Ever since the Romantic era the theatre has satisfied its adventurous desires by means of exact observation of the most varied relations, the most different circumstances, the most picturesque and interesting surroundings, while the early lyric theatre fulfilled its temperament in the Baroque excesses of its formal classical heritage. The latter-day opera house was unwilling to be left behind its supposed rival, the theatre; it engaged a barker who, standing at the main entrance, harangued the passers-by: “Do enter, ladies and gentlemen! What you will see here is no make-believe but life itself, life with all its shades and tones as you see it every day.”
To say that an artist takes his figures from life is a truism; everyone takes everything from life, for even the boldest imagination receives its materials from life. Such statements hide from us not only the truth but also the problems to be solved. The dramatist’s subjects and figures are the result of the work of centuries, in some cases of millennia. They are developed and changed but slowly, and we are closer to the truth when we say that the dramatist receives his figures not from life but from tradition. The dramatic figure is the offspring of culture, nourished by the soul of generations, from which the impress of the too capricious individual has been eliminated to make way for the type, for the universal. The great creative artist only seizes these types with greater force and effect than the ordinary talent, because genius is precisely the interpreter of the universal. The genius has a better eye with which to see truth, a more generously endowed heart to feel values, and a stronger voice to proclaim what he has seen and felt and understood.
The old individualism was naive, the new is conscious. Our modern concept rejects any conformity that it finds hobbling, but it has created an entirely new set of conformities. This again leads to a paradox, for in the new opera individual character is vastly more important than in the old; character is everything because the struggle is about it and for it, therefore character has become the problem of style. Unfortunately, while the dissection of “cases” can be interesting, it seldom succeeds in opera. In the old opera there were gigantic individual characters—Alexander, Julius Caesar—but they were part of a mysticism that was the direct opposite of our rationalism and which saturated the dramatic psychology as it did the composition itself. The technique, the musical representation itself, was rational, often excessively so, but character appeared within a logical musical form. What made this Baroque operatic hero a “real” man was beyond the drama: he was entirely dissolved in music; the action does not claim the entire man, and he reveals himself in his actions only to a limited extent. The situation is not unlike that in Leonardo’s Holy Family, where the mathematical infallibility of the triangle, which is the frame of composition, is nevertheless reconciled with the mystic view of the figures without actually fully merging with them.
This mode of composition demands a broad foundation for characterization, a broadness that turns the accidental nature of the happenings in the drama into a necessity, because in the drama there are either no accidents or they are placed at the proper spot, whereas in life they often occur quite mal à propos. This poetic nullification of accident, the classical method, is “old-fashioned” and is no longer appreciated in our day. Our dramatists believe that mere accident ceases to be accident if its immediate reasons can be causally established. But artistic motivation gains little by this method. The crudely carpentered and barely explained accidents in the catastrophe of Romeo and Juliet do not impress at all as accidents. And so we judge Baroque librettos from an inadmissible angle. They were not bona fide dramas but literary texts that provided the composer with the opportunity for lyric effusion. They were “literary” because in general they were impeccably written if seemingly cool and often stereotyped poetry, but the librettists knew perfectly well what would happen to the words once they were clothed in music. Fundamentally these operas were not dramatic; they stressed nobility of tone and attitude, classical restraint, which is what the public liked, hence the demand for the same subjects—even the same librettos—set by different composers to see how the familiar subject would be treated by a different hand. As a matter of fact, arias were often so general in tone that they could be shifted from one opera to another when situations were at all similar.
The 19th and 20th centuries liberated the operatic stage, its form and language, from every accustomed fetter, and as the old conventions disappeared so did understanding for all opera before Gluck. Except for the Italians, opera as a genre departed from its ancient nature and began to decline. The crown passed from the stage to the orchestra pit, the aria yielded to the “endless melody,” the orchestral symphonic ecstasy. Opera’s territory was widened until it became almost limitless, the composers and librettists became philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, reformers—even politicians. Then came naturalism, which in turn was rejected as more recent composers found it a limiting factor. Still, a great deal of Weltanschauung remains attached to the lyric stage. It would never have occurred to a Baroque dramatist to say that the German spirit would be purified and renewed by the magic fire of the music drama, as Nietzsche and Wagner maintained. Perhaps the most noteworthy difference between the Baroque composer and the Romantic and post-Romantic musico-dramatist is that the latter intensifies or “dynamizes” the elements of his conflicts, while the former on the contrary tends to tone them down. The Baroque operista is not a psychologist; his portraits of men are not made up from analytical observation, the reconstruction of a character from observed states of mind. Rather his characterization is deductive and formal. The thread is formed not so much by events as by the lyric stream and élan. Nevertheless, he did understand, only he wanted not to paint his figures in action but rather to interpret their reactions to events.
W. H. Auden maintains that “drama is not suited to the analysis of character, which is the province of the novel. Dramatic characters are simplified, easily recognizable and over life-size.” The simplified creatures of a single mood in Baroque opera carry out this definition to the letter; they are the natural vehicles of the Baroque composer’s emotions and thought. They are also likely to disturb the ordinary plausibilities of the “normal” theatre, even though there can be no question that Auden’s postulate has a great deal to recommend it. True drama does not involve minutiae of “characterization,” the petty naturalistic surface of minor habit. It is the representative aspect of character that we, used to naturalism, no longer recognize and experience, though it must be added that by trying to avoid minutiae, Baroque opera often ran too far in the other direction. The dramatic composer, as opposed to the playwright or the novelist, feels a single mood, observes a single aspect of life with extreme intensity, and it is inevitable that he should wish to exclude everything else as irrelevant. Thus in an opera a character may represent no more than jealousy or innocence, a single quality detached and intensified, the figure made complete only by the music. And often there is even less realism than is implied by such a procedure; a single mood may be expressed not only in one character but in a large part of an opera. For this reason ordinary methods of telling a story can be neglected in an opera while the attention of the audience is still held.
The Baroque opera composer is invisible, and to most modern lovers of music—as well as to many music historians-nameless as well. True, there is a fine Scarlatti by Dent, a fascinating Lully by Prunières, and a valuable Jommelli by Abert, but judging by the continued obscurity of these composers, few in a position of artistic leadership have read them. Furthermore, almost all this Baroque opera is in manuscript or rare early editions; of the entire 17th century all we have at our disposal in modern printed editions, if we do not count Lully, are less than a dozen works. As to the first half of the 18th century, Handel’s and Rameau’s operas are available in antiquated editions badly in need of thoroughgoing revision, but otherwise we have nothing but samples before Gluck. It is almost incredible that of Scarlatti we should have nothing in print but fragments. With so mysterious a m
edium as that of the stage it is impossible without trial to know what will “play,” but surely many of these operas would prove viable with very little editorial work. We know from our experience with Cammarano, Piave, and all the other grand-opera librettists that music can lend magic to worn and leaden platitudes.
The historian’s difficulties with this buried treasure are endless. We can seldom date the individual works, cannot pull them out of the current of musical history to the safe banks where they can be examined. To us there are in these works no individual traits by which the composer stakes his claim and avoids being confused with others. There were hundreds upon hundreds of operas, and the Baroque opera became so well constructed and polished that it could belong to anyone and everyone. But this collective character is not purely negative, for this opera expressed with steadily growing confidence and force what the public liked and wanted.
It looks then as though in Baroque opera music was victorious over the composer, and in certain measure music is here indeed the only essential thing, yet the great composers of Baroque opera did not surrender their rights, they only adjusted to the peculiar circumstances of the times. This is what Mozart did, and half a century ago we completely misunderstood him, berating the conventions he felt it necessary to follow. We took away his secco recitatives, reworked his librettos, helped out here and there with the orchestration, and reshuffled the numbers within the acts. A Richard Strauss did not find it objectionable to perform such collegial service for Mozart, as Wagner and Berlioz had done for Gluck and Weber, and indeed, Mozart himself before them for Handel. But today the enlightened musician knows that such editing can be done only with a historical sense and with loyalty toward original conceptions.
The greatest obstacle to the understanding of “old” opera is our overrating of the value of realism. The classic maxim of esthetics is that the real is what we feel as real, what the artist can compel us to accept as real. Improbabilities, illogical time sequences, loose plots are nothing, for the powerful creative mind can make us forget our objections. Or does anyone doubt the reality of the Queen of the Night, sitting on the edge of the moon and singing hair-raising coloraturas? It is impossible and it is absolutely true and real. What we do not feel today is the synthesis of the external and the internal in the Handelian Baroque opera; his inwardness is not yet so morbidly intensive as that of the Romantic composers, there is not yet present the desire, the necessity, to follow every mood to its final psychological roots. The Baroque dramatist—though not the choral composer—usually stops before the ultimate door, nor does he see external events in all their hard brutality and strong sensuality. As a consequence, the two extremes are not so far removed from each other that they cannot be held in an organic whole. To us the heroes of this old opera seem more passive than active; they are acted upon rather than acting, and their heroism often seems prescribed rather than achieved. It can be said of any one of them that he acts as that kind of man would act, but seldom as he, a significant individual, would act; he is a type. But there is still in them much of the spirit of that great cradle of our civilization which supplied the favorite subject of these operas, even if the characters often indulge in long-winded exegesis and in crvptic or allusive dissertations about the riddles of ancient history and mythology.
The modern opera public demands variety and a lively pace, but in Baroque opera variety of moods and rapidity of action would impede the aim, which is the depiction of single moods requiring little action. Metastasio, the “Sophocles of Italy,” knew this, and while he has often been reproached for being frosty and formal, in reality his fine librettos present the quintessence of Baroque dramaturgy: the more the center of motivation moves away—that is, the more the external, visible factors gain in their determining force upon the drama—the more the affective struggle moves inward. In opera this is expressed in pure lyricism; the means become the end, wherefore (to us) the hierarchy of things becomes uncertain. Yet this is still the drama of idealism, powerful and intense, but we no longer recognize it as such, for individualism as a problem of life dates for us from the advent of middle-class culture following the French Revolution—and the Handelian opera is purely aristocratic.
What makes it very difficult for the modern operagoer to assimilate Baroque opera is that movement and action are more in the style than in the drama; the music does not need constant attachment to the libretto. Moreover, the struggle for expression in the old Baroque composer is not easily perceptible to the uninitiated; to us it seems smooth, subdued, and equalized, whereas in the Romantic works the smoke of the battle always hangs over the scene. Critics of Baroque opera say that the weight of its “eternal pathos” renders it monotonous, but this weight is the lead on the sole of the cothurnus, and to the Baroque audience it was congenial, for it appealed to a well-developed collective understanding for style. This collective feeling was not something vague or fluid—the jury can have a much more characteristic profile than the single judge. The Baroque composer may be less powerful than the collectivity that created the style, but he possesses muscles that he can flex under beautifully cut garments. He does have originality; since this originality, however, was within the boundaries of the collectivity it is no longer apparent to us who have no such sense of stylistic oneness and cannot conjure up the spirit that animated the Baroque audience, to whom “originality” meant not new songs but characteristic variants of eternal themes. The Baroque composer—and often his public—knew the previous musical settings of the libretto upon which he was engaged, as did his librettist who reworked older models sometimes with little or no change, or used plot and characters approximately in the same spirit. They knew them well, even if the material was fifty or seventy years old.
It would be a great mistake to assume that this 18th-century public was naive, ready to accept any cliché; nor was it a mere consumer to whom the publisher or impresario sold goods made by a stranger; it was a federation dedicated to music and including within its own ranks composer, performer, and audience. We are speaking, of course, of the Italian public, for Baroque opera was thoroughly Italian, but the same is true of the Italian “islands” such as those in Dresden, Vienna, and London. We might add that the fate of this Baroque opera was not so dependent as our own on the brilliance or failure of the composer, for the public riveted its attention on the artistic conditions of the genre rather than on what happened to the individual contribution.
There is a parallel to Baroque opera in the Elizabethan theatre. Indeed, one often stops when reading Shakespeare to enjoy an unexpected association, the gait of a line or two, to consume it in sips, like good brandy. The action, even the story, is of little importance, often conventional; Shakespeare himself cared neither where he found his stories nor how he manipulated them. What is great in the plays, the philosophical heights, the wondrous art of characterization, the imponderable beauty of language and verse, the lyricism, the imagery, the lavish description of nature, the epic certainty of the milieu, and the profoundly felt moods —all these are independent of the quality of the action. But it is far more difficult to recapture Baroque opera than Baroque dramatic poetry; the music is much more elusive than the words. Handel, the opera composer, seems to the modern opera public a ghost coming from the remote past, of which practically all traces have vanished. The textbooks all pay homage to the operas, whose titles are listed like the clubs in a substantial citizen’s obituary, and they deplore these operas’ unsuitability for our time, while praising their melodies. Even the great musicologists of the last century, from Chrysander onward, seem to have acquiesced in the general opinion that these operas are lost forever, that they cannot be resuscitated for modern audiences. Of all Handelian scholars of the older generation, Hugo Leichtentritt approached this problem most intelligently when he refused to accept the various operatic reforms as necessarily constituting progress. “The Handelian opera is neither rationalistic nor sentimental but fantastic storytelling. Those who do not like fairy tales wil
l of necessity regard these operas as childlike, flat, and lacking content.” Then he spells out his opinion with precision by saying that the Handelian opera is pure Gefühlsmusik, not weighted down with psychological complications. This was said a good many years ago, and has since been ably seconded by Hermann Abert, Donald Grout, and a few others, yet most critics and historians still cannot see anything in Handel’s operas beyond a stubborn insistence on forcing upon the English public something it did not want: a genre doomed to almost aimless struggle, conflict, failure.
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WHEN WE SPEAK of Baroque opera we must distinguish between opera of the second half of the 17th century and that of the early 18th. The older opera, though often bizarre and unconscionably complicated as well as heterogeneous, was nevertheless true music drama. It often abounded in pointless episodes and comic incidents, but in the great scenes it rose to true tragic eloquence.33 In Handel’s time the older opera turned into the “concert opera,” enthusiastically abandoning itself to the sensuous attraction of the human voice. Beautiful melody and ravishing singing became the principal aims; the melting arias not only changed opera but vitally influenced all music. The reflective arias tended to convey not the personal feelings of the protagonists but generalized feelings themselves, thus adjusting the independent life of sensuous music more or less externally to the drama. This made it possible to put together the many pasticcios, in which composers took successful numbers from earlier operas and tacked them onto more or less new scores for the gratification of both singers and public. In a word, what was being said became less and less important than how it was said.
George Frideric Handel_Dover Books on Music Page 21
