History of the Opera from its Origin in Italy to the present Time. Edwards Henry Sutherland

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      In the matter of stage decoration we have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing" since the beginning of the 18th century. Servandoni, at the theatre of the Tuileries, which contained some seven thousand persons, introduced as elaborate and successful mechanical devices as any that have been known since his time; but then as now the real and artificial were mixed together, by which the general picture is necessarily rendered absurd, or rather no general picture is produced. Independently of the fact that the reality of the natural objects makes the artificiality of the manufactured ones unnecessarily evident as when the branches of real trees are agitated by a gust of wind, while those of pasteboard trees remain fixed – it is difficult in making use of natural objects on the stage to observe with any accuracy the laws of proportion and perspective, so that to the eye the realities of which the manager is so proud, are, after all, strikingly unreal. The peculiar conditions too, under which theatrical scenery is viewed, should always be taken into account. Thus, "real water," which used at one time to be announced as such a great attraction at some of our minor playhouses, does not look like water on the stage, but has a dull, black, inky, appearance, quite sufficient to render it improbable that any despondent heroine, whatever her misfortune, would consent to drown herself in it.

      The most contemptuous thing ever written against the Opera, or rather against music in general, is Swift's celebrated epigram on the Handel and Buononcini disputes: —

      "Some say that Signor Buononcini

      Compared to Handel is a ninny;

      While others say that to him, Handel

      Is hardly fit to hold a candle.

      Strange that such difference should be,

      'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee."

      Capital, telling lines, no doubt, though is it not equally strange that there should be such a difference between one piece of painted canvas and another, or between a statue by Michael Angelo and the figure of a Scotchman outside a tobacconist's shop? These differences exist, and it proves nothing against art that savages and certain exceptional natures among civilized men are unable to perceive them. We wonder how the Dean of St. Patrick's would have got on with the Abbé Arnauld, who was so impressed with the sublimity of one of the pieces in Gluck's Iphigénie, that he exclaimed, "With that air one might found a new religion!"

BERANGER ON THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA

      One of the wittiest poems written against our modern love of music (cultivated, it must be admitted, to a painful extent by many incapable amateurs) is the lament by Béranger, in which the poet, after complaining that the convivial song is despised as not sufficiently artistic, and that in the presence of the opera the drama itself is fast disappearing, exclaims:

      Si nous t'enterrons

      Bel art dramatique,

      Pour toi nous dirons

      La messe en musique.

      Without falling into the same error as those who have accused Addison of a selfish and interested animosity towards the Opera, I may remark that song-writers have often very little sympathy for any kind of music except that which can be easily subjected to words, as in narrative ballads, and to a certain extent ballads of all kinds. When a man says "I don't care much for music, but I like a good song," we may generally infer that he does not care for music at all. So play-wrights have a liking for music when it can be introduced as an ornament into their pieces, but not when it is made the most important element in the drama – indeed, the drama itself.

      Favart, the author of numerous opera-books, has left a good satirical description in verse of French opera. It ends as follows: —

      Quiconque voudra

      Faire un opéra,

      Emprunte à Pluton,

      Son peuple démon;

      Qu'il tire des cieux

      Un couple de dieux,

      Qu'il y joigne un héros

      Tendre jusqu' aux os.

      Lardez votre sujet,

      D'un éternel ballet.

      Amenez au milieu d'une fête

      La tempête,

      Une bête,

      Que quelqu'un tûra

      Dès qu'il la verra.

      Quiconque voudra faire un opéra

      Fuira de la raison

      Le triste poison.

      Il fera chanter

      Concerter et sauter

      Et puis le reste ira,

      Tout comme il pourra.

PANARD ON THE OPERA

      This, from a man whose operas did not fail, but on the contrary, were highly successful, is rather too bad. But the author of the ill-fated "Rosamond" himself visited the French Opera, and has left an account of it, which corresponds closely enough to Favart's poetical description. "I have seen a couple of rivers," he says, (No. 29 of the Spectator) "appear in red stockings, and Alpheus, instead of having his head covered with sedge and bulrushes, making love in a fair, full-bottomed, periwig, and a plume of feathers, but with a voice so full of shakes and quavers that I should have thought the murmurs of a country brook the much more agreeable music. I remember the last opera I saw in that merry nation was the "Rape of Proserpine," where Pluto, to make the more tempting figure, puts himself in a French equipage, and brings Ascalaphus along with him as his valet de chambre." This is what we call folly and impertinence, but what the French look upon as gay and polite."

      Addison's account agrees with Favart's song and also with one by Panard, which contains this stanza: —

      "J'ai vu le soleil et la lune

      Qui faissient des discours en l'air

      J'ai vu le terrible Neptune

      Sortir tout frisé de la mer."

      Panard's song, which occurs at the end of a vaudeville produced in 1733, entitled Le départ de l'Opéra, refers to scenes behind as well as before the curtain. It could not be translated with any effect, but I may offer the reader the following modernized imitation of it, and so conclude the present chapter.

WHAT MAY BE SEEN AT THE OPERA

      I've seen Semiramis, the queen;

      I've seen the Mysteries of Isis;

      A lady full of health I've seen

      Die in her dressing-gown, of phthisis.

      I've seen a wretched lover sigh,

      "Fra poco" he a corpse would be,

      Transfix himself, and then – not die,

      But coolly sing an air in D.

      I've seen a father lose his child,

      Nor seek the robbers' flight to stay;

      But, in a voice extremely mild,

      Kneel down upon the stage and pray.

      I've seen "Otello" stab his wife;

      The "Count di Luna" fight his brother;

      "Lucrezia" take her own son's life;

      And "John of Leyden" cut his mother.

      I've seen a churchyard yield its dead,

      And lifeless nuns in life rejoice;

      I've seen a statue bow its head,

      And listened to its trombone voice.

      I've seen a herald sound alarms,

      Without evincing any fright:

      Have seen an army СКАЧАТЬ