Music

SINCE Gounod’s Faust was first brought out in America with Miss Kellogg and Signori Mazzoleni, Biachi, and Bellini in the leading parts, no operatic novelty has created such general enthusiasm as has Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon¹ with Miss Nilsson, Mademoiselle Duval, and M. Capoul. We mention thus particularly the most prominent features in the casts ot both operas, as their almost immediate popularity was probably in a great degree due to the singers themselves. Without Miss Kellogg as Marguerite, and Signor Biachi as Mephistopheles, an opera in a then so unaccustomed style as Gounod’s Faust, with such a marked tendency to embrace the arioso and recitative forms, and to discard the set forms of cavatina, caballetta, and aria, could hardly have sprung so rapidly into popular favor as it actually did. With the exception of the March, the Waltz, and Siebel’s “ Flower-song,” there was little, if anything, in Faust immediately to catch the popular ear ; and the real great beauties in the opera were probably only appreciated some time after it had already become firmly established as a general favorite. What of poetical and dramatic beauty remained in Goethe’s story after its distortion by the operatic prism of MM. Barbier and Carré, helped greatly, no doubt, to make the opera popular ; but the story of Faust, well known as it was to our public, had not become so interwoven with our daily intellectual life as it had in Germany, and the characters of Margaret and Mephisto were too vague in our minds to have appealed so directly to our sympathies, unless presented to us with the vivid dramatic force that they were by Miss Kellogg and Signor Biachi.

What Miss Kellogg and Signor Biachi did for Faust, Miss Nilsson and M. Capoul have done for Mignon. MM. Barbier and Carré have treated Goethe’s story this time with even less respect than before. As the Berlin Kladderadatsch said when Mignon was brought out there : “ Wilhelm Meister went not long ago to Paris, and there he met two Frenchmen by the name of Barbier and Carré who put him into such a state that on his return even his most intimate friends did not know him.” Indeed the French librettists have succeeded in turning out nothing better than quite a good libretto, “as libretti go.” Better than most libretti, inasmuch as the scenes follow each other in a natural, unforced way, and have some connection with each other instead of being merely a series of disconnected tableaux, such as we see in “ Scenes from the life of St. A——,” in old German and Italian compartment pictures. No better than the generality of libretti, inasmuch as the characters, with the exception of Mignon herself, are no characters at all, merely dressed-up puppets that serve as convenient vehicles for a given amount of music and quasidramatic action.

As for the music, the prevailing impression that we received from hearing the opera was that of having heard it all before. Without perhaps laying himself open to the charge of direct plagiarism, M, Thomas has so benefited by the example of Meyerbeer and Gounod, that one finds it difficult to see any individuality in his music. Every number of the opera bears marks of the most careful elaboration, and throughout the work we find passages which prove the composer to be a contrapuntist who has, to say the least, studied carefully and conscientiously. His themes, although rarely distinctly original, are generally very pleasing, especially many of those little strains in the minor which have a quaint, piquant, gypsy air, if not quite free from a certain French artificiality and stagy refinement that rather lead us to mistrust their spontaneity and genuineness, and make us feel much as the old lady from the country did about Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle in the last act, when she exclaimed, “ My ! how clean he hev kep’ his linen all this time ! ” The one stroke of originality in the opera is the first theme of Philine’s Polonaise “ Je suis Titania la blonde,” which is thoroughly charming, the opening phrase alighting on an inversion of the chord of the ninth being particularly bewitching. The second theme of the same number is very pretty, light, and taking, though it somewhat lacks the cachet of the first; but it is treated with great skill, and the little accent upon the last note of the bar saves it from being entirely commonplace. The allegro of the overture is principally built upon these two motives. The opening polonaise theme is skilfully, although perhaps too heavily, instrumented for its light character, and is quite effectively worked up, though without any pretension to contrapuntal display or particularly elaborate treatment. In the treatment of the second theme M. Thomas has come to grief on that rock which has shattered the respectability of so many modern French and Italian composers, namely, the abuse of the cornet à pistons. The nature of the figure itself, composed as it is of the notes of the common triad, seemed to invite the crackling little instrument to try its voice upon it, and the fatal ease which modern mechanism has given the cornet of lending itself indiscriminately to melodic passages in any key made the temptation too strong for the composer to resist, and the lively little theme which on the violins or some of the lighter wind instruments might have been thoroughly fascinating even if trivial, on the cornet becomes vulgarized to a mere quadrille tune, worthy of nothing better than a circus or a dance-hall. The last eighteen or twenty bars of the overture seem hardly in keeping with anything else in the opera, and must be regarded rather as a gratuitous display of fireworks to give éclat to the performance and astonish the audience.

The most perfect number in the opera, though not the most original, is the little entr’acte before the second act, which is in every respect worthy of old Father Haydn himself. But after all there is something unsatisfactory in most of the music. We feel too often the want of an internal necessity in the musical development, and there is hardly a passage in the opera that seems to have sprung spontaneously either from a dramatic or purely musical necessity, hardly a progression that seems to hold its place by the divine right of fitness, and because it and nothing else could satisfy the demands of the situation. The counterpoint has rather the air of having been thrown upon the themes than of being the natural outgrowth of the themes themselves, and we find ourselves often inwardly groaning over the amount of work the composer has lavished upon merely ornamental details, instead of being carried away by the beauty of an elaborately perfected whole. The sextet in the first act, which is perhaps the most pretentious number in the opera, is little more than an agglomeration of musical phrases of the sort that contrapuntists call “passage-work,”—a series of modulations, sometimes of great beauty, it is true, but only beautiful as modulations, gathering nothing from their mutual relations as parts of an organic structure. It is rather like one of those pages of “Studies from the Antique ” in drawing-books, where arms, legs, and other disjointed members of the human body are thrown together in artless confusion, interesting to the student and connoisseur from their intrinsic beauty, but wanting the master-hand to combine them into a living organism.

As for the character of Mignon herself, both librettists and composer have mercifully done as little about her as possible. The part is both musically and dramatically very like those blank patches in the halfworked specimens of worsted-work that we see exhibited in the shop windows, and which the purchaser can fill out as her fancy dictates. That the part as performed here is so irresistibly charming is wholly due to Goethe and Miss Nilsson. Composer and librettists sink into utter insignificance in comparison. The most important part musically is that of Philine. With the exception of the duet with Lothario, Légères hirondelles, which is charming in melody and skilfully worked out, the music assigned to Mignon is as uninteresting as may be. The song, Connais tu le pays ? and almost all the music of the third act, that is, almost all the music that is written in any other than the light opéracomique vein, is but a weak dilution of Gounod and Meyerbeer, that is, at times, almost painful from its want of either musical or dramatic force and interest, The music of Lothario is so hopelessly dismal, that the otherwise inoffensive old man becomes a perfect incubus before the opera ends. In the Berceuse, “ De son cœur j'ai calmé la fièvre,” M. Thomas has made one of those dreary attempts at so-called “ classical ” purism that one meets with sometimes in modern French composers. Here he has imitated Meyerbeer in one of his most questionable tendencies. After having half crazed his audience by setting off at once all the musical pyrotechnics at his command, Meyerbeer would sometimes do penance in some bit of musical crust and water of most ascetic simplicity, and hurl it at the heads of his bewildered critics as if in proof of his own artistic respectability. As an accomplished contrapuntist, M. Thomas no doubt also wanted to show what he could do dans le style sévère, and write something after the manner of “ the old masters,” with a sop to Cerberus, to be sure, in the shape of a lazily persistent drone-bass, in order that an audience accustomed to float languidly down the tide of Gounod’s sensuous, dreamy sentimentality might not be frightened away by this display of ungarnished erudition. But in imitating “ the old masters ” M. Thomas, like his predecessor Meyerbeer, has fallen into the error of the man who thought he could become a painter by working with one of Albert Dürer’s brushes. He has worked with their tools instead of reproducing their workmanship, and in place of a composition has given us a carefully written exercise. The music allotted to Wilhelm is easily fascinating throughout, and quite in keeping with the small amount of individuality that the libretto has allowed him. The Romance in the third act, Elle ne croyait pas, is beautiful in its opening phrase, and, although it may somewhat lack vital decision of outline, is the most successful piece of sentimental writing in the opera.

One of the most valuable additions to the musical literature of the day is Dr. Hans v. Bülow’s edition of Beethoven’s Pianoforte works,² beginning with Opus 53. This edition deserves a high place among the many contributions to art and science which the world owes to German industry and perseverance. The first part, which now lies before us, contains all the sonatas from Op. 53 to Op. 111, inclusive ; two sets of Bagatelles, Op. 119 and Op. 126; thirtythree variations upon a waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120; and the posthumous Rondo a Capriccio in G, Op. 129. All these works are accompanied by the most copious and exhaustive explanatory foot-notes, by the editor. Explanatory, not in the quasitranscendental Berlioz fashion of finding various poetical, extra musical suggestions in the music, but from the more purely musical point of view of one who has, after a long course of faithful study, grown to understand and to reverence the great

master for what he really was, rather than for what he possibly might have been. For where Berlioz, in his perfectly sincere, though superficial subjectivity, found in Beethoven’s compositions only a strong magnifying mirror wherein he saw reflected with hundred-fold intensity his own poetical fancy, Von Bülow has found a transparent glass through which he looks objectively at the vivifying musical germ beneath. As a pupil of Liszt, and a musician who has lived and studied under influences in a great degree opposed to the tendencies of the Leipzig and Western German schools of to-day, Von Bülow might well have been expected to approach his subject in a spirit more congenial to that of Beethoven’s later works, than any of the disciples of what has, with a certain grim irony, been called the “ Modern-Romantic ” school. But in-keeping clear of the Scylla of antiquarian pedantry, he has taken good care not to be drawn into the Charybdis of sentimentalism, which latter extreme might have been feared for one of the followers of Franz Liszt. Unfortunately for those students who do not read German with great ease, Von Bülow has clothed his thoughts in that curiously involved diction in which German science delights to find expression; but in defence of this may be said that, however much the German Kathederstyl lacks perspicuity, it is certainly unrivalled in exactness of expression. The sentences have the definiteness of algebraic formula, though like them they often have to be carefully worked out before the meaning is clearly intelligible. The constant use of French and Italian words and expressions might be called affected by some, but the author has never used a foreign word where a German one would have been equally expressive, and, far from quarrelling with what at first might seem a blemish in style, we are often compelled to admire the wonderful appropriateness of the terms he uses.

Besides explanations of the musical significance of the compositions, the author has given most minute directions for the technical part of performance, which, coming from a pianist of his vast executive ability and experience as a teacher, cannot be estimated too highly. We would heartily recommend this edition to all Beethoven lovers and students.