Cecil Gray "History of Music"

Excerpts from
The History of Music

By Cecil Gray

"The History of Music" by Cecil Gray (1895-1951)* 1935 ed. published by Knopf, New York, within the series "The History of Civilization"

These excerpts from the Second Edition, pp. 201-210 from the Chapter "Italy and Germany, 19th Century"

*Gray was a Scottish composer and renowned critic.

See also, Cecil Gray "A Note About Meyerbeer" from "Contingencies and Other Essays"

In his Vie de Rossini, written in 1823, Stendhal compares the German and Italian operatic traditions to two great rivers which, taking their rise in different and widely separated regions, like the Rhone and Saône, might similarly come together. « Ces deux grands courants d'opinions et de plaisirs différents, representé aujourd'hui par Rossini et Weber, vont probablement se confondre pour ne former qu'une seule école; et leur réunion, à jamais mémorable, doit peut-être avoir lieu sous nos yeux, dans ce Paris qui est plus que jamais la capital d'Europe ». It speaks highly for Stendhal's prescience that his prophecy should have been realized within a few years of its being made, by Meyerbeer, in whose operas, written for the Paris stage, the characteristically Italian melodic idioms of Rossini and Bellini are to be found side by side with the elaborately colouristic orchestral style of writing introduced by Weber.

It has long been the fashion to decry Meyerbeer even to the extent of denying him the possession of any redeeming features whatsoever, apart from a remarkable orchestral virtuosity and an unerring sense of theatrical effect, but this is altogether too harsh and sweeping a verdict, and one which is not warranted by an impartial and dispassionate examination of his works. It is true that in order to do him justice we must to a certain extent discard purely aesthetic standards of judgment and take into consideration the time at which he wrote and the enormous influence which he exercised. The fact of the matter is that we are apt to debit Meyerbeer with the undoubted weaknesses and faults of his music, and to credit others with many admirable conceptions which are originally to be found in his work. Passages which everyone admires in the art of Wagner and of Verdi, for example, are often nothing 'more than thinly disguised variations, adaptations, and elaborations of suggestions embodied in the scores of their much maligned predecessor. In a word, all that was fruitful and enduring in Meyerbeer's art has been assimilated by others and has become public property, while only its by-products and detritus are recognized as his own. Even so, much of his music, judged by the more exacting standards, is by no means as contemptible as it is generally supposed to be by those who are content to receive their opinions ready-made, or pre-digested, from musical primers and elementary text-books. How many people, one would like to know, have ever looked at the score of Struensee, which contains some of his best music? By far the greater part of Les Huguenots, too, despite the cheap sneers it elicited from the critical confraternity at its recent revival at Covent Garden--when the unfortunate work was first cut about and disfigured until it was entirely unrecognizable and then atrociously performed--and a great deal of L'Africaine as well, will sustain favourable comparison with any dramatic music of its time. The chief reproach made against Meyerbeer consists in his alleged insincerity, but whether it is justified or not, it is at least certain that the insincerity of a man of talent like Meyerbeer is preferable to the sincerity of a mediocrity. Sincerity, indeed, is too often only the consolation prize that we award to the "also-rans" of art, of whom it is impossible to say any more than that they possess it; the fact that we do not say so of Meyerbeer is a proof that, although he may not be one of the first in the race, he is certainly not among the last.

In one respect the prophecy of Stendhal was not fulfilled. Meyerbeer did not actually found a school. The Italian and German traditions which came together for a moment in his work eventually separated again, although they both continued to .bear evident traces of their momentary confluence for some time, and attained two of their highest points in the art of Verdi and of Wagner respectively.

The artistic careers of these two great masters present a similar combination of analogies and differences to that which we have already had occasion to note with regard to Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, or other similarly assorted pair's of contemporary figures in musical history. They were both of them born in the same year, and both of them developed slowly and painfully from the most unpromising beginnings to the attainment of absolute mastery. There is as little to be said for Oberto and Il Finto Stanislao as for Die Feen or Liebesverbot. While Wagner's sway eventually extended over practically the whole of Western Europe to the Alps, Verdi remained unchallenged in his supremacy beyond them; in the words addressed to Attila in his early opera of that name -- ''Avrai tu l'universo, restì l'Italia a me"-- there would almost seem to be a prophetic allusion to the rôles which the two great masters, one the accredited representative of Latinity and the other the all-conquering Teutonic barbarian, were subsequently fated to play on the stage of musical history. Both composers too, apart from their artistic significance, are figures of great cultural importance. Wagner was a symbol of German unity and expansion; in his Meistersinger, which is primarily a glorification of German civilization and a hymn in celebration of its triumphs in the fields of both art and war, he quite consciously speaks as such through the mouthpiece of Hans Sachs. In the personality of Verdi, on the other hand, is strikingly prefigured the aspirations of Italy, her struggle to attain independence, and the eventual triumph of the Risorgimento. It was not merely because the letters of his name, by an astonishing coincidence, stood for "Vittorio Emmanuele, Rè d'Italia ", that the cry Viva Verdi was the rallying cry and watchword of the Italian people during the critical years; but also because at a time when the written and even the spoken word was so closely scrutinized and censured that the public expression of political sentiments was virtually impossible, Verdi made the most innocent and unexceptional passages in his librettos, which escaped even the alert eyes of the Austrian officials, implicit with ardent revolutionary sentiments by virtue of the sheer force and point of his music, thus helping to sustain the spirit of the common people -- like Tyrtæus in ancient times--which alone, in the end, made victory possible. Examples of this kind of thing are to be found throughout the works written during the critical period: the chorus in I Lombardi, "0 Signore dal tetto natio ", "Io ho la lingua, egli ha il pugnale" in Rigoletto, "A Carlo Quinto (by whom was implied Carlo Alberto, king of Sardinia, and father of Vittorio Emmanuele) "sia gloria ed honor" in Ernani -- all illustrations of the truth that, to adapt the words of Beaumarchais, what is too dangerous to say in words can be sung to music. In this way it is probably not going too far to say that Verdi played a more important and decisive part in the liberation of Italy than even Mazzini, Garibaldi, or Cavour themselves, individually, although the fact has yet to be recognized by historians.

In his own artistic development, too, Verdi is a symbol of the risorgimento and the achievement of Italian independence, for in his two last and best works, Otello and Falstaff, he finally succeeds in purging his art of the last remaining traces of foreign influences, and arrives at the creation of a wholly personal and essentially, Latin style. It is important that this should be recognized, for these two master-works are generally represented as having been written under the influence of Wagner -- a truly fantastic suggestion, and one for which there is not the slightest justification. Anything less Wagnerian either in spirit or in style it would be impossible to imagine. Verdi was never in the slightest degree indebted to his great German contemporary. It is true that there are traces of foreign influences in the works which precede his two masterpieces, in Aida particularly, and also in the Vêpres Siciliennes and Don Carlos, both of which were written for the French stage, but it is not the influence of Wagner, but of Meyerbeer. In other words, any superficial resemblances that may be detected here and there between the later Verdi and Wagner are simply the outcome of an influence to which both were subjected. This Meyerbeerian element is even to be found in such a comparatively early work as Il trovatore, written long before Wagner became a dominating force in music. As Dannreuther rightly says in the "Oxford History of Music", "the rôle of Azucena is but that of Fidès in Le Prophète of Meyerbeer, translated into Romany ", and Aida is musically little more than a grandiose pendant or sequel to L’Africaine.

Verdi's occasional use of the leit-motiv, moreover, is strikingly different from that of Wagner; it is associated, not so much with individuals or definite objects as in the Ring, but rather with ideas and emotional situations, as in Otello for example, where a theme from the love music of the first act recurs at the close of the work. The continuous texture of Falstaff, again, so far from being Wagnerian, is of identically the same kind as is to be found in the old Venetian opera of Cavalli or in the Incoronazione di Poppæa of Monteverdi, in which aria and recitative are so interpenetrated with each other and interfused as to form a homogeneous arioso style which is neither one or the other. This fact lends additional force and significance to Verdi's often-quoted dictum "Tornate all'antico e sara un progresso ". In short, the legend -- for it is nothing more -- that Verdi was influenced by Wagner in his last works, and that their excellence is due to this cause, is simply a palpable piece of propaganda on the part of the Wagnerians, to whom the idea that excellence could be achieved in any other way than by the wholehearted acceptance of the principles and methods of their idol, is anathema. So far from it being true, the greatness of Falstaff is largely the consequence of its diametrical opposition to and independence of the art of Bayreuth. When Nietzsche, in his vitriolic attack on Wagner, sought for a form of operatic art which he could oppose to that of the latter, he was compelled for lack of anything better, to fall back upon Bizet's Carmen, and thereby greatly weakened his case; for Carmen, though certainly a charming little work, is far too slight and unimportant a thing to stand comparison for a moment with the majestic and monumental creations of the great German master. Falstaff was then, unfortunately, still unwritten; otherwise Nietzsche could hardly have failed to recognize in it the living embodiment of his artistic ideals, for which he had hitherto sought in vain -- "a mocking, nimble, volatile, divinely undisturbed, divinely artificial art, which blazes up like pure flame .into a cloudless sky -- a music which, unlike other music, would not die away, nor pale, nor grow dull beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear Mediterranean sky ".

It is by virtue of this work, and Otello also, that Verdi lives for us to-day, and, it is fairly safe to say, will continue to as long as music itself. Aida, despite its great reputation and popularity, is a very much overrated and somewhat disagreeable production, impure in style, grandiose and pretentious in conception. It is essentially a transition work, and like so many works of which this can be said, less perfect and less satisfying than others which are comparatively immature. It belongs to a stage of development similar to that of adolescence, possessing neither the charm and innocence of youth, nor the wisdom and dignity of complete maturity. Infinitely preferable to it are some of the earlier works, such as Rigoletto, La traviata, and even Il trovatore, with their immortal, sublimely vulgar barrel-organ tunes, which will continue to haunt the ears of men for centuries to come, despite the horror and disapproval of all the pedants, past, present and future.

While Verdi's artistic development consists in a gradual elimination of foreign impurities and in the final attainment complete individuality through a process of refinement and concentration, Wagner's steady advance towards mastership is, on the contrary, a process of triumphant assimilation and expansion. He seems almost to suck the strength and from the art of all his predecessors and contemporaries, one by one, like a vampire, leaving them pale and lifeless; he does not so much sum up the work of others, as Bach does, but rather robs them -- in Rienzi Meyerbeer and Spontini, in the Flying Dutchman Marschner, in Tannheuser and Lohengrin Weber, in Tristan and the Ring Liszt, in Die Meistersinger Bach even, in all of them, of course, Beethoven -- these are only a few of the more obvious sources from which he derives his artistic substance. But there is hardly a single composer of note that he does not forcibly lay under contribution, including even the most unlikely people. The Liebestod in Tristan is unmistakably a gigantic expansion of the final scene from Bellini's Norma, the Rhine music in the Ring is the working out and elaboration of a motive in the Melusine Overture of Mendelssohn, and the influence of Chopin's iridescent chromatic harmonies is in evidence throughout the entire work of his maturity. Few composers have actually invented less than Wagner; not even Handel has ever turned to better use the inventions and discoveries of others, and in this miraculous power of assimilation and reproduction, combined with a lack of original creative power, he typifies the Teutonic spirit, of the nineteenth century at least.

Yet this gigantic musical synthesis was not even an end in itself, but only one single element in an even greater art-synthesis. Wagner might justly be called the Napoleon of music, for in the same way that the latter sought to establish. a world-empire and used France merely as a means to the accomplishment of his purpose, so Wagner aimed at the creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, embracing all the arts, in which music was only to be one among many means, though possibly the most important of them all, to this end. In order to attain his ambition he was as willing to sacrifice the interests of music as ruthlessly as Napoleon sacrificed the lives of his French subjects. When Wagner declared that music should only be the means to the end of drama, we are reminded of Napoleon's contemptuous exclamation made in the course of negotiations with Metternich -- "what are the lives of a million French soldiers to me" ! No ruler with the interests of his subjects at heart, no composer with the interests of music at heart, could possibly speak thus; and the explanation of it is to be found in the simple fact that Wagner was no more a true musician at heart than Napoleon was a Frenchman. As Wagner himself admitted in one of the expansive moods of cynical and disarming frankness which he occasionally allowed himself in conversation with his intimates, and which a strongly remind one of the great historical figure to whom we are comparing him, he learnt to compose music as one learns foreign language. He gradually mastered the medium completely, and was eventually able to express himself with perfect ease in it, but, like Napoleon, he never lost his accent.

We find here the explanation of the peculiar qualities of Wagner's art, so different from those of any other composer who has ever lived, and the secret of his popularity with masses and with the average, semi-cultured man who is interested in the arts in a vague way only, and of his popularity with musicians. There is nothing specifically: musical in his thought. He was one of these men of potentialities who could probably have expressed himself just as well in any other artistic medium, or at least in some other. Bad though his poetry and prose may appear, critically considered, they are certainly no worse than his early music; and it is more than probable that if he had chosen to take the trouble of perfecting himself in this direction rather than in music, he would have been as great a writer as he became a composer.

The reason why Wagner adopted music as the principal vehicle for the expression of his ideas is simply to be found in the fact that music was, more than any other art, the dominant art of the nineteenth century, and the one best fitted to his purposes. As I sought to show in "A Survey of Contemporary Music", we shall generally find that at any given period there is one art in particular which best expresses and embodies the values of that period. "In the Middle Ages, for example, the predominance of architectural conceptions and methods is immediately noticeable . . . . the characteristic art-expression of the succeeding era, to which all the others continually tend, is painting -- the eighteenth century is primarily that of literature . . . . and similarly neither the consummate literary achievements of the century, nor the splendid hierarchy of the French painters from Delacroix to Cezanne, can alter the fact that, collectively speaking, music is the art of the nineteenth century -- the medium which, better than any other, realizes and embodies the characteristic aims and ideals of the time, and which alone could adequately express them." This is only a bald summary of the argument which is there developed and illustrated at length. The seeming paradox that during this period literary conceptions are perhaps commoner in music than ever before, so far from militating against the truth of this statement, tends rather to confirm it; for as a result of this aptitude of music for expressing the romantic values, the medium attracted to it many artists such as Wagner, who as we have already suggested, would probably in other times have expressed himself in some other way. The idea and conceptions underlying Wagner's art of that vague, indeterminate, universal order which is not bound up with any specific artistic medium, and might just as well be expressed in any of them. Wagner, in fact, was a condottiere of the arts, whose sword was at the disposal of whichever of them could offer the most advantageous terms for his services or the best opportunities for distinguishing himself; and, as it happened, it was music at that particular period that was best able to do so, in the same way that France served as the instrument of Napoleon's ambitions.

For a time the impossible seemed to have come true. Bayreuth became the artistic capital of the world, to which all the emperors, kings, and petty princes of the arts flocked to do homage to their conqueror; and the Revue Wagnérienne, whose contributors represented the intellectual élite of every form of artistic or philosophic activity, was founded at Paris. Wagner's reign, however, was as short-lived and as insecurely based as that of Napoleon. The subject arts arose in revolt and, shaking off his yoke, regained autonomy; poets, painters, dramatists, and philosophers, "crept out again to feel the sun ". The Wagnerian Empire of the Gesamtkunstwerk crumbled into dust. Even the kingdom of music itself, which was the instrument he employed to subjugate the other arts, renounced its allegiance, and restored again the true principles of the art and the great masters of the past to the throne from which they had been banished by the great usurper. Left weak and exhausted, however, by the fierce Wagnerian domination, music to-day is hag-ridden by the alien and equally pernicious influences of literature and the plastic arts.

It is exceedingly difficult for us of the present generation to do justice to Wagner, or to arrive at any final and impartial conclusions concerning the permanent value of his gigantic achievement. As after a great war, we can only see destruction, the damage, the irreparable loss it has entailed the irretrievable harm that his reign has done to the art music, from which we are only now beginning to recover. benefits can only be apprised by a later generation which ceased to suffer from its effects.

It is true, of course, that many, perhaps even most, artists produce a similar effect on the minds of their successors, and that it is only the figures of lesser rank and smaller who, probably because they suggest more than they actually achieve, exercise a benign, fruitful, and stimulating on those who come after them. It is even possible that greater an artist is, the more devastating his influence; and is conceivable that the successors of Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, felt a despondency and hopelessness similar that which modern musicians feel to-day after Wagner. feels that there is a difference, none the less, between him and them, a definitely pernicious quality in his work, quite from its shortcomings--indeed, one feels it even more in best work than in his worst--which has poisoned music for generation, and from the effects of which we are only beginning slowly to recuperate.

However that may be, there can be no two opinions concerning the gigantic stature and demoniac vitality of the creator of this vast world-empire of art. Whatever of his actual tangible achievement survives, whatever the nature of the influence, that remains, he is, abstractly considered, unquestionably of the most significant and arresting figures not merely in all music, but in all art; and of all his works the one which is most likely to be accounted his masterpiece, despite faults and intolerable longueurs, is surely the Ring -- one of grandest and most ambitious artistic projects ever and carried to completion by a single human brain, comparable in its immensity only to such gigantic creations as the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages or the temples of Bore Budur, at which whole generations have laboured.

Similarly, you may wish to research the following articles about Meyerbeer on this site:

Cecil Gray "A Note About Meyerbeer" from "Contingencies and Other Essays"

Bernard Van Dieren, from "Down Among the Dead Men" and other essays

Moritz Moszkowski

George Sand from Lettres d'un voyageur

Reynaldo Hahn

Max Brod -- Embracing Meyerbeer: A Challenge to the Jews -- Some thoughts of Max Brod, Robert Ignatius Letellier and Chaim Nachman Bialik

Heinrich Heine

Giuseppe Mazzini -- thoughts and writings compiled by Marco Pellegrini in English and Italiano

Walt Whitman Poem from Leaves of Grass