in 1804 was his first gage of adherence to the higher ideals he henceforth made his own.
He was influenced materially by an earnest study of Gluck and Mozart and through his friendship with the dramatic poet Étienne Jouy. La Vestale (1807), his first great success, was the result of three years of effort, and upon its performance at the Académie Impériale, through the influence of the Empress Josephine, a public triumph, it won the prize offered by Napoleon for the best dramatic work. In La Vestale, one of the finest works of its class, Spontini superseded the parlando of Italian opera with accompanied recitative, increased the strength of his orchestra—contemporary criticism accused him of overloading his scores with orchestration—and employed large choruses with telling effect. La Vestale glorified the pseudo-classicism of the French directory; Ferdinando Cortez, which duplicated the success of that opera two years later, represents an attempt on the part of Napoleon to ingratiate himself with the Spanish nation he designed to conquer.
The same year the composer married the daughter of Érard, the celebrated piano-maker, and in 1810 he became director of the Italian Opera. In this capacity he paid tribute to the German influences which had molded his artistic views by giving the first Parisian performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and organizing concerts at which music by Haydn and other German composers was heard. Court composer to Louis XVIII in 1814, he was for five years mainly occupied with the writing of Olympie, set to a clumsy and undramatic libretto, which he himself considered his masterwork, though its production in 1819 was a failure.
Five months after this disappointment, in response to an invitation of Frederick William III of Prussia, he settled in Berlin, becoming director of the Royal Opera, with an excellent salary and plenty of leisure time. In spite of difficulties with the intendant, Count Brühl, he accomplished much. Die Vestalin, Ferdinando Cortez, and Olympie, prepared with inconceivable effort, were produced with great success in 1821. But in the same year Weber’s Freischütz, full of romantic fervor and directly appealing to the heart of the German nation, turned public favor away from Spontini. In Nourmahal (1822), the libretto founded on Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh,’ and Alcidor (1825) Spontini evidently chose subjects of a more fanciful type in order to compete with Weber. His librettos were poor, however, and the purely romantic was unsuited to his mode of thought. In Agnes von Hohenstaufen, planned on a grander scale than any of his previous scores, he reverted again to his former style. It is beyond all doubt Spontini’s greatest work. In grandeur of style and imaginative breadth it excels both La Vestale and Ferdinando Cortez. So thorough-going were Spontini’s revisions that when it was again given in Berlin in 1837 many who had heard it when first performed did not recognize it.
Spontini’s suspicious and despotic nature, which made him almost impossible to get along with, led to his dismissal, though with titles and salary, in 1841. Thereafter he lived much in retirement and died in 1851. His music belonged essentially to the epic period of the first French empire. The wearied nations, after the fall of Napoleon, craved sensuous beauty of sound, lullabies, arias, cavatinas, tenderness, and wit rather than stateliness and grandeur. Thus the political conditions of the time favored Rossini’s success and, in a measure, at Spontini’s expense. Spontini was the direct precursor of Meyerbeer, who was to develop the ‘historical’ opera, to which the former had given distinction, with its large lines and stateliness of detail, its broadly human and heroic appeal, into the more melodramatic and violently contrasted type generally known as French ‘grand’ opera.
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1863), first known as Jacob Meyer Beer, the son of the wealthy Jewish banker Beer, of Berlin, was an ‘infant prodigy,’ for, when but nine years old, he was accounted the best pianist in Berlin. The first teacher to exert a decided influence on him was Abbé Vogler, organist and theoretician, of Darmstadt, to whom he went in 1810, living in his home and, with Carl Maria von Weber, taking daily lessons in counterpoint, fugue, and organ playing. Appointed composer to the court by the grand duke two years later, his first opera, ‘Jephtha’s Vow,’ failed at Darmstadt (1811), and his second, Alimelek, at Vienna in 1814. Though cruelly discouraged, he took Salieri’s advice and, persevering, went to Italy to study vocalization and form a new style.
In Venice Rossini’s influence affected him so powerfully that, giving up all idea of developing a style of his own, he produced the seven Italian operas already mentioned, with brilliant and unlooked-for success, which, however, did not impress his former fellow student, Weber, who deplored them as treasonable to the ideals of German art. Meyerbeer himself, before long, regretted his defection. In fact, the last of the operas of this Italian period, Il Crociato in Egitto (Venice, 1824), is no longer so evidently after the manner of Rossini. It was given all over Italy, in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and even at Rio de Janeiro. Weber considered it a sign that the composer would soon abandon the Italian style and return to a higher ideal. The success of Il Crociato gave Meyerbeer an excellent opportunity of visiting Paris, in consequence of Rossini’s staging it at the Italiens, in 1826, where it achieved a triumph. The grief into which the death of his father and of his two children plunged him interrupted for some time his activity in the operatic field. He returned to Germany and until 1830 wrote nothing for public performance, but composed a number of psalms, motets, cantatas, and songs of an austerely sentimental character, among them his well-known ‘The Monk.’ This was his second, or German, period.
It is probable that in 1830 he planned his first distinctively French opera, Robert le Diable, for which the clever librettist Eugène Scribe wrote the book. The first performance of that work, typically a grand romantic opera, on November 22, 1831, aroused unbounded enthusiasm. Yet certain contemporary critics called it ‘the acme of insane fiction’ and spoke of it as ‘the apotheosis of blasphemy, indecency, and absurdity.’ Schumann and Mendelssohn disapproved of it—the latter accused its music of being ‘cold and heartless’—and Spontini, because of professional jealousy, condemned it. Liszt and Berlioz, on the other hand, were full of admiration. There is no doubt that text and music had united to create a tremendous impression. The libretto, in spite of faults, was theatrically effective; the music was pregnant, melodious, sensuously pleasing and rendered dramatic by reason of shrill contrasting orchestral coloring. So striking was the impression it made at the time—though from our present-day standpoint it is decidedly vieux jeu—that its faults passed almost unobserved.
From the standpoint of the ideal, the work is lacking in many respects. First intended for the opéra comique, its remodelling by Scribe and Meyerbeer himself had built up a kind of romantic and symbolic vision around the original comedy. The Robert (loyal, proud, and loving) and Isabella (tender and kind) of the original were the same, but the characters of Bertram and Alice had been elevated, respectively, to the dignity of angels of evil and of good, struggling to obtain possession of Robert’s soul, thus exalting the entire work. The change had given the score a mixed character, somewhat between drama and comedy, making it a romantic opera in the manner of Euryanthe or Oberon. Still, excess of variety in effects, the occasional lack of melodic distinction, and want of character do not affect its forceful expression and dramatic boldness. The influence of Rossini and of Auber, whose Muette de Portici had been given three years before, of Gluck and Weber was apparent in Robert le Diable, yet as a score it was different and in some respects absolutely novel. If Meyerbeer had less creative spontaneity and freshness than Rossini and less ease than Auber, in breadth of musical education he surpassed them both.
In a measure both Spontini and Rossini may be excused if they thought that Meyerbeer, in developing their art tendencies, transformed and distorted them. Spontini, no doubt, looked on him as a huckster who bartered away the sacred mysteries of creative art for the sake of cheap applause. The straightforward Rossini probably thought him a hypocrite. And therein they both wronged him. An eclectic, ‘an art-lover rather than an artist,’ Meyerbeer revelled in the luxury of using every style and attempting every novelty, in order to prove himself master of whatever he undertook. But he was undeniably honest in all that he did, though he lacked that spontaneity which belongs to the artist alone. And in Les Huguenots, his next work, first performed in 1836, five years after Robert, he composed an opera which in gorgeous color, human interest, consistent dramatic treatment and accentuation of individual types, in force and breadth generally, marked a decided advance on its predecessor.
Les Huguenots was not a historical opera in the sense of Tell. In Tell Rossini showed himself as an Italian and a patriot. The Hapsburgs of his hero’s day were the same who, at the time he wrote, oppressed his countrymen. Gessler stood for the imperial governor of Lombardy, his guards for Austrian soldiers; the liberty-loving Swiss he identified with the Lombards and Venetians whose liberties were attacked. But, though the subject of Meyerbeer’s opera is an episode of the ‘Massacre of St. Bartholomew,’ that episode is merely used as a sinister background, against which his warm and living characters move and tell their story. Les Huguenots may be considered Meyerbeer’s most finished and representative score. Not a single element of color and contrast has escaped him. In only two respects did its interest fall short of that awakened by its predecessor. So successful had the composer been in his treatment of the supernatural in Robert that the omission of that element now was regretted; and, more important, the fifth act proved to be an anti-climax. The opera, when given now, usually ends at the fourth act, when Raoul, leaping from the window to his death, leaves Valentine fainting. In psychological truth Les Huguenots is undoubtedly superior to Robert. There is a double interest: that of knowing how the mutual love of Valentine the Catholic and Raoul the Protestant will turn out; and that of the drama in general, against which and not out of which the fate of the Huguenots is developed.
In the third act especially the opera develops a breadth and eloquence maintained to the end. The varied shadings of this picture of Paris, its ensembles, contrasted yet never confounded, constitute, in Berlioz’s words, ‘a magnificent musical tissue.’ Les Huguenots, like Robert, made the tour of the world. And, as Tell was prohibited in Austria, for political reasons, so Meyerbeer’s opera was forbidden in strictly Catholic lands. This did not prevent its performance under such titles as The Guelphs or The Ghibellines at Pisa; a letter to Meyerbeer shows that he refused an arrangement of the libretto entitled The Swedes before Prague!
After Les Huguenots had been produced Meyerbeer spent a number of years in the preparation of his next works, L’Africaine and Le Prophète. Scribe[71] had supplied the librettos for both these works, and both underwent countless revisions and changes at Meyerbeer’s hands. The story of L’Africaine was more than once entirely rewritten. In the meantime the composer had accepted (after Spontini’s withdrawal) the appointment of kapellmeister to the king of Prussia and spent some years in Berlin. Here he composed psalms, sacred cantatas, a secular choral work with living pictures, Una festa nella corte di Ferrara; the first of his four ‘Torchlight Marches,’ for the wedding of Prince Max of Bavaria with Princess Mary of Prussia, and a cantata for soli, chorus and brasses, set to a poem of King Louis I of Bavaria. In 1843 he produced Das Feldlager in Schlesien (The Camp in Silesia), a German opera, based on anecdotes of Frederick the Great, the national hero of Prussia; which, coldly received at first, was at once successful when the brilliant Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind, made her first appearance in Prussia in it, as Vielka, the heroine. Three years later he composed the incidental music for Struensee, a drama written by his brother Michael. The overture is still considered an example of his orchestration at his best.
His chief care, however, from 1843 to 1847 was bestowed on worthily presenting the works of others at the Berlin Opera. Gluck’s Armida and Iphigenia in Tauris; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Zauberflöte; Beethoven’s Fidelio; Weber’s Freischütz and Euryanthe; and Spohr’s Faust, the last a tribute of appreciation. He even procured the acceptance of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Rienzi, that ‘brilliant, showy, and effective exercise in the grand opera manner,’ whose first performance he directed in 1847.
In 1849 Meyerbeer produced Le Prophète in Paris, after many months of rehearsal. The score shows greater elevation and grandeur than that of Les Huguenots, but it is marred by contradictions and inequalities of style. In spite of its success and many undeniably beautiful sections, it betrays a falling off of the composer’s creative power; and it suffers from overemphasis. His two successful efforts to compete with the composers of French opéra comique on their own ground, L’Étoile du Nord and Le pardon de Ploërmel (‘Dinorah’), were heard in Paris in 1854 and 1859, respectively. L’Étoile du Nord was practically Das Feldlager in Schlesien, worked over and given a Russian instead of a Prussian background. Its success was troubled by the last illness and death of the composer’s mother, to whom he was passionately attached. A number of shorter vocal and instrumental compositions were written during the five years that elapsed between its première and that of his second comic opera. This, Le Pardon de Ploërmel, was set to a libretto by Carré and Barbier. It is a charming pastoral work, easy, graceful, and picturesque. Its music throughout is tuneful and bright, but its inane libretto has much to do with the neglect into which it has fallen.
From 1859 to 1864, besides the shorter compositions alluded to, Meyerbeer worked on various unfinished scores: a Judith, Blaze de Bury’s Jeunesse de Goethe, and others. He left a quantity of unfinished manuscripts of all kinds at his death. But mainly during this period he was busy with the score of L’Africaine, his last great opera. When at length, after years of hesitation, he had decided to have it performed and it was in active preparation at the opera, he was seized with a sudden illness and died, May 2, 1864. He had not been spared to witness the first performance of this which he loved above all his other operas and on which he lavished untold pains. It was produced, however, with regard to his wishes, April 28, 1865, and was a tremendous success. Scribe’s libretto contains many poetic scenes and effective situations and gave the composer every opportunity to manifest his genius.
It is the most consistent of his works. In it he displays remarkable skill in delineation of characters and situations. His music, in the scenes that occur in India, is rich in glowing oriental color. Nowhere has he made a finer use of the hues of the orchestral palette. And in the fifth act, which crowns the entire work, he exalts to the highest emotional pitch the noble and touching character of his heroine, Selika, who sacrifices her love for Vasco da Gama, that the latter may be happy with the woman he loves. In dignity and serenity the melodies of L’Africaine surpass those of the composer’s other operas. Its music, though in general less popular than that of Les Huguenots, is of a finer calibre, and the ceaseless striving after effect, so apparent in much of his other work, is absent in this.
The worth of Meyerbeer’s talent has long been realized, despite the fact that Wagner, urged by personal reasons, has ungratefuly called him ‘a miserable music-maker,’ and ‘a Jewish banker to whom it occurred to compose operas.’ Granting that his qualities were those of the master artisan rather than the master artist, admitting his weakness for ‘voluptuous ballets, for passion torn to tatters, ecclesiastical display, and violent death,’ for violent contrast rather than subtle characterization, he still lives in his influence, which may be said to have founded the melodramatic school of opera now so popular, of which Cavalleria rusticana is perhaps the most striking example. As long as intensity of passion and power of dramatic treatment are regarded as fitting in dramatic music his name will live. Zola’s eulogy, put in the mouth of one of the characters in his L’Œuvre, rings true:
‘Meyerbeer, a shrewd fellow who profited by everything, ... bringing, after Weber, the symphony into opera, giving dramatic expression to the unconscious formula of Rossini. Oh, what superb evocations, feudal pomp, military mysticism, the thrill of fantastic legend, the cries of passion traversing history. And what skill the personality of the instruments, dramatic recitative symphonically accompanied by the orchestra, the typical phrase upon which an entire work is built.... An ingenious fellow, a most ingenious fellow!’
The French grand opera of Rossini and Meyerbeer was the musical expression of dramatic passionate sentiments, affording scope to every excellence of vocal and orchestral technique and even to every device of stage setting. It is not strange that it appealed to contemporary composers, even Auber, Hérold, Halévy, and Adam, though more generally identified with the opéra comique, attempted grand opera with varying success.
Auber, in his La muette de Portici (‘Masaniello’), given in 1828, meets Spontini, Rossini, and Meyerbeer on their own ground with a historical drama of considerable beauty and power. Its portrayal of revolutionary sentiment was so convincing that its first performance in Brussels (1830) precipitated the revolution which ended in the separation of Holland and Belgium. Hérold united with Auber’s elegance and polish greater depth of feeling. Zampa (1831), a grand opera on a fanciful subject, and Le pré aux clercs (1832) are his best serious operas. His early death cut short the development of his unusual dramatic gift. Halévy even went so far as to distort his natural style in the effort to emulate Meyerbeer. Of his grand operas, La Juive (1835), La Reine de Chypre (1841), Charles VI (1834), La Tempesta (1850), only the first, a work of gloomy sublimity, with fine melodies and much good instrumentation, may be called a masterpiece. Adam’s few attempts at grand opera were entirely unsuccessful, though his comic operas enjoyed tremendous vogue.
But the influence of Rossini and Meyerbeer on grand opera has continued far beyond their own time. The style of La Patrie by Paladilhe is directly influenced by Meyerbeer. Verdi, in his earlier works, Guido, Trovatore, I Lombardi, shows traces of his methods. Gounod, in the ‘dispute’ scene in the fourth act of Romeo et Juliette likewise reflects Meyerbeer; and Wagner was not above profiting from him whom he most scornfully and unjustly belittled.
In summing up the contributions of Rossini and Meyerbeer to the history of music, it may be said that their operas, and in particular those of the latter, are a continuation and amplification of the heritage of Gluck. Édouard Schuré says in his important work, Le Drame Musical: ‘The secret of the opera of Meyerbeer is the pursuit of effect for effect’s sake.’ Yet it will be remembered that Gluck himself wrote in the preface of his Alceste: ‘I attach no importance to formulas; I have sacrificed all to the effect to be produced.’ The art of Gluck and the art of Meyerbeer have the same point of departure, and each is expressed in formulas which, while quite distinct and individual, denote the highest dramatic genius. Both Rossini and Meyerbeer increased the value of the orchestra in expressing emotion in all its phases in connection with the drama; and helped to open the way for the later development of French grand opera and the innovations of Richard Wagner. Weber and Schubert had both died before Meyerbeer began to play an important part. Succeeding Spontini and Rossini as the dominant figure of the grand opera stage, his real successor was Richard Wagner. But, though Rossini, Meyerbeer, and their followers had enriched the technical resources of opera, had broadened the range of topic and plot, yet they had not turned aside the main current of operatic composition very far from its bed. The romantic and dramatic tendencies which they had introduced, however, were to bear fruit more especially in French romanticism and the development of the evolution of the French opéra comique into the drame lyrique.
An account of the origin and development of the French opéra comique as a purely national form of dramatic musical entertainment has already been given in the chapter dealing with Gluck’s operatic reform. Here we will briefly show its development during the period of which he have spoken.
François-Adrien Boieldieu[72] may be considered (together with Niccolò Isouard) the last composer of the older type of opéra comique, to which his operas Jean de Paris and La dame blanche gave a new and lasting distinction. As Pougin says: ‘It is positive that comic opera, as Boieldieu understood it, was an art-work, delicate in type, with genuine flavor and an essentially varied color.’ Boieldieu was especially successful in utilizing the rhythmic life of French folk song, and La dame blanche has those same qualities of solid merit and real musical invention found in the serious opéra comique of Cherubini and Méhul. In fact, it was these three composers who gave the genre a new trend. In Scudo’s words, Boieldieu’s work is ‘the happy transition from Grétry to Hérold and, together with Méhul and Cherubini, the highest musical expression in the comic opera field. After Boieldieu’s time the influence of Rossini became so strong that opéra comique began to lose its character as a distinct national operatic form.’
The influence of Rossini was especially noticeable in the work of the group of opéra comique composers, including Auber, Hérold, Halévy, Adam, Victor Massé, Maillard, who were to prepare the way for the lyric drama of Thomas and Gounod. The contributions of Auber, Hérold and Halévy to the ‘historical’ or grand opera repertory have already been mentioned in the review of operatic development in Italy and France. Here we will only consider their work as a factor in transforming the French comic opera of Méhul and Boieldieu into the more sentimental and fanciful type of which the modern romantic French opera was to be born. One fact which furthered the transition from opéra comique to drame lyrique was the frequent absence of the element of farce, with the consequent encouragement of a more poetic and romantic musical development.
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) uninterruptedly busy from 1840 to 1871,[73] and his name identified with many of the greatest successes of the comic opera stage of his time, has been somewhat unjustly termed ‘a superficial Rossini.’ Auber undoubtedly borrowed from Rossini in his musical treatment of the comic, and he had little idea of powerful ensemble effects or of polyphonic writing; but grace, sweetness, and brilliancy of instrumentation cannot be denied him. ‘The child of Voltaire and Rossini,’ from about 1822 on he wrote operas in conjunction with the librettist Scribe. Fra Diavolo (1830) shows Auber at his best in comic opera. ‘The music is gay and tuneful, without dropping into commonplace; the rhythms are brilliant and varied, and the orchestration neat and appropriate.’ Incidentally, it might be remarked that Auber has written an opera on a subject which since his time has appealed both to Massenet and Puccini, Manon Lescaut (1856), which in places foreshadows Verdi’s ardently dramatic art.
In spite of Auber’s personal and professional success (not only was he considered one of the greatest operatic composers of his day, but also he succeeded Gossec in the Académie (1835), was director of the Conservatory of Music (1842), and imperial maître de chapelle to Napoleon III), he was essentially modest. With more confidence in himself than Meyerbeer he was quite as unpretentious as the latter. Though by no means ungrateful to the artists who contributed to the success of his works he would say: ‘I don’t cuddle them and put them in cotton-wool, like Meyerbeer. It is perfectly logical that he should do so. The Nourrits, the Levasseurs, the Viardot-Garcias, and the Rogers are not picked up at street corners; but bring me the first urchin you meet who has a decent voice and a fair amount of intelligence and in six months he’ll sing the most difficult part I ever wrote, with the exception of that of Masaniello. My operas are a kind of warming-pan for great singers. There is something in being a good warming-pan.’
Hérold’s most distinctive comic operas are Marie and Le Muletier (1848). The last-named is a setting of a rather spicy libretto by Paul de Kock, the novelist whose field was that of ‘middle class Parisian life, of guingettes and cabarets and equivocal adventures,’ and was highly successful. It seems a far cry from an operetta of this style to the romanticism of the drame lyrique. But if an occasional score harked back as regards vulgarity of subject to the equivocal popular couplets which the Comtesse du Barry had Larrivée sing for the entertainment of the sexagenarian Louis XV at Luciennes some sixty years before, it only serves to emphasize by contrast the trend in the direction of a finer expression of sentiment. Halévy’s masterpiece in comic opera is L’Éclair (1835). A curiosity of musical literature, it is written for two tenors and two sopranos, without a chorus; ‘and displays in a favorable light the composer’s mastery of the most refined effects of instrumentation and vocalization.’ Wagner, while living in greatly reduced circumstances in Paris, had been glad to arrange a piano score and various quartets for strings of Halévy’s Guitarrero (1841).
The most famous of Auber’s disciples was Adolphe-Charles Adam (1802-1856). Adam had been one of Boieldieu’s favorite pupils and was an adept at copying Auber’s style. Auber’s music gained or lost in value according to the chance that conditioned its composer’s inspiration; but it was always spiritual, elegant, and ingenious, hiding real science and dignity beneath the mask of frivolity. Adam, on the other hand, was an excellent imitator, but his music was not original. He wrote more than fifty light, exceedingly tuneful and ‘catchy’ light operas, of which Le Châlet (1834); Le postillon de Longjumeau (1836), which had a tremendous vogue throughout Europe; Le brasseur de Preston (1838); Le roi d’Yvetot (1842), and Cagliostro (1844) are the best known. Grisar, another disciple of Auber, furnishes another example of graceful facility in writing, combined with a lack of originality. Maillart’s (1817-1871) Les dragons de Villars, which duplicated its Parisian successes in Germany under the title of Das Glöckchen des Eremiten, was the most popular of the six operas he wrote. Victor Massé (1822-1884) is known chiefly by Galathée (1852), Les noces de Jeanette (1853), and Paul et Virginie (1876).
F. H. M.