Essay by Bernard Van Dieren [click for bio]

PART II OF IV

[Born: 27 December 1887, Rotterdam (The Netherlands)]
[Died: 24 April 1936, London (England)]

PART I
1. Small Pride and Great Prejudice

PART II 
2. Ineffectual Ghosts and Contemporary Caricatures 

PART III
3. The Highfalutin Standard

PART IV
4. Begone, Dull Care

From "Down Among the Dead Men" and Other Essays, Oxford University Press 1935

2. Ineffectual Ghosts and Contemporary Caricatures

'The People', according to the Encyclopaedists, were 'right, good, and just.' But Phocion did ask the crowd, 'What imbecility have I spoken that you should applaud me?' Meyerbeer was cultured and sensible enough to be aware of this, and more, to grasp the implied ethics. He honourably rejected the cynical precept to smile at the public's jeers and applause if only their gold flowed into his coffers. He knew all about the popular addiction to his music. Yet he had the artistic decency not to exploit it. He could confidently have written his dozens of operas. He could have palmed off on doting audiences his 'Legend of Joseph' and 'Ariadne auf Naxos'. But, whatever the belated insinuations of his enemies, he was too great an artist.

The timidity that has been accounted to him for weakness came from his conscientiousness. The doubts and apprehensions that in his later career impeded his production derived from his artistic responsibility. He understood well enough what were the tendencies that bred his popularity. If he took his public seriously he would not therefore be held in such subjection as to mistake its grounds. But he is no longer given credit for that, although it implies rare qualities of mind. It has become the custom to treat his works with a supercilious smile. Midgets who at the height of his fame would have been tremblingly craving his favours, write him down as a musical crétin. They remember his unforgivable successes, and also the cringing of their ancestors. They now try to restore some of the tribal self-respect by an ostentatious contempt.

Meyerbeer was not, in the fullest sense of the term, a great man. Let us assume that he was one of the smaller of the nearly great. This still puts him far above the mediocrities that gladden the hearts of scribblers who thank their paper gods for minor artists to extol. It is revolting to observe the eagerness with which some of his critics are trying to repair the errors of their predecessors. [4] None of the tribe like to be reminded of the servility which erected a pedestal whose height in the end appalled them.

Newer leaders of public opinion are as lustily shouting: 'Great is Strauss of the Prussians', and 'Great is Stravinsky of the Choreographers', as their forebears roared the praises of the one and incomparable Meyerbeer!

I have often tried to find out whether people who were speaking of Meyerbeer's operas with confident disdain could have been acquainted with them. During the last twenty-five years there has not been much opportunity of hearing his operas. There were a few performances of 'Le Prophete' at Covent Garden, occasionally one of 'L'Africaine' at Berlin, and rare appearances of the same works on the stages of the Milan Opera House and the Metropolitan in New York. I have heard some of these, and I can say that the performances had so little to do with the actual music that unless a hearer had studied the scores with the greatest care) he could only have the haziest impression of what the music originally was. Some years ago Londoners might have had an opportunity of testing this for themselves, provided they had been acquainted with the score of the 'Huguenots'. Unfortunately, few people who heard the 1925 performances could have had many previous experiences by which to make comparisons. If any one had set out gratuitously to cause further harm to Meyerbeer's reputation, he could not have done better than present so offensive a caricature as was seen at Govent Garden on that occasion. But it could not have been deliberately perpetrated. The motives presumably were so mixed that they must remain obscure. Financial expectations were too unfavourable to make the possibility of bad faith admissible. But while the offence cannot have been committed with malice, music-lovers had no reasonable chance to form a judgement. If to settle an historical query we had recourse to exhumation, and found a coffin filled with stones, who would be bold enough to say that one of these must have been the tenant's heart? It would seem fairer to conclude that there was some mistake. Why pretend that the stones had any connexion with the monumental one bearing the name of the missing principal? But how many listeners could have an inkling of the situation when, at that lugubrious Covent Garden ceremony, we were invited to recognize in a fantastic abortion one of Meyerbeer's most vital works? The majority of the audience were defencelessly deluded into the belief that they looked on the ungalvanizable remains of a creation that had once been unaccountably glorified.

We shuddered at something that was not even the ghost of the opera. It was sheer nothingness. Apparently no one concerned in the production had any convictions about the work, or even the interest to simulate them. The mangiest stage properties had been considered good enough. The orchestra was evidently unprepared; there was nothing to break the intolerable tedium of the singers, and the polite audience could not have known that they heard an unforgivable pot-pourri of a score that for its effects depends chiefly on dramatic coherence and logical structure. Even then it proved impossible to destroy some of those vocal numbers that had preserved Meyerbeer's memory long after his position as an operatic composer second to none had been undermined.

The worst consequence of this outrageous affair was that it spoilt Meyerbeer's chances of a fair hearing in London for many years to come. Yet some one moved by genuine interest must have planned the revival. But apparently no one had understood the first causes that to-day militate against the acceptance of Meyerbeer's operas.

Almost every musician is so enormously cultured as to call Scribe's libretti execrable. It is generally conceded that good taste demands their rejection. But why the book of an opera should possess literary value is not so easy to see. The demand is irrelevant. As if one were to insist that a painter must only work on the finest material. When the painting is good, we do not feel unhappy because it is on canvas instead of silk or ivory. In fact, one feels that a simple panel or canvas is properly the material preferred by the best masters. Insistence on literary value in a libretto has paradoxically become most marked since Wagner's homespun libretti, in which no one today affects to discover exceptional structural or poetic qualities. See what a proud pretence can do! One would have to search long to find anything more preposterous than the 'hotgospeller' treatise on disease and faith-healing dramatized in 'Parsifal', with its doyen of sufferers -- an inoperable case -- its authentic and its unorthodox practitioners, its chorus of trained nurses with Klingsorian instructions, and the dark lady spreading the troubles against which the most cunningly prepared remedies prove all but useless. All this conveyed in the true adepts' jargon, which makes one feel that only knowledge of the cabbalistic gestures admits to the privilege of the magic circle. [5] This allegory is treated with portentous solemnity, while the books of some of the greatest operas are spoken of as abominations. Common sense alone ought to make us sceptical about this. To take a few proverbial examples: could the book of the 'Zauberflote' be as bad as it is called? Would Goethe have been so impressed with it as to write a sequel?

And 'Il Trovatore'? And 'Robert le Diable'? They must possess some exceptional qualities to have lasted in spite of plausible criticism. The fact that they enabled composers to write good music should be enough to make us pause.

Can one write a good opera to a bad book? Can one write good music to a really bad text? Does not the quality of the music speak for inherent merit in the text, although to any one but a creative musician it might remain hidden?

Probably there is a fine balance that represents the coefficient of useful failings and embarrassing beauties. The precise proportion of the factors is immaterial. What matters is that however much a libretto may now appear absurd, inadequate, offensively silly, it enabled a composer to write inspired music. [6] His inspiration was found in and between the librettist's lines. Whatever Wagner may have said about the texts of those Mozart operas which he liked least, they achieved something to earn our gratitude when they inspired Mozart to write music which he did not call forth from the chaos.

The appeal to a composer's imagination is a high distinction. When it provides a foundation on which the composer erects his edifice it fulfils its most ambitious purpose. The book for an opera should not be 'too good'. Composers who tried to use literary masterworks without adaptation, instead of a rough sketch like a woodcut over which to brush the colour of their music, invariably failed. When Boito the poet provided impeccable texts for his own operas, he failed, apart from his insufficiencies as a composer, to make them live musically because he attempted to make one harness suffice for horse and mule. When he wrote a libretto for Verdi, he had to listen to the innumerable objections of a musician who could unhesitatingly tell when the words were too good for the purpose, or the exposition of the dramatic knot either too subtle or too precise for musical treatment. Verdi kept him to the practical point -- to the merest poetic commonplaces, the best for the occasion. Whenever Boito became abstruse or original, he found himself pulled up by the composer who had learnt all the hard lessons of the theatre. Often against his will he was directed to produce something usefully neutral that could be made to live by the ardency of music. 

Even gifted song-writers make the mistake which the experienced dramatic composer avoids, of obtruding music on perfect poetry. Seldom has a composer added anything to words like Goethe's 'Der du von dem Himmel bist', and then, significantly, in a setting which (like that of Loewe) avoids dramatic accentuation but gives the singer a simple symmetrical line that least interferes with the listener's familiar reaction to the poetry. Generally speaking, the best songs can be written only to words which by themselves are incomplete. These need music: not the others that by their loveliness move the musician to emulation.

Mozart found in Da Ponte's unpretentious lines all the suggestions he required for the ordering of dramatic conceptions which in embryo were crying out to be born. [7] Unerring instinct in all such matters makes Mozart what he is. He could not have written anything so true and profound if he had used Milton's or Klopstock's untouched lines. Neither could he have been so heroically comic or erotically witty if, instead of taking an adaptation of Beaumarchais, he had been ill-advised enough to set the original words of Rabelais or Boccaccio.' Schikaneder was the man to write an opera libretto, not Keats. Metastasio produced better books for opera than Dante or Ronsard could have.

If Wagner believed that there was only one poet who could write books for his operas, and that poet's name was Wagner, it was because in his estimation there was one man who could do everything better than any one elseWagner. Had he been able to overcome this megalomania, he might have found his Boito, and it would be easier to-day to admire Wagner without having to become a Wagnerian. It might have been better for him; certainly pleasanter for his audiences. Only he could not help taking his texts as paranoically seriously as he took himself. An occasional licence with the sacrosanct words might have been good for the music. But he dared not take liberties with his own literary products.

Wagner has been as fantastically successful as, at his hungriest, in his Paris days, he dared dream to make up for the depressing reality. So we are mostly inclined to take him at his own valuation and accept his own treatment of his own words by his own standard. Maybe this is justice. When, however, we apply that standard to the works of other composers we certainly commit an injustice. We appraise them by a measure never meant to be universally applicable. There may exist a natural equilibrium of text and music, but when the Wagnerians announced that only The Master achieved it, this was because they grew impatient when his highly personal methods were not admitted quickly enough. It has become the fashion to test operas for purity according to the Wagner standard, as if this were an unquestionable criterion, very much as, after a successful political revolution, all citizens' deeds and intentions are judged by their conformity to the victorious shibboleths.

Footnotes to Part II

[4] The author of a popular kind of tradesmen's catalogue of Orchestration refers contemptuously to a much-quoted passage for bassoons from 'Robert': 'The less said about Meyerbeer and his rubbishy thirds the better.' But it deserves mention that dealing with a passage from Berlioz which he admits he has never heard, the same author informs his readers that 'it probably sounds very nasty'. Presumably the world would be incomplete without such critics. (See C. Forsyth, 'Orchestration'.)

End of Part II

Go to Part I

Go to Part III 

Go to Part IV