Part 7
I have already spoken of _Dolores_. It is one of a long series of operas and zarzuelas written by Tomás Bretón y Hernandez (born at Salamanca, December 29, 1850). First produced at Madrid, in 1895, it has been sung with success in such distant capitals as Buenos Ayres and Prague. I have been assured by a Spanish woman of impeccable taste that _Dolores_ is charming, delightful in its fluent melody and its striking rhythms, thoroughly Spanish in style, but certain to find favour in America, if it were produced here. Our own Eleanora de Cisneros at a Press Club Benefit in Barcelona appeared in Bretón’s zarzuela _La Verbena de la Paloma_. Another of Bretón’s famous zarzuelas is _Los Amantes de Ternel_ (Madrid, 1889). His works for the theatre further include _Tabaré_, for which he wrote both words and music (Madrid, 1913); _Don Gil_ (Barcelona, 1914); _Garin_ (Barcelona, 1891); _Raquel_ (Madrid, 1900); _Guzman el Bueno_ (Madrid, 1876); _El Certamen de Cremona_ (Madrid, 1906); _El Campanere de Begoña_ (Madrid, 1878); _El Barberillo en Orán_; _Corona contra Corona_ (Madrid, 1879); _Les Amores de un Príncipe_ (Madrid, 1881); _El Clavel Rojo_ (1899); _Covadonga_ (1901); and _El Domingo de Ramos_, words by Echegaray (Madrid, 1894). His works for orchestra include: _En la Alhambra_, _Los Galeotes_, and _Escenas Andaluzas_, a suite. He has written three string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quintet, and an oratorio in two parts, _El Apocalipsis_.
Bretón is largely self-taught, and there is a legend that he devoured by himself Eslava’s “School of Composition.” He further wrote the music and conducted for a circus for a period of years. In the late seventies he conducted an orchestra, founding a new society, the Union Artistico Musical, which is said to have been the beginning of the modern movement in Spain. It may throw some light on Spanish musical taste at this period to mention the fact that the performance of Saint-Saëns’s _Danse macabre_ almost created a riot. Later Bretón travelled. He appeared as conductor in London, Prague, and Buenos Ayres, among other cities outside of Spain, and when Dr. Karl Muck left Prague for Berlin, he was invited to succeed him in the Bohemian capital. In the contest held by the periodical “Blanco y Negro” in 1913 to decide who was the most popular writer, poet, painter, musician, sculptor, and toreador in Spain, Bretón as musician got the most votes.... He is at present the head of the Royal Conservatory in Madrid.
No Spanish composer (ancient or modern) is better known outside of Spain than Isaac Albeniz (born May 29, 1861, at Comprodon; died at Cambo, in the Pyrenees, May 25, 1909). His fame rests almost entirely on twelve piano pieces (in four books) entitled collectively _Iberia_, with which all concert-goers are familiar. They have been performed here by Ernest Schelling, Leo Ornstein, and George Copeland, among other virtuosi.... I think one or two of these pieces must be in the répertoire of every modern pianist. Albeniz did not imbibe his musical culture in Spain and to the day of his death he was more friendly with the modern French group of composers than with those of his native land. In his music he sees Spain with French eyes. He studied at Paris with Marmontel; at Brussels with Louis Brassin; and at Weimar with Liszt (he is mentioned in the long list of pupils in Huneker’s biography of Liszt, but there is no further account of him in that book); he studied composition with Jadassohn, Joseph Dupont, and F. Kufferath. His symphonic poem, _Catalonia_, has been performed in Paris by the Colonne Orchestra. I have no record of any American performance. For a time he devoted himself to the piano. He was a virtuoso and he has even played in London, but later in life he gave up this career for composition. He wrote several operas and zarzuelas, among them a light opera, _The Magic Opal_ (produced in London, 1893), _Enrico Clifford_ (Barcelona, 1894; later heard in London), _Pepita Jiminez_ (Barcelona, 1895; afterwards given at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels), and _San Anton de la Florida_ (produced in Brussels as _l’Ermitage Fleurie_). He left unfinished at his death another opera destined for production in Brussels at the Monnaie, _Merlin l’Enchanteur_. None of his operas, with the exception of _Pepita Jiminez_, which has been performed, I am told, in all Spanish countries, achieved any particular success, and it is _Iberia_ and a few other piano pieces which will serve to keep his memory green.
Juan Bautista Pujol (1836-1898) gained considerable reputation in Spain as a pianist and as a teacher of and composer for that instrument. He also wrote a method for piano students entitled “Nuevo Mecanismo del Piano.” His further claim to attention is due to the fact that he was one of the teachers of Granados.
The names of Pahissa (both as conductor and composer; one of his symphonic works is called _The Combat_), Garcia Robles, represented by an _Epitalame_, and Gibert, with two _Marines_, occur on the programmes of the two concerts devoted in the main to Spanish music, at the second of which (Barcelona, 1910; conductor Franz Beidler) Granados’s _Dante_ was performed.
E. Fernandez Arbós (born in Madrid, December 25, 1863) is better known as a conductor and violinist than as composer. Still, he has written music, especially for his own instrument. He was a pupil of both Vieuxtemps and Joachim; and he has travelled much, teaching at the Hamburg Conservatory, and acting as concertmaster for the Boston Symphony and the Glasgow Orchestras. He has been a professor at the Madrid conservatory for some time, giving orchestral and chamber music concerts, both there and in London. He has written at least one light opera, presumably a zarzuela, _El Centro de la Tierra_ (Madrid; December 22, 1895); three trios for piano and strings, songs, and an orchestral suite.
I have already referred to the Valverdes, father and son. The father, in collaboration with Federico Chueca, wrote _La Gran Via_. Many another popular zarzuela is signed by him. The son has lived so long in France that much of his music is cast in the style of the French music hall; too it is in a popular vein. Still in his best tangos he strikes a Spanish folk-note not to be despised. He wrote the music for the play, _La Maison de Danse_, produced, with Polaire, at the Vaudeville in Paris, and two of his operettas, _La Rose de Grenade_ and _l’Amour en Espagne_, have been performed in Paris, not without success, I am told by La Argentina, who danced in them. Other modern composers who have been mentioned to me are Manuel de Falla, Joaquin Turina (George Copeland has played his _A los Toros_), Usandihaga (who died in 1915), the composer of _Los Golondrinos_, Oscar Erpla, Conrado del Campo, and Enrique Morera.
Enrique Granados was perhaps the first of the important Spanish composers to visit North America. His place in the list of modern Iberian musicians is indubitably a high one; though it must not be taken for granted that _all_ the best music of Spain crosses the Pyrenees (for reasons already noted it is evident that some Spanish music can never be heard to advantage outside of Spain), and it is by no means to be taken for granted that Granados was a greater musician than several who dwell in Barcelona and Madrid without making excursions into the outer world. In his own country I am told Granados was admired chiefly as a pianist, and his performances on that instrument in New York stamped him as an original interpretative artist, one capable of extracting the last tonal meaning out of his own compositions for the pianoforte, which are his best work.
Shortly after his arrival in New York he stated to several reporters that America knew nothing about Spanish music, and that Bizet’s _Carmen_ was not in any sense Spanish. I hold no brief for _Carmen_ being Spanish but it is effective, and that _Goyescas_ as an opera is not. In the first place, its muddy and blatant orchestration would detract from its power to please (this opinion might conceivably be altered were the opera given under Spanish conditions in Spain). The manuscript score of _Goyescas_ now reposes in the Museum of the Hispanic Society, in that interesting quarter of New York where the apartment houses bear the names of Goya and Velasquez, and it is interesting to note that it is a _piano_ score. What has become of the orchestral partition and who was responsible for it I do not know. It is certain, however, that the miniature charm of the _Goyescas_ becomes more obvious in the piano version, performed by Ernest Schelling or the composer himself, than in the opera house. The growth of the work is interesting. Fragments of it took shape in the composer’s brain and on paper seventeen years ago, the result of the study of Goya’s paintings in the Prado. These fragments were moulded into a suite in 1909 and again into an opera in 1914 (or before then). F. Periquet, the librettist, was asked to fit words to the score, a task which he accomplished with difficulty. Spanish is not an easy tongue to sing. To Mme. Barrientos this accounts for the comparatively small number of Spanish operas. _Goyescas_, like many a zarzuela, lags when the dance rhythms cease. I find little joy myself in listening to “La Maja y el Ruiseñor”; in fact, the entire last scene sounds banal to my ears. In the four volumes of Spanish dances which Granados wrote for piano (published by the Sociedad Anónima Casa Dotesio in Barcelona) I console myself for my lack of interest in _Goyescas_. These lovely dances combine in their artistic form all the elements of the folk-dances as I have described them. They bespeak a careful study and an intimate knowledge of the originals. And any pianist, amateur or professional, will take joy in playing them.
Enrique Granados y Campina was born July 27, 1867, at Lerida, Catalonia. (He died March 24, 1916; a passenger on the _Sussex_, torpedoed in the English Channel.) From 1884 to 1887 he studied piano under Pujol and composition under Felipe Pedrell at the Madrid Conservatory. That the latter was his master presupposed on his part a valuable knowledge of the treasures of Spain’s past and that, I think, we may safely allow him. There is, I am told, an interesting combination of classicism and folk-lore in his work. At any rate, Granados was a faithful disciple of Pedrell. In 1898 his zarzuela _Maria del Carmen_ was produced in Madrid and has since been heard in Valencia, Barcelona, and other Spanish cities. Five years later some fragments of another opera, _Foletto_, were produced at Barcelona. His third opera, _Liliana_, was produced at Barcelona in 1911. He wrote numerous songs to texts by the poet, Apeles Mestres; Galician songs, two symphonic poems, _La Nit del Mort_ and _Dante_ (performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time in America at the concerts of November 5 and 6, 1915); a piano trio, string quartet, and various books of piano music (_Danzas Españolas_, _Valses Poéticos_, _Bocetos_, _etc._).
_New York, March 20, 1916._
Shall We Realize Wagner’s Ideals?
Shall We Realize Wagner’s Ideals?
Historians of operatic phenomena have observed that fashions in music change; the popular Donizetti and Bellini of one century are suffered to exist during the next only for the sake of the opportunity they afford to some brilliant songstress. New tastes arise, new styles in music. Dukas’s generally unrelished (and occasionally highly appreciated) _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_ may not be powerful enough to establish a place for itself in the répertoire, but its direct influence on composers and its indirect influence on auditors make this lyric drama highly important as an indication of the future of opera as a fine art. Moussorgsky’s _Boris Godunow_, first given in this country some forty years after its production in Russia, is another matter. That score contains a real thrill in itself, a thrill which, once felt, makes it difficult to feel the intensity of a Wagner drama again: because Wagner is becoming just a little bit old-fashioned. _Lohengrin_ and _Tannhäuser_ are becoming a trifle shop-worn. They do not glitter with the glory of a _Don Giovanni_ or the invincible splendour of an _Armide_. There are parts of _Die Walküre_ which are growing old. Now Wagner, in many ways the greatest figure as opera composer which the world has yet produced, could hold his place in the singing theatres for many decades to come if some proper effort were made to do justice to his dramas, the justice which in a large measure has been done to his music. This effort at present is not being made.
In the Metropolitan Opera House season of 1895-6, when Jean de Reszke first sang Tristan in German, the opportunity seemed to be opened for further breaks with what a Munich critic once dubbed “Die Bayreuther Tradition oder Der missverstandene Wagner.” For up to that time, in spite of some isolated examples, it had come to be considered, in utter misunderstanding of Wagner’s own wishes and doctrines, as a part of the technique of performing a Wagner music-drama to shriek, howl, or bark the tones, rather than to sing them. There had been, I have said, isolated examples of German singers, and artists of other nationalities singing in German, who had _sung_ their phrases in these lyric plays, but the appearance in the Wagner rôles, in German, of a tenor whose previous appearances had been made largely in works in French and Italian which demanded the use of what is called _bel canto_ (it means only _good singing_) brought about a controversy which even yet is raging in some parts of the world. Should Wagner be sung, in the manner of Jean de Reszke, or shouted in the traditional manner? Was it possible to sing the music and make the effect the Master expected? In answer it may be said that never in their history have _Siegfried_, _Tristan und Isolde_, and _Lohengrin_ met with such success as when Jean de Reszke and his famous associates appeared in them, and it may also be said that since that time there has been a consistent effort on the part of the management of the Metropolitan Opera House (and other theatres as well) to provide artists for these dramas who could sing them, and sing them as Italian operas are sung, an effort to which opera directors have been spurred by a growing insistence on the part of the public.
It was the first break with the Bayreuth bugbear, tradition, and it might have been hoped that this tradition would be stifled in other directions, with this successful precedent in mind; but such has not been the case. As a result of this failure to follow up a beneficial lead, in spite of orchestral performances which bring out the manifold beauties of the scores and in spite of single impersonations of high rank by eminent artists, we are beginning to see the Wagner dramas falling into decline, long before the appointed time, because their treatment has been held in the hands of Cosima Wagner, who--with the best of intentions, of course--not only insists (at Bayreuth she is mistress, and her influence on singers, conductors, stage directors and scene painters throughout the world is very great) on the carrying out of Wagner’s theories, as she understands them, and even when they are only worthy of being ignored, but who also (whether rightly or wrongly) is credited with a few traditions of her own. Wagner indeed invented a new form of drama, but he did not have the time or means at his disposal to develop an adequate technique for its performance.
We are all familiar with the Bayreuth version of Wotan in _Die Walküre_ which makes of that tragic father-figure a boisterous, silly old scold (so good an artist as Carl Braun, whose Hagen portrait is a masterpiece, has followed this tradition literally); we all know too well the waking Brünnhilde who salutes the sun in the last act of _Siegfried_ with gestures seemingly derived from the exercises of a Swedish _turnverein_, following the harp arpeggios as best she may; we remember how Wotan, seizing the sword from the dead Fasolt’s hand, brandishes it to the tune of the sword _motiv_, indicating the coming of the hero, Siegfried, as the gods walk over the rainbow bridge to Walhalla at the end of _Das Rheingold_; we smile over the tame horse which some chorus man, looking the while like a truck driver who is not good to animals, holds for Brünnhilde while she sings her final lament in _Götterdämmerung_; we laugh aloud when he assists her to lead the unfiery steed, who walks as leisurely as a well-fed horse would towards oats, into the burning pyre; we can still see the picture of the three Rhine maidens, bobbing up and down jerkily behind a bit of gauze, reminiscent of visions of mermaids at the Eden Musée; we all have seen Tristan and Isolde, drunk with the love potion, swimming (there is no other word to describe this effect) towards each other; and no perfect Wagnerite can have forgotten the gods and the giants standing about in the fourth scene of _Das Rheingold_ for all the world as if they were the protagonists of a fantastic minstrel show. (At a performance of _Parsifal_ in Chicago Vernon Stiles discovered while he was on the stage that his suspenders, which held his tights in place, had snapped. For a time he pressed his hands against his groin; this method proving ineffectual, he finished the scene with his hands behind his back, pressed firmly against his waist-line. As he left the stage, at the conclusion of the act, breathing a sigh of relief, he met Loomis Taylor, the stage director. “Did you think my new gesture was due to nervousness?” he asked. “No,” answered Taylor, “I thought it was Bayreuth tradition!”)
These are a few of the Bayreuth precepts which are followed. There are others. There are indeed many others. We all know the tendency of conductors who have been tried at Bayreuth, or who have come under the influence of Cosima Wagner, to drag out the _tempi_ to an exasperating degree. I have heard performances of _Lohengrin_ which were dragged by the conductor some thirty minutes beyond the ordinary time. (Again the Master is held responsible for this tradition, but though all composers like to have their own music last in performance as long as possible, the tradition, perhaps, is just as authentic as the story that Richard Strauss, when conducting _Tristan und Isolde_ at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre in Munich, saved twenty minutes on the ordinary time it takes to perform the work in order to return as soon as possible to an interrupted game of Skat.)
But it is not tradition alone that is killing the Wagner dramas. In many instances and in most singing theatres silly traditions are aided in their work of destruction by another factor in hasty production. I am referring to the frequent liberties which have been taken with the intentions of the author. For, when expediency is concerned, no account is taken of tradition, and, curiously enough, expediency breaks with those traditions which can least stand being tampered with. The changes, in other words, have not been made for the sake of improvement, but through carelessness, or to save time or money, or for some other cognate reason. An example of this sort of thing is the custom of giving the _Ring_ dramas as a cycle in a period extending over four weeks, one drama a week. It is also customary at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to entrust the rôle of Brünnhilde, or of Siegfried, to a different interpreter in each drama, so that the Brünnhilde who wakes in _Siegfried_ is not at all the Brünnhilde who goes to sleep in _Die Walküre_. Then, although Brünnhilde exploits a horse in _Götterdämmerung_, she possesses none in _Die Walküre_; none of the other valkyries has a horse; Fricka’s goats have been taken away from her, and she walks to the mountain-top holding her skirts from under her feet for all the world as a lady of fashion might as she ascended from a garden into a ballroom. At the Metropolitan Opera House, and at other theatres where I have seen the dramas, the decorations of the scenes of Brünnhilde’s falling asleep and of her awakening are quite different.
Naturally, ingenious explanations have been devised to fit these cases. For instance, one is told that animals are _never_ at home on the stage. This explanation suffices perhaps for the animals which do not appear, but how about those which do? The vague phrase, “the exigencies of the répertoire,” is mentioned as the reason for the extension of the cycle over several weeks, that and the further excuse that the system permits people from nearby towns to make weekly visits to the metropolis. Of course, Wagner intended that each of the _Ring_ dramas should follow its predecessor on succeeding days in a festival week. If the _Ring_ were so given in New York every season with due preparation, careful staging, and the best obtainable cast, the occasions would draw audiences from all over America, as the festivals at Bayreuth and Munich do indeed draw audiences from all over the world. Ingenuous is the word which best describes the explanation for the change in Brünnhildes; one is told that the out-of-town subscribers to the series prefer to hear as many singers as possible. They wish to “compare” Brünnhildes, so to speak. Perhaps the real reason for divergence from common sense is the difficulty the director of the opera house would have with certain sopranos if one were allowed the full set of performances. As for the change in the setting of Brünnhilde’s rock it is pure expediency, nothing else. In _Die Walküre_, in which, between acts, there is plenty of time to change the scenery, a heavy built promontory of rocks is required for the valkyrie brood to stand on. In _Siegfried_ and _Götterdämmerung_, where the scenery must be shifted in short order, this particular setting is utilized only for duets. The heavier elements of the setting are no longer needed, and are dispensed with.
The mechanical devices demanded by Wagner are generally complied with in a stupidly clumsy manner. The first scene of _Das Rheingold_ is usually managed with some effect now, although the swimming of the Rhine maidens, who are dressed in absurd long floating green nightgowns, is carried through very badly and seemingly without an idea that such things have been done a thousand times better in other theatres; the changes of scene in _Das Rheingold_ are accomplished in such a manner that one fears the escaping steam is damaging the gauze curtains; the worm and the toad are silly contrivances; the effect of the rainbow is never properly conveyed; the ride of the valkyries is frankly evaded by most stage managers; the bird in _Siegfried_ flies like a sickly crow; the final scene in _Götterdämmerung_ would bring a laugh from a Bowery audience: some flat scenery flaps over, a number of chorus ladies fall on their knees, there is much bulging about of a canvas sea, and a few red lights appear in the sky; the transformation scenes in _Parsifal_ are carried out with as little fidelity to symbolism, or truth, or beauty; and the throwing of the lance in _Parsifal_ is always seemingly a wire trick rather than a magical one.