Of the numerous other Italian composers who bask in the sunshine of popularity south of the Alps very few are known to fame beyond the frontiers of Italy.  The younger men follow religiously in the steps of Mascagni or Puccini, while their elders still hang on to the skirts of ‘Aida.’  Giacomo Orefice won a success of curiosity in 1901 with his ‘Chopin,’ a strange work dealing in fanciful fashion with the story of the Polish composer’s life, the melodies of the opera being taken entirely from Chopin’s music.

Spinelli’s ‘A Basso Porto’ (1895), which has been performed in English by the Carl Rosa Opera Company, is redolent of Mascagni’s influence, but the nauseating incidents of the plot make ‘Cavalleria,’ by comparison, seem chaste and classical.  The libretto deals with the vengeance wreaked by a villainous Neapolitan street loafer upon a woman who has played him false—­a vengeance which takes the form of ruining her son by drink and play, and of attempting to seduce her daughter.  In the end this egregious ruffian is murdered in the street by the mother of his two victims, just in time to prevent his being knifed by the members of a secret society whom he had betrayed to justice.  The music is not without dramatic vigour, and it has plenty of melody of a rough and ready kind.  There is technical skill, too, in the treatment of the voices and in the orchestration, but hardly enough to reconcile an English audience to so offensive a book.  Salvatore Auteri-Manzocchi has never repeated the early success of ‘Dolores,’ and Spiro Samara, a Greek by birth, but an Italian by training and sympathies, seems to have lost the secret of the delicate imagination which nearly made ‘Flora Mirabilis’ a European success, though his ‘Martire,’ a work of crude sensationalism, enjoyed an ephemeral success in Italy.  Franchetti, the composer of ‘Asrael,’ ‘Cristoforo Colombo,’ and other works, conceived upon a scale grandiose rather than grand, appears anxious to emulate the theatrical glories of Meyerbeer, and to make up for poverty of inspiration by spectacular magnificence, but none of his operas has yet succeeded in crossing the Alps.

CHAPTER XIII

MODERN GERMAN AND SLAVONIC OPERA

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sh;­GOETZ—­GOLDMARK—­HUMPERDINCK—­STRAUSS—­ SMETANA—­GLINKA—­PADEREWSKI

The history of music furnishes more than one instance of the paralysing effect which the influence of a great genius is apt to exercise upon his contemporaries and immediate successors.  The vast popularity of Handel in England had the effect of stunting the development of our national music for more than a century.  During his lifetime, and for many years after his death, English-born musicians could do little but imitate his more salient mannerisms, and reproduce in an attenuated form the lessons which he had taught.  The effect of Wagner’s music upon German opera