MEYERBEER

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3. The Highfalutin Standard

Meyerbeer has been ridiculed for his methodical use of reiteration. Reformed musicians laughed at his variations, which proceeded to their predestined symphonic end while the text introduced no new version of the idea expounded in the first few words. It is begging the question to criticize such repetitions for precisely that principle which brought them about.

Is it certain that the method is so contemptible? Is the protracted variation of a single literary phrase an aesthetically superior device? Meyerbeer makes his singers repeat a dozen times la vengeance et la foi'; true, but what is so very wrong with that? Only the musically uninformed, who listen to the performance of an opera as if it were drama with a bit of music going on, spiritually speaking, 'behind the scenes', could take exception. Since the music justly demands and must be given all the room it wants, verbal reiteration seems a perfectly legitimate procedure. The praises of Wagner's superior appreciation of literary responsibilities naturally make one ask whether his treatment is really much better, or even intrinsically different.

Meyerbeer, at least, sees to it that a repeated phrase is distributed over the choir, the various ensembles and soloists' parts. In the Wagnerian manner we get the protagonists endlessly addressing each other about such things as 'Liebe und Tod', 'Ew'ge Nacht, Welterlosung', without the relief that changing vocal colours might attain. While he works at his climax he unashamedly lets his singers go through a formidable number of permutations until he has developed the symphonic material. His justification here is no better than that which makes him call an opera a Musikdrama. His nomenclature frequently serves to affirm an originality which otherwise none but the initiated would discover.

Unsre Liebe?
Tristan's Liebe?
Dein und mein,
Isolde's Liebe.

or:
TRISTAN:

Ewig einig
Ohn' Erwachen,
Ohne Bangen,
Namenlos

and:

Can this be poetry before which 'Tu I' as dit, tu m'aimes!' pales into insignificance or stands revealed as sheer rhetoric? Or can we say that 'Plus blanche que la blanche ermine' will not bear hearing next to such doubtful euphony as 'die brautige Schwester befreite der Bruder, zertrummert liegt wasje sie getrennt' ? Generally speaking, Scribe's unpretentiously mellifluous lines stand repetition better than Wagner's barbaric alliterations and grating consonants which stick like burrs.

Even if nothing could be said against the Wagnerian manner, and if three-fourths of all the criticism of that of Meyerbeer could be maintained, it still does not follow that the former is preferable. When we know that singers are only repeating words which at the beginning of the section fixed the mood, we can give our attendon to the musical development instead of wasting it on pretentious depths of meaning in a mystical disquisition proceeding on the stage. Closer examination, moreover, reveals that these are not only as tiresomely redundant as mere repetition could possibly be, but mostly as bombastic as the worst lines of the worst libretti in the old style.

We can better assimilate the course of the music towards a dramatically conditioned point when our attention is not deceived by a pretence of poetic and ethical significance in a text that consists of sheer word-spinning without an honest admission of the fact. The display of symphonic apparatus, by which the Musikdrama evinces its superiority over mere Opera, mostly makes the hearer feel all the more embarrassingly that he is kept eternally rotating round one dramatic spot. He has to seek compensation in the seductive assurance that with a proper understanding of the text's literary beauties he ought to feel his 'soul is moved and purged'. Wagnerians may feel this is a consolation, but there are also intelligent opera-goers who prefer to remain unpurged, and hear the composer get on with the job. Get on, that is, with all of life, instead of a subtly prolonged preparation, slowly, slowly, with the maddening deliberation of Achilles' tortoise-partner, moving to one orgiastic climax in order to have one act of complete collapse, or perhaps one should say, have one complete act of collapse. And to think that there were people who complained of the 'Rossinian crescendo' where a composer lets us participate in a light-hearted vitality which renews itself continually by its own freshness. They didn't know when they were well off.

What has kept opera as a form alive, through all vicissitudes, is not 'the combined appeal of all the arts'.

People like dancing not for theories they may have about rhythm or melody, but simply because they like dancing. And they like operas not for the love of poetry and painting and movement, but simply for the music. They prefer to have music more or less explained to them as it goes on. This, opera does better than 'programme music' could possibly do, and so opera survives the perpetual offensive. If the critics who despise the attitude which sees in opera primarily a musical entertainment needed a test, it could easily be supplied. Present the miming and the choreography of an opera separately, have the drama acted without music; there is not an opera-enthusiast who would sit through it. But we know that in a concerthall the music of an opera can be completely satisfactory, Wagnerians are the first to acknowledge that many fragments of The Master's works gain rather than lose when played in the concert-hall. But I have yet to hear of a Wagner fanatic who could stand a theatre performance of 'The Flying Dutchman' or 'The Mastersingers' without the music! The very thought makes cold shivers run down one's spine.

Meyerbeer is, more than is generally realized, reproached for extra-musical aspects of his works. Few of his critics would hear all those hateful insincerities and trivialities in the music alone if they should hear it outside the opera-house. They would not in his 'Struensee' music or in his 'Fackeltanze' discover the fearsome sins imputed to him. Probably not even in the old popular favourites, like the Bridal March of 'Les Huguenots', or the Arias of Fides in 'Le Prophete'. When it comes to 'Le Pardon de Ploermel' or 'L'Etoile du Nord', one can safely wager that of twenty who turn up genteel noses, less than one has ever heard or seen a note of the work.

Many operatic conventions called unforgivable in Meyerbeer occur in the work of composers not so diligently explored for weak spots, simply because they had not been so irritatingly idolized by the largest public. None of the critics that gibe at the book of the 'Zauberflote' would risk being so sardonic about the music Mozart mysteriously managed to write to it. And although Gluck is often described as a forerunner of Wagner, few experts would care to deny that his 'numbers' lose nothing when taken out of their context. Most of Beethoven's 'Fidelio' can perfectly well stand on its symphonic legs, without thereby becoming weaker as a setting of the text. Berlioz, a most consistent composer of programme music, has given us in 'Les Troyens' symphonic movements whose appeal is quite independent of their dramatic meaning.

The structural intentions for which Meyerbeer is frequently pilloried are exactly those that give his music a coherence which holds good in and out of the theatre. It was never denied that his works were theatrically effective. But too often it has been assumed that therefore they must be insincere and trashy. This criticism is founded on the mistrust that inclines radical thinkers to the belief that every theologian is a Pharisee, every preacher a hypocrite. It may often be true, but ignorance and prejudice combined here tend to raise suspicion to an axiom.

Meyerbeer's method is to let his 'book' arrive at a situation that can be symphonically summed up. There was an originality in this which impressed his contemporaries. Before him, the procedure had been to lead to a lyrical summit where concentrated emotional intensity gave a poetic illustration. Meyerbeer selected the dramatic clashes as props of a swift musical development which cumulatively employed all the resources of his musical powers.

The 'tableau', alternating with the deliberately conventional aria, was a striking innovation of Meyerbeer's; one which legitimately gripped his audience. [8] These thrilled listeners were nowhere near so silly in their admiration of his originality and monumentality as his modern critics would have us believe. It may seem cavilling to censure the expert knowledge of his detractors, but how shall we overlook that they evidently disliked his capacity for extensive melodic structure, his easy-flowing line and luscious orchestral sound, all sustained at once without effort. Yet that very facility is what too serious musicians find difficult to forgive. They prefer a tenuous musical tissue unrolling while the action is tying its knots on the stage, the composer building up a theatrically sound, but symphonically neutral, body of tone. At the climax the protagonists are expected to hold the audience by their histrionic powers. That Meyerbeer should not only have been able to shoulder all these tasks, but also to obey strict academic precepts without neglecting the charm of sound otherwise considered the prerogative of the technically incompetent -- proved more than flesh could bear. It had been taken for granted that it could not be done. When it was done for once respectable musicians concluded that apart from a slight smell of sulphur, there was the unquestionable stamp of charlatanism discernible. Others mistrusted Meyerbeer as they would an astronomer who discovers a new comet every week, or a physician who cures everybody by unexpected and yet rational methods. One knows somehow that it cannot be done, and while waiting to expose the trick one might warn a gullible public they are obviously being swindled, and that they need but a little patience before one can tell them how. Schumann gravely drew a funeral cross on the score of 'Les Huguenots' at a time when he would have been hard put to it to say why this was a dead work waiting for burial. Composer-critics, especially, behaved like exasperated heirs, on tiptoe in an ante-room for the sad tidings, ready to sit on the corpse if it should show signs of returning life. There was the feeling in the air that it was time to end this disgusting success of Meyerbeer. Every self-respecting young musician knew he could prove his artistic integrity by taking part in the movement to overthrow the unspeakable colossus that practically monopolized the market. It was an acceptable and expected feeling. What is not quite so straight is that later critics shared it, that, in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth century, writers adopted the intolerant tone to which their impatient and embittered predecessors felt constrained. It had become superfluous. Yet they made the old superstition so much their own that even now they fulminate against him with the antiquated fervour of a politician insisting on laws against witchcraft.

To some extent the cause of this lasting hostility is that Meyerbeer was at one time the chosen target of neo-classicists as well as of neo-romantics, and, what is perhaps equally important, of anti-Semites and militant Wagnerians. Later critics may not have realized that they identified themselves with German political schisms, French musical quarrels, and personal clique-antagonisms, persisting through generations of standard text-books.

Possibly there were some grounds for the stereotyped reproaches which Meyerbeer's critics monotonously preferred in their diatribes. He may have been even 'insincere'! What if he were? Are we always sure of the sincerity of great composers? One is inclined to question the sincerity of the most attractive figures. The indubitable sincerity of others does not become any more pleasant in consequence. Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, Brahms, and Sir Hubert Parry were, of course, as sincere as any child born of woman. And, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, Loyola, Napoleon, Offenbach and Byron, were not. One cannot escape the impression that the good men are not always the right men.

Meyerbeer's enemies may have been honestly actuated by clean convictions when they attacked Meyerbeer for his alleged habit of offering impressive musical displays where a little less might have served better. Here, one should ask first whether when musical climaxes were obviously indicated, he failed to give all that can be reasonably demanded. If, then, he gave as generously as one could expect with fresh recollections of the feast provided at less urgent moments, it would not be fair to find fault with his lavishness. On that score Meyerbeer has not been found wanting. His worst enemies had to admit that after the dramatic splendours of the 'Benediction des Poignards' in 'Les Huguenots', he contrived a further summit with the lyrical tenderness of the duet between Marcel and Valentine. Let us assume it was achieved by insincerity; we have heard how the whole thing was an afterthought, suggested by a tenor, if not by the legendary fireman. Who would not be insincere if it made him write such music, or the strangely moving last bars of the 'Ô, transports, ô douce extase' of 'L' Africaine', where the sheer emotional penetration succeeds in making us forget a frankly ludicrous situation.

If we judge Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, or almost any composer by the standard of sincerity, can we be certain their work bears close scrutiny? Are the greatest men's purple patches always justified by the implications of previous symphonic development? Do not all composers welcome opportunities to let go? Is it not just this recurring chance which makes opera so irresistible to composers? It is this which makes it immeasurably more than the musical illustration of anecdote.

How the erudite's logical respect for the text leads the conscientious composer to hell, Debussy demonstrates perhaps better than any one else. His emasculated mezzotints forcibly suggest what happens to a man's music if he thinks too much of the poet instead of thinking, as he ought, of music first, last, and all the time.

Footnote to Part III

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