The Opera eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 339 pages of information about The Opera.

The Opera eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 339 pages of information about The Opera.

The cant phrase in use in FitzGerald’s days, ‘the lyric stage’, might have conveyed a hint of the truth to a man who cared for the forms of literature as well as its essence.  For, in its highest development, opera is most nearly akin to lyrical utterances in poetry, and the most important musical revolution of the present century has been in the direction of increasing, not diminishing, the lyrical quality of operatic work.  The Elizabethan writers—­not only the dramatists, but the authors of romances—­interspersed their blank verse or their prose narration with short lyrical poems, just as in the days of Mozart the airs and concerted pieces in an opera were connected by wastes of recitative that were most aptly called ‘dry’; and as it was left to a modern poet to tell, in a series of lyrics succeeding one another without interval, a dramatic story such as that of Maud, so was it a modern composer who carried to completion, in ‘Tristan und Isolde’, the dramatic expression of passion at the highest point of lyrical utterance.  It is no more unnatural for the raptures of Wagner’s lovers, or the swan-song of ecstasy, to be sung, than for the young man whose character Tennyson assumes, to utter himself in measured verse, sometimes of highly complex structure.  The two works differ not in kind, but in degree of intensity, and to those whose ears are open to the appeal of music, the power of expression in such a case as this is greater beyond all comparison than that of poetry, whether declaimed or merely read.  That so many people recognise the rational nature of opera in the present day is in great measure due to Wagner, since whose reforms the conventional and often idiotic libretti of former times have entirely disappeared.  In spite of the sneers of the professed anti-Wagnerians, which were based as often as not upon some ineptitude on the part of the translator, not upon any inherent defect in the original, the plots invented by Wagner have won for themselves an acceptance that may be called world-wide.  And whatever be the verdict on his own plots, there can be no question as to the superiority of the average libretto since his day.  No composer dare face the public of the present day with one of the pointless, vapid sets of rhymes, strung together with intervals of bald recitative, that pleased our forefathers, and equally inconceivable is the re-setting of libretti that have served before, in the manner of the eighteenth century composers, a prodigious number of whom employed one specially admired ‘book’ by Metastasio.

Unfortunately those who take an intelligent interest in opera do not even yet form a working majority of the operatic audience in any country.  While the supporters of orchestral, choral, or chamber music consist wholly of persons, who, whatever their degree of musical culture, take a serious view of the art so far as they can appreciate it, and therefore are unhampered by the necessity of considering the wishes

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Project Gutenberg
The Opera from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.