A FRIENDLY correspondent, whose letter exhibits more gentlemanlike politeness than musical judgment, has mildly reproached us for the contempt we have expressed for the Italian opera, I Capuleti e Montecchi. Of this work we hoped never to hear further mention, but the grave remonstrance of our correspondent, who desires that his communication may not be published, induces us to insert a critique, a very just and able one, from the German Iris, of the 21st of June last, by which our friend will perceive that foreign critics do entertain the same opinion of this last production of Signor Bellini, as that universally felt in London.

—— As to the opera itself,—says the German writer, M. Rellstab,—it is like many other modern works, which we might find ample fault with, if we found but a footing in any part which was good or beautiful, so as to be able to separate the bad and to submit the latter to criticism; but when a thing is awry on all sides,—if no part of it display rationality of ideas, much less beauty, where is a poor critic to begin? Begin? whether we start from above, from below, at angles or across, whether we skim like a swallow over the work, weaknesses will present themselves at every step. But suppose he has begun, where is he to leave off? but no matter, let us venture upon the task. Why is everything to be censured? Why is criticism to demand absolute perfection, since the art itself cannot arrive at it; and since the greatest work of art must fall short of the desired perfection, at least as far as regards an author who culls his labour to a strict account? Goethe himself confesses unceremoniously, that a work of art can never be finished: why should we, Dii minorum gentium, not subscribe to that opinion? Why should criticism take into its head to attain a greater perfection? No such thing! The reader therefore shall be served with more critical aphorisms;—a critical thunderstorm, with some flashes of lightning. But ad rem! The overture, a charivari more destitute of ideas, a more unmeaning ding-dong of instruments, a more mawkish whine of melody, has never reached my ears or eyes. Verily the overture is invaluable! it is as if it were prefixed to the work as a sort of board, with the warning ‘Here nothing is to be gained, a mere triumph of insipidity is celebrating within.’ It is, indeed, a bold thing to speak thus of a renowned man, who has the public so much on his side. Honest Germans! Honest Viennese in particular!—for you more especially constitute the public of Bellini—I have but a poor opinion of you who can live tens of years without hearing Gluck, who can find Mozart antiquated, and Beethoven’s Fidelio and Weber’s Euryanthe dull and tedious. From that which you reject and spurn, we may judge to a nicety of the value of that which you choose. But let us proceed: choruses, arias, recitativos, everything runs helter skelter, without rhyme or reason, into each other, and at cross purposes. Tebaldo sings like Romeo; Romeo like Lorenzo; Lorenzo like Julia; the enemy like the friend; the happy like the miserable; the lover like the deadly foe. How divine! how perfectly freed is the critic from the odious task of entering into the sense and meaning of a work of art! How heavenly a state of existence when the mind is absolved from all exertion, when we may stretch our limbs comfortably, gape away, and enjoy the dolce far niente! I myself had nearly fallen into this pleasing state; I felt as if I had exclaimed, ‘Pursue your musical sounds; blow on, whistle, fiddle, and drum away; drag the melody through endless suspensions like a chain of sighs, then let it rattle off like a Dutch alarm clock, which enhances the enjoyment of sleep, because it just renders us conscious of being asleep. But how is all this? How comes it that every thing penetrates but skin deep? How? because the question was to write something which should not remind the hearer that he possessed a heart or brains; or, in short, that he was an intellectual being. But surely this problem might have been solved by the composer in a less offensive manner. Fifths and octaves will split the tympanum of a New Zealander, of a buffalo; will rupture the asses’ skin of a drum itself. Oh, Signor Bellini, you really are going beyond a joke with our poor ears! Faults and crudities are permitted, we allow, but such lumps and clumps of faults which would make an elephant stumble, such blocks, ought surely not to have been strewed across my critical path. The public, it is true, regards them as genial mountains, as aËrolites dropped from the moon, or a something else unheard of before. Ah, if they remained but unheard! if they were but inaudible! but there are many abodes upon earth, and I will add, there are many sorts of ears.

Dearest friend,—I hear my readers exclaim,—we perfectly perceive that you will never cease censuring; but do pray begin to bestow your praise too. Courteous readers of the Iris, the latter is more difficult than to leave off finding fault. You fancy perhaps I need only say the composer writes advantageously for the voice; really that would be one of the most barefaced fibs that I could be guilty of, according to my notion of what constitutes genuine song. True it is, that he writes for vocal caricature, for the very destruction of the vocal art, in which everything noble and beautiful stands a fair chance to be thus ruined. Although there may be found, here and there, singers who know how to transfer what is great and valuable in their art, even to such specimens of its degeneracy and abuse. And this indeed is the sole reason why the operas of such composers maintain their ground in Italy; they afford opportunities to a singer destitute of true feeling of showing his vocal volubility and execution, and of creating astonishment by such means; while to the great singer they present a field for compensating by his art, that which the brainless author was incapable of producing. But in the eye and ear of the true connoisseur, such productions must ever remain monsters. Bellini, and still worse Rossini, laugh at the idea of expressing words or feelings by means of music; inasmuch as the most insipid, commonplace ideas are often resorted to, to depict situations of the most intense interest. But let it not be thought, after all, that the composers or the public intend to forego this requisite expression. Far from it. The singer is expected to supply this desideratum, and thus coarse minds get hammered into them that which is insupportable to a cultivated taste; in the same manner as children or savages look upon a glaringly rouged and tinselled doll as a decided beauty, while to a cultivated eye the sight is revolting. In this doll, we no doubt trace the embryo of an attempt at the beautiful, as much as in Bellini’s finales, which, like the papier machÉ busts in barbers’ shops, with their full blown cheeks and inch deep rouge, are meant to represent loveliness.

Jam satis! But is there really nothing whatever to be praised? For the true judge in the art, nothing? Here and there we distinguish an evanescent bubble, as it were, of some little melodic beginning, which just proves that, as in the most obdurate being, the spark of what is good is not totally extinct,—so in the most perverted taste, and in a state of its greatest degeneracy, there will still lurk some remains of the feeling for the beautiful inherent in our nature. Of this kind are the Romance, however supported by the most clumsy harmony—the funeral dirge of the young maidens, &c. &c. But enough: were I to begin to enumerate the mere germs of what is good, I should have to do the same with the full-leaved, full-blossomed weeds, in which case, my critique would probably occupy the whole of the future numbers of the Iris for the remainder of the year.