Scan 23
Musical Courier 1902-01-01: Vol 44 Iss 1136, 1902
30 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 24. See the scan on archive.org.
1LAST week I reveled in opera, French and German. My partiality for the works of Gounod and Mendelssohn is well known to you! Rossini was a genius, Gounod was not; neither was Mendelssohn. This critical valuation is not mine alone. The old-time worship for both men is passing away—even "Faust" is being sung at the Saturday night's popular performance.
3Before the D minor overture-prologue to Gounod's "Romeo and Juliet" was finished last Wednesday night the audience had gathered; even the boxes looked less bleak, and at the end of the first act the house was alive with the kind of people always seen on an operatic Christmas—fashionable, musical, curious, and again fashionable folk.
5But it is seriously to be doubted if Gounod's threadbare setting to Shakespeare's Song of Songs gathered together this smartly attired throng. Gounod is no longer a magnet. His music was antiquated twenty years ago, and we are just finding this out. But he seems to survive as an excellent curtain raiser for the season operatic in New York; and, after all, that is something. Until this season "Faust" has alternated for years with "Romeo," the latter leading in the race. And there is no particular reason why this pleasing and altogether trivial composition should not serve as a finger post. Gounod himself, if he were alive, might object seriously to following Wagner; but the uses to which dead composers' dead celebrities are generally put was set forth centuries ago by Hamlet. Then, too, "Romeo and Juliet" is an excellent soprano—particularly soprano—and tenor duo, a trifle spun out, to be sure, but pleasing, innocuous and without a dramatic bar in the whole spineless score. It was revived by Jean de Reszké and by him given a dignity that it does not deserve.
7There is such a thing as hearing a musical work so often that it literally becomes a novelty if carefully studied. To say that "Romeo and Juliet" possesses any specific qualities to the regular opera-goer would be stating a paradox. He hears the valse song; he knows the Exile air; and he always wanders in late to the death scene. For the rest, the action, the minor personages and the character of the music are so many silences.
9Yet "Romeo and Juliet" repays a careful study. It is chiefly instructive as a specimen of what a composer—a composer of great reputation, although not of genius—can do to help aid the pot boil. The score is a string of sentimental commonplaces, the tragic note is never struck—and what is "Romeo and Juliet" if not tragic? The overture, interrupted by an absurd tableau, is weak as water; empty fifths as well as empty emotions! And surely no lover of the composer of "Faust" will pretend that the first ballroom scene, with its vapid dance music, its arpeggiated entrance for Juliet—shades of Shakespeare!—and its "ecoutez, ecoutez!" is aught but sublimated opera bouffe. Papa Capulet must needs sing a Mozartian minuet. Why? Because Gounod admired Mozart.
11Mercutio's "Queen Mab" is a fair imitation of Berlioz—here the scoring is ambitious—but at no time is the real Mercutio sketched in the music. Nor Tybalt, nor the nurse, richest in humor of Shakespeare creations after "Falstaff." Fancy what Verdi could have done with this same Gertrude, the Verdi of the Merry Wives of Windsor. Then the Juliet of Gounod's librettists; what an operatic creature she is, full of passion for three-fourths rhythm and footlights. Her valse song, "Je veux vivre dans ce rêve," is but an echo of the valse in "Traviata," an echo that has caught up in its transit from Italy to France something of the odor of the Bal Mabile. It is not necessary to follow the fortunes of the tunes in this first act. They are all mediocre.
13The second gives us pause. Romeo sighs throughout, but not like a furnace. That would be in bad taste. His passion is the lyric passion heard in the larynxes of the Gallic society tenor. It is all small, refined, and has the finesse of the petite maître, not the full, overflowing passion of ingenuous youth. And Juliet answers him in kind. It is a mincing episode, this balcony duo, with its comic opera chorus, flute counterpoint tiptoeing in, lanterns, mystery and all. After the garden has been well aired by the bravo-like chorus, the lovers resume their speech, but it is never sincere; it is voiced for the sweet tooth of music, the bon-bon buyers, and those who admire the merely decorative. "O Nuit, Divine" is charming, yet it never melts with its fervor, for its music is sentimental and not compact of deep feeling.
15Friar Laurent has more musical body to his characterization. He at least is realized, easily so, for he is a type thoroughly theatrical. With the entrance of Stephano, the duel provoking page, we come upon the real personage of the play. He is not in Shakespeare, but that matters little to the composer, who gives him, or rather her, a neat little song about a gentle dove. It leads up to a big climax, and again the big, passional note is missed; there is even more fire in the duel scene from "Faust." Romeo's exile song, admired of tenors who aim at the production of tearful voices, is weak, despite its imposing surroundings. The curtain falls upon banality.
17The bed chamber scene is better, for here the ardent lyricism of Gounod finds vent without the restrictive clauses of dramatic action. Romeo and Juliet pipe as sweetly as the lark of the lovers' lines. "No, no, it is not yet near day" is tender music, romantic music, with its salon flavor of 1850, and the undisturbed coiffures of heroines who sing of love wisely, but not too well. The story goes up in the air when the others come on, the stage father, nurse and friar. Nor can it truthfully be said that this scene ends convincingly, though the friar's adjuration and instruction is music worthy of Gounod. Throughout there is little real musical development, while the instrumentation is commonplace.
19The orchestral interlude, "Le Sommeil de Juliet," is Gounod at his best in this particular opera. There are atmosphere, color and some dim prevision of the awful tragedy. As in that change from major to minor in the last few bars of the overture, the composer seems about to compass the unique word, but he loses it, and the entire tomb scene is full of rank operatic offenses. For such deaths one can have no intimate sympathy, even admitting the necessity of certain operatic conventions. Juliet dies, Juliet awakens, and they sing a footlight duo. Then both die. And all this is calmly ignored by an audience, the most critical on the globe, when a new work is presented. But such is the deadening effect of repetition that the ears are sealed to the music and action of a misnamed grand opera, for "Romeo and Juliet" is hardly opera comique. It is a curtain raiser, though that is no reason why it should not be critically listened to at least once in a decade.
21The performance was as most performances. I do not agree with the remark of a young, audacious American girl recently from Paris, that the Metropolitan Opera House was an "Old Ladies' Home." There were two fresh voices, at least in this opera, Emma Eames and Carrie Bridewell. Eames was lovely to look upon, and after her nervous entrance sang artistically, though there was an occasional tonal acidity and a preponderance of the nasal. Miss Bridewell improves steadily. Her superb organ, sometimes unwieldy, is now under control. Alvarez is always miscast as Romeo. He wore a Shylock wig of rusty red, and his voice, a terrific, baritonal tenor, dropped below pitch very often. The rest do not count—except Ed. de Reszké and Journet.
23Nothing less than the lyric genius of a Jean de Reszké can make "Faust" a musical reality. This opera comique, for such it was at first, is not a work of genius, though the product of a genially erotic imagination. When Gounod is not praying, he is apostrophizing the silken petticoat. Indeed, he is a magnificent example of what psychologists would call the correlation of piety and prurience. But a critical revaluation of this music would be a useless, as well as an ungrateful task. The opera is, for most audiences, a pleasure breeding chaplet of lyrics. That Goethe had conceived a Faust, a Gretchen and a Mephisto something quite different from Gounod's elderly roué, blond mixture of sentiment and sawdust, and a jolly bourgeois devil, are facts not to be demonstrated by any but a cold hearted professor of criticism. To the average listener, not always the normal one by any means, the third act of "Faust" ever will be the very ecstasy of passion, the last musical expression of dramatic poesy.
25Alas! To others who have felt the throb and passionate surge of Wagner's dynamic music, this very act appeals by its lack of sincerity, of atmosphere, of imaginative lift. The pursuit of the girl with the golden locks set to pretty, sensuous music; the deification of desire without one hint of the redeeming philosophy of Goethe, and back of it all a leering man of the world, dressed in red, with a taste for luminous horticulture and conjuring tricks; this is Gounod's Faust. Not so is the poet's "Spirit that Denies," not so is Gretchen—here is a mature and bejeweled spinner of flax and fairy tales—not so is the thinker and dreamer Faust, the prototype of modern man. Why cavil? Faust has been sung for over forty years, and may last ten decades more, sadly worn as it is. It has more dramatic spine and less flabbiness than Romeo and Juliet. It has theoric climaxes, the duel and death of Valentine and the church scene; and even if the prison scene is rank operaticism, has is not a trio that may be hummed and whistled?
27Boito's version of the poem, truncated though it be, came nearer to the original than Gounod's. If "Mefistofele" were but less cerebral and more musical it would have driven the Frenchman's attempt off the field years ago. However, more than brains are needed to make an opera; and whatever Gounod's intellectual deficiencies are—and they are many—he has the gift of sweet melodizing and certain facile tricks of temperament. Future generations in noting his achievements will probably refer to him as the little Parisian who audaciously misrepresented Bach, Shakespeare and Goethe—for his one unpardonable sin in the eyes of devout musicians is his sacrilegious treatment of the first piano prelude of Bach. His librettists will share with him his perversion of Shakespeare and Goethe, but for the outrage against the fair name of Bach the poor man alone will be attainted.
29The popular night performance last Saturday did not suffer in comparison with any during the
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