What do ye singing? What is this ye sing?

Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon.

Several factors have united in causing a new interest in the opera of Italy. In so far as New York is concerned the singing together of two such admirable exponents of the art of bel canto as Mme. Marcella Sembrich and Enrico Caruso has restored to life some of the older works, while a recent visit of Mascagni and the frequent performances of Puccini's "La BohÈme" and "Tosca" have directed serious attention to the tendency of the younger art. The struggles of the youthful school to maintain its national characteristics in the face of its own yearnings after the flesh-pots of Wagnerism have afforded an absorbing spectacle for observers of musical progress.

The leader and master of all these young eagles was, of course, the incomparable Verdi, the most characteristic composer of opera Italy ever brought forth. But although he showed them all precisely how to mingle the fruits of the new fields opened by Wagner with those of the old Italian soil, they have not always wisely accepted his instruction. They have sought for independence in manner, and in some instances with disheartening results. But perhaps a cursory review of some of their achievements may not be in vain.

Doubtless the casual observer will be struck first by the instrumentation of these modern Italians. Puccini's scores certainly offer abundant food for study, and his clever adjustment of the leading motive scheme to the instrumental background of a thoroughly Italian vocal melody, as in "Tosca," is an accomplishment not to be passed by with a smile. If we compare the scores of such works as those of Puccini and Mascagni with the works of the Donizetti period, we note with astonishment the immense strides made in the use of the orchestra.

But we must not be deceived. The Donizettian period was one of reaction. The Gluck-Piccini battle had not long since been fought out in Paris, and the principles of dramatic verity in opera had once more been vindicated, but at the cost of a great public weariness. The classic polish and repose of Gluck's music were intellectually satisfying, but his scores lacked the vital heat to keep warm the blood of the artistically indolent. To this day the best works of Gluck invite our admiration, but seldom awaken our feelings. The idle, pleasure-seeking public of Europe soon turned again to its strumming ditties. It threw itself at the feet of Rossini, and within forty years after the establishment of Gluck's superiority in Paris the whole Continent was beating time to "Di tanti palpiti."

Once more the Voice was the deity of the operatic stage, and woe betide the composer who so wrote for his orchestra as to interfere with its supremacy. Rossini, who had artistic aspirations in spite of all his insincerity and intellectual laziness, made many improvements in operatic writing. It was he who first omitted from an opera all use of the old-fashioned dry recitative and used throughout that which has the support of the orchestra. He enriched the manner of writing for horns and clarinets, and he introduced instrumental effects which later composers have adopted with good effect. But, nevertheless, "William Tell" was a failure, and Rossini sulked in his tent for thirty years, while Bellini and Donizetti turned out their nursery operas, in which the orchestra has been likened to a "big guitar."

The advance in orchestral writing in opera after this time is often erroneously attributed wholly to Wagner, but undoubtedly it is the king of all musical charlatans, Meyerbeer, who should have the lion's share of the honor. When Wagner was a young, struggling, and utterly unknown composer, seeking for an opening in Paris, he threw himself at the feet of Meyerbeer, who was the idol of both the French and the Prussian capitals. Meyerbeer's operas were already known throughout Europe, and to their cheap and tawdry orchestral effects the later composers no doubt owed the suggestion that with the orchestra much might be said that could not be given to the voices. Subsequently the leaven of Wagnerism permeated European musical art, but the despised Meyerbeer undoubtedly pointed out to many writers the path which led back toward the true source of Italian operatic composition.

For in the beginning of opera, Monteverde experimented with orchestral effects, chiefly descriptive, to be sure, but indicating what might be done. Lully afterward developed some ideas as to dramatic expression in the instrumental score, and these were further expanded by Gluck. The progress along this path was checked temporarily by the reaction in favor of cheap tunes for the display of voices. Verdi took up the development of the orchestral part of Italian opera where Rossini left off, and in his early works wrote in a style that bears more than a family resemblance to that of "William Tell." But Verdi was a man of broad vision, an assimilator of universal ideas, and he was not slow to recognize the drift of operatic art. He discerned the rising importance of the orchestral score and realized the full value of the instrumental adjunct. In "AÏda" he utilized to their utmost capacity its resources in coloring and in "Otello" he placed in the orchestra some of the most important and significant passages of his music,—passages which went further than anything in the setting of the text itself toward the complete explication of the emotions working in the drama. In "Falstaff" he used the orchestra as a commentator on the humor of every situation, and even succeeded in making it aid in the interpretation of Falstaff's ridiculous philosophy.

One has only to hearken for a minute to Mascagni's use of the basses in "Cavalleria Rusticana" to recognize the source of his knowledge. "Otello," with its wonderful bass recitative in the murder scene, was produced in 1887; "Cavalleria Rusticana" was brought out in 1890. Mascagni's dramatic treatment of the orchestral part of the lyric drama is no mere imitation, however; it is a part of the general movement in Italian opera which began with Verdi's "AÏda" and which may without difficulty be traced back through Boito's "Mefistofele" (of which the first version was produced in 1868) to Rossini's "William Tell." The advance was akin to that made in all species of music. The first experiments were in the direction of description by means of imitative figuration. These are what we find in "Tell." The allotment to the orchestra of the emotional background of the drama was bound to come later, in the natural order of things. Mascagni stands in the direct line of progress in this matter, and his contribution to the general results is, though small, nevertheless worthy of remark.

How much he and Leoncavallo and Puccini owe to Ponchielli would be hard to determine. The composer of "La Gioconda" was somewhat ahead of his time, and his work was not fairly understood when it was new. But in one feature of operatic composition suggested by this work all the later composers seem inclined to go too far. They are striving to follow Verdi in his earnest attempt to set every phrase of the text of "Otello" to music perfectly adapted to the expression of its meaning. But Verdi avoided the fatal error into which these young Italians are falling. He never went so far as to obliterate from his scores all trace of melodic character.

If one were to take a dozen or twenty pages of "Tosca," "Pagliacci," "Iris," and "Zanetto," shuffle them together and then play them, it would be almost impossible for any ordinary lover of music to distinguish the writing of one composer from that of another. "Zanetto" sounds as much like Puccini as like Mascagni, and the composer of "Iris" might have written almost any page of "La BohÈme." This work, however, bears the same relation to Puccini's other works as "Cavalleria Rusticana" does to the other operas of Mascagni. It is well supplied with clearly formed melodies. That is the real reason of the wide popularity of "Cavalleria Rusticana." Rarely sinking below the level of passionate expression demanded by the intense tragedy of the story, it is always purely lyric, and its melodies stamp themselves upon the memory.

The other works for the most part seem to wander along in endless stretches of melodious phrases, which have no closely organized relation to each other. They sound well, for these Italians have the trick of writing well for the singer. But they are open confessions of a fear of becoming tuneful in the old Italian style of Donizetti and Rossini. These young men seem to be constantly on the verge of writing in the aria form and of avoiding it only by thrusting in some unnatural modulation or some unexpected cadence. They seem to be striving for an endless melody, like Wagner's, which is not congenial to them. They forget that when the emotional conditions of the scene pointed to melodious music Wagner was frankly melodic, and that he wrote as lyrically as Schubert himself, though naturally constructing his melodies on a larger frame. Think of the joyous carol of the Rhine maidens in the water-woven vision of the first scene of the great trilogy; of the hard-wrung tribute of the crafty Loge to "Weibes Wonne und Werth"; of the love song of Siegmund, the duet between him and Sieglinde, the heart-rending farewell of the stricken god in the last scene; of Siegfried's Titanic cradle song to his infant sword; of the nightingale twitter of the forest bird, of the throbbing love duet of the third act of "Siegfried"; of the ebullient duet in the first scene of "GÖtterdÄmmerung"; of the chorus of Gunther's men, of the narrative of Siegfried, and of the stupendous threnody of BrÜnnhilde's immolation. Wagner was not afraid to write songs when he needed them in his art.

It is a grave mistake to sell the Italian birthright of vocal melody for a mess of orchestral pottage. And it is altogether unnecessary. These young Italians must let alone their attempts to set reason to music. Their latest librettos contain too much philosophizing and not enough passion. Zanetto is altogether too sophisticated to be typical. Sylvia thinks too much. Osaka in "Iris" is altogether too much a man of the world. Iris is a human doll. Kyoto is an accomplished speculator in human folly. These are not figures to be animated with great music. They forbid its presence. These young Italians must get back to a realization of the fundamental truth that music is the speech of emotion. Love, hate, fear, elation, depression, grief,—these are for music to interpret. But you cannot discuss Christianity and positivism in lyrics, nor make intelligent comment in six-eight time on the causes of poverty. The limitations of music are far smaller even than those of lyric poetry, yet its field is as large as that of the true drama, for it is that of all human emotion.

Do they need a model? Well, there is one of whom they seemingly know not. Away back in the years before even Rossini assailed flaccid Paris with the strenuous peal of "William Tell," a German boy of seventeen wrote in 1814 a song called "Gretchen am Spinnrade," and the following year he cast upon the waters that marvellous condensed drama "Der Erl-KÖnig." In the five minutes of that one song by Franz Peter Schubert lies the history of a human soul. It is an epitome of emotion, and the piano does quite as much as the voice—but not more—in the expression. If the young Italians would like to learn something more than they already know about the way to build condensed opera, let them study the songs of Schubert. There they will find a solution of the problem of how to combine perfect vocal melody with a dramatic accompaniment without sacrificing one iota of dramatic verity.

An additional question of high import is whether these young firebrands are not setting the torch to the roots of nationality in their art. It is useless for theoreticians to argue that there is no nationality in music. There is nationality in all art, and the "Virgin" painted by Rubens is a Flemish woman just as surely as she is Italian when limned by Michael Angelo. There never was a German who could have conceived the lilt of "Funiculi, funicula," nor an Italian who could have composed "Schwesterlein." No Russian could have penned the dainty "Pierre et sa Mie," nor could a Frenchman have imagined "Ay Ouchnem." Only an Englishman could have written "Rule Britannia," of which Wagner said that the first four measures contained the whole character of the English people.

Nationality shows itself most conspicuously in song. Instrumental music is at best an artificial species. Its forms, its methods, are handed from one nation to another, and the Harvard graduate builds his symphony upon the Viennese model of Papa Haydn. But the musical idioms of a people cannot be kept out of their songs. The folk song was ignored successfully for a thousand years, but in certain happy days of the Middle Ages it wooed and won the fugue, and modern music, strong with the strength of musical science, beautiful with the beauty of spontaneous emotional utterance, was the fruit of this union. But for all time the idiom of the folk song colored the vocal art. The musical idioms imposed themselves on the scientific basis, and when a German or a Frenchman or an Italian composed a song, he composed it with a counterpoint common through all Europe, but with the melodic idiom of the songs of his own people.

The Italians of to-day have not wholly forgotten the essentials of their native melody. Indeed, their composing betrays a deep self-consciousness. They see the character of their own music and try to escape it, and it is of this very act that complaint is here made. But the fundamentals of Italian melody are not entirely lost. The pages of Puccini's "Manon," "La BohÈme," and "Tosca" are not completely devoid of song which is indisputably Italian. No one would ever mistake it for French or German. But it is no longer the melody of Donizetti and Bellini. That is well. The Italian masters of the beginning of this century wrote tunes for their own sake without thought of their dramatic expressiveness, and Donizetti did not hesitate to stop the entire action of his "Lucia" at one of the most critical points in order that the famous sextet might be sung.

The modern Italians do not fall into that sort of error. They are striving with all their power to compose dramatically. They are striving, too, to preserve Italian music, and for this all honor should be shown them. More than that, they have shown plainly the path along which Italian music should advance. They have demonstrated beyond question that the aria, which was the central sun of the old Neapolitan system of opera, is wholly unessential. They have shown that the dialogue of the lyric drama can be carried on in a musical speech which is melodious, but not dominated by musical patterns. They have illustrated to the full the possibilities of a flexible and eloquent recitative. They have carried to a high degree of excellence the art of fitting the musical accent to the word, and the contour of the phrase to the natural inflection of the speech. This they have done, too, in the full knowledge that their art in this detail is quite lost upon the general public and appeals only to a few studious critics of their music.

They have abolished from the Italian stage the foolish repetitions of lines of the text as syllables on which to hang cadenzas. They have wiped out the empty colorature song, designed solely for the amazement of groundlings and for the glorification of the prima donna. They have almost terminated the career of the prima donna herself, and substituted for her, if not the singing actress of Wagner, at least an acting songstress. They have placed Italian opera beside French in its honest search after theatric directness. Italian opera is no longer music and nothing else: it is what its early fathers intended it should be, drama per musica.

The movement of the young Italians toward dramatic verity, as already noted, did not originate in a weak surrender to the conquest of Europe by Wagner. The "Gioconda" of Ponchielli, produced in 1876, shows not a single trace of Wagnerian influence; and yet to that work as much as to any other are the young Italians indebted. They have travelled the path on which Ponchielli was moving, but they have gone much farther than he did. Ponchielli utilized the orchestral forces with high skill, and his dramatic recitative was far ahead of that found in Verdi's earlier works. For a second-rate master he attained extraordinary influence over his successors. Alas! that suggests that they are even less than second-rate, and it is quite possible that the near future will decide that they were less than third-rate. But we of the present must take them as they appear to us, and endeavor to learn from their works whither operatic music is tending.

Boito's "Mefistofele," which is as old as 1868, gave these young Italians much to think of, so much indeed that one can trace a good deal more than a family resemblance between the introduction of Mascagni's "Iris" and the prologue in heaven in the Boito work. But the young men have striven again to make advances. That they have endeavored to introduce into their music an Italianized Wagnerism is the fault for which they must be most severely blamed, for in doing this they have wandered away from true nationalism and have betrayed their birthright.

It is not possible in a brief essay to point out the details of the methods of these young men. It may be said, however, that what they have apparently striven to do is to rear a distorted vocal structure, composed of the elements of the older Italian singing style, upon a foundation of acrid, restless, changeful, distressful harmonies. It may perhaps be injudicious to find fault with them for this, for no thoughtful observer of musical progress can fail to see that toward something new and strange in harmonic sequences all music is advancing. One needs only to think of the French operas of Bruneau and Charpentier, the piano music of the young Russians, the vast orchestral tone-riddles of Richard Strauss. If the use of strictly technical terms may be allowed, the harmony of to-day is no longer diatonic; it is not even chromatic; it is the harmony of the minor second. In other words, it is the harmony in which the sharpest of all dissonances, that of two tones only a semitone apart, is prevalent. In the presence of this style of harmony the chord of the diminished seventh becomes as gentle as the tonic triad, for music is filled with what the eloquent and witty James Huneker once happily called "diseased chords of the twenty-sixth."

This style of harmony is not natural to Italian music. The genius of Italian song is utterly opposed to it. The proclivities of the Italian people are inimical to it. It is not adapted to the methods and traditions of the Italian lyric drama, and it has not been found necessary by the writers of the greatest masterpieces of Italian opera. Verdi and Boito were able to construct their notable works without it. Mascagni, on the other hand, has forced his music into this uncongenial way. His "Iris" teems with harsh and discordant harmonies, and in order to set the melodic voice-parts on this uneasy basis he has been compelled to twist the melodic curves of Italian song into unseemly angles.

Now these are facts. Just what they are to signify in the progress of musical art only a very confident person would venture to predict. Where is Italian opera? That question we may answer. Whither is it going? To that we can only hazard a reply. We may, too, be wholly wrong in supposing that it is an evil day for art when Italian opera sacrifices anything of its intense nationality for the sake of rivalling the drastic music-drama of Richard Wagner. Critics are not prophets. They can only study the conditions of art in their own day, and try to reconcile them with those standards which the experience of time has shown to be the highest. As Mr. Webster once intimated, the only way to judge of the future is by the past. That method points to the conclusion that nothing good will come of the effort to dethrone the national genius. On the other hand, this effort looks amazingly like a confession of weakness.

It looks as if the young Italians were not of fruitful inventiveness in the production of thematic ideas. All the good tunes have not been written yet. John Stuart Mill confessed that for a time he was troubled with a fear that because there were only seven tones in the scale all the possible melodic ideas were nearly exhausted. But it has been noted that in spite of the immense drain made on the scale by Bach and Mozart and Weber and Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann there were still tunes enough to make a Dvorak, a TschaÏkowsky, a Brahms, and a Wagner.