Chapters of Opera Part 19

Ma.s.senet's "Jongleur de Notre Dame," Saint-Saens's "Helene," Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," and "an opera by our American composer, Victor Herbert." Offenbach's charming opera had been heard in New York before, from a French company managed by Maurice Grau, but it required a memory that compa.s.sed twenty-five years to recall that fact; so in respect of it Mr. Hammerstein's slip was venial at the worst. His list of the greatest singers in the world read as follows: Sopranos: Nellie Melba, Lillian Nordica, Mary Garden, Gianinna Russ, Camille Borello, Ludmilla Sigrist, Giuseppina Giaconia, Helen Koelling, f.a.n.n.y Francisca, Mauricia Morichina, Jeanne Jomelli, Emma Trentini, and Alice Zeppilli; mezzo sopranos and contraltos: Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Bressler-Gianoli, Eleanore de Cisneros, J. Gerville-Reache, Emma Zaccaria, Gina Severina; tenors: Giovanni Zenatello, Amadeo Ba.s.si, Charles Dalmores, Jean Perier, Leone Cazauran, Carlo Albani, Emilio Venturini, Francesco Daddi; barytones: Maurice Renaud, Charles Gilibert, Mario Sammarco, Vincenzo Reschiglian, Mario Ancona, Hector Dufranne, Nicolo Fossetta; ba.s.sos: Adamo Didur, Victorio Arimondi, Luigi Mugnoz; ba.s.so buffo: Fernando Galetti-Gianoli. Cleofonte Campanini was again musical director.

These the magnificent promises. Had half of them been kept the fact would have amazed a public whom long experience had taught to put no more faith in the promises of impresarios than in those of princes. As a matter of fact, barring the extravagant attributes alleged to be due to the singers, the majority of whom were worse than mediocre, more than half were kept, and the deficiency more than counterbalanced by new elements which were introduced from time to time, as happy emergencies called for them. Chief of these was the engagement of Luisa Tetrazzini; of which more in its proper place. The official announcement was of subscription performances on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, and Sat.u.r.day afternoons, for twenty weeks. Also there were to be twenty Sat.u.r.day evenings at popular prices. Just before the opening of the season there was semi-official talk of popular performances also on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, which, had it been realized, would have kept the opera company as busy with a large repertory as the ordinary theatrical company with its single play running through a season. A beginning was made with the Thursday performances, but Mr.

Hammerstein concluded after a short trial of the experiment, that the game was not worth the candle, and so abandoned it. Before the close of the season Mr. Hammerstein announced an extra week of five performances, which he invited his subscribers to enjoy without money and without price, on the ground that the exigencies of the season had compelled him to repeat operas on subscription nights. The season of twenty-one weeks, which began on November 4, 1907, and ended on March 28, 1908, was thus made to embrace 116 representations in all; that is to say, eighty subscription nights and matinees, twenty popular Sat.u.r.day nights, five performances in the extra week, and eleven special afternoons and evenings. The discrepancy between these figures and the total of the last column in the appended table, showing the dates of first productions in the season, and the number of performances given to each opera, is accounted for by the fact that nine times in the course of the season the entertainment consisted of two operas, and once there was a bill of shreds and patches from various operas.

To complete the statistical record of the company's activity, it must be added that two performances were given in Philadelphia, and that there were eighteen concerts on Sunday nights, at the last few of which operas were given in concert form. Twice the opera house was kept closed on Sunday nights because of the enforcement of a rigid interpretation of the law prohibiting theatrical entertainments on Sunday.

A study of the list of performances shows that the 116 performances were distributed among twenty-three operas. Of these four had never been given in New York before (they were "Thas," "Louise," "Siberia," and "Pelleas et Melisande"), three had been given in New York, but so long ago that they were to all intents and purposes novelties ("Les Contes d'Hoffmann," "Crispino e la Comare," and "Andrea Chenier"), and three, though familiar to the public, were new to the house ("La Gioconda,"

"La d.a.m.nation de Faust," and "Ernani"); the other thirteen were in the Manhattan repertory for the season of 1906-07.

Opera Composer First performance Times given

"La Gioconda," Ponchielli ................ Nov. 4 4 "Carmen," Bizet .......................... Nov. 5 11 "La d.a.m.nation de Faust," Berlioz ......... Nov. 6 3 "Trovatore," Verdi ....................... Nov. 9 5 "Ada," Verdi ............................ Nov. 11 9 "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," Offenbach ....... Nov. 15 11 "Thas," Ma.s.senet ........................ Nov. 24 7 "Faust," Gounod .......................... Nov. 28 4 * "La Navarraise," Ma.s.senet .............. Dec. 9 5 * "Pagliacci," Leoncavallo ............... Dec. 9 9 "Ernani," Verdi .......................... Dec. 11 1 "Rigoletto," Verdi ....................... Dec. 20 5 "Un Ballo in Maschera," Verdi ............ Dec. 27 4 "Don Giovanni," Mozart ................... Dec. 28 3 * "Cavalleria Rusticana," Mascagni ....... Dec. 31 4 "Louise," Charpentier .................... Jan. 3 11 "La Traviata," Verdi ..................... Jan. 15 5 "Lucia di Lammermoor," Donizetti ......... Jan. 20 8 "Siberia," Giordano ...................... Feb. 5 3 "Pelleas et Melisande," Debussy .......... Feb. 19 7 "Dinorah," Meyerbeer ..................... Feb. 26 1 "Crispino e la Comare," Ricci brothers ... Mar. 6 3 "Andrea Chenier," Giordano ............... Mar. 27 1 --- 124 * Parts of double bills.

When Mr. Hammerstein issued his prospectus in the early autumn he promised to produce no less than eight operas which had never been performed in America. Managerial promises of this kind are generally made and accepted in a Pickwickian sense, but Mr. Hammerstein came nearer than is the custom to keeping his, though the season closed with his subscribers waiting for "Dolores," by Breton; "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame," by Ma.s.senet, and "Helene," by Saint-Saens. He also promised performances of three German operas ("Lohengrin," "Tannhauser," and "Tristan und Isolde"), a new American opera in English, to be composed by Victor Herbert, and the following operas from the standard list, viz., "Le Prophete," Ma.s.senet's "Manon," "Romeo et Juliette,"

"Mefistofele," and "La Boheme." He had fought in the courts for the privilege of performing the last opera in the preceding season, but abandoned it without contention this season in the face of Mr. Conried's a.s.sertion that he had purchased the exclusive rights to all Italian performances of Puccini's operas in the United States. It is not likely that the statement about Mr. Herbert's opera was taken very seriously in any quarter; he is a prolific and marvelously ready writer of comic operetta scores, but it is not likely that he will ever attempt to find a suitable grand opera book and set it to music within six or eight months, while occupied, as he is, with a mult.i.tude of other enterprises.

Mr. Hammerstein had promised in his prospectus that there would also be performances in German of "Lohengrin," "Tannhauser," and "Tristan und Isolde." This part of the manager's scheme went by the board early in the season. It was contingent upon the presence in the company of singers familiar with the three works of Wagner. Of such there was only one when the season began, and she, Mme. Nordica, remained a member of Mr. Hammerstein's forces only six weeks, during much of which time she was idle. Mme. Schumann-Heink, though announced as a member of the company, interrupted her concert activity only long enough to sing once, and then she sang in an Italian opera ("Il Trovatore"), albeit she did her part in German.

Up to the coming of Signorina Tetrazzini Mr. Hammerstein pinned his faith on the interest which might be aroused in his French novelties. On the second subscription night he came forward with Berlioz's "d.a.m.nation de Faust," with which he had contemplated adorning his first season, and for which he had prepared the scenic outfit. The undramatic character of the transformed cantata had caused its failure at the Metropolitan Opera House in the season of 1906-07, and not even the fine performance of M.

Renaud, whose impersonation of Mephistopheles is one of the n.o.blest memories left by the season, the excellent singing of M. Dalmores, and the beautiful pictures could save it. There was a long wait between the first and second representations, and after one more trial the work was abandoned. Meanwhile, however, Offenbach's "Contes d'Hoffmann," which had had a few performances at the Fifth Avenue Theater twenty-five years before, was brought forward. Again Messrs. Renaud and Dalmores were admirably fitted with parts and scant justice done to the opera in the distribution of the women's roles; but the charm of Offenbach's music overcame the defects of performance, and the opera achieved so p.r.o.nounced a success that it could be given with profit eleven times before M. Renaud's departure from New York after the performance of February 4th.

The libretto of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" proclaims a phase of French literary taste which made heroes two generations ago out of two foreign romancers,--the German E. T. A. Hoffmann and the American Edgar Allan Poe. Very much alike were these two men in some of their strongest characteristics. Both were possessed of genius of a high order; both led lives of dissipation, which wrecked them physically; both found their fantastic creations in the world of supernaturalism which imagination, stimulated by alcoholic indulgence, presented to them as realities. This is literally true, at least, of Hoffmann, who, coming home from his nightly carouses with the boon companions, whom he has celebrated in his "Serapion's Bruder" (the coterie somewhat vulgarly parodied in the beginning and end of Offenbach's opera), was wont to call for his wife to sit beside him through the remainder of the night to ward off the ghostly, ghastly, grisly creatures which his own perfervid imagination had conjured up. Sixty years ago France was full of admiration for the weird tales of Hoffmann, and in view of the singular vicissitudes of the fantastic romancer's life, some of them quite as startling as the adventures which he ascribed to his imaginary creatures, it was not at all strange that Barbier and Carre should have conceived the idea of making him the hero of a play dealing with incidents of his own invention. In 1851 they brought out their play in five acts at the Odeon. It did not endure long, but it made so deep an impression on the mind of Offenbach that when he was seized with the ambition to write a serious work, which he might leave to the world as a legacy, to prove that his ambitions went beyond the things with which he amused the careless folk of the Second Empire, he turned to the old play for his libretto.

In a way it was a happy choice. If an author was to be blended with his creations and utilized for operatic purposes, history might be searched in vain for a better subject than Hoffmann. He was jurist, court councillor, romancer, caricaturist, scene painter, theatrical manager, and musical composer. In several ways he is living in the musical annals to-day. His opera, "Undine," is forgotten, though it was highly praised by Carl Maria von Weber, who had not feared soundly to abuse Beethoven; but his literary creation, the Chapelmaster Kreissler, lives in Schumann's "Kreissleriana," and other conceits of his filtered through Jean Paul, in other compositions by the same master. His criticisms, though cast in fantastic form, opened the eyes of many to the beauties of Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven. His admiration for Mozart went to such an extreme that he cast aside part of his baptismal name in order to subst.i.tute for it one of the given names of his hero--Amadeus. Of this admiration neither Offenbach nor his librettists were unaware, for when Hoffmann and Nicklausse come into the tavern where the roystering students greet them, in the prologue, they are still so full of the opera "Don Giovanni," to which they had just been listening, that Nicklausse quotes the words of Leporello's first song, and Offenbach reverently quotes the music.

Let no one think that the production of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" was in any way a.n.a.logous with the operetta performances with which Mr. Conried lowered the status of the Metropolitan Opera House when he performed "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" at his benefits. No serious reader of mine will expect to see in this place dispraise of the genius of Johann Strauss; but the works mentioned are operettas in form and in spirit, while "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" was conceived in an entirely different vein, and shows the musician who composed it in a character that no one would dream was his who knew him only as the composer of the Bouffes Parisiens. It is a pathetic, but also lovely, doc.u.ment in proof of the fact that with all his frivolity he wanted to die at least in the odor of artistic sanct.i.ty. The piquant rhythms and prettily superficial melodies of his musical farces were a perfect reflex of the careless art-feeling of his day, just as the farces themselves were admirably adjusted to the taste of the boulevardiers who basked in the suns.h.i.+ne of Napoleon the Little, and laughed uproariously while their Emperor and their social inst.i.tutions were being castigated by the cynical German Jew and his librettists. "He was the Beethoven of the sneer," said emil Bergerat, when Offenbach died, and then with a fantastic pencil worthy of the caricaturist Hoffmann himself, he drew a dreadful picture of Offenbach and his times; of the mighty fiddler beating time upon the well-filled goatskin and sawing away across the strings, his mouth widened with a grin "like some drunken conception of Edgar Poe's, or some fantasy of Hoffmann, while the startled birds flew back to heaven, the moon split herself back to her ears, and the stars giggled behind their cloud-fans." The planetary system only revolved to frisky rhythms, and the earth herself, like a mad top, hummed comically about the horrified sun. En avant la musique! and the old edifice crumbled in dust around the musician. To Bergerat Offenbach was the great disillusioner of the age, the incarnation of what he conceived to be the spirit of the nineteenth century, a spirit that hated and contemned the past, mocked at the things which the simplicity of preceding centuries held sacred, threw ridicule upon social sentiments, rank, caste, ceremonialism, learning, and religion.

The composer of "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" is nothing of this. The opera was the child of his old age. He loved it, and labored over its score for years. It is full of lovely melody (the barcarolle of the second act will always exert a potent and lovely influence) fluent from beginning to end, and rich in dramatic characterization. No one is likely to listen to the trio at the culmination of the third act (that dealing with the fate of a singer's daughter) without realizing what a really admirable power of expression was that which Offenbach, for reasons explained by the spirit of the times and his own moral nature, chose to squander so many years on his operas bouffes. Frequently the melodic line in the opera rises to admirable heights; always melody, harmony, and orchestration are refined, unless a burlesque effect is aimed at, as in the ballad of "Kleinzack," and Nicklausse's song of the doll.

Offenbach's opera had its first performance on November 14, 1907, the cast being as follows:

Olympia ...................................... Zepilli Giulietta .................................... Jomelli Antonia ...................................... Borello Nicklausse ............................... De Cisneros A Voice ..................................... Giaconia Hoffman ..................................... Dalmores Cornelius | Dappertutto | Dr. Miracle | ................................. Renaud Spalanzni | Grespel | ................................. Gilibert Lindorff | Schlemihl | .................................. Crabbe Cochenille | Pitichinaccio | ................................ Daddi Frantz ............................... Gianoli-Galetti Hermann .................................. Reschiglian Nathaniel .................................. Venturini Luther ...................................... Fossetta Conductor, Cleofonte Campanini

On November 25, 1907, Mr. Hammerstein brought forward Ma.s.senet's "Thas," to signalize the first appearance in America of Miss Mary Garden. The opera was produced with the following cast:

Thas ....................................... Mary Garden Crobyle ........................................ Trentini Myrtale ........................................ Giaconia Albine .................................. Gerville-Reache Athanael ......................................... Renaud Nicias ......................................... Cazouran Palemon .......................................... Mugnoz Un Serviteur ................................ Reschiglian Conductor, Campanini

With this work French opera won its second triumph. The charm of Miss Garden's personality was felt, but her singing compelled less tribute, and though the opera had seven representations before the departure of M. Renaud compelled its withdrawal, its success was due much more to him than to his fair companion. The Thas of MM. Gallet and Ma.s.senet is not the Thas of cla.s.sical story, who induced Alexander to burn the palace of the Persian kings at Persepolis--"who like another Helen, fired another Troy"--but she is of her tribe. Also of the tribe of Phryne, Las, and Messalina, who live in history and in art because of their beauty and their pruriency, their loveliness and licentiousness. The operatic Thas is the invention of Anatole France, who borrowed her name for a courtesan of Alexandria some centuries after the historic woman lived. With the help of suggestions borrowed from the stories of innumerable saints who fled from the vicious world into the desert, and industriously cultivated sanct.i.ty and bodily filth, of converted trollops and holy Anthonys, he constructed a tale of how one of these desert saints, filled with ardor to save the soul of a cyprian who had the gay world of Alexandria at her feet, went to her, persuaded her to put her sinful life behind her, enter the retreat of a saintly sisterhood and die in grace, while he, falling at the last into the clutches of carnal l.u.s.t, repented of his good deed and wrought his own d.a.m.nation. Changing the name of the unfortunate zealot from Paphnuce to Athanael, M. Louis Gallet made an opera-book out of France's story, and Ma.s.senet set it to music. It is a delectable story, but it fell into the hands of master craftsmen, and the admirers of "art for art's sake" and at any cost, have cause to rejoice at the treatment which it received.

Glimpses into the life of the frowsy fraternity of cen.o.bites, and fragments of their doleful canticles are not engaging in themselves, but they are fine foils to pictures of antique vice and the songs and dances of cla.s.sic voluptuaries. There are splendid dramatic potentialities for those who like such things and those who find profit in exploiting in the juxtaposition cheek by jowl of saintliness and sin; of Christian hymning and harlotry; of virtue in a physical wrestle with vice, and coming out triumphant, but handing the palm over to the real victor at the end; in the picture of a monk sprinkling the couch of Venus with holy water, and decking his cowl with roses.

Also there was a large personal note in the original creation of "Thas," and there was a large personal note in its reproduction. It is not altogether a pleasant one for the lover of real art to listen to.

Had there been no Sybil Sanderson, it is doubtful if Ma.s.senet would ever have been directed to the subject. True, he had shown a predilection for frail women as his heroines before, as witness Marie Magdalen, Eve, Herodias, and Manon Lescaut; but in the works which exploited these women the personal equation did not enter so far as the world knows or the printed page discloses. But when he wrote "Thas" it was neither histrionic nor musical art that be aimed primarily to exploit, but the physical charms of an individual. Something was needed for the jaded boulevardiers of Paris to leer at while they feebly clapped their hands and piped "Ah, charmante! Ravissante!" It may be that the fine command of Oriental color which is supposed to have affinity in the idioms of music with voluptuousness in all its forms, had something to do with the case, but the whole structure of the piece, superb as it is in its contrasting elements, and theatrically ingenious and effective, points nevertheless to the unfortunate Sanderson. And in the same way its Parisian revival points to Madame Cavalieri and Miss Garden, and its American production to the latter. For the sake of gifted singers and accomplished actors merely, the opera was not created, and will not be kept alive. It rests for its success on the kind of argument which Phryne, of cla.s.sic story, presented to her austere judges.

The brilliancy of the play, its masterly handling of contrasts equally gratifying to the scenic artist, the actor, and the composer, challenged admiration and won it in large measure at the Manhattan performances.

From the ordinary theatrical point of view it would not be easy to pick a quarrel with the drama. It would be almost churlish when there is so much to be grateful for, to pick flaws in M. Ma.s.senet's score. In the first place, compared with the vast volume of stuff poured forth by his younger colleagues of Italy, and even by some of his confreres of France, it makes appeal for approval by its evidences of consummate technical mastery. It never trickles; it never grows stagnant; it never gropes; it never fails for want of matter and manner in utterance.

Its current is smooth and self-reliant. It carries action and scene buoyantly and unceasingly, even if it does not always expound them deeply or give them adequate external adornment. When it has no real warmth it simulates it admirably. Its texture is well-knit. There is purpose, not deep, not long-sustained, but, so far as it goes, logical, in the composer's application of the system of typical or representative phrases. There is, too, a measure of appositeness in the structure and character of his themes--the themes of asceticism, of Athanael, of Thas. There is mastery of local color which makes the composer's use of Oriental tints as dramatically appropriate as it is engaging in all the scenes of ancient profligacy which fill the center of the artist's canvas.

M. Ma.s.senet's orchestra is an active agent in the development of the drama, and the episodes in which it becomes dominant are not pauses in the action created because of a felt need for something besides an undercurrent for the inane chatter of dialogue; instead they carry on the psychological action, the concealed drama which is playing on the stage of the hearts of the people concerned in the story. There is fitness in the interlude, in which Thas disposes herself to reproduce the pantomime of the loves of Aphrodite and Adonis, and a pretty touch of significance in the reminiscence of the music which had disturbed Athanael's dream in the first act. There is more than mere musical charm in the intermezzo which follows the scene in which the monk wakes into life the conscience of the courtesan. She has defied him to the last, but the struggle in her soul has begun, and while he sleeps on the steps of her house the progress and outcome of the struggle are portrayed in the instrumental number which Ma.s.senet has called a "Religious Meditation." In itself it is not unlike scores of pieces similarly int.i.tuled, but it is made significant by its introduction of the theme of Thas in a chastened mood, in the garb of solemn gravity; and the melody of the violin solo, borne up by almost indefinable harmonies, and floated by harp arpeggios, recurs again before the death scene of Thas to delineate her ecstasy and Athanael's despair. Though the intermezzo, thus admirably motived, marks the highest flight of Ma.s.senet's genius in this opera, there are many other pages in the score which might be chosen for praise. Enough that while the admirers of "Manon" and "Werther" are not likely to find the music of those operas equaled, they will yet find much to fascinate them in "Thas."

I have said, in effect, that the chief triumph in the performance of Ma.s.senet's opera was won by M. Renaud. Miss Garden had, indeed, established herself as a popular favorite, but it was not until the production of Charpentier's "Louise," on January 3, 1908, an opera with which her name was more intimately a.s.sociated in popular report, that it could be said without qualification that French opera had won its battle. The princ.i.p.al parts in this opera were distributed amongst Mr.

Hammerstein's singers thus:

Louise ..................................... Miss Mary Garden Julien .................................. M. Charles Dalmores Mother of Louise ...................... Mme. Bressler-Gianoli Father of Louise ........................ M. Charles Gilibert Irma ................................... Mlle. Alice Zeppilli Camille ..................................... Mlle. Morichini Gertrude ..................................... Mlle. Giaconia Suzanne ............................... Mlle. Helene Koelling King of the Fools .............................. M. Venturini A Ragpicker .................................. M. Reschiglian A Junkman ......................................... M. Mugnoz Elise | A Street Sweeper | ........................... Mlle. Severina A Street Arab ................................ Mlle. Trentini An Apprentice ................................. Mlle. Sigrist Conductor, Campanini

"Louise" had made a great noise, both in a literal and figurative sense, during the greater part of the preceding eight years. It had made the rounds of the princ.i.p.al opera houses on the European continent, but most of the noise came from Paris, and among those who sat in Mr. Hammerstein's boxes and stalls on the occasion of its American production there were many who had already made the acquaintance of the work at the Opera Comique, in the French capital. It is likely that their interest in the performance was mingled more or less with curious questionings touching the att.i.tude which local opera-lovers would a.s.sume toward it. There is a vast difference in the mood in which Americans go to public entertainments in Paris and at home. In a sense, though not a large or dignified one, the tragic element in the story of Charpentier's opera is universal; but its representation is in every particular the most local and circ.u.mscribed of any opera ever written. I am not disposed to waste much time or s.p.a.ce in a discussion of things to which the patrons of our playhouses have often exhibited a callous indifference. It is only to justify a hurried a.n.a.lysis of the artistic nature of the work that attention is called to some of its essential characteristics. "Louise" is not a French opera, though its score is French, its people speak French, and its music echoes French measures when it is original, and also when borrowed or imitated. "Louise" is Parisian in its gaiety, its pa.s.sions, its vulgarity, and its artistic viciousness. If music could in itself give expression to ethical ideas, it would also be proper to say that this score is Parisian in its immorality. Coupled with its story, which glorifies the licentiousness of Paris and makes mock of virtue, the sanct.i.ty of the family tie, and the inst.i.tutions upon which social stability and human welfare have ever rested and must forever rest, the music may also be set down as immoral. Certain it is that there is nothing in it that is spiritually uplifting, and as little that makes for gentleness and refinement of artistic taste. It is not French in the historic sense, because it rudely tramples upon all the esthetic principles for which the French composers, from Lully to the best of Charpentier's contemporaries have stood--elegance, grace, and beauty of expression.

It is, however, characteristic of the times--characteristic in subject and in utterance. To the intellectual and moral anarchism universally prevalent among the peoples of Western culture, which desires to have idealism outraged, sacred things ridiculed, high conceptions of beauty and duty dragged into the gutter, and ugliness, brutality, and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity placed upon a pedestal so long as a consuming thirst for things hot in the mouth may be slaked, it makes a strong appeal. To Mr. Hammerstein its success meant much. It was a reward for another exhibition of a bold and adventurous spirit; of his skill in gathering together a band of artists splendidly capable of presenting the works which he was trying to make the prop of a new lyric theater in the American metropolis; of a daringly enterprising purpose to make all the elements of his new productions harmonious and alluring--the stage pictures, the action, the singing, and the instrumental music. This achievement he accomplished when not only the large and striking features of the opera--its scenic outfit, its pictures of popular carousal on the heights of Montmartre, the roystering realism of the scene in a dressmakers' shop, the splendid acting of Miss Garden and Mme. Bressler-Gianoli, the fine singing of M. Dalmores, and the more than superb acting and singing of M. Gilibert--found their complement in the finish of a hundred little details, insignificant in themselves, but singularly potent in helping to create the atmosphere without which "Louise" would be little better than Bowery melodrama,--a play that would be a hundred times more effective if its hero and heroine were represented as living in Williamsburg, swelling at the spectacle of the lights spanning the East River, and longing for the fleshpots of the so-called "Tenderloin District" in New York.

The story of "Louise," in brief, is that of a sewing-girl who lives with her parents on Montmartre, up to which, night after night, blink and beckon the lights of the gay city. An artist, who is her neighbor, wooes her and offers marriage, but her parents, a harsh, unsympathetic mother and a tender-hearted father, are rigid in their objections to him because of his insufficient means and loose character. Her lover lures her out of her workshop, and, after he has inculcated in her the doctrine of free love and free life, she leaves her parents to consort with him. The artist's jovial companions make her queen of a Montmartre festival for a purpose wholly extraneous to the story, but one that serves the composer, who is his own librettist, and in the midst of the merrymaking the mother appears and pleads with the girl to return to her home to comfort her dying father. Her lover permits her to do so on her promise to return to him. At home her father entreats her to give up her life of dishonor. She listens to him petulantly. The music of a fete in the city below, voices calling her from a distance, and the flas.h.i.+ng lights in the great city below, throw her into a frantic ecstasy; she sings of her love and calls to her lover. The mother thinks her mad, but the father drives her out of the house, only to repent and call after her a moment later. But she is gone, and the drama ends with the father shaking his fist at the city, and shrieking at it his hatred and detestation.

The thoughts of opera-goers will naturally revert to "La Boheme"; but there are many points of difference between the story which Puccini's librettist pieced together out of Murger's tales of bohemian life more than half a century ago, and this one of to-day. The differences are all in favor of the earlier opera. It was in a letter written by Lafcadio Hearn to me that he called attention to the fact that under the levity of Murger's picturesque bohemianism there was apparent a serious philosophy, which had an elevating effect upon the characters of the romance. "They followed one principle faithfully,--so faithfully that only the strong survived the ordeal,--never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocation for any other occupation, however lucrative, not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her wors.h.i.+pers." There is very little in Puccini's opera to justify this observation, but the significant fact remains that throughout the dramatic development of the piece the bohemian artists and their careless companions grow in the sympathy of the audience. For one thing, there is no questioning their sincerity. For this there is only one parallel in Charpentier's opera.

There is, in fact, only one really dramatic character in it. It is that of the father; in him there is honest, human feeling, a tenderness and love which yield only to a moment of pa.s.sion when he is perplexed in the extreme and at a moment when the last drop of sympathy for Louise has oozed away. Her tender regard for her father is pathetic in the first act, where it is set against the foil of her mother's harshness. In the last act, however, she is petulant, irascible, and cold, until the moment of frenzy, when she surrenders to the call of Paris and her wretched pa.s.sion. Julien is scantily and unconvincingly sketched. There is little indeed even to indicate sincerity in his love for Louise; at first, while she sings of the ecstasy of first love, he calmly reads a book; and when he responds, it is to invoke her to join him in a paean in praise, not of their love, but of Paris. Does she find him, when she rushes down the stairs, pursued by her father's broken-hearted calls?

One can feel no certainty on the point. The last impression is only that she has gone to plunge into the flood of wickedness, never to be seen again.

It was said some years ago, when "Louise" was celebrating its first triumphs, that the opera was the first number of a projected trilogy, and that Charpentier would tell us the rest of the story of the sewing-girl in other operas. But the years have pa.s.sed, the composer has grown rich and is giving no sign. Instead, there is an organized "Louise" propaganda in Paris. Funds are raised to send the working girls of the city to the opera in droves, there to hear the alluring call to harlotry, under the pretense that the agonies of the father will preach a moral lesson.

There are dramatic strength and h.o.m.ogeneity only in the first and last acts of the opera. The scenes between are shreds and patches, invented to give local color to the story. In the original form the picture of low life at dawn on Montmartre, in which charwomen, scavengers, ragpickers, street sweepers, milkwomen, policemen, and others figure, was enlivened by a mysterious personage called Le Noctambule, who proclaimed himself to be the soul of the city--the Pleasure of Paris.

It was a part of the symbolism which we are asked also to find in the flitting visions of low life and the echoes of street cries in the music. But it was a note out of key, and Mr. Campanini eliminated it, with much else of the local color rubbish. And yet it is in the use of this local color that nearly all that is original and individual in the score consists. Until we reach the final scene of the father's wild anguish there is very little indeed that is striking in the music, except that which is built up out of the music of the street. We hear echoes of the declamatory style of the young Italian veritists in the dialogue, much that is more than suggestive of the mushy sentimentality of the worst of Gounod and Ma.s.senet in the moments when the music attempts the melodic vein, and no end of Wagnerian orchestration in the instrumental pa.s.sages which link the scenes together. Some of this music is orchestrated with great beauty and discretion, like the preludes, but all that is conceived to accompany violent emotion is only fit to "tear a cat in" or to "make all split." The score, in fact, is chiefly a triumph of reflection, of ingenious workmans.h.i.+p, and there is scarcely a moment in the opera that takes strong hold of the fancy, for which the memory does not immediately supply a model, either dramatic or musical, or both. Wagner's marvelous close of the second act of "Die Meistersinger," with the night watchman walking through the quiet streets flooded with moonlight, singing his monotonous chant, is feebly mimicked at the close of the first scene of the second act of "Louise,"

when, all the characters of the play having disappeared, an Old Clothes Man comes down a staircase crying his dolorous (all the street cries are strangely melancholy) "Marchand d'habits! Avez-vous des habits a vendr'?" while from the distance arise the cries of the dealers in birdseed and artichokes. The spinning scene in "The Flying Dutchman,"

which reproduces a custom of vast antiquity, is replaced in "Louise"

with a scene in the dressmaker's workshop, in which the chatter of the girls and the antics of the comedienne are borne up by the music of the orchestra, with the click-click of the sewing machines to make up for the melodious hum of Wagner's spinning wheels. Puccini's bohemians meet in front of the Cafe Momus, enlivened by the pa.s.sing incidents of a popular fete; Charpentier's bohemians celebrate the crowning of the Muse of Montmartre with a carnival gathering and ballet. It is this fete, we fancy, which formed the nucleus around which Charpentier built his work.

Twice before "Louise" was brought forward he had utilized the ideas of the popular festival at which a working girl was crowned and made the center of a procession of roysterers, and a musical score with themes taken from the noises of Paris. His "Couronnement de la Muse," composed for a Montmartre festival, was performed at Lille in 1898; from Rome he sent to Paris along with his picturesque orchestral piece, "Impressions d'Italie," a symphonic drama, "La Vie du Poete," for soli, chorus, and orchestra, in which he introduced "all the noises and echoes of a Montmartre festival, with its low dancing rooms, its drunken cornets, its hideous din of rattles, the wild laughter of bands of revelers, and the cries of hysterical women." But even here M. Charpentier is original in execution only, not in plan. There is scarcely a public library in the large cities of Europe and America which does not contain a copy of Georges Kastner's "Les Voix de Paris," with its supplement, "Cris de Paris," a "Symphonie humoristique," with its themes drawn from the cries of the peripatetic hucksters and street venders of the French Capital; and as if that were not enough, historic records and traditions trace the use of street cries as musical material back to the sixteenth century. There seems even to have been a possibility that a "Ballet des Cris de Paris" furnished forth an entertainment in which the Grand Monarch himself a.s.sisted, for the court of Louis XIV.

French opera had won its battle; but even now, the way was not wholly clear and open, for the successful operas were too few and their repet.i.tion caused some grumbling.

At this critical moment the star of Luisa Tetrazzini rose in London and threw its glare over all the operatic world. Two years before Mr. Conried had engaged the singer while she was in California, but had failed to bind the contract by depositing a guarantee with her banker. He failed, it is said, because when he wanted to complete the negotiations he could not find her. Mr. Hammerstein also negotiated with her for the season of 1906-07, so he said, but she proved elusive.

Neither of the managers felt any loss at his failure to secure her. The London excitement may have set Mr. Conried to thinking; Mr. Hammerstein it stirred to action. On December 1st he announced that he had engaged her for the season of 1908-09, and hoped to have her for a few performances before the end of the season of 1907-08. A fortnight later he proclaimed that she would effect her New York entrance on January 15th, and that he had secured her for fifteen representations in the current season, with the privilege of adding to their number. Mr.

Conried threatened proceedings by injunction, but his threats were brutum fulmen; she made her debut on the specified date in "La Traviata," and when the season closed she had added seven performances (one in Philadelphia) to the fifteen originally contemplated. In New York she sang five times in "Traviata," eight times in "Lucia," once in "Dinorah," three times in "Rigoletto," three times in "Crispino e la Comare," and once in a "mixed bill." She was rapturously acclaimed by the public and a portion of the press. It is useless to discuss the phenomenon. The whims of the populace are as unquestioning and as irresponsible as the fury of the elements. That was seen in the Tetrazzini craze in New York and in London; it was seen again in the reception given to that musically and dramatically amorphous thing, "Pelleas et Melisande." This was as completely bewildering to the admirers of the melodrama as to those who are blind and deaf to its attractions. It should have been more so, for it is more difficult to affect to enjoy "Pelleas et Melisande" than to yield to the qualities which dazzle in the singing of Tetrazzini. Nevertheless, "Pelleas et Melisande" had seven performances within five weeks.

Debussy's opera was performed for the first time on February 19, 1908, the parts being distributed as follows:

Arkel ........................................ M. Arimondi Pelleas ........................................ M. Perier Golaud ....................................... M. Dufranne Melisande .................................... Miss Garden Yniold ..................................... Mlle. Sigrist Genevieve ........................... Mme. Gerville-Reache Un Medecin ..................................... M. Crabbe Conductor, Sig. Campanini

The production of "Pelleas et Melisande" was the most venturesome experiment that Mr. Hammerstein had yet made and the one most difficult to explain on any ground save the belief that a French novelty, no matter what its character or its merits, would win profitable patronage in New York at the moment. There was nothing in the history of the work itself to inspire the confidence that it would make a potent appeal to the tastes of the opera-lovers of New York. Nowhere outside of Paris had it gained a foothold, and its success in Paris was like that which any esthetic cult or pose may secure if diligently and ingeniously exploited. Mr. Hammerstein knew this and he had seen the work at the Opera Comique. It could not have escaped his discerning mind that only a small element in the population of even so cosmopolitan a city as New York could by any possibility possess the intellectual and esthetic qualifications necessary to enthusiastic appreciation of the qualities, not to say merits, of the work. These qualifications are quite as much negative as they are positive. It is not enough to the appreciation of "Pelleas et Melisande" that the listener shall understand French. He must have a taste--and this must be an acquired one, since it cannot be born in him--for the French of M. Maeterlinck's infantile plays, "Pelleas et Melisande" being on the border-line between the marionette drama and that designed for the consumption of mature minds. He must, moreover, have joined the inner brotherhood of symbol wors.h.i.+pers, and be able to discern how it is that the world-old story of the union of December and May, of blooming youth and crabbed age with its familiar (and, as some poets and romancers would have us believe, inevitable) consequences, can be enhanced by much chatter about crowns and rings dropped into wells, white-haired beggars lying in a cave, stagnant and mephitic pools, fluttering doves, departing s.h.i.+ps, kings who lose their way while hunting and are dashed against trees at twelve o'clock, maids who know not whence they came or why they are weeping, and a whole phantasmagoria more, out of all proportion to the simple incidents of the tragedy itself.

This so far as the literary side of the matter is concerned. On the musical much more is demanded. He must recognize unrhythmical, uncadenced, disjointed, and ejaculatory prose dialogue, with scarcely a lyrical moment in it, as a fit vehicle for music. He must not only be willing to forego vocal melody, but even the semblance of melody also in the instrumental music upon which the dialogue floats; for everybody knows since the Wagnerian drama came into being that words which are in themselves incapable of melodious flow may be the cause of melody in the orchestral music which accompanies them. [There is here no allusion to tune in the conventional sense, tune made up of motive, phrase, period and section, but to a well modulated succession of musical intervals, expressing a feeling or ill.u.s.trating a mood.] He who would enjoy the musical integument of this play must have cultivated a craving for dissonance in harmony and find relish in combinations of tones that sting and blister and pain and outrage the ear. He must have learned to contemn euphony and symmetry, with its benison of restfulness, and to delight in monotony of orchestral color, monotony of mood, monotony of dynamics, and monotony of harmonic device.

It is not at all likely that Mr. Hammerstein expected to find a sufficient number of opera-goers thus strangely const.i.tuted among the patrons of his establishment to justify him in the astonis.h.i.+ng exhibition of enterprise or venturesomeness ill.u.s.trated by the production of "Pelleas et Melisande" with artists brought especially from Paris only because they had been concerned in the Parisian performances, with new scenery, and at the cost of much money and labor spent in the preparation. It is therefore safe to a.s.sume that he counted on the potent power of public curiosity touching a well-advertised thing. He had fared well with Mme. Tetrazzini in presenting operas which represent everything that "Pelleas et Melisande" is not. In this he had much encouragement. He played boldly, and won.

"Pelleas et Melisande" as it came from the hands of M. Maeterlinck, and in the only form which the author recognizes, had been presented in New York in an English version. What has been said above about the qualifications of him who would rise to an enjoyment of the music with which Debussy has consorted it ought to serve also to characterize that music. Nothing has been exaggerated, nothing set down in a spirit of illiberality. No student of music can be ignorant of the fact that the art, being a pure projection of the human will, is necessarily always in a state of flux, and in its nature, within the limitations that bound all the manifestations of beauty, lawless. M. Debussy might have proclaimed and ill.u.s.trated that fact without in his capacity of a critical writer having sought to throw odium on dead masters who were better than he and living contemporaries who are at least older. The little Parisian community who pa.s.s the candied stick of mutual praise from mouth to mouth would nevertheless have given him their plaudits. In his proclamation of the principles of musical composition as applied to the drama he has proclaimed principles as old as opera. It needed no man who has outlived the diatonic scale to tell us that vocal music should be written in accordance with the rhythm and accents of the words, and that dramatic music should be an integral element of the drama, or, as he puts it, be "the atmosphere through which dramatic emotion radiates."